Douglas Tottle: The David Irving of the Ukraine Genocide Part III-
Now let us see how Tottle reconstructs these references:
"However, "A History of Ukraine" by Mikhail (sic) Hrushevsky - described by the Nationalists themselves as 'Ukraine's leading historian' - states: 'Again a year of drought coincided with chaotic agricultural conditions; and during the winter of 1932-33 a great famine, like that of 1921-1922, swept across Soviet Ukraine...' Indeed, nowhere does History of Ukraine claim a deliberate, man-made famine against Ukrainians and more space is actually devoted to the famine of 1921-22." (p.91)
Tottle then adds laconically that Hrushevsky’s was published posthumously in 1941 and that it was updated to 1940 based on notes by Dr. Luke Myshuha. Tottle does not deem it necessary to mention the work of Professor Frederiksen, or to specify when and where Hrushevsky died, although these facts are essential to appreciate the reference to the famine. He does, however, go out of his way to point out that Myshuha was “editor-in-chief of Svoboda”, and that he had “visited Berlin in 1939, speaking over Nazi radio in Ukrainian,” (p. 92) information quite irrelevant to the analysis of the famine, but necessary to make the perfidious famine-Nazi link which I shall discuss further on.
Here again we have a mixture of irrelevant truths, misleading half-truths, and lies. The comments by Myshuha/Frederiksen on the famine are deformed (damaging reference to Skrypnyk’s suicide to protest the export of grain while several million starved is left out), and even though Tottle does not actually attribute them to Hrushevsky, he words his statement in such a way as to create that impression. Whether Szczesny was privy to Tottle’s ruse or was duped by the insinuation, the result is the same; a lie about Hrushevsky’s alleged denial of the famine-genocide.
Third, a few words are in order on the subliminal Nazification of the Ukrainian famine-genocide. If there is one common denominator to all the famine-genocide denial literature, it is the effort to tie the Ukrainian famine to the Nazis and sandwich between them that part of the Ukrainian diaspora which defends the right of the Ukrainian nation to exist as a sovereign state. Genocide deniers would be happiest if they could blame the famine on the Nazis and the “Ukrainian collaborators” as Stalin pinned Katyn on the Germans. But since this can not be done, they try the next best thing: link with Nazis those who speak out about the famine (including famine survivors and descendants of famine victims).
On the cover of Tottle’s book one can see a photograph of a woman with an undernourished child, and looming over the photograph a hand with a paintbrush. The brush is about to be dipped into oilpaint profusely pouring out of a tube marked with a swastika. What a disgusting spectacle, and yet how descriptive of the author and the book! Isn’t Tottle getting ready to apply Nazi colours to the famine victims?
When one checks the book’s table of contents one notices that only one chapter is classified as “famine”, the other nine deal with “fraud” and “Fascism”. In fact, at least ten times as much space is devoted to the task of making the famine-Fascism connection as is given to the study of the famine. Unabashed, the author admits that he “does not attempt to study the famine in any detailed way”. (p.1) He is more interested in the “Nazi and fascist connections” and the “coverups of wartime collaboration” (p.3). Both topics, even if they had been objectively treated, are completely irrelevant to the study of the famine and can neither prove nor disprove the existence of the famine or define the nature of the tragedy. (Many of Tottle’s attacks on the various segments of the Ukrainian diaspora constitute hate literature and should be dealt with in our courts of law.)
The attempt to hush up serious examination and legitimate condemnation of the famine-genocide, or to dismiss it as Nazi-related propaganda, makes the writings of Tottle and the other famine-genocide deniers particularly repugnant. They have the impudence to desecrate the memory of millions of innocent people deliberately starved to death by criminals who have never even been punished for their diabolical act. Perhaps it was people like the famine-genocide deniers that Oleksandr Dovzhenko had in mind when he made this entry in his diary written on the German front on May 4, 1942:
"If all the heroism of the sons of Ukraine in the Fatherland war, all the sacrifices and suffering of (its) people, and all (their) victorious energy after the war, cunning hands and pens of certain clever fellows throw into a common...pot, and on account of Ukrainians, these same hands thrust artificially created Hitlerite Petliurivshchyna and anti-Semitism with all the consequences of slaughter-houses, it would be better for me to die and no longer witness human baseness, bottomless hate, and fathomless eternal lies which entangle us. (Dnipro, 1988, No.10, p.89)
In his review of Tottle’s book Szczesny writes:
"The theory of the big lie is that the bigger the lie and the more often it is repeated, the more it will be believed." (p.22) Szczesny should have added that in order to render their own lie more credible, the hoaxsters accuse their opponents of the deception they themselves practice, while presenting their own fabrication as a corrective to their opponents' alleged lie. Need we be reminded that the real hoax is not the Holocaust but what Butz has to say about it and the great fraud is not the famine-genocide but Tottle's treatment of it?
Documents on the famine published recently in the West (M. Carynnyk, et al, “The Foreign Office and the Famine,” Kingston, Ont., 1988, and others), and in the Soviet press (isn’t it about time that the ‘UC’ reprinted some of them?) leave no room for doubt that the famine in Ukraine was man-made. As Yuri Shcherbak, the author of a novel on Chornobyl states, “the famine of 1932-33 was in no way a natural disaster. There was no drought, no hurricane as its origin… The Ukrainian harvest of 1932 while not a record one was totally adequate. Yet there was an unusual famine. From the beginning to the end it was organized from the top… Peasants, packed on train rooftops, tried to flee the famished regions. But on the border between Russia and Ukraine… units of border guards were stationed…” (Sobesednik, Moscow, 1988, No.49)
Is it legitimate to call this famine genocide?
Ten years ago few people outside the Ukrainian diaspora would have ventured such an opinion: in the West because of what was thought to be a lack of reliable evidence (diplomatic archives were closed and testimony from “refugees” was viewed with suspicion), and in the Soviet Union because the very subject was taboo. All this has radically changed in the last few years.
Taking advantage of glasnost, Ukrainians began to speak openly about the crime of the “33rd”, calling it “man-made famine”, “artificial famine”, “extermination by starvation (holodomor). Although they use the more familiar traditional expressions, in their minds these terms are synonymous with genocide”. What else is the deliberate starvation of millions of people, if not genocide? Occasionally, one even comes across the words “holocaust” and “genocide” as when Wasyl Pakharenko answered those who do not recognize the specificity of the Ukrainian famine. “The uniqueness of our (Ukrainian) tragedy lies in this that in Ukraine, the social-class genocide coincided with the cultural-national (genocide).” (Molod’ Cherkashchyny, Cherkassy, 1988, No.30)
The notion that the famine was genocide is also gaining acceptance in the West. Michael R. Marrus, professor of at the University of Toronto, and the author of “The Holocaust in History,” in his forward to The Foreign Office and the Famine (cited above), comes to the conclusion that the evidence presented by the British documents suggests that there was a genocidal attack upon Ukrainians. Leo Kuper, professor emeritus at the UCLA and author of Genocide, a pioneer work on the subject, writes in his latest work “The Prevention of Genocide” about the “many millions who died in the Soviet manmade (sic) famine of 1932-33”. Kuper accepts the argument that “this artificially induced famine was in fact an act of genocide, designed…to undermine the social basis of a Ukrainian national renaissance.” (p.50)
In the light of all the evidence we now possess on the famine, how bleak and ignoble appear the statements of genocide deniers of the Stalin era (unscrupulous journalists like Walter Duranty of the New York Times, credulous and dishonest intellectuals like the British writer Bernard Shaw, the French politician Edouard Herriot). It took fifty years to debunk their big lie; how long will it take the defenders of truth to dispose of the big lie promoted by Tottle and his supporters? The challenge is before the Ukrainian community. Will The Ukrainian Canadian, for one, have the courage to take it up and make the last stand of the famine-genocide deniers a short one?
THE LAST STAND OF THE UKRAINIAN FAMINE-GENOCIDE
By Dr. Roman Serbyn, Professor of Russian and East European History University of Quebec, Montreal, Canada
The Ukrainian Canadian magazine, February, 1989
FOR PERSONAL AND ACADEMIC USE ONLY
http://www.artukraine.com/famineart/serbyn4.htm
You accused me first!
