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Remember the Holodomor
Meanwhile, the famine remains little known in the West, despite efforts by the Ukrainian diaspora. Indeed, the West has its own inglorious history with regard to the famine, starting with the deliberate cover-up by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty.
In the late 1980s, the famine gained new visibility thanks to Robert Conquest's Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1987) and the TV documentary Harvest of Despair, aired in the United States and Canada. A backlash from the left was quick to follow. Revisionist Sovietologist J. Arch Getty accused Conquest of parroting the propaganda of "exiled nationalists." And in January 1988, the Village Voice ran a lengthy essay by Jeff Coplon (now a contributing editor at New York magazine) titled "In Search of a Soviet Holocaust: A 55-Year-Old Famine Feeds the Right." Coplon sneered at "the prevailing vogue of anti-Stalinism" and dismissed as absurd the idea that the famine had been created by the Communist regime. Such talk, he asserted, was meant to justify U.S. imperialism and whitewash Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis.
By the time Coplon wrote, however, the Soviet regime was dying. The partial opening of Soviet archives soon confirmed the extent to which Stalin and his henchmen knowingly used hunger to punish resistance and beat the peasantry into submission. Among the finds was a direct order by Stalin to cordon off starving villages and intercept peasants trying to flee in search of food. The post-Soviet leadership of both Russia and Ukraine was willing to acknowledge the Terror-Famine, though differences soon emerged on whether it should be regarded as a Ukrainian genocide or equal-opportunity mass murder.
With celebrations underway across Germany to celebrate the opening of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Communist East German regime, a new survey says a surprising number of Germans wouldn’t mind seeing the barrier go back up.
Those who want to see the Wall rebuilt are mostly unemployed, working class and vote for The Left party, successors to the East German Socialist Unity Party which ruled the country until 1990 before being voted out of power months before German reunification on October 3, 1990.
America has about ten percent fringe voters from both Parties - no story here.
That percentage would be FAR higher in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, including countries consider economic "success stories", like Poland, Czech Republic, and Hungary. That should really concern alot of people...
That's just way wierd. I watched a show about the Berlin Wall on the History Channel last night. It showed all these people digging tunnels, sewing balloons, etc so they could escape.
That's just way wierd. I watched a show about the Berlin Wall on the History Channel last night. It showed all these people digging tunnels, sewing balloons, etc so they could escape.
It was bad enough there that they even just tried to climb the wall knowing they wouldn't get over.
I doubt that millions of Germans were killed in Berlin behind the wall but the fence that stretched from the North Sea down into the Balkans saw many people trying to get out to the West. Land mines and machine guns covered the whole length of the place. I saw the fence in Czechoslovakia when we sneaked into the county. We just drove across the border but we knew we would get into serious trouble with our own commanders for entering a Soviet country like that. After that trip I knew just how lucky I really am to still be around
It was bad enough there that they even just tried to climb the wall knowing they wouldn't get over.
I doubt that millions of Germans were killed in Berlin behind the wall but the fence that stretched from the North Sea down into the Balkans saw many people trying to get out to the West. Land mines and machine guns covered the whole length of the place. I saw the fence in Czechoslovakia when we sneaked into the county. We just drove across the border but we knew we would get into serious trouble with our own commanders for entering a Soviet country like that. After that trip I knew just how lucky I really am to still be around
So you were a daredevil back in the day? Good for you!
East Germany or the DDR was a real piece of work. After being raped and pillaged by the Red Army (The Red Army had a thing for Germans after what the Germans did to the Russians) the Soviets dumped millions of Germans in the DDR when they ethinically cleaned up Prussia and Sileasia and gave these places to Poland. But the East Germans being Germans made the best of their Soviet system and became the leading source for high tech Optics (the Carl Zeiss Optik Jena was in their sector), electronics (The Soviets got most of their computers from an East German Co called Robotron) and pharmacuticals (the East Germans were leaders in formulating Steroids and human growth hormones). For a small nation of 19 million people the East Germans set their sights on the Olympics and by the mid-1970s were routinely beating team USA by making superior use of training and better doping. It was the East German women who dunked the US women in the pool at Montreal in 1976 and it was an East German women who won the Olynpic Figure Skating Gold in 1980,1984 and 1988. The East Germans were some of the most effective spys for the Communist block from Klaus Fuchs to Willy Brandt's personal secretary. Stazi had quite a stable of agents who had no problem posing as our Germans. So it very understandable that some have fond memories of the DDR a little country that had a lot to overcome and sometimes did.
A third of US citizens want a wall built on our southern border!
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