By CHRISTOPHER MANION
“Let’s not mince words. Russia’s dictator, Vladimir Putin, and his regime are evil,” writes Rutgers Professor Alexander J. Motyl.
The language gives rise to memories of another prelude to an American war. The date was September 14, 2001; the occasion was George W. Bush’s address to both Houses of Congress after the terrorist attacks of 9-11:
“Just three days removed from these events,” the president said, “Americans do not yet have the distance of history. But our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”
“Rid the world of evil?”
Well, it doesn’t look like we can say “mission accomplished” just yet. And today U.S. policy in Ukraine resembles that in Iraq twenty-two years ago in one vital particular: Most of those making the decisions have failed to fulfill their “responsibility to history.”
Let’s face it: in 2001, few of them knew what countries bordered Iraq, much less the intricate history of the region. John McCain, an avid supporter of the war, thought that Iraq shares a border with Pakistan (there are 500 miles of Iran in between).
And the public? Even today, few Americans know more about Ukraine than what its flag looks like. Find it on the map? Trace its millennium-long history with what was to become Russia? Or know that in 882, modern-day Kiev was first capital of modern-day Russia?
No, say the “experts,” don’t bother with your “responsibility to history,” just relax in the hot tub of Manichaean malarkey: “Evil Putin!” “Evil Russia!”
Caution: Must be repeated early and often.
To be sure, some responsible analysts are less strident; maybe Putin has to go, or maybe Russia itself will eventually break up. But such approaches differ radically from “ridding the world of evil” — even though that enthralling prospect captivated the American public quite handsomely. After all, we were told in February 2022 that the war would be over in six months.
And when the war wasn’t over in six months after all, a visibly embittered Joe Biden expanded his field of fire: “MAGA extremists” are “dangers to our democracy,” Joe bellowed in Constitution Hall last September first.
In word and image, Biden’s tantrum exuded the temper of a tyrant bent on exterminating his critics.
Unfortunately, such abrasive rhetoric is not only offensive, it’s dangerous.
Its use implies a command that all must obey — or else.
And so it is with “ending evil in the world.” The habit of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is often called “insanity”; however, the habit also afflicts a good deal of modern American foreign policy.
Today’s advocates of U.S. aid to Ukraine are stuck in a feedback loop that they appear willing to repeat over and over again “as long as it takes.”
It is almost a scandal: In their reliance on the epithet factory, they ignore their most powerful and persuasive argument.
And that argument also happens to be true.
The Holodomor.
It really happened. And nobody has ever heard of it.
Our Task: Recovering Lost Truths
We all admit that epithets — “keywords,” “slogans” — play a significant role in a culture whose attention span gets shorter every day.
“Just three days removed from these events,” said George W. Bush, “Americans do not yet have the distance of history.”
Fair enough. But isn’t ninety years enough?
Because ninety years ago, Josef Stalin imposed a silent genocide on the people of Ukraine. He ordered the confiscation of the country’s agriculture production — all of it — and shipped it off to Russia, intentionally starving some six to nine million Ukrainians.
That famine’s Ukrainian name is “Holodomor.”
In translation: “death intentionally inflicted by hunger.”
And that’s exactly what Stalin did.
Stalin’s brutal collectivization of agriculture in the late 1920s was a failure. Naturally, he blamed the victims. For Stalin, Ukrainian farmers were as dangerous as Russia’s Kulaks. Both “backward” classes had to be destroyed.
By the millions.
So Stalin turned on the Ukrainian peasantry and seized all the country’s agricultural production — meaning all of its food — in the fall of 1932. “The Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933 was caused by the maximum extraction of agricultural produce from the rural population,” according to the “Report of the Commission on the Famine in Ukraine” submitted to the U.S. Congress on April 22nd, 1988.
Yes, that’s right. The U.S. Congress formed a Commission on the Holodomor in the 1980s. Its members held hearings throughout the country and heard testimony from 57 witnesses who had experienced the Holodomor firsthand.
This is a phenomenal report. It bursts with reality. It screams with horror.
Has anyone in Congress or the Senate today read it? Do they even know it exists?
Coming To Terms
In recent months I have posed the question to several prominent supporters of U.S. military intervention in Ukraine: why haven’t they raised this horrific Russian genocide of some five to nine million Ukrainians in arguing for our supporting them so strongly? Might it not help to explain the intensity of Ukrainian tenacity?
A few say, “I don’t know,” and the rest — and that’s a lot of them — have never even heard of it.
“Holodomor?” they say. “What’s that?”
And true to form, the U.S. media buried the truth as well – in the 1930s and today.
New York Times reporter Walter Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932, for his glowing praise of Stalin’s murderous tyranny. His falsehoods appearing daily in “the newspaper of record” were resonated by America’s pro-Soviet Left. Ultimately, the Potemkin-style propaganda played a significant role in Roosevelt’s embrace of “Uncle Joe” Stalin, all the way through his betrayal of 100 million eastern Europeans at Yalta.
When Gareth Jones, an independent British journalist, traveled to Ukraine in 1933 and exposed the lies of Duranty, he was a marked man. He was kidnapped and murdered in Mongolia two years later, most likely by the Soviet Secret Police, but the truth had been told, only to have the West ignore it (Jones’ daring efforts were recounted Agnieszka Holland’s acclaimed movie, Mr. Jones, available on YouTube).
In my conversations with various conservative intellectuals and activists about the Holodomor, the observations of my longtime friend and colleague, historian and celebrated author Paul Gottfried, sum up the issue nicely:
“Considering that Putin was associated with a regime and represents a country that murdered millions of Ukrainians in the 1930s,” Dr. Gottfried writes, “I am truly appalled that all our onetime anti-Communist paleoconservatives of a certain age are running around defending Putin’s crimes. It’s as if a German regime, which calls itself something other than National Socialist, began killing Jews and Poles. I can’t even get my head around this volte-face, although some on the Right are so desperate for a right-wing hero that they pick one from the gutter.”
The Holodomor was real. It happened. May its millions of victims rest in peace.
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