Most Brutal Dictator/Communist Leader

Most Brutal Dictator/Communist Leader

  • Total voters
    54

Abdul Hadi Pasha

Banned
OK.

robertp6165 said:
I have seen the same thing in printed books. Does it make it more true if it is in a printed book? The truth is the truth, wherever it is printed.

I have also spoken to Ukrainians who were there (or in some cases whose parents or grandparents were there)...and who saw the very things described in these articles. I have no reason at all to doubt these people.

At least I bothered to try to locate some easily accessable sources for my argument. What sources have you offered?
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Once you decide you can stop being hostile and just discuss, I will be glad to. And listing the first two sites that come up in the google search "Ukrainian Genocide" is not providing "sources", it's providing links to nationalist propaganda. Give me a written order from Stalin to deliberately kill off millions of Ukrainians in a concerted effort at genocide, and I'll concede your point.

Even at the height of the Cold War the most die-hard anti-communists never claimed there was a Ukrainian Genocide. This is all part of the ever-growing genocide industry piggy-backing on the Holocaust, which was a REAL Genocide.

Anway, if you can find it,

Famine in Ukraine, 1932-1933
by Roman Serbyn (Editor), Bohdan Krawchenko (Editor)

is fairly definitive.

The question is not whether or not there was a famine, it's whether or not Stalin deliberately killed millions of Ukrainians in a policy of genocide.

Collectivization was supposed to improve agricultural productivity and produce grain reserves to feed the growing urban labor force, and the anticipated surplus was to pay for industrialization. Collectivization was also expected to free many peasants for industrial work in the cities.

He DID deliberately destroy the Kulaks, who were the wealthier farmers, who were considered hopelessly bourgeoise - they were scattered all over the Soviet Union and something like a million of them died in transit. So, the dispersing of the most productive farmers and the fact that the peasants were much less motivated to work on a state collective caused productivity to fall rather than rise, leading to the famine.

I lived for quite some time in Eastern Europe, and I think everyone is forgetting about the mind-boggling incompetence of state bureaucracy, especially one run by people with no education.

And I must say, "The truth is the truth, wherever it is printed." is an amazing statement. So who decides what the truth is? I always thought that having evidence to back up a position and a lack of evidence to disprove a position is what makes something true. That there is no documentary evidence whatsoever to support that Stalin deliberately orchestrated a Genocide is apparently irrevelant.
 

Abdul Hadi Pasha

Banned
Matt:

What exactly is your point? I am not denying there was a famine, I am denying that it was a deliberate Genocide. You posted a book that is a catalogue of a photographic exhibit at Harvard in 1983. Does that prove that Stalin orchestrated a genocide?

Here, read this, there's a large bibliography at the end.

http://www.artukraine.com/famineart/tauger.htm

All the books you posted previously are highly biased and political, on both sides. You have to learn to distinguish between inflamitory revisionism designed to sell books or support a political agenda from actual scholarly research.

Earlier, Scott posted about the shabbiness of history books in stores. I think we are dealing with the death of history. Methodical research is no longer valued in writing, only political advocacy.
 

Abdul Hadi Pasha

Banned
And,

Morality is not a numbers game. If a driver has a stroke and plows a bus full of schoolchildren off a cliff, is he more evil than someone who drowns a puppy just for kicks? No. One was intentional, the other was a tragic accident.
 
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robertp6165

Abdul Hadi Pasha said:
Once you decide you can stop being hostile and just discuss, I will be glad to. .
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I am not being hostile...sorry if you are taking it that way.

Abdul Hadi Pasha said:
And listing the first two sites that come up in the google search "Ukrainian Genocide" is not providing "sources", it's providing links to nationalist propaganda..
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Actually the internet search I used was "Ukrainian famine Stalin." I never said the Ukrainian famine was genocide, and did not use that term in my search. Genocide is defined as "The systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group," and Stalin clearly did not intend that all of the Ukrainians die. He did intend to break the back of the resistance to his collectivization efforts and to break the back of Ukrainian nationalism, and used a politically inspired, artificially created famine to do so, but that is not genocide. But it is interesting that even using the relatively neutral terms I used in my search...NOT ONE SINGLE ARTICLE COMES UP WHICH DISPUTES THE ARGUMENT THAT THE UKRAINIAN FAMINE WAS MANUFACTURED BY THE SOVIET GOVERNMENT FOR POLITICAL REASONS. One would think that somebody, somewhere, would have posted one, if indeed there was any basis for arguing the contrary.

Abdul Hadi Pasha said:
Give me a written order from Stalin to deliberately kill off millions of Ukrainians in a concerted effort at genocide, and I'll concede your point...
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I'm sorry, but Stalin didn't work that way. From what I have read of the internal workings of Stalin's regime, orders like these were generally verbally communicated to Stalin's underlings (such as Beria), who then carried them out. By the way, there is no written order from Hitler ordering the mass extermination of Jews, either. But you have no problem accepting that this happened. Why the difference?

Abdul Hadi Pasha said:
Even at the height of the Cold War the most die-hard anti-communists never claimed there was a Ukrainian Genocide. This is all part of the ever-growing genocide industry piggy-backing on the Holocaust, which was a REAL Genocide....The question is not whether or not there was a famine, it's whether or not Stalin deliberately killed millions of Ukrainians in a policy of genocide.
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I never claimed that it was genocide. But it was a politically motivated mass murder via an artificially created famine. Even the book you cite (which I have read...) does not dispute this.

Abdul Hadi Pasha said:
And I must say, "The truth is the truth, wherever it is printed." is an amazing statement. So who decides what the truth is? I always thought that having evidence to back up a position and a lack of evidence to disprove a position is what makes something true. That there is no documentary evidence whatsoever to support that Stalin deliberately orchestrated a Genocide is apparently irrevelant.
Click to expand...

Again, I never claimed that Stalin orchestrated a genocide. But he did engage in politically motivated mass murder on a scale which has never been exceeded in human history. The "purposes" for which Hitler mass-murdered were certainly more evil. But which is really worse...a man who murders out of hatred, or a man who murders simply because human life has no meaning for him and his victims are simply "in the way?" The latter scares me a heck of a lot more than the former.
 

MerryPrankster

"Rafi will be jealous that you're arguing with someone else besides him john so stop"

Heh, heh, heh

"If a driver has a stroke and plows a bus full of schoolchildren off a cliff, is he more evil than someone who drowns a puppy just for kicks? No. One was intentional, the other was a tragic accident"

That's a bad argument, since the terror-famine was not an accident.
 

Straha

Banned
instead of the eternal rafi-john armenian debate we could seeo nthe new forum a john-matt ukranian debate. I liked the armenian debates better.... I learened all I know about the armenian genocide form Rafi and John's flamewars ;)
 

thearcticfalcon

Two men who aren't on the list and probably should be: Idi Amin and Pol Pot.

It would be Saddam. He combines the ruthlessness and human detatchment of Stalin with the craziness of Pol Pot. So, despite the fact that his regime killed fewer people than Uncle Joe's, he would be it.
 

thearcticfalcon

SurfNTurfStraha said:
he's not on because saddam was small potatoes in terms of causalities compared to the rest
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Saddam's on the list.

As for the Stalin thing, didn't they deliberately close Ukranian borders to prevent aid from getting in?
 

Abdul Hadi Pasha

Banned
OK.

Wow, that's the same search I used - great minds?

Anyway, I believe in the Holocaust because there are mountains of documentary evidence and orders, not to mention careful ledgers of all the Jews murdered and their personal belongings, and also not to mention the sworn testimony of hundreds of senior Nazis after the war that confirm there was a "final solution" policy, plus, Hitler said he was going to do it over and over, starting with Mein Kampf. There is ZERO documentary evidence to support that Stalin created an artificial famine to kill off millions of Ukrainians. The whole Soviet Union was hit by famine, not just the Ukraine. There was not enough grain to feed everyone, period. An artifical faminine would require the government to hold back existing food supplies from a population to deliberately starve them when it could be avoided. What occured was a REAL famine, not an artifical one.

As for the Google search, did you read all 10,400 results or just the top 100 or so? Google lists results by the volume of hits any site receives. Since a nationalist Ukrainian with an axe to grind is more likely to be looking for Ukrainian Genocide articles than your average American on his lunch break, the top sites in a google search are most likely to be political. Type the words "iraq genocide" into Google and you will get enormous loads of garbage; the second is an article on jewwatch.com, and most are about the US genocide occurring in Iraq tight now. Or try "bush genocide" - you will have to go through tens of thousands of results before you find anyone who disagrees that Bush is a genocidal madman.

There is a very great body of scholarly work that does not support that there was a deliberate policy of murder of Ukrainians, and almost everything written to the contrary was written very recently, since the standards of scholarship required by editors have fallen away to nothing.
 

Abdul Hadi Pasha

Banned
Matt Quinn said:
"Rafi will be jealous that you're arguing with someone else besides him john so stop"

Heh, heh, heh

"If a driver has a stroke and plows a bus full of schoolchildren off a cliff, is he more evil than someone who drowns a puppy just for kicks? No. One was intentional, the other was a tragic accident"

That's a bad argument, since the terror-famine was not an accident.
Click to expand...

Yes it was.
 

Abdul Hadi Pasha

Banned
You're right, Straha

SurfNTurfStraha said:
Rafi will be jealous that you're arguing with someone else besides him john so stop
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I don't want to make anyone jealous, so let's move on now to the so-called "Armenian Genocide".

[avoids flying beer bottles and rotten cabbage]

Oh, come on, it's just a joke! You know you laughed.
 

Straha

Banned
wait for Rafi to get online and argue with him I mean the armenian arguement is far more catchy than the ukrainina famine arguement
 

Straha

Banned
now to get rafi in here both of you have to make long posts denouncing the existence of the armenian genocide.
 

Wiggy

Abdul Hadi Pasha said:
The death toll of Stalin's regime might have been higher, but it was a longer period of time, and Hitler killed a greater number BY INTENT. Most of Stalin's deaths were regrettable side effects of necessary de-bourgeoisification.
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Side effects of de-bourgeoisification!? C'mon. Stalin's intent was as clear as Hitler's. He starved the Ukraine and Baltic countires into submission and built the gulag as a machine to kill people. I don't think "side-effect" cuts it and he sure as hell didn't shuffle off this mortal coil expressing any regret. He got away with his murders by being on the winning side. Victors write the history books and all that.

"Necessary" is a whole separate can of worms.

I'll put your view down as "interesting".
 
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