"1931 Stalin's Holodomor, or murder by starvation. 1960 Mao's Great
Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe. 1975
Starvation in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge Famine. 2021 According to the
International Crisis Group, Venezuela on the brink of a famine. The
thread that binds all of these events - Socialism"

`````````````````````````````````````````

Joseph Stalin starved millions to death - we must help Ukraine to stop
it happening again: As Vladimir Putin uses famine as a weapon against
the innocent, DOMINIC SANDBROOK recalls a powerful lesson from history

More than 50 days into Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion, the Ukrainian
people’s living nightmare remains as dark as ever.

Almost every evening brings news of more appalling Russian war crimes.
Yet as horrific as the war has been, the worst may be yet to come.

In yesterday’s Mail On Sunday, Ukrainian ambassador Vadym Prystaiko paid
a heartfelt tribute to readers who have donated to the Mail Force
campaign, which is sending half a million food boxes to his beleaguered
people.

Yet more is needed, for his country faces one of the worst humanitarian
catastrophes in modern European history.

As Mr Prystaiko noted, Ukraine has long been renowned as the breadbasket
of Europe.
A local resident prepares to cook at an entrance of a building damaged
during fighting in Mariupol. Russian troops have been shelling farms,
food warehouses, grain silos, shopping centres and supermarkets, and
even stealing tractors and combine harvesters and driving them across
the border.

A local resident prepares to cook at an entrance of a building damaged
during fighting in Mariupol. Russian troops have been shelling farms,
food warehouses, grain silos, shopping centres and supermarkets, and
even stealing tractors and combine harvesters and driving them across
the border.

But the Russian invaders have pushed it to the verge of famine, shelling
farms, food warehouses, grain silos, shopping centres and supermarkets,
and even stealing tractors and combine harvesters and driving them
across the border.

In the ambassador’s words, this appears to be a ‘targeted campaign by
Putin to try to starve innocent Ukrainian civilians’.

And tragically, it seems to be working.

Already there are reports from eastern Ukraine of people drinking water
from radiators and puddles, and even killing and cooking stray dogs to
avoid starvation.

And with the Russians planning a new offensive in the coming weeks, such
stories are likely to become distressingly common.

As Mr Prystaiko wrote, one of the horrible things about this is that
it’s so familiar.

The pages of Ukraine’s history are stained with suffering, but the
darkest chapter of all is the story of the early 1930s, when at least
four million men, women and children died in a famine directed from Moscow.

Ukrainians know this as the Holodomor, a crime of ‘murder by starvation’.

Many historians see it as an act of genocide, planned and organised by
one man – the Communist dictator Joseph Stalin.

Then as now, the roots of the famine lay in the Russians’ brutal
contempt for their neighbours.

A few years earlier, amid the chaos of the Russian Revolution, the
Ukrainians had made an abortive bid for freedom, only to be crushed by
the Red Army. Ever since, Stalin had regarded them with deep distrust.

He had nothing but contempt for Ukraine’s language, culture and
traditions, and was infuriated by its peasants’ reluctance to embrace
his Marxist utopia.

At the turn of the 1930s he decided to break the Ukrainians’ resistance
by ‘liquidating’ the richer peasants and forcing the rest into vast
state-run farms, where they would toil ceaselessly for the greater
Soviet good. But what followed was a tragedy on an unimaginable scale.
A boy next to the body of his father after the man was shot for
approaching a prohibited area of a farm while picking grain during the
Holodomor. Dominic Sandbrook writes we must not let scenes like this be
repeated

A boy next to the body of his father after the man was shot for
approaching a prohibited area of a farm while picking grain during the
Holodomor. Dominic Sandbrook writes we must not let scenes like this be
repeated

As Stalin’s henchmen roamed the Ukrainian countryside, seizing grain
that he could sell abroad, food supplies dwindled and families began to
starve.

By early 1932, the reports on his desk told of peasants fleeing their
homes in search of food, children swollen with hunger, people living on
grass and acorns, bodies in the streets of Ukraine’s cities.

Instead of intervening, Stalin blamed Ukrainian nationalists for
‘hiding’ grain supplies and ordered his thugs to tighten their grip. And
so the death toll mounted – from thousands to millions.

The best work on these terrible years, Anne Applebaum’s prize-winning
account Red Famine, is one of the most haunting books I’ve ever read.

In one of countless dreadful anecdotes, she describes a 15-year-old farm
girl begging beside a queue outside a Communist-run bread shop.

As each person passed, the girl asked for crumbs. Finally she asked the
shopkeeper, who struck her to the ground.

‘Get up,’ he said, kicking her. ‘Go home and get to work!’

But she did not move; she was dead. At that, people in the queue started
crying.

‘Some are getting too sentimental around here,’ the shopkeeper said
threateningly. ‘It is easy to spot enemies of the people.’

Amid the horror, some families turned on one another. One man was so
enraged by the sound of his children crying for food he smothered his
baby in its cradle and killed two other children by smashing their heads
against a wall.

In the western Ukrainian province of Vinnytsia, another farmer tried to
suffocate his starving children by lighting a fire and blocking the
chimney. When they screamed for help, he strangled them with his bare hands.

Applebaum’s most terrible stories are those of desperate people reduced
to cannibalism.

In one Ukrainian village, the police arrested a man who had gone mad
after his wife died.

A neighbour asked why he seemed better fed than everybody else. ‘I have
eaten my children,’ the man said, ‘and if you talk too much, I will eat
you.’

Later, in Stalin’s prison camps, a Polish woman met hundreds of
‘unhappy, barefoot, half-naked Ukrainians’, who had been sentenced for
cannibalism.

Their children, they said, had died of hunger. Maddened by grief and
starvation, the parents had cooked and eaten them.

But afterwards, ‘when they came to understand what had happened, they
lost their minds’.

Yet even as four million Ukrainians starved to death, Stalin’s Western
admirers refused to acknowledge the truth.

Here in Britain, Left-wing intellectuals maintained the famine was a
myth, and hailed him as the architect of a ‘new civilisation’.

One courageous exception was Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, who
travelled through Ukraine in March 1933 and returned to break the news
of a ‘catastrophic’ famine. Shamefully, however, the New York Times
claimed Jones was lying.

Its reporter Walter Duranty, a paid-up Stalin stooge, accused him of
spreading ‘malignant propaganda’, and insisted that reports of the
famine had been invented by the British government.

For decades afterwards, discussion of the famine was suppressed by the
Soviet regime. But the Ukrainians themselves did not forget. How could they?

‘I was so frightened by what had happened,’ recalled one woman, who
managed to escape after her emaciated body was mistakenly thrown into a
mass grave for famine victims, ‘that I could not talk for several days.
I saw dead bodies in my dreams. And I screamed a lot.’
Local residents cook sitting at an entrance to their damaged apartment
building in an area that Russian-backed separatists claim to control in
the Ukraine city of Mariupol

Local residents cook sitting at an entrance to their damaged apartment
building in an area that Russian-backed separatists claim to control in
the Ukraine city of Mariupol

Was the famine genocide? The man who coined the term, Polish law
professor Raphael Lemkin, certainly thought so.

The famine, he wrote in 1953, was ‘the classic example of Soviet
genocide’, designed to bring ‘the destruction of the Ukrainian nation’.

In that respect, it failed. Today the famine is a central element of
Ukrainian identity – a spur to their sense of national distinctiveness,
as well a terrible reminder of their suffering at the hands of Moscow.

You probably won’t be surprised to hear that its coverage in Russia is
very different.

Pro-Kremlin historians deny it happened, while others claim it has been
exaggerated by the Ukrainians.

Five years ago, Putin himself complained about the Western ‘demonisation
of Stalin’.

At the time, few people noticed. But perhaps we should have seen it as a
sign of what was coming.

History never repeats itself exactly. But in this case, the pattern of
lies, propaganda, contempt and cruelty, masterminded from the Kremlin to
punish the people of Ukraine, is only too familiar.

On 25/04/2022 20:22, JeSSe wrote:
>
> "1931 Stalin's Holodomor, or murder by starvation. 1960 Mao's Great
> Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe. 1975
> Starvation in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge Famine. 2021 According to the
> International Crisis Group, Venezuela on the brink of a famine. The
> thread that binds all of these events - Socialism"
>
>
> `````````````````````````````````````````
>

Well some people count Communism as one of the great plagues to beset
mankind (I'd count myself among them). I don't know what to count
Putin's war as though. It's a war of ambition pretending to be a war of
containment. It was unnecessary. Russia wasn't going to be attacked by
NATO, only prevented from attacking and Russia was gradually re-joining
the world after it's experiment with international Communism. There was
a huge peace dividend waiting to be cashed in by all sides once the West
and Russia no longer saw each other as a threat. Imagine how much money
and resources that would release. Maybe the bulk of it has already been
spent, but I'm sure it would be a lot in just a few years.

I'm not sure we're going to be able to do a lot about the food shortage
problem, that seems to have already got started. We just weren't ready
for so many problems in such a short space of time. That has the
potential to really get bad. It's an ill wind that blows nobody any
good of course, and it'll help Putin at least. The poor guy needs some
good news and millions of people starving because they wouldn't comply
with his will might at least put a smile on his face for a moment.

>
>
>
>
> Joseph Stalin starved millions to death - we must help Ukraine to stop
> it happening again: As Vladimir Putin uses famine as a weapon against
> the innocent, DOMINIC SANDBROOK recalls a powerful lesson from history
>
>
> More than 50 days into Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion, the Ukrainian
> people’s living nightmare remains as dark as ever.
>
> Almost every evening brings news of more appalling Russian war crimes.
> Yet as horrific as the war has been, the worst may be yet to come.
>
> In yesterday’s Mail On Sunday, Ukrainian ambassador Vadym Prystaiko paid
> a heartfelt tribute to readers who have donated to the Mail Force
> campaign, which is sending half a million food boxes to his beleaguered
> people.
>
> Yet more is needed, for his country faces one of the worst humanitarian
> catastrophes in modern European history.
>
> As Mr Prystaiko noted, Ukraine has long been renowned as the breadbasket
> of Europe.
> A local resident prepares to cook at an entrance of a building damaged
> during fighting in Mariupol. Russian troops have been shelling farms,
> food warehouses, grain silos, shopping centres and supermarkets, and
> even stealing tractors and combine harvesters and driving them across
> the border.
>
> A local resident prepares to cook at an entrance of a building damaged
> during fighting in Mariupol. Russian troops have been shelling farms,
> food warehouses, grain silos, shopping centres and supermarkets, and
> even stealing tractors and combine harvesters and driving them across
> the border.
>
> But the Russian invaders have pushed it to the verge of famine, shelling
> farms, food warehouses, grain silos, shopping centres and supermarkets,
> and even stealing tractors and combine harvesters and driving them
> across the border.
>
> In the ambassador’s words, this appears to be a ‘targeted campaign by
> Putin to try to starve innocent Ukrainian civilians’.
>
> And tragically, it seems to be working.
>
> Already there are reports from eastern Ukraine of people drinking water
> from radiators and puddles, and even killing and cooking stray dogs to
> avoid starvation.
>
> And with the Russians planning a new offensive in the coming weeks, such
> stories are likely to become distressingly common.
>
> As Mr Prystaiko wrote, one of the horrible things about this is that
> it’s so familiar.
>
> The pages of Ukraine’s history are stained with suffering, but the
> darkest chapter of all is the story of the early 1930s, when at least
> four million men, women and children died in a famine directed from Moscow.
>
>
> Ukrainians know this as the Holodomor, a crime of ‘murder by starvation’.
>
> Many historians see it as an act of genocide, planned and organised by
> one man – the Communist dictator Joseph Stalin.
>
> Then as now, the roots of the famine lay in the Russians’ brutal
> contempt for their neighbours.
>
> A few years earlier, amid the chaos of the Russian Revolution, the
> Ukrainians had made an abortive bid for freedom, only to be crushed by
> the Red Army. Ever since, Stalin had regarded them with deep distrust.
>
> He had nothing but contempt for Ukraine’s language, culture and
> traditions, and was infuriated by its peasants’ reluctance to embrace
> his Marxist utopia.
>
> At the turn of the 1930s he decided to break the Ukrainians’ resistance
> by ‘liquidating’ the richer peasants and forcing the rest into vast
> state-run farms, where they would toil ceaselessly for the greater
> Soviet good. But what followed was a tragedy on an unimaginable scale.
> A boy next to the body of his father after the man was shot for
> approaching a prohibited area of a farm while picking grain during the
> Holodomor. Dominic Sandbrook writes we must not let scenes like this be
> repeated
>
> A boy next to the body of his father after the man was shot for
> approaching a prohibited area of a farm while picking grain during the
> Holodomor. Dominic Sandbrook writes we must not let scenes like this be
> repeated
>
> As Stalin’s henchmen roamed the Ukrainian countryside, seizing grain
> that he could sell abroad, food supplies dwindled and families began to
> starve.
>
> By early 1932, the reports on his desk told of peasants fleeing their
> homes in search of food, children swollen with hunger, people living on
> grass and acorns, bodies in the streets of Ukraine’s cities.
>
> Instead of intervening, Stalin blamed Ukrainian nationalists for
> ‘hiding’ grain supplies and ordered his thugs to tighten their grip. And
> so the death toll mounted – from thousands to millions.
>
> The best work on these terrible years, Anne Applebaum’s prize-winning
> account Red Famine, is one of the most haunting books I’ve ever read.
>
> In one of countless dreadful anecdotes, she describes a 15-year-old farm
> girl begging beside a queue outside a Communist-run bread shop.
>
> As each person passed, the girl asked for crumbs. Finally she asked the
> shopkeeper, who struck her to the ground.
>
> ‘Get up,’ he said, kicking her. ‘Go home and get to work!’
>
> But she did not move; she was dead. At that, people in the queue started
> crying.
>
> ‘Some are getting too sentimental around here,’ the shopkeeper said
> threateningly. ‘It is easy to spot enemies of the people.’
>
> Amid the horror, some families turned on one another. One man was so
> enraged by the sound of his children crying for food he smothered his
> baby in its cradle and killed two other children by smashing their heads
> against a wall.
>
> In the western Ukrainian province of Vinnytsia, another farmer tried to
> suffocate his starving children by lighting a fire and blocking the
> chimney. When they screamed for help, he strangled them with his bare
> hands.
>
> Applebaum’s most terrible stories are those of desperate people reduced
> to cannibalism.
>
> In one Ukrainian village, the police arrested a man who had gone mad
> after his wife died.
>
> A neighbour asked why he seemed better fed than everybody else. ‘I have
> eaten my children,’ the man said, ‘and if you talk too much, I will eat
> you.’
>
> Later, in Stalin’s prison camps, a Polish woman met hundreds of
> ‘unhappy, barefoot, half-naked Ukrainians’, who had been sentenced for
> cannibalism.
>
> Their children, they said, had died of hunger. Maddened by grief and
> starvation, the parents had cooked and eaten them.
>
> But afterwards, ‘when they came to understand what had happened, they
> lost their minds’.
>
> Yet even as four million Ukrainians starved to death, Stalin’s Western
> admirers refused to acknowledge the truth.
>
> Here in Britain, Left-wing intellectuals maintained the famine was a
> myth, and hailed him as the architect of a ‘new civilisation’.
>
> One courageous exception was Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, who
> travelled through Ukraine in March 1933 and returned to break the news
> of a ‘catastrophic’ famine. Shamefully, however, the New York Times
> claimed Jones was lying.
>
> Its reporter Walter Duranty, a paid-up Stalin stooge, accused him of
> spreading ‘malignant propaganda’, and insisted that reports of the
> famine had been invented by the British government.
>
> For decades afterwards, discussion of the famine was suppressed by the
> Soviet regime. But the Ukrainians themselves did not forget. How could
> they?
>
> ‘I was so frightened by what had happened,’ recalled one woman, who
> managed to escape after her emaciated body was mistakenly thrown into a
> mass grave for famine victims, ‘that I could not talk for several days.
> I saw dead bodies in my dreams. And I screamed a lot.’
> Local residents cook sitting at an entrance to their damaged apartment
> building in an area that Russian-backed separatists claim to control in
> the Ukraine city of Mariupol
>
> Local residents cook sitting at an entrance to their damaged apartment
> building in an area that Russian-backed separatists claim to control in
> the Ukraine city of Mariupol
>
> Was the famine genocide? The man who coined the term, Polish law
> professor Raphael Lemkin, certainly thought so.
>
> The famine, he wrote in 1953, was ‘the classic example of Soviet
> genocide’, designed to bring ‘the destruction of the Ukrainian nation’.
>
> In that respect, it failed. Today the famine is a central element of
> Ukrainian identity – a spur to their sense of national distinctiveness,
> as well a terrible reminder of their suffering at the hands of Moscow.
>
> You probably won’t be surprised to hear that its coverage in Russia is
> very different.
>
> Pro-Kremlin historians deny it happened, while others claim it has been
> exaggerated by the Ukrainians.
>
> Five years ago, Putin himself complained about the Western ‘demonisation
> of Stalin’.
>
> At the time, few people noticed. But perhaps we should have seen it as a
> sign of what was coming.
>
> History never repeats itself exactly. But in this case, the pattern of
> lies, propaganda, contempt and cruelty, masterminded from the Kremlin to
> punish the people of Ukraine, is only too familiar.
>
> This time, though, we must learn from the past. We cannot stand idly by
> while the Ukrainians starve.
>
> These brave people need all the help we can give them: not just food
> parcels to fight the famine, but helicopters, missiles, tanks and guns
> to fight the invaders.
>
> For in the long run, there is only one answer to their plight. Victory.
>
> https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-10726973/Stalin-starved-millions-help-Ukraine-stop-happening-DOMINIC-SANDBROOK-writes.html
>

On 27/04/2022 04:53, TWP wrote:
> On 25/04/2022 20:22, JeSSe wrote:
>>
>> "1931 Stalin's Holodomor, or murder by starvation. 1960 Mao's Great
>> Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe. 1975
>> Starvation in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge Famine. 2021 According to the
>> International Crisis Group, Venezuela on the brink of a famine. The
>> thread that binds all of these events - Socialism"
>>
>>
>> `````````````````````````````````````````
>>
>
> Well some people count Communism as one of the great plagues to beset
> mankind (I'd count myself among them).  I don't know what to count
> Putin's war as though.  It's a war of ambition pretending to be a war of
> containment.  It was unnecessary.  Russia wasn't going to be attacked by
> NATO, only prevented from attacking and Russia was gradually re-joining
> the world after it's experiment with international Communism.  There was
> a huge peace dividend waiting to be cashed in by all sides once the West
> and Russia no longer saw each other as a threat.  Imagine how much money
> and resources that would release.  Maybe the bulk of it has already been
> spent, but I'm sure it would be a lot in just a few years.
>

My point here is that the West / NATO has no reward coming to it by
having a war with Russia. It isn't a nation just a defence agreement so
isn't going to be 'expanding' in the true sense - not like Russia
intends to expand. It's not out to occupy any Russian land. It isn't
looking for lebensraum. NATO is a threat to Russia only if Russia
intended to be threatening to others and even then NATO wouldn't have
made the first move. Other than that Russia could have just amused
themselves watching the West waste loads of money on weapons and defences.

On Wed, 27 Apr 2022 04:53:34 +0100
TWP <ngspammersad@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> There was a huge peace dividend waiting to
> be cashed in by all sides once the West and Russia no longer saw each
> other as a threat.

Indeed. And why did that not come about ?

It wasn't because Russia didn't want that. It wasn't because the EU didn't want that. It was because America didn't want that.

Russia's attempts to come in from the cold were rebuffed by the US who feared that would strengthen the EU and the euro, diminish America's standing and damage dollar supremacy.

That's why Obama sent Victoria "Fuck the EU" into Ukraine to drive a permanent wedge between the EU and Russia, put an end to the threat of Russia joining the EU, to dash Russian hopes of securing peace.

Russians got the message, understood they would never be allowed to have peace, and got behind Putin as the best man to lead and protect their country.

Having turned the EU against Russia, Obama and vice president Biden hoped to see the destruction of Russia during the following term of office. Unfortunately for them, Trump got elected, and those plans had to be put on hold until Biden was elected as president.

And here we are. Biden is simply completing the mission he and Obama had embarked upon a decade earlier.

On Wed, 27 Apr 2022 05:04:19 +0100
TWP <ngspammersad@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> My point here is that the West / NATO has no reward coming to it by
> having a war with Russia. It isn't a nation just a defence agreement
> so isn't going to be 'expanding' in the true sense

You are completely ignoring that NATO is the outreach arm of American foreign policy, a convenient coalition of armed western forces which the US controls.

Trump could never understand that, couldn't comprehend why the US was spending billions of dollars to retain that invaluable resource, but it's back to being what it always has been since Biden got elected.

No, there won't be any reward going to NATO, any members of NATO except America. We are fighting America's war on their behalf, suffering the consequences while America dictates the course of this war from thousands of miles away.

If this war destroys Europe, damages the EU, that's a double-win for America. We foolishly think it will be a win for ourselves, because we consider ourselves more American than European, still imagine the "special relationship" is a two-way street, imagine that if we help America get what she wants then our elite we will be greatly rewarded.

The probably will be. It's the rest of us who have to pay the price of what they do in our names.

TWP wrote:
> On 27/04/2022 04:53, TWP wrote:
>> On 25/04/2022 20:22, JeSSe wrote:
>>>
>>> "1931 Stalin's Holodomor, or murder by starvation. 1960 Mao's Great
>>> Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe. 1975
>>> Starvation in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge Famine. 2021 According to the
>>> International Crisis Group, Venezuela on the brink of a famine. The
>>> thread that binds all of these events - Socialism"
>>>
>>>
>>> `````````````````````````````````````````
>>>
>>
>> Well some people count Communism as one of the great plagues to beset
>> mankind (I'd count myself among them).  I don't know what to count
>> Putin's war as though.  It's a war of ambition pretending to be a war
>> of containment.  It was unnecessary.  Russia wasn't going to be
>> attacked by NATO, only prevented from attacking and Russia was
>> gradually re-joining the world after it's experiment with
>> international Communism.  There was a huge peace dividend waiting to
>> be cashed in by all sides once the West and Russia no longer saw each
>> other as a threat.  Imagine how much money and resources that would
>> release.  Maybe the bulk of it has already been spent, but I'm sure it
>> would be a lot in just a few years.
>>
>
> My point here is that the West / NATO has no reward coming to it by
> having a war with Russia.  It isn't a nation just a defence agreement so
> isn't going to be 'expanding' in the true sense - not like Russia
> intends to expand.  It's not out to occupy any Russian land.  It isn't
> looking for lebensraum.  NATO is a threat to Russia only if Russia
> intended to be threatening to others and even then NATO wouldn't have
> made the first move.  Other than that Russia could have just amused
> themselves watching the West waste loads of money on weapons and defences.
>

Don't know, am not liking the recent Bolshevik lunge towards
confrontation, which has been building for a while and seems to have
culminated with Xidens negro secretary blurting out that we seek to
greatly weaken Russia, and that WE, I mean they, can win.

Proxy wars are fine but no need to shout it from the rooftops, and no
need to make it personal. We are in uncharted territory since we don't
know who is calling the shots in the US, certainly not the senile puppet
Xiden, most likely a cabal of power players with Xiden fronting.
I fear they want to ramp up the rhetoric and confrontational moves
precisely to embroil NATO forces vs Russian, and why would they want to
do something like that ?
Not out of concern for Ukraine but concern for their grip on power,
covid is fading fast and they direly need a new national emergency to
continue with the edicts that are wrecking this nation, to continue with
puppet rule and continue with the demonization and divisiveness which
brought them to power in the first place.

These people are demons TWP, I hope I am wrong and may possibly be, for
it would take complicity with European powers to pull off. Actions speak
much louder than words and The coming weeks are critical, Putin as is
well known needs some sort of victory for May 9th, and while of course I
would not like to see that happen, I also don't want to see us dragged
in to prevent it.

--
Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for
light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.