• YEP [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    I have heard of it that is why I referenced it, this argument has been raging for decades. The idea of a terror famine has been pushed in popular media even though it is not the common view held by experts in the field of study. I’ll link one of the funnier exchanges on the subject in Getty’s review of Conquest’s harvest of sorrow (one of the more more widely cited sources in popular culture of the intentional famine narrative) in the London review of books.

    https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n02/j.-arch-getty/starving-the-ukraine

    For context this was also written before western academics has access to the Soviet archives which further served to vindicate the Getty’s criticism of the narrative.

    No one denies that there was death and hardship. When you call something genocide you are saying there was a deliberate effort to eradicate a peoples, there isn’t sufficient evidence of intentionality or malice to come to the conclusion of genocide. You can say there was a poorly planned and executed state policy(I personally think it could have been better handled) but it also ignores the global context of wide spread crop failures at the time, for example in the north American dust bowl or the West African famines (I’d argue you can make a much more substantiated claim of genocide in West Africa). It also ignores the material conditions that Soviet agriculture at the time was underdeveloped because of the serfdom under the tsars.

    I don’t expect us to reconcile but when your response is just my grandma says so you come off as unserious and that’s why you are getting dunked on. In America a popular boomer conspiracy that people will attest to is that there were Jews celebrating when 9/11 happened it doesn’t mean it’s correct or should be taken seriously.