I just read this and I have to say that the newspaper clipping you found with pictures taken during the Holodomor really affected me. I can definitely see how it would be difficult to NOT have a bias concerning the issue, as you pointed out. What really baffled me about the situation is that there were collectivized crops sitting out to rot due to inefficiencies in planning while people and their animals starved. This reminded me of some of the situation I studied in a class dealing with Imperialism and Colonialization, where people in India and Africa suffered crippling poverty or terrible starvation while their own resources (the same ones that could have helped cure these problems!) were shipped off to Europe. It made me wonder if Stalin's treatment of Ukrainian peasants during this period can be fairly compared to the Imperialists' treatment of peasants in the undeveloped nations they conquered....
Nice. I can see where people would tend to call this a genocide, especially with examples like "from 1932 to 1933, authorities established barricades along the border of the USSR to prevent any peasants from leaving all hunger-stricken regions." That seems pretty intentional to me.
The entire situation strikes me as a microcosm of how poorly executed and inhumane the Soviet system was. I will never be able to understand how a country with so little regard for human life and freedom and entrepreneurship managed to remain one of two world superpowers for nearly 50 years.
2 comments:
I just read this and I have to say that the newspaper clipping you found with pictures taken during the Holodomor really affected me. I can definitely see how it would be difficult to NOT have a bias concerning the issue, as you pointed out. What really baffled me about the situation is that there were collectivized crops sitting out to rot due to inefficiencies in planning while people and their animals starved. This reminded me of some of the situation I studied in a class dealing with Imperialism and Colonialization, where people in India and Africa suffered crippling poverty or terrible starvation while their own resources (the same ones that could have helped cure these problems!) were shipped off to Europe. It made me wonder if Stalin's treatment of Ukrainian peasants during this period can be fairly compared to the Imperialists' treatment of peasants in the undeveloped nations they conquered....
Nice. I can see where people would tend to call this a genocide, especially with examples like "from 1932 to 1933, authorities established barricades along the border of the USSR to prevent any peasants from leaving all hunger-stricken regions." That seems pretty intentional to me.
The entire situation strikes me as a microcosm of how poorly executed and inhumane the Soviet system was. I will never be able to understand how a country with so little regard for human life and freedom and entrepreneurship managed to remain one of two world superpowers for nearly 50 years.
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