| In defence of the comparison - it is not at all a consensus that the Holodomor was deliberate from the beginning, that’s an active debate with prominent experts on both sides. In both famines, there was a refusal to intervene to alleviate the famine once it had begun, and in both cases that was unequivocally a deliberate choice of the British/Soviet leadership. Further - there are many cases through history of companies steering the state violence, from Colonial India to Blair Mountain to Aaron Swartz. The broad point here is that the Soviet Union is constantly used in our Western discourse for our own brand of whataboutism. Our systems fail people constantly and brutally. Our supermarket shelves are stocked, but most of the Anglosphere is in the grips of an unprecedented housing crisis. There’s absolutely lessons we can learn from the Soviets in housing policy, but we won’t if any mention of them ends up reduced back to their worst failures. They didn’t get their shelves stocked by talking about MKUltra or smallpox blankets all day. You can argue that the grass is greener overall, but there’s still dead patches all over our lawn. That’s the broader point. |
Either you're being deliberately dishonest or haven't read enough of the details. Yes, there is debate on what percentage of that gargantuan human tragedy was started by tyrannical incompetence and how much of it was done through deliberate vengefulness by the Stalin government, further moved forward by local initiative, but virtually all experts agree that at least deliberate indifference allowed things to grow monstrously and prolonged them too.
The leaders in Moscow (especially Stalin) and local commissars could soon clearly see that the collectivization policy was practically extinguishing all human life in the Ukrainian countryside, yet they continued to pursue it and even block all avenues of escape, while at the same time exporting grain they'd confiscated from people who were by then dying in their millions.