Monday, March 24, 2014

For The Ukraine

Hasn't the Ukraine suffered enough?  It's ridiculous. 

A lawyer named Rafal Lemkin invented the word "genocide" in reference to the 3.3 million deaths FROM HUNGER in the Ukraine in the years 1932-33. 

It is usually called a famine, but really it was more like The Great Hunger over in Ireland.  While millions of Irish were dying of hunger, Ireland was the biggest exporter of foodstuffs in Europe.  All of the agricultural products were the property of landowners who exported the food for cash, while the Irish starved.  The Ukraine, which had been essentially seized by the Soviets after they came to power in the early Twenties, had been collectivized.  The grain from the collective farms was sold for foreign currency by Stalin, while the Ukrainians starved.

Amazingly, it only got worse for the Ukraine after that.  There were the mass killings and deadly forced migrations in the late Thirties.  Germany invaded the USSR in 1941, straight into the Ukraine, and the Red Army swept back across in 1944, and in between there was a lot of back and forth along with partisan warfare and reprisals and, let's not forget, the systematic destruction of the Jews, something like a million of whom were Ukrainian Jews. 

And now the long-suffering Ukrainians must be thinking that they're having some kind of flashback from a bad, bad trip.  Russians invading them, again; Russians moving their borders, again; Russians turning them into some kind of colony, again. 

I see the problem, but I'll be damned if I have any suggestions for stopping the Soviets, I mean the Putinists, I mean the "Russian Federation."  I'm following the whole thing with interest, and I don't think it's going to go well, and I feel really bad about it, but I don't think there's anything that I or anybody else can do about it.

I really have to get over this feeling of helplessness about every damn thing.  


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