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Bette Dangerous

@Heidi_Cuda

Dec 28, 2025

FAMINE AS WEAPON: Exposing Soviet Evil

In Part 2 of our Speakeasy series with Ukrainian historian Tetiana Boriak, she offered the Bette Dangerous community a detailed history of the Holodomor, Stalin’s man-made famine. Here is that report

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bettedangerous.com/p/famine-as-we…

Author’s note: With the help of a Ukrainian scholar, I am rewriting the history of what we know about communism. Any romanticized notions go out the window when we view history through the eye of a refugee-historian, with access to key documents that tell a cold and hard story about lies and theft, murder and starvation. We are offering a service to reality that helps us in this grave moment when political starvation proves again convenient to dictators and war criminals who talk of peace, as fascist dictators did a century ago. The following transcript, edited lightly for brevity and clarity, is from our interview with Ukrainian historian Tetiana Boriak on November 23, 2025, about the history of the Holodomor, Stalin’s man-made famine, which took the lives of 3.9 million Ukrainians. While working on a book project on the topic in February of 2022, Boriak realized that ‘Russia was killing us again,’ and she sought refuge in Lithuania for her and her children. She is now an associate professor in the History Department at Vilnius University. This interview took place during the week of the Holodomor Remembrance and is part of our three-part Speakeasy series with her. As you will learn, the Soviets were expert at creating fake realities to fool the West, a tradition that continues today.—hsc

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FAMINE AS WEAPON: Exposing Soviet Evil

Words by Tetiana Boriak; edited by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, from Part 2 of our Speakeasy series with the Ukrainian historian on the history of the Holodomor, Stalin’s man-made famine

Begin transcript:

Tetiana Boriak: I will try to make it pretty clear, because it’s not complicated. When you know the consequence of the events, then you can better understand the contemporary situation.
So the starting point is to understand the man-made famine, the Holodomor, is recognized as a genocide by almost 30 countries — the European Union, the European Parliament, the Assembly of the Council of Europe.

To understand, you will have to go back to the First World War, because 1914 - 1918 was the period when the empires collapsed, the Russian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Ottoman Empire.

The First World War became a certain social network, because people from various regions of one country met accidentally on the battlefield. And they suddenly discovered that they have similar problems. And when we talk about the Ukrainians on the front of the First World War, they discovered that they have the portrait of Shevchenko, that is the national Ukrainian poet, who wrote about oppression under the Russian Empire — that they basically have the same needs. They just want land. They just want to work on this land and that Petrograd, that is St Petersburg, it’s far away and Moscow is far away. And basically, this is not their war.

So this was the main outcome for Ukraine, together with the collapse of the Russian Empire. Then we had the March 1917 resignation of the last Russian emperor, Nikolai II.

Then we have an attempt of a democratic government, of the temporary government, to create some kind of… Russia of the future, they were trying to implement some democratic changes, but the authoritarian machine seemed to be pretty powerful.

And the second reason that is probably even more important is the Russian propaganda. The Soviet Union started with the Russian propaganda. It was an unprecedented level of propaganda in world history, I would say, because the Bolsheviks, namely Lenin, was pretty smart, he was a criminal, obviously, he put millions to the ground, but he was a pretty smart guy in terms of how to communicate their messages. So the whole army of Russian agitators was created.

They had the printing houses. They printed leaflets. So basically they were saying to the Russian soldiers that this is not their war, as well. And so if the front has collapsed, the Russian sign the agreement with Germany and their allies, they kind of leave the war. But on the other hand, this allowed them to focus on occupation of the territories.

And in Ukraine in 1917, simultaneously, with the resignation of the Russian emperor Nikolai II, the democratic government was created. And so they started to do all these changes that were necessary to set the stage to have negotiations, how to govern, how to communicate with the people, to create an army, to introduce Ukrainian languages, language of communication, etc.

So this Ukrainian revolution lasted from 1917 to 1921 — there were several democratic governments during this period. But the war with Russia began already in December of 1917, right after what is called the Great Bolshevik Socialist Revolution, on November 7, 1917. By December, the Russians launched war on Ukraine.

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Bette Dangerous

@Heidi_Cuda

Dec 13, 2025

The Last Defence Against Trump's Total Immunity

Donald Trump’s recent threat to the International Criminal Court is a sign that he is in far more trouble than he is willing to admit, I report in @BylineTimes

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bylinesupplement.com/p/the-last-def…

Donald Trump’s administration this week threatened new US sanctions on the International Criminal Court, in an attempt to strong-arm it into not investigating him and his top officials.

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Such a move is an admission of guilt. An innocent man would have no reason to demand that the ICC amend its founding document. Reuters first reported the threat on Thursday.

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Bette Dangerous

@Heidi_Cuda

Oct 23, 2025

We Fight As We Breathe—A Q&A with ⁦@Mamulashvili_M⁩

A thoughtful conversation with commander of the Georgian National Legion Ukraine on Putin’s attempts to reanimate the corpse of the Soviet Union and why supporting Ukraine is the West’s best play bettedangerous.com/p/we-fight-as-…

Author’s note: On September 23, reporter Adam Sybera and I interviewed Mamuka Mamulashvili, Commander of the Georgian National Legion — Ukraine, at Bette’s Happy Hour. Mamuka has been fighting in Ukraine against the Russia invaders for more than a decade, survived multiple assassination attempts, three poisonings, and 32 years of war. At the age of 14, Mamuka took part in the Georgian-Russian war in Abkhazia. Towards the end of the conflict, he and his father were taken prisoner. Mamuka spent three months in captivity and was later released through a prisoner exchange program.
What follows is a transcript of the interview, lightly edited for clarity and brevity.—hsc

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We Fight As We Breathe: A Q&A with Mamuka Mamulashvili

A conversation with the commander of the Georgian National Legion Ukraine on Putin’s attempts to rebuild the corpse of the Soviet Union and why supporting Ukraine is an insurance policy for the rest of the free world

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Bette Dangerous

@Heidi_Cuda

Oct 16, 2025

Orbán Bagman and ‘Other Loyal Servants of Organized Crime’

A brief conversation with Alex Alvarova about Hungary etc.

1/ bettedangerous.com/p/orban-bagman…

Bette’s Happy Hour on Tuesday with disinformation analysts Dietmar Pichler and Alex Alvarova was one of our finest — the exchange of information from our global community was phenomenal.

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I kicked off the event by talking about how I’m framing the world at the moment between those pushing illusion and those living in reality. The illusionists create phantoms — this week’s model is ‘antifa’ — a conjured phantom to defang the word ‘fascist’ so the illusionists can target political enemies.

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Bette Dangerous

@Heidi_Cuda

Oct 1, 2025

‘A Book for Our Own Troubled Times’

A historic look at how conspiracies poison democracy, as detailed in Richard J. Evans book, “The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination”

1/ bettedangerous.com/p/a-book-for-o…

It’s okay to admit we got it wrong. We weren’t prepared for the Great Propaganda Wars.

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How could we be? We who were raised in democratic nations relied on a shared narrative of truth. We relied on academic and scientific expertise. We put our trust in higher learning, and those who deviated from a fact-based world — the snake oil salesmen, who exploited fear and ignorance — well, there were repercussions for these criminal exploiters. Our fact-based world had punitive laws for the exploiters.

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Bette Dangerous

@Heidi_Cuda

Sep 11, 2025

Nazi Martyr Horst Wessel

Beware the mobilizing martyrdom by American fascists

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The moment I learned of Charlie Kirk’s death, I thought of Jeff Sharlet. Sharlet has documented extremist right-wing movements in America for two decades, and he was the one who taught me how Ashli Babbitt became a MAGA martyr.

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In an interview with RadPod on his book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, Sharlet told us:

So Ashli Babbitt, 35-year-old white woman from Southern California, Air Force veteran storms the Capitol with violent intentions - she wrote about them. That's her knife on the cover of the book. That's the evidence photo, you can see it dated 1.6.2021.

She climbs up into a window leading a mob through a broken window, they smash the window, she comes up into it.

And we see on the video that very day, the two hands of the Capitol Hill police officer who shoots her, and it is the hands of a black man, and she's a white woman, and as a student of American mythology and American history, I know right away what's going to happen with that story.

And it happened within hours. First, they started saying Ashli - she was 135 pounds, she was in her 20s. Or maybe she was 16, she was just a little white girl. And they start shrinking her - she's 125 pounds, that's not going to work. She's 115 pounds. No, she's 110. They are making her into this model of white innocence.

Now, those not familiar with the history of lynching don't realize that at the heart of lynching throughout American history has been this kind of sexualized panic. This idea that black men are coming for our - possessive, you see - white women - a kind of property.

And that's the story that they began telling.

That's when the book really started to take shape. I said I'm going to follow the formation of this martyr myth.—Jeff Sharlet, on RadPod

bettedangerous.com/p/lucid-dreami…

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