Basically all photographic “evidence” purported to document the 1932-33 famine dramatized as “Holodomor” is fraudulent. Let’s look at examples, taken from Douglas Tottle’s Fraud, Famine and Fascism.
The seminal accounts of what would become the “Holodomor” was a story published in the rabidly pro-Nazi Hearst press by a man going by the name of Thomas Walker. Shortly after it’s publication, it was revealed that he had never visited Ukraine and his account was completely false
Not only was his account fictitional, but Walker himself was a fraud. In reality, he was an escaped convict named Robert Green previously convicted of forgery. In his trial he admitted fabricating the story for Hearst.
Walker’s fraudulent photographs are still widely used by Ukrainian nationalists and Western propaganda departments at prestigious institutions such as the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, which resurrected the Holodomor myth as part of 1980s Cold War propaganda.
The second major source for Holodomor photographs was Ewald Ammende’s 1935 Human Life in Russia, published in Nazi Germany. The book cites many Nazi sources, Nationalist emigres and Mussolini’s Italy, in addition to Hearst men.
Amennde just so happened to have worked in famine relief in the 1922 Volga famine, where most of the photographs he claims were shot in 1933 were actually taken. Curiously, many photographs he attributed to a Nazi functionary “Dr. Ditloff” were also attributed to Thomas Walker.
Rounding out the set of primary sources from which contemporary Holodomor “scholarship” draws is the rabidly anti-Semitic Black Deeds of the Kremlin, published in 1953 during the McCarthy era by Ukrainian Nationalists.
The Black Deeds accuses Soviets of the Vynnitsiya massacre, citing as witness one Petro Pavlovich, a Nazi collaborator who praised Germany as “liberator of Ukraine” and called for the defeat of “Jew-communism”. German soldiers later testified to fabricating the atrocity.
Donors to the book included Ukrainian Nazis like Anton Shpak, who personally executed a Jewish childhood friend during a pogrom.
As evidence, The Black Deeds of the Kremlin includes 9 Thomas Walker photographs and 10 from Dr. Ditloff to accuse the “jew-communists” of famine-genocide.
Until 1953, Ukrainian nationalists in the UPA carried out a bloody, CIA-supported terrorist campaign against the forces which liberated the country from the Nazis. Many of these die-hard fascists fled to Canada and the USA with self-exculpating national victim narrative.
During the Reagan anti-communist furor of the 1980s, the story of the Holodomor was dusted off and put to good use. Harvard’s anti-communist propaganda capabilities were augmented with a Ukrainian Research Institute which commemorates the 50th anniversary of the famine-genocide.
Scholar-cum-propagandists like James Mace and Olexa Woropay published harrowing accounts which relied on familiar primary sources: Walker, Ammende, Ditloff and the Black Deeds, going so far as to cite Walker’s account directly, ignoring the author’s admission of its fraudulence.
But the most popular retelling of the famine-genocide was the 1986 Harvest of Sorrows, written by former Robert Conquest, formerly of British intelligence’s Information Research Department, tasked with conducting disinformation and propaganda campaigns targeting communist states
Conquest relies on the testimony of Ukrainian nationalist emigres, including members of the OUN-B, as well well as the same fraudulent sources described above. He also cites Thomas Walker.
The Holodomor famine-genocide myth depends entirely on fraudulent primary sources. It is a political propaganda project of fascist Ukrainian nationalists and the imperialist USA which funds them and has used their movement to undermine both Soviet communism and a resurgent Russia
Ukraine’s sovereignty was violated in the US-orchestrated 2014 Maidan coup. Since then, the US has instigated a proxy war in which hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are dying for the purpose of weakening and isolating a US rival and boosting US arms sales. It’s utterly cynical.
Here are links to an index of the Walker and Ammende photographs which can be used to cross-reference and trace images claiming to show "Holodomor" back to their original, fraudulent sources. Bookmark these! garethjones.org/soviet_article… garethjones.org/soviet_article…
Several folks have brought up another source for Holodomor photographs. Alexander Wienerberger was a Jewish Nazi who fought for the Germans in WWII, a phenomenon that seems relevant today given claims Ukraine can't be fascist bc the puppet leader is Jewish en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander…
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On revolutionary theory, anticommunism, and the cultivation of a Compatible Left which neglects imperialism and disciplined organization and in so doing is incapable of threatening capitalism
Why George Orwell was a piece of shit who supported imperialism while claiming to be a “socialist”, and how his writing about propaganda and misinformation under socialism was informed by his personal experience doing redacted those things on behalf of capitalist Britain.
Many on the left hold a reductive view that Trade Unions = Good. While trade unions are a key vehicle for class struggle, they can and often do have a reactionary character. Reactionary unions are even a favorite tool of the CIA. Let's have a look. 🧵
The assumption that unions are an inherently progressive force is false. Trade unions which abandon the broader struggle to focus exclusively on their own interests at the expense of workers generally are no more progressive than highly paid workers bargaining individually.
In a revolutionary country where the working class controls the state, the situation is even more radically altered. Here "independent" unions bargain not with an exploiting class, but with the rest of the working class. This distinction makes all the difference in the world.
For folks who want to learn more about the actual science of nuclear meltdowns, radiation, and mortality at Chernobyl, check out the two excellent videos linked below. TLDR: popular media and fiction like the HBO series overstate the danger by a factor of 1 MILLION.
In terms of long-term health risks, there is vast uncertainty about the relationship between low level radiation and cancer risk. Studies of 66,000 liquidators (the ppl who cleaned up the area) found NO increased overall mortality, although thyroid cancer rates were elevated.
The high estimates of excess deaths in the thousands are based on unsupported assumptions about the effects of low level radiation on cancer rates, not empirical data. I.e. assuming the worst & extrapolating, a standard reserved for estimating mortality in socialist states.
In addition to the more obvious political motives, there is a fourth factor I neglected to mention at play in the gross overstatement of the effects of Chernobyl: the intra-capitalist rivalry between nuclear power and fossil fuels.
Struggle btw competing blocs of capital is often a determining force in capitalist development. While outcomes are largely determined by the relative size of the competing capitals, the bourgeois state intervenes to create conditions favorable for capital accumulation as a whole.
A classic example is the struggle between automotive and railroad capital. Automotive capital, allied with Big Oil, decisively defeated railroad capital in the USA. The state intervened on behalf of the auto industry because it stimulated consumption, investment and accumulation.
Chernobyl killed just 31 ppl thx to competent disaster management. A far more appropriate (but less ideologically convenient) comparison is India’s Bhopal Disaster, which claimed 4-16k lives when US company Union Carbide ignored safety procedures and poisoned an entire city. 🧵
And yet it’s Chernobyl, not Bhopal, that immediately comes to mind, for several reasons: 1) Anticommunism 2) American corporations don’t want ppl to associate them with mass death 2) The victims were a colonized people whose suffering Westerners have long been trained to ignore
Buried under all those beautiful rice fields and beaches are the bodies of hundreds of thousands of Indonesian peasants and workers who dreamed of a strong Indonesia free from Western exploitation. Their CIA-backed mass murder allowed Bali to become the tourist haven it is today.
In 1965 the popular nationalist Third World leader Sukarno fell victim to a military coup. US-trained generals, Islamists and social reactionaries rounded up half a million Indonesian communists and suspected communists and murdered them. Learn more 👇 outrun.substack.com/p/the-jakarta-…
Sukarno's ouster not only dealt a major blow to Third World aspirations, it enabled former corporate clients of CIA director Allen Dulles to secure access to Indonesia's vast oil and mineral reserves, including the world's richest gold mine in West Papua.