MooDengist [he/him]

Yo dawg why are you just blatently ignoring all the shit I quoted and just spout new wrong stuff? That I even explicitly have quotes for like the genocide thing. Also many historians like who. Some weirdo super conservatives? Is that why they aren’t named? Your shit reads like a wiki article that you are quote mining so put in some more effort.

I would do a longer thing about this but I am limited on time currently all I will say is that Robert Conquest is widely discredited by actual historians and after the Soviet Union fell and the Archives were opened he himself had to walk back stuff he wrote before that time because the amount of evidence was so overwhelmingly against him.

I will also mention that Robert Conquest worked for MI6 for several years as an anti-communist propagandist and despite seeming like a historian does not have a degree in sovietology or history or a related field and heavily grabbed from a proven MI6 outlet the Information Research Department, pretty much anything Conquest wrote should be seen through the lense of him being a anti-communist conservative at best and huge reactionary at worst. The guy literally though that the Church of England was left-wing, if he were around today he’d call it woke.

A lot of his sources are interviews and reports from the IRD or journalists quoting the IRD which again most historians now go and say ‘What are you doing we have primary sources now why are you quoting dubious things’, well they would if he wasn’t dead. So Robert Conquest is not to be taken serious and was not a serious man.

Edit:

Citing from the same book again.

Our study of the famine has led us to very different conclusions from Dr Conquest’s. He holds that Stalin ‘wanted a famine’,142 that ‘the Soviets did not want the famine to be coped with successfully’,143 and that the Ukrainian famine was ‘deliberately inflicted for its own sake’.144 This leads him to the sweeping conclusion: ‘The main lesson seems to be that the Communist ideology provided the motivation for an unprecedented massacre of men, women and children.’145 We do not at all absolve Stalin from responsibility for the famine. His policies towards the peasants were ruthless and brutal. But the story which has emerged in this book is of a Soviet leadership which was struggling with a famine crisis which had been caused partly by their wrongheaded policies, but was unexpected and undesirable. The background to the famine is not simply that Soviet agricultural policies were derived from Bolshevik ideology, though ideology played its part. They were also shaped by the Russian pre-revolutionary past, the experiences of the civil war, the international situation, the intransigeant circumstances of geography and the weather, and the modus operandi of the Soviet system as it was established under Stalin. They were formulated by men with little formal education and limited knowledge of agriculture. Above all, they were a consequence of the decision to industrialise this peasant country at breakneck speed.

And

It is regrettable that many of the advocates of the genocide thesis continue to claim Conquest to justify their position, despite his clearly expressed views on this matter. See the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute Conference on Holodomor on November 18, 2008, http://www.huri.harvard.edu/na/2008_11_17-18_famine_conf/2008_11_18_werth-graziosi-flier.html (accessed May 18, 2009). At the conference Nicolas Werth was asked by a participant in the conference, who had attended a lecture given by Wheatcroft, whether Conquest accepted the view that the famine was genocide. Werth strangely replied that ‘we all know in scientific circles the very complicated relations between Conquest and Wheatcroft’; he repeated this several times, but declined to reply to the question. Kul’chitskii more straightforwardly has explained that in June 2006 a Ukrainian delegation of experts on the Holocaust and the Golodomor met Robert Conquest in Stanford University and enquired about his views, and were told directly by him that he preferred not to use the term genocide (Kul’chitskii (2007), 176).

Edit edit:

I thought it was obvious but that was stupid. Nicolas Werth was one of the authors of the Black Book of Communism which is it’s own topic which I won’t go into but I think should make my point that Nicolas Werth is not a fan of communism who wants to mischaracterize Conquest.

From The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933: By R. W. Davies, Stephen G. Wheatcroft

Western commentators and historians long debated whether the famine was man-made. They differ in their assessments of the extent to which Soviet policy was responsible for the famine and the extent to which Terror was consciously used by the state. In response to the first edition of our book Robert Conquest, the most widely cited advocate of the view that the famine was man-made, has clarified his position on this matter and has clearly stated that although he thinks that the famine was caused by the Bolsheviks, who engaged in criminally terroristic measures, he nevertheless does not think that it was consciously intended (see note 145 on page 441 below).

Danilov and Zelenin concurred that Stalin did not want or anticipate a famine, but they characterised it as an ‘organised famine’, while also describing Stalin’s actions as being ‘fully or not fully conscious’. We think that this is a misleading way of looking at the problem. We do not think it appropriate to describe the unintended consequences of a policy as ‘organised’ by the policy-makers. Russian historians sometimes call the famine ‘rukotvornyi’ – man-made – on the grounds that it was ultimately a result of the forcible collectivisation of agriculture, and that is more defensible. But in our opinion they and Conquest underestimate the role of climate and other natural causes in producing the bad harvests of 1931 and 1932, and are mistaken in believing that the 1932 harvest was an average harvest rather than a poor one. The two successive bad harvests in 1931 and 1932, partly resulting from the previous policies of the Soviet leadership, meant that by the spring of 1932 there was an absolute shortage of grain, which became more severe in the ensuing twelve months. This was a central feature of a general crisis in 1932–33. The Soviet leaders were faced with major problems throughout the economy, which led to another chain of ‘mutually connected and mutually dependent Stalin actions’, parallel with that described by Danilov and Zelenin.

First, the Japanese aggressive policy towards the Soviet Union, culminating in the invasion of Manchuria in September 1931, led to the Soviet decision to increase defence preparation. Secondly, the world economic crisis involved a major turn of the terms of trade against Soviet agricultural and other exports. In 1931 imports greatly exceeded exports, and the foreign debt increased by 50 per cent in that single year. Thirdly, the food shortage in the towns, serious since 1929, grew much worse under the impact of the flood of labour into industry in 1931.

There was no easy way to cope with these developments, and the Politburo had to modify greatly its original aims. The defence plans launched in the autumn of 1931 had to be cut back halfway through 1932, and remained in a reduced form in spite of the advent of Hitler to power in January 1933. Imports for the industrialisation programme had also to be cut drastically in 1932 and 1933, affecting such major projects as the Chelyabinsk tractor factory. And additional grain for the towns was not available. As early as the spring of 1932 the Soviet authorities planned not to increase the state grain collections from the 1932 harvest, and eventually they were able to procure only 18.5 million tons as compared with the 22.8 million tons obtained from the 1931 harvest. Rations in the towns were drastically cut back, and in the winter and spring of 1932–33 many townspeople were starving. For the first time since the early 1920s, in 1933 the number employed in the non-agriculture sector was reduced, including the number employed in industry and on the railways, and investment was reduced for the first time since the early 1920s. The crisis had forced Stalin and the Politburo to retreat ignominiously. Stalin’s clarion call of February 1931 to close the gap between the USSR and the advanced countries within ten years, ‘or they will do us in’, could not now be honoured. These were desperate and brutal men tryingto cope with a crisis, not organisers of a deliberate famine.

What does being ethnically Russian have to do with the language? Ukraine is perfectly fine with people who were born in Soviet or post-Soviet Russia

Except if you speak Russian then…well not so much now right? But this is also nonsense if again Canada banned French in schools and government institutions it doesn’t matter if someone like Céline Dion is beloved when normal people are negatively impacted by their protections being taken away. Do you think that some 50-60 year old ethnically russian person that maybe learned ukrainian as a school kid but since they never used it again or not often enough doesn’t really speak ukranian anymore and now has to go to their municipal offices to renew some permits or their passport or whatever and they are shit out of luck because Poroshenko did away with all of that because he was and presumably still is a far right nationalist.

Again while the latter is not outlawed when you pass laws that clearly do away with protections and you not so subtly say ‘You know it’s ok to be cruel to those people’ then people will be cruel, like look at the USA currently under Trump where a lot of people are a lot more comfortable being cruel towards minorities.

But hey let me just quote a part the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages:

Part II of the Charter

Recognition of regional or minority languages as an expression of cultural wealth.

Respect for the geographical area of each regional or minority language.

The need for resolute action to promote such languages.

The facilitation and/or encouragement of the use of such languages, in speech and writing, in public and private life.

The provision of appropriate forms and means for the teaching and study of such languages at all appropriate stages.

The promotion of relevant transnational exchanges.

The prohibition of all forms of unjustified distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference relating to the use of a regional or minority language and intended to discourage or endanger its maintenance or development.

The promotion by states of mutual understanding between all the country’s linguistic groups.

Protections of minority groups is again like one of those things most nations and people agree on this isn’t radical stuff because if those existing protections are being taken away then it’s often a one way trip to ethnic repression which unless drastic measures are taken to put them back in will inevitably lead to mass killings or worse.

WTF Yes.

Around 30% of the Ukrainian population was ethnically Russian before the war, that is 30% of the population whose mother tongue is Russian and that language was forbidden. Like let’s not get into the many languages still spoken in Canada but just imagine if they said 'Sorry no more french being used as an official language or in our institutions, and the amount of french speakers in Canada is lower at 22%, if Switzerland said ‘fuck you french speakers and italians only swiss german from now on’.

Like I thought this shit was obvious to everyone that ethnic minorities should get protections which include speaking their own languages. What are you some freak that walks around in the US that yells ‘SPEAK ENGLISH’ at people?