The detachments of Waffen-SS participated in the gravy military crimes…
What did gravy ever do to them? I knew these nationalists were gravophobic.

Posted by: Patroklos | Apr 29 2021 14:27 utc | 3

This is clearly a translation mistake. Non-Anglophones learn the adverb any as a necessary substitute of every in negative sentences. Unless you live in an anglophone country and speaks it every day, it is easy to automatically associate “any” in the negative depending on your mother tongue (as a substitute to neither/no one/no).
And the march not only did happen: the RT filmed it live:
Ukrainian far-right nationalists stage march in center of Kiev to mark 77th anniversary of WWII Nazi military division SS Galicia

Posted by: vk | Apr 29 2021 15:32 utc | 5

The tweet is in Ukrainian not Russian, of course no western media would publish anything of what really happens in Ukraine, Rozhin in ColonelCassad published some pictures a couple of days ago, and signed off with his typical “There is no fascism in Ukraine”© Any Idiot.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/6735773.html

Posted by: Paco | Apr 29 2021 15:34 utc | 7

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…graaaaaavy military crimes.
(only works with a homer simspons voice, i guess.)

Posted by: the pair | Apr 29 2021 15:48 utc | 9

Good/balanced article on RT regarding the cultural battles in Ukraine:
https://www.rt.com/russia/520471-propaganda-ridiculous-cultural-war/
Putin messed-up on Ukraine.
He left it to fester then did little when government was over-thrown.
Now he would like to influence how Ukraine handles it’s internal affairs – which admittedly it handles very badly.

Posted by: jared | Apr 29 2021 16:17 utc | 11

Looks to me like an innocent translation mistake.
250 participants is surprisingly few.

Posted by: m | Apr 29 2021 16:50 utc | 13

“The lunatic fringe” is all you need to take over a country, so long as the mass media paints them as the good guys and law enforcement looks the other way. Hardcore fascists have always been a minority, even in Japan and Germany in the pre-WWII period. The media simply gaslights the population into thinking there are more of the lunatic fringe than really exist and makes sure the narrative is always on the fascists’ side. In this particular case the Europeans are trying hard to maintain denial over the fact that the fascists have taken control in the Ukraine so their local media will downplay the significance of the fascists there; only claiming 250 in this march. If the elites need the fascists to be empowered then the corporate mass media will err in the other direction, claiming tens of thousands of marchers. We’ve seen that most recently in Venezuela, Hong Kong, Russia, and Syria.
Of course, it is more difficult for the corporate mass media to gaslight the population since the rise of the Internet because their control over the daily narrative has been weakened. That, by the way, is why they have gone full bore on “Identity Politics” and other “woke” nonsense. They need to be able to “cancel” non-establishment voices on the Internet and steer ears away from those voices, otherwise their efforts to glorify monsters and demonize the true heroes will not be as effective as it used to be.

Posted by: William Gruff | Apr 29 2021 17:34 utc | 15

I agree with VK @5 about the cause of the mistranslation. I can generally translate from Russian to English fairly well, but there are sometimes cultural nuances that can cause problems. Translating from English to Russian is much harder, having grown-up in an English speaking country and having an English language thought process.

Posted by: Cossack | Apr 29 2021 17:55 utc | 17

@ Stonebird
Well, what were/are the west’s objectives in Ukraine –
1) Stabilize economy,
2) Improve living conditions,
3) Improve governance,
4) Bring it into the EU,
5) Bring it into NATO,
6) Provoke/malign Russia,
7) Drive a wedge in relations between EU and Russia,
8) …?
I think they are down malign and wedge at this point – empire of chaos.
It’s a bit ironic – In a sense Ukraine is western Russia.
So the US is partnering with Russia to malign Russia.
There is some question as to what extent Zelensky has control of anything.

Posted by: jared | Apr 29 2021 18:28 utc | 19

Poutine Poutine Poutine. It’s always about Poutine. A true a crime by gravy.

Posted by: robin | Apr 29 2021 18:38 utc | 21

jared @19
As far as America is concerned the conflict between the Ukraine and Russia is a bum fight. Just because you pay off one bum to fight another bum doesn’t mean you are that bum’s partner. The US doesn’t care if the bum they paid gets destroyed in the fight as the US wants to see them both wrecked.

Posted by: William Gruff | Apr 29 2021 19:30 utc | 23

BTW, Cyrillic alphabet has a different version for every language that uses it, and to the best of my knowledge, і and ї are used only in Ukrainian. I wonder how to easily recognize the other…

Posted by: Piotr Berman | Apr 29 2021 19:39 utc | 25

Can´t listen to the damn damnation of Ukrainian SS anymore. Soviets came in in 1939, deported 10% of population to Siberia and shot tens of thousands of prisoners when Germans invaded in 1941. Not to mention that millions died during the forced collectivisation at the beginning of the 30s. Ukrainians were throroughly brutalised and became brutal themselves. Thats why they joined the SS. Sure they killed lots of civilians. And so did the Soviets. Then the Ukies lost the war and now they are the bad ones. Nothing but a cynical use of atrocities long gone by.

Posted by: Tom67 | Apr 29 2021 20:41 utc | 27

I just noticed that there is a hoax article on Wikipedia on a “Russo-Ukrainian War.”
The content is a hoax. There is no war between Ukraine and Russia and never has been. Nor is Russia a party in any ceasefire agreements Ukraine has signed (Minsk 1 and 2). Russia and Ukraine maintain diplomatic relations and I think Russia is still Ukraine’s largest trading partner.
Here, see for yourself:

• Russo-Ukrainian War – Wikipedia

Posted by: Petri Krohn | Apr 29 2021 21:12 utc | 29

@Tom67

…millions died during the forced collectivisation at the beginning of the 30s.

Are you talking about Ukrainians or all Soviets? 1.35 million Ukrainians died during the 1932–1933 Soviet famine. Claims of 6–7 millions or even 10 millions are propaganda. Interestingly, Ukrainians were also dying of hunger in Poland-controlled Western Ukraine, where obviously no collectivization was taking place.

Posted by: S | Apr 29 2021 22:04 utc | 31

@m #13:

250 participants is surprisingly few.

@jared #8:

Why is this march of 250 people significant?

It’s significant because of the 2015 Ukrainian law “On the condemnation of the communist and national socialist (Nazi) regimes, and prohibition of propaganda of their symbols”:
Ukraine bans Soviet symbols and criminalises sympathy for communism (The Guardian, Alec Luhn, May 21, 2015).
The false equalization of Nazis and Soviets is, of course, one of the Big Lies of the West, but that’s not the point of my comment. The point is that the application of the law during the next six years only affected Soviet symbols/toponyms/etc., while nothing happened to those who were displaying Nazi regalia.
Tens of thousands of streets, hundreds of villages, even large cities and oblasts were renamed. Not just “Lenin Street” and “Stalin Street,” but also streets like “Tereshkova Street,” named after the first woman in space Valentina Tereshkova, “Marshal Zhukov Avenue,” named after the legendary Soviet Marshal Georgiy Zhukov who was instrumental in the Soviet victory over Nazism and who is now being demonized in the Ukraine as “a butcher of the Ukrainian people” without any factual basis whatsoever, even “Yaroslav Halan Street,” named after Ukrainian anti-fascist writer Yaroslav Halan, that was curiously renamed to “Roman Shuhevich Street”—Roman Shuhevich being the deputy commander of Abwehr’s Special Group Nachtigall, the deputy commander of Abwehr’s Schutzmannschaft Battalion 201 and the leader of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) that carried out mass murders of Polish and Jewish civilians (as well as of fellow Ukrainians who didn’t subscribe to their fanatical ideology):
Odessa’s Marshal Zhukov Avenue renamed after the Heavenly Hundred (Lenta.ru, May 26, 2016).
Ukrainians are being dragged to courts over Soviet memorabilia—baseball caps, T-shirts and other items displaying symbols of a country that existed for 74 years and is now being erased from the official Ukrainian history:
Coat of arms of the USSR: Ukrainian received a sentence for the wrong T-shirt (Gazeta.ru, Ivan Apuleev, October 27, 2019)

The Ukrainian was sentenced to one year probation for wearing a T-shirt with the Soviet emblem. A citizen of the country was found guilty of violating the ban on the demonstration of the “symbols of the communist totalitarian regime.” The violator must now report to the authorized bodies and not leave Ukraine without permission.
…
In early August, Ukrainian nationalists in Khmelnytsky cut a man’s clothes because of Russian symbols. The video shows how radicals demand from a visitor to a cafe to explain why he has a Russian flag on his shirt, the OMON inscription and a hammer and sickle. The frightened Ukrainian said that he bought the shirt in Spain and did not pay attention to the emblems.
After that, the nationalists took out a knife and began to cut off the stripes, after which they promised to buy the man a T-shirt in the colors of the Ukrainian flag. They also appealed to the Ukrainians, urging them to be “vigilant” and prevent the appearance of Russian symbols on the streets of Ukrainian cities.
In May, a minor girl was detained in Odessa because of the Soviet symbols banned in Ukraine on her clothes.
“On the Kulikovo field, the police stopped an underage girl with symbols prohibited by Ukrainian legislation on her clothes. The girl was taken to the territorial police department, where law enforcement officers carried out explanatory work with her,” the National Police said.
According to her, given the 15-year-old age of the girl, her father was brought to administrative responsibility “for failure to fulfill the duties of raising his daughter.”
…
At the same time, torchlight processions of Ukrainian nationalists and neo-Nazis began to take place in Ukraine much more often. In April 2018, in Lviv, about 1,000 people held the so-called “March of Greatness and Spirit” in honor of the memory of the SS Galicia Division.
…

Meanwhile, Ukrainian Nazis march through the streets of Kiev commemorating an SS division (for the first time in Kiev), displaying its symbols, and nothing happens to them.
That’s what’s significant here.

Posted by: S | Apr 29 2021 22:23 utc | 33

@vk #32:

Even taking into account the SS divisions, the vast majority of the Ukrainian population fought and supported the Soviet Union.

Exactly. About 6 million Ukrainians fought in the Red Army against the Nazi Germany, whereas only 150,000–250,000 Ukrainians were members of UPA (about 2/3 of them previously serving in the Auxiliary Police, which was responsible for the majority of killings of Jews in the Ukraine—the Germans were too busy fighting the war). And yet, the hammer and sickle is banned in the Ukraine, while Nazi and Nazi collaborator symbols, although de jure also banned, de facto are proudly displayed by Ukrainian Nazis.

Posted by: S | Apr 29 2021 22:44 utc | 35

@Mi(#22):
> “So, marching is bad, but wearing a Nazi uniform inside during sex is still okay, right?”
Yes marching is really bad! But if you friend prefer bad sex a lover wearing a Nazi uniform is a good start! LOL! SCNR!

Posted by: Wolle | Apr 29 2021 23:03 utc | 37

Tom 67
“Can´t listen to the damn damnation of Ukrainian SS anymore.”
Tom 67 if you think that the west actually gives a shit about Ukrainian SS then you got another think coming.
You are a tool to cause problems for Russia.

Posted by: arby | Apr 29 2021 23:57 utc | 39

Just a few things I have pointed out before, firstly mass famines which led to millions dying of starvation were not uncommon back in the tsarist days of Russia and occurred every couple of decades . One (Off the top of my head I think it was 1896 but could be wrong it may have been in the 1880’s) was a deliberate famine caused by the landowners deciding to sell all crops overseas to get gold to pay for industrialisation, killed about 6 million humans.
Mostly these regular famines were brought about by drought and killed 4-6 million humans. It took a while for the soviets to get sufficient control of agriculture to prevent these regular famines and the USSR suffered one but that was it – after that expensive learning exercise there were no more famines which was a major since they had been happening at regular intervals for centuries in the tsarist era.
The other thing is it is a mistake to think that every uke who joined the SS was a nazi.
I have written before about a bloke I used to know in Darwin in the 70’s, he was one of the ‘long grass’ (homeless) people I had befriended. Anyway he was Ukrainian and had been in the SS and his story was this.
At 14 the Red Army came to his village and rounded up all the young single blokes to join the army. I guess this would have been late 1941. He copped some training and was then sent off to fight. He was captured by the nazis – the first 12 months of the fascist invasion were not good, many millions of Red Army soldiers were captured and millions died. The nazis threw all the USSR POWs into huge open air barbed wire enclaves and didn’t feed em. During WW2 Nazis captured over 5 million red army soldiers, 3.3 million died.
Stefan (my friend) had been in the camp for a few months slowly starving to death and cannibalism was becoming a thing though he said that scared him most of all that he would get into that and the fact he was so young 15 or 16 by now, that he was worried one of the cannibal gangs would grab him, when a bunch of Ukrainians looking well fed and smart in their black SS uniforms came to the camp. Their leader gave a speech about how well they lived now that they had changed sides blah blah. He recognised one of the blokes in the SS squad as someone from his village, got talking to him and thought “WTF anything has to be better than here” so he volunteered. Stefan will be long dead now and in the time I knew him he was a total lost soul a fierce alcoholic with nothing to his name apart from tales of being used by a range of nations as a soldier as a young man. When the fascists were obviously losing he moved west and when he was picked up and checked out he would be offered the same deal “join our army or go back to the USSR”. He didn’t imagine going back to the USSR would get him a heroes welcome so he ended up fighting long after WW2 had ended. His last tour was with the French in Vietnam that didn’t go well at all so he deserted and basically walked cross Laos into Thailand and down to Singapore, then managed to hitch a ride on a boat to Darwin where he had lived ever since.
There was nothing nazi or racist about his behaviour and he could be a pain in the arse- like he always knew when it was public service payday and would stick his hand out for a few bucks after laying in wait for me and a coupla other blokes he knew, one of whom eventually sorted out his immigration status – and in the process discovered his story was correct.
If these 3rd & 4th generation idiots imagine the Ukrainians who fought for the nazis were somehow heroic or idealistic they have truly got the wrong end of the stick. These were just humans stuck in the middle of something much bigger than them who did what they had to to survive.
It is likely that those who were captured and returned to the USSR did make up a line of bulldust to tell their families once they got back from their lag in Siberia, their peers who had witnessed the madness of barbarossa, case bleu & citadel probably had a good idea they were talking nonsense but didn’t call them out as few were models of good behaviour during the insane brutality of the nazi invasion. Unfortunately that generation is all dead but their children & great grandchildren lapped it up and here we are.
War, what is it good for? Nothin’

Posted by: Debsisdead | Apr 30 2021 0:21 utc | 41

Google’s translate service is so yesterday – almost always wrong and most often useless if one wants to understand something in a language one doesn’s speak nor read. No wonder big part of this thread is wasted on bringing sense to Google’s translation of Anka Feldhusen’s thoughtful tweet on the commemorative march honoring the SS Division “Galicia”. Kudos go to my fellow philologist Piotr Berman for a very good linguistic analysis of her tweet.
I fed Anka’s 2 pregnant sentences to the Yandex translation service at
( https://translate.yandex.com/?lang=uk-sr&text=Підрозділи… ) and sure enough it spat out the correct translation along Piotr’s lines of thought:
Јединице Ваффен ЦЦ учествовале су у најтежим ратним злочинима и холокаусту током Другог светског рата. Ниједна волонтерска организација која се данас бори и ради за Украјину не би требало да буде повезана са њима.
It even guessed correctly my family’s dialect, but the “CC” was wrongly transliterated as “ЦЦ” instead of the more correct “CC” due to the fact that the cyrillic letters for the sibilant “S” appear to be identical to latin letters for “C“.
Yandex also provided almost perfect translation into English:
Waffen CC units were involved in the most serious war crimes and the Holocaust during World War II. No volunteer organizations that are currently fighting and working for Ukraine should be associated with them.
Yandex however made the same mistake as Google when I asked it to translate Anka’s thoughts into both Bosnian and Croatian dialects of our common Serbo-Croatian language. Nobody’s perfect I guess, though some are less imperfect than others.
By the way, Ukrainian is actually a dialect of Ukro-Russian. But if someone wants to call it Ukrainian, it’s also OK, ’cause Russian might just as well be a Ukrainian dialect, if you squint your ears tight enough.
The lesson learned is that one should not rely on Google just because Yandex is Russian, lest one commits tha same mistake all of EU is making today by letting the dead bodies pile thousands high just to spite Putin.

Posted by: karlo | Apr 30 2021 1:49 utc | 43

Posted by: Debsisdead | Apr 30 2021 0:21 utc | 42
Thanks for your informative comment. I haven’t heard of the term ‘long grass people’ for a long time. Probably since I was in the NT. BTW did you ever visit Lameroo Beach in the 70’s? Interesting.
Your comment reminded me of a long dead old friend. He was Slovenian. He was a supporter of pan Slavic unity in the form of Yugoslavia in his youth. Although he later regretted it in practice as the greater majority state, Serbia, dominated the union.
As a young man, following the declaration of war, he volunteered to join the Royal Yugoslav Army of King Peter although he deplored the coup leaders in Belgrade and would have preferred peace to war.
Some weeks later he was captured by the Wehrmacht and thrown into a concentration camp. The Wehrmacht had other fish to fry and later handed him over to the Italians who put him in one of their concentration camps in Italy. There was starvation.
Eventually the Yugoslavs were allowed to return home. Later the Tito partizans waged a brutal civil war causing damage and death to the Wehrmacht and the local Yugoslavs. General Muhalivich [a Serb] waged a war against both the Whermact and the British supported Titoists.
My friend joined the Slovenian Home Guard to defend innocent people from Titoists.
At the end of the war he was thrown in to a British concentration camp and was lucky not to be deported to the Soviets and Titoists, who murdered many thousands who they called Nazis. I think this disgraceful episode, approved by Churchill, was called Operation Keelhaul.
My friend made it to Australia and led a successful and constructive life. He told methe reason many Russians and other eastern Europeans became Nazi collaborators was because of the Soviet campaign to eliminate the Kulaks, or small farmers and the Soviet forced famine of the Ukraine. Millions died.
They couldn’t help noticing the fact that when communism came the overwhelming number of commissars were jewish. To them the Nazis were the answer. My friend was not a Nazi or a Nazi sympathiser. When Slovenia finally became free he was hailed as a returning hero. Of course he was opposed to the Iraq war for the right reasons.
Let us put this in context.

Posted by: Paul | Apr 30 2021 3:21 utc | 45

re Paul | Apr 30 2021 3:21 utc | 46
Yeah I knew a little of the Lameroo scene when I first got to Darwin but mayor ‘Tiger’ Brennan closed it down not long after I arrived, something which we berated Brennan about & which he said later he realised it was a mistake.
I guess I’m a little more cynical about Slovenia than you, I also had a friend from there I met in Darwin and while he was a lovely fella, I have to say that the whole Slovene independence thing struck me as a bit opportunistic especially with regard to Serbia. That is to say they picked some terrible ‘allies’, basically anyone who fights Serbia is our friend. There is also an ugly element to the way Slovenes consider Serbians to be Slavs, but they are not, according to themselves Slovenes are germanic with a touch of Italian.
The Balkans are a mess now just as they have been for centuries, the result of being the meat in a three way sandwich between xtian Europe to the west, orthodox xtian from the north and Islam from the south. All three cultures have had their turn dominating the other two leaving a common language spoken by all, but that seems to divide them rather than join them. Feuds going back centuries are rekindled by opportunistic wannabe politicians.
Churchill backed the Serbians, led by a Croat (Tito) because they were the only group who rated the nazis & Ustaše fascists as enemy #1, the other groups if they weren’t outright siding with the nazis, were more interested in killing some other Balkan faction ahead of killing nazis. A promise was made to Tito & the serbs and there was no way Churchill could have got the brits on the ground working with the partisans to back any other play.
The Greek partisans had no such luck as although communists made up the bulk of the resistance to the nazis, Churchill turned on them at the end of the war and had Brit soldiers siding with former enemies (greek fascist sympathisers) against the englanders’ former allies, the Greek communists.
Churchill reckoned that he only did it as payback over Poland, where he reckoned Joe had rorted him, but that isn’t really correct, at one of the last Yalta meetings Churchill gave Joe a map that had poland a Soviet area of interest and Greece an englander area of interest.
Churchill couldn’t be seen to agree that Poland was a Soviet sphere because in 1939 it was the invasion of Poland by the nazis which caused england to declare war on Germany “in the name of freeing Poland”.
I have no faith in the Kulak story as western propaganda beat up the deaths from the famine into a conflict over collectivisation and I don’t see how any Slovene could have any direct knowledge as there is more than 1,000 kilometres and several nations between Ukraine and Slovenia.

Posted by: Debsisdead | Apr 30 2021 5:36 utc | 47

As a former EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teacher, I can confirm that non-English speakers (NESs) often have trouble distinguishing between some/any/no. Since ‘any’ is most often used in questions and negative sentences (‘not…any’), NESs frequently assume that ‘any’ and ‘no’ are equivalent. The example cited by b in his article is clearly an unintended mistake, not a deliberate mistranslation.
A bit OT, but I have been surprised by the lack of Western media reaction to Putin’s speech to Russian parliamentarians last week. Putin used – for him – uncharacteristically strong terms in talking about Russia’s red lines and how Russia would react to their being crossed. A commentator I saw on Al Jazeera actually said that Putin had suffered a major humiliation by withdrawing his troops from the Donbass border, allegedly bowing to NATO pressure, whereas it seems to me that Russia had made its point and that it was the Ukraine which had been shown that any military attack on the LNR and DNR would be met with lethal force.
Another (non-)event Western MSM have also ignored was the poor turnout in the pro-Navalny rallies, though they are currently making a big song and dance about the court actions against his organisation.

Posted by: B. Wildered | Apr 30 2021 10:12 utc | 49

Posted BY Debsisdead @ 48
Here is another attempt to beat the clock:
I think Slovenes and anyone else has the right to resist any alien ideology imposed on them. 
The Slovenes are surrounded by mountains and have their own distinct language, culture and history. Most Slovenes can understand Serbo-Croatian. They do not regard themselves as Germanic or Italian. Yugoslavia means ‘Southern Slavs.’
The Reich ‘allegedly’ annexed some northern provinces during WW11 and began conscripting the locals. 
The Slovene province of Carinthia is in today’s  Austria.
 
WW11 Croatian leader Dr Pavlich ‘allegedly’ annexed some Slovenian Adriatic coastline. 
Italy ‘allegedly’ annexed Trieste. 
Surely the US State Department is aware the Geneva Conventions were upgraded following WW11 to reflect the abhorrence of these ‘alleged’ annexations. Therefore the bandit state’s ‘alleged’ annexation of Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Syrian Golan Heights and the Lebanese Shebaa Farms will not last according to international law.
 
I met an elderly Slovene who showed me a photo of himself in Wehrmacht uniform. He defected and joined Tito’s partizans. I also saw a photo of him in Titoist uniform after the war. He became disgusted by their barbarism and defected again. He eventually made it to Australia. He was delighted by the end of ‘Bolshevism’ in his homeland.
 
Some Serbs regard Slovenes as ‘Mountain Serbs’ much the same as some Russians regard Ukranians as ‘Little Russians.’ 
The ancient Germanic Hanseatic League city of Danzig was never in Poland. Nor was the German province of Brandenburg. These and other Austro Hungarian and German areas were ‘given’ after the ‘armistice’ supposedly ending WW1. This happened at the misnamed Paris ‘Peace’ Conference of 1919 setting in train the rise of Hitler and eventually WW11. This conference also dismembered and divided the homelands of their Arab ‘allies’ possibly setting in train WW111.
The Arab ‘allies’ were not given a seat at the conference table or allowed to state their legitimate case as belligerents. The World Zionist Organisation were honoured guests at the negotiating table, despite not being allies or belligerents.They were ‘given’ a beach head for further expansion in Palestine. Prior British ‘promises’ to the Arabs were brushed aside. US Zionists dominated president Wilson’s entourage. So much for his famous 14 points.
 
The Chinese ‘allies’ refused to sign the final communique because part of their province of Manchuria, formally a German concession, was ‘given’ instead to the Japanese, who promptly expanded their beach head, beginning WW11 in Asia. Of course, the British kept Hong Kong. 
Was there a quid pro quo? I’ll ‘give’ you this if you agree to that. 
Doesn’t it strike you as peculiar that Churchill claimed to defend ‘Poland’ while Hitler and Stalin divided it between themselves? Only to hand it all over to Stalin at Yalta. 

Posted by: Paul | Apr 30 2021 10:59 utc | 51

Addendum to 52
the Ukrainian forced famine and mass murder of the Kulaks was known across the world. Incredibly Walter Durante of the NYT won a Pulitzer Prize for his failure to report it. Many others
did cover it.Here is a review of a film about It. It was well known in Europe at the time.
“Harvest of Despair” documents the Ukrainian terror famine of 1932-33, which caused the deaths of 7,000,000 people. Using interviews with survivors and scholars to supplement rare photographic evidence, it established that the terror famine was deliberately created by the Soviet Government as part of Stalin’s decades-long effort to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry, who resisted the forced collectivization of their lands. Since its original release, it has received many international awards (including an Academy Award nomination) and has been featured on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line program on the PBS television network. A powerful film, “Harvest of Despair” provides rare insight into one of this century’s least-known but most vicious genocides.”

Posted by: Paul | Apr 30 2021 11:53 utc | 53

Posted by: vk | Apr 30 2021 12:39 utc | 55
So the Kulaks ‘fled’ much like the Palestinians ‘fled’ probably on orders received from their ‘leaders’ by texts on their cell phones.
Here we have Professor Carroll Quigley on “Stalinism 1924 -1939 In his book Tragedy and Hope. Sorry it’s not VI Lenin or Trotsky.
“Distinctions of wealth reappeared among the peasants, the richer ones (called Kulaks) being regarded with suspicion by the regime and with envy by their less fortunate neighbours.”
Hang on vk told us they had already ‘fled’ Now I am confused , who to believe? Professor Quigley or vk.
Let the reader be the judge. I cant stop laughing. Remember the great man, Dr Timothy Leary, said ‘laughing is an anti state activity’ but don’t tell vk, I might end up in Siberia with Navalny, a fate worse than death, bored to death.

Posted by: Paul | Apr 30 2021 13:02 utc | 55

Paul @57
Sure, and Iraq had WMD programs when the US invaded, Libya had “rape rooms”, and the Syrian military gassed civilians in Douma, right?
Looking at the Ukraine now there seems to still be a lot of Nazis there, so if Stalin was trying to kill them all he failed. But if Stalin was willing to kill 7 million, then why didn’t he keep going and kill another 7 million? And then another 7 million after that if the Nazis were not eradicated yet? Why were there no more famines after the Soviet Union modernized agriculture if the famines were deliberate and the Ukrainians that Stalin supposedly wanted to genocide still existed?
The whole “deliberate famine” forced meme is nonsense brainwashing that cannot hold up once you look at it rationally.

Posted by: William Gruff | Apr 30 2021 14:16 utc | 57

@ Posted by: Tom67 | Apr 30 2021 14:22 utc | 60
You’re missing the big picture here.
Ukraine is irrelevant. What matters here is the USA and Russia. The USA claims they’re supporting a liberal-democratic government in the Ukraine. That’s evidently false, as the Nazis – whatever your moral considerations – are not liberal-democrats by any definition of the term (they are liberals, but not liberal-democratic). That’s the discussion and nothing else; no one is judging here if those 250 people who marched for the SS Galicia should or should not feel pride for their Nazi ancestors.
I wasn’t in the East Front. All I have is the historical documents. And those documents leave no doubt: the vast majority of the Eastern European peoples supported and chose to fight (for whatever reasons) for the Soviet Union/Allies. Hitler kinda made some room for his relatively few admirers by creating the Waffen SS divisions for non-Aryans (e.g. it was a French Waffen SS division who defended Berlin to the last moment), but, in reality, Nazism was not an attractive ideology for non-Aryans (for obvious reasons) and Hitler never cared about it to being with.
Does this mean every partizan in Eastern Europe was a graduated Marxist and a convinced communist? Of course not. But that’s not how History works either way. In the War of Secession (American Civil War), most of the soldiers who fought for the Union (“North”) only did so for the salary (if memory doesn’t fail me, it was USD 12.00 or USD 20.00) and the food (we know that because a lot of letters of these soldiers survived) – not because they shared Abraham Lincoln’s ideals of the union and freedom. In fact, during the later stages of the war, many of the Union’s soldiers were recently arrived Irish immigrants.

Posted by: vk | Apr 30 2021 14:51 utc | 59

Mao Cheng Ji@62 “RE: the American civil war: Actually, there were multiple ‘draft riots’ in the North. Including the real big one in NYC, where Union troops used artillery against the rioters – or should I say: protestors?”
Such marvelous concision in portraying the sympathies borders on true eloquence, I think. Mao Cheng Ji maybe learns “history” from assholes like Martin Scorsese (Gangs of New York…”auteur” is French for “artistic fraud.”) Or if a SF fan, maybe a browncoat who thinks the TV series Firefly showed us how totalitarian the union is/was, beneath the SF tropes? One of the noble ideals Mao Cheng Ji admires so much was epitomized when the beloved (by Mao Cheng Ji, not me) protestors set fire to the Colored Orphans Asylum. New York City was always a key emporium in the South’s international trade, which is why there was always so many sympathizers for empire. This was true in the days of the Revolution, when the English found many friends. And it was true in the days of the Civil War, when mayor Fernando Wood bloviated about secession of the city. Fernando Wood was the congressman played by Lee Pace in the vastly superior movie Lincoln, by the way. Scorsese is a turd, so despite the universal agreement among the critics he is superior to Spielberg. The movie Lincoln shows you a much more correct version of the protest against the draft. If you watch the movie and see Lee Pace/Fernando Wood, think “Mao Cheng Ji!”

Posted by: steven t johnson | Apr 30 2021 16:20 utc | 61

@ Posted by: Mao Cheng Ji | Apr 30 2021 15:57 utc | 62
Yes, but, ultimately, the economic laws of capitalism imposed their will on the populace, and, combined with the endless influx of immigrants, the North essentially enjoyed unlimited manpower in relation to the South in the later half of the war. Which, dialectically, just demonstrated the Union had the superior system to the Confederacy: the Confederates suffered from grave depletion of manpower, as they couldn’t send the slaves to war (they were worth a fortune in the slave market, plus giving them weapons could trigger a slave revolt). I think that, at one point, the North outnumbered the South 10:1 if we count the reserves.
In the later stages of the war, the Confederacy had to resort to the desperate policy of sending the small slaveowners (those who owned less than 10 slaves) to the war, in order to protect the interests of the larger slaveowners. This was the drop that broke the camel’s back, as the veil of the Herrenvolk Democracy was torn down, and it became clear that the Confederacy wasn’t a bucolic paradise for the master race, but a plain capitalist nation where big business also exploited small business. A wave of desertions followed and the South quickly collapsed.

Posted by: vk | Apr 30 2021 17:05 utc | 63

@vk,
Sure, the socioeconomic component of it is clear. And of course the Union had far more population. On the other hand, it was, after all, an invasion. I think that explains draft riots in the Union, and why the Confederacy managed to fight for as long as it did.

Posted by: Mao Cheng Ji | Apr 30 2021 18:25 utc | 65

Posted by: Skiffer | Apr 30 2021 18:24 utc | 66
Exactly.. A good example was Maidan and the burning and clubbing to death of workers.

Posted by: arby | Apr 30 2021 18:41 utc | 67

The United States government did not invade the United States in 1861, no matter what the Klansman Mao Cheng Ji says.
lysias@68 seems to think that Black people were targeted because of resentment of conscription, instead of it being a racist pogrom by a minority. The Irish who were *not* anti-Black racists and did believe in democracy were often in the Army already, leaving the Irish rampaging through the streets unrepresentative. As an expression of the hatred on the part of some for Black people, the “Draft” riots did succeed. The fiscal demands had already made payment for substitutes widespread. Unless lysis can demonstrate, the funds “somehow” made available came from the government, the claim the riots succeeded is wrong.
One aspect of the pogrom is the anticipation of the guerrilla war against Black people fought by the early KKK and sister organizations. Lincoln’s indifference to another rebellion is a depressing suggestion that he would have been reluctant to suppress racist violence during Reconstruction, that he would have been far too similar to Johnson if he hadn’t been assassinated.

Posted by: steven t johnson | Apr 30 2021 18:55 utc | 69

stj@71 << but note that the KKK formed not as a "pogrom against blacks" but as a reaction to the northern carpetbaggers who appeared all over the south after the war using the newly vote franchised blacks. The KKK used its terror tactics against blacks to keep them fearful and break this alliance with the opportunist carpetbaggers...

Posted by: Simplicius | Apr 30 2021 20:09 utc | 71

That sounds like a reluctant admission that I was right and that the draft stopped being enforced against New Yorkers.
I plead guilty of thinking that the Civil War that killed 600,000 people and helped to make the United States a superpower was a disaster.

Posted by: lysias | Apr 30 2021 20:42 utc | 73

Ukrainians who wish to celebrate their victorious ancestors, the absolute majority of which fought in the ranks of the red army, are not allotted the same protection as those who celebrate Nazi collaborators and subsequently face harassment. Additionally, it’s difficult to think of SS Galicia as soldiers, seeing as they rarely saw combat against an armed opponent and mainly faced off against unarmed civilians in so-called anti-partisan or policing duties. By their deeds, they’re closer to contemporary terrorist organizations, and to celebrate them is in some sense an endorsement of their methods and ideology.
Posted by: Skiffer | Apr 30 2021 18:24 utc | 66
I would add that SS Galicia acted much like other anti partisan forces in paces like South Vietnam, Guatemala, El Salvador, Iraq or Afghanistan, destroying the village to save the village. Watch the Belarus movie, Come and See and those Germans and local forces can easily transform into US and friend’s SOF/advisors and local paramilitaries burning whole villages in churches. Guatemala had 626 villages destroyed by paramilitary/Guatemalan armed force with US aid. Belarus had 628 villages destroyed. The goal was the same, control the population through brutality.
VP Harris virtually met with Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei, “They agreed to explore innovative opportunities to create jobs and to improve the conditions for all people in Guatemala and the region, including by promoting transparency and combating crime,” the statement said. So the US destroyed many countries and “transparency”, created a lot of crime and now wants transparency, job creation and to fight crime. The best way to achieve these goals would be for the US to GTFO of other governments business. The US needs to work on transparency and crime at home first. There would be no refugees on US southern borders if it wasn’t destroying countries to the south of them.
The Nazi’s transported to North and South America after WW2 have had devastating effects, not only the physical destruction but also the poisoning of society. The west ignores the genocides they create and create myths of genocides of those they wish to rule over. I haven’t seen any reporting of these marches in Kiev in the west. The Nazi’s are now the good guys, fighting evil Russians and those pesky inhabitants of countries like Bolivia that want to hoard all that lithium and other natural resources and stop the march to the new utopia, the new green deal.
What will it take for those in the “west to experience what Pogo said, “I have seen the enemy, and the enemy is us. The “west are Nazi’s. and have been for a long time. There was a short interlude when “a few bad apples” caused a little bit of trouble 1939-45 but that’s behind us.
There is a monument to the SS Galicia division in Oakville Ontario, Canada. Someone vandalized it last year (spray painted “Nazi war monument” on it.) An investigation was opened for a hate crime. This is not the Onion. It’s a crime to hate Nazi’s, but it’s ok to vandalize a monument to Canada’s first Prime Minister. What goes on in Ukraine is ok for Canada because we have so many of the bastards over here infecting our body politic. We can’t condemn these actions be they are us.
https://www.rbth.com/arts/332350-come-and-see-soviet-movie

Posted by: Tom | Apr 30 2021 21:19 utc | 75

Posted by: Simplicius | Apr 30 2021 20:09 utc | 73
This drawing kind of confirms what you state.
but note that the KKK formed not as a “pogrom against blacks”

Posted by: arby | Apr 30 2021 22:41 utc | 77

Like lysias, Simplicius, Paul, Friar Ockham are a crew that fits the commentariat here very well. The southern states revolted rather than accept the election of a president who would restrict the *growth* of slavery, after refusing to allow Lincoln to even run in their states. That has everything to do with slavery. Ordinances announcing secession explicitly cited the slavery issue. The new vice president of the confederacy called slavery the cornerstone of their freedom. They re-wrote the US Constitution to put slavery in explicitly. In short, despite the boasting about independent judgment and the endless abuse of fools who believe the MSM or work for the CIA, this crew lies.
And a minor detail, only government officials and commissioned officers were deprived of a franchise. And even they could petition for exemption.
The South was not another country. Invasion means marching into another country. This is merely the insolence of a liar confident that fellow liars are committed to the lie.
“It was about money just like today.” This is the sort of thing that really does inspire contempt for so-called realistic, common sense thinking: Slavery was about money, big money.

Posted by: steven t johnson | Apr 30 2021 23:23 utc | 79

Posted by: Friar Ockham | Apr 30 2021 22:56 utc | 80
Jeffrey Davies called the preservation of slavery “the issue of trancendent magnitude”. Stevens described as the “cornerstone” of southern civilization and stated explicitly that slavery and racial superiority were the foundaional underpinings of the Confederacy. Every single secession by a southern state was accompanied by a declaration that placed primary importance on the grim institution considered under attack by a president elected democratically in a landslide victory.
Yet, internet personas with the historical knowledge of a racoon are convinced that the secessions took place for another reason against the very explicit declarations of the actual secessionists. Afterwars, they try to convince everyone else about the correctness of their hosecrap views.

Posted by: Constantine | May 1 2021 0:10 utc | 81

Lincoln’s election by less than 40 percent of the vote was no landslide.

Posted by: lysias | May 1 2021 0:16 utc | 83

If the South had won its independence, it would presumably have continued to be an ally of Britain. That would probably have meant that the North would be the ally of whatever European power most challenged Britain, whether Germany or France.
I think that would have meant that whoever the United States allied itself with would have had much less power than the current Five Eyes, and might even have lost a world war.
I have only recently reached this conclusion about the Civil War, after seeing how evil the U.S. and its alliance have become. I used to be a true believer in the Cold War. I am a retired naval officer.

Posted by: lysias | May 1 2021 1:07 utc | 85

I didn’t recognize until recently what Lincoln was doing in creating a superpower, but Edmund Wilson recognized it in his 1962 book “Patriotic Gore”.

Posted by: lysias | May 1 2021 1:34 utc | 87

I am not familiar with the German ambassador, and I don’t follow German politics. I am also not familiar with the local and regional broadcast networks, and programs carried by them.
However, anyone who actually believes that our world needs more nazis probably needs to become more intimately acquainted with a firing squad.

Posted by: Josh | May 1 2021 2:08 utc | 89

Posted by: lysias | Apr 30 2021 20:42 utc | 75
I see you are a retired naval man.
You are right about the war between the states being a disaster. US publishes more books about this war per year than any or the war or conflict.
Slavery was simply abhorrent, in any form , like Jim Crow also It had to go.
From a non US south seas point of view:
The other loss of this was to the US army doctrine.
US army leaders are indoctrinated by the Civil War history as cadets. They read that heavy losses in numerous battles occurred on both sides. Since then US army losses have been extravagant and indicate success.
We saw this crazy waste US army manpower in the US campaigns for Buna and Gona in New Guinea in WW11, see Morison. [Jims, grandfather]
Hubris is always fatal.

Posted by: Paul | May 1 2021 7:19 utc | 91

@vk, 82 “the War of Secession (which they call “the Civil War”)”
It’s a good point: Guerre de Sécession, as I remember from reading Jules Verne in my childhood years. They don’t call the Korean war ‘civil war’. ‘Civil War’, in this case, is a propaganda term.
Incidentally, slavery is still perfectly legal in the Union. All they have to do is convict you of a crime. Not a exactly a super-difficult task.

Posted by: Mao Cheng Ji | May 1 2021 8:49 utc | 93

Posted by: Mina | May 1 2021 10:49 utc | 96
My impression is that the politics of Chad, if you can call it “politics” are as follows. There are two basic zones: the north consists of Sahara plus a dry belt called Sahel where the population was traditionally nomadic and warlike, and savanna in the south where crop based agriculture is possible and where the bulk of the population lives. The power is always in the hands of northerners, and periodically changes hands between the warlike clans. Peaceful transitions of power are as frequent as in medieval Europe.
All the years of French influence did not bring Chad from the equivalent of French 12 century to 20-th. This makes me think that the failure of a similar conversion in Afghanistan is somewhat excusable. Except that the French “failed” with a much smaller budget.

Posted by: Piotr Berman | May 1 2021 12:25 utc | 95

>> “Harvest of Despair” documents the Ukrainian terror famine of 1932-33, which caused the deaths of 7,000,000 people. Using interviews with survivors and scholars to supplement rare photographic evidence,
In my lifetime alone, I’ve observed many Big Lies including at least one recent instance of an empire “documenting” a genocide that apparently didn’t happen. The “documentation” includes “eyewitness” testimonies. There is continuity in this empire’s policies of regularly creating Big Lies. Enough to make me look back at history very differently, I am confident this movie’s makers chose to lie to their viewers. Not just in small ways.

Posted by: oglalla | May 1 2021 16:16 utc | 97

Just a reminder to all; tomorrow, May 2, 2021, is the 7th anniversary of the heinous murder of dozens of pro-Russian demonstrators at the hands of Ukrainian fascist footballers and other Ukro-nazi thugs while locked inside the Odessa Trades Union building where many were beaten & tortured or leaped to their deaths from the upper floors while many others were burned alive by fires started by numerous Molotov cocktails thrown into the building by the fascist mob! LET US NEVER FORGET ALL THOSE MURDERED DURING THE ODESSA MASSACRE OF MAY 2, 2014!!

Posted by: Dr. William Fusfield | May 1 2021 18:09 utc | 99