Memes

The names wouldn’t fit

Yes, but not until after the revolution.

That would be the Black Book of Communism.

It gets dumber: they also counted soviets killed by nazis in ww2 and the hypothetical children that dead eastern front nazis never had as victims of communism

Yup, and they're used as the foundational source for Soviet death toll. Wikipedia uses them, even.

> victims of communism monument
> empty

god tier bit

Oh, Canada. 🫣

Victims of Communism is a specific propaganda campaign from various right wing orgs. Hence the capitalization. It attempts to draw an equivalence to mass murder performed by right wing regimes in order to delegitimize left alternative. All the while pushing right wing agendas. It's also why such memorials often feature nazis as victims. A recent example.

It is the academic consensus even among western scholars that the Ukrainian famine was indeed a famine, not an intentional genocide. This is not my opinion, but, again, the overwhelming consensus even among the most anti-communist historians like Robert Conquest who described himself as a "cold warrior." The leading western scholar on this issue, Stephen Wheatcroft, discussed the history of this in western academia in a paper I will link below.

He discusses how there was strong debate over it being a genocide in western academia up until the Soviet Union collapsed and the Soviet archives were open. When the archives were open, many historians expected to find a "smoking gun" showing that the Soviets deliberately had a policy of starving the Ukrainians, but such a thing was never found and so even the most hardened anti-communist historians were forced to change their tune (and indeed you can find many documents showing the Soviets ordering food to Ukraine such as this one and this one).

Wheatcroft considers Conquest changing his opinion as marking an end to that "era" in academia, but he also mentions that very recently there has been a revival of the claims of "genocide," but these are clearly motivated and pushed by the Ukrainian state for political reasons and not academic reasons. It is literally a propaganda move. There are hostilities between the current Ukrainian state and the current Russian state, and so the current Ukrainian state has a vested interest in painting the Russian state poorly, and so reviving this old myth is good for its propaganda. But it is just that, state propaganda.

Discussions in the popular narrative of famine have changed over the years. During Soviet times there was a contrast between ‘man-made’ famine and ‘denial of famine’.‘Man-made’ at this time largely meant as a result of policy. Then there was a contrast between ‘man-made on purpose’, and ‘man-made by accident’ with charges of criminal neglect and cover up. This stage seemed to have ended in 2004 when Robert Conquest agreed that the famine was not man-made on purpose. But in the following ten years there has been a revival of the ‘man-made on purpose’ side. This reflects both a reduced interest in understanding the economic history, and increased attempts by the Ukrainian government to classify the ‘famine as a genocide’. It is time to return to paying more attention to economic explanations.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326562364

Yes, there was a famine in the 1930s. It was largely due to adverse weather conditions, coupled with the bourgeois farmers called "kulaks" killing their livestock and burning their crops to resist the Red Army collectivizing agriculture. However, to paint those who died as "victims of communism" when the communists were the ones that finally ended famine in a region where famine was historically common and regular is hardly genuine.

The term "Holodomor," the right-wing theory describing a man-made and intentional famine, was created by Ukrainian nationalists in the 80s. It was named as such to draw direct connection to the Holocaust, and as such is a form of Holocaust trivialization. Archival evidence proves that there was no such intentional famine, but it is used politically to demonize socialism in the real world, wielded like a club.

At least 10 million every year from starvation and preventable diseases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzbuch_Kapitalismus

https://mltheory.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/austin-murphy-the-triumph-of-evil.pdf