Comment by osipov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by osipov | Hacker News Reader

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Have you ever read "The Grapes of Wrath"? Did Stalin cause the famine in the United States? It is purposeful selective attention to call out the terrible famine in the Ukraine in the 1930. My ancestors died of the same famine in Russia and I know of many Russians who lost members of their family to hunger in 1930s. There was a widespread famine at the time, caused by collectivization and industrialization policies to migrate from inefficient, low capital, individual-based farming practices to highly efficient, large scale, high capital practices. In Soviet Union it was an inhumane, ruthless collectivization. In United States it was a bit more humane, financial capital driven policy of moving individual farmers off their land. In both cases, there was no nationalistic or genocidal component. Attempts to portray the famine as targeted at Ukranians serves no purpose other than to divide Russians and Ukrainians and pit them against each other. Recent events in Ukraine show that this is exactly the policy of the United States.

[Basis of knowledge here: descent from a large extended family of dry-land farmers who lived on the Great Plains during the Great Depression in the United States. And, yes, I have read the novel The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, which is required reading in many United States schools.] No, the situations in the two countries were not at all comparable. First of all, there was no widespread famine in the United States. I have close relatives who lived through that era in that place (they never moved from their family farms) and are now more than ninety years old. Second, there was no governmental effort to keep the people who thought they were best off moving from moving. Third, both before and after the interstate moves, most of the people who moved were land-owners. Fourth (maybe this should be first on the list), all of the adults in the United States during the Great Depression, other than most black people in the South, were voters and able to influence the political system. Just outside the region I wrote about first here, the region you mentioned first, were grassroots political movements to represent farmer rights. (Nothing of the kind existed under Stalin's dictatorship.) Here in Minnesota, the state branch of the Democratic Party is actually formally named the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, having been formed by a merger (just about exactly seventy years ago) between the state Democratic Party and the Farmer-Labor Party, a third-party movement so powerful that it elected a governor during its heyday.

So, no, in the United States we look at the historical experience of Stalinism as a wholly negative example, one of the worst examples of mass irrationality and needless human suffering in the twentieth century. Where the various branches of my family have lived for generations, we know better than to take Stalin's policies as models of modernization or anything worthwhile.

The causes of the famines in US and SU were related. The policies to deal with them were different. Note that the OP implied the famine under Stalinism was directed against an particular ethnic group in the SU. My argument refutes that. Your argument does nothing to back the position of the OP.

And what is OP? ..... Don't bother, too late now and life is short.

OP = original poster. A synonym is "parent comment" or "grandparent comment." In this case it refers to arethuza's toplevel comment.

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