"The Genocide Loophole"

Henry Alminas at the soc.culture.baltics newsgroup drew my attention to Jonah Goldberg's recent article in the National Review. It begins: "Last week, Russia’s lower house of parliament passed a resolution insisting that Josef Stalin’s man-made 1932-33 famine — called the Holodomor in Ukrainian — wasn’t genocide." In view of some of the debates in the comments at this blog, like those that followed "Прибой," I thought I would highlight Goldberg's piece.

Today, Mao and Stalin aren’t in Hitler’s class of evil because Hitler wasn’t a “modernizer,” he was a racist. Note how the Russians have no problem copping to the charge of mass murder but recoil at suggestions it was racially motivated.

It’s a wrongheaded distinction. Murder is murder, whether the motive is bigotry or the pursuit of allegedly enlightened social planning.

It’s also a false distinction. Racial genocide is often rationalized as a form of progress by those responsible. Under the Holodomor, Ukrainian culture was systematically erased by the Russian Soviets, who saw it as expendable. No doubt the Sudanese janjaweed in Darfur and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in Tibet believe they are “modernizers,” too.

Read the entire article here.

The mask is from the Occupation Museum. "Such masks were tied on to protect the face from frostbite when working outdoors in temperatures as low as -40°C (-40°F). The mask was made for the political prisoner Kārlis Ārgalis in the Amur region in the 1950s."