EDITORIAL: Victims of Communism and the Holodomor (10/08/06)

EDITORIAL

Victims of Communism and the Holodomor

"The souls of Stalin's millions of victims still cry out for justice."

- Eric Margolis, contributing foreign editor for Sun National Media Canada, in a commentary that appeared on LewRockwell.com on August 28.

Victims of Communism and the Holodomor

Two stories in this week's issue have prompted the writing of this week's editorial: the first about the Senate's passage of HR 562, which authorizes the government of Ukraine to build, on federal land in the District of Columbia, a monument to the Famine-Genocide of 1932-1933 (the House of Representatives had passed the measure back in November 2005); the second about the groundbreaking for the much more ambitious project known as the Victims of Communism Memorial, also in Washington.

Both memorial projects could help tell the story of what we used to call the Great Famine that killed 7 million to 10 million people in Ukraine and ethnographically Ukrainian areas of the Soviet Union. Lately we have come to use the Ukrainian term "Holodomor" - which means death by forced starvation -a precise description of how this genocide against the Ukrainian nation was implemented by Stalin and his henchmen.

The first project, the monument to victims of the Famine-Genocide, is meant to be completed in time for the solemn 75th anniversary commemorations in 2008 of this horrendous chapter in history. The monument is to be a gift from the government of Ukraine; thus, no federal funds will be used to construct it. (The next step is for Ukraine to find an appropriate plot of land in the District of Columbia where the monument can be erected, and, as Ambassador Oleh Shamshur said, for the Embassy of Ukraine and the Ukrainian American community to work together on the monument's design.)

It must be noted that there was opposition to the Ukrainian Genocide monument on the part of the U.S. administration. John Parsons of the National Park Service, Department of the Interior, testified that the monument "duplicates efforts currently under way to establish a memorial that would honor all victims of communism worldwide" and that "creating separate memorials for individual groups would detract from the overall message of the Victims of Communism memorial and could, potentially, create an unfortunate competition amongst various groups for limited memorial sites in our nation's capital."

As for the Victims of Communism Memorial, that is to be completed by June 2007 to coincide with President Ronald Reagan's famous "Tear down this wall" address at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. The memorial, a 10-foot replica of the Goddess of Democracy statue erected in Tiananmen Square, will recognize the 100 million who died under Communist regimes in some 25 captive nations during the 20th century.

Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky, the highest-ranking Ukrainian American in Bush administration, spoke at the groundbreaking ceremony and enumerated the victims who perished: in the Katyn Forest, in the gulag, on the streets of Budapest and in the fields of Cambodia. Surprisingly, she did not mention the Famine-Genocide in Ukraine.

And so, once again, Ukrainians felt that the story of their genocide was not being told.

Which is all the more reason for our community to once again take up the cause of telling the world about the Famine-Genocide that killed millions of our kin - about the genocide that many still refuse to acknowledge as such. For, as we have written in the past, quoting the words of Robert Louis Stevenson: "The cruelest lies are often told in silence."

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