Backgrounder on Holodomor and WW1 Internment
WW1 Internment Operations?
During Canada’s first national internment operations of 1914-1920 thousands of Ukrainians and other Eastern Europeans were unjustly imprisoned in 24 labour camps throughout Canada. Tens of thousands were disenfranchised and forced to regularly report to authorities as they were considered “enemy aliens” only because of where they had come from.This event gave precedence to other well-known human rights abuses in Canada including the Chinese Head tax, Internment of Japanese and Italians during WW2.
Why the Holodomor?
1. It is a genocide recently recognized (May 2008) by the Parliament of Canada and one which is relatively unknown.
2. By its geographical focus and intensity it is one of the greatest genocides in human history.
3. It is a lens through which to view the human rights violations suffered by the victims of communism around the world.
4. Food continues to be used parts of the world today to subjugate and destroy people. The lessons of the Holodomor will help the world better understand the crimes being committed today and hopefully never allow this to be repeated.
5. Studied in concert with the Holocaust, the Holodomor provides a valuable study of two heinous regimes and dictators that attempted to eradicate the Jewish and Ukrainian peoples on the territory some scholars have called the Bloodlands.
6. It is still being denied by some today.
Teaching Human Rights through the lens of the Holodomor
Why the Holodomor must be an integral part of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights
Some have called the Holodomor the unknown genocide. It may seem surprising that most Canadians know little to nothing about one of the greatest genocides in the history of humanity. However, the Soviet Union propagated for over half a century a whitewashed version of its own history which covered-up the crimes of Joseph Stalin and other Soviet leaders. Only now that Soviet archives have been opened in Ukraine and Russia both historians and governments are coming to grips with this tragedy and the world is taking notice.
According to the most recent academic research (see Bloodlands by T. Snyder or Stalin’s Genocides by Naimark), the USSR destroyed some 8-9 million lives. If the Holodomor accounts for just 3-4 million (although some argue it is closer to 7-10 million), then it represents the single most important and most devastating mass killing perpetrated by the Soviet authorities. Hence, if we want to understand the anti-human nature of the Soviet regime, we must understand the Holodomor. The Holodomor is the lens through which the world can learn about the crimes of communism and witness how ideologies can indoctrinate people to commit human rights atrocities.
As a host of non-Ukrainian (and of course Ukrainian) scholars have recently concluded, the Holodomor was specifically directed against the Ukrainian nation. That means that the prevailing conventional wisdom about the Soviet and other Communist regimes as being "international" or "supra-national" or "indifferent" to nationality is not true (as Ukrainians and non-Russians have known all along). If we truly want to understand the anti-national and indeed anti-Semitic policies of the USSR and other Communist regimes, we must understand the single most important anti-national mass killing--the Holodomor.
Most genocides have been uncontroversial, meaning that most scholars in most countries have accepted them as genocides. The Holodomor stands out in sharp contrast. It has been denied, negated, explained away, in the USSR and in the West. Just how and why such massive negation has been undertaken and sustained is worth studying, as it obviously tells us something very important about East-West relations, Communist apologia, Soviet propaganda, the politicization of genocide, etc.
As Yale University’s Prof. Timothy Snyder argues in Bloodlands, the Stalinist and Hitlerite regimes form one part of a single whole. They devastated the bloodlands by means of their revolutionary schemes and their wars, but they were also functions of each other, sustaining each other. As a result, Hitler cannot be understood in isolation from Stalin and Stalin cannot be understood in isolation from Hitler. By extension, the Holocaust and Holodomor must be viewed in relation to each other as well. Indeed, one cannot understand the Holocaust without understanding the Holodomor.