Category: ENGLISH (Page 9 of 28)

There a few posts written in English

On antisemitism in the West

21.07.2023 / pelshvalen

So, the British Labour Party has barred Jeremy Corbyn from running as Labour’s candidate in the next election on the grounds of – of all things – antisemitism. Corbyn’s, that is.

The dethroning of Corbyn has allowed Keir Starmer to take his place and he, Starmer, is certainly neither willing nor able to rally opposition to the ghastly neoliberal policies that are hurtling the UK back into a pre-war state, a pre-first-World-War state, mind you, as described by Charles Dickens in his heart-rattling novels.

Labour’s strait-jacketing of Jeremy Corbyn on the grounds of his alleged antisemitism was the greatest blessing the top decile could possibly wish for in the UK. The trick will surely be – has already been – copied by powers-that-be in other countries, which is why I am writing this piece.

Just exactly what has Corbyn done? Well, apparently, he failed to take sufficient action in response to complaints against persons in his party; antisemitism complaints. According to Corbyn himself, action was taken, but procedures were initially unclear and the process was sluggish, particularly to begin with.

He is quoted as follows:

Anyone claiming there is no antisemitism in the Labour party is wrong. Of course there is, as there is throughout society, and sometimes it is voiced by people who think of themselves as on the left. Jewish members of our party and the wider community were right to expect us to deal with it, and I regret that it took longer to deliver that change than it should
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/oct/29/jeremy-corbyn-rejects-findings-of-report-on-antisemitism-in-labour

The above statement is to some extent corroborated by the so-called “Investigation into antisemitism in the Labour Party”, which was the document that eventually lead to Corbyn’s fall:

While there have been some recent improvements in how the Labour Party deals with antisemitism complaints, our analysis points to a culture within the Party which, at best, did not do enough to prevent antisemitism and, at worst, could be seen to accept it
https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/sites/default/files/investigation-into-antisemitism-in-the-labour-party.pdf

Now, I haven’t read the entire 130 page document, just leafed through it, as it were, searching for clues as to just how that alleged antisemitism had been expressed. I found no particulars, no details, not even in the chapter starting on page 24 “Acts of unlawful harassment which the Labour Party is responsible for”.

However under the heading on page 8 “Our findings – Unlawful Acts”, we find a summary

using antisemitic tropes and

suggesting that complaints of antisemitism were fake or smears.

ibid

The “using antisemitic tropes” rings a bell with me, though. Yes, that sounds bad. Remember the Merchant of Venice? Very bad, in fact. But what are antisemitic tropes today? And what is antisemitism today? I find the very concept disturbing. After all, the notion of “race” has long since been discredited or, to quote Encyclopedia Britannica, “has no biological validity”:

Racism, then, is an anachronism. Criticism of religion, on the other hand, is still dangerous ground, true, but not illegal – to my knowledge – in countries of the so-called “collective West”.

Finally, you have ethnic differences – and the term ethnic can mean almost anything you want it to. “Antisemitism” seems to have landed in this last and most shadowy terrain; convenient, you must admit, for Zionist hardliners, who – you must also admit – rule the roost in Israel and have done so for a long time.

Now, Jeremy Corbyn is not the only person to have lost his job due to alleged antisemitism. There have been several other instances, not least in academia and journalism. Criticizing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is not something you do if you have children to provide for or a career that matters to you. (Just to give you an example, every time I have expressed, here, support for the Palestinian cause, this site has been subjected to DDoS attacks.)

So the crux of this thorny matter appears to be how antisemitism is defined. That is easily ascertained: 37 Nations and 865 Orgs Worldwide had (by March 2022) adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which is vague, to say the least, so it includes 11 examples of what would constitute antisemitism, and according to a few of them, criticism of certain Israeli policies will be construed as antisemitism.

Since this post concerns the UK in particular, I should add that the UK government, adopted the IHRA definition in 2016. The two main political parties and most academic institutions, could not, of course, be seen to “condone” antisemitism, so they all eventually did so too. Even in the UK, however, there was some criticism:

Some have expressed concerns that the IHRA definition restricts freedom of speech by prohibiting legitimate criticism of Israeli government action in the Palestinian territories.

Geoffrey Robertson QC set out many of these concerns in an opinion prepared for the Palestinian Return Centre, arguing that several of the IHRA’s examples were drafted in a way that could be detrimental to freedom of speech. He also criticised the Prime Minister for adopting the definition without Parliamentary debate and without the caveats proposed by the Home Affairs Committee.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/uk-governments-adoption-of-the-ihra-definition-of-antisemitism/

Finally, this year, somebody spoke up at last. A letter was sent to UN Secretary-General António Guterres and Under Secretary-General Miguel Ángel Moratinos, expressing concerns that, based on the IHRA definition, just about anyone could be labelled antisemite. The signatories included:

Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel*
Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association
Al Mezan Center for Human Rights
Al-Haq, Law in the Service of Mankind
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
Amnesty International*
B’Tselem
Gisha – Legal Center for Freedom of Movement
Human Rights Watch
International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH)
Ligue des droits de l’Homme (LDH)
Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR)
Physicians for Human Rights-Israel

The signatories recommend an alternative definition of antisemitism, that of the Jerusalem declaration. See in particular section “C. Israel and Palestine: examples that, on the face of it, are not antisemitic” [my highlight]”

I am not as polite as the signatories of the above-mentioned letter to the Secretary General. I put to you that the UK has compounded its disgraceful record of press freedom infringements (cf. Julian Assange) by letting itself be bulldozed into labelling as antisemitism valid criticism of Israel.

Mind you, real antisemitism does exist. I think it is largely based on ignorance – but I have occasionally been stunned to hear, in seemingly “normal” conversations, some very weird, almost mystical, ideas about Jews. As Philip Roth’s novels remind us time and time again, the persistence of such ideas have complex roots and causes. As long as he lived, he seemed to be continuously grappling with them.

However, to my knowledge – and I may well be wrong, because there is so much we are not told – there have fortunately been no outright massacres of Jews for a long time. However there are still, to this day, almost routinely, massacres of Muslims. Does “antisemitism” cover the politically motivated killing of so-called Arabs?

Do people in the UK or USA get kicked out of academia or political positions for holding strong anti-Islamic views, for peddling anti-Islamic “tropes”?

In 2019, 51 people were massacred and 40 were injured in two mosques in New Zealand. Could that be referred to as antisemitism?

In June this year, an overcrowded boat carrying migrants from Libya went down off the coast of Greece. There were 104 survivors, but more than 500 remain missing. That was not, admittedly, a massacre. But there is pretty solid evidence that the authorities ignored repeated calls for help from the ship for several hours before it actually sank. Does that not effectively amount to — well, yes, — a massacre?

In the Israeli-occupied territories, at least 177 Palestinians have been killed by the murderous IDF just this year, and Israel’s finance minister declares that a Palestinian town of more than 5000 should be “wiped out”. These killings are not, strictly speaking, massacres, but they are extra-judicial, and they seem to be part of a pretty concerted effort to exterminate Palestinians on the “West Bank”.

Nevertheless, the US House of Representatives just passed a resolution according to which “the State of Israel is not a racist or apartheid state, … and the United States will always be a staunch partner and supporter of Israel.” Just so. USA’s men and women of power defend and uphold their God-given right to continue living in Never-never-land.

Afterthought (24 hours later):

Speaking of massacres, did you know about the Paris Massacre? I did not until I recently read Annie Ernaux’s novel Les années. She refers to 17 October 1961, assuming the reader would understand the reference, and muses: How much did we suspect, back then? Were we not just enjoying the unusually balmy weather?

I looked up the reference, and this is what I found:

The Paris massacre of 1961 (also called the 17 October 1961) was the mass killing of Algerians who were living in Paris by the French National Police. It occurred on 17 October 1961, during the Algerian War (1954–62). Under orders from the head of the Parisian police, Maurice Papon, the National Police attacked a demonstration by 30,000 pro-National Liberation Front (FLN) Algerians. After 37 years of denial and censorship of the press, in 1998 the government finally acknowledged 40 deaths, while some historians estimate that between 200 and 300 Algerians died. Death was due to heavy-handed beating by the police, as well as mass drownings, as police officers threw demonstrators into the river Seine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_massacre_of_1961

Maybe the truth about that massacre would never have come to light if Maurice Papon had not been accused in 1981 and found guilty in 1998 of responsibility for the deportation of 1,690 Bordeaux Jews to Drancy internment camp from 1942–44. All of which just goes to show that suppression of information in the press is no novelty.

And yes, over the past 24 hours, this site has been honoured with a DDoS attack.

La semana trágica

12.07.2023 / pelshvalen

No language can compete with Spanish when it comes to heartbreaking titles (surely you will admit that “The tragic week” isn’t up to much).

There must be hundreds, if not thousands, of tragic weeks scattered throughout the pages of history, even (or rather, not least) recent history, yet my search engine only returns results from Argentina (1919) and Spain (1909) although my search string was “tragic week” (yes, in English).

I am not going to write about Argentina’s La semana trágica, because I am more interested in another aspect of Argentinian history, the extermination of the Mapuche on the Argentinian side of the cordillera. There have been many tragic weeks for the Mapuche, not – I repeat – not 500 years ago, but towards the end of the nineteenth century, a time when most of the “civilised” world was seeing the light of humanitarianism. Alas, not so in the elevated circles of Buenos Aries. To this day a twang of haughtiness can clearly be detected in that repeatedly bankrupt metropolis.

As Pedro Cayuqueo writes in his fascinating Historia secreta mapuche: “The Argentinians, they keep saying even to this very day, are all grandchildren of gringos or Europeans”.

The E ncyclopedia Britannica’s short article about the Mapuche doesn’t even mention the Argentinian extermination campaign, referred to in Wikipedia as the “conquest of the desert“. “Desert” is a misnomer, by the way, as the Pampas and Patagonia were extremely fertile, which was why they were so coveted. Still are.

No, for the moment, I am looking at Spain’s Semana trágica. Like any self-respecting tragedy, it had a prelude, an overture, as it were, one that is 300 years long – far too long. So I shall just take a cut of it, a pars pro toto: Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, who was assassinated (understandibly, if you ask me) by an anarchist in 1897. He had been passionately opposed to universal suffrage, which would, he feared, favour socialism. He served six terms as prime minister of Spain under weak Bourbon sovereigns. I quote Wikipedia:

The policies of repression and political manipulation that Cánovas made a cornerstone of his government helped foster the nationalist movements in both Catalonia and the Basque provinces and set the stage for labour unrest during the first two decades of the 20th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_C%C3%A1novas_del_Castillo as on 10 July 2023

I add, for the record, that the expression “labour unrest” in the above quote is a euphemism, if ever there was one. The violence was volcanic.

During a religious procession in 1896, in Barcelona, a bomb was thrown. Immediately three hundred men and women were arrested. Some were Anarchists, but the majority were trade unionists and Socialists. They were thrown into the notorious prison at the fortress of Montjuïc in Barcelona and tortured. After a number had been killed, or had gone insane, their cases were taken up by the liberal press of Europe, resulting in the release of a few survivors. Reputedly it was Cánovas del Castillo who ordered the torture, including the burning of the victims’ flesh, the crushing of their bones, and the cutting out of their tongues. Similar acts of brutality and barbarism had occurred during his regime in Cuba, and Canovas remained deaf to the appeals and protests of civilized conscience.
ibid

So much for the overture. Now for the actual semana tragica:

In 1909, the Spanish government sent troops of reservists over the sea to fight against Moroccans. The Spanish government, “the Crown”, considered Morocco its property – and had always considered peasants its property to do with as it saw fit. The problem was that a) Moroccans were not appreciative of Spanish ownership and that b) 520 of the peasants had already completed active duty six years earlier. Besides, they had families who depended on them.

Mind you, Morocco was a meat grinder for the Spanish malnourished, poorly armed and untrained soldiers. In 1859, 4000 Spanish soldiers had perished there, and 1893 had seen more military disasters because, of course, Moroccans fiercely defended their land. As would you and I.

A number of pious ladies saw the conscripts off from several harbours in Cataluña, handing out medallions of the Holy Mother and whatnot, but the conscripts were stony-faced as they boarded the ships. Their wives, however, were not. They were furious. How were they supposed to feed their children when their husbands were carted off? At the time, only prostitutes were allowed to work.

In 1909, once the half-starving conscripts had landed in Morocco – I am quoting Wikipedia:

a series of skirmishes over the following weeks cost the Spanish over a thousand casualties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rif_War as on 11 July 2023

Meanwhile, all Hell broke loose in Barcelona. The “tragic week”. To sum it up, there was a riot, the outcome of which was, to quote Wikipedia:

Police and army casualties were 8 dead and 124 wounded, while 104 to 150 civilians were reportedly killed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragic_Week_(Spain) ason 11 July 2023

That’s it! That was the tragic week, the 8 dead law enforcers, and the 104 to150 civilians. Not the “over a thousand casualties” in Morocco.

You would have thought that the Spanish Crown learnt a lesson in 1909, but Spain was adamant. Spanish peasants were bled again and again in Morocco. In 1921 Spain “sufferered anywhere from 8,000 to 10,000 deaths” according to Encyclopedia Britannica. A commission was set up to investigate the debacle. “The report that resulted—the Expediente Picasso—was damning. It highlighted negligible military leadership, poor troop morale and training, problematic frontline logistics shoddy equipment, and the generally pitiable state of Spain’s colonial army.”

Still, the Spanish Crown failed to learn. Quoting Encyclopedia Britannica again:

The Rif War balance sheet was striking. Official Spanish casualty figures published in the late 1920s put losses at approximately 43,500 troops killed, missing, or wounded. Moreover, estimates put Spanish war-related expenses at 3.2 billion pesetas (more than $540 million), an astronomical figure given the size of Spain’s economy at the time.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Rif-War/Expansion-and-escalation

Mind you, the poor bastards dying in Morocco were not the “owners” of Morocco. The owners were all enjoying the good life back in Spain. Neither they nor their sons or grandsons had to serve in the meat grinder. They merely paid a coin or two to a couple of their peasants to replace them.

Homo sapiens has changed, of course – thank goodness! We are good, now, democratic, just, and above all, fair. Oh, and I forgot: honest.

Prayer for Africa

24.06.2023 / pelshvalen

What are the headlines in your country?

I bet one of today’s biggest headlines in your country is the same as in my country: about the implosion of a small vessel somewhere off the coast of Canada. It had a handful of passengers, it is true, and to their families, we of course offer our condolences. I’m sure that being imploded is a disagreeable way of dying.

Mind you, I watched Titanic, too – the film, that is – and I admit I was impressed by the luxurious tableware and the music and the grandeur of the disaster. Goodness, yes!

But frankly, looking back now, I realise that Titanic was nothing – even visually nothing – compared to the grandeur that meets the eye if you run a Google images search for climate+disaster+Africa. Try it.

I wonder, I honestly do, how it is that while few Europeans, and maybe even US Americans, remain dry-eyed at the edge of any one of the innumerable and endless French fields decked with plain white crosses over nameless humans who fell there in WWI, we turn our backs to what is going on in Africa. There are doubtless many and complex reasons, but I will mention two, for rhetorical purposes:

1) Could it be that we feel guilty, that we suspect that – although we never meant to hurt them, oh no! – that we suspect that our welfare (let’s be honest and admit that anyone who is reading this enjoys conditions of life far superior to the average African living in Africa) somehow, to some degree, for obscure reasons beyond us, has contributed to their plight? Through no fault of our own, of course.

2) Could it be that in spite of all our activism for Black rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights and whatnot rights, we are just a wee bit, you know – just a tiny bit – um, I hardly dare use the word – racist?

Those who fell in WWI are unknown to most of us, but they were white. Those who are dying in the Mediterranean are also unknown to us, but they are not white. I hear there is much talk of anti-Semitism again. I resent such talk, not – I repeat NOT – because I condone what is real anti-Semitism in any way, shape or form, but because the term “anti-Semitism” is being abused with impunity to commit horrendous racist crimes against Palestinians, whose skin is just a touch darker than the former Europeans who moved to Israel after WWII.

So how, I wonder, do Africans feel about all this? Most of them are much darker, even, than Palestinians. Are we all, in the West (and Israel undoubtedly belongs to the West) a bunch of closet racists?

A good photographer can take stunningly beautiful photos of despair, while hinting at even more stunningly precarious human existence shrouded in mist or sand, somehow alive under unbelievably difficult conditions. David Attenborough has shown us that there are tiny animals that survive miraculously in the Sahara. Maybe we shall see him in a final scene, telling us about how the unbelievably brave and resistant sapiens sapiens is miraculously surviving in, yes, a spreading-like-wildfire-desert, in Africa. That would be his crowning masterpiece.

Many don’t survive of course. Another 39 just drowned, trying to cross the Mediterranean. But we don’t want to hear about starving Africans. It’s their own fault, isn’t it? They’re corrupt, aren’t they, and they’re ignorant. We, of course, in the West, are neither corrupt nor ignorant.

Sci-fi authors regularly write about how the entire planet has been destroyed by weapons of mass destruction, greed and climate disasters. I put to the community of sci-fi authors: Let Africans survive. The rest of us are useless.

I’M NOT FINISHED!

I check the news from the Norwegian National Broadcasting company every single day without fail. So I can assure you that we do hear about Africa from time to time. Listening to or reading the news from the Norwegian National Broadcasting Company, you will get the impression that the only problem in Africa is a few warlords. There are, indeed, a few horrible warlords in Africa, in Sudan, for instance, and in Congo. There is one fundamental difference, however, between a warlord from the global south and a warlord from the filthy-rich “West”: Warlords from the Global South would not be able to start WWIII. Our warlords, however, in the filthy-rich West, seem determined to do just that. After all, their kids will not be the ones to serve and die on the battle fields.

Warlords are an irresponsible psychopathic lot, agreed, be they white, black or green. Hegemon warlords, however, are the very, very worst.

The Great Divide

04.06.2023 / pelshvalen

The other night I had a terrible argument with a couple whom I consider particularly close friends. They were spending the weekend at my place, and we had enjoyed two lovely days, when in the evening, I unwittingly stepped on a sore toe. Now, I had been very careful not to even mention Ukraine; in this country we are told in no uncertain terms that we are defending democracy against fascism and that the war is being waged between good and evil. Moreover, those who exclusively read the New York Times and Guardian – and my friends consider them the ultimate sources of information about current events – will “know for a fact” that such is the case. So no, not a word about Ukraine.

Assuming that we would probably agree about “cancelling”, I joked about this growing trend. There are all sorts of views that qualify as grounds for cancelling these days, and I happen to believe – and assumed that my academic friends would agree – that rather than cancel views we don’t like, we should discuss them. Well, my friends, didn’t agree. They were in fact furious with me: 1) The very concept “cancelling”, they maintained, was invented by the ignorati such as Trump and his followers. There was no such thing as cancelling. 2) Misinformation, however, deserved to be suppressed (i.e. cancelled). “People need to check their facts,” they insisted, and they repeated the word again and again: facts. facts. facts.

Admittedly, a few facts, such as many but far from all historic dates, are more or less incontrovertible (except, perhaps, among philosophers). Conversely, in a war, most “facts” are contentious and a great number go on to be debated for centuries.

Even within the exact sciences, calculations are often debatable, if for no other reason because the figures on which they are based,which in turn rely on other figures based on figures, etc. are open to debate. Most social scientists do not even pretend that their “facts” are conclusive. Historians, however, tend to cheat a bit. After all, when all is said and done, history is anything but a-political.

I forget who said that history is always written by the victors, be they Roman or British or US American, not by the Galls, the African peoples or the indigenous (North, Central and South) Americans. Historians live in the victors’ society and their world view will inevitably reflect that of their surroundings. True there will be the occasional deviant interpretation of past events, but in the end, the version that is accepted science and generally agreed upon is the one that gives the best possible impression of “our actions”,”our country”, “us”.

The breakup of the Soviet Union represented the demise of Communism in Europe. Yet, the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO) which had been established to “defend” Europe against Communism, was not disbanded (why?) and the Great Divide persisted. Why? Why did we not throttle the growth of the monster that was quietly being groomed in our midst? Was there a real threat or was there something else going on? In 2021, Russian military expenditure was fairly modest, whereas the US controlled about 750 bases in at least 80 countries and spent more on its military than the next 10 countries combined. How could anybody imagine that Russia would wish or be able to threaten Europe with such puny means? Even in 2022, the country’s military expenses amounted to a mere 4% of global military expenditure, compared to the USA’s 39%.

Now a SIPRI headline from April 2023 reads: “World military expenditure reaches new record high as European spending surges”. Whom does this absurd military build-up benefit? Certainly not the population of Ukraine! Certainly not the populations of Europe!

The information war waged between the so-called blocks is no less terrifying: the battle for hearts and minds. Remember Vietnam? The Pentagon Papers and the persecution of Daniel Ellsberg? And that was just the beginning.

Before the breakup, during the first Cold War between what the West called Communist states and what so-called Communists called Capitalist states, the stories told on each side were grossly inaccurate. I happen to be familiar with both of them.

Take, for instance, DDR, East Germany, a country which is, with reason, indelibly linked in our minds with “repression”, “fear”, “Stasi”. With reason, yes, but we never heard the whole story. We will probably never know how misinformed we were, because East Germany is gone, subsumed into a greater Germany, and those who lived there have nothing but flighty memories to go by when evoking the past. The German writer Jenny Erpenbeck is one who recalls beautiful fragments of what is gone. True, even in the worst of places you find happy people, just as even in Beverly Hills there are lots of suicides. So I agree, fragments of memory are not reliable.

Analysing quality of life is no joke anywhere, let alone in an entire country, now non-existant, yet still reviled, both by the West and by the East. The only defenders of what was once East Germany are people who actually lived there.

If NATO “wins” Ukraine, as that horrible man at the top insists it will, will the Ukrainians weep for joy? Weep, they will, you may be sure.

The Great Divide runs not only between East and West, but straight down the middle of our societies, splitting families and friendships, spreading distrust, even hate — as welfare states are mangled by military budgets. And fear, yes, because the absurd contradictions imbedded in the concept of waging war as a deterrent to war confuse and frighten us. We suspect we’re being had. We all know that unless these spiralling excesses stop, there will be war for us all. We blame the Russians, but that does not make us feel better.

Formerly respected news outlets, which used to argue about political issues, now all clamour for more weaponry. All who try to paint a fuller picture of the situation are vilified, though I have not yet seen them referred to as “traitors” – just a question of time, you may be sure. Here is a short video explaining what happens to “the fuller picture“.

In short, I very much doubt that the press is much freer in the West than in Russia. In fact I suspect that here, the battle for hearts and minds (in short, indoctrination) has been more successful. Nevertheless it is growing ever more aggressive (in short, authoritarian), not least in the UK, which after Brexit appears to be accountable only to the US administration, not to the EU and certainly not to the British people.

I recommend a conversation between Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Edward Snowden — remember him and the “No Such Agency” story that broke exactly ten years ago on 6 June. The conversation, on Glenn Greenwald’s site, starts at about 21 minutes into the video.

What enlightenment is not

17.05.2023 / pelshvalen

Yep, artificial intelligence and Wikipedia have already met, I fear. Or are the automatons at work human? Diligent cancelists? At any rate, things are starting to happen, awful things reminiscent of noxious chemical reactions.

The other day, I looked up Helsinki Times in Wikipedia. The first paragraph read:

Helsinki Times is the first English language daily online newspaper in Finland providing news about Finland and the world for English-speaking readers resident in the country. A weekly printed edition was issued between 2007 and 2015.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helsinki_Times (as at 17 May 2023)

That sounded ok, The article went on to tell me that “notable guest columnists include ….” I looked up those I did not know, including Cynthia McKinney.

Wikipedia’s introductory sentence about Cynthia McKinney was:

Cynthia Ann McKinney (born March 17, 1955) is an American politician, academic, and conspiracy theorist [my emphasis].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynthia_McKinney (as at 17 May 2023)

Now I have no idea of what views are held by Cynthia McKinney, who is a member of the Democratic Party. Since she has served six terms in the House of Representatives, she must have served her voters well. She is sure to hold various views which you or I may or may not not share, but HONESTLY: Committing character assassination of Cynthia McKinney in the very first sentence of the Wikipedia article about her seems a bit over the top, no? I don’t know what “conspiracy theorist” views she holds, mind you: Wikipedia having rubbished her, I naturally read no further.

Is Wikipedia now a guardian of a modern “Index Librorum Prohibitorum” ( a list of written works condemned as heretical or injurious to the Christian faith by the Catholic Church at the Council of Trent in 1563)?

Who gets to define something as a conspiracy theory? It certainly isn’t anybody I know.

I am told that if you don’t believe the official story about the murder of JFK, you hold a conspiracy theory. I look up Lee Harvey Oswald in Wikipedia. The article is extremely long. It contains no doubts about the matter, no unanswered questions: The man was emotionally screwed, a defector to the USSR and he did it. He killed Kennedy. Alone. Period. In Wikipedia he is damned without a trial.

I read somewhere just the other day that 70% of the US population have doubts about that story; 70% of the US population are “conspiracy theorists”?

What is a conspiracy theory? Firstly, the expression is pejorative. If you hold conspiracy theories, you should get your head examined, and people you know will cross to the other side of the street when they see you. Conspiracy theories tend to 1) question the intentions of powerful institutions — say banks, the CIA, the President, the national health authorities, etc. 2) Their dissemination is deemed a “threat to Democracy”, to “national security”, etc.

It’s usually the mainstream press that gets to attach the bell to the cat, and the social media will immediately follow suit. The mainstream press does not need to pretend to be unbiased, on the contrary. It’s supposed to promulgate political positions. It might encourage debate on some issues – for instance, about the environmental benefits of electric cars – but conspiracy theories are above question, or should I say below question. They are so base, they must not be put on the table. They are simply trampled on.

Encyclopaedias, however, are supposed to hold certain academic, yea, scientific standards. They may present differing views about controversial issues, including the arguments supporting those views, but it is not for the encyclopaedist to make the final judgment unless the arguments on one side are particularly flimsy.

The arguments raising doubts about the official story of the JFK killing are not flimsy. In the last and very brief paragraph about Lee Harvey Oswald, sub-titled “Other investigations and dissenting theories” those arguments are, however, not presented. A couple of films are listed, presumably to lengthen the paragraph. Remember Oliver Stone’s film JFK? A rather compelling story, no? Too compelling, it would seem, because it is not among the films listed.

The JFK case was a long time ago, and principal players in that drama are long gone. But some lasting damage has been done: You and I know that we cannot believe everything we are told by presidents, government agencies and corporate spokespersons even though they earnestly look you straight in the eye from the TV screen. Had the US authorities not put so much effort into suppressing the “dissenting theories”, the damage would have been far greater.

And now we can no longer trust the intentions of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is, or rather was, our encyclopedia. We made it. Hundreds and thousands of us contributed painstakingly to its remarkable growth. True, we always knew that in the heat of a scuffle, some articles would be skewed. Who can blame a writer from an occupied state who is less than objective about the occupying country! However, since we all had access, we could edit, correct, and view the article’s history. We still can, of course, but with artificial intelligence, it’s a losing battle, I fear.

Today, I came across, once again, an important and well-sourced article in the Grayzone. Articles in the Grayzone tend to be a bit tedious, as they seek to adhere strictly to the source. They are not colourful, ironic or full of beautiful metaphors. They are simply dull, yet, sometimes extremely interesting. I was sure the Grayzone article satisfied journalistic and even scientific standards, so I gave Wikipedia a new chance. This is what I got by way of an introductory paragraph:

The Grayzone is an American far-left news website and blog founded and edited by American journalist Max Blumenthal. The website, initially founded as The Grayzone Project, was affiliated with AlterNet before becoming independent in early 2018. A fringe website, it is known for misleading reporting and sympathetic coverage of authoritarian regimes The Grayzone has denied human rights abuses against Uyghurs, promulgated conspiracy theories about Venezuela, Xinjiang, Syria and other regions, and promoted pro-Russian propaganda during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Grayzone has been described by Commentary as a propaganda shop devoted to pushing pro-Assad, pro-Maduro, pro-Putin, and pro-Hamas narratives. [My highlights.]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grayzone (as at 17 May 2023)

Wow! Kill, kill, kill. Is it really no longer possible to simply disagree with content? Does it have to be savaged?

Wkipedia appears to be rapidly descending into an artificial intelligence Hades from which there will probably be no return, unless the damage done is the work of diligent cancelist humans.

On the other hand, GPT chatbot is basically the child of Silicon Valley, which is basically affiliated with the Democratic Party establishment. So whether the automatons at work are digital or human, the ongoing editing of Wikipedia appears to bear the imprint of cancelist Dems.

Back to Palestine

14.05.2023 / pelshvalen

While the war in Ukraine has engulfed most of our attention, the plight of Palestinians in Gaza, the occupied territories, and Jerusalem has grown dramatically worse. Almost every day, one or multiple Palestinians are killed.

The paragraph I just wrote is no different from what you might read in any mainstream paper. What is missing from that paragraph, however, particularly in the last sentence, is the grammatical agent: Killed by whom? Why?

Well, the mainstream media will probably not be accused of anti-Semitism even if they admit that the killers are Israeli, although they would never dare use the word “killers” about Israeli soldiers or settlers. And they will always add that the Israelis naturally have a right to defend themselves. Remind me now: How many Israelis have been killed by Palestinians?

The Ukrainians have a right to defend themselves, we are told; the Israelis have a right to defend themselves, we are told; do not the Palestinians have a right to defend themselves? It’s just that they can’t. No way. The Israeli stranglehold on the Palestinian people is deadening.

Yet, the EU does not seem to get the point. Ursula von der Leyen recently held a speech commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Israeli state. In her speech she made no mention of the roughly 750,000 people who were driven off their land and/or killed to make way for the Israeli state.

Her speech included two very provocative sentences:

” …Today we celebrate 75 years of vibrant Democracy in the heart of the Middle East.” Vibrant Democracy? VIBRANT DEMOCRACY!!!! Von der Leyen lives on the moon? Or is Von der Leyen an abject liar?

and

” …You have literally made a desert bloom.” Really? I believe the Palestinians who used to live in the part of Palestine that is now Israel engaged in agriculture (e.g. oranges and olives) before they were chased away like vermin..

The conditions under which the Palestinians who still refuse to move from what little remains of their land are unbelievably harsh. They are treated not like dogs – anybody treating a dog that way would be prosecuted under laws prohibiting cruelty to animals – but like white folks treated the indigenous peoples whose lands they had stolen 400 years ago, i.e. much, much worse. It’s a wonder they are still alive.

If you are in any way in doubt about my assertion, please take the time to look at the following two videos.

About Hebron in the occupied West Bank

About Jerusalem

As for Gaza, more than 40 Israeli war planes carried out attacks for two hours, starting at 2 at night on 8 May, killing 13 people including women and four children and wounding at least 20 others.

Harnessing history to politics, part II

08.05.2023 / pelshvalen

The Icelandic historian Thorarinn Hjartarson has written a piece about the 1932–33 famine in Ukraine. What follows is most of the second part of his analysis.

Causes of grain shortage

Historians explain the food shortage in the Soviet Union in 1933 in various ways. The predominant view is that the dramatic changes imposed by the collectivisation campaign led to confusion and chaos. This is the view held by, among others, R.W. Davies and St. Wheatcroft. This is, incidentally, also the view held by the current government in Moscow.

Others give preference to environmental circumstances as causal factors. Mark B. Tauger is probably the main proponent in the West of such views.

Tauger writes that the famine was primarily a consequence of a number of natural circumstances during the period 1931–32 that were not referred to in official statistics at the time (Stalin, Soviet Agriculture and Collectivization“, p. 112). A drought ravaged the land in 1931, whereas excessive precipitation and humidity was the problem in 1932 (in Ukraine precipitation was almost three times the average). The harvest looked promising during the summer, but various kinds of mould and mildew infected the harvest, particularly in Ukraine and North Caucasus, where as much as 70% of the harvest was damaged in large areas.

Tauger refers to figures from state farms (sovkhozi) in Ukraine in 1932, according to which only 60% of the required quota had been achieved. On the other hand, Tauger finds an abrupt 60 % harvest increase from 1932 to 1933, specifically in Ukraine. (The 1932 Harvest…, p. 81)

….

Collectivisation

Collectivisation, which was imposed – at breakneck speed – in 1930, revolutionised ownership and production in the countryside, where all the food was produced. More than half of all farms had been collectivised as early as in 1931. Such a “shock therapy” naturally spawned a whole series of problems that would necessarily lead to a decline in production; from discontent to anger and outright resistance among farmers, compounded by violence against owners of large farms.

Meanwhile, investment prioritised industry, and there was an exodus from the countryside to the towns. In short: Chaos.

What followed were two years of poor harvests, 1931 and 1932. Food was rationed in all of the country’s cities, and rations were repeatedly reduced both years. Tauger describes the ensuing chaos and some of the authorities’ reactions: People fled from factories and from collective farms, so there were millions of people just drifting throughout the country, in search of better conditions. Towards the end of 1932, the authorities re-introduced a “tsarist” rule requiring “internal passports”. (Ibid p. 86-87). The authorities particularly wanted to stop the influx of people to areas affected by food shortages. The internal passport requirement has been interpreted as part and parcel of Stalin’s authoritarian style, and of his genocidal intentions. In reality, it is more a reflection of the extent of chaos in the country at this point….

If the chaos in the country was a direct consequence of the collectivisation campaign, the subsequent famine can be said to be so too. In fact that is what the majority of historians studying the issue have concluded. Though meteorological conditions may have reduced the harvest, as described above, we should safely be able to say that harvest reduction hit the Soviet Union, and not least Ukraine, at a difficult point in time.

Mark B. Tauger is not convinced that collectivisation as such caused the famine. For one thing the harvest of 1933 was excellent, also in Ukraine, in spite of the fact that the grain seeds had been sown during the spring when the famine was at its worst (Tauger, Soviet Peasants and Collectivization, 1930-39: Resistance and Adaptation, p. 84-85).

In order to assess the effects of collectivisation, we have to take a look at the prevailing conditions at the time and also during the period preceding it. There were Socialist uprisings here and there in Europe at the end of the war in 1918, but only in one country was there a successful revolution, and that country was inhabited mainly by peasants engaged in primitive agriculture. According to Marxist theory, socialism required a well-developed industrial society. A bone of contention among the Bolsheviks was whether it was possible to create industry in a Soviet society without any help from other socialist countries, and if so, how.

The economic basis was rickety, indeed. Robert C. Allen, Professor of Economic History at New York University, Abu Dhabi, and Senior Research Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, is the author of Farm to Factory. A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution (2003). This is an extensive study of statistical material in several countries, including tsarist Russia …. Judging from official figures, the economy and productivity of Soviet Russia in the twenties – the period referred to as NEP (1921-28) – was equivalent to that of South-East Asia and the poorest parts of South America. The country had little in common with countries such as Germany and the USA (Allen, p. 3-4).

The crux of the problem was the backwardness of agriculture. Allen compares agriculture in the European part of Russia to agriculture in areas in Canada with similar meteorological and topographic conditions. … According to his calculations, production per hectare in the twenties was very similar in the two areas. However, production per working person was 8 times greater in Canada. (Allen p. 73).

In 1928, 82% of the Soviet population lived in rural areas, working under relatively primitive conditions. Villages were over-populated and produced only a slim surplus to send to markets in the cities. The country was thus vulnerable to harvest fluctuations and food insecurity, and famines occurred fairly frequently. After all, one of the main demands of the October Revolution had been “Bread!” Hence there were several famines during the twenties. The worst of them was at the end of the civil war in 1921-22, when fatalities probably numbered about 5 million. Another serious famine occurred in 1928-1929, and not without reason.

After the October revolution, agricultural productivity decreased. One important reason for this was that the proportion of people living in rural areas had grown from less than 70% (in the last year before the war, 1913) to 82% in 1928. Per capita production in Russia/the Soviet Union was thus almost the same in 1928 as in 1900, and it had fallen since 1913 (Allen, p. 5).

The Russian Revolution had to a large extent been a peasant revolution. Peasants divided the major landowners’ land between them. This they felt entitled to do in view of the revolutionary activities in the cities. … As a result, the number of farms rose from 16 million in 1913 to 28 million in 1928.

Creating industry without foreign investment requires enormous economic effort. For the Soviet Union, there were few other sources of capital than the country’s agricultural sector. However, most farmers were still living practically in a barter-economy. They had little surplus to sell. What little excess production reached the cities was produced by large farms. Determining prices of industrial goods versus agricultural goods became a source of contention towards the end of the NEP period. When business conditions benefited the agricultural sector, owners of the large farms were the ones to thrive, something that stimulated capitalism within the sector. When, on the other hand, business conditions benefited industrial production, agricultural produce was not delivered to the market and the reciprocal exchange of goods between the sectors shrank.

One consequence of all the land partitioning was thus that the amount of agricultural produce for sale in the cities fell sharply. In 1928, it shrank by 24% compared to 1913. As for the most important of all the agricultural commodities, grain, the reduction of produce that reached the cities was 50%; likewise for potatoes and vegetables. The Communist Party and its policies were in deep trouble (Allen, p. 79-81).

Moreover, wheat and grain in general had constituted the country’s main exports during tsarist times. Exported grain in 1928 amounted to no more than 1:20 as compared to in 1913. …

In other words, the agricultural sector proved incapable of a substantial rise in productivity under the prevailing conditions, and as a result society as a whole was vulnerable to imminent famines. …

To ensure food security in the country and to stimulate industrialisation, the Communist Party decided to restructure the entire agricultural sector.

Collectivisation as a prerequisite for industrialisation

They opted for a fairly drastic measure: that of the collectivisation campaign. I won’t go into the details of how it was performed, but briefly look at the outcome in terms of production and productivity.

Production fell in 1931 and 1932, but rose during the following years. In 1937 the country’s total production was 10% higher than in 1928. More importantly, though, the supply of grain to the cities had risen by 62%. This can be explained by the fact that productivity had doubled after the collectivisation, not least since the new, large agricultural units could sustain tractors and other mechanised farming equipment. As a result, fewer working hands were needed, so large numbers of people left the land to work in industrial plants. During the thirties, 25 million people moved from rural communities to thriving and rapidly growing industrial towns (Allen, p. 100-101).

It seems clear, then, that though the collectivisation campaign was far from pretty, it did ensure future food security for the Soviet Union. Also, it seems to me, while recent history is dotted with numerous and terrible famines, only some are stridently flagged as “crimes against humanity”. The Holodomor narrative appears to be a cynical manipulation of a tragedy for political purposes.

I should add that the ongoing accelerating ecological breakdown is indeed a crime against humanity. Its results will include global famine. It is currently being hastened by Russia, Ukraine, the USA, the EU and other NATO countries. The victims: the largely powerless inhabitants of the countries perpetrating the crime and, to an even greater degree, the populations of the Global South.

Intermezzo

07.05.2023 / pelshvalen

I shall be publishing the second part of Thorarinn Hjartarson’s analysis of the “Holdomor” narrative in a couple of days.

In the mean time you might take a look at an article that appeared yesterday in Helsinki Times. I was kindly informed about it by a friend in Poland. I gather press freedom is not much greater in Poland than it is in Norway these days.

https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/world-int/23512-detaining-gonzalo-lira-another-blow-to-the-freedom-of-press-in-ukraine.html

Harnessing history to politics

30.04.2023 / pelshvalen

The Icelandic historian Thorarinn Hjartarson has written a piece about the 1932–33 famine in Ukraine. What follows is most of the first part of his analysis. The quotes included by the author were translated by him to Icelandic from English. Since I have been unable to consult all his sources, I must include some of the quotes indirectly, foregoing quotation marks.

On 23 March, the Icelandic National Assembly (Allting) unanimously approved the following resolution: “The Allting declares that the Ukrainian famine of 1932–1933 was a genocide.”

The statement accompanying the resolution reads:

The famine was a direct consequence of forced collectivisation, and was systematically used as retribution… The Soviet authorities’ aim was to suppress Ukrainian national sensibilities. Hence the Ukrainians were deliberately starved for political purposes.
https://www.althingi.is/altext/153/s/0834.html

A multinational effort

The Icelandic National Assembly (Allting) has taken the extraordinary step of determining the cause of a famine that occurred 90 years ago in Ukraine. I am not aware of any Icelandic historian who has discussed it, and it is hardly likely that members of the Allting have been able to acquaint themselves with its circumstances. Most probably, quite a few of them had never even heard about it. But do we really have to know? As long as others “know”, we should be on the safe side, no? This is, after all, a multinational effort, a response to the “plea from Ukraine” in which the expression “genocide” is used to describe the famine in question.

The essence of the Icelandic resolution and the accompanying statement is that the famine was perpetrated by the authorities in Moscow, “deliberately and for political reasons” and that it was targeted particularly against the Ukrainian population.

Why is the Allting adopting such a resolution? No resolution has been adopted about, say, the famine in Bengal in 1943, which killed millions. That affair would be closer to home, as it were, since the British were in charge there. The answer is pretty obvious: the purpose of the resolution is to support today’s Ukrainians in their war and to thwart today’s Russia and stir up more russophobia.

A famine ravaged in the Soviet Union during the winter and spring of 1933. According to Wikipedia it claimed 5.5–8.7 million lives, 3.3–5 millions of whom were in Ukraine. There is little controversy about the extent of the famine. Most historians today, including Timothy Snyder and Stephan G. Wheatcroft, who differ in most other respects, set the number of lost lives in Ukraine at around 3.5 million. Ukrainian nationalists, however, multiply that figure to 7 million, and the West-leaning former President Jushenko stated, on his visit to the USA in 2006 that “Holodomor claimed 20 million Ukrainian lives”.

During the Cold War, proponents of the blood-curdling theory that the famine was genocide – deliberately carried out by the authorities in Moscow against the Ukrainians – were mainly Ukrainian emigrants in the West.

The British historian Robert Conquest introduced it to the field of historical study with his book Harvest of Sorrow in 1986. Conquest was already world-famous after having written his anti-Communist magnum opus The Great Terror in 1968, about “Stalin’s purges”. In the 1986 book (Harvest of…) he maintained that the famine in Ukraine had been a deliberately engendered scourge upon the people. It was the result not of any food shortage, but of the authorities’ rigorous demands for and collection of grain in the wake of the collectivisation campaign in 1930. Conquest wrote that the lesson to be learned appeared to be that Communist ideology served as the basis for an unparalleled genocide of men, women and children. In other words the lesson he had learned was about the malevolence of Communism.

He quotes Ukrainian scholars who hold that collectivisation was imposed on the Ukrainian people with the specific purpose of suppressing the Ukrainian separatist movement and to do away with the social foundation underlying Ukrainian nationalism: private ownership of land (Harvest of Sorrow, p. 219). However, the collectivisation was implemented in the same manner elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Was it intended as a scourge on other peoples too? As theories goes, this one seems a bit far-fetched.

On the independence of Ukraine in 1991, and particularly after anti-Russian forces came to power and the orange revolution (2004), the Holodomor theory has become the bedrock of Ukrainian nationalism and national conscience and has been taught in all schools. Under the leadership of Viktor Júsjenkó (2005-2010) the Holodomor Law was enacted in 2006.

Section 1 states that Holodomor 1932–1933 was the genocide of the Ukrainian people.

Section 2 states that Public denial of Holodomor amounts to an insult against the memory of millions of Holodomor’s victims and an offence against the dignity of the Ukrainian people, and is punishable by law.

This law still applies, and Ukrainian nationalism systematically seeks to erase the distinction between the past and the present in order to nurture anti-Russian sentiment. Putin is said to continue where Stalin left off.

Harnessing history to politics is not a Ukrainian invention, but prohibiting discussion and alternative interpretations is undoubtedly a bit over the top. The Russian Duma’s reaction in 2008 to Kiev’s historical analysis was: “the famine in 1933 does not qualify as genocide according to the internationally accepted definition of the term”.

The purpose of the multinational declaration stating that the famine amounted to genocide is twofold:1) It serves to perpetuate the disrepute of Communism 2) It is a weapon in the ongoing campaign against present and past Russia.

So what actually happened in Ukraine in 1932–33?

Asking Ukrainians will probably not be helpful, since any surviving doubts about the official storyline are punishable by law.

During the cold war, discussion in the West about the Soviet Union tended to be highly politicised and dichotomous. Political sympathies inevitably coloured analyses of the country’s history and the ideological dividing line between opponents ran between (market) liberal and socialist sympathies. The narrative about the collectivisation held a fairly prominent position in that discussion, not least because that was a field in which anti-communist authors held excellent ammunition.

With the gradual opening of the Soviet archives starting under Gorbachov, we have seen the emergence of interpretations that tend to explain developments around 1930 in economic rather than political terms. However, ever since Ukraine was dragged into a geopolitical confrontation in the wake of the Orange Revolution in 2004, the Maidan Revolution in 2014 and the invasion of Russia in 2022, Ukrainian history has once again increasingly been understood from a political and moral perspective, cf. The Turn Away from Economic Explanations for Soviet Famines.

What side we are on about our interpretation of history tends to determine what side we are on in the present conflict and vice versa.

Timothy Snyder

In 2010, a book published by the US history professor Timothy Snyder became a best-seller in the USA, Germany and Poland: Bloodlands. Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, about the Soviet Union, Poland and Ukraine from 1932 to 1945. Morally, he basically equates Stalin’s and Hitler’s regimes and adds that we now know, having discussed Soviet documents for 20 years, that in 1932, Stalin turned collective farming’s famine into a politically motivated deliberate starvation campaign. (Chapter 1). He adds that Stalin’s campaign targeted the Ukrainians because of their nationality.
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/136199

Snyder has no primary references about the famine, but he supports his claim by extensively quoting nationalist Ukrainian historians. His book has lent academic credence to the Holodomor narrative. Snyder is much appreciated in Ukraine and has been a guest of President Zelensky.

He is using history as a political crowbar. Ever since the occupation of Crimea in 2014, he has written a barrage of articles explaining how Putin is an existential threat not only to Ukraine but to all of Europe and that he continues where Stalin left off.

Davies and Wheatcroft

Over the past twenty years or so, the British professor, R.W. Davis has been the West’s grand old man about Soviet economic history. (He died in 2021.) Together with E.H. Carr, he wrote the last volume of the great History of Soviet Russia. His bibliography includes the seven-volume Industrialisation of Soviet Russia, one volume of which is called The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture 1931-1933. The co-author to that volume is Professor Stephen Wheatcroft, based in Melbourne, whose specialist field is Soviet social, economic and demographic history, as well as agriculture and famines all over the world. He has engaged in detailed studies of the Soviet collectivisation campaign.

Davies and Wheatcroft’s book is the single most detailed and thorough book about the “grain crisis” in the Soviet Union in the 1930s that has ever been published, at least in the West. One of the main conclusions of the book is that the famine was a result of a severe grain shortage in the country, not that grain was withheld from people. The authors take pains to dismiss Robert Conquest’s claims on that score, not least because those claims had been so widely disseminated and trumpeted.

[The following is a back translation:] Our studies about the famine have led us to completely different conclusions than those reached by Dr. Conquest. He argues that Stalin “wanted the famine”, that the Soviet authorities did not want to deal with it successfully and that the famine was deliberately imposed on Ukraine. The story we are telling in our book is the story of Soviet authorities struggling with a famine crisis that to some extent was caused by their own failed policies, but which at any rate was unexpected and unwelcome. Their agricultural policies were formed by conditions preceding the revolution, by civil war experiences, by the situation on the international stage, by intractable geographical and meteorological conditions as well as by the modus operandi of the Soviet system during the Stalin era. They were formed by people with inadequate relevant training. Above all, the famine was a consequence of the decision to industrialise agricultural land in record time.
R.W. Davies og Stephen G Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture 1931-1933, p. 441

The book includes a footnote quoting R. Conquest explaining that he had not maintained that Stalin had intentionally caused the famine in 1933, only that when the famine was imminent, he could have prevented it. Here Wheatcroft writes that when he and Davies confronted R. Conquest with evidence about the extent of the crisis and the number of secret emergency measures taken by the Politbureau to mitigate it, he withdrew his previous criticism.

Was there a grain shortage

What was the real extent of the crisis, i.e. the size of the harvest following the summer of 1932? Encyclopedia Britannica reflects the prevailing line of thought in the West, explaining that the famine was no less than an attack on Ukrainian farmers; that it was engendered deliberately is inferred from there being no preconditions for any famine in Ukraine; that the harvest there in 1932 had been less than average, (partially due to the chaos caused by the collectivisation) but sufficient to feed the population.

This is the crux of the matter, then. The Holodomor narrative is underpinned by the assumption that the harvest in 1932 was normal, so that the sole cause of the famine was the state’s excessive grain collection. Was that the case? Stephen Wheatcroft writes, in 2018:

The famine was associated with two years of harvest failure in 1931 and 1932. 1931 was a year of drought with demonstrably excessive temperatures and low rainfall in the early summer injuring the ﬂowering and ﬁlling out of the grain. 1932 was a year in which the biological yield (prior to harvesting) was relatively normal, but in which harvest losses were excessively high as a result of damp weather during the harvest period, and a slow progression of the harvesting which greatly increased harvest losses. …In 1931 and 1932 the level of grain actually available for use was dangerously low.
Roundtable on Soviet Famines

Mark B. Tauger

Mark B. Tauger, professor at West Virginia University is one of the world’s most prominent specialists on famines and has devoted 30 years to studies of famines in the Russian empire and the Soviet Union. In 1991 an article by him appeared in Slavic Review: “The 1932 harvest and the Famine of 1933”.

One important conclusion reached by Tauger in that article is that publicly available harvest figures for the years following 1930 were extremely unreliable. The figures for expected yields tended to be exaggerated, and the authorities’ demands for and collection of grain (so-called procurement quotas) were based on those figures. Modern assessments of the causes of the famine are also based on those figures. He writes that due to the drought-reduced harvest in 1931,

the 1932 grain procurement quota, and the amount of grain actually collected, were both much smaller than those of any other year in the 1930s. The Central Committee lowered the planned procurement quota in a 6 May 1932 decree,… from the 1931 quota of 22.4 million tons to 18.1 million tons;
The 1932 Harvest…, p. 71

Although the procurement quota had been sharply reduced, harvesting in 1932 did not go well and 10% was missing from the much reduced quota that was collected. As a result there were violent confrontations between collectors and farmers in the autumn of 1932, not least when it became clear that there was insufficient grain to feed the country’s population.

At the time, the authorities always operated with overoptimistic assessments of the amount of threshed grain. Tauger refers to annual reports from collective farms (in 1933, we find reports from about 150 thousand collective farms handed in when the harvest was over) which indicate that the harvest was poor compared to official expectations.

Tauger also points out that the famine was not limited to Ukraine:

Soviet regional mortality figures for the early 1930s, compiled by TsUNKhU [the Soviet Statistical bureau] and recently published by Wheatcroft, show that while the famine was more severe in certain Ukrainian oblasts than elsewhere, it was by no means limited to Ukraine. Both urban and rural mortality rates in 1933 considerably increased over those of 1932 in most regions, and in the Volga basin,Urals, Siberia, and central agricultural regions, they approached or equalled Ukrainian levels.
Ibid, p. 87

In Bloddlands (p. 41–42) Snyder maintains that Stalin’s governmnt had not cut back grain exports in 1932–33 and did not send relief to the affected areas. Tauger provides exact figures:

Due to the poor harvest in 1931 and the need to transport grain to areas affected by famine, the government reduced grain exports from 5.2 million tonnes in 1931 to 1.73 million tonnes in 1932. They declined to 1.68 million in 1933
Ibid p. 88

There is no doubt that grain collection during the autumn and early winter of 1932 was extremely harsh…. Moreover, the authorities did not understand until too late and poorly the truth about the real amount of grain, the local shortages and the imminent famine.

Only in November were the procurement quotas reduced for North Caucasus and Ukraine. In February 1933, grain seed and grain for food was sent back to areas where the need was greatest, 320 tonnes to Ukraine and 240 tonnes to North Caucasus. By April, total aid to Ukraine had exceeded 560 thousand tonnes.

Ibid p. 88

To my mind, Thorarinn Hjartarson has convincingly made the case
1) that the famine was ghastly, but that it was not due to malevolent intentions on the part of the Soviet authorities;
2) that when one country wishes to support another country, it should be wary of hot-headed political rhetoric.

When engaged in contests or conflicts, humans tend to forget what differentiates them from other mammals.

I may or may not translate and publish the rest of T. Hj.’s analysis where he examines various theories as to why the grain harvest was poor two years in a row.