Whether history repeats itself or merely rhymes, human nature can be counted upon to make history seem repetitive or rhythmic.
Stephen Kotkin concludes Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 with this observation: “History, for better and for worse, is made by those who never give up.”
Stalin never gave up. He had succeeded in subduing his enemies within the USSR by 1928, but he would continue to imprison and execute anyone whose words or actions he deemed threatening to his dictatorship or to the cause that he had embraced.
That cause was state socialism, “collective” control by the Communist Party (acting through the state) of the economy of the nation (in the name of the people, of course). To succeed in that cause, it was necessary to stifle and eradicate any dissent — real, imagined, actual, or potential — from the edicts of the Party (i.e., Stalin).
One of those edicts was collectivization of agriculture, a program that Stalin announced in January 1928 and began to implement in 1929. The rest, as they say, is history — a grim history in which Ukraine figured largely (though not exclusively):
The Ukrainian famine—known as the Holodomor, a combination of the Ukrainian words for “starvation” and “to inflict death”—by one estimate claimed the lives of 3.9 million people, about 13 percent of the population. And, unlike other famines in history caused by blight or drought, this was caused when a dictator wanted both to replace Ukraine’s small farms with state-run collectives and punish independence-minded Ukrainians who posed a threat to his totalitarian authority.
“The Ukrainian famine was a clear case of a man-made famine,” explains Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University and author of the 2018 book, Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine. He describes it as “a hybrid…of a famine caused by calamitous social-economic policies and one aimed at a particular population for repression or punishment.”
In those days, Ukraine—a Texas-sized nation along the Black Sea to the west of Russia—was a part of the Soviet Union, then ruled by Stalin. In 1929, as part of his plan to rapidly create a totally communist economy, Stalin had imposed collectivization, which replaced individually owned and operated farms with big state-run collectives. Ukraine’s small, mostly subsistence farmers resisted giving up their land and livelihoods.
In response, the Soviet regime derided the resisters as kulaks—well-to-do peasants, who in Soviet ideology were considered enemies of the state. Soviet officials drove these peasants off their farms by force and Stalin’s secret police further made plans to deport 50,000 Ukrainian farm families to Siberia, historian Anne Applebaum writes in her 2017 book, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine.
“Stalin appears to have been motivated by the goal of transforming the Ukrainian nation into his idea of a modern, proletarian, socialist nation, even if this entailed the physical destruction of broad sections of its population,” says Trevor Erlacher, an historian and author specializing in modern Ukraine and an academic advisor at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Russian, East European, & Eurasian Studies.
Collectivization in Ukraine didn’t go very well. By the fall of 1932 … it became apparent that Ukraine’s grain harvest was going to miss Soviet planners’ target by 60 percent. There still might have been enough food for Ukrainian peasants to get by, but, as Applebaum writes, Stalin then ordered what little they had be confiscated as punishment for not meeting quotas.
The Ukrainian famine, as catastrophic as it was, was just one thread in the tapestry of death, torture, impoverishment, and virtual enslavement to the state that was woven by leftist dictators like Stalin, Hitler (yes, a leftist), Mao, Tito Pol Pot, Castro, and on and on.
But — smug billionaires, corporate media types, academics and most politicians and bureaucrats will say — it can’t happen here because we have “our democracy” to protect us from the ravages of dictatorship. Spouting such nonsense, if it were a capital offense, would soon rid us of the aforementioned apologists for the dictatorial state that has assumed power in the United States.
“Our democracy” has become nothing more than a vast conspiracy of the same aforementioned apologists for statism. They are alike in their commitment to the attainment of perfection (as they define it) through the power of the state. (In that respect, it is deeply dismaying that six fellow-travelers and cowards who occupy seats on the Supreme Court today decreed that the central government may continue to use Big Tech to propagandize for its statist agenda.)
Evidence of “our democracy” acting in concert to deprive Americans of liberty and prosperity has been accumulating for more than a century. I won’t burden you with a recitation of examples (for that you can start here and here, and then comb through the index of posts). I will merely point to the fact that the central government’s most onerous actions (these days) are lawless. They are being conducted through administrative and executive edicts and sometimes in open defiance of laws enacted in accordance with the Constitution. I have in mind, of course, the effort- to kill off fossil fuels, the failure to enforce immigration laws, discrimination in favor of blacks and mentally ill LGBTQ+ persons.
The irony of it all is that almost every American (though not all) would claim to revile Stalin, whereas about half of them adore the machinations of the central government and the policies represented by the left’s puppet in the White House.
The difference between Joe Stalin and Joe Biden is one of degree, not one of kind. Biden doesn’t overtly kill,impoverish, and enslave people; his policies are having that effect, however.
Politics and Prosperity 