#and one of them is Holodomor

[jacensolodjo]

So I came across a thing a bit ago. About how now that Russia has invaded Ukraine we were going to “lie about the Holodomor again as some kind of impetus for why Ukraine is the victim”. Shit like that. You know, “The Holodomor is an antisemitic conspiracy theory that PROVES ukrainians are nazis” is something that just never gets old huh?

What is your proof? Tell me, oh moron of hammer and sickle. “Fraud, Famine, and Fascism by Tottle, duh!” Ah, yes! One whole book! Versus a little less than a dozen in English with more being written all the time! To say nothing of books in Ukrainian and all the proof and books in Russian. You are very intelligent! What does Tottle say about the Holodomor? “The word itself was created to echo the Holocaust” ah yes. Heaven fucking forbid two words sound similar! (No but really, every commie I’ve seen deny the Holodomor quotes Tottle’s book. Whereas you’ve got Black Book of Communism, Harvest of Sorrow, Bloodland, etc., being used by anti-commies. I dunno about you but having fewer sources does not look great; even more so if it’s one whole book you got going for you) Do you know what the word actually comes from? Holod is Ukrainian for ‘hunger’, mor is Ukrainian for ‘plague’. Holodomor the whole word translated is ‘death by hunger’. Ergo, not actually descended from ‘Holocaust’.

Other super intelligent opinions include “you can’t control a populace through hunger/starvation”. Explain to me how starvation works. Explain to me how you don’t know how the human body reacts to starvation without telling me you have no fucking clue how the human body reacts to starvation. Ironic, honestly, because commies don’t fucking know how agriculture works so how would they know how starvation does? Experiment: try not eating for 3 days or even 24 hours and see how you feel. I know when I hit even like 12 hours my mood takes a hit and i start feeling a little weak. Once you hit 3 days, though, you start getting pretty fucking weak. Especially if you’re already at a disadvantage such as diabetes or whatever else that relies on you having proper blood sugar. This is why Judaism and Islam are both insistent that you NOT fast if you have a medical reason in which it would do you real harm not to eat all day. Go for 5 days and you’re getting really fucking malleable and desperate to do whatever you’re told if you’re promised food in return. Mr. Tottle disagrees. I wonder how often he toddled off to the fridge in a day. How if he went a few hours without food how hungry he found himself to be. But then, the Holodomor was not interested in control of the populace of Ukraine it was interested in the eradication of the people of Ukraine. Or so we evil anti-commies who are also antisemites claim.

You realize every fucking argument you come up with is used for Holocaust denial right? All the way down to ‘Soviet citizens would have KNOWN’. Because surprise! They DID know! They were the ones letting the food rot! They were the ones shooting toddlers for daring to pick up a tiny little thing of wheat off the ground! They SAW Ukrainians dying of hunger in the streets and did nothing. Or worse, remarked about how they deserved to die, they were clearly in the way of the glorious Soviet nation’s ability to grow and thrive in the global stage! The only ones starving were the ones guilty of sabotage. How do toddlers commit sabotage? I don’t know! But then I’m not a commie. There are former commies who wrote for the Black Book of Communism who admit how easy it was for them to believe the lies about sabotage, about the ‘evil kulaks’. Other former commies mention how they would throw elderly people out into the snow without so much as a shirt. How they shot preteens over a potato.  All because they really did believe these people were the enemy, were out to destroy the glorious Soviet Union. Because of a fucking potato. 

The man who coined the word genocide lists the Holodomor in his examples of what he means by genocide. But that isn’t enough, is it? Oh no. But Mr. Tottle is the absolute truth of all things Holodomor. 

If Tottle was so fucking sure he was right why did he deny to comment during the 1988 commission to research the validity of the Holodomor being real and to what extent was its damage? I dunno, if it were me I’d jump at the chance to expand my theory further in such an official capacity. Now, maybe he said no for other reasons. But let’s be real. When someone declines to comment or respond, that usually means they have nothing they are confident enough to put on such a public record. Easy to write a book and publish it (especially if you self-publish). Not so easy to have your comments put down in an official capacity. Your book may be relegated to obscurity but anyone who does research of archives will find your comments from an official commission.

Let’s look back a bit further. A year prior to this commission, Robert Conquest published his Harvest of Sorrow. How humiliating must it be for someone with such a tiny book (Fraud, Famine, and Fascism) to go up against the mighty tome of Harvest of Sorrow that in fact uses official Soviet archives just as you claim to use. Except with better record keeping, apparently and far more interviews. 167 pages vs. 412. I mean yes, admittedly, page count doesn’t always mean better content. But if you read the two, one stands out as better written and researched and it ain’t the smaller book.

Tottle also apparently completely missed the existence of Gareth Jones, preferring instead to attack William Randolph Hearst (and Thomas Walker). An easier target, I suppose, given Gareth was murdered (most likely, anyway his death has never been ‘solved’ but many believe it was due to him putting the word out about the Holodomor). Instead he focused on Thomas Walker, a man who is in fact considered to be a Soviet plant exactly to discredit William Randolph Hearst as well as bury Gareth Jones’ articles. Helped in this endeavor by a Louis Fischer. No anti-commie worth their salt claims Walker as a trusted source. Only Gareth Jones. So why Tottle decided to focus entirely on Walker is, quite frankly, a little sad. But again, perhaps an easier target than a man who is considered to have been murdered for his Holodomor whistle blowing. 

I guess if I really only had Tottle’s book as a source for my beliefs I’d be a bit desperate for him to be right. Also Tottle’s book basically repeats over and over and over again. Chapters change but the shit he says is the same just written in different ways; it isn’t even new info in new chapters! Dude has a real hard-on for this Thomas Walker fellow. He’s just so convinced Walker and Hearst are devils incarnate. I’m not saying William Randolph Hearst was a stand-up guy. But I am saying he isn’t nearly the boogeyman Tottle wants him to be. But Tottle honestly reads like one of those people who is convinced Mothman is real and is desperate for you to believe that Mothman is real, too. Otherwise what is he doing with his life? I mean the man’s Wikipedia entry is like a whole 3 paragraphs. If this man were a trusted source I would expect a little bit more about him than being a Canadian with holodomor denial leanings. But then, I guess that feeds into commie belief too. It’s just the evil anti-commies, the anti-semites, trying to bury the truth Tottle was trying to tell us by keeping this man’s existence on the downlow. Gosh it’s fun to be a conspiracy theorist about conspiracy theorists. 

And lastly, how the FUCK do we get ‘antisemitic’ out of ‘holodomor happened’? I guess cause some Jews were commies. That Marx was a Jew so therefore it’s antisemitic to be anticommunist. I’ve made that post before. Being against something created by a Jewish person is not inherently antisemitic. If you are against it BECAUSE of who created it, sure. There is nothing really connecting Holodomor to antisemitism in the way of ‘Jews did it’. If anything, the Holodomor also affected Jews as a higher rate. So pray tell, how is saying Holodomor happened antisemitic? I’d say it’s the other way around. Denying the Holodomor is antisemitic. You ignore the Jewish victims. No one who isn’t y’know a fucking nazi blames Jews for the Holodomor. I have never seen anyone so much as begin to imply it. All I have seen is Holocaust deniers instead pointing at the Holodomor as a ‘real event’ as opposed to the Holocaust. They’re not affiliated with me. They cannot share my table. 

If you deny the Holodomor just cause some nazis said jews did it and thus ukrainians are nazis because they also say the Holodomor happened, your logic is bad and you should feel bad. Should we consider all vegetarians to be mass murdering fuckheads because a mass murdering fuckhead was a vegetarian? Are you against smoking? Maybe you shouldn’t be because same mass murdering fuckhead was against smoking. That is what your logic sounds like. 

[gurorori]

haha oh no im definitely not at all disturbed by the prevalence of leftists on all platforms who are loudly 'anti-genocide' when it comes to the palestinian cause (and a couple others at best :3c) yet the only time ukraine [ʊkrɐˈjinɐ] leaves their mouths is in critique, in stark comparison to the former or in complaint about their (american) government sending aid.

at first what i saw often was pointing out the differences in western media framing [ukraine vs palestine], and that's fair (until the words and the agenda of western journalists are used to paint, as a whole, ukrainians who have been actively going through genocide as some kind of white supremacists hogging the blanket of global attention when they kinda just want to live and have the rights to their own land, culture, names and families)

but no one is even caring to do that anymore, today bitches just invent metaphorical scenarios and people to get mad at and to throw an entire ethnos away because wahhhh i decided that you care for X but not for Y!!!.... all while doing the exact thing they are condemning. the exact absolute same and they don't even hide it but do lack the self-awareness to realise

[sixty-silver-wishes]

dang it may be 3 am but seeing all these dumb takes on soviet history by tankies has made me Really wanna get back on shostakovichposting

like . soviet history is never as cut and dry as many people on multiple sides of an ideological argument will have you believe, but I will say that researching it properly will make you hate tankies

[msbluebell]

How We Fall For People Like James Somerton

We're all joking, but this James Somerton thing has me really fucked up.

I wasn't a huge fan of James. I saw a few of his videos and liked them. In the ones I saw he was calm and explained things straightforwardly and even the one or two times he said things against white women...well, that's language I've been seeing on Tumblr since I joined back in my tweenage years. I thought it was just a dismissive joke pointing out a frank reality.

I didn't watch him too much. Just a few videos. I kept meaning to watch more, but I didn't because sometimes I wanted something easier. But I regarded him sell because of how informed he seemed.

And that's the thing, isn't it? He SEEMED informed. He spoke confidently and sometimes quoted queer sounding articles and I trusted him blindly. And why? Because he was giving me information that SEEMED well researched.

Illumanaughtii too. I WAS a consistent fan of hers before other youtubers came out. Because she presented information really well and I like hand drawn characters and because she read academic sounding quotes. I trusted her and her information was stollen. And I feel like a fool for ever having trusted her now, but at least her stollen facts were apparently accurate. Maybe.

James though, he straight up lied. Todd in the Shadows went through a lot of effort to expose those lies. He did so much research that I didn't bother to do. And he admitted he only did it because he happened to know people more informed than him that noticed the lies and went down a rabbit hole.

And maybe if I was more involved I would have noticed. But that's beside the point. what's getting me is I didn't bother to check myself, I just blindly trusted.

And the worst part is I can see why it happened.

I work.

I work, and then I get home, and when I get home I stress. I stress about work I have to do tomorrow, or classes, or finding a new job that actually pays a livable wage. And to escape that stress I go online to AO3, or tumblr, but especially Youtube.

Because I like youtube, I like to have noise in the background while I work. I like to listen to things while I read. And some of the time it's ASMR videos, or watching someone cook something. But mostly? It's history things or video essays.

And when I'm working, or reading, I'll hear a fact, and I'll look up, and I'll think "Huh, that's interesting to know, I didn't know that." And I won't think anything about it.

Because I'm busy, or I'm tired. I'm tired from work, and I don't want to do more work. Or sometimes it's mental health. This is my coping mechanism. I'm trying to learn things, do something to distract myself. I'm not looking to disprove things.

In other words I'm lazy. Or, if I'm being kind to myself, I'm tired.

Maybe if the topic was something I was an expert in I would have noticed. I'm a former ballerina, I'm a failed history major dropout. Maybe if he'd said something like "Holodomor never happened" or "Boudica is a Finnish folk hero" I'd have noticed. Maybe.

But he didn't, and I didn't notice. I assumed he did the work, and why?

Because surely a gay man wouldn't spend hours on youtube talking about Queer history if he wasn't passionate. Because he, a queer man, would surely know about queer history. Surely he wouldn't want to spread lies and hate. And he's quoting from books and articles so why wouldn't I trust him?

My trust was blind and unfounded.

And now I'm reeling from that. I'm reeling because I'm starting to feel like I can't trust a lot of people. How can I listen to any Youtuber casually now?

I can't, I never should have assumed I could.

Now every informative video feels like I need to do tens of hours of research just to be sure what I'm hearing is true. I feel like I can't trust anything unless I do.

James Somerton took my trust.

And it's not only that either. That's not what scares me the most. It's that there are THOUSANDS of people like me. Millions like me. Who are learning something from a video or a tweet or a tumblr post from someone they assume is an expert and are blindly trusting because they assume they can trust it. They don't intend to do their own research because they're tired, or don't know how. And that scars me. I was a history major, I studied tyrants and misinformation and the rise of propaganda, and I, with all my tools to notice, was still blind.

You cannot blindly trust a video, you cannot blindly trust a tweet, you especially cannot blindly trust a tumblr post.

YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE TO PROPOGANDA

[ohsalome]

What Ukrainians ate to survive Holodomor

(translated excerpts from an Історична Правда article): + images source

The villagers would dig up the holes of the polecats to find at least a handful of grain hidden by these animals. They pounded it in a mortar, added a handful of oilcake (from hemp seed), beetroot, potato peelings, and baked something from this mixture.

Those who managed to hide at least a little grain would grind it in iron mills made from wheel axles and cook "zatyrukha" (a concoction made from a small amount of flour ground from ears of grain).

Acacia flowers were boiled and eaten raw, and green quinoa was mixed with crushed corn cobs. Those who could - and this was considered lucky - added a handful of bran. This food made their feet swell and their skin crack.

The peasants dried the husked ears of corn and millet husks, pounded them, ground them with weeds, and cooked soups and baked pancakes. Such dishes were impossible to chew, the body could not digest them, so people had stomach aches. Pancakes, the so-called "matorzhenyky", were made from oilcake and nettle or plantain.

It went so far that peasants would crumble straw into small chips and pound it in a mortar together with millet and buckwheat chaff, and tree bark. All this was mixed with potato peelings, which were very poisonous, and this mixture was used to bake "bread", the consumption of which caused severe stomach diseases.

There were cases when village activists took away and broke millstones, mortars, poured water on the heat in their ovens. After all, anything found or saved from the food had to be cooked on fire, and matches could only be purchased by bartering for their own belongings or by buying them in the city, which was impossible from villagers that were on "black lists".

Chestnuts, aspen and birch bark, buds, reed roots, hawthorn and rose hips, which were the most delicious, were used as food substitutes; various berries, even poisonous ones, were picked; grass seeds were ground into flour; "honey" from sugar beets was cooked, and water brewed with cherry branches was drunk. They also ate the kernels of sunflower seeds.

Newborns had the worst of it, because their mothers had no breast milk. According to testimonies, a mother would let her child suck the drink from the top of the poppy head, and the child would fall asleep for three days.

In early spring, the villagers began to dig up old potato fields. They would bake dumplings from frozen potatoes, grind rotten potatoes in a mash and make pancakes, greasing the frying pan with wheel grease. They also baked "blyuvaly" (transl. "vomities") from such potatoes and oatmeal mixed with water, which was so called because they were very smelly.

They ate mice, rats, frogs, hedgehogs, snakes, beetles, ants, worms, i.e. things that weren't a part of food bans and had never been eaten by people before. The horror of the famine is also evidenced by the consumption of spiders, which are forbidden to kill in Ukrainian society for ritual reasons.

In some areas, slugs were boiled into a soup, and the cartilaginous meat was chopped and mixed with leaves. This prevented swelling of the body and contributed to survival. People caught tadpoles, frogs, lizards, turtles, and mollusks. They boiled them, adding a little salt if there was salt. The starving people caught cranes, storks, and herons, which have been protected in Ukraine for centuries, and their nests were never destroyed. According to folk beliefs, eating stork meat was equated with cannibalism.

The consumption of horse meat began in 1931, before the mass famine. People used to take dead horsemeat from the cemeteries at night, make jelly out of it and salt it for future use.

Dead horses were poured with carbolic acid to prevent people from taking their meat, but it hardly stopped anybody. Dead collective farm pigs were also doused with kerosene to prevent people from dismantling them for food, but this did not help either.

After long periods of starvatiom, the process of digestion is very costing for the human body, and many people who would eat anything would drop dead immediately out of exhaustion.

If a family had a cow hidden somewhere in the forest, they had a chance to survive. People living near forests could hunt/seek out berries and mushrooms, but during winter this wouldn't save them. People living near rivers could fish in secret, but it was banned and punishable by imprisonment/death.

[stillunusual]

The word "Nazi" has a specific meaning to normal people, but to vatniks and tankies it has five basic meanings…. "anybody I don't like" "anybody who disagrees with me" "anybody who's a citizen of a country that Russia wants to invade" "anybody who opposed or simply didn't want to live in one of the tyrannical regimes I simp for" "anybody who was oppressed or killed by one of my favourite mass murderers" EDITED TO ADD: a tankie clown reblogged this post and made some typically asinine comments, so I thought I'd elaborate a little bit…. Tankie clown: @well1x is either referring to the fact that a lot of the "deaths under communism" listed in "the black book of communism" (which gives us the 10 million number or whatever) are quite literally Nazis in WWII, or they're referring to the fact that the only people who have been made to deliberately suffer under communism have been literal Nazis and fascists (generally speaking)

Joining the tankie cult requires you to live in a delusional clown world and believe in a shit ton of made up (and often contradictory) nonsense that requires a considerable repertoire of mental gymnastics (and lies) to maintain….

@well1x is literally trying to claim that all victims of communism are "nazis and facists" (sic), which - back in the real world - is a very obvious lie. It's also a blatant example of victim blaming. For example, most of the millions of men, women and children who were robbed, raped, imprisoned, sent to the gulags, tortured, starved to death, executed or ethnically cleansed by Stalin's henchmen were not Nazis or fascists, and many were innocent of any crime. The vast majority of the population in Stalin's Soviet Union also had to put up with crippling poverty and backwardness, the brutal suppression of their religious and community life and the total lack of freedom.

Based on his comment, I doubt if the tankie clown has ever read "the black book of communism" and I'm also not sure why he mentions this book in particular, when there are thousands of others that thoroughly document the numerous crimes of the regimes tankies insist on being the useful idiots for, and I think it's safe to assume that he hasn't read any of those books either (in fact, I doubt if he's ever read any book whatsoever)…. Tankie clown: Karina then shows an image of (presumably) some kids in the Ukraine famine. This is completely unrelated though because this famine was not manufactured by the USSR as say the Irish famine was by the English. Can't really attribute natural disaster to "muh communism"

Again - a typical genocide-denying tankie lie.

Tankies generally start by saying that the holodomor was Nazi propaganda, and when you debunk that they claim it was just a natural disaster, and when that doesn't work they make up some bullshit about how millions of farmers who barely had enough to live on were wealthy kulaks who burned crops and slaughtered cattle (and therefore deserved to die). And when you point out that the red army actually broke into their homes and confiscated all their grain, every cow or chicken or any other food they had, and that the Soviet authorities blacklisted villages, sometimes purely for containing relatives of Ukrainian independence fighters, and prevented the villagers from leaving, shot them for even collecting ears of grain from the fields, and watched them starve to death - tankies will just deny it, or laugh, or pretend that millions of holodomor victims were all rich landlords (and therefore deserved to die) etc etc….

I've also never seen English people pretending that the Irish famine never happened, or claiming that the victims deserved it, or that it was a good thing, or that Britain should re-conquer Ireland. On the other hand, it's difficult not to notice Stalin's smooth-brained groupies swarming all over social media every day denying or justifying the holodomor and other crimes of Russia and the USSR, and hoping that Russia not only re-conquers Ukraine but also Finland, the Baltics, Poland and other countries it has invaded and occupied in the past.

There's no point trying to reason with tankies using facts, logic or common sense - and appealing to their sense of decency while they're simping for their favourite mass murderers is a complete waste of time. Tankie clown: Karina then says @well1x is defending imperialism(???), defending ethnic cleansing (which …what??), dreaming about labour camps and mass shootings (for Nazis yes plz), and does not do any praxis (based on?).

Yep - most tankie clowns claim to be communists while simultaneously embracing Russian fascism, supporting the imperialism of Russia’s mega-rich ruling class, mindlessly repeating the Kremlin's propaganda and cheerleading their war crimes. These morons seem to have no idea that the Russian Federation is an empire made up of many conquered states that Russia invaded, occupied and colonised in the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, or that Russia's war against Ukraine is a brutal attempt to reassert control over one of its former colonies. Russia's history of imperialism is at least as bad as that of any western country - and they're still doing it in the 21st century.

And I have seen countless examples of tankies speaking openly of wanting to mass murder their ideological enemies (or people they don't like) - because they also delude themselves into believing that if their revolutionary dreams ever came true, they'd be the ones doing the arresting and killing, despite the fact that in a real revolution they'd be about as much use as a fart in a spacesuit. They also have no idea how their small dick energy is somehow going to bring capitalism to its knees, which they'd inevitably end up crying about if it ever actually happened in reality.

Most of them are complete losers who spend the majority of their time sitting in their bedrooms huffing their own farts while reading tankie fan fiction online. Tankie clowns also claim to be against western imperialism and capitalism, despite living comfortable lives in western capitalist countries and owing everything they have to capitalism, including the freedom to use their capitalist smartphones or laptops to post anti-capitalist tantrums on social media platforms owned by western capitalists (thus helping these western capitalists to maximise their profits).

This is generally the sum total of a typical tankie's - ahem - "revolutionary" activity.

The vast majority of tankie clowns wouldn't dream of ever giving up the comforts of capitalism to move to one of the authoritarian shitholes they stupidly simp for, because then they might not be able to play their favourite capitalist video games anymore….

It's also a fact that Russia and the USSR have ethnically cleansed millions of people. Tankie clown: OP takes this insane train all the way to the station, and says @well1x is talking about anyone they don't like which… no. They're talking about the traditional Nazis.

No - they're falsely claiming that all victims of communism are Nazis and fascists. Learn to read…. Tankie clown: But also let's break this down. Who does OP think is being called a Nazi? "anyone I don't like" I mean I don't like Nazis, but I don't think everyone I don't like is one lmao. Funny tho, dude throws around the word tankie until it has no meaning.

In my experience, if you disagree with tankies about anything, they will pretty soon call you a fascist or a Nazi. It's they who throw around words like "fascist" and "Nazi" until they have no meaning (and most of them hilariously claim to be opposed to fascism while simultaneously supporting it - if it happens to be Russian). Tankie clown: - "anyone who disagrees with me" if you disagree that all human beings deserve to live a dignified life regardless of race/sex/gender identity/sexual orientation/age/disability/whatever then yeah you probably are a Nazi

Straw man. See above….

It's also amusing to observe the doublethink of somebody who apparently believes that "all human beings deserve to live a dignified life" while simultaneously thinking that when his favourite mass murderers oppressed and/or killed huge numbers of people it was perfectly OK…. Tankie clown: - "anyone who's a citizen of a country that Russia wants to invade" why the fuck are we talking about Russia? Believe it or not OP, USSR does not stand for "United Soviet States of Russia" lmaoooo

We're talking about Russia because most tankie clowns support Russian imperialism and mindlessly parrot the Kremlin's propaganda about how Russia's latest invasion of Ukraine is some sort of special de-nazification operation (see above). Tankies are generally so ignorant, gullible and stupid that they will literally believe anything the Kremlin tells them…. Tankie clown: - "anyone opposed or simply didn't want to live in one of the tyrannical regimes I simp for" tyrannical regimes lmao. These were only "tyrannical regimes" for people who actually were in fact Nazis.

Again - this is the kind of reality-denying nonsense I'd expect to hear from a tankie clown. One thing that really appalls people in the central and eastern European countries that experienced the reality of being occupied by the USSR and/or Russia, is the staggering ignorance and stupidity of western useful idiots who have no idea what it was actually like, and are not only dumb enough to join the tankie cult, but insist on westsplaining to the victims and their descendants about how the horrors they and their families suffered (usually for doing literally nothing) either didn't happen ("cuz the CIA made it all up") or claiming that they somehow deserved it ("cuz they were all Nazis/fascists/kulaks/slave owners").

Back in the real world, these were tyrannical regimes for tens of millions of ordinary people who had done nothing to deserve being subjected to tyranny…. Tankie clown: - "anyone who was oppressed or killed by one of my favourite mass murderers" yeah basically that's what I've been saying.

Thanks for proving my point….

And please note that smoking weed on your mum's sofa isn't actually going to bring the world revolution closer.

That was just a joke…. 🤣😂

[anastasiareyreed]

all russians are guilty and let me explain why.

make yourself comfortable, it's gonna be a long ride.

you might notice that every time, if russians appear in a movie, series or documentary, they have either done something criminal, are doing it or are planning to do it. because the entire history of russia's existence is built on crimes, wars, genocides and occupations — Ukraine, Syria, Georgia, Chechnia and many more.

russia unleashed the most frequent genocidal attacks against Ukraine. occupation of Ukrainian lands and enslavement of Ukrainians, constant persecution and murder of speakers of the Ukrainian language, Ukrainian poets, writers, teachers — the entire nation, any Ukrainian figures of culture or politics. And, of course, the awful Holodomor (if you more into visualization, watch the movie about the Holodomor — «Mr Jones».)

no matter who is in power, throughout its existence, russia has been trying to destroy Ukraine and everything related to Ukrainian culture and history.

first of all, I think the terms «guilty» and «bad» must be separated here. I'm not saying all russians are bad, because «bad» is quite subjective and vague term. just like term «good». a person can be good in relations with neighbors, good at their job or good meaning polite. but what happens to a «good» person who stands by when other people are killed, tortured and raped in front of this person's eyes and on this person's behalf? this person becomes guilty. and many can and DO have the right to call and consider this person bad.

what exactly you are doing when you write «not all russians support the war»? you tell Ukrainians that THIS TIME there are definitely good russians, good guys among the people who constantly repressed Ukrainian people. but let me tell you this. if ten people stand in front of me and tell me that only one of them probably is not a murderer, I WILL NOT trust that person. I won't risk my life, and I'm sure you won't either.

I, like many Ukrainians, had friends or relatives in russia. but all of us were betrayed by these people, because it is in their DNA to put themselves above Ukrainians. and it's quite unreasonable in the digital age to justify their position about war by the fact that they don't know anything and totally drowned in propaganda. do they not know how to search for information, use their phones, computers or brain?

when you say that right now not all russians are against Ukraine or Syria, you cannot be sure that a russian who writes «I don't support the war» is telling the truth. that this person is not trying to maintain their public image and avoid condemnation. how can we believe the word of the representatives of the nation that every decade wage a war? the presumption of innocence doesn't apply here, hundreds of thousands of victims of russia are proof of that.

my favorite topic that people like to manipulate is how can we blame russian children. sure, we are in our right mind, so we don't say that a russian child is as guilty as an adult russian man who raped Ukrainian children and tortured Ukrainian women and men. we say that the russian child must know and feel collective responsibility from an early age, so that in the future the child doesn't take the place of that adult russian man.

while other countries honor the memory of their heroes and victims of the WWII on the day of victory over the fascists, only the russians proudly and joyfully said every year that they could repeat and start another war. which they did. that's why russian children should see that the world associates russia only with death, crimes and wars. that the world doesn't tolerate russian products, art, culture or people. this is the only way children will be able to realize from an early age that this way of russia's lifestyle is condemned by the world and must be radically changed.

Ukrainian and Syrian children, who are currently suffering from russia's actions, grew up too early and lost their childhood, they know what war is, know that it's evil and russia is a terrorist state. russian children should know this as well, so that the changes in the russian mentality — that the world has been waiting for several centuries in a row​ — have come.

you say russian children are not guilty, sure, but they are taught that war is branded, powerful, cool and solid. Ukrainian and Syrian children are not guilty, but they are taught how to act if their parents are killed by a russian missile. you say russian youth are not guilty and shouldn't risk their future to protest against the war. Ukrainian and Syrian youth are not guilty, but every day they give their lives for the freedom that the russians are trying to take away.

russian soldiers who went to kill Ukrainians and Syrians. russians who are relatives, friends or colleagues of these soldiers. russians who openly support wars in Ukraine & Syria or show their passivity. russians who volunteer to support the russian army. russians, who for centuries raised their children with imperialist views and contempt for other nations and races. and, as history shows, will continue to raise in the same way, no matter how the war ends. if russia loses they will raise children ready for another revenge. if russia wins they will raise children with mindset that Ukrainians are an inferior nation. russians have hundreds of years of experience in it. ask how the peoples that russia once occupied live today.

imagine what those hundreds of thousands of russian soldiers would achieve not on peaceful Ukrainian streets, killing people, but somewhere in a square in moscow, protesting against the war. soldiers, their relatives, friends and neighbors. eight years ago, Ukrainians protested against the dictator, dying for their principles and freedom.

Iranians went against a real dictator, dying for their principles and freedom. because this is the only way to achieve change.

the only «protest» action of russians is to post a picture somewhere online or to stand peacefully for half an hour in a small group of people, passively holding «no war» piece of paper and leaving before dark, because tomorrow they have to go to work or universities. russians support the war or simply don't care, because it's easier to live that way. if they chose collective indifference, they must face collective responsibility.

your «not all russians are guilty» is based on your assumptions about the good faith of russians, a naive idea of what this nation really is. my «all russians are guilty» is based on hundreds of years of history of relations between russia and Ukraine. on the number of wars russia has waged in the past and is waging now, the number of nations it has destroyed and the number of evil actions the world has forgiven the russians, hoping that THIS TIME everything will definitely be different.

[savagefenty]

one of my grandmas was a teenager during holodomor years, she told me stories about people eating dirt from the fields where wheat grew before soviets took it and that her mother used to make them pancakes stinging nettles for holidays because there was nothing else to make them from. she kept a loaf of bread in pockets of all her sweaters and little pouches with cereal around the house. my great grandma told me how her mother used to hide her from a neighbour who lost her mind from starvation and wanted to eat her. her father used to steal oat grain by grain from kolgosp to feed his family. she told me that cats taste better than dogs. she never brushed off bread crumbs from the table just picked them up very carefully and gave them to her pigs or chickens. most of the recipes she passed to her children are meals you can make from grass. she also never learned to make a soup with meat. the biggest ass-kicking i ever received was for throwing away a piece of moldy bread. you hear these stories long before school explains to you what it was, you literally see you grandparents hoarding food that’ll last you a lifetime before you know what food is. and there’s thousands, if not millions, of stories like these. ukrainians do have a cult of food and maybe that’s because our ancestors have been so violently deprived of it.

[flydar333]

She would paint flowers but never picked them.

She didn't attend art school or even any school but was self-taught.

She survived Holodomor and refused to paint the portrait of stalin.

🎨All these facts are just a small part of the lifestory of Kateryna Bilokur - personally one of my favorite Ukrainian folk artists. Her passion and talent are undoubtedly impressive.

Her parents though didn't understand her painting hobby. One of her life stories:

"I stole a piece of white canvas from my mother and took charcoal. I would draw something on one side of the canvas and then flip it on the other side, same here. And then I would wash that canvas and draw again. At once, I didn't paint a landscape but the birds and felt so happy that I managed to create something like that! I would look at that painting and laugh as I was mad. And just like that, my father and mother caught me. They torn apart my painting and threw it into the fire, saying, "What are you mad doing? God forbid, what if others saw you doing what you do? Then no one will ask to marry you"

Despite the parents' disapproval, her paintings became so popular that Picasso, after seeing one of her paintings in Paris display, said: "If we had an artist of such level of skill, we would make the whole world talk about her".

🪄I gathered here some of her most significant pictures but highly recommend getting to know more about her works.

[olderthannetfic]

https://www.tumblr.com/olderthannetfic/749685852364472320/httpsolderthannetfictumblrcompost74926621022?source=share

Ok but lol whether or not it's appropriation, the idea that you need to be a French person breathing French air and standing in French soil to fully understand this historical event is still stupid af lol. I'm curious does this person think this applies to people who aren't French who are history professors, and do they know less than say a French person who is bad at history

I think appropriation came up because it's relevant to why you can't just do this with every culture and you can't just do this with every thing in the same way. That's also why the middle school thing got brought up - whether you learned right in middle school or not the point is that it's a part of GLOBAL history and culture and a GLOBAL cultural and political legacy that just isn't true of some of the other historical events that people do this about. But I think the most important thing is that the French Revolution is not in living memory. No one living in France in 2024 has some special insight into France in 1789 that a person living in Canada or Russia or Taiwan or Brazil or Zimbabwe or wherever cannot also figure out via research. It's not the same thing as talking about fraught historical events like the Holodomor or Holocaust where they are still in living memory and/or there's a documented history of generational trauma (afaik, being descended from some aristocrat who lost their head is not shown to affect peope psychologically in the way being a descendent of slaves or genocide victims is and also, lol, if we're applying that to ALL French people and NO one else we're just not going to deal with that a lto of those descendents are now in other countries, and a lot of the people attacking them were also French)

I'm sure whatever XJZ said was headass af but this idea that it was wrong because the people she was arguing with were French, and not because those individual French people knew stuff about history that XJZ doesn't (and which was equally true of a lot of non-French people in tha conversation), is still deeply stupid

--

Oh my god, guys, they're openly nonbinary.

[anoonimthepoorchad]

Late night thoughts because we had one more late night air raid and I can't fall asleep during those: it's kind of weird that I always associated the Holodomor remembrance day's dinner as something cursed, when even the tastiest food feels gross and you just kinda feel dirty, ill and ashamed, and it repeats every year. I think it's because most information politics in my childhood were concentrated on retelling the stories of people who survived the genocide, but they didn't really put an accent on blaming the imperialistic ussr for murdering our people. So instead it felt like a guilt trip for eating and being healthy and not killed by russians. And this year it felt slightly less shameful, because I thought more about how similarly we repeat the doomed fates of our people, 90 years ago and now, and how fucked up it is that moskals (russians) keep on killing us and that the world just lets them do it. I felt like I finally wasn't a "spoiled by being allowed to exist normally" child. And I finally understood how fucked the whole narrative was, to blame us for needing to eat, and for being killed by russians not such a long time ago and now.

Also I now think that other people, especially those who live in safety, feel the same guilt reading about us, in danger. But safety is a human right, just like food is. So people shouldn't blame themselves for not being in danger, instead they should think about what they can do now, tomorrow and every day to ensure that no moskal (russian), imperialistic scum or any other trash of a person gets to rule over our human rights.

[jacensolodjo]

I'm trying to work on my intro for one of the other wings in the museum so I qualify for more than one of them as a docent but my anger keeps getting the best of me lmaoooo

[apostate00]

What's your opinion on Tankie? I think he's kinda funny and cute

Ohoho THIS is gonna be a long one, strap in!

Well, my opinion on Commie is mostly negative. I HATE this guy, but it's like a passionate hate, the kind that if he were gone, things would feel empty, because he's my favorite guy to despise.

I tend to make him worse in my HCs than he is in the show, even though he's already not great either. I think part of my dislike for him also stems from them fact that he's held up in the fandom as a good guy, when he really isn't, seeing how he's blatantly disrespectful to trans/non-binary people, and would discriminate against minorities if they didn't do as he said.

Nevermind the fact that he's a tyrant and denies the holodomor, which he caused, and also brushed off Nazi's holocaust denial. Also he runs gulags, which are basically just concentration camps & slave labor, but people seem to be mysteriously brushing over that if it's commies who do it. It's a joke then.

People have told me before that the reason they like him is because he's just desperate for a family and community, but personally, that makes me like him less.

How people can ship Leftist Unity is beyond me, when Commie repeatedly disrespects Ancom and later Ansyn. He doesn't give a shit about trans people, misgendering them simply because he can. Also, we all know damn well Commie will kill Ancom the second he doesn't need quem anymore.

I think some of it also stems from me being agender myself. I generally really hate how Ancom/Ansyn's queerness was handled in the show since no one respects quis pronouns ever, and it's more played as a joke than anything.

Fuck even the fandom doesn't respect quis pronouns at times.

People prolly think that it's not that big a deal, but for me who is incredibly protective of the self and their individual identity, disrespecting someone else's to integrate them into your homogeneous view of things is so repulsive and disgusting; it's not nessecarily the act of misgendering, even though that is bad too, but the complete disregard for individuality and identity.

I read Commie as abusive, but I've gathered that some people in the fandom really don't like that lol, I got to add onto my tally of "people online told me to kms" over it. But yes, generally I picture Commie as someone who actively infantilise Ancom and makes quem adopt this uwu uwu personality we see so often, to take away quis teeth, make them submissive, follow him around and make quem less likely to stand up for quemself against him.

There's more of course but, my personal headcanons are besides the point.

I do also use this guy to project my own personal experiences and trauma onto sooo, he has become kind of an amalgamation and caricature of my abusers.

I don't know, basically everything about Commie is so repulsive to me. I can basically only tolerate him with Nazi because they're both tyrannical scum and deserve each other.

I'm pretty big on freedom & individualism so that probably also doesn't help his case in my brain 😭

People can like Commie ofc, you can love and adore characters that are pieces of shit; I'd know so since Ancap is my second favorite character only surpassed by Ancom, but you know, I know what it's like to love a character who is fucking awful.

I guess I just wish people would acknowledge Commie's shitty behaviour more often instead of treating him like this big friendly harmless guy.

But yeah, people can do whatever they want of course, that's just my thoughts about it! :3

[rotzaprachim]

let’s talk genocide denial!!! I’ve been seeing a Lot of it and it’s very infuriating on all fronts, especially when we are facing situations with multiple genocides at play! For ref, I am not indigenous to turtle island, I am a Tagalog Jew! 1) people refusing to recognize the nakba and the state of Israel’s long-form treatment of Palestine as a form of genocide because “there are more of them now!!!” Genocide is not solely a matter of “numbers” of people alive but also the purposeful destruction of peoples and cultures, as has been enacted against Palestine. 2) this is a complex one but…. Importation of discourses of originalism and indigeneity to middle eastern and Eastern European cultural contexts where they don’t belong. While pretty straightforward on turtle island, the constant flow of people into and out of these regions has meant many groups of people have lived in the same places for hundreds or thousands of years. The claim of “certain” groups of people as being invaders or recent “imports” has been a central aspect of the justification of deportation and genocide across EE and SWANA regions. This includes Jews across Eastern Europe (middle eastern invaders!!!) Palestinians in Palestine (Arab or greek invaders!!!) Armenians everywhere (Christian invaders!!!!) Greeks in Turkey and Egypt, Bosnians in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Turkish invaders!!!) and so forth. Don’t adopt these discourses. 3) point blank labeling of antisemitism as something *fake* the Jews control. *antisemitism*

4) refusal to reckon with the extent of the Shoah and intergenerational traumas and realities of the Shoah (like other genocides.) a genocide affects not only the survivors but their descendants. I’m seeing a lot of people acting like Zionism is a particularly evil ideology the Jews cooked up and then brainwashed other Jews into believing and then everyone chose to move to Israel instead of continue living in their nice cosy Yiddish bund homeland, and that removes the goysiche agency from the story. The Shoah outright obliterated the Jewish homelands and cultural areas Jews had been living in across Europe, and any genuine antizionism or diasporism NEEDS TO LOOK that history right in the face rather than sweeping it under the rug. It NEEDS to reckon with why so many Jews came to believe that they could no longer live outside of their own state because the goyishe world told them with blood that they could no longer live outside of their own state. It also needs to deal with the fact mass numbers of Jews were pretty unceremoniously dumped from DP camps to the state of Israel after the war was over. Genocides affect the survivors for generations, including where they live. 4) refusal to recognize antisemitism in the Arab world or the contexts which forced middle eastern Jews from their homelands and into the state of Israel. Oh it must be /their fault./ see above, no effective antizionism without reckoning with these histories.

5) tankies. There’s just been a mass platforming of tankies recently and many of them engage in genocide apologism or outright denial, especially of the holodomor. Others whitewash the policies of forced cultural assimilation or land dislocation undertaken by the USSR as “necessary anti-conservative revolutionary action against reactionaries.” I don’t care what their *good stances* are, we should not platform outright genocide deniers even if they can *justify* mass killings by means of political ideologies. These ideas include the idea that any discussion of governmental violence or genocide by a non U.S.-aligned state is a western psyop invented by the U.S., and they include not only historic genocides (although as discussed, genocides are not solely “historic” in the sense they continue to affect survivors and their children for generations) but current and ongoing violence against Uighur, Kurdish, Ukrainian, and Tibetan people.

5) anti indigenous racism in turtle island. Also a complex one as I don’t want to engage in whataboutism, but a lotttt of the jokes about *just send the Israelis to New Jersey/New York/Florida* ignore the fact that New Jersey, New York, and Florida are also settler colonies and indigenous homelands. A lot of the discussion of IL by white settlers has revealed the extent that they do not view themselves as white settlers, nor do they really understand native peoples and First Nations continue to exist. “I’d let Native American Hamas kill me and it would be awesome!!!!” Well there is no Native American Hamas, but there might be a tribe in your area that needs money for new kindergarten chairs or support for landback, so you shouldn’t treat them as a vaguely existent hypothetical.

6) reimposition of the colonial notion of one land for one ethnic group with one language and only one language that can be applied to place names. Even if this is in a *decolonial* sense for one area it’s still very dangerous logic to play with, especially with the ethnic diversity of much of the world. The idea of inherent primacy of one ethnic group over another in the post colonial era has been at the root of many mass killings.

7) labeling a language as “evil” or “untrustworthy”

8) I shouldn’t have to tell you why the idea that “there are no civilians” is very bad in literally any case

[ohsalome]

Not long ago I finished reading @TimothyDSnyder's book "Bloodlands. Europe between Hitler and Stalin".

I wanted to share some quotes from the chapter on the Holodomor that struck me personally the most. It is difficult to imagine what was happening then. A small but heavy thread:

The peasants who were slowly dying of starvation were believed to be saboteurs who were actually playing into the hands of the capitalist powers who wanted to discredit the Soviet Union. Hunger is resistance, and resistance is a sign of the imminent victory of socialism.

Forced to pass off their swollen bellies as a manifestation of political opposition, they came to the conclusion that the saboteurs hated socialism so much that they deliberately brought their families to starvation.

On 22 January 1933, Balytsky warned Moscow that peasants were fleeing the republic, and Stalin and Molotov ordered law enforcement agencies to stop the flow of people. The next day, the sale of long-distance railway tickets to peasants was banned.

The Ukrainian musician Yosyp Panasenko was sent with a group of bandura players to the countryside to bring culture to the starving peasants. Having taken away the last piece of bread from the peasants, the authorities had a grotesque intention to raise the mood and spirit of the deathly hungry people. The musicians found completely empty villages.

Children born in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and early 1930s found themselves in a world of death, surrounded by helpless parents and a hostile government. The average life expectancy for a boy born in 1933 was seven years.

One father in the Vinnytsia region came to the cemetery to bury two of his children, and when he returned, he saw that another child had died. Some parents locked their children in the house to save them from cannibals.

Parents gave their children to distant relatives or strangers, left them at railway stations. Desperate peasants who held their babies through the windows of the wagons did not necessarily beg for bread: very often they wanted to give their children away, to strangers who lived in cities and did not suffer from hunger.

Countless parents killed and ate their own children and then died of hunger anyway. One mother boiled her son for food for herself and her daughter. A six-year-old girl rescued by relatives last saw her father sharpening a knife to stab her.

The children's stomachs were swollen, their whole bodies were covered in wounds, scabs, and abscesses. We took them, laid them on the sheets, and they were moaning. One day, the children suddenly stopped talking, and we looked at them and saw that they were eating the youngest one, Petrus. They were pulling off his scabs and eating them. And Petrus was doing the same thing - pulling off his scabs and eating them, eating as much as he could. Other children were sucking blood from their own wounds. We pulled the children away from this activity and cried.

There came a time when there was virtually no grain left in Ukraine, and human meat was the only type of meat.

One Komsomol member in the Kharkiv region reported to his superiors that he could only meet the meat supply plan at the expense of human beings.

More than one Ukrainian child has told a brother or sister: "Mum said we should eat her if she dies". This tragic solution was found by love and care

[panimoonchild]

Colonization is the same everywhere, but Russia uses in Ukraine all possible methods with excessive cruelty

She was reduced to tears by an Irish tour bus driver. Listen to his words:

We share the same pain and devastating experience.

Monument to the Holodomor victims in Kyiv.

That's crazy to understand through history how many small and free nations have been living through colonization by bigger countries. Always not enough land, or power for them.

Throwback Russian crimes. Different time, but the Russian obsession with genocide is never-ending:

My Donbass. My Ukrainian Donetsk region. Always.

Glory to the Heroes of The Azov!

"Don't escalate" - someone said. Ukrainian army if they can, will target the enemy's equipment. And Ukrainians did that damage with the Ukrainian complex Neptun by the way.

That ship was Ukrainian before the Russian occupation of Crimea. Don't worry when all our lands will be liberated, Ukrainians build so much more powerful ships that won't be used to kill us.

Ukrainians, please listen to air raid alarms. Russians don't stop even for one moment. Ukrainian lives matter. Be safe. Take care of yourself.