Holodomor Remembrance Day: Memory and witness for the victims of Stalin's 1932-33 Ukrainian Famine 91 years ago, and calling out Putin's genocide today

"There are pages in our history that are too painful to remember; but cannot be forgotten. The crimes that prove: the cruelty and cynicism of tyrants know no bounds. No words have yet been invented to fully describe the pain that Ukrainians have endured. In 1921, 1922, 1923. In 1946 and 1947. And in the darkest years of the Holodomor genocide of 1932–1933." - Volodymyr Zelenskyy, November 23, 2024 

#HolodomorRemembranceDay 

 

Holodomor Victims Remembrance Day is held on the fourth Saturday of November, at 4:00pm, the memory of more than 10,5 million Ukrainians killed during Stalin's genocide is commemorated with a moment of silence and lighting of candles.

The genocide in Ukraine is known as the Holodomor and took place ninety one years ago between 1932 -1933. Millions of children died in he artificial famine. This crime was ignored by the United States as it formally recognized the Soviet Union in 1933.  The Economist in 2012 reported on the 80th anniversary of this man-made famine:

Holodomor literally means death by hunger. In 1932 and 1933, a vast famine in Soviet Ukraine killed three to seven million people, according to estimates. While people starved, the grain was shut away in barns for export.

The deadliest famines in the 20th century were not in Africa but in Europe (Ukraine) and China.

Social science research has demonstrated that famines "happen only with some degree of human complicity."  Human decisions "determine whether a crisis deteriorates into a full-blown famine."

According to Felix Wemheuer, professor of Modern China Studies at the University of Cologne, in his book Famine Politics in Maoist China and the Soviet Union," during the twentieth century, 80 percent of all famine victims worldwide died in China and the Soviet Union." 

Millions starved to death under brutal famine imposed by Joseph Stalin

However, to understand the nature of famine politics in communist regimes the monograph of Andrea Graziosi and Frank E. Sysyn in the East/West: Journal of Ukranian Studies titled "Communism and Hunger" is required reading. Consider the following:

"In fact, with the exception of the 1943 Bengal famine with its approximately two million victims, all of the other major famines of the twentieth century are directly connected to socialist "experiments": in 1921 and 1922 in Russia and Ukraine ( 1million - 1.5 million deaths); in 1931, 1932, and 1933 in the USSR (6.5 million - 7.5 million deaths, of which 4 million were in Ukraine and 1.3 million - 1.5 million in Kazakhstan); in 1946 and 1947 in the USSR (1 million - 1.5 million deaths); from 1958 to 1962 in China (30 million - 45 million deaths); from 1983 to 1985 in Ethiopia (0.5 million - 1.0 million deaths); and from 1994 to 1998 in North Korea ( estimates vary from a few hundred thousand to more than 2 million deaths)."

This was not due to poor central planning and socialist inefficiencies, but a deliberate policy of genocide against targeted population to consolidate political control by eliminating those who do not support their regime. The percentage of victims in the USSR and China relative to their respective overall populations were the same (5%). In the case of the USSR that meant around 7 million deaths out of a population of 160 million and in the case of China  estimates between 30 million and 45 million deaths out of a population of 600 million. 

The Ukrainian Research and Documentary Center on the 50th anniversary of the Holodomor released the documentary Harvest of Despair.

 We must also remember those who bore witness and spoke truth, and those who covered it up. Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist broke the story on the Ukranian famine on March 29, 1933 despite official denials. Walter Duranty of The New York Times wrote an article a day later rebutting Jones's claims that was published in the paper of record on March 31, 1933. Duranty knew that what Jones published was true, but he sought to appease his Soviet hosts, and remain in the country.

The Russians, under the dictatorship of Vladimir Putin, are engaging in genocide again. People of goodwill cannot remain silent, or worse try to minimize what is taking place. 

It also saddens me that the dictatorship in Cuba is not siding with the small country attacked by a superpower, but is backing the aggressor, and doubled down repeatedly in support of Vladimir Putin's criminal war on Ukraine on the diplomatic and misinformation fronts, and with thousands of Cuban soldiers fighting for Putin in Russian uniforms.

I stand in solidarity with Ukraine, and against Russian aggression.

 

There are pages in our history that are too painful to remember; but cannot be forgotten. The crimes that prove: the cruelty and cynicism of tyrants know no bounds. No words have yet been invented to fully describe the pain that Ukrainians have endured. In 1921, 1922, 1923. In… pic.twitter.com/ovztDcYSX0

— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) November 23, 2024

John F. Kennedy was killed 61 years ago today. Did Fidel Castro get him first?

 “We are prepared to fight them and answer in kind. U.S. leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.” 

 - Fidel Castro, September 6, 1963*

President Kennedy with the First Lady in the backseat moments in Dallas.

Sixty-one years ago, on November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. At 12:30pm Central Standard Time, the Kennedys in their convertible limousine turned off Main Street at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. As they were passing the Texas School Book Depository, President John F. Kennedy was shot twice and slumped over toward First Lady Jackie Kennedy. The governor of Texas was also hit. At 1:00pm, President Kennedy was pronounced dead.

On the 61st anniversary of this political assassination the spin doctors and agents of influence continue to cloud the circumstances leading up to the murder of America's 35th president. However, the question that needs to be asked looking back to that fateful day: who benefited most from his death? Cui bono?

Following the Bay of Pigs debacle in April 1961 the White House initiated Operation Mongoose. President Kennedy's brother and Attorney General of the United States, Robert Kennedy, headed up the sustained effort to topple the Castro regime and this included the assassination of Fidel Castro.

 On December 29, 1962, President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy met with the Bay of Pigs veterans, and over 40,000 Cuban exiles at the Orange Bowl. On that day the returning soldiers gave President Kennedy the flag of Brigade 2506. " I want to express my great appreciation to the brigade for making the United States the custodian of this flag. I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana," stated President Kennedy to all assembled there.

Daniel Harker of the Associated Press interviewed Fidel Castro on September 7, 1963 at the Brazilian Embassy in Havana at a reception, and in it the communist dictator made an explicit threat. “We are prepared to fight them and answer in kind. U.S. leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe.”

It is evident in a White House memorandum from ten days before President Kennedy was killed on November 12, 1963, that the Kennedy Administration was still committed to pursuing an aggressive strategy to topple the Castro regime:

Support of Autonomous Anti-Castro Groups. The question was asked from where would the autonomous groups operate. Mr. FitzGerald replied that they would operate from outside U.S. territory. He mentioned two bases of the Artime group, one in Costa Rica and the other in Nicaragua. Also it was hoped that the autonomous group under Manolo Ray would soon get itself established in a working base, possibly Costa Rica. Mr. FitzGerald said that much could be accomplished by these autonomous groups once they become operational. A question was asked as to what decisions remain to be made. Mr. FitzGerald replied that we were looking for a reaffirmation of the program as presented, including sabotage and harassment. When asked what was planned in sabotage for the immediate future, he said that destruction operations should be carried out against a large oil refinery and storage facilities, a large electric plant, sugar refineries, railroad bridges, harbor facilities, and underwater demolition of docks and ships. The question was also raised as to whether an air strike would be effective on some of these principal targets. The consensus was that CIA should proceed with its planning for this type of activity looking toward January.

Less than eleven months after making his pledge at the Orange Bowl, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas by Lee Harvey Oswald.

On November 29, 1963 in a phone call with President Lyndon Baines Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI revealed Oswald’s links with the Castro regime. "This angle in Mexico is giving us a great deal of trouble because the story is they have this man Oswald getting $6500 from the Cuban Embassy and then coming back to this country with it."

Politico in 2014 reported, "White House aide Joseph Califano, who was part of the anti-Castro plotting, said he was convinced that 'Robert Kennedy experienced this unbelievable grief after his brother’s death because he believed it was linked to his—Bobby’s—efforts to kill Castro.'” 

Lee Harvey Oswald raises his fist after being captured in Dallas, TX

In 1968, Johnson told ABC reporter Howard K. Smith that “Kennedy was trying to get to Castro, but Castro got him first.”

Leo Janos, one of President Lyndon B. Johnson's former speech writers, interviewed him for the July 1973 issue of The Atlantic in which LBJ "expressed his belief that the assassination in Dallas had been part of a conspiracy. 'I never believed that Oswald acted alone, although I can accept that he pulled the trigger." Johnson said that when he had taken office he found that "we had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean.' A year or so before Kennedy's death a CIA-backed assassination team had been picked up in Havana. Johnson speculated that Dallas had been a retaliation for this thwarted attempt, although he couldn't prove it."

Following the President's assassination within a year Operation Mongoose was scrapped and Fidel Castro would remain in power until 2006, then replaced by his brother Raul in a dynastic succession following a health crisis. General Raul Castro remains the maximum authority in Cuba. Fidel Castro died of old age after causing much suffering in Cuba and around the world in places such as Ethiopia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

Respected German documentary filmmaker Wilfried Huismann in 2006 made the case that Fidel Castro was behind the killing of the 35th president, and explained why.

We settled the question of why in three years of research on this documentary in Mexico, USA and Cuba. Oswald had been an agent for the Cuban intelligence services since November 1962. He was a political fanatic and allowed himself to be used by the Cuban intelligence services to kill John F. Kennedy. It was a Cuban reaction to the repeated attempts of the Kennedy brothers, above all the younger Kennedy, Robert, to get rid of Fidel Castro through political assassination -- a duel between the Kennedys and the Castros, which, like in a Greek tragedy, left one of the duelists dead.

 

Fidel Castro and John F. Kennedy.

President Trump returns to office next year, and during the campaign he promised to declassify all the remaining government records surrounding the assassination if he got a second term. Will Havana's role finally be fully exposed in this historic crime?

 

"Los líderes norteamericanos deben pensar que si están cooperando con los planes terroristas para eliminar a líderes cubanos, ellos mismos no estarán seguros" -Fidel Castro

35 years ago on November 9, 1989 the Berlin Wall did not fall, it was torn down by free Germans

  "It is your duty to use your combat … skills in such a way as to overcome the cunning of the border breacher, to challenge or liquidate him in order to thwart the planned border breach... Don’t hesitate to use your weapon even when border breaches happen with women and children, which traitors have often exploited in the past.” Order to Border Guards October 1, 1973.

"If we get shot, will you write about us?" - E. German Student, demonstrating against GDR regime 

Tearing down the Berlin Wall in November 1989

Thirty five years ago tomorrow the Berlin Wall began to be physically torn down. It was a great day for freedom and the triumph of long years of nonviolent resistance throughout Eastern Europe.

The Berlin Wall had been constructed beginning on August 13, 1961. with barbed-wire fence followed by a 100-mile wall and more than 300 watchtowers to spot and shoot escapees and the East German communists called it the "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart." Minefields were laid in some sectors.

The destruction of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 was not inevitable. It did not fall down. It was torn down.

With their courage & desire for freedom, the people of the #GDR brought down the #BerlinWall-which we will be celebrating tomorrow! The division of #Germany 🇩🇪 is history. The commitment to #freedom is more important today than ever. Freedom cannot be taken for granted.… pic.twitter.com/gRmhbR9VmF

— GIC Africa (@GermanyInAfrica) November 8, 2024

Remember that between 1961 and the very year it was torn down, at least 140 Germans were extrajudicially executed by the East German border guards for trying to cross the Berlin Wall to freedom. There is the Berlin Wall Museum, which offers a complete listing of the 140 known victims with details about them and their deaths.

We should also remember those who celebrated or ignored this scar that ran through the heart of Germany for 28 years and defended or rationalized the murder of unarmed civilians while hobnobbing with the East German leadership. What is their moral responsibility for these horrors?

Fidel Castro on the Berlin Wall in 1972

Fidel Castro's first visit to Berlin began on June 13, 1972 and at various points, the Cuban dictator addressed the border guards that policed the Berlin Wall to prevent East Germans from escaping to the West. At Brandenburg Gate on June 14 in the afternoon (pictured above), he addressed the men charged with shooting East Germans fleeing to West Germany as "the courageous and self-denying border guards of the GDR People's Army, who stand guard in the front line of the entire-socialist community." Later in the evening, Premier Castro addressed the Nikolay Bezarin Barracks in East Berlin:

It is very important to know that the people of the GDR have great confidence in you, that they are truly proud of you. The comrades of the party and the citizens of socialist Berlin have told us with great satisfaction about the activity of the border troops, speaking with great admiration for you and for your services.

Later in the same speech Mr. Castro offered his take on what he saw there and the prospects for the future:

We have no doubt that a great political and revolutionary victory has been won in the GDR. You have created the foundations for the future, a truly revolutionary state, a border state to whom the future belongs. You are the new generation, which will continue this work.

He spent most of his time there, accompanied by Erich Honecker, who, as Central Committee secretary for security matters in 1961, was in charge of constructing the Berlin Wall and, by 1971, had become the dictator of East Germany through a power struggle and Soviet support the de facto head of state.

Erich Honecker and Angela Davis in 1972

Angela Davis also paid visits to East Germany (in 1965 and 1972).  During her 1972 visit, she was received by Erich Honecker. She celebrated the East German communist regime and refused to criticize, or recognize its shortcomings on human rights. She refused to make any mention of the Berlin Wall in her autobiography.

This practice extended beyond East Germany.

Angela Davis also visited Cuba in 1972, and Fidel Castro made her an honorary member of the infamous Committee in the Defense of the Revolution (CDR). Neighborhood committees that spied on Cubans to ensure their loyalty to the dictatorship.

Innocent people were being killed in Germany until 1989, and are still massacred in Cuba today.

 

Chris Gueffroy killed at the Berlin Wall on Feb 5, 1989

 

One of the last victims, Chris Gueffroy, was born on June 21, 1968, and shot dead by East German border guards on February 5, 1989, while trying to cross on the Britzer Zweigkanal, near the small garden colonies "Harmonie" and "Sorgenfrei" on the sector border between Berlin-Treptow and Berlin-Neukölln. At the age of 20, he was executed for the crime of wishing to live in freedom. 

A memorial column in memory of Chris Gueffroy was erected at Britzer Zweigkanal in Berlin-Treptow in 2003 in honor of his 35th birthday. A biography and account of the circumstances that led to his death and the aftermath are available online.  

Memorial Column for Chris Gueffroy

The process of the Berlin Wall being torn down was both a struggle of ideas, nonviolent resistance, and international solidarity. Germans crossed the wall seeking freedom in an act of nonviolent defiance. Many escaped, but others paid the ultimate price for freedom. The Order to Border Guards from the East German regime was clear:

"It is your duty to use your combat … skills in such a way as to overcome the cunning of the border breacher, to challenge or liquidate him in order to thwart the planned border breach... Don’t hesitate to use your weapon even when border breaches happen with women and children, which traitors have often exploited in the past."

Thirty five years have passed, and the words of the late Czech dissident Vaclav Havel remain relevant for our times, and in defiance of the inhumanity represented by the Berlin Wall. In 2003, he addressed a gathering at Florida International University that was prescient.

"Our world, as a whole, is not in the best of shape, and the direction it is headed in may well be quite ambivalent. But this does not mean that we are permitted to give up on free and cultivated thinking and to replace it with a set of utopian clichés. That would not make the world a better place, it would only make it worse. On the contrary, it means that we must do more for our own freedom, and that of others."

The legacy of the Berlin Wall reverberates strongly among Cubans because, since 1959, the Florida Straits have been turned into a killing zone by the communist regime in Cuba, along with the border with the U.S. Guantanamo Naval Base.  

Finally, let us denounce the watery Berlin Wall in the Florida Straights created by the Castro regime that continues to kill Cubans seeking freedom. Less than five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, on July 13, 1994, thirty-seven Cubans were massacred for trying to flee Cuba. The most recent massacre in Cuba occurred a little over two years ago, on October 28, 2022, killing seven Cubans, including a two-year-old.

 

However, we must commemorate the tremendous days of liberation that took place in the heart of Europe in 1989, the winds of change that emancipated tens of millions of people, and the fact that these free societies are still flourishing in freedom after 35 years.

While honoring and remembering tomorrow the events and heroes of November 9, 1989, I will also remember the struggle for liberty and justice never ends.  

From Ukraine, to Taiwan, to Venezuela, to Cuba, and too many other places around the world the struggle for freedom continues.