Harvest of Despair

Posted by James Bowery on Sunday, 11 December 2005 10:35.

Given the, literally, hundreds of movies and documentaries about the Holocaust, it struck me as rather odd that there wasn’t a comparable body of work about the Holodomor—the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933. I finally found one 55 minute documentary about it. But then I found something more disturbing ...

I’ve grown up with the Holocaust. The first movie about the Holocaust I saw was in Iowa during a high school history class back in 1971. Since then I’ve seen at least as many Holocaust movies as passing years.

Around 1981, someone pointed out to me that there was a deliberate mass killing of millions of Ukrainians, by Stalin and his “willing executioners” that occurred prior to the Holocaust. I’d never heard of it let alone seen a movie about it. Little was written about it. It stuck in my mind as a profound incongruity but until the WWW search engines I didn’t think much of reading about it let alone looking for movies about this event, called the “Holodomor”.

Recently I heard that there was a “movie” made about the Holodomor named “Harvest of Despair”. It wasn’t available via Netflix nor any interlibrary loan. So I searched the web for sources. It turns out it wasn’t a movie but rather a 55 minute documentary broadcast on PBS in 1986.

However, the Google search turns up something more interesting than the sources of the film:

The top 2 hits are Holodomor revisionist sites claiming the number of deaths was far less than the higher estimates.

Many of the other hits are not references to the movie at all but to a book by the same name: “Harvest of Despair”. One might presume this to be the book upon which the documentary is based—but no. OK then, perhaps it is a book about the making of the documentary—but no. Then perhaps it is just a random overlap between titles as sometimes occurs and this book is legitimately about some famine—perhaps that occurred in Africa?

No.

Amazing coincidence: It is a book, published by Harvard University just last year, about the Nazi occupation of the Ukraine!

One may expect such vile tactics from the ADL, JDL or SPLC, but Harvard? This is particularly perverse since reaction to the Ukrainian famine was one of the catalyzing events leading to the election of Hitler as Chancellor of Germany 1933.

To add insult to injury, the section of Wikipedia discussing Holodomor revisionism is in the Holodomor article itself—under “Objections to the mainstream account of the Holodomor”. Contrast this to the Wikipedia articles on the Holocaust where the very phrase “Holocaust revisionism” is redirected to “Holocaust denial”. The supposedly “non-negotiable” policy of Wikipedia is that all articles be “NPOV” or Neutral Point of View. Arguments from points of view can be presented but must be bracketed within attributed quotes. No Holocaust revisionist arguments are presented in the Wikipedia article about the Holocaust. There is a separate “holocaust denial” article which doesn’t really present the POV of Holocaust revisionists but rather presents the reasons revisionists have no merit to their arguments. There is even a third article called “Holocaust denial examined” which is supposed to be where one can find revisionist POV but even this third indirection fails to really present what Holocaust revisionists say they actually think about the key issues.

As a mere agnostic I find myself forced to be sympathetic with the “Holocaust deniers” given the manifest biases from mainstream institutions like Harvard and Hollywood—and even aura of fear from governments that now pervades the topic. Indeed, it is considered morally unacceptable and criminally suspect to merely be an agnostic!

Tags: That Question Again

Comments:

Posted by Amon on Sun, 11 Dec 2005 12:40 | #

You’re right - there ought to be a legitimate page on Holocaust denial. After all, there are ones for creationism and Greek mythology.

Posted by RobertinArabia on Sun, 11 Dec 2005 15:13 | #

There is no business like Shoah business.

Posted by seelow heights on Sun, 11 Dec 2005 19:38 | #

The real question is why “holocaust deniers”, alone of all the world’s cranks and crackpots, are routinely sent to prison in purportedly democratic countries. Noone is ever persecuted for denying or minimizing the various Communist democides.

Posted by stari_momak on Sun, 11 Dec 2005 20:47 | #

There is, however, a fairly new reprint, with new preface, of Conquests “Harvest of Sorrow”. That phrase is the one most closely associated with works on the Ukrainian famine. Whether this “Harvest of Despair” title is too close Conquest’s title is, of course, in the eye of the beholder. No doubt the Conquest book was in the author or editor’s mind when the book on the Nazi occupation of the Ukraine was thought up.

Posted by Robert Light on Sun, 11 Dec 2005 21:30 | #

If it was actually official Nazi policy to have considered the Ukranians “Untermeschen,” why then, pray tell, did the Nazis have, you know, the . . . . <u>Ukrainian SS</u>? Hmm? Also: it just so happens that the commandant of Treblinka was a Ukrainian. In fact, the Ukrainians had a large hand in running many of the eastern death camps. I don’t suppose the author of that book, Karel Berkhoff, had anything to say about that, now, did he?

Posted by Svigor on Mon, 12 Dec 2005 01:03 | #

You’re right - there ought to be a legitimate page on Holocaust denial. After all, there are ones for creationism and Greek mythology.

Any objective person who takes a bit of time to look into the issues raised in this thread will come away smelling rat. Period.

Why is it that being any kind of “wacko” (men in black, contrails, little green men, anti-holodomor, anti-gulag, etc., ad infinitum) under the sun is “harmless fun,” but being an anti-HOLOCAUST “wacko” is grounds for prison, firing, being run out of town on a rail, etc?

Figuring out why ain’t rocket science.

Posted by Amon on Mon, 12 Dec 2005 02:22 | #

Svigor,

It’s because elites are disproportionally Jewish and leftist, not because Holocaust denial/revisionism is legitimate.

Posted by R J Stove on Mon, 12 Dec 2005 03:16 | #

When Conquest’s book The Great Terror was reprinted after the end of the Cold War, he is said to have been asked by his publishers for a suggestion as to a reprint title, and to have recommended that the reprint be called I Told You So, You F**king Fools.

Sometimes I think I should sue, for malpractice, the “history” department of the Australian “university” which purported to provide me with an “education” back in the 1980s. Little matters such as the Ukrainian famine and the Armenian genocide were sedulously concealed from our Modern History course, except when one talented and unfortunate Russo-American lecturer - whose pearls-before-swine-casting efforts I recall with gratitude - tried to get them mentioned.

Posted by friedrich braun on Tue, 13 Dec 2005 00:46 | #

not because Holocaust denial/revisionism is legitimate

You’re showing your ignorance. Have you studied Revisonist literature to any extent?

Start a thread on The Revisionist Forum

http://revforum.yourforum.org/

Pick any of the major holocau$t tenets, let’s see what becomes of your received wisdom. If you aren’t prepared to be challenged, spare us your glib rhetoric.

Posted by Amon on Tue, 13 Dec 2005 03:05 | #

friedrich,

Every Holocaust revisionist paper I’ve been asked to read has been crap. The papers ramble on and on, without making a point. I won’t waste my time reading any more of them. So how about you summarize an argument for me, here? If Holocaust revisionism is actually tenable, you should be able to do that. (No Holocaust revisionist has ever accepted my challenge…hmm.)

Posted by friedrich braun on Tue, 13 Dec 2005 04:02 | #

Every Holocaust revisionist paper I’ve been asked to read has been crap.

Yeah? Which ones have you read?

This blog isn’t about holocau$t revisionism, post on any topic on the Revisionist Forum or jump in an existing thread. Issue a challenge, pick a topic…any topic…let’s see what happens…I mean, you seem to be pretty confident and you’ve read “revisionist paper[s]”

I won’t waste my time reading any more of them.

Is this a joke? I can’t take you seriously. You’re not really interested…it’s so much easier to spout lazy platitudes and cliches, than to actually do your homework. You know exactly zilch as far Revisionism goes, so stop posturing.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Tue, 13 Dec 2005 07:33 | #

”[Holocaust researchers who don’t draw the “correct” conclusions from their research get thrown in jail] because elites are disproportionally Jewish and leftist, not because Holocaust denial/revisionism is legitimate.” (—Amon)

But Amon you don’t explain why Jews would want Holocaust researchers (whether serious scholars or cranks) thrown in jail for not drawing the “correct” conclusions from their research. Why would Jews want that? Researchers in any field always come up with different opinions about things related to that field. Free discussion then takes place and it’s through that means, that free discussion, that the truth is arrived at.

There are plenty of people around the world who deny Americans landed on the moon. Wouldn’t it be peculiar, to say the least, if the Americans pressured governments to throw moon-landing deniers in jail for the “crime” of moon-landing denial? In other words, “lots of people don’t believe the moon landings, so we’re going to force them to”? That would be a baffling thing for Americans to do.

The Jews know it makes no sense to pressure governments to jail Holocaust researchers who don’t draw the “correct” conclusions from their research, because, first, it’s not moral to do that—people have a right to express their opinions on historical questions—and second, it makes people around the world believe the Holocaust even less, and finally, it turns people around the world against Jews. Jews aren’t imbeciles. They know this will be the effect of their pressuring governments to hunt down and imprison Holocaust researchers who don’t draw the “correct” conclusions from their research. Yet they persist. Why? I don’t understand their game here—I don’t understand what they gain from this.

Posted by Amalek on Wed, 14 Dec 2005 19:53 | #

Jews and their pet scholars are quite free to make drastic revisions in the Holocaust legend, e.g. the reduction in estimated Auschwitz victim counts from 4m in 1945 to (according to some respectable, non-prosecuted characters) under 1m today. But such tweaks are permissible only as long as the script remains controlled by the Zionists, who seized the propaganda mythology from the USSR after 1945 and retrofitted it to justify the annexation of Israel and expulsion or subjection of its Arab population.

The original Soviet line was to emphasise how the Nazis had exterminated all kinds of enemy without regard to race or religion. Jews were not identified as prime targets in the first reports from the liberated camps. Only 20 or more years later, once Israel became the ME overdog following the Six Day War and American and European Jews seemed to be becoming dangerously free from discrimination, did the Zionist apparat begin to bang the Holocaust drum—- to keep the Diaspora in line and coughing up.

‘It happened once, it can happen again… unless Israel has land and nukes’ became the theme song. This necessitated making unproven allegations about (i) how systematic and centrally directed the ‘Holocaust’ had been—a sinister plot rather than a series of panicky improvisations under the stresses of war; (ii) following on from this ‘intentionalist’ conspiracism, how ‘scientific’ and ‘centrally planned’ the persecution had been (industrial killing); and (iii) of necessity, how brilliantly the Germans had concealed the evidence, to explain why it had taken so long for the full horror of the ‘targeted genocide’ to become apparent.

All the elements of this legend have thrown up small absurdities (false accounts of victimhood, soap made of human fat, weird methods of execution) and larger nonsenses, such as the constantly varying account of how many died in different places combined with the sacralising of an overall total of Six Million. The Holocaust naturally has to be given special legal protection against too much inquisitiveness by non-partisan scholars, since it is the only major event in history whose existence is supposed to be demonstrated by the ABSENCE of evidence: no unambiguous Nazi blueprints or orders, not one photo or frame of film of a gas chamber, confusing forensic traces, very few pictures of mass shootings, attested records of disappearance (never mind death) for only a fraction of the 6m, witness testimony obviously corrupted by interrogation and polluted by propaganda, or obtained decades after the event.

The last few drops of political juice are still being squeezed from the Holocaust. Lazy or timid souls such as ‘seelow heights’ are still swallowing the story that anyone who dares question the ZOG-approved version (whatever that is this year) is a weirdo, like flat earthers. But the Holocaust of the Foxmans and Bronfmans and Nizkors is coming apart at the seams. Like the claim of Iraqi WMDs, it will be grudgingly abandoned or modified when it has served its purpose. ‘Premature revisonists’ will still be accused of malice, but they will no longer be defamed, sacked, fined, assaulted or jailed. I suspect that after the last purported survivors die off, this retreat will be quick. At last we will be able—horror of horrors—to ‘relativise’ Jewish persecution amid all the other atrocities of the 20th century.

Posted by dddd on Tue, 21 Feb 2006 09:06 | #

‘Every Holocaust revisionist paper I’ve been asked to read has been crap. The papers ramble on and on, without making a point. I won’t waste my time reading any more of them. So how about you summarize an argument for me, here? If Holocaust revisionism is actually tenable, you should be able to do that. (No Holocaust revisionist has ever accepted my challenge…hmm.)’

This is a totally inane comment, because we don’t know which Holocaust revisionist papers you say you’ve been asked to read.

What’s more, we don’t know who asked you to read them. Maybe someone with an interest in suppressing revisionism asked you to read a bunch of really bad papers.

Anyway, what do we know about your reading skills? Maybe you don’t have the intellectual capacity to understand reasoned argument, which would place papers of any quality at a great disadvantage.

How would you distinguish a ‘tenable’ argument from an untenable one? For many people, a ‘tenable’ argument is one that only conforms to what they think they know.

And what do you mean by asking posters to ‘summarise an argument for you here’? Why not go to a revisionist website and download one of the many excellent revisionist books?

I bet you haven’t read a single one, and the reason is, because you don’t really want to know the truth. You only want to bash those who are searching for the truth.

So here’s my challenge to you: prove the Holocaust story is true in six words or less.

You can’t rise to my ‘challenge,’ can you?

Posted by mike on Mon, 13 Mar 2006 00:25 | #

you can find movies at this link including Harves of despair