| |
SELECTIVE MEMORY
By Prof. James Mace
THE DAY, Culture Page
Kyiv, Ukraine, November 29, 2001
|
PROF. JAMES MACE, CONSULTANT TO THE DAY
Photo By Mykola LAZARENKO, The Day
|
What would we know about the Holocaust, had Hitler won the Second World War?
It is impossible to know with absolute certainty, of course, what would have
happened in the wake of something that did not happen, but there are clues
that can be drawn from analogous things that did. In all probability, the
verbal fig leaf of “resettlement to the East” as the “Final Solution to the
Jewish Question” would be largely accepted, and the Holocaust would be no
more a part of most people’s consciousness of the twentieth century than was
the Ukrainian Manmade Famine of 1932-33 as long as the USSR endured.
There would be books of memoirs, of course, some scholarly studies based on
what could be gleaned from open sources, underutilized diplomatic and
intelligence reports in the archives of the United States and Britain, along
with Jewish zealots running around historical congresses saying something
perceived as unintelligible, unsubstantiated allegations based on biased
interpretation of the evidence, just as most Western scholars of the former
Soviet Union perceive work on Ukraine’s Holodomor. It would be an open
secret for a certain generation of the Reich, of course, but in a
totalitarian society one knows what one can and cannot discuss openly.
Nietzsche once said that we need an art of forgetting. The Ukrainian Famine
shows that when convenient, it is an art easily mastered.
|
Journalists and scholars, when confronted by mighty and victorious closed
societies with the carrot of the almighty visa and access to even limited
information they can use along with the stick of expulsion and denial of
official access, have often opted to go along, to write what is “necessary”
to get what they want in order to further their careers, to actively assist
in discrediting the unbending — or perhaps simply naive — few who seek
honestly to find the truth, analyze it as best they can, and show something
too incredible to be believed. It happened with the Ukrainian Famine both at
the time and later to me; it would surely also have happened with a
victorious Nazi Germany dominating much of the world and for that reason an
object of the unquenchable thirst for information bred of the resultant
mixture of unquenchable curiosity, admiration, and fear. Even a little over
decade ago this remained for the Soviet Union, still remains for some, and
would surely have remained for a fascist Germany dominating what the postwar
Soviet Union did west of the current Russian Federation.
The story of the famine in Ukraine and the North Caucasus broke in the
English language press in March 1933 when Gareth Jones, a reporter for the
Manchester Guardian and soon thereafter Malcolm Muggeridge, writing for the
same paper, traveled separately to Ukraine reported on what they saw. Moscow
quickly forbid journalists from traveling there. In response, two American
correspondents, Pulitzer Prize winner Walter Duranty of the New York Times
and Louis Fischer of The Nation , the latter out of conviction and the
former out of simple opportunism, took the lead in denying any such thing as
a famine in Ukraine. Duranty was the most famous American foreign
correspondent of his day, but his moral flexibility is clear from the fact
that when he visited the US Embassy in Berlin to get his passport renewed in
1931, he told the consul that in agreement with the Soviet authorities and
The New York Times, his dispatches reflected “the official point of view of
the Soviet government” and not his own. When the Jones story broke, Duranty
immediately wrote a dispatch claiming that the Englishman had concocted a
“big scare story” and resorted to such formulas as in one report with the
title, “Russians Hungry But Not Starving.” Fischer, a young radical who
later changed his views, blamed any hardship that might exist on rural
“wreckers” who had contaminated whole villages and this forced the
authorities to deport such malefactors to lumber camps. On an American
lecture tour when the Jones story broke, he stated emphatically, “There is
no starvation in Russia.”
|
In his memoirs, Assignment in Utopia, United Press Moscow correspondent
Eugene Lyons called the “containment” of the Jones story “the whole shabby
episode of our failure to report honestly on the Russian famine of 1932-33.”
He recalled how Soviet censor Konstantin Umansky met with the American
press corps in a reporter’s hotel room, knowing the reporters were all eager
to cover the Metropolitan-Vickers show trial of British engineers.
|
Photo from "Ukraine: Milestones of History", Kyiv, 2OO1
TAKING GRAIN
|
|
“He could afford to be gracious,” Lyons wrote. “Forced by competitive
journalism to jockey for the inside track with officials, it would have been
professional suicide to make an issue of the famine at this particular time.
There was much bargaining in a spirit of gentlemanly give-and- take, under
the efflulgence of Umansky’s gilded smile, before a formula of denial was
worked out.
“We admitted enough to soothe our consciences, but in round-about phrases
that damned Jones as a liar. The filthy business being disposed of, someone
ordered vodka and zakuski, Umansky joined in the celebration, and the party
did not break up until the early morning hours” (p. 572).
|
Photo From The Famine in Soviet Ukraine 1932-1933, Harvard, 1986
THE DEAD NO LONGER NOTICED
|
Western governments also knew perfectly well what happened, and collections
of dispatches from the British and German archives have been published. When
I was staff director of the US Commission on the Ukraine Famine, I worked
with documents from the National Archives of the United States. Emigre
German Mennonites were the first to address officials, followed by
Ukrainian-Americans and Canadians. The head of the Mennonite Central
Committee, Dr. P. C. Hiebert, even prevailed upon Senator Arthur Capper to
raise the matter with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who in turn promised
to take up the matter with the secretary of state. The latter Cordell Hull
gave an icy reply: “Unfortunately, there do not appear to be any measures
which this Government may appropriately take at this time in order to
alleviate the sufferings of these unhappy people.” The State Department
itself worked out a standard answer of its own, repeated many times,
reiterating essentially the same formula. In response to an inquiry to
American diplomats abroad, in October 1933 it received a reply from the US
Embassy to Greece stating that diplomats from other countries who had been
posted to the USSR confirmed the famine’s existence. The following month,
the USA extended diplomatic recognition to the USSR.
The best information seems to have been in the possession of Italy, which
had a consulate in the Ukrainian SSR capital. These documents, with
underlining from the famous blue pencil of Benito Mussolini, were discovered
by representatives of the Ukrainian Catholic Church in Rome, and my
commission published a number of them in English in our 1988 Report to
Congress. Perhaps the most interesting, albeit containing certain
inaccuracies and anti-Semitic undertones, was dated May 31, 1933: “RE: THE
FAMINE AND THE UKRAINIAN QUESTION.” According to Consul Gradenigo, there was
no doubt that the famine was artificial, designed to “change the ethnic
material in Ukraine,” and intended to solve the “Ukrainian problem” once and
for all.
If the world stood silent before this final solution, is it so strange that
it did likewise during another that took place a decade later during World
War II?
No. 33, November, 20, 2001, THE DAY, Kyiv, Ukraine
http://www.day.kiev.ua/DIGEST/2001/33/issue.htm
FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY
|
|
back
