Neil Oliver And Justin Trudeau Both Blew It - Due To Ignorance Of History

"History is a patient teacher, the lessons are repeated until they are learned."

First, the accusatory bit from Neil Oliver:

Think about this before you cast blame on Hunka, who would have been 20 years old in 1945:

"In 1932 and 1933, millions of Ukrainians were killed in the Holodomor, a man-made famine engineered by the Soviet government of Joseph Stalin. The primary victims of the Holodomor (literally "death inflicted by starvation") were rural farmers and villagers, who made up roughly 80 percent of Ukraine's population in the 1930s. While it is impossible to determine the precise number of victims of the Ukrainian genocide, most estimates by scholars range from roughly 3.5 million to 7 million (with some estimates going higher). The most detailed demographic studies estimate the death toll at 3.9 million. Historians agree that, as with other genocides, the precise number will never be known. Through a study of the Holodomor (which has been referred to as the Great Famine), students can come to understand that the Holodomor is an example of how prejudice and a desire to dominate and control a particular ethnic group can lead to the misuse of power, mass oppression, and genocide.

Ukraine Before the Holodomor

Beginning in the 18th century, Ukrainian territories were divided between the Austrian and Russian Empires. In the aftermath of World War I and the overthrow of the Russian monarchy in February 1917, Ukraine set up a provisional government, declaring itself the independent Ukrainian People's Republic in January 1918. The Ukrainian People's Republic fought the Bolshevik Red Army for three years (1918-1921) but lost its fight for independence. The bulk of Ukrainian territory was forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union, or USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), and by 1922 Ukraine became the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkrSSR). Then the USSR sanctioned the requisition of all surplus agricultural products from the rural population, resulting in economic collapse. Discontent among the farmers forced Lenin to halt the requisitions and bring in the New Economic Policy (NEP) in March of 1921. The NEP was intended to provide greater economic freedom and permit private enterprise, mainly for independent farms and small businesses. Beginning in 1923, the Soviet authorities also pursued a policy of indigenization, which in the Ukrainian SSR took the form of Ukrainization, a policy of national and cultural liberalization that promoted Ukrainian language use in education, mass media, and government. The goal for the introduction of both NEP and Ukrainization was to increase support for the Soviet regime in Ukraine.

Causes of the Holodomor

By the end of the 1920s, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin consolidated his control over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Feeling threatened by Ukraine's strengthening cultural autonomy, Stalin took measures to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry and the Ukrainian intellectual and cultural elites to prevent them from seeking independence for Ukraine. To prevent "Ukrainian national counterrevolution," Stalin initiated mass-scale political repressions through widespread intimidation, arrests, and imprisonment. Thousands of Ukrainian intellectuals, church leaders, and Ukrainian Communist Party functionaries who had supported pro-Ukrainian policies were executed by the Soviet regime. At the same time, Stalin decreed the First Five Year Plan, which included the collectivization of agriculture, effectively ending the NEP. Collectivization gave the Soviet state direct control over Ukraine's rich agricultural resources and allowed the state to control the supply of grain for export. Grain exports would be used to fund the USSR's transformation into an industrial power. The majority of rural Ukrainians, who were independent small-scale or subsistence farmers, resisted collectivization. They were forced to surrender their land, livestock and farming tools, and work on government collective farms (kolhosps) as laborers. Historians have recorded about 4,000 local rebellions against collectivization, taxation, terror, and violence by Soviet authorities in the early 1930s. The Soviet secret police (GPU) and the Red Army ruthlessly suppressed these protests. Tens of thousands of farmers were arrested for participating in anti-Soviet activities, shot, or deported to labor camps. The wealthy and successful farmers who opposed collectivization were labeled "kulaks" by Soviet propaganda ("kulak" literally means "a fist"). They were declared enemies of the state, to be eliminated as a class. The elimination of the so-called "kulaks" was an integral part of collectivization. It served three purposes: as a warning to those who opposed collectivization, as a means to transfer confiscated land to the collective farms, and as a means to eliminate village leadership. Thus, the secret police and the militia brutally stripped "kulaks" not only of their lands but also their homes and personal belongings, systematically deporting them to the far regions of the USSR or executing them. These mass repressions, along with manipulation of state-controlled grain purchases and collectivization through the destruction of Ukrainian rural community life, set the stage for the total terror – a terror by hunger, the Holodomor." https://cla.umn.edu/chgs/holocaust-genocide-education/resource-guides/holodomor

And Mr Oliver makes great note that the Soviets were allies of Canada and the UK Commonwealth in World War II - but that wasn't true for the first two years of the war, from 1939 to 1941, when the Soviets under Stalin and the Germans under Hitler, signed the Ribbentrop Pact, in which the two of them divided up Poland, the Baltic States, and Finland (in the Winter War of 1939) between them. In light of the Holodomor, which would have happened when Hunka was seven years old, the Nazis were viewed as liberators from the brutal, oppressive, and genocidal Soviet Russians. Few in the West have heard of the Holodomor, it has been largely erased from history, even though nearly as many died there under Stalin as died under Hitler in the Holocaust. Perhaps if this bit of history were better known - and explained - Justin Trudeau could have discovered the reason for calling Hunka a hero - and told it to the world. Instead, he fell flat on his face, as did the others who apologized - and hurt an old man who fought against genocidal tyrants in his youth.