With armies surrounding the Ukraine one should look back at their history. There has been enough pain and suffering for any nation.
Ukraine is a Texas-sized nation to the west of Russia. It was part of the Soviet Union and ruled by Stalin. He imposed collectivization which replaced individually owned farms with state-run collectives. Ukraine small farmers resisted giving up their lands and livelihoods and were considered enemies of the state. Soviet officials drove these farmers off their farms and deported 50,000 Ukrainian families to Siberia.
1932 the grain harvest missed the planner's target by 60%. There may have been enough food to get by. Stalin ordered their small crops to be confiscated as punishment for not meeting quotas. Much of the confiscated grain was sold overseas as proof of the success of collectivization. By 1933 only 1/3 of the households were left while prisons and labor camps were jammed and many were deported.
The Ukrainian famine was a clear case of a man-made famine. It was a hybrid caused by terrible social-economic policies and one aimed at a particular population group as repression and punishment. This Ukrainian famine became known as the Holodomor a combination of the Ukrainian words for “starvation” and to inflict “death” It claimed the lives of 3.9 million people or about 13% of the population with horrific stories of the terrible agony of death by starvation.
The Holocaust of World War II also started in Ukraine. One in every four Jewish victims of the Holocaust was murdered in Ukraine. The number of Ukrainians that collaborated with the Germans amounted to about 100,000. They joined police units and their auxiliaries, and lent a hand rounding up the Jews, for the mass shootings.
Before the death camps of Poland, killing squads called Einsatzgruppen A B C D of about 1500 men each fanned out over the East behind the front lines. They were only successful because of the Ukrainian police that supported their efforts. In just one suburb of Kyiv, 34,000 Jews were murdered on September 29 – 30, 1941 at Babi Yar shot and buried in a large Ravine. It only took 2 days. A total of 100,000 were murdered in and around Kyiv.
Ironically the Nazis decided that shooting women and children individually was inefficient and took an emotional toll on the soldiers. A more productive, method of extermination was needed, hence the industrial death camps and the gas chambers.
By the time the killing centers opened at Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Majdanek, more than 1.5 million Jews had already been murdered by the Germans, their Axis allies, and local collaborators in Ukraine, Belarus. Today there are some 2000 mass graves within Ukraine ranging in size from a few dozen victims, to tens of thousands.
Vasily Grossman was a Jewish Soviet writer from Ukraine. He wrote for the Soviet Ministries newspaper called the Red Star when he learned of the massacres in Ukraine. In despair, because he had no news from his mother, he wrote in an article…. There are no Jews in Ukraine. In the big cities, in the small towns, in the thousands of villages, you won't see a young girl's black eyes filled with tears, you won't hear an old woman's voice racked with mourning, and you won't hear a hungry baby's cry. Everything is silent. Everything is peaceful. A whole people have been massacred.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Ukraine finally became an independent nation—and for some the Holodomor and others, the Holocaust remains a painful part of Ukrainians’ common identity.
Now surrounded by armies and not part of NATO - they will again be abandoned to an uncertain future. This crisis may be the event that prompts Europe to awaken to her own vulnerability and weakness.
I expect a new order and leadership in Europe. Nationalism, trade war, sanctions, and U.S. interference will not be economically beneficial to our allies. The economic fallout from the coming collapse will forge new alliances. These conditions will mirror the 1930’s and they gave us Franco, Tito, Tojo, Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler. It was Europe that dragged the world into war…Twice. The third time is a charm.
