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Cathy Young in the Weekly Standard reminds us of the Ukrainian famine of the 1930′s.
This year marks the 75th anniversary of one of the most horrific chapters in the history of the Soviet Union: the great famine the Ukrainians call Holodomor, “murder by starvation.” This catastrophe, which killed an estimated 6 to 10 million people in 1932-33, was largely the product of deliberate Soviet policies. Inevitably, then, its history is fodder for acrimonious disputes.
Ukraine–which, with Canada and a few other countries, observed Holodomor Remembrance Day on November 23–seeks international recognition for a Ukrainian “genocide.” Russia denounces that demand as political exploitation of a wider tragedy. Some Russian human rights activists are skeptical of both positions.
Meanwhile, the famine remains little known in the West, despite efforts by the Ukrainian diaspora. Indeed, the West has its own inglorious history with regard to the famine, starting with the deliberate cover-up by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty.
In the late 1980s, the famine gained new visibility thanks to Robert Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1987) and the TV documentary Harvest of Despair, aired in the United States and Canada. …
Ilya Somin posts on the subject in Volokh Conspiracy.
… On a more personal note, I recently discussed this dispute with my grandmother, who actually lived through the famine in early 1930s Ukraine (though she is not Ukrainian). She reacted with incredulity. “How can anyone doubt there was a genocide,” she said, “I saw the starving and dying people myself!” I tried to explain to her the genocide-mass murder distinction embedded in current international law as neutrally as I could, noting some of the justifications offered for it. She, of course, was unmoved, and continued to see the distinction as a dubious contrivance. I have to agree. …
Good Contentions post on what a Peace Nobel is worth.
2005 Nobel Peace Prize Winners Mohammed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency are once again gathering attention — and once again, not in a good way. They are being criticized by Israel for their utter failure to provide any meaningful check on Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
This should come as no surprise. This is the same IAEA that watched North Korea set off a kinda-sorta nuclear bomb, had no clue that Syria was building a bomb factory until Israel converted it into a crater, and was caught completely off guard by Libya’s nuclear program when it announced it had turned the whole kit and kaboodle over to the US.
But they’ve been very, very attentive to Israel’s nuclear program, which — by definition — is none of their business, as Israel never signed on to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Unlike, say, the above-mentioned nations. Or India and Pakistan, for that matter, who have also joined the nuclear club. …
Bill McGurn in WSJ says now we’re going to have a real debate on Gitmo.
Not all that long ago, Guantanamo was simply one more manifestation of the wickedness of George W. Bush. Back then, the operating assumption appeared to be that the only people being held at Guantanamo were innocent goat herders whose only crime was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. As a result, the focus was on detainee abuse and their lack of rights, as witness an Associated Press headline from last December: “Lawyers complain iguanas at Guantanamo get more legal protection than detainees.”
One year later, we now have Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 plotters at Gitmo saying they want to plead guilty. And the headlines have begun to concede that closing the detention center will not be as easy as the critics suggested. “Closing detainee camp a minefield of critical steps,” notes the Miami Herald. “Closing it may be the easy part; With Guantanamo, the issue for Obama will be deciding what to do with the 250 prisoners, experts say” reports the L.A. Times. “Close Guantanamo prison? Sure. But that’s the easy part,” says USA Today.
What unites all these stories is the acknowledgment of the basic fact of Guantanamo: The problem is the people, not the place. …
David Harsanyi reports on GOP internecine warfare as Kathleen Parker takes on parts of the God squad.
Do we need God in politics?
Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker recently penned a provocative column titled “Giving up on God,” wherein she suggested that the Republican Party ditch G-O-D. The piece so rankled James Dobson (Ph.D in Divine Insight) that he compared Parker to that seditious bum Benedict Arnold.
Among factions of conservatism, there is a general willingness to co-exist and — sporadically — win elections. Dobson, conversely, employs a saintly litmus test that marginalizes large swaths of his own party. He has redefined “traditional values,” an essential ingredient for Republican victory, to mean “illogical rigidity.”
Californians, Dobson rationalizes, prove that values voters still matter because “many who pulled the lever for the ‘change’ he [Obama] espoused also pulled it for the stability provided by marriage as recognized for millennia in all civilized societies.” …
Ed Morrissey looks at Obama’s public works. Says it is a “new old deal.”
… Now, with the federal government deep in debt, unwilling to address an entitlement disaster, and throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at private enterprises in a vain attempt to rescue them from their own bad management and labor practices, Obama wants to create a new WPA to renew American infrastructure not because it’s needed as much as Obama needs to ensure his re-election.
The original WPA should serve as an object lesson for us now. It was bureaucratic, inefficient, and since it served mainly as a work-to-welfare program, had almost no way of disciplining its employees to improve production. The massive resources it ate could have been much more efficiently utilized by the private sector, which could have produced higher-quality work at a lower price. That has been the lesson of privatization in infrastructure that we have seen in Minnesota with the St. Anthony Bridge project and the rebuilding of Southern California freeways and overpasses after the 1994 Northridge earthquake. …
David Brooks is underwhelmed too.
… In a stimulus plan, the first job is to get money out the door quickly. That means you avoid anything that might require planning and creativity. You avoid anything that might require careful implementation or novel approaches. The quickest thing to do is simply throw money at things that already exist.
Sure enough, the Obama stimulus plan, at least as it has been sketched out so far, is notable for its lack of creativity. Obama wants to put more computers in classrooms, an old idea with dubious educational merit. He also proposes a series of ideas that are good but not exactly transformational: refurbishing the existing power grid; fixing the oldest roads and bridges; repairing schools; and renovating existing government buildings to make them more energy efficient.
This is the federal version of “This Old House.” And this is before the stimulus money gets diverted, as it inevitably will, to refurbish old companies. The auto bailout could eventually swallow $125 billion. After that, it could be the airlines and so on. …
So what does one of the left-wing blogs think of Caroline Kennedy as senator? FireDogLake has an answer.
… It’s a truly terrible idea.
Her leadership could have been really helpful when the rest of us were trying to keep the progressive lights on and getting the stuffing beaten out of us by a very well-financed right wing for the past eight years. But when things were tough, she was nowhere to be found.
Now that the Democrats are in power, she’d like to come in at the top. We have absolutely no idea if she’s qualified, or whether she can take the heat of being a Kennedy in public life. She’s certainly shown no appetite for it in the past. She’ll have a target on her back and if she can’t take it, if she crumbles, she will become a rallying point that the right will easily organize around. …
ChiTrib reports on Walgreens retail medical clinics.
The push into retail medicine is regaining momentum, and Deerfield-based Walgreen Co. is leading that charge.
Although the economic downturn slowed growth this summer, retailers and hospital systems continue to open retail clinics. The number of U.S. clinics jumped to 1,135 as of Monday compared with 1,104 as of Nov. 1, according to Merchant Medicine. …
Samizdata on why the chicken crossed the road.
Why did the chicken cross the road?
BARACK OBAMA: The chicken crossed the road because it was time for a change! The chicken wanted change!
JOHN MC CAIN: My friends, that chicken crossed the road because he recognized the need to engage in cooperation and dialogue with all the chickens on the other side of the road.
HILLARY CLINTON: When I was First Lady, I personally helped that little chicken to cross the road. This experience makes me uniquely qualified to ensure – right from Day One! – that every chicken in this country gets the chance it deserves to cross the road. But then, this really isn’t about me.
GEORGE W. BUSH: We don’t really care why the chicken crossed the road.. We just want to know if the chicken is on our side of the road, or not. T he chicken is either against us, or for us. There is no middle ground here. DICK CHENEY: Where’s my gun? …