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This is excellent. It’s a thorough, timely and very necessary analysis of the vital role of the Ukrainian Far Right diaspora in the construction of the prevailing ‘Holodomor’ narrative. It rightly concludes by noting its role in the current war, and also in the real genocide taking place in Gaza. As I was ‘privileged’ to witness it was indeed an “industry” and one that has spared no expense on slick PR and other methods to sell its product. In that advertising campaign it has indeed been successful but whether in the end the “industry” has helped develop Ukraine, or alternatively brought it to the brink of destruction, is of course open to debate.

What my family didn’t realise back in the early noughties was that the diaspora Ukrainians who suddenly entered our lives, and whose interest in our forgotten relative was at the time so welcome, weren’t quite the benign ex-pats we presumed them to be. Many of them are mentioned above.

It now turns out they were, on the whole, either Nazi collaborators or apologists for their OUN-B Nazi collaborating parents, none of whom seemed to have had any direct experience of the famine. Why? Because they all ultimately hailed from the OUN-B’s Galician heartland in Poland where no famine took place. Their aim? Well, a big part of it seems to have been to eclipse the real Holocaust they or their parents helped perpetrate by attempting to create the deflection of a Ukrainian famine super-Holocaust. To do this they set about instrumentalizing what was, without question, a terrible man-made disaster, cynically and dishonestly reframed it, not least by grossly inflating the mortality figures.

And when it came to the truth of my great uncles’ testimony they weren’t going to let its inconvenient aspects get in the way of a good myth. So they just air-brushed them out, and they continue to do so. And those inconvenient aspects pointed to an opposite conclusion, that what happened certainly couldn’t be described as a “Russian genocide” and, in Gareth's his eyes, wasn’t a ‘genocidal’ act at all. Their greatest victory in that campaign of falsification was in the propaganda film Mr Jones, a film that has fooled the world and helped fuel a war.

It wasn’t just the famine in the Soviet Ukraine that the authorities wanted kept hidden it was all the famines that Gareth reported on, it was the Great Soviet Famine in its entirety. They were hiding an embarrassing catastrophe that in the short term wasn’t a good advert for socialism, something noted well, however he found out, by Hitler at the time. But because the famine was hidden for so long, the world didn’t know what it looked like. So when it was eventually brought into the open, as it rightly had to be, it has been all the easier for Ukrainian nationalists to bring it out only partially and dress “their” famine in the garb of a “Russian genocide”. They’ve disguised it, privatized it and falsified it for political, nation-building, Russia-demonizing reasons.

It is something that has been done malevolently and whilst it is a huge disservice to my great uncle Gareth Jones, it is mainly a disservice to those who died horribly of starvation and whose deaths have been weaponized, with disastrous effects, by fascists. All credit to Moss Robeson for his painstaking research and important documentation of all this. Philip Colley, the Gareth Jones Society, www.garethjonessociety.org

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Jeffrey S. Kaye's avatar

Superb work!

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