A Word for an Ethnocidal Atrocity
Holodomor (Голодомо́р) • noun • (huh-loh-doh-morr)
Definition: Death by starvation
Origin: Ukrainian
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My book THE CRIME WITHOUT A NAME was released on October 12, 2021 and NPR has picked it as one of the top books of the year!
You can order the book—including the audiobook—and watch recordings of my book tour discussions at Eaton and the New York Public Library at thecrimewithoutaname.com.
It is never problematic to learn new words, but it does fascinate me how the need for new language often derives from the necessity to create words to articulate types of terror and destruction that had been previously unimaginable and/or unnamed.
The work of SCL derives from the creation of the word ethnocide. Despite America frequently talking about slavery and racism, our society had never cultivated the word to accurately describe the nature of this atrocity. It is common to describe slavery and racism as immoral, but there is little clarity about what “immoral” truly means.
Ethnocide—the destruction of a people’s culture while keeping the people—precisely describes the nature of the atrocities that are the transatlantic slave trade, chattel slavery, Jim Crow, and their countless derivatives that still shape American life. By precisely naming the atrocity, the unimaginable becomes imaginable, and you soon realize that you now need a new vocabulary for articulating the many nuances and attributes of this previously unimaginable aspect of existence. You also need a new vocabulary for articulating the good world you wish to create in order to combat this newly defined, previously unimaginable atrocity.
Our newsletter and the more than 100 words we’ve explored so far demonstrate the importance of this new vocabulary.
I’m highlighting this process of linguistic creation because this week’s word, Holodomor, was created by Ukrainians to describe a previously unimaginable atrocity inflicted upon them by Russia (technically the USSR at the time) from 1932-1933. Also, Vox published a great video this week about the Holodomor that I highly recommend.
Terror and violence often thrive in spaces without language, so it is imperative that we understand how a language committed to articulating the truth helps make the world a better place.
The Task of Articulating Terror
In the 1930s, Ukraine was not an independent nation and instead was part of the USSR, which was led by Joseph Stalin at the time. Ukraine has some of the most fertile lands in the world, and to this day is still commonly referred to as the “breadbasket of Europe” due to its capacity to grow large amounts of wheat and grain. Since Ukraine was part of the USSR, Stalin wanted to control the production of Ukrainian agriculture and his agenda resulted in the starvation and death of millions of Ukrainians in less than two years.
The fertility of Ukrainian land meant farming was the livelihood of many Ukrainians, but these were not large industrial farms. Smaller familial farms populated Ukraine and cultivated a culture of self-sufficiency where people were accustomed to growing everything they needed to live off of.
Stalin had no concern for Ukrainian culture and instead wanted the USSR’s Communist government to control and rapidly industrialize Ukrainian agriculture to fuel the economic growth of the USSR. Stalin’s disregard for Ukrainian life as he implemented his plan caused the Holodomor.
Prior to implementing the policies that created the Holodomor, Stalin also implemented an agenda of killing and silencing Ukraine’s intelligentsia who were the intellectual core of Ukrainian culture. By destroying or decapitating the figurative head of Ukraine, he believed that Ukrainians would be less inclined to rebel and more susceptible to Russian subjugation.
Once Stalin implemented the rapid industrialization of Soviet agriculture, he intentionally set impossible quotas and inflicted harsh punishments on those who could not meet his demands. For the Ukrainian farmers who failed to hit the quotas, Soviet soldiers would confiscate every ounce of grain and Ukrainians faced up to 10 years in prison if they were caught hiding grain.
Stalin’s policies literally deprived Ukrainians of their lifeforce and at least three million people in Ukraine died of starvation, along with millions of others in neighboring Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan.
During and after this atrocity, Stalin also disseminated language to downplay the severity of the crisis. He prevented journalists from visiting Ukraine and expelled journalists who wanted to tell the truth. The Holodomor was commonly described as a “food shortage.” Vladimir Putin is using similar propaganda tactics today regarding the current Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Today, the Holodomor is often described as a genocide, but the word genocide was not coined by Raphael Lemkin until 1944. That amounts to more than a decade without having the language to even attempt to describe this atrocity. Despite many people describing the Holodomor as a genocide, I believe that ethnocide is a more accurate description.
Genocide and ethnocide can have similar manifestations of terror, but we cannot forget that they have vastly different end goals. A genocide aspires to terrorize, exterminate, or forcefully remove a society of people to create an environment contingent upon their absence. Ethnocide, however, aspires to destroy a people’s culture so that ethnociders can create a society contingent upon their subjugation and oppression.
Stalin did not want to create a Ukraine without Ukrainians. He wanted Ukrainians to exist as Russian subjects. To accomplish this goal, he worked to destroy their culture by eradicating their intelligentsia, severing their connection to the land, dehumanizing the Ukrainian people, and implementing a reign of terror.
The Holodomor is an ethnocidal atrocity and, if Russia could commit mass violence against Ukrainians in the 1930s, we should not be surprised when they try to do it again almost one hundred years later.
Culture and the State
In my book The Crime Without a Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America, I describe that culture comes from an attachment to a physical place. One’s environment shapes their culture. The food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, and the words you create are all shaped by the place you live in and the people’s collective desire to cultivate what they need so that they can live and survive in that physical place in perpetuity.
At first, many Americans were surprised by this definition of culture because American society does not prioritize cultivating an attachment to place. The United States exists primarily as an idea or a dream, and the physical place that is the United States is more of an afterthought. Americans have no problem destroying the place in which we live if they believe that destruction aids them in their pursuit of the American Dream.
The essence of America is prioritized ahead of our existence in America, and a key facet of American essence is democracy. Americans value the idea of democracy more than whether our democracy is actually democratic. Our cultureless ethnocidal society even convinces us that democracy is our culture, when in fact America’s undemocratic democracy is merely an idea or essence that derives from our ethnocidal culture.
The distinction between culture and the state is incredibly important because culture is attached to existence and the state or government is attached to essence. This is the natural order of things, and the inversion of this order is incredibly dangerous. When the state claims to be or control the culture, it is common for the state to propagate a false, mythical, idyllic monoculture that is supposed to define all of the people within the nation. When the state propagates this faux culture, they often implement genocidal and ethnocidal terror to create this monocultural ideal.
With regards to Ukraine and Russia, it is clear that Putin and Stalin have disseminated propaganda articulating the negation or nonexistence of Ukrainian culture. They claim that Ukrainian culture is merely a derivative or subsection of Russian culture and, therefore, it needs to be absorbed within the Russian or Soviet state. This is an ethnocidal agenda.
With regards to the United States, our ethnocidal society has long propagated that Indigenous people were merely cultureless savages and that an entire continent was essentially a barren wasteland until colonizers arrived. In America, “culture” allegedly resides within European ideas and these ideas shape how we interact with the land and our fellow humans. If European ideas state that non-Europeans are at best a lesser form of humanity and the purpose of life is the acquisition of wealth and property, it will be logical for colonizers to consider non-Europeans as their property and force them to cultivate their privatized land to financially enrich the colonizers.
Since the United States has never had an authentic, cultural connection with the land, we are encouraged to believe that our culture resides within the idea of democracy, and not within our shared existence as we work together to survive in perpetuity in a specific place. Instead, our ethnocidal democracy will support division and terror such as chattel slavery and Jim Crow in order to sustain the idea of America at the expense of non-white people’s existence.
When the state tries to claim or become the culture, it becomes very easy for the state to destroy authentic culture in the name of preserving the state’s inauthentic façade of culture.
During the Holodomor, Russia attempted this culturally destructive agenda upon Ukraine and today’s invasion of Ukraine is another attempt at destroying Ukraine’s culture and turning Ukraine into a subject of Russia.
The United States is founded upon this ethnocidal agenda, and many countries today and throughout history have destroyed authentic culture so that they can replace it with their fake, fabricated idea of culture.
Essentialist philosophies such as René Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” have encouraged people to value their thoughts or capacity to think more than their own and our shared humanity, and these ideas can create a violent world as people destroy humanity to sustain their ideas or essence. Philosophies such as Ubuntu’s “I am because we are” and SCL’s “Freedom is other people” prioritizes humanity and existence ahead of ideas and essence.
By prioritizing existence, which includes culture, ahead of essence, and the various ideas of government, we will live in a much more peaceful and equitable world.
