Political Quotes

“this resolution recognizes and remembers the victims of one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century, namely, the more than 5 million men, women and children in Ukraine who were deliberately starved to death by the Soviet regime in the terrible decade of the 1930s. That regime perpetrated many horrors in its seven decades of existence, but surely this must rank among its most damnable. It is important to stress that this famine was not a natural phenomenon, but was instead deliberately engineered. Virtually all sustenance in the targeted area was seized, even as the availability of food elsewhere in the Soviet Union remained sufficient to prevent the famine. The export of grain never ceased even at the height of the death tolls. Nor was this the result of mere indifference to life, but an uncaring regime. Soviet troops and secret police forces were deployed to forcibly prevent the starving population from leaving the area in the desperate search for food. A sentence of mass death had been pronounced and was mercilessly enforced. The purpose of the artificial famine was to break resistance to the regime's policy of forced collectivization of agriculture, but this was coupled with a murderous determination to destroy Ukraine's national identity, which the regime considered as a mortal threat to its empire and, therefore, brutally suppressed. There is a legacy of shame that the West must bear.…”