this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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Wikipedia still has up Nazi propaganda in regards to the "Holodomor" with old or cherrypicked or outright false statements from sources calling it a genocide when in fact it's widely recognized as, basically, a fuckup of Soviet policy under Stalin. Not genocide.
The "double genocide" shit is Nazi propaganda and yet Wikipedia legitimizes it. Any ignorant person who googles it after reading "derp derp Stalin killed 10 kazillion people!" Would find themselves quickly on a webpage "confirming" that false belief.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor link for anyone curious.
Wikipedia can be decent for some stuff, but while shit like this remains on the site, I dunno, it can't be trusted in many regards.
Please stop forcing me to defend Wikipedia. π₯Ί
Btw,
Holodomor:
Holocaust:
The opening paragraphs from the respective articles.
Spot the difference.
more neutral wording would have been just 'famine'. there was nothing deliberate about it and the famine killed not just Ukrainians but Russians too.
and 'holodomor' itself is a term which makes people think its like holocaust. 'Communism as bad or worse than Nazism' is historical revisionism.
It's man-made because the severity of the famine was undeniably affected by policy. I don't think there's anything biased about that. What it means, and the extent to which it was deliberate, if at all, should be expanded upon in the article proper.
The usage of "Holodomor" is so common that it's perfectly reasonable for an encyclopedia to use it. It's the article title most people are going to be looking for, after all. But it's worth noting that the very first section (etymology) has a paragraph about how Holodomor is different from the Holocaust due to no evidence of intentional extermination.
wikipedia could have Holodomor redirect to Soviet Famine but they don't.
why call it man-made then? sure you can argue that man-made doesn't mean 'deliberate' but thats not how most people would interpret it. 'famine' is the clear neutral term.
where is mention of 'man-made' in Bengal Famine?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
where is the criticism is British policy?
If you only read the first paragraph and ignore the rest of the article you deserve to not understand anything.
Feel free to add it. I'll support the change
misleading people is good, got it.
First, the page is protected, also good luck getting that past mayo ass mods.
I don't think it's misleading. Distinguishing between famines caused solely by external factors, and famines caused in part or in whole by policy, seems entirely reasonable. I was responding to your assertion that someone might misunderstand the meaning of "man-made".
The biases of Wikipedia reflect the biases of its editors (there are Wikipedia articles about that). It could be a great tool for radicalization, but I suppose it's easier to just complain about it.
i do not wish to spend the rest of my life in edit-wars with crackers. i've already had the pleasure of having to talk to these annoying turds in neoliberal economics related articles.
There haven't really been that many famines throughout history (at the very least in the last few centuries) that have been caused by there not being enough food to eat per se. Most of them are caused by food being distributed away (either directly via railroads or "indirectly" by market forces and speculation) towards places that already have enough food.
There is no such thing as a famine "caused solely by external factors". The wording is misleading because it implies there is such a thing as a famine that isn't man made and therefore the one that occurred in the Soviet Union being called "man-made" is already a deliberate attempt at drawing a distinction between it another famines. It is a fact that in all famines there is a human factor necessary to compound on environmental factors in order to cause a famine. You don't get famines that occur due to nature alone. The problem with this article is that by starting out with such language the myth is reinforced that there was something exceptionally malicious about this famine.
the human component of the famine is disputed by (even liberal) historians to this day. Wikipedia, as an encyclopedia promoting a No point-of-view policy, should not be so strict on classifying the famine like this in the very opening paragraph. Additionally it's accepted that non-human factors played into the famine, so it's also wrong to imply the famine was strictly man-made.
Unless they mean man-made to say that the kulaks burned their grain, but somehow I doubt that. Still, it does raise a question of ambiguity: who was responsible for the man-made factor? In my opinion, this should then be left out of the opening paragraph because it can confuse the reader, and developed in the article.
There were many factors
Natural factors because the year of the famine was not good for crops.
Kulak factor resulted in destruction of crops and farm animals.
Government incompetence in calculations and policy favouring cities over rural areas.
Keep in mind that once Collectivisation was in full effect, the famine situation in the USSR improved drastically.
Yeah policy exacerbating the problems of the famine through mismanagement still shouldn't be described simply as man-made. At best you could call it a mismanaged famine. Man-made ascribes something deliberate to it.
It would be like calling the deaths by covid in America man-made. Which is sort of true, the US government engaged in negligence and let a million people die. But if I said "covid is man-made" that would be a poor way of framing it, right? It would sound like someone deliberately designed the disease.
FDR's Dustbowl genocide
Holodomor is under their genocide collection. It 100% wasn't a genocide, it shares no umbrella with the Holocaust. If anything the slightly less direct language shows that you can only distort reality so much.
I felt the same way until I started trying to correct errors in my professional field of research and they stubbornly refused to fix the errors despite a wealth of primary literature showing that the current scientific consensus contradicts what was written on Wikipedia.
As useful as it is for science, it has serious issues. I wish I could say I haven't found many similar errors or poor/outright contradictory sourcing over the last decade. They need to seriously examine their own biases and restructure their editing process. Wikipedia is one of my favorite human projects, but that doesn't mean we should ignore its flaws.
I was more specifically referring to the part in the table portion (whatever that's called. The very top first area) that says something like "recognized as a genocide by X number countries". It's just putting that out there right off the bat for the average person going "wait a second... I thought this was... ah! Yeah! I knew it! Genocide denier!" My faith in humans to read beyond that table is... low.
But even if they scroll to the intro that you quoted, I mean, that is such a lightly veiled accusation. Like if a neutral statement is a 5/10, I'd say that's 7/10 towards accusatory. Maybe that's my bias. Including "man-made" in the intro, I dunno, I wouldn't do it ESPECIALLY when it's now become a hot issue for liberals and right wingers to call the Holodomor a genocide. The author is just fueling their beliefs, imo.
I suppose this delves into ethics and such around authorship of pages like this and their responsibility to limit misunderstandings and false narrative propagation. I personally believe science and history writers, even if writing a summary for a wiki, do have this responsibility to make clear that while there might be controversy on a subject, it's manufactured controversy. Like a Wikipedia on abortion I would expect (I haven't looked) to NOT mention anything about pro-life, God, etc. until some later section specifically labeled "Controversies" and then lay out why people have an issue with it from purely non-scientific, non-medical, purely theological and ideological bases. The same should be done regarding the Holodomor. It can be in the introduction even, but briefly mentioned with something like "some far right coalitions in certain countries have attempted to classify the famine as genocide for ideological reasons." That's a factual statement. I'm sorry if that hurts right wingers feelers when they read it on Wikipedia BUT ITS TRUE and putting up vaguely worded things and starting off the article by saying "all these countries call it a genocide!" is representing the right wing narrative.
There's other examples on Wikipedia of doing misinformation or "kinda true if you ask the right wingers" shit. The Korean War is an easy one. It says the DPRK started the war when it crossed the border (they mean the US-created 38th parallel which neither side considered significant or a border). History shows that the US and US controlled SK instigated the war and the DPRK was defending its fledgling democracy. See a problem with accusing defenders of being attackers? I do. And it just happens to be the US's official stance on the war... which... do I need to say the US is lying? Does that need to be said?
Anyway, this was a bit scattered, but my point summarized is Wikipedia tends to always take pro-US stances and anti-USSR (and adjacent countries) stances, which is a big fucking problem considering the US constantly lied during the Cold War making these narratives up and now they're repeated forever on Wikipedia. I'm not a fan.
It's not necessarily cherry picked, only a statement of who considers it what
Article seems pretty in line with your description of the event as well
No that kind of language is dangerous and also false, it'd be like saying that evolution/young earth creationism is disputed. Like technically it is but the people that are disputing are arguing it out of purely ideological reasons. The Soviet famine of 1932-1933 is no longer disputed since the opening of the Soviet archives, even Robert Conquest a person that was a huge anti-communist, so anti-communist that he was in support of the contras, has walked back his Cold War language since then and has said that the soviets didn't purposely cause it.
It'd be like if wiki had an article up about abortion and starts with "Abortions are considered illegal in x countries" and " [.....] whether abortions constitute murder remains in dispute", and the article listing like abortion numbers and stuff like that.
The article is not written from a neutral position because the average american has consumed a ton of cold war propaganda and a lot of Wikipedia has really bad slants because the overwhelming majority of its user base identifies as male (80+%), and works in STEM and/or are a white-collar worker, on top of that people from the USA are the biggest user group so their biases will dominate, like I say that as someone that managed to edit some articles on Wikipedia in the past and has given up because it is incredibly tedious if you are going against the STEM/USA/Male biases that come up over and over again.
The article on Evolution has an entire section about the controversy, with links to dedicated articles about it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution
I mean thanks for making my point I guess? Creationism doesn't come up during the first few paragraphs at all because it's not a relevant theory, people read the first couple of paragraphs and usually just skip the rest and that's completely fine, so let's see what the first few paragraphs are about:
1st Paragraph: What evolution is 2nd Paragraph: Who came up with the theory of evolution. 3rd Paragraph: Competing ideas of evolutions and models and such. 4th Paragraph: LUCA, fossile records and general stuff 5th Paragraph: Ongoing study of various aspects of evolution.
So 'dispute' comes up after long and very good and thorough explanations of evolution like people need to scroll through a ton of other stuff before they get to creationists. Creationism isn't presented as this grand other theory it's waaaaay down and presented as '[...] but it returned in pseudoscientific form as intelligent design (ID), to be excluded once again in the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case.'
Which article do you think addresses their topic better, which article do you think has a higher overall quality? Again Wikipedia will have a generally good quality if it's in the STEM field but once they get to the 'soft sciences' the quality drops like a ton and many wikipedia users will go "I know how to do physics let me just write a short article about this event I learned about in high school".
The article in question is of a poor quality and it pushes the idea "The Soviets were just as bad as the Nazis" and we can see that effect all over the world now with the Canadian government giving a standing ovation to a SS-Nazi, SΓΆder in bavaria being ok with 'ex-nazi' Aiwanger and any other place I haven't heard about but I'm sure someone will tell me about nazi normalization happening in other 'civilized nations'.
For this, the source from wiki https://www.dw.com/en/european-parliament-recognizes-ukraine-holodomor-as-genocide/a-64107714 from 15 December 2022. What happened in 2022 I wonder? Why all of sudden it's a genocide, what happened from 1933 to 2021?