Thursday, February 23, 2017

Bitter Harvest

13 comments:

  1. What do you think you are doing promoting cheap propaganda from Hollywood full of lies and distortions designed to engender hatred between peoples?

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    1. It wasn't all that cheap. Looks to have been a 30 million dollar movie. As to why I'm posting it. To discuss either the forced starvation itself or the propaganda that pulls in Soviet figures against a modern Russia that isn't Communist any longer.

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    2. The Soviet famine of the winter of 1932/33 was not a forced starvation. It was not a genocide directed at Ukrainians but occurred across Southern Russia and Kazakhstan as well

      To rewrite it as a genocide is malignant. In any case the Ukrainian SSR was run by Ukrainians and for over half the existence of the USSR the leader of the USSR was Ukrainian and this event occurred under Stalin a Georgian in any case

      Americans conflate USSR with Russia when it suits their propagandistic purposes and this tale of genocide in Ukraine is historical revisionism written in the USA to create a rift between Russia and Ukraine

      And if you think the USA in the 1930s was paradise on earth compared to the USSR in the same era, I have very bad news for you - it was just as cruel, probably crueler if you were a Black living in the South and millions of Americans were displaced from their farms and forced to move to greener pastures

      And men on chain gangs were flogged while the electric chair and the gas chambers worked overtime

      Why not make a movie about the Bengal famine of 1943 when the British took so much of India's harvests to feed their home population and troops in the field that millions of Indians starved?

      Or one about Iraq in the 90s and the mass death that occurred there under Bill Clinton's sanctions regime

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    3. Butthurtmuch? Or just reading too much into this post?

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  2. the Holodomor was a policy of a mad Georgian but somehow the Russians get blamed for it.

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    1. In the same way a mad Austrian gave the Germans a bad rap.

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    2. Yeah, Stalin did it all by himself. He personally drove out to take everyone's grain and everything. A lot of energy, those Georgians.

      That said, this movie does look pretty bad. Yes, the topic is important and should be widely discussed, but this looks like a third-rate imitation of third-rate Hollywoodisms.

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  3. I think it will be an important film that brings to popular attention a terrible event in history.

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    1. Most Russians think the USA is about to attack their country and it is certainly behaving as though it is

      Exceptionally silly films based on bogus history demonizing Russia will do nothing to calm the situation

      But then it is obvious that the American foreign policy establishment wants confrontation with Russia.

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    2. Andrei, if it demonizes Communists, I'm all for it. Russia could use a little humility on this score. And how do you know this film is "exceptionally silly"? As compared to what? And does the world really need lectures from Russians on demonizing others and silly films?

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  4. Apparently you are unaware that we have a new president who can't stop fawning all over Putin and Russia. Perhaps Russian fears of US attack is Russian propaganda.

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  5. The Irish still remember with bitterness the Potato Famine and rightly fault the English for it, but that anger would be worse if the English also denied their leading role in that tragedy.

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  6. This review of the movie, which also explains its unusual financing, is pretty amusing...

    http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/film/bitter-harvest-review-an-epic-monstrosity-that-s-so-bad-it-s-almost-unmissable-1.2983494

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