One Frame Does NOT Fit All

I decline to take part in the "my mass atrocity is better (i.e. worse) than your mass atrocity" conversation; I leave that mug's game to others. I would note, however, that history is often more complicated than you think it is, and the problem with fitting genocide into a "human rights" frame is that sometimes things don't fit too well. Such is the case with the Ukrainians' Holodomor, the mass atrocity perpetrated by Stalinist Russia in the early 1930s. In their book Red Star Over Hollywood, Ronald and Allis Radosh write about a cockamanie 1943 film--a big hit at the time--called North Star. Scripted by ardent Communist Lillian Hellman, the movie told the story of happy, rosy-cheeked Ukrainian peasants whose collectivist paradise is destroyed when the Nazis invade. Setting the record straight, the Radoshes remark that

The reality, of course, is that the Ukrainians were among the strongest resisters to collectivization. Farmers broke their tools and killed their animals rather than hand them over to the state. In the mass starvation that followed, Stalin withheld all government assistance, producing a state-sponsored famine. A total of six million people died. In the Ukraine alone, four million peasants lost their lives. When the war broke out, many Ukrainians unsurprisingly saw Hitler's invading army not as oppressors but as liberators. Villages like those in Hellman's film certainly did not become joyous Soviet partisans united in fighting the Nazis.

Ukrainians welcoming Nazis (who incinerated Jews) as liberators: it's hard to know how to fit that unfortunate tidbit into the "human rights" mausoleum. Most likely, because it doesn't fit in the "human rights"/victimhood frame, it will simply be ignored.