In our blog of November 12, 2020 entitled “Individual Responsibility” we saw that one person by themselves cannot change the world. It takes a group of people committed to an idea. We saw that Hitler alone was not responsible for the Holocaust but thousands of others shared his vision and helped him carry it out.
This lesson is reinforced in Anne Applebaum’s book Red Famine which documents how Stalin deliberately removed all food from the Ukraine in order to starve the kulaks into the collectivization of their farms and to teach them resistance was futile. It is estimated that around three million people died.
As Applebaum points out in her book, it took thousands of people to implement the policies that caused the starvation of the Ukrainian people; Stalin did not do it on his own. [1] It took activist teams to search all the farms and remove anything edible; it took neighbors iinforming on neighbors. [2] It took the extraordinary effort of the international press together with government officials to deny the famine ever existed, to cover it up. [3]
This event is history and there is nothing we can do to change it. What we can do is to learn from it. The most important question for us to ask ourselves is how would we respond if we were ordered by our government to take an action against strangers or even our neighbors, knowing full well we were condemning them to death? It would take courage to refuse to carry out such government orders and it might even cost us our life. What an incident such as this would reveal to us is the type of person we really are. Would we condemn another person to death to save our own life, to secure for us and our family a better future? Or would we heed the words of Jesus: “For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?” (Luke 9:25 ESV)
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[1] Anne Applebaum. Red Famine. New York: Anchor Books, 2017, pp. 253-254.
[2] Ibid., pp. 264-286.
[3] Ibid., pp. 354-359. Also watch the movie Mr. Jones to see how the international news media handled this human tragedy.
