Commentary

The Holodomor (meaning death by hunger) was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932–1933 that killed millions of people, primarily Ukrainian peasants. It was part of a wider Soviet famine (roughly 1930–1934) that also affected parts of Russia and Kazakhstan, but the Ukrainian famine was intensified by specific policies directed at Ukraine.⁠

Under Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leadership forcibly collectivized agriculture starting in the late 1920s. Peasants were compelled to join collective farms, “kulaks” (better-off farmers). Resisters were deported or repressed. Whole villages were blacklisted and their grain confiscated. An internal passport system and border controls were created that prevented peasants from leaving famine areas.

Mortality was hideous, peaking in the spring and summer of 1933. Today we have all the evidence of widespread starvation, mass deaths, and cases of cannibalism.⁠ All told, as many as 5 million died. It was a genocide.

What is especially remarkable about this historical fact is that no one in the West knew anything about it while it was happening. U.S. newspapers had reporters on the ground in Russia but they consistently wrote stories that either ignored or debunked the claims of famine.

New York Times journalist Walter Duranty, the Moscow bureau chief from 1922 to 1936, had won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting. “There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be,” he wrote. “Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.”

As it turns out, he had a good relationship with the Soviet state and clung tightly to his privileges and access, the price of which was to turn a blind eye to suffering. It was other stringers like Malcom Muggeridge of the Manchester Guardian, following the lead of Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, who dared reveal these truths to the world, and he was largely dismissed at the time as a conservative alarmist.

How was this censorship possible? The sources of information were few and they were captured. No one on the ground possessed any technology to get the word out. There were no cell phone cameras or social media accounts to document anything. So it all happened while the victims were silenced and those who might have revealed the truth stayed quiet.

My mind keeps returning to this horrifying case because we like to think that this would never be possible in our times, not with all our information sources, not with all our social media, not with all our cameras and our ability to monitor the world around us in real time. Surely censorship on this level is impossible now.

I’m not so sure.

In December 2020, the U.S. government and the companies it backed released a shot promising to protect people from a virus that was circulating. Millions rushed to take it out of fear, and also a desire for life to get back to normal. After all, the whole society had been locked down since the previous March. The promise was that taking this potion would make everything get back to normal.

Some people worried about safety. The agency CDC responded with a service called V-safe. Sign up for it, report your experience, and if anything should go wrong, the agency will call you back and explain what’s happening and try to help. The very existence of the program boosted confidence. More than 10 million people rushed to sign up for it.

A robot contacted them on the first day, the next day, the following week, and all the way up to a year. The CDC did not tell anyone but there was no one reading those messages and reports. Sure, they ran some quick data scans and offered rosy reports in publications coming out over the following months.

What no one knew at the time is that something horrifying was happening out of sight. A third of respondents reported side effects that interrupted their lives. Between 7 and 10 percent of people had to seek some medical care. That’s the people who could afford it. Many of them could not. There were cries for help, suicide ideation, and death.

The worst among these reports chronicle splitting headaches, missed or excessive menstrual bleeding, screaming rings in the ears, rashes and bleeding welts on the body, a racing heart that would reach 150 and higher even at night, loss of mobility, growing blindness, palpitations, memory loss, confusion and fatigue, all symptoms that cause people to stop working, leading to despair.

The CDC had an automatic message for these people sent by email or by an automated phone call: call your doctor. That’s it. Many did. The doctor would have no idea so he would refer those injured to a specialist who would order tests and they mostly came back negative unless a cancer had shown up, which often happened. Many of these people report spending 20–50K on medical care with no results.

How many are we talking about here? Such injuries were not “very, very rare,” as Fauci promised. They were pervasive and devastating, for a shot that did not stop infection in any case and was not even needed by healthy children and adults if it had worked. Tens of thousands at least, that we know of, were likely harmed even for life, but possibly hundreds of thousands or millions were hit with adverse events, once you extrapolate the data to those about whom we do not know.

The victims mostly believed that their cases were highly unusual. The news media never spoke about the subject. Some people tried to start Facebook groups. When the company found out about them, they faced pressure from the White House to take the groups down. They did, one after another, thousands of them. When someone on Twitter tried to report this, their accounts were deleted. It was the same on all social media. They were all censored. As incredible as it seems, this population-wide wave of pharmaceutical injury and death was actually silenced.

As a result, these people—our families, friends, neighbors, fellow citizens—suffered and often died alone with no acknowledgement that this was iatrogenic. Doctors who tried to sound the alarm were investigated by their medical boards.

Reporters who wanted to cover this were told no by their editors. The editors who wanted to cover it were told no by their publishers. The publishers who wanted to cover it were told no by their advertisers, most of whom were pharmaceutical companies making money from the problem.

Suspicious attorneys began to file freedom-of-information requests. The CDC and FDA refused them. They had to go to court. This took years of litigation. Finally, the agency coughed up the results. We now have more than 10 million pages of data that they tried to keep silent.

We know now that reports of possible injury had reached 700,000 by Sept. 10, 2021. On this date, the president of the United States said of people who refused the shot: “What more is there to wait for? What more do you need to see? … We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin.”

Scary message. Many people who had resisted finally stepped up. Look at what happened.

I’ve spent 15 hours reading the compilation of V-safe text fields aloud in a show on X. I have to space this out over time to keep my sanity. By my calculation, I have another 45 hours of reading to go. All of this is gathered in the Brownstone book called “Cries for Help,” two volumes of what is surely among the most grim and tragic pieces of nonfiction ever published.

I’m still in shock from learning the full truth, and in further shock that so few are willing to speak of this. There are of course many examples of mass tragedy and injury that was hushed up by the regime and the people entrusted to report it. The Holomodor was an example in the 1930s. We think that cannot happen again. Based on what I know now, it absolutely has happened again.

Censorship today requires a great deal of complication: bribes and blackmails, relying on careerism, depending on people’s desire to maintain the good graces of their superiors and powerful industrial interests, industrial cartels, and a strange philosophy of compliance before freedom.

Censorship today requires far more than merely issuing edicts. It relies on people who are afraid to break censorship with the truth.

Bless those who speak out. Now and always.

How Censorship Works