Missing history. Why?

I've recently become email buddies with an associate of my dad's from the sixties. He contacted me through our daughter-in-law's Facebook account. Like my interest in economics has driven me to be a latter-day student, his interest is history. He teaches classes and related two stories that got me to thinking about our future, relative to our knowledge of history.

As he greeted some middle school students, their teacher said, “We are here to learn about World War Eleven.” My friend then abandoned the use of Roman numerals when referring to the world wars.

Several times my friend was asked, “Didn't the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor because we dropped the atomic bombs on them?”

This brings to my mind what information we use to make decisions. As I mentioned in the last column, information and emotion can radically effect a decision. When I read history today I find the feeble amount of knowledge I have has dis-qualified me as a voter. One of the most frequent comments I receive about this column is, “Thanks. I didn't know that.”

I was in my thirties when I first learned about the Kulaks. The Kulaks were peasants who were wealthy enough to own land, hire labor, and sell their produce in Ukraine during the Bolshevik Revolution. The Kulaks were “hesitating” allies of the revolution. They resisted Stalin's forced collectivization.

In 1929, land was taken from the owners and became the property of “the people.” The government dictated crop-ping changes from familiar crops to crops such as sugar beets and cotton. Many acres went unharvested because of poor administration and lack of knowledge. The peasants resisted the change and were punished through confiscation of their crops. Farmers who were discovered to have hid-den crops were shot. It was even illegal to glean fields for produce that was missed at harvest.

The Holodormor, as the famine was called, killed 3 to 12 million people. I never learned of it in school. “Kulak” and “Holodormor” are not recognized by my Open Office spell checker. Hmmm.

What is the difference be-tween the Holodormor and the Holocaust?

The Holocaust was based on ethnic prejudice. The Ho-lodormor was based on “class struggle.” The Jews were por-trayed as greedy exploiters to gain public support for their extermination. But now The Holocaust is solely depicted as an ethnic tragedy.

The Holodormor was based on envy of wealth. The peas-ants who were successful enough to hire help or provide necessities to the people in exchange for income were branded as “greedy blood-suckers.”

The reason those terrible catastrophes are viewed differ-ently today is to justify theft based on success. Racial, reli-gious, and other “identities” are even viewed as legitimate recipients of such theft. Suc-cessful people however, be-came successful through mak-ing life better for others; unless that success was gained through force or fraud (which is entirely possible with the vast maze of laws which few of us understand).

The Kulaks of today are the workers and business owners, who sell their goods and ser-vices to willing buyers. Their livelihoods are in danger be-cause few people understand that this safety net we all ex-pect, has to come from some-where. To put that burden on the smartest and most ambi-tious among us is a road to extinction.

Any responses to The Alternative may be sent as a letter to the editor or to Fritz’s email address 4selfgovernment@gmail.com. His blog, www.alternativebyfritz.com, is now being updated regularly. It's diverse, like the universities claim to be.