Read Time:6 Minute, 39 Second

The world has ended before.

Just look up the word Holodomor, an engineered famine that killed anywhere from 4 to 10 million people in Ukraine during a single winter. The word means mass murder by starvation. Ukraine officially considers it genocide, as do a handful of other countries. Here’s what happened: Under Stalin, The Soviet Union forced the country to over-harvest in order to meet staggering grain quotas, which led to famine. In other words, they stole another country’s crops. Then they stormed into homes and confiscated food. Left with nothing, people turned to cannibalism.

We’re not just talking about a few cases. Thousands of ordinary, educated, innocent people killed and ate each other. Parents had to decide if they were going to become meat for their children.

It makes you sick to read about.

Imagine living it.

We let history repeat itself.

There’s a few reasons why a lot of people don’t know about the Holodomor. The Soviet Union banned discussion of it. They also hid as much of the true story as they could. There’s another reason…

It’s a harsh lesson in humanity.

It’s bad enough to learn about events like The Holocaust. It’s something else to grapple with the fact that, throughout history, on varying scales, world leaders have been invading other countries and pillaging their resources, murdering their own citizens through the most appalling means, including children, and coming up with justifications for it.

Stalin didn’t just steal Ukraine’s food. He didn’t just subject them to famine and mass murder by starvation. He told them they deserved it. He told them it was their fault. He blamed the famine on farmers for hiding food. He accused people of eating their own children.

He called them barbaric.

It’s a hard lesson that Stalin murdered upwards of 20 million people while trying to modernize and industrialize Russia. It’s hard to see that his crimes were ecological and environmental, and those ecological crimes killed millions. It’s hard to read about gulags and secret police rounding up innocents by the thousands, for all kinds of reasons, even not clapping for his birthday. It’s even harder to accept Stalin is just the worst, most obvious example of a common theme in humanity.

He’s not the only monster.

He’s a pattern.

It’s especially hard to accept that your country, regardless of where you live, has engaged in similar acts. It’s especially hard to read about Hitler and Stalin, and then learn your own leaders committed war crimes and acts of genocide against entire generations. It’s especially hard to learn about after you’ve spent most of your life being taught to worship them as your founding fathers, as heroes who always told the truth, even when they chopped down a cherry tree or broke someone’s plow.

Hard, but necessary.

Genocide is happening everywhere.

Vladimir Putin is one particular kind of monster.

He’s Stalin 2.0.

No, he’s not a communist. Then again, neither was Stalin. If you ask me, the political philosophy these men fall back on is just a bunch of bullshit they use to justify their own psychopathic violence.

It’s hard to estimate Putin’s death count. Like Stalin, a lot of the blood on his hands didn’t come by way of straight up executions. It comes from policy decisions, which both Putin and Stalin made knowing very well how many people they would kill. In that sense, he’s not very different from the CEOs and billionaires who’ve pressured our government into ignoring the most deadly and unpredictable disease we’ve ever faced, which promises to kill and permanently disable millions. He’s not that different from the robber barons of the gilded age, or gilded age 2.0.

The word “genocide” is open to interpretation. According to the Oxford Dictionary, it simply means the deliberate and targeted killing of a large number of people, among a particular nation or group.

The group could be defined by religion. They might be defined by ethnicity, by social class, or by occupation.

We’re living through our own dark times now, with autocrats and kleptocrats and technocrats making all kinds of decisions that leave us in poverty, that expose us to deadly diseases, that break our hospitals, that subject our children to relentless daily trauma, that feed our lives and our futures into shredding machines of various political and economic doctrines. And when it all goes wrong, they blame us.

Every. Single. Time.

The wishful thinkers are in on it, too.

Here’s an interesting detail about The Holodomor: Ukrainian farmers tried to warn Stalin’s bureaucrats about over-farming.

They didn’t listen.

They engaged in exactly the kind of wishful thinking and false hope that we see so much of now. They dismissed warnings about a harsh winter as “doomsaying.” Soviet idiots forced their version of “normal,” along with their grain quotas and productivity expectations, down Ukraine’s throat, then sat back and judged them for the fallout.

History explains why all these wishful thinkers and positivity nuts piss us off so much when they pop up to accuse us of pessimism and negative thinking. As the record shows, dictators and their propaganda machines use positive thinking as a weapon to neutralize criticism. They drag it out to alleviate themselves from accountability.

That’s why we’re so skeptical of it.

Things are bad right now.

They’re bad because a handful of wealthy, elite assholes are working us to death. They’re strip mining the world for its last little bit of resources. They’re forcing everyone to produce more than they can, and it’s leading to a worldwide murder by starvation.

The oligarchs don’t just live in Russia. They’re everywhere. Likewise, the poor people don’t just live in places like Sudan or Afghanistan, where parents are now selling their own children for food. They’re everywhere, too. You just have to know where to look. These places that fragile suburbanites describe as “dangerous,” are really just the pockets of crime and poverty our economic system has created, and knowingly maintains.

Capitalism profits from despair.

It engineers trauma.

There’s more than one apocalypse.

The apocalypse isn’t some catastrophe that happens suddenly. It’s happening right in front of us, slowly, with plenty of chances to stop it.

Ukraine understands this.

They’ve been through an apocalypse. It’s not so far back in their history. Every year, while Americans celebrate Thanksgiving with football and urgent shopping, Ukraine observes Holodomor, a time when a brutal dictator starved them. That’s why they’re fighting like hell for freedom. They’re not going to let someone else put them through that ever again.

This struggle is going on everywhere.

Ukraine is a country of heroes right now. They’re the ones standing up to a bully and an abuser. Anyone who’s ever been bullied or abused knows that once you’re free, you’ll do anything to avoid going back. We know that the apocalypse isn’t some Hollywood script. It’s the kind of pain and suffering that doesn’t make for good entertainment. It’s the kind of atrocities that we’re tempted to overlook and wish away.

It has happened before.

Call it the apocalypse. Call it armageddon. Call it WWIII. Call it whatever you want. It’s happening right now. Everywhere we look, the rich and powerful are abusing us and destroying our homes through all kinds of injustices, many of them environmental, and irreversible.

It’s not that hard to stop any of this.

The best news is that by saving ourselves, by learning to survive and be happy with less, by practicing sustainability, and demanding it from our leaders, by refusing to accept “normal,” we are also saving the world.