That Old Egyptian River

Dougal MacDonald, an assistant lecturer at the University of Alberta, has been the subject of much controversial discussion recently over some posts he made on Facebook last month. In these posts he denied the historical reality of the Holodomor.

Holodomor, for those not familiar with the term, although it sounds like a neologism, a portmanteau coined to create a word similar to Holocaust, is in fact a Ukrainian term that means “killing by hunger.” It describes the same event that, before the fairly recent importation of the Ukrainian term, we English speakers called the Terror Famine. This was the man-made famine by means of which Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union killed millions of Ukrainians in 1932-33. Those interested in the history of this event are advised to read either Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-famine (1986) or Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (2017).

Mr. MacDonald described the Holodomor as a “myth” that was created and spread by the Nazis to discredit the Soviet Union. These comments led to protests by the Ukrainian Students Society, calls for him to be fired, and his being denounced on Twitter by Alberta Premier Jason Kenney.

Inevitably, comparisons have been made between Mr. MacDonald’s views and those which earned such notoriety for Ernst Zündel and James Keegstra four decades ago. The contrasts, however, strike me as being more interesting than the comparisons.

First, Mr. MacDonald’s posts unquestionably deny the Holodomor. By contrast, the majority of those who are described as Holocaust deniers by progressives, the media, Jewish activist groups, and antiracist organizations are people who have only questioned elements of the conventional Holocaust narrative such as the total number killed and the means, and regard themselves as revisionists rather than deniers.

Second, while progressives maintain that all “Holocaust deniers” are admirers of the Third Reich who through some weird sort of guilt-by-association share in that regime’s culpability for the crimes they supposedly deny, this is manifestly not the case. Paul Rassinier, one of the first “Holocaust deniers” if not the first, was himself a survivor of Buchenwald having been a part of the anti-Nazi resistance in occupied France who was later captured. In the United States, the first to give Rassinier’s revisionist arguments a hearing and a degree of acceptance, were not the Hitler worshipping followers of George Lincoln Rockwell, but the old kind of American liberals who had rebranded themselves libertarian when American liberalism went statist in the New Deal, a large percentage of whom were Jewish. Such vehement anti-statist, anti-war types as Harry Elmer Barnes and Murray N. Rothbard can hardly be credibly described as “Nazis”. A number of Christian theologians – limiting ourselves to the Protestants, R. J. Rushdooney, Gary North, and Kurt Marquart are just three of the more prominent – found Rassinier’s version of events the more convincing and spoke out against the non-revisionist version as a violation of the Ninth Commandment. These men were not Nazis or Nazi-sympathizers either.

Dougal MacDonald, however, is clearly a Communist. In this year’s Dominion Election he was the candidate for the Marxist-Leninist party in the riding of Edmonton-Strathcona, and has run for that party in previous elections as well.

Third, in response to the controversy, the University of Alberta pointed out that MacDonald was not speaking on behalf of the University and emphasized the commitment of the University to academic freedom and the freedom of its faculty and staff to express different and controversial points of view. While this is exactly the position they ought to be taking, can you imagine them talking this way if one of their instructors had been accused of denying the Holocaust rather than the Holodomor?

Maybe if his name was Mohammed.

Fourth, there is not the slightest degree of credibility to MacDonald’s Communist claim that the Holodomor is propaganda manufactured by the Nazis. The Terror Famine itself began in 1932. In March of the following year, Welsh journalist Gareth Jones went to the Soviet Union, snuck into the Ukraine, and recorded what he personally observed of the famine in his diaries. At the end of that month he issued a press release informing the world of the Terror Famine. At this point in time Adolf Hitler had only been Chancellor of Germany for three months. The newspapers that carried Jones’ report, such as the Manchester Guardian, the flagship newspaper of classical English liberalism, were hardly sympathetic to the Nazi movement, much less controlled by it. Indeed, the same newspaper had published an earlier, anonymous account of the famine, which had appeared two weeks prior to Hitler’s becoming Chancellor! The author of the anonymous account was Malcolm Muggeridge who had travelled to the Soviet Union the previous year at a time when he was still sympathetic to the Communist cause. Furthermore, the work of confirming these early accounts and providing a full, detailed, account of the Terror Famine was carried out by researchers with no ties to the Third Reich or sympathy with that regime, decades after it had fallen and been utterly discredited.

Should, however, someone wish to maintain that the Soviet regime exaggerated the accounts of Nazi atrocities for its own purposes, he would have plenty of grounds upon which to base this claim.

First, the Soviet Union was a very active participant in the Nuremberg Trials. They provided a judge, an alternate judge, and a chief prosecutor to the proceedings, as did the UK, USA and France. American Senate Majority Leader Robert A. Taft observed at the time that the kind of justice being administered in these trials far more closely resembled the Soviet notion of justice than the Anglo-Saxon justice of the UK and the USA. This suggests that Soviet influence over the trials far exceeded that of its one-vote-in-four. The “confessions” portion of the evidence for the Nazi atrocities is largely taken from these trials.

Second, it was the Soviets and not the free Western Allies, who “liberated” the part of Europe in which the death camps were located and kept that part of Europe under Communist slavery until the fall of the Iron Curtain. (1) This meant that for forty years after the war, access to the places like Auschwitz that were the sites of Nazi atrocities, and hence to a major source of information about what went on there, was under Soviet control.

Third, the Soviets were demonstrably spreading disinformation about Nazi war crimes and through this means quite successfully manipulating Western governments and Holocaust victim groups to act as their unwitting agents against those the Soviet regime had marked for revenge as late as the 1970s and 1980s. It was in these decades, the last of the Cold War just prior to the Soviet Union’s fall, that the KGB began targeting Ukrainian ex-patriots in Canada and the United States by accusing them of having been Nazi war criminals. In most cases the accusation was based upon the Ukrainian in question having been forced to serve the SS in some capacity or other – translator, guard, etc. – when the Nazis overran the Ukraine. In one case, the most famous of them all, John Demjanjuk of Cleveland, Ohio was falsely accused of being a specific war criminal, “Ivan the Terrible” of Treblinka. In each case the “useful idiots” such as the Office of Special Investigations of the United States Department of Justice and the Canadian Jewish Congress, danced to the tune the KGB played. The CJC began hounding the Canadian government to revoke the citizenship of several elderly Ukrainians. Just this week the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear the final appeal of one such man. The OSI stripped Demjanjuk of his American citizenship and extradited him to Israel, where he was charged with the war crimes of “Ivan the Terrible” and convicted. On appeal, however, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the evidence proved conclusively that another man, and not Demjanjuk, had been “Ivan the Terrible” and overturned the conviction. Greatly to their credit, the Israelis refused to have any part of it when the KGB’s stooges then accused Demjanjuk of having committed war crimes as a guard at Sobibor. If the Soviets were spreading false information pertaining to Nazi war crimes in order to manipulate people in the West and accomplish their nefarious purposes at the end of the Cold War, there is no good reason to believe that they had not been doing this since the beginning of the Cold War. (2)

Considering the above, it makes zero sense whatsoever that the taboo on suggesting that the Holocaust account be revised to take into consideration the likelihood of Soviet tampering remains so absolute. It makes even less sense, if there can be anything less than zero sense, a sort of sense deficit, that, with a possible controversial and unprincipled exception for members of the Muslim community, the taboo has increased in strength since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Today, someone who says that the Nazis killed only 5, 999, 999 and a half Jews, runs the risk of being labelled a "Holocaust denier" and subjected to a campaign of vilification on the part of people mercilessly determined to ruin him, his life and reputation, job and career, family and social standing. It is greatly to our shame that we have tolerated this kind of persecution in our country.


There are many today who rightly object to the form of mob mentality known as cancel culture. Somebody decides to take offence at something that another person has said, calls that other person out, using one of the many weaponized words that progressives have manufactured for precisely this purpose – “racist”, “xenophobic”, “anti-Semitic”, “sexist”, “homophobic” and more recently “transphobic” are the most common of these – and the howling hordes of the easily outraged quickly assemble to carry out the metaphorical – for now – lynching of their victim. Canadian legend, Don Cherry, who for the past four decades had provided the first intermission entertainment for views of Hockey Night in Canada, was recently and disgracefully, made the victim of just this sort of mob attack.


Those who oppose cancel culture today ought, if they were around, to have fought tooth and nail against the persecution of Ernst Zündel and James Keegstra four decades ago. That is where it all began. To paraphrase, and very appropriately if I do say so myself, Pastor Martin Niemöller, “First they came for the Holocaust deniers and I did not speak out – Because I was not a Holocaust denier.”


What began with the persecution of the Holocaust revisionists and has grown into the cancel culture of today is an outright assault on one of the most basic principles of the Canadian tradition. In the debates during Confederation, Sir Richard Cartwright said “For myself, sir, I own frankly I prefer British liberty to American equality.” In the 1930s on the eve of the Second World War, Donald Creighton, Canada’s greatest historian, declared that free speech had for generations been considered “the proudest heritage of the British peoples.” (3) In the name of that heritage, Creighton opposed both the Toronto Police’s clapping down on Communists and the provincial government of Ontario’s demands that Frank Underhill be dismissed from his position at the University of Toronto over his socialist, pro-American – at the time these would not have been considered mutually exclusive – and anti-British views. Creighton, who was an old-fashioned, ultra-conservative, pro-British Tory, had no sympathy either for Communism or for his arch-nemesis Frank Underhill, but he understood that free speech was too important a heritage to allow to be jeopardized.

Some, noting the very objectionable double standard that is applied to Holocaust revisionists on the one hand and those with views like Dougal MacDonald on the other, would eliminate the double standard by extending the taboo against “Holocaust denial” to “genocide denial” in general. To sin further against freedom of speech, however, is hardly a solution. The problem with the double standard is not that some people are allowed to “get away” with saying things some consider to be offensive, rather it is that we allow others to be persecuted and destroyed for the views they hold and the words they say. A general taboo against “genocide denial” would sin not only against freedom of speech, but against that keystone of justice as it has long been understood in the English-speaking world, the right of the accused to presumption of innocence, the importance of which right can hardly be said to decrease when the accused is no longer an individual, but an entire nation or even an entire civilization.

Those who insist that “denial” of this-or-that, whether it be the Holocaust, genocides in general, or whatever idée de rigueur such as climate change that progressives happen to be currently fixated on, constitutes a grave moral offence place upon others a moral duty to affirm each of these things. To morally require the affirmation of tenets of faith from its membership is the prerogative of a creed-based faith community. What we are seeing looks very much like the creation of a new, post-Christian, civil religion. Orthodox Christians and classical liberals who oppose any blurring of the distinction between civil society and faith community both have good reasons, albeit rather different ones, to find this disturbing.

I am beginning to develop a strong suspicion that somewhere far away, in the realms of eternal woe, Adolf Hitler is laughing at the way in which some of the countries that at such a huge cost to themselves defeated him almost a century ago are now throwing away their most treasured rights and freedoms out of fear of offending his victims. If some people have their way, Joseph Stalin will be joining him in that laugh very soon.

(1) The distinction between extermination camps or death camps and those which were merely concentration camps was not made by revisionists but is part of mainstream Holocaust history. The former, such as Auschwitz, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were never located on German soil, but rather in German-occupied Poland. Camps on German territory, such as the Dachau camp in Bavaria that was liberated by the Americans, were concentration camps. Poland was overrun by the Soviets and remained under Communist control behind the Iron Curtain until 1989.

(2) Anyone familiar with “Operation Keelhaul”, the most disgusting outcome of the Faustian compact made with Stalin at Yalta in which the Western Allies agreed to hand ex-patriots who had fled the Soviet Union and ended up in Hitler’s camps back over to Soviet tyranny, will recognize sickening echoes of it in the way Canada and the United States allowed themselves to be manipulated into doing the KGB’s dirty work for them in this. For those unfamiliar with Operation Keelhaul, I refer you to Julius – that’s Julius not Jeffrey – Epstein’s book by that title from 1973, and Count Nikolai Tolstoy’s Victims of Yalta, published four years later.

(3) I found the Creighton quote on page 149 of Donald Wright’s, Donald Creighton: A Life in History, published by the University of Toronto in 2015. Wright writes approvingly of Creighton’s stand for free speech, as well he ought. Unfortunately, he failed to live up to the principles of his subject himself, and earlier this year was one of the University of New Brunswick faculty whose signature could be found on a letter condemning their former colleague Ricardo Duchesne for dissenting from the usual academic politically correct tripe on ethno-political matters and, hence, writing far more interesting things than any of them ever dared to put out.