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The Holodomor Terror Famine!
28 Plays3 years ago
In this episode of "What the conspiracy?" Josh informs M about the Holodomor Terror Famine!
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
You can learn more about M’s academic work at: http://mrxdentith.com
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Transcript
Struggling with Intro Script
00:00:00
Speaker
Well, that's that. I've got nothing. Not a single script idea. Brain's completely empty. Nothing funny to say. Well, that's not unusual.
00:00:15
Speaker
We could just not do an intro. We don't have to have something scripted every week. But our audio is fickle and sometimes leaves us because you get drunk. Or listens to us because of the possibility you might get drunk. Maybe a drink might solve your problem. That's your answer to everything. Podcast needs refreshing. Get em drunk. Mortgage needs renegotiating. Get em drunk. Need another child. I think we've come to the end of that train of thought. Perhaps what you need is a change of scenery. Maybe we could sit on opposite sides of the sofa.
00:00:43
Speaker
It wouldn't make any difference. We're recording mono now. No one would notice. Well, I'm out of ideas. Me too.
00:00:53
Speaker
Is there a punchline to this intro? No, that's the point. So it's kind of a meta commentary on comedy? No, there is no joke. There's no point to this. I don't have an intro. But just because you don't have an intro doesn't mean I can't punch up the outro. Let me see, not enough setup for your mum joke. Maybe I could slip in a reference to metabolising complex carbohydrates?
00:01:17
Speaker
No, no, it has to be the word penis. What? If we end this intro with penis, it's comedy gold. Penis. I'm not getting it. You don't have to. You just have to trigger the theme music when I say penis.
00:01:30
Speaker
Why? Because it's funny. Is it though? I mean, it's how we ended our first episode, and it's been as close to recurring gag as anything on the show.
Fictional Sound Engineer Introduction
00:01:40
Speaker
But is it actually funny? Is saying penis funny? That was when Phil Hartman said it on News Radio. Well... And we both recognise the genius of the Orson Welles green penis ad. True. Julie, play that clip.
00:01:56
Speaker
Yes, rosebud frozen peas. Full of country goodness and green penis. Wait, that's terrible. I quit. Just a handful for the road. Oh, what luck. There's a french fry stuck in my beard. One question. Who's Julie? Oh, she's a completely fictional sound engineer I just made up who's responsible in future for all the stings and such like.
Podcast Start and Auckland Post-Lockdown
00:02:22
Speaker
We'll probably never hear about her again.
00:02:25
Speaker
Unless we do. The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr Indented. Peace.
00:02:46
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Edison. They are Dr. Emdentith. We are managed to actually co-locate once again in Auckland, New Zealand. If you've been following the news, Auckland was locked down due to a pesky COVID resurgence, but only for three days. Some people think that's a good thing. Some people disagree. It's actually quite fascinating because
00:03:12
Speaker
We had a high amount of anxiety when we discovered the UK variant of COVID-19 in our community, which led people to think, oh my God, we're going into lockdown for quite some time. So Auckland went into lockdown level three, the rest of the country went into lockdown level two.
00:03:31
Speaker
After basically two and a bit days of no transmission, on the third day it turned out there were two more cases, the government dictated that we in Auckland were going back down to level two and the rest of the country back down to level one. And I have to say, most of the reaction has been, has the government made the right decision, causing more anxiety by taking us out of lockdown than we would have had if we had stayed in lockdown for a few more days?
00:03:59
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, they seem confident that they've got it. They know exactly where it came from and how far it's got and that there's no danger of it spreading
Patreon Funds Joke and Conspiracy Segment Intro
00:04:07
Speaker
further. But if this time next week we're super extra locked down for even longer, I guess we'll know why. But fingers crossed for so far. We will indeed.
00:04:18
Speaker
Now, have we any admin before we get things started? No, none whatsoever. I'm only apart from the fact I'm still here. Oh, obviously, yes, yes. But we're still working on it. The catapult is nearing completion. I thought we could use the patron monies for a railgun. No, we don't have that much patron monies, geez. Which is why, if you donate money to this Patreon, or this podcast, which has a Patreon, which makes more sense than donating money. Donating?
00:04:46
Speaker
I haven't even started drinking the chartreuse, but the smell of it's already wafting through and curing my brain meds. If you donate money to this podcast via our Patreon, we will use that money to build a railgun to send me somewhere. Somewhere. You definitely won't be here.
00:05:05
Speaker
afterwards. Well, I mean, bits of me will be here. Yeah. And bits of me will be everywhere across the earth. But anyway, that's for the uncertain future. We're living in the now. And now it's time for another another instalment of what are we calling it? What the conspiracy? What the conspiracy? Is this an actual question mark?
00:05:22
Speaker
I mean, I have been thinking about whether we should have some kind of special sting for this, but we do now have a special surprise sting. So the motion will be that the person who is finding out about the conspiracy will have access to the sting button. And when they're surprised by what's going on, they can press it to denote their surprise.
00:05:45
Speaker
Now, there's absolutely no point to this, there are no prizes, there are no points, but at the same time, it gives the person who's finding out about things a way of getting around that reluctance by New Zealanders to show any emotional response when it comes to pleasure or pain. Yep. Well, in that case, shall we play just the ordinary good old sting and get straight into it? Indeed. It's time for a fortress around my heart.
00:06:19
Speaker
Our viewers at home who are watching this on YouTube might have noticed that I'm conspicuously holding my tablet so that Em can't possibly see it. I don't even know why I'm holding my tablet. I'm making my tablet. Well, no, you have to read it all. Actually, I will use it as a little tray for my drink. I think that's the best idea.
00:06:35
Speaker
Okay so let's play the game again. Where, when and about what do you think the conspiracy I'm about to tell you is? So last time it was the UK so I'm going to cross the Atlantic and go all the way to the Americas but because I think you're going to try and fool me I'm going to South America. Now the when
00:07:00
Speaker
I'm going to say it's probably going to be post-colonisation, although it would be interesting if you got me a pre-colonial conspiracy theory in the South Americas. So I'm going to say sometime about the 1860s, and I think it's going to be a murder-related conspiracy. Well, you're kind of right on one of those.
00:07:24
Speaker
Is it the murder? It's the murder. OK. How far away was I from the actual geographical location? We're in the former Soviet Republic. Interesting. And that means it's probably well beyond the 1860s. A little bit after that. Just a little bit. Just early, early 1930s.
00:07:46
Speaker
Mmm, that's 70 years. Yeah. I mean, are you sure you don't have a backup conspiracy theory, which is actually closer to my initial
Exploring the Holodomor Famine
00:07:56
Speaker
prediction? I'm afraid I probably should have had one, because now that I think of it, you probably know a fair bit more about sort of Eastern Europe, former Soviet states than I do, so the chances are... Yes, you've fallen into my trap. Of you not knowing about this. My finger is hovering over the button, but am I going to press it? Well... And that's not a reference to the Cold War. That's the surprise button.
00:08:16
Speaker
Yeah, so as to what it's about. Well, we've had some fun, haven't we, in this segment? We've had wacky sort of Shakespeare-inspiring hijinks. We've had eccentric society ladies. We've had rocky-themed authorship conspiracies. It's all been a jolly, Jape. So today I want to talk about genocide.
00:08:44
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's going to get less appropriate as we go, quite frankly. What do you know of the Holodomor? Well, wasn't he a character in Game of Thrones? Holodomor? Wasn't that for short, for hold the door? No, almost. We'll get into the etymology shortly, actually. Also known as the Ukrainian terra-famine of walking.
00:09:08
Speaker
1932 to 1933. The terra famine. It is known as the terra famine. Right, just let me get something straight here. So a famine usually describes a lack of something. So a terra famine is a case where no bad things happen to cause the population of Russia to be scared for a period of time. That's a terra famine. I wish that were true. This story would be a lot less bleak
00:09:38
Speaker
if your vision of offense were correct. Yes, I'll grant you that Ukrainian terra famine is the most metal name of any humanitarian disaster I can think of, but that's basically all it's got going for it in the positive stakes. The word halodomor is a compound of Ukrainian words for hunger and plague, and basically translates to death by hunger or death by starvation or something like that. Well, this sounds pleasant.
00:10:07
Speaker
The fact that Holodomor sounds a bit like Holocaust is coincidental, but people have used the similarity to rhetorical effect, not always for good causes. Apparently sort of anti-communist types have compared the two to say, look, see, the communists were even worse than the Nazis, which kind of gets you into that Holocaust minimising territory that just got Gina Carano in trouble.
00:10:33
Speaker
Yeah, and the less spoken about Star Wars, the better. Yes. So this is part there was a wider famine throughout the whole USSR in the early 1930s, but it was most pronounced in Ukraine. Apparently, if you look at the demographics as sort of sort of population growth in Ukraine was about half what it was in the other Soviet states nearby.
00:10:55
Speaker
And you'll notice at this point, nothing I'm saying is overtly conspiratorial, but we will get there. Can I just jump ahead? Is this going to be a case of there being a cover-up of the perpetrators? There is a cover-up because it's Soviet Russia and there's always a cover-up, but that's not the... That is part of the conspiratorial angle, but it's not the more interesting one.
00:11:20
Speaker
Okay, please do continue. So first of all, let's just lay out what happened. This is a famine that left somewhere between three and ten million people dead.
00:11:34
Speaker
The latest research from what I've read suggests somewhere between 3.3 and 7.5 million. So basically the population of New Zealand, plus or minus 50%. And essentially when you're talking about human loss of life, if the word after the number is million, the number almost starts to become immaterial.
00:11:53
Speaker
It's that Eddie Izzard sketch about Stalin and all the people he killed all over again. Now how it happened, I mean now this is a super complex state of affairs. You've got you've got you know agricultural issues and you've got this this is
00:12:11
Speaker
the beginnings, I guess, of the United Soviet Socialist Republic. Stalin's enacted the first of his five-year plans. There's sort of upheaval and chaos all over the place as society is fundamentally reorganized along Soviet principles. So what I'm saying is almost certainly missing out a whole bunch of important points, but the gist of it... Soviet history is very complex. The gist of it is
00:12:39
Speaker
On the one hand, you had this policy of forceful collectivisation of agriculture. So they were taking society from having individuals owning their own farms, working their own farms, to the farms all become collectivised, nationalised. I guess that's a nice way of saying confiscated.
00:12:58
Speaker
Yep. And everybody works on the farms collectively. Their produce is harvested and stored collectively and then rationed out according to the planners in the Soviet administration. Now, right from the start, this had a big effect on Ukraine because at the time, the majority of the Ukrainian population lived in a rural setting, most of them on small scale farms, subsistence sort of farming.
00:13:27
Speaker
So this was a massive shake-up. It was seen in some parts as a return to serfdom, really. It's back to being people working the land that they don't own to a lot of the peasant class. They felt this was no different from working on land owned by aristocrats. And apparently Ukraine had more than the other Soviet states in some cases.
00:13:52
Speaker
history of nationalism. They were more resistant perhaps than others than to be part of the Soviet Union.
00:14:01
Speaker
So there was the collective harvesting and distribution of crops. Grain is the only one that what they even have ever seen to talk about, but I'm assuming a lot more was farmed there. Actually, given the five-year plans, possibly not, they weren't particularly good plans, but they did take five years. They did.
00:14:22
Speaker
And so the food was distributed both internally and also for export. They had, you know, making lots of money exporting to other countries. And so there they had export targets in place.
00:14:35
Speaker
Now, even before all this had started, food requisitioning was a thing. They would gather up by force or otherwise the food from regions so that it could be centralized and then distributed as they pleased. So they had all these plans and unfortunately things did not go to plan.
00:14:57
Speaker
their expected yields were well below the plans due to again a whole bunch of these complicated factors. So there were environmental factors, there was a drought, there was plant disease which caused
00:15:18
Speaker
their harvest to be lower than expected. And then at the same time, there was just this upheaval from the massive change to society. There was, apart from the fact that people, a lot of people weren't happy about it, there was a lot of, you know, just the sort of confusion you'd expect people
00:15:34
Speaker
you know, the right equipment wasn't in the right places or the right people weren't used to using the equipment. There was the issues about, you know, where the labour goes and so on and so on. So there are a whole bunch of reasons why they started not meeting their quotas. And yet the quotas remained the same from year to year, whether that was stubbornness or ignorance on the part of the planners or more malicious things we'll get to.
00:15:59
Speaker
And so that meant that peasants who couldn't meet their quotas were subject to harsher and harsher penalties, having to give up their own stores of food. The rationing became more and more severe until there basically just wasn't enough food to go around across the entire state. And when there's not enough food, people starve to death, unfortunately, and starve to death in very, very large numbers, as we've said.
00:16:26
Speaker
I love the potato famines in Ireland. Yes, making things worse. There was no real aid going to these famine-stricken areas. Internally, the USSR was not distributing things in any sort of, you know, humanity. They're still sticking to their plan.
00:16:44
Speaker
humanitarian concerns didn't really come into it. They also continued meeting the export targets, so they didn't have enough food to feed their own citizenry, but they couldn't not send the grain they'd agreed to out to other countries because then it would make them look bad and also might clue people into the fact that there was a famine going on. And as you say, there was, of course, a cover-up of this fact, which meant that there wasn't foreign aid coming in because people didn't actually know that famine was going on to begin with. Because from all external
00:17:14
Speaker
from all the externalities it seemed like well you're exporting all this food that must be the excess food that you have after you've fed your citizens so of course we're thinking everything's fine in the Ukraine because you're exporting a lot of grain
00:17:29
Speaker
Now, it did get out eventually. Certain reporters, there was one in particular who were able to get inside the country and saw firsthand the widespread death and starvation and got out and told the tale. Russia then sort of mounted a bit of a propaganda campaign. They invited other people, other sort of celebrities of the time. George Bernard Shaw was one of them, I believe.
00:17:53
Speaker
to sort of tour around the nice parts and say, look, see, everything is fine in Russia. And they'd go back and say, oh, yes, I don't know what that chap he's talking about with his little, this famine business. That reminds me of Dennis Rodman and his constant trips to North Korea.
Genocide Debates and International Recognition
00:18:07
Speaker
A little bit like that. Yeah, it does sort of seem to be the same, the same old tactic. Almost as if autocratic regimes play from the same rulebook.
00:18:17
Speaker
So that's obviously conspiratorial whenever you have a cover-up, but the interesting question is, the famine as a whole
00:18:28
Speaker
becomes one of those questions of conspiracy or cock-up. Was the famine simply a result of environmental factors coupled with poor planning, coupled with stubbornness and refusal to change, and possibly indifference to the suffering of the peasants, or was it a deliberate act
00:18:51
Speaker
to kill off a sizable portion of the Ukrainian dissidents who looked like they might have been... ...agitating for nationalism and not want to be part of the glorious Soviet republics? Yeah.
00:19:07
Speaker
So there are sort of theories either way. You can certainly say, you know, it wasn't entirely manmade. There were natural conditions that played a part.
00:19:24
Speaker
And so some people will say, well, no, this wasn't a deliberate act. You can explain it entirely in terms of you had a bad situation that just got made worse by the environment of the time. It wasn't a, quote unquote, manmade famine. It was a natural famine that was exacerbated well beyond what it should have been due to human factors.
00:19:49
Speaker
So is this a let it happen versus made it happen on purpose thing? I'm glad you said that because yes, there are there are sort of variations there. There is there is the idea that I mean, maybe maybe you could even run the line that it was just just plain incompetence. And these people were sitting around going, what's happening? All these people don't have enough food. But look, our plans or it could be
00:20:12
Speaker
Things aren't going to plan and people are dying. They're only peasants, whatever. Or it could be things aren't going to plan and people are dying. And it's kind of the ones we'd be happy to be rid of. So, you know, why not let nature take its course? I mean, this actually sounds an awful lot like some of the debate that goes around the Soviet promotion of Lysenkoism.
00:20:33
Speaker
Because it was quite obvious early on, Lysenkoism or kind of adaptability through inheritance was never going to work the way that Lysenko said it did because he believed that Darwinian evolution by natural selection was a bourgeois pseudoscience. And some people are going, surely the Soviets knew fairly early on.
00:20:56
Speaker
that these plans were not going to work, but they were simply being obstinate and not being seen to retract upon their claim that evolution by natural selection is a bourgeois pseudoscience. Or they were going, is it because Stalin likes him?
00:21:11
Speaker
Because Stalin really, for a period of time, likes Lysenko a lot. And people are going, we don't like pissing off Stalin, because we've seen all the photos where former friends of ours disappeared. And we don't know where they are. So we're just not going to say anything.
00:21:31
Speaker
But then we have the other side of the coin that says this was actually deliberate, that the quotas that were set for Ukraine were deliberately unachievable so that they would have an excuse to roll out these punitive measures, that Stalin was possibly punishing Ukraine for its nationalism or basically eliminating a potential independence movement.
00:21:56
Speaker
And under these conspiracy theories, that then makes the famine basically an act of genocide. And there is argument for the study. With the idea that the five-year plan was simply a cover story for, no, actually, we're going to starve your population to death, but we're doing it in the name of economics, or at least that's what we'll tell people if they are.
00:22:19
Speaker
Yes, well, I mean, I don't know that they say the entire plan was to pretext for killing off a bunch of Ukrainians, but certainly it was something that was done deliberately while all that business was going on.
00:22:35
Speaker
That's a theory that's talking about our... Look at the paper last week. There were a whole lot of intentional states that we're positing there. But at this point, we haven't actually argued either way. And obviously, we can't exactly ask Stalin about it. And as far as I'm aware, there are no sort of diaries or anything that have surfaced. Wait, wait. We should get ourselves a wedgerboard and have a section called We Are Stalin.
00:23:03
Speaker
We could do that. I fear that it could go horribly, badly wrong. I think if we only do it in the next few weeks, because once they leave for China, the Ouija board thing's not going to work. But if we can get a Ouija board, so if we have someone who has a Ouija board, or we can actually just even construct one ourselves, you just need a rudimentary planchette and a piece of paper with letters and numbers on it. And yes, no.
00:23:28
Speaker
We can ask Stalin. We can summon the spirit of Stalin and ask him what he... We can ask Stalin about all sorts of different conspiracy theories. You know that the Ouija board was originally a board game. It was. It was invented by Parker Brothers or something. Yeah, it was meant to have anything to do with the supernatural. It was meant to be about detecting your subconscious desires.
00:23:49
Speaker
Anyway, no, but so we don't have any direct testimony from anyone saying, yes, I did this on purpose because I wanted to kill millions of Ukrainians. What we do have is sort of a pattern of policies
00:24:06
Speaker
that seem to show Ukraine being singled out for much harsher penalties than any of the other Soviet states who were also suffering from this famine were subjected to. So Wikipedia has an interesting list that's been compiled of things which by themselves
00:24:30
Speaker
aren't overly onerous, but all put together do make it certainly make it look like someone had it in for Ukraine. So we have, so starting November 1932, peasants from Ukraine were started to be required to return any extra grain that they had earned previously for hitting their targets.
00:24:52
Speaker
And people, you know, this wasn't just, come on empty out your pockets, fellows. This was people, this was state police and so on going into regions to upturn whatever they could find and confiscate any food that turned up.
00:25:11
Speaker
Near days after that, ordnance was put in place, a law was passed forcing peasants who couldn't meet their grain quotas to surrender any livestock they had. And apparently, at the beginning of collectivisation, it was relatively common for peasants to slaughter all of their livestock rather than have it taken away by the government. So there was sort of a shortage of livestock going on around as well.
00:25:37
Speaker
So that cuts in both directions. It does. So then even just a few days after that, these collective, collectivised collective farms that failed to meet their quotas were placed on blacklists. And a blacklisted farm was forced to surrender 15 times their quota. They were picked over for any possible food that could be taken away.
00:26:03
Speaker
And these blacklisted communities had no right to trade or receive deliveries of any kind. So you had these communities where they'd taken away all the food that was there. They weren't allowed to get food in from anywhere else. So what can you do but starve?
00:26:22
Speaker
And it kept going. In November of 1932, Ukraine by itself was required to provide a third of the grain collection of the entire Soviet Union. Now, the Soviet Union, I'm just thinking about my visual map where we go from, say, St. Petersburg on one side to Vladivostok on the other.
00:26:48
Speaker
I mean, the Ukraine's a fairly large chunk of land.
00:26:52
Speaker
around Eastern Europe. But it's, it's not a third of the USSR. No, no, it's probably not even an eighth of the USSR. Well, now I'm thinking we're talking about in the case of a projection map. So we actually think that the Soviet Union is a massive space. But actually, when you start scaling it up, it turns out that our country's North Island is almost the exact size of the United Kingdom by landmass. So actually, now I'm thinking about God knows how big the Ukraine is. It's probably the size of Mars.
00:27:25
Speaker
What else? December 1932, Stalin's security chief presented the justification for terrorising Ukrainian party officials to collect the grain. They don't go into detail about what this terrorising entails, but if Stalin's security chief is terrorising you... It's probably not a pink field duster. I'm fairly certain you'd be thoroughly terrorised. It was considered treason if anyone refused to do their part in grain requisitions for the state.
00:27:52
Speaker
January of 1933, Ukraine's borders were sealed in order to prevent Ukrainian peasants from fleeing to other republics. So by the end of February 1933, approximately 190,000 Ukrainian peasants had been caught trying to flee Ukraine, but were forced to return to their villages where, as we have established, there was no food and no food coming in.
00:28:17
Speaker
And they continued collecting grain even after the annual requisition target for 1932 was met in late January of 1933. So when you add all these things up, it starts to look like there was a deliberate policy of basically starving out the state of Ukraine.
00:28:41
Speaker
It really does. And so, I mean, yeah, there are, again, there are sort of multiple intentions you could propose. We have the, did they make it happen on purpose? Did they take something that was already happening and sort of let it happen on purpose and possibly throw fuel on the fire to make it, you know, once they realised it was something in their favour, make it even worse?
00:29:06
Speaker
There's also the idea, was it a little bit too successful? Was the intention to actually kill off a large chunk of Ukraine's population? Or just break them? Yeah, was it just to cow them? Was it just to get them to accept this collectivism or else? Was it supposed to be a warning that got a bit out of hand?
00:29:29
Speaker
So we'll never really know. It's an issue that is talked about today. Apparently... Unless we use our wedgie board. Unless we use our wedgie board, yes.
00:29:36
Speaker
inappropriately as you point out because it's not meant to be a supernatural communication device. So apparently there is no overall international consensus as to whether the Holodomor counts as an act of genocide. Ukraine certainly these days regards it as one. And they're in a bit of a testy relationship with the Russian Federation aren't they? Yes they certainly are. In fact I believe that our other
00:30:02
Speaker
We actually know exactly what happened to MH17. Al, the other techs of the podcast, MH17, is a Russia-Ukrainian problem. Yeah, so Ukraine recognises this as an act of genocide, and apparently a dozen other countries or more agree with them.
00:30:25
Speaker
Are we one of those countries, do you know? I don't know. I would sort of imagine that we're a bit far afield from Ukraine for that to have been something that's come up. But I couldn't see an actual, when I was reading about this, I couldn't see a specific list of the individual countries. So that's pretty much it. However bad you think it was, it was probably worse. I haven't even mentioned the cannibalism.
00:30:57
Speaker
an excuse to do that. Apparently, yeah, sort of people have said that basically in this famine, the good people died first, the ones who weren't willing to kill for food, who weren't willing to prostitute themselves for food, who weren't willing to eat the bodies of the dead to survive. And supposedly more than two and a half thousand people were convicted of cannibalism.
00:31:19
Speaker
during the Holodomor because obviously there are all these laws in place at the time that continued to be enforced even when it was clear what the effect of them was going to be.
00:31:30
Speaker
Now I do want to point out to listeners of the podcast that we are not making a valued judgement here about prostitution. Prostituting yourself for food, or indeed the act of sex work, is in no way... Consensual sex work, yes. Is a perfectly fine thing to engage in. In fact, it's not just a perfectly normal thing to engage in. It's been going on for the entirety of human history. This is a valued judgement made by historians.
00:31:54
Speaker
about the idea that prostituting yourself for food somehow makes you a bad person. We're not endorsing that. No, we're not. But certainly, I think you could say that this was a case where it could be considered to be coerced by circumstance. Oh, yes. And certainly the cannibalism. I don't think we're going to be justifying that. No, certainly not.
00:32:15
Speaker
So I'll just finish things off just on a completely trivial but interesting linguistic point, which ties into the other stuff. One of the other things that contributed to making life so difficult for people was that they criminalised the activity of gleaning.
00:32:35
Speaker
Now, we know glean as a word that we usually apply it to information. You're gleaning information from certain sources. But that's a metaphorical use. And I found out while researching this that gleaning actually refers to the act of going over fields after crops have been harvest and sort of picking up any leftovers that might be left behind.
00:32:57
Speaker
Oh, now I understand where cleaning comes from. And so this was, in the past, this was kind of used as a bit of a sort of an ad hoc welfare system. People who didn't have enough food, who couldn't afford enough, that would sort of be allowed to pick over the leftovers of the harvest. We've done our harvest here. There's anything you can find, you can help yourselves. But nope, that was not, that was too individual. That was not in keeping with the communist, collectivised spirit.
00:33:26
Speaker
So that practice was also criminalised, making things just that little bit harder to get any food on top of anything else.
00:33:39
Speaker
So, yes, I'm afraid this one was a bit of a downer compared to our other instalments of this thing, but it's a thing that happened to come to my attention
Reflecting on Conspiracy Segment Tone
00:33:48
Speaker
recently. And I thought, A, it's something I hadn't heard of before, and B, for our purposes, it does have a bit of interesting conspiracy versus cock up, made it happen versus let it happen, sort of uncertainty that brings up a bunch of questions around the nature of conspiracies and conspiracy theories.
00:34:04
Speaker
Now what's interesting is that I don't know this conspiracy theory by its actual name. I kind of do know it in a weird way from having socialized with a lot of Russians when I was in Romania and then talking about the Soviet Union's rather deplorable relationship with the Ukraine.
00:34:24
Speaker
and the idea that there are all these theories that Russia quite deliberately tried to destabilise or cause issue for the Ukraine. But I was in no way aware of just how bad that problem was, or the fact that it was called a terror famine. Do we have any etymology as to why it's got that particular name?
00:34:45
Speaker
No, no, just because it was it was a famine, which was associated with a campaign of terror. Yes, I assume the implication is that people claim it's a famine that was engineered to terrorize the population into compliance with Soviet doctrine or what have you.
00:35:05
Speaker
And also it does get us back to that rather interesting thing about the Soviets and their five-year plans, which they would stick to even when there and that also I think feeds in in a kind of interesting way to the story. Yeah to the uncertainty of it because they were engaging in bad five-year plans elsewhere in the Soviet Union as well.
00:35:28
Speaker
Yes, so like I say, you can tell a story that it's simply down to pigheadedness and a refusal to change plans even in the face of massive human tragedy. Or you can tell a story where it's actually a deliberate act for a specific end, which was of course conducted in secret.
00:35:52
Speaker
Yeah, what a great contribution to what the conspiracy. Why, thank you. So I think that's probably all the doom and gloom we can handle.
Promoting Bonus Content and Conclusion
00:36:03
Speaker
Yes, I mean we've got some bonus content coming after the break where news-wise we do kind of have to talk about that rather unsuccessful impeachment occurred in the Senate over in the good old US of A. We should probably mention very briefly about the whole lockdown thing and the
00:36:22
Speaker
various local conspiracy theories that emerged. And we've got a really interesting true crime story about the investigation of what Ted Cruz is up to. But our main story in the bonus episode this week is a plot to kill Edward VIII.
00:36:37
Speaker
Which one was that? King Elizabeth's dad? No, that was George. He was the Nazi, the one who abdicated. Oh, right. Yeah, good old Nazi Edward VIII, the one who married Wallace Simpson. Yeah. And actually, I have no idea what happens to titles of kings if they abdicate. So is Edward VIII now kind of an...
00:36:58
Speaker
unfilled thing. So he was Edward VIII because he stopped being the king. Edward VIII is actually just no longer a kingly title. Do they go on to a nine? I have no idea. I assume because they have a regnal name, don't they? So Edward probably wasn't his name before he became king, so he would have gone back to his original name. Yeah, but what happens to the regal name?
00:37:20
Speaker
Does that just get locked in, as in there wasn't Edward VIII, but he abdicated? Do we go, well, because he abdicated, he wasn't a real king. And frankly, actually, now I think about it, I also don't care. I just don't care about the royal family at all. I just think that this particular plot's quite interesting.
00:37:37
Speaker
So if you're a patron you can look forwards to hearing about that very shortly. And if you're not a patron you can become one and listen to our bonus episodes where we take little dives into conspiracy theories which don't quite fit into the main episodes but are still nonetheless interesting. Indeed.
00:37:59
Speaker
If you'd like to become one, of course, just go to Portrayon and look for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. You can also go to conspiracism.podbean.com and sign up to Podbean's native patronage system if you really want to. But I think all the cool kids are on Portrayon these days, aren't they? It is. It's also a lot easier for us to get money in and out of Portrayon.
00:38:19
Speaker
And that is all. I suppose we never really say this, but these episodes show up on YouTube. If you go to my YouTube channel under my username monkeyfluids, you can actually watch the two of us sit side by side on this. It is interesting you have chosen to promote the episode where you didn't bring the actual light rig along. So it's going to look kind of awful. Well, I think actually the sort of slightly dark oppressive atmosphere is probably quite suited to the tone of this episode.
00:38:47
Speaker
In fact, that was my plan all along. I deliberately left the lights at home and then got here and then pretended that I didn't realise that I'd left them at home and looked around for them. And then this is, of course, a complete lie. It is a stretching of the truth, I'll grant you that. So I think that's all we have.
00:39:10
Speaker
I think that's all we have for this main episode of the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. So with that in mind, I think it's good night for me. And it's good night from the people of the Ukraine. The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy is Josh Addison and me, Dr. M.R.X. Denterth. You can contact us at podcastconspiracygmail.com and please do consider supporting the podcast via our Patreon.
00:39:38
Speaker
And remember, they're coming to get you, Barbara.