According to the parliament itself, the German Bundestag is primarily supposed to pass laws and control the government. What he shouldn’t do is pass inconsequential resolutions. With the voices of traffic lights and the Union, the Bundestag has just done exactly that and described the “Holodomor” – Joseph Stalin’s mass murder of millions through hunger – as genocide. In 2016, the Bundestag had already described the mass murder of the Armenians by the Ottoman Empire as genocide.
If you consider where mass murders and genocides have taken place and are taking place everywhere, from Australia to South, Central and North America, from Biafra to Rwanda, from Bosnia to Ukraine and Syria to Myanmar and China, from the German crimes in the Second World War Not to mention World War I, the Bundestag would have a lot to do if it wanted to be even halfway fair. However, he should keep his hands off it.
Historians should argue about the assessment of historical events, people should form an opinion through the media; Crimes in the present are to be decided by courts, such as the International Criminal Court, which convicted the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic, of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Politicians are sometimes historians – think of Helmut Kohl – and often lawyers; as politicians, however, they should make neither historical nor legal judgments. I am convinced that the Armenians were victims of genocide. In the case of Stalin, I rather think that he consistently carried Lenin’s program of “liquidating the kulaks as a class” to its conclusion.
There were too many supposedly “useless mouths” in the countryside and too little bread for the workers in the new industries. So the Bolsheviks confiscated the grain, starved millions in the countryside, and required the survivors to produce as much grain as before. The Georgian and Great-Russian chauvinist Stalin might have been pleased that this murder program primarily affected the peasants of the Ukraine, the granary of the Soviet Union; but it hit the peasants primarily as peasants, not as Ukrainians. That was class war.
I could be wrong on both counts. Maybe the crime against the Armenians wasn’t genocide and the Holodomor was. But I want to be able to argue about that without the authority of the representative body being thrown into the balance one way or another. Incidentally, I fear that the Bundestag will be all the more willing to condemn a genocide the more inconsequential it remains.
When in 2016 the left tabled a motion to condemn the genocide of German troops against the Herero and Nama in German Southwest Africa, which would have immediately raised questions about appropriate reparations, the Union and SPD voted against it, the Greens abstained. Historical truth, however, is not a function of political opportunity. This is precisely why the Bundestag should not pose as an authority for finding the truth.
