In 1992, when I was the academic dean at William Penn College, we initiated an exchange program with the Cherkasy Pedagogical Institute in Ukraine. The program was suggested by a local Rotarian and college trustee who had visited Ukraine following its declaration of independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.
In the spring of 1993, we brought six students and two professors to Oskaloosa, Iowa for a semester of study. One vignette seems especially pertinent right now, given the push from the Trump administration to design and teach patriotic education.
Several weeks into the new semester, a political science professor came into my office to report that he had gotten into a serious row with two of the Ukrainian students in his class. He was discussing post-WWI realignments in Europe and spent some time talking about the Holodomor of 1932-35. During this time, Stalin, fearful that a growing independence sentiment in Ukraine would threaten his hold on the country, basically starved Ukraine into submission by appropriating their crops to feed starving Russians. Credible estimates put the Ukrainian death toll from starvation somewhere between four million and six million.
The Ukrainian students were outraged. Before the class was over, they were in a shouting match with the professor. There was no famine, they said, and it was a lie that Stalin deliberately starved Ukrainians. Their grandparents had been alive during that time and none of them ever spoke of such a thing, nor was there any mention of it in their textbooks. They argued that the professor was feeding propaganda to the class and that as Ukrainians, they certainly knew more about Ukrainian history.
The students had been educated in Soviet Ukraine. The Holodomor had been covered up since 1935; it was forbidden to talk about it, and it certainly was not in the textbooks from which students had learned their entire lives. They had already reconciled inconsistencies between what they had been told about America and what they encountered in America, but this was a deception of far greater magnitude. Their initial anger makes sense.
A couple of observations: First, we know how the student’s grandparents wiped the memory of the famine out of their minds. We know this from our own experience. The world watched in horror on Jan. 6, 2021, when an angry mob, incited by the sitting president, stormed the Capitol, beating police and actively hunting the vice president and speaker of the house, to stop certification of the 2020 election results. In real time, it looked like an attempted coup.
Only four years later, the offending president has been re-elected, and the insurrectionists pardoned for their crimes. Investigators and prosecutors who pursued the insurrectionists, including members of Congress, find themselves as targets of a federal justice department that is unabashedly on a revenge tour.
And the official governmental records of events and subsequent prosecutions are now in the hands of the insurrectionists. The memory of what happened on Jan. 6 is being actively scrubbed from websites and museum exhibits and new, sanitized, even heroic, accounts of the events are being widely circulated on websites and podcasts.
We know how a generation of Ukrainians who endured deliberately imposed famine forgot it and neglected to teach subsequent generations about it, because we are doing the same thing right now in America.
The people deliberately erasing and rewriting the events of Jan. 6 cannot be trusted to write an honest curriculum for a patriotic education.
Dave Throgmorton, Ph.D., is a sociologist who spent most of his career as academic dean and vice president at liberal arts and community colleges. Recently retired, he and his wife moved to Cortez from the I-80 corridor in Wyoming
