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`Scientific' calculations
Dushnyck invented a `scientific' method to calculate the dead during the `famine-genocide'; Mace followed his method:
`(T)aking the data according to the 1926 census ... and the January 17, 1939 census ... and the average increase before the collectivization ... (2.36 per cent per year), it can be calculated that Ukraine ... lost 7,500,000 people between the two censuses.'
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Ibid. , pp. 69--71.
These calculations are meaningless.
The world war, the civil wars and the great famine of 1920--1922 all provoked a drop in the birth rate. The new generation born in that period reached physical maturity, 16 years of age, around 1930. The structure of the population would necessarily lead to a drop in the birthrate in the thirties.
Free abortion had also dramatically reduced the birthrate during the thirties, to the point where the government banned it in 1936 to increase the population.
The years 1929--1933 were characterized by great, violent struggles in the countryside, accompanied by times of famine. Economic and social conditions of this kind reduce the birthrate.
The number of people registered as Ukrainians changed through inter-ethnic marriages, changes in the declared nationality and by migrations.
The borders of the Ukraine were not even the same in 1926 and 1939. The Kuban Cossaks, between 2 and 3 million people, were registered as Ukrainian in 1926, but were reclassified as Russian at the end of the twenties. This new classification explains by itself 25 to 40 per cent of the `victims of the famine-genocide' calculated by Dushnyck--Mace.
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Ibid. , p. 71.
Let us add that, according to the official figures, the population of Ukraine increased by 3,339,000 persons between 1926 and 1939. Compare those figures with the increase of the Jewish population under real genocidal conditions, organized by the Nazis.
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Ibid. , p. 74.
To test the validity of the `Dushnyck method', Douglas Tottle tried out an exercise with figures for the province of Saskatchewan in Canada, where the thirties saw great farmers' struggles. The repression was often violent. Tottle tried to `calculate' the number of statistical `victims' of the `depression-genocide', caused by the 1930's Great Depression and Western Canadian drought, complicated by the right-wing Canadian governments' policies and use of force:
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This `scientific method', which any respectable person would call a grotesque farce for Canada, is widely accepted in right-wing publications as `proof' of the `Stalinist terror'.
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Fri Aug 25 09:03:42 PDT 1995