Part 1 of the article on the Soviet famine of 1932-33 traced its causes to environmental factors leading to a poor harvest which did not produce enough grain to feed the entire population. While there were other contributing factors  — crop disease infestations, shortage of labor to harvest the fields and of horses to do the plowing and soil exhaustion reducing fertility — Ukrainian nationalists (who later fought on the Nazi side in World War II) spread the myth that the Soviet government deliberately cut off grain to the Ukraine, causing the famine. There was absolutely no evidence supporting this. The Soviet government reduced grain exports and diverted supplies to the famine-stricken areas, trying to distribute what grain was available in an egalitarian manner but this did not meet the overall need (see CHALLENGE  3/26).

The Question of Grain Exports
Like the pre-revolutionary Czarist regimes, the Soviet government exported grain. Contracts were signed in advance, which created the dilemma. Professor Mark Tauger of West Virginia University has spent the past two decades studying Russian famines and the famine of 1932-33. He describes the situation with grain exports as follows:

The low 1931 harvest and reallocations of grain to famine areas forced the regime to curtail grain exports from 5.2 million tons in 1931 to 1.73 million in 1932; they declined to 1.68 million in 1933. Grain exported in 1932 and 1933 could have fed many people and reduced the famine: The 354,000 tons exported during the first half of 1933, for example, could have provided nearly 2 million people with daily rations of l kilogram for six months. Yet these exports were less than half of the 750,000 tons exported in the first half of 1932. …[A]vailable evidence indicates that further reductions or cessation of Soviet exports could have had serious consequences. Grain prices fell in world markets and turned the terms of trade against the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, its indebtedness rose and its potential ability to pay declined, causing western bankers and officials to consider seizure of Soviet property abroad and denial of future credits in case of Soviet default. Failure to export thus would have threatened the fulfillment of its industrialization plans and, according to some observers, the stability of the regime.

While the USSR was exporting it was also allocating much more grain to seed and famine relief. Tauger documents the fact that the Central Committee allocated more than half a million tons to Ukraine and the North Caucasus in February, and more than half a million tons to Ukraine alone by April 1933. The government also accumulated some three million tons in reserves during this period and then allocated 2 million tons from that to famine relief. Soviet archival sources indicate that the regime returned five million tons of grain from procurements back to villages throughout the USSR in the first half of 1933. All of these amounts greatly exceed the amount exported in this period.
However, there was simply not enough food to feed the whole population, even if all exports had been stopped instead of just drastically curtailed, as they were. According to Tauger:

…[E]ven a complete cessation of exports would not have been enough to prevent famine. This situation makes it difficult to accept the interpretation of the famine as the result of the 1932 grain procurements and as a conscious act of genocide. The harvest of 1932 essentially made a famine inevitable.
Grain delivery targets (procurement quotas) were drastically reduced multiple times for both collective and individual farmers in order to share the scarcity. Some was returned to the villages. It is these collection efforts, often carried out in a very harsh way, that are highlighted by promoters of the “intentionalist” interpretation as evidence of callousness and indifference to peasants’ lives or even of intent to punish or kill.

Feed 40 Million People in the Cities
Meanwhile the government used these procurements to feed 40 million people in the cities and industrial sites who were also starving, further evidence that the harvest was small. In May 1932 the Soviet government legalized the private trade in grain. But very little grain was sold this way in 1932-1933. This too is a further indication of a small 1932 harvest. (Tauger 1991, 72-74)
About 10 percent of the population of Ukraine died from the famine or associated diseases. But 90 percent survived, the vast majority of whom were peasants, army men of peasant background or workers of peasant origin. The surviving peasants had to work very hard, under conditions of insufficient food, to sow and bring in the 1933 harvest. They did so with significant aid from the Soviet government.
A smaller population, reduced in size by deaths, weakened by hunger, with fewer draught animals, was nevertheless able to produce a successful harvest in 1933 and put an end to the famine. This is yet more evidence that the 1932 harvest had been a catastrophically poor one. (Tauger 2004)
Government aid amounted to five million tons of food distributed as relief, including to Ukraine, beginning as early as February 7, 1933; the provision of tractors and other equipment distributed especially to Ukraine; “a network of several thousand political departments in the machine-tractor stations which contributed greatly to the successful harvest in 1933” (Tauger 2012b); and other measures, including special commissions on sowing and harvesting to manage work and distribute seed and food aid.
Some anticommunist “experts” have adopted the Ukrainian nationalists’ “intentional” interpretation — the “Holodomor” myth. They claim the Soviet government cut the Ukraine off completely, making no effort to relieve the famine. They ignore environmental factors — which were in fact the primary causes — and fail to mention the Soviet government’s large-scale relief campaign which, together with their own hard work under the most difficult conditions, enabled the peasants to produce a large harvest in 1933. In Tauger’s judgment:
[T]he general point [is that] the famine was caused by natural factors and that the government helped the peasants produce a larger harvest the next year and end the famine.
The so-called “Holodomor” or “deliberate” and “man-made” famine interpretation is not simply mistaken on some important points. Its proponents misrepresent history by omitting evidence that would undermine their interpretation. It is not history but political propaganda disguised as history.
Other writers like R. W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft adopt an interpretation similar to that of the Russian government. They attribute the famine to several causes, with collectivization being a very important, if not the most important cause. In their opinion environmental factors played only a secondary role. Those who take this view believe the Soviet government could have saved many, perhaps millions, of lives if collectivization had not been undertaken at all, and mitigated if the Soviet government had not handled the famine in a “brutal” manner.
As shown in the last article, this hypothesis, too, is mistaken. Environmental factors caused the famine. Collectivization, the role of the Soviet government in organizing and managing agriculture and seizing and redistributing the grain that did exist, plus the hard work of hungry peasants, brought in a successful harvest in 1933 and ended the famine.

For centuries, schools in France were run by the Catholic church. It was only in 1882 that the promotion of religion in public schools was ended. Ever since then, keeping religion out of the schools has been a left-wing position.
The fascist National Front (FN) copies the Hitler-era Nazis.  The FN tries to co-opt left-wing causes. This is one way they attract workers disgusted with the broken promises of the Socialist Party and other fake left organizations.
The latest case in point was on April 4, when FN leader Marine Le Pen announced on RTL radio that the fascists would begin serving pork again in school canteens in the ten cities where the FN controls the city council. She claimed that Muslims were preventing non-Muslim students from eating pork because Islam forbids eating pork. She said the FN would defend the exclusion of religion from public schools.
Journalists from Libération newspaper discovered that it was all a big lie. Pork is on the menu in all French schools. In schools with Muslim and Jewish students, but there is often also a school lunch without pork.
The basis for the big lie was the fact that, for one week in 2011, in the town of Séméac (population 4,700), the school canteen only served non-pork meals – not because Muslims had imposed religious dietary laws, but because of a temporary kitchen problem that prevented the chef from preparing two different meals. The fascists used this to create a rumor to stir up hatred between Muslim and non-Muslim workers.
This is a typical example of the fascist technique of the big lie. Workers everywhere, and not just in France, must beware of this. In particular, the fascists are very clever at spreading their lies and rumors on the Internet.
Anti-fascist from France

The following letter is from a comrade in Haiti who heard one of his United States comrades had some health problems. She was touched by his comradely concern and revolutionary outlook and thought to share it with our CHALLENGE readers.

I just received the news of your health. I am moved to my innermost being. But I do not doubt your courage and your will to win for our class, despite illness and bad news about this “world without heart!”
Comrade, we are often betrayed by the size of our tasks. So much arduous work, worries and heartbreak to change the world from top to bottom spoils our physique. The long journeys here and there to help develop class conscience in our class, wear down our strength. But there is always the hope of our future that animates us, despite the daily task which becomes more difficult. Especially when there are borders between us, and we are divided by sexism, and racism kills us, the unjust system we live under tries to undermine us, then our solidarity becomes increasingly necessary and urgent.I regret frankly that I cannot come to see you physically. It is only possible to me to write to you.
Dear friend, I won’t keep you too long, just want to let you know that we are continuing the struggle here. The rulers of the world do not know now that they are going to have to face the wrath of the entire international working class. That those of us who do not own the means of production, those without, will rise up one day to improve not only the material conditions of our lives, but also to fulfill our destiny and rule the earth. The stakes are enormous. But we will take the risk! It continues until the final victory .
My sincere greetings to all our comrades and friends. On to May Day!
Compère Général Soleil

12 Years a Slave is the story of Solomon Northup, a free black man living in Saratoga, New York around 1841. He is kidnapped and sold into slavery. The film does a good job of depicting the horrors of slavery, from beatings to the humiliations of being treated like animals, with men and women paraded naked for potential buyers to inspect. I watched the movie with clenched fists and tight jaws — I wanted to see the slavers punished for their wrongdoing.
For all the degradation the slaves went through, the situation cried out for scenes of rebellion, but they are missing. There were many in those years that could have been referred to. Northup and some other kidnapped slaves do talk of a rebellion on the slave ship taking them to the South. It doesn’t happen, though: Although Solomon says “The crew is fairly small...if it were well-planned, “I believe they could be strong armed.”  Another replies, “Three can’t stand against the whole crew , the rest are N****** born and bred slaves. N****** ain’t got the stomach for a fight, not a damn one.” The movie illustrates racist division rather than unity. It ignores the unity of many white women and men — indentured servants — with slaves.
The movie also failed to show the critical role of women. Fighters such as Sojourner Truth, Harriet
Tubman, Angelina and Sarah Grimke, were crucial in the fight against slavery, revealing that the fight against racism and sexism is one intertwined battle.
Personal vs. Collective Freedom
The movie also portrays Solomon as depending on the legal system for his personal freedom — if only he could get his “papers” from New York he could prove that he was a free man. The slave traders mocked him in this quest. This movie is concerned with the freedom of one slave while the whole system of slavery was causing misery for millions. It was not the legal system or a court or Abraham Lincoln that ended slavery; it took hundreds of slave rebellions, the abolitionists and a civil war to end it.
Never in mainstream media has the real story of Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, and John Brown been told. In fact, there are over 400 accounts of recorded slave rebellions and revolts in the United States. Instead, the story of Solomon Northup highlights a single courageous black man’s struggle to survive slavery only to wait 12 years to be freed by a stroke of luck and a sympathetic Canadian.
The end of slavery was not a simple death, either. The racism it rested on continued, and so did the power of the plantation-owning  aristocrats. Within a few years after the Civil War ended they were back in power, using state, local and Federal governments, their courts and the Ku Klux Klan to spread racist terror throughout the South, ushering in the era of Jim Crow. They used intimidation and lynching to enforce power to terrorize the black working-class population — and to warn off any whites who understood the need for unity between black and white workers.
The power of workers fighting back together can be seen in one incident: the attempted judicial lynching of nine young black men by the state of Alabama in 1931. Known as the Scottsboro Boys, they were arrested and tried on fake charges of raping two white women on a train. Even though one of the accusers admitted it was a lie, within two weeks their trial was over and they were sentenced to death.
But the International Labor Defense (ILD), led by the U.S. Communist Party, took their case, determined that “they shall not die.” Unlike the movie, they used but didn’t depend on the legal system. The ILD provided the lawyers and the legal fight; the Communist Party organized mass demonstrations around the world, in Latin America, Europe, Asia, the Soviet Union and across the U.S. The campaign saved them from the electric chair — but even though they were innocent some of them still served many years in jail.
In the movie 12 Years a Slave, it is a big letdown to see one man freed by a sheriff, while all the others on the plantation are left in bondage. The sharp contrast to the case of the Scottsboro Boys, and the mass actions led by communists, exposing Jim Crowism to the whole world, show us how to fight against slavery and racism, and that fight continues to this day.