“The figure for trees felled for wind farm development on Scotland’s forests and land, as managed by FLS, over the past 20 years is 13.9m. However, it should be noted these trees – being a commercial crop – will eventually have been felled and passed into the timber supply chain in any case.
“That figure for felled trees should also be contrasted with that for the number of trees planted in Scotland over the years 2000-2019, a total of 272,000,000, and renewable energy developments fit well with this.
“To date, the amount of woodland removed across Scotland’s national forests and land, managed by FLS, for wind farm development is not even one per cent of the total woodland area.”
Weird that Scotland always gets the most scrutiny despite being the part of the UK with the most forest cover and ambitious energy sustainability goals.
It’s almost like they write attention-grabbing headlines and cherrypick scary statistics completely out of context
Doom clickbait. The article even states that in the same time period 272 million trees were planted.
Also the site is owned by American with massive media holdings so…
Yeah I can really tell that the historian you linked on Youtube is “casual.” This uncredentialed dude just scrounging up sources that get laughed out of any serious soviet studies conference is your source? Your dude’s video cites
Anne Applebaum, Robert Conquest, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Richard Pipes. This is like, the Captain Planet of Black Book of Communism. We’re really only missing
Steven Rosefielde, and we might as well throw in Adrian Zenz. I’m sure Zenz’s had some things to say about the USSR.
In the actual field of studying the history of the USSR, Prof. Mark B. Tauger (of West Virginia University inshallah he gets tenure), whose specialty is AGRARIAN HISTORY as well as the history of Russia and the USSR, talks at length about the Holodomor, and actually directly refutes Anne Applebaum in his “Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933,” where he outlines that actually, yes, USSR did try to help, but every time, another act of God happened over and over, and made a viable harvest at a large scale impossible, and resources got stretched thin even while Stalin sent scientists to study how to stop this and resources to keep people fed in the meantime. So yes, when you are not citing people whose job is to deliberately misunderstand history, it is a Neo-Nazi conspiracy theory.
The idiot I replied to gave us yet ANOTHER youtuber as a source then blocked me. Apparently Neo-Nazi conspiracy apologists also can’t actually do research, but nevermind that. I feel that since he thinks his list of sources can refute Tauger, I at least owe him a response. He cites Timeghost History, yet another rando with no credentials, abusing sources til kingdom comes.
The list of sources used in the video are:
- Applebaum, Anne, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (2017).
- Lewin, M, ‘The Immediate Background of Soviet Collectivization,’ in: Soviet Studies 17-2 (1965) 162–197.
- Kuromiya, Hiraoki, ‘Ukraine and Russia in the 1930’s, in Harvard Ukrainian Studies 18-¾ (1994) 327–341.
- Marples, David R, ‘Ethnic Issues in the Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine,’ in: Europe-Asia Studies 61-3 (2009) 505–518.
- Watstein, Joseph, ‘The Role of Foreign Trade in Financing Soviet Modernization,’ in: The American Journal of Economics and Sociology 29-3 (1970) 305–319.
- Wolowyna et al., ‘Regional Variations of 1932–1934 Famine Losses in Ukraine’.
We already know that Applebaum is a total hack who is so disgraced that she has to write scarepieces for U.S. state dept apparatuses.
David R Marples, we also know, is famous for writing about Bandera and how his views are justified if you just shift your views to his times (this is wrong and dangerous, if you know how Bandera is). Kuromiya article openly admits that others, such as Kazakhstan, lost more lives proportionally during the famine, but basically states that if Moscow hadn’t taken grain from Ukraine, then Ukrainian lives could have been saved, without mentioning that all kinds of crops everywhere was being taken and distributed to everywhere, as one does in crisis situations in a collectivist society.
However, we also know that Wolowyna, as well as Davies (and Wheatcroft, as the two often write together), are in this list. Why is that? They do Alright work, as you might know. Well, it’s because there’s a trick here. Indy Neidell, better known as
TimeGhost History, is doing a trick where he cites legitimate statistics from 2000s, but sneakily does not use the conclusions drawn from the same article. Instead, he uses works from 1960s - 1970s and uses their conclusion, despite the fact that these conclusions were often drawn from incomplete data set at best, or willing tolerance of lying to paint the USSR as a Leninist moral abberation at worst.
In fact, TimeGhost History’s own source link includes a (miscited) link to a Davies and Wheatcroft article, which I have hyperlinked as you would have seen on the description to the youtube video (rather than in a more effecient way, just so you guys know I’m not lying). Not only is
Wheatcroft’s last name truncated in the citation (this is a minor gripe, since the source is linked), this article linked
puts forward the argument that while Stalin’s bureaus’ planning had failed and created a brutal condition, assigning malice and deliberate cruelty in letting peasants starve is not something they are prepared to do, because there is just no evidence for this. These are people who literally argue against the idea of holodomor. The source (ab)used directly refutes the argument that there was a deliberate attempt at killing a group of people. Another article (which I hunted down and read), authored with Tauger, also states that while Stalin could have done a better job (which is an argument that I am open to hearing), there was no grain hoarding away from the Ukranian people with malfeasance.
I’m also going to ignore the literal government-funded propaganda from USA, Ukraine, and Canada that is being elevated to the same level as academic text on that post. This is laughable and farcical to include this, esp Ukraine and Canada, if you know the history of Ukrainian-Canadians and their history of Neo-Nazism.
Then, here’s this gem.
So, I know that Tauger has worked with Wheatcroft and Davies before, and Wheatcroft and Davies certainly do not push holodomor as “Red Famine,” like Applebaum. So I was wondering, what exactly did they disagree with? Upon close reading, all they really disagree with is statistics on agricultural outputs being adjusted by 19%, to match adjustments the data set often make to the pre-tsarist regime’s stats, and how there are some inconsistencies on this front, and Wheatcroft states that Tauger doesn’t seem to understand why Wheatcroft (and Davies) do not take the dataset at face value.
Yet, if you did not take the dataset at face value, that means that the yield during the famine was actually much worse, all without (as Wheatcroft and Davies believe) Stalin hoarding grain or feeding the rest of the USSR while Ukraine starved. This actually strengthens Tauger’s point, but Tauger (as many historians do) is just being a stickler for data he sees as being under-discussed due to ideological reasons while being accurate enough.
So, really, what did this prove? All this proved is that YouTube historians without any training rely on tricks and fancy editing to seem like they are equipped to talk about these, and they often push their own reactionary view of history while doing this. Maybe it’s a good way to look more knowledgeable than you are with your group of friends to talk about these hack historians, but if you do this to anyone with any serious training (and a bit of free time), you see that all it gets you is laughed out of the discussion. Really, just a sad, sad display.
If I may, I came across this amazing article by a Jewish author that talks about how the right wing of Europe conspired to liken the Holodomor with the Holocaust–watering down that industrial genocide in order to drag communism/USSR down to the same evil as Nazi Germany.
