What is 'Holodomor'?

I've come across references to 'Holodomor' numerous times, and this morning I decided to figure out what it means. Turns out it is a renaming of a real historical event, known as the 'Golodomor', which was a mass starvation that claimed the lives of six to eight million people in the former Soviet Union in the early 1930's.

Calling this event holodomor instead is an attempt by some to combine the words golodomor and holocaust in an attempt to have the event recognized as a genocide. The technicalities of the term 'genocide' will probably prevent this from being recognized officially, but it should come to symbolize the failure of command economies, something the political left here in the U.S. is enamored with.

When I was an instructor of philosophy at Washington State University, I asked each of the 75 student philosophy 101 sections I was teaching if they knew about the Soviet Union. This was the fall semester of 2006, and my students ranged in age from 18 to 22 years old, typically. Out of 150 students, only about 4 or 5 of them knew what the Soviet Union was. All of my students were alive when it existed, and all of their school teachers most definitely were. It is frightening that something as destructive and evil as the Soviet Union is already being lost in the memory and knowledge of the future leaders of this country, in less than one generation even. The failure of our government education system is underscored by this example, amongst others. If the knowledge of what the Soviet Union was is forgotten, then as it is said, we may be doomed to repeat it.