Denialism as the word indicate is denying that atrocities happened and/or who committed them, but knowing that atrocities happened and who did it require evidences. So when an anti-communist is accusing us of denialism for pointing out that there is no evidence that communist committed a certain atrocity, what they are saying in essence is that the claim of communists committing the atrocity should be considered ontological true independently of any evidence and are accusing us of denying that ontological truth by refusing to accepting their position that it doesn’t require evidences.

You see this a lot with liberals even outside of that particular subject. Whenever you criticize “too harshly” a politician they like or a narrative important to their worldview, they often respond with “gotchas” that translate too “my theses is obviously the true one and doesn’t need proof and you are an idiot for thinking otherwise”. For example, during the last election whenever all of their arguments were variations of “the Democrats arr the lesser evil” and didn’t bother explaining how or why because to them “the Democrats are less bad than the Republicans” is an obvious truth that doesn’t need to be proven.

Let’s make a comparison between our supposed denialism and actual denialism: The holocaust vs the “holodomor”.

What makes denying the Holocaust denialism? Proofs! We have humongous amounts of evidences that the Holocaust happened: we know why it happened from all the writings in which Hitler and his underlings explained in detail what they wanted to do and why they wanted to do it, about the lebensraum, the so called “aryan race”, the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories propagated by the Nazis, we know that it happened and how it happened from all the administrative documents tracking the deportations, who was in which train in destination to which camp from where, from the camps and gaz chambers themselves that were thoroughly investigated by the allies after their capture, from the mass graves, belongings and remains found in large quantities, the case is so full bursting with evidences you have to be either a liar or a special kind of ignorant to think it didn’t happen and/or wasn’t on purpose.

On the other hand, in the case of the claim that the Soviets caused the famine on purpose to kill Ukrainians we have nothing of the sort, not even a little bit. We have no internal documents showing that the soviets purposefully withheld grain from Ukraine or explaining why they would even want to do that in the first place, no evidence that the soviet government and anything against the Ukrainians in particular, nothing. Worse! We have evidence that contradict this narrative, administrative documents from the time show that as soon as the soviet government found out about the famine they not only stopped exporting grain out of Ukraine they even started importing grain to Ukraine. On top of that there are inconsistencies in the narrative, most of all in my opinion: the fact that it focuses only on the Ukrainians even though other ethnicity of the USSR were affected by the famine, some even more than the Ukrainians like the Kazakhs. Why is the narrative Ukrainian centric? Because the Holodomor narrative was crafted by the Nazis as a way to justify war against them, and the Nazis being the racists that they are didn’t wanted the “heros” of their narrative to be central asians so they took the most “aryan” of the Slavs (according to them), the Ukrainians. Because that’s the true nature of the Holodomor, it’s a Nazi narrative to demonize communists, and it still is. Have you ever heard or read someone say that the Soviets are worse than the Nazis because of the Holodomor? That’s the intended conclusion. The Holodomor’s purpose is to relativize Nazi horrors and demonize the USSR by making you arrive at the conclusion that the Communists are worst than the Nazis.