They called it "Stalin's Famine."  In an effort to modernize Russia, dictator Josef Stalin, in the 1930s, systematically forced millions of Ukrainian peasants off their family farm into massive agricultural collectives.  And the wheat they grew, he did't leave for them.  He shipped it overseas to fund his modernizing efforts.

     And millions and millions of people died.  Until an Englishman named Gareth Jones, whose work has been recently immortalized in a film entitled "Mr. Jones," sneaked into Ukraine and reported on what he found, the rest of the world had no idea.

     Then it did.  Sadly, however, the pragmatics of international relations demanded that America and Britain, the leaders of the Western war effort against Adolf Hitler, establish good relations with Stalin to win the war.  They had to overlook the famine to achieve what they considered to be a greater good.  It was utilitarianism at its finest.

        This notwithstanding, Jones did the planet a favor:  he exposed the perfidy of a philosophy that, although its founder intended for it to liberate, will, if mismanaged, do exactly the opposite.  It's a perplexing irony of who we are that we often build liberation on the back of oppression.

      To wit, it's hard to be free in metaphysical chains.