I shared this because I thought it was an interesting interaction, and not just because he declined to answer. I'm not sure at all why you would infer the latter point from the above, personally.
/.../
That's kind of the feeling I got too. He did try his utmost to be diplomatic and respectful. Sometimes not answering is also answering too I think.
Thank you for the answer whitecoast, I really wasn't sure what was the focal point in your post.
The problem with the asker, as I see it, is that his question was so loaded that it would take a long time to fully dissect it. In brief, he starts with a 'troubling' topic, then identifies himself to put JP's mind in peace, represents Solzhenitsyn's book in a simplistic way (in the best case), presents one of its thesis as he sees it (the Holodomor was a religious war), then offers a cookie (individual responsibility, not a tribal one, I know what you teach), and finally asks for predicting the future. Wow.
If you start answering the question, you've more or less accepted the supposition.
But it wasn't "Jewish individuals [who] hated Christian Ukrainians enough to starve millions of them to death". There were many factors involved: crop failure, disastrous Bolshevik/ Stalin's regime, a necessity to keep exporting crops to rebuild the country after several wars, etc... Historians still argue if the Holodomor was a deliberate policy against the Ukrainian people. Many more non-Ukrainian people (Russian, Kazahs and other ethnic groups) died at that time from starvation than Ukrainians, so it was hardly directed against that one nation. But like with the
Katyn massacre (Soviets did it - Germans did it), admissions and accusations come and go depending on the political wind. It's quite likely, that
some Jews saw it as an opportunity to pay back for their past oppression. But what, if there had been no Jews in the NKVD, the Holodomor wouldn't have happened? Really? The "over-representation" is another problematic argument.
I like the way Antony Sutton approached this kind of thinking in the Appendix to his "Wall Street And The Bolshevk Revolution" excellent book:
There is an extensive literature in English, French, and German reflecting the argument that the Bolshevik Revolution was the result of a "Jewish conspiracy" [...] Generally, world control is seen as the ultimate objective; the Bolshevik Revolution was but one phase of a wider program that supposedly reflects an age-old religious struggle between Christianity and the "forces of darkness." [......]
There is no concrete evidence that Jews were involved in the Bolshevik Revolution because they were Jewish. There may indeed have been a higher proportion of Jews involved, but given tsarist treatment of Jews, what else would we expect? There were probably many Englishmen or persons of English origin in the American Revolution fighting the redcoats. So what? Does that make the American Revolution an English conspiracy? Winston Churchill's statement that Jews had a "very great role" in the Bolshevik Revolution is supported only by distorted evidence. The list of Jews involved in the Bolshevik Revolution must be weighed against lists of non-Jews involved in the revolution. When this scientific procedure is adopted, the proportion of foreign Jewish Bolsheviks involved falls to less than twenty percent of the total number of revolutionaries — and these Jews were mostly deported, murdered, or sent to Siberia in the following years. [...]
The persistence with which the Jewish-conspiracy myth has been pushed suggests that it may well be a deliberate device to divert attention from the real issues and the real causes. ... What better way to divert attention from the real operators than by the medieval bogeyman of anti-Semitism?
In a similar way, it's somehow easier to see a foreign hand in this kind of disaster than a hand of your owns. Perhaps that's a partial reason why Solzhenitsyn wrote the "200 Years" book.
I don't know whether JP just didn't want to touch this 'sensitive' topic (which would be understandable, he has to choose his battles) and was aware that his knowledge here was limited, or he saw a whole mine field in the question, but I think not answering it was a wise decision.
My mind was focused on the word "Tiptoe through the tulips" in the lyrics. I had no clue that this guy was the composer of it. That is doubly funny.