A SINGLE STATE SOLUTION
Wednesday, 14 February 2007
One might think the worst holocaust deniers—at least the only ones who command serious attention—are those who insist the Nazi holocaust, as it involved the Jews only, was without parallel.
Guenter Lewy argues for example in The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies (Oxford University Press, 2000) that while the Gypsies were gassed, shot and otherwise exterminated in great numbers, right alongside the Jews, they were not true victims of "the" Holocaust (capital "H") but only of something collateral. Lewy even suggests the Gypsies invited their own destruction with certain cultural traits—in particular, sharply divergent moral standards for dealing among their own and with outsiders.
But pre- or anti-Enlightenment Judaism is hardly a less ethnocentric or hostile moral system. As Edward Gibbon correctly notes in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, v. 1, ch. 15 (1776), "the wise, the humane Maimonides openly teaches [in The Book of Torts, 5:11] that, if an idolator fall into the water, a Jew ought not to save him from instant death." See also Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai’s remarkable second-century exercise in ejusdem generis: "The best of the heathen merits death; the best of serpents should have its head crushed; and the most pious of women is prone to sorcery" (Yer. Kid. iv. 66c; Massek. Soferim xv. 10; comp. Mek., Beshallah, Wayehi, 1, and Tan., Wayera, 20, all as cited by JewishEncyclopedia.com). For "heathen" some translators write "goyim"; for "prone to sorcery" they write "a witch."
Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, in Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (2d ed. 2004), write (pp. 150-51) that "the great majority of books on Judaism and Israel, published in English especially, falsify their subject matter [in part by omitting or obscuring such teachings]. . . . The information freely available in Hebrew can and should be used to redress apologia by omissions in English." For a fuller discussion of the point, see Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, esp. ch. 2 (1994), available online. As to Jews, Gypsies or anyone else, of course, ethnocentrism or even outright cultural hostility as a rationale for genocide is obscene.
A particularly relevant parallel to the Nazi holocaust is the Ukrainian holodomor of 1932-33, a state-created famine—not a crop failure—that killed an estimated five million people in the Ukraine, one million in the Caucasus, and one million elsewhere after the Soviet state confiscated the harvest at gunpoint. See Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, esp. p. 306 (1986). See also Oksana Procyk, Leonid Heretz and James E. Mace, Famine in the Soviet Ukraine, 1932-33 (Harvard University Press, 1986); Miron Dolot, Execution by Hunger (1985); and the Commission on the Ukrainian Famine, Report to Congress (1988). That report, at pp. 6-7, cites estimates of the number killed that range as high as 8 million in the Ukraine and 9 million overall.
Nikita Khrushchev, in Khrushchev Remembers: The Final Testament, p. 120 (1976), says "I can’t give an exact figure because no one was keeping count. All we knew was that people were dying in enormous numbers."
In September 1933, Walter Duranty of the New York Times—who cultivated his relationship with Stalin, and is remembered today for his public denials that any such thing was happening—privately told fellow journalists Eugene Lyons (United Press) and Anne O’Hare McCormick (herself from the Times) that the death toll was 7 million, but that the dead were "only Russians." (Sic: mostly Ukrainians; and note the word "only.") See Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, pp. 579-80 (1937). Duranty’s number is described in Lyons’s book only as "the most startling I had. . . heard," but is revealed in Lyons’s "Memo for Malcolm Muggeridge" (Dec. 9, 1937), quoted by Marco Carynnyk in "The New York Times and the Great Famine, Part III," available online.
Several days after giving the 7-million number to Lyons and McCormick, Duranty told the assembled staff at the British chancery in Moscow that the toll for the Soviet Union as a whole might be as high as 10 million. See the report of William Strang, the charge d’affaires (Sept. 26, 1933), quoted by Carynnyk in the text accompanying n. 46. The British government referred publicly to the ongoing situation as an "illegal famine." Id., n. 46.
Duranty’s 10-million number may have come from Stalin himself. It’s reputedly the same number Stalin gave Churchill a decade later; see, e.g., Eric Margolis, "Remembering Ukraine’s Unknown Holocaust," Toronto Sun, Dec. 13, 1998 (available online).
According to Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine, pp. 261-62 (1967):
In 1932-3, the years of the great famine which followed the forced collectivisation of the land, I travelled widely in the Soviet Union, writing a book which was never published. I saw entire villages deserted, railway stations blocked by crowds of begging families, and the proverbial starving infants. . . . [T]hey were quite real, with stick-like arms, puffed up bellies and cadaverous heads. I reacted to the brutal impact of reality on illusion in a manner typical of the true believer. I was surprised and bewildered—but the elastic shock-absorbers of my [Communist] Party training began to operate at once. I had eyes to see, and a mind conditioned to explain away what they saw. This "inner censor" is more reliable and effective than any official censorship. . . .
Some Ukrainian accounts, and that of Muggeridge, who covered the holodomor for the Manchester Guardian, take the trouble to say that this mass starvation was imposed in very substantial part by Jews. Lazar M. Kaganovich is often identified as an architect of the policy. In Muggeridge’s novel Winter in Moscow (1934) Kaganovich appears as Kokoshkin, "a Jew" and "Stalin’s chief lieutenant"—which is accurate on both counts.
In 2003 Levko Lukyanenko, the first Ukrainian ambassador to Canada, was said to have made an anti-Semitic embarrassment of himself on this subject. But see Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, p. 363 (2d ed. 1994) ("Jews were . . . disproportionately prominent among the Bolsheviks, notably in their leadership, among their tax- and grain-gathering officials, and especially in the despised and feared. . . secret police [emphasis added]"); and Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, p. 60 (1988) ("As of the late twenties. . . [a] disproportionate number of Jews came to hold high posts in the [Soviet] secret police and to serve as political commissars in the armed services. They. . . were. . . appointed to high-level and conspicuous positions which called for unimpeachable political loyalty. . . "). Mayer, a professor emeritus of history at Princeton, is himself Jewish, and had to flee the Nazis as a refugee.
Jews among the Bolsheviks who imposed the holodomor would have relished settling scores after the 40 years of bloody pogroms that followed Czar Alexander II’s assassination in 1881—especially the still-recent massacre of 50,000 to 100,000 Jews, mostly in the Ukraine, during the Russian civil war of 1918-21. (A vastly greater number of gentiles, of course, also perished in that war.) See Albert S. Lindemann, Esau’s Tears, p. 442-43 (Cambridge University Press, 1997):
In. . . the Ukraine, the Cheka leadership was overwhelmingly Jewish. . . . George Leggett, the most recent and authoritative historian of the Russian secret police, speculates that the use of [non-Slavic ethnic minorities in the secret police] may have been a conscious policy, since such ‘detached elements could be better trusted not to sympathise with the repressed local population.’ Of course, in the Ukrainian case that population had the reputation of being especially anti-Semitic, further diminishing the potential sympathies of Jewish Chekists in dealing with it. [Citing Leggett, The Cheka, Lenin’s Political Police, p. 263 (Oxford University Press, 1981).]
. . . It is instructive that the high percentage of Jews in the secret police continued well into the 1930s, when the proportion of Jews gradually diminished in most other areas of the Soviet and party cadres.. . . Cheka personnel regarded themselves as a class apart. . . with a power of life or death over lesser mortals. Comparisons to the secret police in Nazi Germany have tempted many observers. . . . [T]he extent to which both. . . prided themselves in being. . . willing to carry out the most stomach-turning atrocities in the name of an ideal. . . is striking.
Shahak, in Three Thousand Years, ch. 4, says Jewish "hatred and contempt" for peasants— "a hatred of which I know no parallel in other societies"—can be traced back to the great Ukrainian uprising of 1648-54, in which tens of thousands of "the accursed Jews" (to quote the Ukrainian leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky) were killed.
The Jews of that time served the Polish szlachta (nobility) and clergy on their Ukrainian latifundia as arendars—toll-, rent- and tax-farmers, enforcers of corvee obligations, licensees of feudal monopolies (e.g., on banking, milling, storekeeping, and distillation and sale of alcohol), and in general as anti-Christian scourges who even collected tithes at the doors of churches and exacted fees to open those doors for weddings, christenings and funerals. They had life and death powers over the local population, and no law above them to which that population had recourse. See, e.g., Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, v. 1, p. 444 (Oxford University Press, 1982); and Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski, Jews in Poland, pp. 68-79, 283 (1993).
Shahak (Three Thousand Years, ch. 4) says "the full weight of the Jewish religious laws against gentiles fell upon the peasants." As to the nature of those laws, see id., ch. 5, esp. under the heading "Abuse." Subtelny (pp. 123-38) says, like Davies and Pogonowski, that the arendars leased estates for terms of only two or three years and had every incentive to wring the peasantry without regard to long-term consequences. According to Chaim Bermant, The Jews, p. 26 (1977):
. . . [I]f the nobility were. . . the ultimate exploiters, the Jews were the visible ones and aroused the most immediate hostility. Rabbis warned that Jews were sowing a terrible harvest of hatred, but while the revenues rolled in the warnings were ignored. Moreover, the rabbis themselves were beneficiaries of the system.
Indeed, according to Davies (p. 444) the oppressiveness of the Jews as arendars "provided the most important single cause of the terrible retribution that would descend on them on several occasions in the future." In 1986 the Stanford history department voted 12-11 against offering tenure to Davies, then a professor visiting from the University of London. Davies sued unsuccessfully for defamation, which suggests the tenor of the discussion. Davies is now a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. The queen awarded him a CMG in 2001.
Jewish tax-farming can be traced back to the earliest times, and has sometimes involved copious use of deadly force. See Flavius Josephus, The Antiquities of the Jews, bk. 12, ch. 4 (1st c.), available online (Syria stripped to its "bones" for Ptolemy III); and Elias Bickerman, The Jews in the Greek Age, p. 120 (Harvard University Press 1988).
Moreover, arendars persisted long after 1654. See Jewish FamilyHistory. org/ Grand_ Duchy_of_Lithuania. htm ("During the 18th century, up to 80 percent of Jewish heads of households in rural areas [of what are now Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and parts of Poland] were arendars, that is, holders of an arenda"). Pogonowski, p. 72, describes the return of the Jews to the Ukraine after 1648-54.
Desire to escape that occupational history may have had something to do with the early Zionist movement’s secularism, its longing for direct labor on the land, and its disparagement of introspection, and of intellectual and commercial occupations. Lenni Brenner discusses that in Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, ch. 2 (1983), available online. See also Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century, pp. 327-28 (Princeton University Press 2004).
Seventeenth- and 18th-century tribal antagonisms (and, as suggested above, some far older) were still very much alive at the time of the holodomor. Indeed they are alive even today, as demonstrated by the prominence recently given a series called "The Oligarchs" on Israeli television. Uri Avnery, in his essay "How the Virgin Became a Whore" (2004), available online, says of this series—which was most definitely not shown in the U.S.:
Some of its episodes are simply unbelievable—or would have been, if they had not come straight from the horses’ mouths: the heroes of the story, who gleefully boast about their despicable exploits. The series was produced by Israeli immigrants from Russia.
[The oligarchs] exploited the disintegration of the Soviet system to loot the treasures of the state and to amass plunder amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars. In order to safeguard the perpetuation of their business, they took control of the state. Six of the seven are Jews. . . . [Boris] Berezovsky boasts that he caused the war in Chechnya, in which tens of thousands have been killed and a whole country devastated. He was interested in the mineral resources and a prospective [oil] pipeline there.. . . In the end there was a reaction: Vladimir Putin, the taciturn and tough ex-KGB operative, assumed power, took control of the media, put one of the oligarchs (Mikhail Khodorkovsky) in prison, [and] caused the others to flee (Berezovsky is in England, Vladimir Gusinsky is in Israel, [and] another, Mikhail Chernoy, is assumed to be hiding here [in Israel]).
The persistence of ancient antagonisms, down to this day, can also be seen in Chaim Nachman Bialik’s poem, "My Father" (1932), which Shahak (Three Thousand Years, ch. 4, n. 9) says is taught in all Israeli schools. The poem depicts Bialik’s "righteous and honest" father selling vodka to Slavic peasants "in a den of pigs like men" who "rolled in vomit" with "monstrous faces of corruption." Bialik adds the word "scorpions" for good measure. The poem nowhere acknowledges the common complaint that Jewish tavernkeepers encouraged alcoholism that produced revenue and made Slavs easier to control.
Moreover, I can find no English translation of "My Father" that antedates Atar Hadari’s in 2000; the poem is absent from Bialik’s Complete Poetic Works, published in English well after his death in 1934.
That takes us back to Shahak and Mezvinsky’s point, above, about translations that falsify by omission. A related point: A search of the Library of Congress catalogue under the keyword "arenda" turns up 35 apparently relevant items, not one of them in English. By comparison, a search under the combination "slavery" and "United States" turns up 5,134. A search under "Ukrainian famine" turns up ten items. A search under "holocaust" turns up 10,000.
Yuri Slezkine’s celebratory The Jewish Century, above, further confirms Shahak’s point about Jewish hatred and contempt for peasants. See Kevin MacDonald’s review of Slezkine, entitled "Stalin’s Willing Executioners?", (a much fuller version of which appears in the Occidental Quarterly, Fall 2005, also available online):
Lev Kopelev, a Jewish writer who witnessed and rationalized the Ukrainian famine in which millions died horrible deaths of starvation and disease as an "historical necessity," is quoted [on p. 230 as] saying "You mustn’t give in to debilitating pity. We are the agents of historical necessity. We are fulfilling our revolutionary duty." On the next page, Slezkine describes the life of the largely Jewish elite in Moscow and Leningrad where they attended the theater, sent their children
to the best schools, [and] had peasant women (whose families were often the victims of mass murder) for nannies. . . .
The phrase "Stalin’s willing executioners"—with its echo of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen—is Slezkine’s (p. 130). At pp. 183-84, translating from the Russian, Slezkine quotes Ia. A. Bromberg (1931) on what Stalinism did to its Jewish servitors:
The convinced and unconditional opponent of the death penalty. . . , who could not, as it were, watch a chicken being killed, has been transformed outwardly into a leather-clad person with a revolver and [has], in fact, lost all human likeness. . . , standing in a Cheka basement doing "bloody but honorable revolutionary work."
The Nazis, too, regarded Slavic peasants with murderous contempt, but were also obsessed with "Judeobolshevism." It would be interesting to know what they made of the holodomor, which was still very much in progress when they came to power in 1933.
They surely knew about it. The German intelligence services, even on the unlikely assumption that they had no sources of their own, could hardly have missed the story in the British press as reported by Muggeridge, by former Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s heroic protégé Gareth Jones, and by A.T. Cholerton of the News-Telegraph and the Sunday Times; in the American press as reported by Lyons, by Ralph Barnes of the New York Herald-Tribune, by W.H. Chamberlin of the Christian Science Monitor, by William Stoneman of the Chicago Daily News, by Harry Lang and Richard M. Sanger of the New York Journal, and by Adam J. Tawdul of the New York American; in the French press as reported by Suzanne Bertillon of Le Matin; and in the German press as reported by the liberal (and Jewish) Paul Scheffer of the Berliner Tageblatt, and by Otto Auhagen in the scholarly journal Osteuropa, VII (Aug. 1932). Even at that early date, Auhagen said peasants were reduced to eating the cadavers of horses, from which they acquired infectious diseases.
The Nazis could hardly have failed to notice, moreover, when Theodor Cardinal Innitzer of Vienna called in August 1933 for relief efforts, stating that the Ukrainian famine was claiming lives "likely. . . numbered. . . by the millions" and driving those still alive to cannibalism and infanticide. See, e.g., the New York Times, Aug. 20, 1933, reporting both Innitzer’s charge and the official denial ("in the Soviet Union we have neither cannibals nor cardinals").
Other sources can be found by searching on the combination of "Innitzer" and "Ukraine" and "famine." Also, P.C. Hiebert and the Rev. Charles H. Hagus tried to organize relief efforts on behalf of the German Mennonite community. None of the proposed relief operations had any significant success.
Most likely, the lesson the Nazis drew was how safe, easy, even acceptable it was to murder whole populations. That was demonstrably Hitler’s own conclusion about the early-20th-century Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks ("Who speaks any more [of that]?") and the annihilation of the American Indians ("Treat them like redskins"). Likewise, the Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky actually spoke of the "good name" Hitler himself had supposedly given to forced "mass migrations."
Just before his death in 1940, Jabotinsky justified "transferring" the Palestinian people out of their homes on the ground that "the world has become accustomed to the idea of mass migrations and has become fond of them. . . . Hitler—as odious as he is to us—has given this idea a good name in the world." Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete, p. 407 (2000); see generally Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948 (1992). Twenty-one years after Jabotinsky’s back-handed compliment to Hitler, Adolf Eichmann was put on trial in Israel. Two of the counts on which he was convicted alleged mass forcible expulsion of people—non-Jews at that—from their homes. Those counts (nos. 9 and 10) both carried the death penalty. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 245 (1963).
Israel is now concerned both to cultivate its relations with Turkey and to preserve the claim of Jewish exclusivity for "the" Holocaust (capital "H"). Accordingly it not only maintains a diplomatic silence about the Armenians but also lobbies against commemoration of their catastrophe in the U.S. See Larry Derfner in the Jerusalem Post, April 21, 2005 ("[O]n the subject of the Armenian genocide, Israel and some U.S. Jewish organizations, notably the American Jewish Committee, have for many years acted aggressively as silencers"); and Jon Wiener in the Nation, July 12, 1999 ("Lucy Dawidowicz, a leading Holocaust historian, argued that the Turks had ‘a rational reason’ for killing Armenians, unlike the Germans, who had no rational reason for killing Jews").
Note carefully Dawidowicz’s "rational reason" for killing 1.5 million human beings, Kopelev’s "historical necessity" and "revolutionary duty" to kill 7 (or perhaps even 10) million, and Koestler’s "mind conditioned to explain away what [he] saw." Bernard Lewis, by the way, a Zionist professor at Princeton, actually has the distinction of having been convicted in a French court of "holocaust-denial" as to the Armenians. See Norman Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah, p. 59n (University of California Press, 2005).
The late David Roth, national ethnic liaison of the American Jewish Committee, once testified before Congress—in 1966, when Israel was describing itself as a bastion against Soviet influence in the Middle East, rather than as a magnet drawing it in—that "it is outrageous to think that the death of 7 million Ukrainians is somehow less important than the death of 6 million Jews." We should, he said, "deny the Soviets the ultimate victory of our silence."
Source: DESIP
Posted to: Ziopedia