The Trotsykite Plot Against Stalin, A Tale of the 1930's USSR

I have been saying for a long time on here that the Purges and Great Terror of the 1930’s, especially 1937-38, were in part a response to a plot within the party to kill Stalin and overthrow the leadership of the party. Trotskyites were involved in the plot. They had cut a deal with Nazi Germany. After the hoped-for invasion of the USSR, the Nazis would allow the Trots to take power in the rump USSR. In return, the Trots would give the Nazis the Ukraine and Belorussia, at the least. People deride the existence of such a plot, and say there is no evidence for it. It’s true that the evidence is a bit sketchy. However, this recent article by top Soviet scholar J. Arch Getty shows that Trotsky was indeed involved with oppositionist circles in the USSR in the early 1930’s anyway, giving at least partial support to the Trotsky As Traitor theory outlined above. I have only given this a cursory look over. Feel free to check it out.

Trotsky in Exile: The Founding of the Fourth International

By J. Arch Getty*

Soviet Studies, vol. XXXVIII, no. 1, January 1986, 24-35

Leon Trotsky’s formal political break with the Bolshevik Party came in 1933 with his decision to renounce allegiance to the Third International (Comintern) and to form a Fourth International. The rupture had not come easily for him. Although the Bolshevik leadership had expelled him from the party in 1927 and exiled him from the Soviet Union in 1929, Trotsky, for his part, had never formally split from the party or the Comintern. From the time of his exile to the 1933 break, pro-Trotsky communists (‘Bolshevik-Leninists’) had tried to work both within and outside the official parties of the Comintern in order to influence their policies in a Trotskyist direction and Trotsky had been reluctant to organise or sanction new Bolshevik-Leninist parties outside the framework of the Comintern. He had consistently maintained his allegiance to the Third International and expressed his willingness to defend the Soviet state and Bolshevik monopoly of power against internal and external class enemies. His four-year loyalty to the party that had exiled him was based in part on his fears of the dangers facing the Soviet government. Trotsky defined the Stalinist regime in this period not as a rightist or ‘Thermidorean’ counter-revolution but rather as a centrist political faction which ‘zig-zagged’ between left and right. He believed and feared that the zig-zagging and incompetence of Stalinist leadership could, however, produce a crisis in which the real political right (kulaks, nepmen, Whites, or even a man on horseback) could take advantage of the chaos and mount a genuine counter-revolution. In such circumstances, Trotsky would feel bound to support and defend even the Stalinist centrists from an attack from the right that could topple the Soviet state. He therefore resisted suggestions that he adopt the slogan ‘overthrow Stalin’ or organise a new political party which could split the Bolsheviks in a time of crisis.1 When studying political actors and theorists it is always difficult to separate the subjective from the objective. Does a politician adopt a particular policy or stance as a result of subjective personal motivations or objective analysis? Treatments of most Bolshevik (and especially Stalinist) politicians have routinely stressed personal ambition as a determinant of political or theoretical pronouncements. But few of the hagiographical or scholarly works on Trotsky have questioned his intellectual integrity or asked critical questions about the personal motives behind his theoretical and political positions. Since Isaac Deutscher’s pioneering biography, Trotsky has been ‘the prophet outcast’, a tragic hero whose personal and political life was shaped—often disastrously—by his objective theoretical views more than vice versa.2 In particular, Trotsky’s 1933 decision to form the Fourth International has been explained as a function of an objective economic, social, and political analysis of the situations in the Comintern and the USSR. Yet Trotsky’s private writings and activities suggest that his changing theoretical evaluations of the USSR and the Bolshevik Party resulted at least in part from the vicissitudes of his tactical position and partisan hopes and not vice versa. Trotsky was a politician as well as a political analyst and one should not be surprised to discover that his private political activities continued in exile or, as with most politicians, influenced his public theoretical pronouncements. Formation of separate political organisations and renunciation of allegiance to the Comintern would have made Trotsky and his followers members of a separate, anti-Bolshevik political party and would have placed him and his partisans completely outside the pale of Bolshevik politics. Such a stance would doom any chance for him to return to the Moscow party leadership. With hindsight, for Trotsky to have harboured such hope seems naive and quixotic, but the uncertainties of the dynamic political and social crisis of 1929-32 made many things seem possible. Indeed, Trotsky believed in and hoped for the possibility of a return to the Moscow leadership and worked tirelessly for it. The collapse of his last hope for a recall to Moscow coincided with his decision to form the Fourth International. Using Trotsky’s public writings of the 1930s, most writers have agreed that Hitler’s crushing of the German Communist Party (KPD) and workers’ movement in February-March, 1933 led Trotsky finally to question his allegiance first to the KPD and then to the Comintern and its member parties.3 Trotsky was angry with the KPD and its Comintern masters for not forming a ‘united front from above and below’ with the German socialists (SPD) to block Hitler’s victory. In March, he wrote a series of articles in which he called for the formation of a wholly new German Communist Party rather than the resuscitation of the KPD.4 Writing under the pseudonym ‘G. Gurov’, Trotsky suggested that the decision had been taken reluctantly:

‘Just as a doctor does not leave a patient who still has a breath of life, we had for our task the reform of the party as long as there was the least hope. But it would be criminal to tie oneself to a corpse.’5

Although Trotsky now sanctioned the formation of a new non-Comintern party in Germany, he stopped short of renouncing loyalty to the Third International or Soviet Communist Party and refused to approve the creation of new communist parties anywhere except Germany. In reply to a rhetorical question about giving up on the Comintern as a whole, ‘G. Gurov’ waffled: ‘In my opinion, it would be incorrect to give a rigid answer . . .’. He then suggested that the German disaster could serve as an object lesson that could shock other communist parties into reforming Comintern policy. ‘The question has not been settled for the USSR, where proclamation of the slogan of the second party would be incorrect . . . It is not a question of the creation of the Fourth International but of salvaging the Third.’6 Again, on 9 April 1933, Trotsky maintained that ‘we do not break with the Third International’. In response to a question on whether it was not inconsistent to break with the Comintern in Germany and not elsewhere, Trotsky minimised the issue as a matter of ‘bookkeeping’. ‘If, however, the Stalinist bureaucracy should bring the USSR to ruin . . . it will be necessary to build a Fourth International.’7 For four months following a call for a new German communist party, Trotsky declined to extend his renunciation of the KPD to the Soviet or other communist parties. It was not until mid-July that he finally announced that one cannot remain ‘captive to one’s own formula’ and that hope for Comintern reform was dead. In an article entitled It is Necessary to Build Communist Parties and an International Anew, he wrote that the Soviet Communist Party was no longer a party at all but merely ‘an apparatus of domination in the hands of an uncontrolled bureaucracy’. There was, therefore, no party with which to break.8 Five days later, he wrote that ‘the Bolshevik Party no longer exists’ and that accordingly it was time to ‘abandon the slogan of the reform of the CPSU’.9 Apprehensive that he would now be widely regarded as an anti-Soviet counter-revolutionary, Trotsky still refused to call for a revolution in the Soviet Union. In his view, Soviet Russia was still a workers’ state that ‘can be regenerated . . . without a revolution’.10 It was not until 1 October 1933 that he asserted: ‘No normal “constitutional” ways remain to remove the ruling clique. The bureaucracy can be compelled to yield power into the hands of the proletariat only by force’. (emphasis Trotsky’s). Still queasy about the implications of this position, he argued that such force would not be ‘an armed insurrection against the dictatorship of the proletariat but the removal of a malignant growth upon it’. He was advocating not ‘measures of a civil war but rather the measures of a police character’.11 Trotsky’s October call for the use of force against the Soviet party regime was not qualitatively new. He was only dotting the ‘i’s and crossing the ‘t’s of his key July statements renouncing the Bolshevik party and denying its existence.12 If reform were impossible and if the Stalinist clique refused to abdicate power, then the July position already implied removing it by force. Trotsky’s July renunciation of the Comintern and Bolshevik party and his simultaneous call for a new International comprise the chief watershed in the political activities of his exile. Why, after the mid-March articles on Germany did it take Trotsky four months to follow the clear logic of his position and break with the Comintern? His admiring biographer Isaac Deutscher found the delay ‘illogical’ but explained simply that ‘the logic of his new venture soon got the better of Trotsky’ in the months that followed. Deutscher attributed Trotsky’s peculiar hesitation on the matter to his longtime loyalty to the Comintern and his fear of Russian counterrevolution.13 While these factors were pertinent to the 1929-32 period, an explanation based on them does not fully account for the illogical four-month pause between breaking with the KPD and renouncing its Moscow Comintern policymakers. Did either rightist danger or Trotsky’s loyalty to the Comintern decrease so dramatically after the March KPD disaster? Trotsky himself anticipated questions about the delay. He had written in April that a Fourth International would not be necessary until the Stalinist clique brought the USSR to ruin. Since he never claimed that any action on Stalin’s part between March and July brought the USSR any closer to ruin than it already was, both the delay and the proposal of a Fourth International needed explaining. Indeed, on 27 July 1933, Trotsky admitted that logically the Comintern break should have come in April. First, he explained that a disagreement between himself and his ‘German comrades’ on the question of a new party had caused friction in the ‘Left Opposition’ and delayed the total break. Trotsky had had to convince his German followers of the necessity for a break. Second, he claimed that between March and July he had been waiting to see if the parties or leadership of the Comintern would ‘wake up’ and abruptly change their policies.14 It is hard to weigh the importance of either these factors for Trotsky’s unusual indecisiveness. It is true that the German Trotskyists with whom he corresponded resisted the notion of a new party, although Trotsky had not taken them seriously enough to consult with them beforehand and had never shown much reluctance to break with the small European leftist groups which defied him.15 The other explanation, that Trotsky waited four months for the Comintern quickly to admit the error of its ways, is even less convincing. No one had less reason than Trotsky to be optimistic about the Comintern and no one had so relentlessly documented its failures over the preceding decade. Trotsky could not have been so naive or ignorant of Comintern politics as to expect either a mea culpa from the Comintern Executive Committee or an independent, defiant policy from the member parties. It seems therefore that the lack of Comintern reform cannot explain the timing of the call for a Fourth International. Yet Trotsky’s typically polemical, assertive, and self-justifying writings have led scholars to accept his version of the Fourth International decision and to ask few questions about his procrastination. The issue is of more than simple antiquarian or psychological interest since both published and archival documents suggest another side to Trotsky’s life in the 1930s quite apart from his journalistic and editorial activities. Behind the scenes of his public reflections on the Comintern, Trotsky was trying both to organise illegal opposition groups in the USSR and to negotiate with Moscow for his legal return. Long before the 1933 disaster in Germany, Trotsky had tried to maintain contact with followers in the USSR. Since 1929 he had corresponded with those of his adherents who were in internal exile in Serbia or Central Asia.16 He had tried to smuggle copies of his Byullenten’ oppozitsii into the Soviet Union, and through his son Lev Sedov (who lived in Berlin) had maintained contacts with tourists and Soviet officials travelling to and from the USSR. As it became clear that his letters to the Soviet Union were being screened and intercepted by the secret police, he switched to postcards, since he believed that they were scrutinised less carefully.17 At the time of the Moscow show trials, Trotsky denied that he had any communications with the defendants since his exile in 1929. Yet it is now clear that in 1932 he sent secret personal letters to former leading oppositionists Karl Radek, G. Sokol’nikov, E. Preobrazhensky, and others. While the contents of these letters are unknown, it seems reasonable to believe that they involved an attempt to persuade the addressees to return to opposition.18 We know considerably more, however, about another clandestine communication between Trotsky and his supporters in the USSR late in 1932. Sometime in October, E.S. Gol’tsman, a former Trotskyist and current Soviet official, met Sedov in Berlin and gave him a proposal from veteran Trotskyist Ivan Smirnov and other left oppositionists in the USSR for the formation of a united opposition bloc. The proposed bloc was to include Trotskyists, Zinovievists, members of the Lominadze group, and others. Sedov wrote to Trotsky relaying the proposal and Trotsky approved. ‘The proposition of the bloc seems to me completely acceptable’, Trotsky wrote, ‘but it is a question of bloc, not merger’. ‘How will the bloc manifest itself? For the moment, principally through reciprocal information. Our allies will keep us up to date on that which concerns the Soviet Union, and we will do the same thing on that which concerns the Comintern’.19 In his view, the bloc should exclude those who capitulated and recanted: capitulationist sentiment ‘will be inexorably and pitilessly combatted by us’.20 Gol’tsman had relayed the opinion of those in the Soviet Union that participation in the bloc by the Right Opposition was desirable, and that formation of the bloc should be delayed until their participation could be secured. Trotsky reacted against this suggestion: ‘The allies’ opinion that one must wait until the rights can easily join does not have my approval . . . .’ Trotsky was impatient with what he considered passivity on the part of the Right Opposition. ‘One struggles against repression by anonymity and conspiracy, not by silence’.21 Sedov then replied that the bloc had been organized. ‘It embraces the Zinovievists, the Sten-Lominadze group, and the Trotksyists (old “—”)’22 ‘The Safarov-Tarkhanov group has not yet formally entered—they have a very extreme position; they will enter soon.’ Ironically, back in the Soviet Union, the leaders of the bloc were being rounded up by the police at this precise moment. Ivan Smirnov and those around him (including the economist Preobrazhensky) had been arrested ‘by accident’. It seems that a provocateur in their midst had denounced them on a separate matter. Moreover, Zinoviev and Kamenev had been arrested and deported for knowing about the oppositional Ryutin platform and not reporting it to the authorities. Although these events certainly disrupted the bloc, Sedov was not despondent. He was sure that the police had found no documents or ‘Trotskyist literature’ on Smirnov, and while ‘the arrest of the “ancients is a great blow, the lower workers are safe’.23 At about this time, Trotsky attempted to contact his ‘lower workers’ directly. During a brief stay in Copenhagen, he handed a letter to an English supporter named Harry Wicks who was to convey it to oppositionists in Russia. The letter began: ‘I am not sure that you know my handwriting. If not, you will probably find someone who dies’. Trotsky went on to call upon loyal oppositionists to become active: ‘The comrades who sympathize with the Left Opposition are obliged to come out of their passive state at this time, maintaining, of course, all precautions’. (emphasis Trotsky’s) He went on to give names and addresses of safe contacts in Berlin, Prague, and Istanbul to whom communications for Trotsky could be sent, and then concluded, ‘I am certain that the menacing situation in which the Party finds itself will force all the comrades devoted to the revolution to gather actively about the Left Opposition’.24 It is clear, then, that a united left oppositional bloc was formed in 1932. In Trotsky’s opinion, the bloc existed only for the purposes of communication and exchange of information, and from the evidence, it is clear that Trotsky envisioned no secret ‘terrorist’ role for the bloc, as Moscow would charge four years later. There is also reason to believe that after the decapitation of the bloc (through the removal of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Smirnov, and others), the organisation included mainly lower level, less prominent oppositionists: followers of Zinoviev, but not Zinoviev himself. Finally, it seems that Trotsky attempted to maintain direct contact with the allies’. The seize and strength of the 1932 bloc cannot be determined and one does not know how threatening it was to the regime. In any case, events would show that both Trotskyists and Stalinists took it seriously. Aside from the bloc, Trotsky was pursuing another strategy in these months. During the autumn of 1932 he had written to his son Sedov that it would be strategically important to offer to ‘cooperate with the regime in power’ in order not to alienate potential supporters within the Stalin apparatus.25 In March 1933 Trotsky made a final attempt to ‘cooperate’ with Moscow by magnanimously offering to return to the Moscow leadership. Three days after his ‘G. Gurov’ article breaking with the KPD, Trotsky made his formal offer to return to the Politbureau leadership under certain conditions. He made his proposition in a remarkable secret letter sent to the Politbureau on 15 March.26Trotsky’s letter was based on his perception that economic catastrophe was overwhelming the party leadership which now needed the support and participation of all factions in order to rebuild the party and maintain power.

‘I consider it my duty to make one more attempt to appeal to the sense of responsibility of those who presently lead the Soviet state. You know conditions better than I. If the internal development [of the country] proceeds further on its present course, catastrophe is inevitable’.

Trotsky referred to the Politbureau to his recent articles in his Byulleten’ oppozitsii for his analysis. He cited Hitler’s recent victory in Germany as evidence of the bankruptcy of Comintern policy and asserted that disasters like that had led to a ‘loss of confidence in the leadership’. ‘Chto nado sdelat’?’ What was needed was a ‘rebirth of the party organisation’ in order to reestablish confidence, and the Left Opposition was willing to cooperate. Some of you will say, Trotsky mused, that the Left Opposition merely wants a path to power and is offering to cooperate only to get back inside the leadership. However, the question, Trotsky replied, is not power [!] for this or that faction but rather the survival of the workers’ state and international revolution for many years:

Only open and honest cooperation between the historically produced fractions, fully transforming them into tendencies in the party and eventually dissolving into it, can in concrete conditions restore confidence in the leadership and resurrect the party.

Trotsky then promised that a returning Left Opposition would not persecute any party members who had opposed it in the past. After describing the conditions which demanded the return of the opposition, Trotsky made the remarkable offer. Alluding to the platform of the Left Opposition, he insisted:

Renunciation of this programme is of course out of the question . . . But concerning the manner of presenting and defending this programme before the Central Committee and the party, not to mention the manner of putting it into effect, there can and must be achieved a preliminary agreement with the goal of preventing shocks or splitting.

Trotsky thus proposed that the Left Opposition be allowed to return to the leadership as a ‘tendency’ within the party, and insisted that his group would not publicly renounce its critique and programme. He was, however, leaving the door open for a deal under which agitation for this programme could be held in abeyance for an indefinite period. Trotsky was willing to re-enter the leadership without the usual recantation but with the suggestion that for the sake of party unity he would refrain from criticism. This was a new proposal. Previously, he had demanded unlimited freedom of criticism for the opposition within the party, but now he was making oppositional criticism conditional on an ‘agreement’ to be worked out. The contradiction with Trotsky’s previous conditions and demands explains the secrecy of the letter.28 Unlike his previous open letters to the Soviet leadership, this epistle was never released or published by Trotsky.29 He concluded the letter by informing the Politbureau that they were receiving the only copy of the document. This would leave the Politbureau ‘free to choose the means’ to begin discussions. The 12 March article KPD or New Party? and the 15 March secret letter were interrelated. First, Trotsky may have thought that his call for a new party in Germany would put pressure on the Moscow leadership, which would conceivably opt to take Trotsky back rather than face a split in the Comintern. Second, the secret letter to the Politbureau also helps to explain why he wrote the 12 March article under a pseudonym. Pending a reply to his 15 March offer, Trotsky was not yet committed to the Fourth International and the pseudonym would allow him later to deny that he had broken with the Comintern parties. Such ‘deniability’ would have been important to him if Moscow had responded favourably to his offer to return. In such a case, Trotsky’s restored position in the Moscow leadership would have been inconsistent with a call to break with the KPD and it would have been necessary to disavow ‘G. Gurov’. Trotsky’s delay in breaking with the other parties of the Comintern (including the Bolsheviks) can thus be partially explained. After March, he was waiting for Moscow to answer his secret letter before committing himself publicly to a Fourth International. As much as waiting for the Comintern to admit its mistakes and reform itself, Trotsky delayed his break with Moscow in order to keep his personal options open. A month and a half later, Trotsky despaired of receiving a reply from the Politbureau. On 10 May 1933 he set the Politbureau an angry coda to the March letter, which he entitled Explanation.30 This short statement began by noting that the Politbureau had only replied to him with silence. He stressed again the danger facing the Bolshevik regime and pointedly warned that the regime could fall because of the mistakes committed by the Stalin faction. He then ominously served notice on the Politbureau that he now felt free to agitate among the lower ranks of the Stalinist bureaucracy. ‘We are sending this document [the March letter plus the May explanation] to responsible workers in the belief that among the blind, the careerists, and the cowards, there are honest revolutionaries from whose eyes one cannot hide the real state of things . . . We call upon these honest revolutionaries to make contact with us. Seek and ye shall find’. The 10 May Explanation marked the end of Trotsky’s attempts to return ‘legally’ to the Moscow leadership. The disaster in Germany, the clumsy economic policy of the apparatus, and finally Stalin’s refusal to negotiate with him convinced Trotsky that any kind of cooperation with the Stalinist faction was impossible. But his 15 July article It is Necessary to Build Communist Parties and an International Anew was still two months in the future. Why did he further delay his total break with the Bolsheviks and the Comintern? While simple indecision was certainly part of the answer, it may well have been that Trotsky felt that the 1932 bloc still offered possibilities short of a total break with the Comintern. As we have seen, Zinoviev and Kamenev had been expelled from the party and exiled in October 1932 for their knowledge of the Ryutin platform. In an article on their expulsion dated 19 October 1932, Trotsky had taken a generally soft, sympathetic, and conciliatory attitude toward the two leaders. (They were, after all, still members of the ephemeral bloc.) Their expulsion from the party and their lack of recantation still put them in Trotsky’s camp, as he saw it.31 Any hopes that Trotsky entertained about the viability of the bloc were shattered in May 1933. Fewer than 10 days after Trotsky appended his May ‘Explanation‘ to the secret letter, he learned that Zinoviev and Kamenev had capitulated to Stalin, recanted their sins and repledged their loyalty to the Stalinist faction. Their departure from the opposition embittered Trotsky. In a 23 May article he described the two as pitiful, tragic, and subservient.32 On 6 July he rallied against them once again and denounced their capitulation in strong terms.33 The leaders (if not the lower workers) of the bloc were gone. Both of Trotsky’s non-public strategies were now in ruins. The Politbureau had ignored his offer to return and the recantations of Zinoviev and Kamenev had decapitated the 1932 bloc. The options which Trotsky had sought to keep open were now closed and he could no longer hope for a return to Moscow in the near future. Nine days after his bitter article against Zinoviev, he penned the fateful 15 July article breaking with the mainstream Communist parties and the Comintern. There was no longer any point in remaining ‘captive to one’s own formula’. The party which one month before Trotsky had sought to rejoin ‘no longer exists’ and was now incapable of reform. It is almost as if Trotsky equated reform of the party with his return to it. There was more to Trotsky’s life in exile than theorising and publishing. Taking the formation of the Fourth International as a case study, one can see that his partisan activities affected the nature and timing of his theoretical assertions. Indeed, the failure of Trotsky’s secret political strategies was a major component in his decision to break with the Comintern and to go it alone. His conspiratorial machinations were not only factors in the decision, but they were important and perhaps better account for the four-month delay in breaking with Moscow than do his public explanations. It seems reasonable to suppose further that Trotsky’s activities were grist to the mill of those hard-line Moscow politicians who favoured repression of the opposition. His activities could not but have provided political ammunition for those in the Kremlin who demanded stern measures. Trotsky’s secret letters to followers in the Soviet Union, his organisation of the 1932 bloc, his formation of the Fourth International, his call for the overthrow of the party leadership by force, and his continued opposition to Comintern policies (particularly to the Popular Front) later made it easy for hard-liners to portray Trotsky as a devious and ‘unprincipled’ plotter who was scheming to return, forming conspiracies, and opposing communist parties both politically and organisationally. In looking back over Soviet history since 1933, Trotsky’s activities and writings’ might at first seem pointless and irrelevant. Indeed, there is considerable pathos in his actions and writings. After years in exile, he still wrote as if he were part of the leadership. In criticizing the first Five-Year Plan he often used the first person:

. . .we have not entered socialism. We have far from attained mastery of the methods of planned regulation. We are fulfilling only the first rough hypotheses, fulfilling them poorly, and with our headlights not yet on.34

With hindsight, his attempts to organise secret blocs and his offers to return to Moscow seem sad. Following Deutscher and others, Alec Nove observed ‘how few were his followers, how politically ineffective, even meaningless, were his eloquent, if sometimes dogmatic words’.35 But hindsight can be misleading. Bolshevik party history showed how quickly political fortunes could change. At the end of 1916 Lenin and his circle of expatriates must certainly have seemed dubious candidates to rule the Russian Empire, but war, social conflict, and political paralysis quickly changed the situation. The social and political upheavals of the 1930s combined with the fascist threat of war offered the possibility of a similarly fluid and dynamic situation. Stalin’s removal and Trotsky’s return did not seem so far-fetched to either of them. It seems that the Stalinists took the possibility quite seriously and never relaxed their pressure on Trotsky and Trotskyism. The Stalinist press constantly vilified Trotskyism as the ‘vanguard of counterrevolution’. Trotsky’s mail to the USSR was intercepted and his entourage was infiltrated by Stalinist agents.36 Secret police officer Yakov Blyumkin was shot simply for meeting Trotsky abroad.37 Later, in 1936, the 1932 bloc became the evidential base for the Moscow show trials and the massacre of Trotskyists in the Ezhov Terror which accompanied them.38 In the Spanish Civil War, hard-pressed Spanish and Russian communists took the trouble to round up and shoot Trotskyists. The Soviet government put continuous pressure on the governments of Norway, Belgium, France, and Mexico in an attempt to deny Trotsky an exile sanctuary or base of operations. Finally, in 1940, with war on the horizon, Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico. Stalin thus made sure that history would not repeat itself. In whatever crisis that might follow, there would be no brilliant exiled revolutionary personality to return home in a sealed train as Lenin had done in 1917. University of California, Riverside * The author is grateful for a research grant from the University of California, Riverside’s Academic Senate Committee on Research.

Notes

1 The Trotsky Papers (Exile Correspondence), Houghton Library, Harvard University, 10248, 4777 show Trotksy’s discussions with his son on such questions. Robert H. McNeal, ‘Trotskyist Interpretations of Stalinism’ in Robert C. Tucker, ed., Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation, (New York, 1977) pp. 30-52, analyses Trotsky’s changing theoretical evaluation of Stalinism. See also the summary in Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast. Trotsky: 1929-1940, (New York, 1963) pp. 172-5.2 Most writers on Trotsky in exile have concentrated on his writings rather than his political activities. See Alec Nove, ‘A Note on Trotsky and the “Left Opposition” 1929-31’, Soviet Studies, Vol. 29, No 4, (October, 1977) pp. 576-89; Richard B. Day, ‘Leon Trotsky on the Problems of the Smychka and Forced Collectivisation’, Critique, No. 13, 1981, pp. 55-68; Warren Lerner, ‘”The Caged Lion”; Trotsky’s Writings in Exile’, Studies in Comparative Communism, Vol. 10, (1977), pp. 198-203; Samuel Kassow, ‘Trotsky and the Bulletin of the Opposition’, Ibid., pp. 184-97; Siegfried Bahne, ‘Trotsky on Stalin’s Russia’, Survey, No. 41, (1962), pp. 27-42. Exceptions include Jean van Heijenoort, With Trotsky in Exile: From Prinkipo to Coyoacan, Cambridge, Mass., 1978 and Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast. op. cit. 3 Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, op. cit. pp. 198-200; Michel Dreyfus, ‘Trockij dall’ opposizione di sinestra ai fondamenti di una nuova internazionale (1930-1935)’, Ponte, Vol. 36, No. 11-12 (1980), pp. 1316-31; Jean van Heijenoort, ‘How the Fourth International Was Conceived’, in Joseph Hansen, et. al, Leon Trotsky: The Man and His Work, (New York, 1969), p. 62; George Breitman and Bev Scott, eds., Writings of Leon Trotsky [1933-34], (New York, 1975), p. 10 (hereafter WLT [1933-34]). 4 ‘Tragediya nemetskogo proletariata’, Byullenten’ oppozitsii, (hereafter, BO) No. 34, pp. 7-11 (dated 14 March 1933); ‘KPG ili novaya partiya?’, Ibid., pp. 12-13 (dated 29 March 1933); ‘Krushenie germanskoi kompartii i zadachi oppozitsii’ Ibid., pp. 13-17 (dated 9 April 1933); ‘KPD or New York? (I)’, Writings of Leon Trotsky [1932-1933], New York, 1972 (hereafter WLT [1932-1933], pp. 137-9 (dated 12 March 1933: not the same article as ‘KPG ili novaya partiya?’ cited above). 5 ‘KPD or New Party? (I)’, WLT [1932-33], p. 137. 6 Ibid., p. 138. 7 BO, No. 34, p. 15. 8 ‘Nuzhno stroit’ zanovo kommunistcheskie partii i International’, BO, No. 36-37, p. 21. (dated 15 July 1933). 9 ‘Nel’zya bol’she ostavat’ sya v odnom “Internationale” so Stalinym, Manuil’skim, Lozovskim, i Ko’, BO, No. 36-37, p. 24. (dated 20 July 1933). 10 Ibid. 11 ‘Klassovaya priroda sovetskogo gosudarstava’, BO, No. 36-37, pp. 1-12 (dated 1 October 1933) In the Moscow purge trials of 1936-38, Prosecutor Vyshinsky would quote from this article as evidence that Trotsky advocated the violent overthrow of the Soviet government. 12 The editors of the Writings of Leon Trotsky see the 1 October article as a qualitative evolution in Trotsky’s thinking, see WLT [1933-34], p. 10, Jean van Heijenoort, however, correctly notes that the ‘perspective of reform was definitely abandoned’ in July. (‘How the Fourth International Was Conceived‘, op. cit. p. 62.) 13 Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, op. cit. pp. 205-7. 14 ‘For New Communist Parties and the New International’, WLT [1933-34], pp. 26-27 (dated 27 July 1933). 15 See ‘The German Decision Against a New Party’, Writings of Leon Trotsky: Supplement (1929-1933), (New York, 1979). pp. 218-9 (dated 19 March 1933); ‘We Must Have a Decision on Germany’, Ibid., pp. 223-5 (dated 3 April 1933). 16 Sedov’s address book contained the exile addresses of Trotskyists in the USSR. Trotsky Papers, 15741. The Exile Correspondence section of the Trotsky Papers contains copies of such letters. 17 See Trotksy’s account of these difficult communications in The Dewey Commission, The Case of Leon Trotsky, (New York, 1937), pp. 128-32, 261-6, 271-3. This volume is the transcript of the 1937 Commission of Inquiry chaired by John Dewey which investigated the charges made against Trotsky at the 1933-37 Moscow show trials. Trotsky participated willingly in the inquiry. 18 Trotsky Papers, 15821. Unlike virtually all Trotsky’s other letters (including even the most sensitive) no copies of these remain in the Trotsky Papers. It seems likely that they have been removed from the Papers at some time. Only the certified mail receipts remain. At his 1937 trial, Karl Radek testified that he had received a letter from Trotsky containing ‘terrorist instructions’, but we do not know whether this was the letter in question. 19 Trotsky Papers, 13095 and 10107. Quoted by permission of the Houghton Library. See also Pierre Broue, ‘Trotsky et le bloc des oppositions de 1932’, Cahiers Leon Trotsky, No. 5, Jan.-Mar. 1980), pp. 5-37 for background on the bloc. Included in file 13095 is a 1937 note from Trotsky’s secretary van Heijenoort which shows that Trotsky and Sedov were reminded of the bloc at the time of the 1937 Dewey Commission but withheld the matter from the inquiry. 20 Trotsky was always bitterly opposed to those who capitulated to Stalin or who recanted their opposition. He wrote such persons off completely. 21 Trotsky Papers, 13095. Quoted by permission of the Houghton Library. Alec Nove has shown that while there were some differences, Trotsky’s critique of Stalin’s industrialisation and collectivisation plans resembled that of Bukharin and the right. (Nove, A Note on Trotsky and the “Left Opposition“, op. cit. pp. 576-84). Indeed, Trotsky’s spirited defence of the smychka and rural market relations, his criticism of the ultra-leftist campaign against the kulaks, and his advocacy of planning on the basis of ‘real potentials’ were similar to the strictures of Bukharin’s ‘Notes of an Economist‘. See, for example, Trotksy’s ‘Problemy razvitiya SSSR’, BO, No. 22, pp. 1-15 and ‘Sovetskoe khozyaistvo v opasnosti’, BO, No. 31, pp. 2-13. (For another view which sees continuity in Trotsky’s critique from the 1920s to the 1930s see Day, Trotsky on the Problems of the Smychka.) In the light of the apparent similarities between his and Bukharin’s critiques, Trotsky was anxious to maintain the separate identity of the Left Opposition. He wrote in 1932 that although ‘practical disagreements with the Right will hardly be revealed . . . it is intolerable to mix up the ranks and blunt the distinctions’. (WLT Supplement (1929-1933), p. 174). In a secret letter to his son about the 1932 bloc, he warned Sedov not to ‘leave the field to the rights’ (Trotsky Papers, 13095). Despite Trotsky’s efforts, Moscow hard-liners were able to portray Trotsky as a scheming ‘unprincipled’ oppositionist and to denounce ‘Left-Right’ conspirators at the Moscow show trials. 22 Trotsky Papers, 13095 (excision of word in original document). Quoted by permission of the Houghton Library. Shortly thereafter, Trotsky wrote cryptically that ‘As far as the illegal organisation of the Bolshevik-Leninists is concerned, only the first steps have been taken toward its reorganisation.’ WLT [1932-33], p. 34. 23 Trotsky Papers, 4782. Quoted by permission of the Houghton Library. 24 Trotsky Papers, 8114. Quoted by permission of the Houghton Library. See also The Case of Leon Trotsky, pp. 274-5. The editors of WLT claim that the letter was intended to help Wocks’ credibility among Russian Trotskyists in London, Writings of Leon Trotsky [1932], (New York, 1973), p. 328 but the archival copy contains a notation which shows that the letter’s intended destination was the USSR. 25 Trotsky Papers, 10248 and T-3485. Quoted by permission of the Houghton Library. 26 Trotsky Papers, T-3522. Quoted by permission of the Houghton Library. See also WLT [1932-33] p. 141-3. 27 Hard-liners in the Moscow leadership must have noted and argued that Trotsky’s proposal that his “fraction” retain is distinctive programme after readmission to the party ran counter to Lenin’s famous 1921 ban on factions and factional platforms. (On Party Unity, adopted at the X Congress in 1921). 28 Without revealing his offer to Moscow, Trotsky wrote that ‘mutual criticism . . . may have a different character depending on the extent to which it is consciously prepared by both sides and in what organisational framework it takes place’. (‘Nuzhno chestnoe vnutripartiinoe soglashenie’, BO, No. 34, p. 31, dated 30 March 1933). These cryptic remarks may have been published in order to prepare his followers for Moscow’s possible acceptance of Trotsky’s proposal to make criticism by the opposition conditional and restricted. 29 For an example of the more common ‘Open Letter’, see Trotsky Papers, T-3423. 30 Trotsky Papers, T-3522. Quoted by permission by the Houghton Library. On the last page of the July issue of Byullenten’ oppozitsii, Trotsky referred vaguely to the 15 March letter to the Politbureau. While mentioning neither his offer to defer the opposition programme nor his May ‘Explanation’, Trotsky claimed somewhat inaccurately that the March letter simply repeated his long-standing offer to return to the Bolshevik party ‘under conditions guaranteeing us the right to defend our views’, see ‘Pochtovyi yashchik’, BO, No. 35, p. 22. 31 ‘Stalintsky prinimayut mery’, BO, No. 31, pp. 13-18 (dated 19 October 1932). 32 ‘Zino’ev i Kamenev’, BO, No. 35, pp. 23-24 (dated 23 May 1933). 33 ‘Zinoviev on the Party Regime’, WLT [1932-33]. p. 286 (dated 6 July 1933). 34 ‘Sovetskoe khozyaistvo v opasnosti!’, BO, No. 31, pp. 2-13 (dated 22 October 1932). 35 Nove, A Note on Trotsky, op. cit., p. 589. 36 Van Heijenoort (With Trotsky in Exile, pp. 93-102) maintains that Sedov’s close assistant Mark Zborowski (alias ‘Etienne’) was a Stalinist agent. NKVD defector Alexander Orlov in testimony before a US Senate hearing, also denounced Zborowski and provided detailed information. See US Senate, Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act, Testimony of Alexander Orlov, Washington, D.C., 1962. Trotsky Papers, 15765 is a file on the suspected Stalinist agents in Trotsky’s entourage. 37 See Rex Winsbury, ‘Jacob Blumkin in Russia, 1892-1929’, History Today, Vol. 27, No. 11, 1977, pp. 712-18, and Deustcher, The Prophet Outcast, op. cit., pp. 84-8. 38 See J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938, (New York, 1985), Chapter 5 for a discussion of how the 1932 bloc might have influenced Soviet party politics in 1936.

Nords Versus Meds, Game Starts at 8 Eastern Time

In the post, Albanians Are Neither White Nor Europeans? Lafayette Sennacherib takes issue with some of my anti-Nordicist POV, suggesting that ancient Greece was populated from the North, specifically the Baltics:

…there may turn out to be some truth in the notion that the Myceneans came from the North (though I think it unlikely that many went back).

I mentioned here before that I’d recently come across this book by Felice Vinci: The Baltic Origins of Homer’s Epic Tales.

Homer, as you are no doubt aware, is credited  (it’s not known if he was one or many authors) with the creation of the earliest European literature with his epic tales ‘the Iliad’ about the Trojan war, and ‘the Odyssey’ about the journeys of Odysseus as he tries to find his way home, with a boatload of men, after the war.

Last I heard, the best guess is that it was composed about 1200BC and written down about 7oo BC. Trouble is, there’s a lot of description in Homer, but none of it fits the Mediterranean.

You’ve guessed what’s coming: Felice has matched all the descriptions and journey times and directions to the Baltic. Apparently there was a verifiable drastic climate change before which the Baltic was a lot more user friendly.

I think ( I haven’t read the book yet), from reviews I’ve read, that he places some of Odysseus’ travels quite far afield up the North Sea coast of Norway, and even to the Shetlands and Orkneys and possibly Scotland and Britain.

If you’ve ever seen the ancient underground towns in Shetland or Orkney (the back of beyond these days; in fact even the Romans called them Ultima Thule – the ends of the Earth), which seem to have had efficient plumbing maybe as early as 1500 BC, you can’t help but wonder how such refinements came to be in this most unlikely of places – Felice’s theory would locate them in a lively interlinked maritime world centering on the Baltic.

Of course, this isn’t proven, but I get the impression that some serious people are taking this seriously enough to fund more research.

Felice speculates that deteriorating climatic conditions caused many of these Baltic peoples to migrate south, and that they took their myths and poems with them, and that the reason that some of the names of towns correspond to known and existing Greek sites is that they named places in their new home after places in their old home, as Europeans have so obviously done in the USA, Australia and so on.

Well, I agree that the theory is interesting, but in the long run, none of it really makes sense from a Nordicist POV. Germanic tribes went all over Europe, so the very idea of Med and Nordic doesn’t make a lot of sense. And Meds went all over up into the north too. The two groups totally mixed in with each other. Nordics are part Med and Meds are part Nordic. Bottom line is that modern Greeks are the same folks as ancient Greeks, no matter where they came from. Modern Italians are the same as the ancient Romans, no matter where the Romans came from. Nordicists take issue with this, and say that Rome and Greece were created by some glorious Nordic types, and then after the Fall, some kind of mud people* or nigger people* from the South (I guess that means Arabs, North Africans, Ethiopians, Lebanese) came into Greece and Italy and muddied up these beautiful White German folks, creating the present day swarthy Med. Nordicists are serious assholes! The ones here in the US really, really, really, really hate Southern Europeans. They think they are inferior greaseball part-Mud*, part-nigger* people. Most US Nordicists say that Meds are not even White. Anti-Southern European prejudice and discrimination, especially discrimination against Italians and Catholics, is pretty much history in White America, but at one time, this was a prominent trend. Italians have moved into the White Ruling Class, and the Catholic JFK was elected and ruled Camelot 50 years ago. Even the KKK lets Catholics in now, and says let’s let bygones be bygones. The fact that probably 8 If you read the original Nazi racialist authors, they do not say this at all. Say what you will about them, but they pursued this stuff as a science. They agreed that Meds were a great White people, and that the modern Meds are descendants of the great cultures of Greece and Rome. They listed many attributes of the Meds and said that in many ways, Meds were superior to Nordics. However, Nordics were also superior to Meds in many ways. When it all tallied up, the Nordics came out on top, but only slightly. To say that the Nazis felt that Meds were inferior is completely mistaken. Meds were a great White people, but Nordics were also great, and Nordics were somewhat greater the Meds. Of course they had to put themselves on top, all Supremacists do. One thing the Nazi racialist scientists did say was that Meds were very creative, perhaps the most inventive and creative Whites that ever existed, or maybe the most inventive and creative humans that ever existed. They said that Meds were superior in terms of the arts, which is somewhat related. I concur. Modern day Nordicists (neo-Nazis in general) who despise and disparage Meds as non-Whites, in all honesty, would have been thrown out of the Nazi Party in Germany! That’s how out of it they are. This is sort of a peculiarly American and Australian thing – the Nordicist contempt for Meds. I’m not sure if you see it that much in Europe, though people are always going to be rivals. It does exist in Italy though, where the Padanianists pour scorn on the “part-nigger”* Southerners. The Padanianists also take pride in being “Celtic.” However, non-racial frustration with the South extends as far south as Abruzze (east of Rome) in Italy. Even in Abruzze, they think that they work hard and they don’t get all their tax money back. Instead it goes to the unproductive South, who take more in revenues than they contribute in taxes. Further, in Abruzze, there is frustration that any tax money sent South in the form of revenues is wasted, as it just goes to the Camorra (Mafia) anyway. The notion of the South, and that means Naples south (Naples is thoroughly Camorra-overrun) as being the Land of the Camorra is not misplaced. The Camorra for all intents and purposes practically run the show down there. Police try to fight them, but they are overwhelmed. Most of the politicians are paid off, and those who are not might get shot. Judges and investigative journalists are routinely threatened and gunned down. There was also something like this North-South rivalry in the former Yugoslavia, with the notion being that Slovenia and Croatia were the economic engines of the place, and everything south just took in more revenues than they paid out in taxes. In the north of Spain, there is some pride once again in being “Celtic”, but I am not aware that Northern Spaniards hate Southern Spaniards all that much, or at all. Some of the north, especially around Leon and Asturias, is in bad shape economically, and I’m sure they take more in revenues than they pay in taxes, so the North-South thing doesn’t really work. In Western Asturias in particular, the region is depopulating, and most towns are losing population. Even wolves are coming back to the hills and foraging in garbage dumps outside of towns. In 20 years, many villages in Western Asturias may be effectively abandoned. The economic and industrial engines of Spain are in the Basque Country and Catalonia (industry in the Basque area, corporate offices in Catalonia). This is one of the main reasons why Spain is dead-set against having these regions secede. *Used sardonically.

Azmi Bishara, “Ways of Denial”

Repost from the old site. Azmi Bishara, an Israeli Arab Parliamentarian and university professor, published an excellent article in the Egyptian paper Al Ahram Weekly in 2007. It’s dated, but it’s very much worth a read. It’s about Holocaust Denial and Zionism and the way that they intertwine.

If I am not mistaken, Bishara was charged with treason for visiting Syria on some sort of a peace mission during or around the time of the Lebanon War. The charges appear to be trumped up. He fled Israel in order not to be prosecuted, and I think he lives in Syria now.

It deals with some issues that continue to confuse many people to this day. What was the cause of the Holocaust?

Why did the Nazis and other Europeans kill the Jews – what made them so angry? What were the essential components of Nazism, and to a lesser extent fascism? What was the response of the Arab Left to the Holocaust? Why has Holocaust Denial taken such a baffling and disturbing root in the Arab and Muslim World?

This work by Bishara is a bit of a tough read in spots, but if you slow down and think about it as you read it, I think most will be able to glean the gist of it. My comments appear in bold. They deal with ultranationalism, ethnic nationalism and its German expression in Nazism, anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, Zionism and the ways in which these things tangle together.

Ways of Denial

By Azmi Bishara

The Nazi Holocaust aimed to rid Europe of its “Jewish taint”. By this was meant banking capital as opposed to industrial capital and the moral degeneracy, lack of patriotism, scorn for national values, heritage and other such ills caused by the “worm” that ate away at all that was noble and pure in the Germanic people.

That worm was the racial strain that never belonged, that was intrinsically alien and that nevertheless insisted on remaining in order to wreak its pollution; it was European Jewry and its various manifestations including capitalism, communism and liberalism, and its mere presence, according to this diabolical system of thought, that were a scourge to racial purity.

[RL: These lines here are very important. The nationalism that arose in Central and Eastern Europe in the late 1800’s and married itself to emerging racial science was unique. Previously, nationalism had generally not been racial. Often, anyone could marry into a tribe and become a full-fledged member – in fact, this has been a well-known norm of tribal societies.

The only nations were either tribes or empires, and empires were not racial. A Roman was anyone who lived in the Roman Empire. If you wanted to cross the Mediterranean and move to Rome and speak Latin, you could become a full-fledged Roman. It had nothing to do with any notion of an Italian race of people.

The Persian Empires were made up of individuals of a variety of ethnic groups, only one of which was Persian. The new nationalism changed all of that. The nation was seen as being only made up of one ethnic group, organically linked to the land through blood, soil and religion, and, tragically, all other groups on the land, including those who had lived there for centuries, were said to be aliens, as they were not part of this organic whole.

The nation was now an area with lines on a map – a territory with borders. Within this area – the nation – a vision formed of the nation as being akin to a human body. Its rivers and lakes were akin to the blood and water in our bodies, and its solid parts were akin to our flesh. The nation had a mind, a soul and emotions, as a human body does.

As we alone – our pure selves – have lived in our human bodies our whole lives, a notion was created that only one ethnic group, a pure ethnic group without outside admixtures, had lived in the national territory for all of recorded history. This people was an organic part of the land, the same as the rivers, rocks and trees.

Indeed, this organic national race was seen, mystically, as almost as much a part of the geological features of the land as the features were likewise seen as a part of the people. A religion and a set of cultural values, always glorious and perfect, was married to this pure people. Their religion and culture was obviously superior to those of their neighbors, if not of everyone else.

The pure people had died and fertilized the soil with their blood, flesh and bones, often in defense of the sacred land. Hence the dirt itself was impregnated with the glorious ancestors of the people.

From this blood-drenched soil sprang the plants and the animals that fed on them. And the soil sprouted crops, and the crops provided food for the animals, and the crops and animals sustained the life of this pure people.

As we prefer our bodies not to be contaminated by poisons, viruses and other unnatural interlopers, so the pure people tended to see the other ethnic groups on the land as akin to viruses coursing through the bloodstream of our bodies.

As we take medicine to rid our bodies of harmful contaminants, so the nation-race suggested “medicine” to rid the “body politic” of those “contaminating” peoples resident on the land who were not part of the pure people. I have striven to paint a rather elaborate picture here, but if you will try to picture this word-painting in your mind, you will begin to understand the essence of Nazism, and indeed all ultranationalism.

In this way, Jews who had lived in German lands for centuries were still defined as aliens.

The notion of the Jew as representative of banking capital – or “parasitic” capitalism was an old one, but it was married to new organic notions of nationhood that defined industrial capital with “national” capitalists. That is, industrial capital was of the land and the soil; i.e., it was “organic” and “natural” (see above) and was run by true Germans (the pure people).

Industrial capital could not migrate at a whim to other lands, and hence was rooted in the land as a plant is rooted in the soil (this was before outsourcing and offshoring). The Jew was seen as a “rootless cosmopolitan”, having no real (“organic”) ties to the land, and hence, a sort of a suspect traitor by default.

The connection of Jews with lack of patriotism, moral degeneracy, scorn for national values, etc. is another long-standing charge. Diaspora Jews tended to be rebels and were often hostile to their host nations, regarding such nations, often rightly so, as hostile to Jews. Furthermore, Jews regarded societies with strong national values, especially religious values, as bad for the Jews, again often rightly so.

The connection with Nazism refers to 1920’s Germany, when many liberal Germans were questioning the nation’s values, which they felt had led them into a disastrous war that had ruined the land. Amongst this group were a number of prominent Jewish comedians, actors, filmmakers, play directors, authors, etc.

As Jews were only

Many German Jews had actually fought bravely for Germany in World War 1, and even in the US, US Jewry largely supported the Germans until the US got into the war, because so many US Jews had German roots, and because Germany was regarded as the cultural center of World Jewry.

Those questioning German values were de facto defined as being unpatriotic. Actually, they were the finest of their generation, and their questioning spirit was right and proper.

Moral degeneracy refers mostly to 1920’s Berlin, teeming with artists, writers, actors, playwrights, directors, drug users, drinkers, prostitutes, and especially homosexuals and bisexuals. Christopher Isherwood comes to mind. Surely most of these folks were Gentiles, but once again, Jews being prominent in the arts, they were overrepresented among this group, and it came to be associated with Jews. Most Germans were still quite conservative, and the antics of the Berlin crowd outraged a traditional population.

The association of Jews with both capitalism and Communism is one of the mysteries of Nazism. Yet Nazism promised to transcend both capitalism and Communism. The newly emerging capitalism was vicious and brutal and seemed to lack all morals, and traditional people regarded it with alarm.

Communism was regarded by the German middle class as a direct threat. In particular, Communism, being explicitly opposed to ethnic nationalism, was regarded as Enemy Number One by nationalists of every stripe – and still is to this day.

Jews were prominent in both German capitalism and Communism, and in the early development of both systems in general. The rational explanation for this is that “Jews lead movements.”

But the Nazis looked at the Jewish factory owner locked in savage conflict with the radicalized Leftist union currently striking his plant and concluded that the owner and his workers must be in cahoots, part of a conspiracy to tear the land apart in order to seize power for the Jews.]

Late capitalism, as forcefully imposed by the centralized bureaucratic state, converged with a fanatical and rabidly xenophobic and very ideological late nationalism of the “Vesrspaeteten Nationen” with a history of religious anti-Semitism dating back to the Middle Ages and the crusader expeditions that attacked Jewish villages in central Europe en route to Palestine, a religious exclusionism that targeted both Muslims and Jews in Andalusian Spain and that shaped part of European identity in terms of both an external determinant — the Muslims — and an internal determinant — the Jews.

But the Nazis’ obsession with the annihilation of the Jews was also fired by an ideology that incorporated totalitarian social engineering, founded upon social Darwinism and assorted recent biological discoveries that were applied to human beings, together with a populist romantic socialism that was hostile to communism, democratic socialism and liberalism, all regarded as alien to the “Volksgeist”, “the spirit of the people”.

[RL: This explains how Nazism could have espoused a strange fake socialism “rooted in the land” while opposing everything on the Left as being de facto unpatriotic. The fact that the Nazis targeted the entire Left shows how bizarre the notion that Nazism is a leftwing movement really is.]

This form of pseudo-scientifically justified and coldly carried out mass extermination would not have been possible without a strong ability to compartmentalize between the bureaucratic functionary and the duty to obey orders, on the one hand, and the individual and his private moral sphere on the other, a phenomenon that is one of the characteristics of the modern state apparatus.

Nor would it have been possible without all the business of documentation, recording and archiving, which is also a characteristic of the modern state.

The irony of all this pseudo-scientific human taxonomy and the obsessive documentation of the names, addresses, confiscated possessions and physical details of the people who were rounded up and freighted to the concentration camps and from there to the gas chambers is that this paperwork has become the most important primary historical source for the Holocaust and the most important instrument with which to refute the claims of those who deny it occurred or belittle its magnitude.

[RL: Yes, the Nazis, in their bureaucratic zeal and German thoroughness and work ethic, pretty much wrote everything down, even if only in code. Thus making Holocaust Denial an even more trying task and ultimately an exercise in absurdity in the face of the mountain of contrary documentation.]

It is not so much the sheer numbers of victims that distinguishes the Holocaust. As unique as it was in the 20th century, millions of native inhabitants were exterminated en masse in the Americas over the course of previous centuries.

Nor is it just a question of scale: many more millions died in the course of World War II, alone, than in the Nazi gas chambers and these included Russians, Germans, Poles, French, Italians and many other nationalities.

The true horror of the Holocaust resides not only in the deliberate singling out of entire peoples — Jews and Gypsies — for extermination and in the scale of this crime, but also in the totality of the target and the “rational” way in which it was carried out.

[RL: This is apparently accurate, but I am very wary of the typically-Jewish efforts to make the Holocaust into the ultimate massacre of all time, such that we cannot even use words like Holocaust for other genocides. To do so, according to perverse tribal-nationalistic Jews, is somehow…get this – anti-Semitism! Ridiculous.]

Jews were snatched from their homes amid the general silence of their neighbors, a silence interspersed by hatemongering by anti-Semitic groups and by the active complicity of informers. Most of the Jews who died in the concentration camps were not Zionists; in fact, many may not have even heard of Zionism.

[RL: This is an important point, and seeing as it is the case, how is it now that the super-racist Zionist state has appointed itself Ultimate Spokesman for these largely anti-Zionist Jews, anyway?]

Moreover, the role of the Zionist movement in saving Jews, or in conspiring with the Nazis, was very marginal, regardless of the number of studies that have been produced on both cases and regardless of the fact that most of their findings have been corroborated.

[RL: This is a good point. Zionism did collaborate with the Nazis in various ways. For the most part, they were only interested in saving those Jews who were Zionists and all the rest could just die. Zionists actively worked to keep Jews from fleeing to places other than Palestine.

Zionists believed that Jews should be cut off from all escape routes except for Palestine, thereby forcing the European Jewish refugees into Palestine, where they were surely not wanted. This history is almost unknown to the vast majority of Americans. Lenni Brenner’s books are a good place to start your digging into this sordid history.

Such was, and is, the insanity of the doctrine that undergirds the Jewish state. On the other hand, the anti-Israel crowd has made much too much of this collaboration. This group, many of whom are out and out Holocaust Deniers and sadly even Nazi sympathizers, make much of the fact that “evil Zionists worked with the Nazis.”

Worked with the Nazis to do what? Apparently to help kill Jews. Except the Nazi “good guys” never killed any Jews because the “Holohoax” is a gigantic fraud! The wildly ironic discrepancies of these mutually contradictory lines is embarrassingly clear.]

Zionism did, indeed, have two faces; it was the perspectives and aims of the researchers that were and remain at odds. The Zionist movement began, and had set its sights on Palestine, long before the Holocaust.

[RL: Precisely! Let us chant this over and over, every time some misguided US liberal tells us that “Israel was created due to the Holocaust.” How many times have you heard that line?]

Zionists only used the Holocaust to justify their national project in hindsight, even if that justification is what drove some Arabs to deny the existence of the Holocaust.

Yet, while there are people who have felt that by minimizing or even refuting the Holocaust they undermine Jewish claims to a state in Palestine, the majority of educated and informed Arab opinion has never denied the Holocaust or the existence of anti-Semitism in Europe.

[RL: This would be news to me, but I am not an Arab. Most of the Arabs that I have known were Holocaust Deniers, including, I am ashamed to say, Arab Communists.]

In the anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist movement, Holocaust Denial and Revisionism in its various insipid formations is spread out like ivy on an overgrown lawn. As a believer in the traditional Holocaust story, I have often felt like I was odd man out.

Rather, they have argued – correctly – that since this horror took place in Europe the Palestinians should not have to pay the price.

Although it vaguely existed as a blend between the residue of a religious culture and extremist nationalist ideas imported from Europe even in early stages,anti-Semitism in the sense of hostility towards the Jews only began to spread significantly in the Arab world in the form of cultural and intellectual output after 1967.

[RL: I don’t agree that anti-Semitism was a marginal factor in the Arab World before 1967, but I agree that it exploded after 1967. After 1967, also, many previously rather apathetic US Jews finally came around and starting supporting Israel full bore, and it was after that war that the Israeli Lobby in the US really exploded, as it was not really that powerful before.]

Clearly, the rise of this phenomenon coincided with the rise of a metaphysical attitude that sought to explain the overwhelming Arab defeat of that year in terms of the confrontation with an absolute evil bent on a global conspiracy of the nature of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, which has been proven to be an invention of the Russian secret service at the end of the 19th century but which nevertheless found many gullible ears in the Arab world in the wake of the 1967 defeat.

[RL: How tiresome is it to hear the line that The Protocols may indeed be a forgery but they still accurately describe the agenda of the Jews? The curious are urged to read the Protocols. Don’t worry, you won’t catch a disease from reading it. It’s a pretty short document and you can read it quickly online in a number of places.]

Reading it, one is struck by how silly and paranoid this document really is. Nor does it have much relation to reality, except that I agree that various wealthy Jews have indeed conspired to control the media in various Western countries in the 1900’s, more to create an environment that is safe for the Jews in that country than for any nefarious means.

Holocaust denial similarly emerged during this period and in the same spirit of a fantastic conspiracy theory that ascribed to an international Jewish cabal the power to invent and dupe the entire world into believing a stupendous set of lies.

I would like to suggest that there are two types of Holocaust denial. One, espoused by elements of the European traditional right and neo-ultra-right, is to deny it happened. This form has not acquired sufficient roots to become a determinant of the behavior of nations and societies.

The other form of denial is to ignore that the Holocaust occurred within a particular historic context and, hence, to deal with it as some fiendish aberration that somehow occurred outside the bounds of time and place.

[RL: I think this is very important. Jews and their allies have worked very hard at the mystification of the Holocaust, along with the mystification of anti-Semitism. In practice, the two are simply tied together. Why did the Holocaust happen?

According to the Jewish line, it was an outbreak of sheer evil that occurred for no reason at all, other than “pure hatred”. Why were these folks seized by such “pure hatred” anyway? Because they were simply evil. How do we know they were evil? Because they were anti-Semites. How do we know anti-Semites are evil? Well, because Jews say they are. Starting to get the feel for the inane circularity of this approach?

Did Jews do anything to make any of these anti-Semitic nasties mad? Nope. Well then, why did the ugly little anti-Semite devils hate Jews, other than the fact that the were just lil’ balls of evil in human form and all that? A very typical Jewish response is…get this – no reason! Ok, now please, try to stop laughing. Jews actually believe that millions of folks hate Jews for absolutely no reason whatsoever . Does it make sense? Nope. Does it serve Jewish ego-defensive needs? Sure.

Or, sometimes, the truly ludicrous Jewish chauvinist argument is offered that because Jews represented good (with a capital G), this infuriated the anti-Semitic beasties so much that they tried to wipe out the Jews. This profoundly disturbed way of thinking is actually very common, especially amongst more militant Jews.

Well, other than being evil, why were these folks anti-Semites anyway? The answer given is…they were always that way. Or, is is said about the Poles, “The Poles learn anti-Semitism at their mothers’ breasts.”

This seriously depressing analysis offers us neither hope nor understanding and merely serves Jewish needs for ego-defensive theories about their history.

The truth is that the only fraud about the Holocaust is the Jewish mystification of it. The sad fact is that the Holocaust was rooted in normal human tendencies that lie within all of us, and if we do not work hard to nip these tendencies in the bud, Holocaust-like phenomena can occur over and over again.]

Some regular, ordinary Nazis, people just like you and me, except that they had fallen into the trap of ultranationalist genocidal racism, play with a kitten they found. As you can see, these folks are not the pure evil people Jews make them out to be. Evil people don’t play with kittens – that’s what folks like you and me do. These are just regular folks who took a really, really wrong turn.
Yet they could be you and me, and you and me could be them. If you don’t believe that, toss it around in your head and see if it starts to make sense for a while.
Photo via Robert John, a colleague. His website is here. John is one of the pre-eminent scholars on the Middle East, especially Palestine.

 

One major consequence of this approach is that it inhibits the study of the Holocaust as a historical phenomenon and as a sobering primer on the dangers of racism, extremist nationalist chauvinism and totalitarian social engineering in modern mass societies.

[RL: Exactly. See my comments directly above.]

But Holocaust denial can assume another face, which is to reduce it to an instrument for realizing political ends. The Zionist movement has excelled in this, its rituals and rhetoric in commemoration of Holocaust victims far outstripping its concern for the victims and its activities to combat the phenomenon when it occurred.

[RL: See Norman Finkelstein’s “The Holocaust Industry” for more on the nauseating “Shoah Business” aspect of Jewish politics.]

In fact, the subject was not even on the agenda of the Jewish organized community, the “Yeshov”, in mandate Palestine during the war years and many Zionists at the time found it embarrassing to hear of Jews being dragged off to be slaughtered without putting up a resistance; it conflicted with the nationalist fighting spirit and the image of the new man they were trying to inculcate.

[RL: Exactly. And Holocaust survivors arriving in Israel were often regarded with open contempt and hostility by the abrasive “Jews with an attitude” Sabras.]

To some extent, this line continues to this day, as bad-ass Sabras attack Diaspora Jews, especially those in the US, as some species of traitorous wimps. The friction between Israeli and non-Israeli Jews is little known outside of Jewish circles.

It was not until the Eichmann trial that the embarrassed silence was broken and emotions suddenly gushed out.

In the course of Zionism’s attempts to portray the history of the entire Jewish people as one uninterrupted stream of oppression and persecution that culminated inevitably in the Holocaust.

[RL: I refer to this as the “false pogrom and persecution view of Jewish history”. It is extremely deeply rooted, even amongst liberal, secular, assimilated US Jews. Actually, it is mostly associated with Ashkenazi Jews and was traditionally not part of the worldview of Sephardic and Mizrachi Jews, although many non-Ashkenazim inside Israel have sadly taken this up. Students of ultranationalism will note that there is nothing unique about the Jewish craving to be a victim. It is simply a component of ultranationalism.

There is even a perverse human need to be a victim, which can be observed as a psychopathological symptom in many people, including those you know. On the individual level, ultranationalism is represented as egocentrism, and ultranationalism is simply egocentrism writ large across the face of the nation, with the tribe standing in for the ego.

Students of psychology are aware that egocentrism is associated with feelings of persecution, and grandiosity (manifested as ultranationalism on the tribal level) is associated with paranoia. Hence we can see that psychological processes that work on the ego level also manifest in aggregations of humans, including entire tribes and nations.]

Holocaust history has been transformed into an exclusively Israeli property.

Victims of the Nazi gas chambers have been nationalised and converted, in spite of themselves, either into an episode in the Zionist struggle to create a state or into an instrument for blackmailing others into supporting Zionist aims or for justifying the crimes the Zionist state perpetrates against others. It is as though the magnitude of the crime entitles Israel to play the victim par excellence or the victims’ sole proxy, placing it beyond accusations of wrongdoing because it is the victim by definition.

The Zionist casting of all Jews as victims of Nazi atrocities has given rise to two curious phenomena. The first is that any Israeli can speak and act as the victim even if he has more in common ideologically and psychologically with the offender or the “Capo” — the Jews who cooperated with the Nazis in the concentration camps.

In other words, the mere fact of being born to a Jewish mother somehow gives license to represent all victims, including in front of those who actually are more victims than he is and those who are more hostile to Nazism, racism and its offshoots.

The second phenomenon is the monopoly claimed by the Israeli ruling establishment to speak on behalf of Jews and Jewish history in general, which largely translates into soliciting, and pressuring for, political and financial support for Israel.

[RL: Feeling bad about the Holocaust? Sure you are. So fork over that donation to the Israeli Lobby today!]

In the first instance, the challenge of truly understanding and learning lessons from the Nazi phenomenon is reduced to something akin to a therapy session in which those in the role of victim help those in the role of perpetrator purge their guilt by satisfying the psychological and material demands of the former.

There is something morally repugnant in this passing of the sins, or innocence, of the fathers to the sons, as opposed to engaging in an objective process of historical investigation with the aim of combating racism in all forms and in all societies. After all, the main victims of European racism today are not Jews, and in Palestine Zionism is not the victim but the perpetrator.

Unfortunately, the Israeli-German therapy sessions ignore such stark realities and, in so doing, offer both the Israelis and the Germans carte blanche to vent their racism on others, as though the Holocaust were a purely German-Israeli concern and the greater phenomenon of racism something else entirely.

It is as if through their mutual catharsis with regard to the former they exonerate themselves from responsibility for the latter. Meanwhile, Zionism’s unwarranted, illogical and historically unsubstantiated monopoly on the role of Holocaust victims’ spokesperson sits well with Europe. Most of Zionism’s aims and demands do not require Europe to engage in a serious process of introspection in order to uproot the deeper causes that gave rise to the Holocaust.

Contrary to what one may logically expect, this suits Zionism’s purposes because it keeps the monolithic discreteness of the Holocaust intact and diminishes, in comparison, the significance of Europe’s other crimes. The upshot is to toss the entire Jewish question outside Europe and dump it in the Middle East. It may come as a relief to European officials to be able to exonerate themselves for the Holocaust by placating Israel with anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab and even anti-Muslim sympathies.

[RL: Have you ever wondered what is behind the Europeans’ curious support for Israel? This is it – Holocaust guilt, and Jewish Zionists never dare let them forget it.]

If anything, however, this form of behavior confirms the continuation of the underlying syndrome, a syndrome that is nevertheless glossed over with a fresh bill of moral health, authorized and stamped by Israel after every visit of atonement a European leader makes to the “Yad Vashem” Museum in Jerusalem.

[RL: Surely it is a legitimate question to ask when radical, racist, nationalist and militant Jews will finally cease their never-ending demands for apologies from Europeans for this crime, even though those asked to apologize are typically now not those present at the scene of the crime, but their offspring.]

It is for this reason that all victims of racism across the world should campaign to break the Zionist hold over the role of spokesman for victims of the Holocaust. Conversely, the Arabs and Palestinians who deny the Holocaust offer European and Zionist racism no greater gift than this denial of the occurrence of the Holocaust.

[RL: I have always said that anti-Semites are the greatest gift that Zionists ever received.]

What possible Arab or Islamic interest can it serve to even offer to exonerate Europe of one of the blackest pages in its history? To do so is not only to absolve Europe of a crime that was, in fact, committed, but also to earn its contempt and to wake up one day to find Europe and Israel joining forces against Arab or Muslim Holocaust deniers with such venom that one might imagine that the Holocaust had occurred in Egypt or Iran and that Holocaust denial is a far graver crime than the perpetration of the Holocaust itself.

Holocaust denial is just plain stupid, also as a political argument. But Israel will be no less expedient in turning the provocation against its regional adversaries who had nothing to do with the Holocaust.

On the other hand, the Holocaust is a phenomenon that merits proper scholastic study, the purpose of which is to sort fact from fiction, and myth form reality. No incident in history lies beyond the realm of historical research.

[RL: Here Bishara delves into the all-too-typical, and silly, line we hear so often these days – that the research into the Holocaust is somehow banned! The many diligent Holocaust scholars toiling for years and decades would be very interested to learn that their studies are forbidden.]

In fact, the entire corpus of the Holocaust story is up for grabs, including the incident itself. The fact that Revisionists are reviled is because they are historically illiterate or deliberate historical forgers, not because inquiry is somehow banned.

This said, Tehran can hardly be said to have a tradition of Holocaust studies; the subject does not rate very high in Iranian academic priorities.

And a conference in Tehran that was proceeded by a political speech denying the Holocaust cannot be said to be an academic conference; it was a political demonstration, one that harms the Arabs and Muslims and serves only the ultra-right and neo-Nazi forces in Europe and the Zionist movement.

During World War II, when some Arabs and other Third World peoples were rooting for Germany because it was fighting the colonial powers France and Britain, the Arab and Third World left, which had allied with the Soviet Union, argued that it was wrong for the victims of racism to side with the racist Nazi regime. Their position was correct.

Today, there is not even a pragmatic immoral justification whatsoever for siding with European racism. Holocaust denial does not undermine the moral justifications for the existence of the state of Israel, as some imagine.

What it does, however, is hand the European right and Israel a convenient enemy upon which to unload their problems. This enemy comprises Palestinians and Arabs, specifically fundamentalist Muslims, those Bush is fond of calling “Islamic fascists”.

The initial Arab reaction to the Holocaust was simple and straightforward and much more rational. The Holocaust occurred, but it was a tragedy for which the Europeans, not the Arabs, should assume responsibility. This is the opinion that prevailed throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the sense of normalcy that survived in all of us continues to hold it.

More on the Fake "Holodomor"

This just never ends. Ukraine is considering filing genocide charges against Russia for the fake Holodomor that never happened in 1932. The Holodomor is a Ukrainian word for a man-made famine, the hallucinatory man-made famine of 1932 that was supposedly directed at the Ukrainian nation for their resistance to collectivization. But there was no Holodomor. It never happened. There was no man-made famine. There was a famine, but no Holodomor. Lies, lies, lies, lies, lies. There was a famine harvest in the USSR in 1932. Famine harvest means the crop failed. That’s what happened. Now, we can argue about why the crop failed, but the truth is that it failed. One of the reasons was a wheat rust epidemic that spread through the area all the way to Bulgaria. The crop failed all over the country, and people starved all over, including 1 million in Siberia. The USSR took less grain from the Ukraine than they have ever taken before or since. The state faced a terrible choice of whether to feed the cities of the villages. It’s true that there was more starvation in the Ukraine than in most other places, but that is because the crop failed worse there than anywhere else. Anyway, there was just as much starvation in the Lower Volga. The starving there were Russian peasants, and they had not been resisting collectivization. Do the Holodomor liars wish to say that the evil Communists deliberately starved Russian peasants in the Volga. What on Earth for? Further, the Ukrainians killed 5 Most people died of disease, not starvation. They were weakened by lack of food. People started fleeing the famine zones, and it is true that after a while, the state tried to stop them from fleeing, because they needed people to stick around to harvest the grain crop the next year. If they would have let everyone flee the famine zones, there would have been no one around to harvest the crop in the next year. It was damned if you do, damned if you don’t. The next year, the crop was good. Figures of 7-10 million dead in the Ukraine alone are routinely tossed around by the Ukrainian liars. It was a terrible time to be a Soviet citizen. As noted, many people died, mostly of disease, not starvation, but they died nevertheless. The 7 million figure was invented after World War 2 by Ukrainian nationalists, many of whom had fought with the Nazis and killed many Jews by participating in the Holocaust. The 7 million figure was invented by these people to be higher than the 6 million Jews killed by Hitler in the Holocaust. In other words, Stalin was worse than Hitler, and Hitler was right to go to war against Judeo-Bolshevism. Get it? Also, the Ukrainian Nazis (Excuse me, Ukrainian nationalists!) to some extent wash their hands of their own evil. Ukrainian Nazis (Oh, I mean Ukrainian nationalists, why do I keep confusing them!) especially the exiles, are notorious for their rank anti-Semitism and pro-Nazi sentiment. The correct figure may never be known, but 5.5 million may have died across the USSR of the famine and its effects. 1 million died in Siberia. There even many deaths in Moscow. I guess this is because evil Commies were trying to kill urban workers or something. Whatever. The death toll was very high in the Lower Volga. I don’t know how many died in the Ukraine. Possibly 3.5 million? With the opening of the Soviet archives, tens of thousands of pages have been diligently sifted through. Nowhere, not even a footnote on a single page, is there any mention of any orders given for a man-made famine in the Ukraine. These were people who wrote everything down, crossed every i and dotted every t. The Ukrainian liars and their buddies keep searching the documents for the evidence they can never find, and they keep coming up empty handed, even though they pull up fake evidence all the time and wave it around, assuming we are idiots. That’s because there’s nothing to find. The Holodomor never even happened. You can’t find evidence for an even that never occurred. Compare to the Nazi archives, where huge piles of evidence documenting the Holocaust have been uncovered, despite the Nazis’ determined efforts to cover it up. One would think that if a deliberate famine was ordered in the Ukraine, evidence would be available in the archives. It is true that there was a Civil War going on in the Ukraine at the time over collectivization. At one point, Ukrainians were carrying out up to 20 armed attacks a day. They raided collective farms, destroyed crops, killed livestock and killed collective farmers. They also raped a lot of women. The counterinsurgency was ferocious and horrible, some would say downright evil. Millions of Ukrainians were deported to Siberia, and there were many executions. When it was all over, 390,000 Ukrainians were killed by the state. If you want to argue that’s a genocide, be my guest. But there was no artificial famine. I’m really getting tired of writing about this, but the Ukrainian liars and their buddies the anti-Semite liars just won’t shut up about this. One man, Robert Conquest, probably did more than anyone else to popularize the Holodomor lie. Conquest now says that there was no Holodomor, no intentional famine. He still tries to blame the state for causing the famine by screwing up, but he admits there was no intention to starve people. Here is a good source of material on the latest, most up to date scholarship on the fake Holodomor. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site.

A Short History of 20th Century Poland

Repost from the old blog. More dealing with Jews, Eastern Europe, WW2, ethnic conflict, etc etc. Eat it up antisemites. One thing I realized in writing up this stuff was how monumentally complicated all of this was. Even the history of Poland in the 20th Century left my head spinning. Great thread on the UK Guardian’s comment page about Poland’s enormously complex recent ethnic history, with Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Jews all fighting with, killing and making nice with each other. I don’t begin to understand it all, but I can grasp the outlines. Pay attention to the anti-Semitic and anti-Russian Polish nationalists and their usual distortions, generally along the lines that Stalin was far worse than Hitler. Ukrainian and Belorussian nationalists were cut out of similar cloth during this war, and most of them are still wearing these silly clothes. Their anti-Communism and hatred of the USSR is leavened heavily with anti-Semitism, and most of them fought alongside the Nazis during the war. This is what this crap about the “Holodomor” (or man-made famine – falsely named because there was no intentional famine) and the Katyn Massacre is really all about – trying to make the Soviets seem worse than Hitler in the interest, in effect if not in intention, of furthering Nazi propaganda. The alliances shift back and forth, Poland invades the USSR in 1920 and anti-Communists blame Soviets for starting the war (!!). Russia conquers eastern Poland early in the war, not a nice thing to do, but those under Russian occupation fared far better than those under German annihilationist occupation. The theme of Polish anti-Semitism runs through the whole thing. Jews were resented for a variety of reasons, principally the fact that Poles were Catholic and Jews refused to convert to Catholicism. Many Jews also supposedly refused to learn Polish. There were also allegations of economic competition that surface wherever Jews exist in large numbers. Holocaust survivor and Israeli resident Israel Shahak’s much-derided book, Jewish History, Jewish Religion is a great read. It’s not that long, and the whole thing is up on the Net. The late Shahak is accused of anti-Semitism, mostly by other Jews. Unfortunately, most of his fine works can only be found on anti-Semitic websites. In Chapter 4, there is a section on the history of Poland. During the 1600’s, many Jews were serving as tax collectors for the Polish Roman Catholic nobility. The peasants they were collecting taxes from were Orthodox Slavs. The Cossacks revolted against the Polish Roman Catholic overlords and their Jewish agents. The revolt resulted in the severing of Ukraine from Poland. Russians and Ukrainians view the rebellion positively and Poles have tended to view it negatively. Khmelnitsky is regarded as the Father of Ukraine, similar to our George Washington. Given this difficult history, you can understand why Jews and Ukrainians have had such a hard time. This rebellion, called the Chmielnicki Rebellion, lasted from 1648-1656, and resulted in the deaths of many Jews, but the numbers have been exaggerated. Chmielnicki is seen by Jews as an anti-Semite, but he called upon the poor Jews to join him in his rebellion, which was just a peasant rebellion against feudalism. The poor Jews refused, citing ethnic solidarity to stand alongside their brethren fighting alongside the feudalists. The Soviet Union created the Order of Bogdan Khmelnitsky (Chmielnicki) for heroism during the Great Patriotic War. There were three classes of the order. Altogether, over 8,423 Soviet citizens were granted this order. Some Jewish soldiers were upset when they heard they were going to be granted the medal because Khmelnitsky is regarded by Jews as a vicious anti-Semite. Jews focus on the 20,000 or so Jews killed during the rebellion – 1/2 of the Jewish population in the Ukraine (not 100,000 as some Jews say) but during this horrible period in the mid 1600’s, Poland was invaded by multiple nations at once, including Sweden, and was riven with horrible wars all across the land. In the context of the typical human deprivation caused by feudalism itself, an incredible 1/3 of the population of Poland died. Yet the Jews see only 25,000 dead Jews and turn their eyes from the larger genocide. Typical Jewish myopia. The Jews welcomed Stalin’s forces with open arms early in World War 2, then Germans overran Soviet forces a year later, and eastern Poland was under the slaughterhouse of German rule. In 1944, the Soviets “re-invaded” (according to Polish nationalists!) and whatever Jews that remained, along with many Poles, thought the Soviets were just fine as they were fighting Germans. Yitzhak Shamir once said that Poles suck in their anti-Semitism with their mother’s milk, a nasty thing to say, but yes, there is truth to it. The Polish Communist government had quite a few Jews in it, and this also fed anti-Semitism along with Polish nationalism and pro-Catholicism. It’s true that Stalin put a lot of Jews in the Polish government because he did not trust native Poles to run the new Communist state very well, as Communism was so unpopular. After a while, there were plenty of Poles running the Polish Communist state and few Jews; by 1970 or so, the Polish state was officially anti-Semitic, running campaigns against “rootless cosmopolitanism” and “Zionology” in tune with the now anti-Semitic Soviet state. But not all Eastern Bloc states mirrored this anti-Semitism from the USSR, which was rooted in the Jews’ mass flight to Zionism and the new Israeli state, aligned with the West, so there must have been some uniquely Polish animus at work there, even in Polish Communists. The Israeli state has since become most famous as being the World’s only single race-religion state, a most dubious distinction. Someone asked why Stalin was persecuting Jews after the war, and he blurted out, “But you don’t understand! They are all Zionists!” Stalin was also afraid of East Bloc and Soviet Jews spying for the West in tandem with the Israelis’ turn towards the West in the late 1940’s. In this he was partly correct, as we now have some evidence, via Terry Kollek, Jewish CIA agent, that a number of Eastern Bloc Jews followed their loyalty to the pro-West Israel by spying for the US against the Soviets and their allies, beginning as early as 1946. Jews in the Eastern Bloc were helping to implement Communism and at the same time working for the CIA to stop it. As usual, there were Jews on both sides of a major issue. To call Stalin an anti-Semite is wrong, but he did turn into one late in life. Stalin persecuted all sorts of minorities, not out of racial supremacism as is often alleged (a sort of hyper Georgian nationalism), but generally only those minorities he saw as disloyal to the USSR. Yet early in its history, the USSR laid down a new model for the best treatment of minorities by a state, a model that is mirrored now in many progressive states the world over. The paradoxes go on and on like funhouse mirrors. The Jews are coming back to Poland, which is very heartening. The anti-Semites are re-awakening too, as we would expect. It’s not correct to be either excessively optimistic or pessimistic about Jewish prospects in Poland today. Nationalist Jews will usually sneer at any notion that things are any better there – as they see Poles as some sort of metaphysical eternal anti-Semites, corrupted probably in their very souls with nary a hope of salvation. Neither is it correct to cheer these events on too much. But in Polish-Jewish relations, any forward progress should be cheered, as it should in most any other arena of life. Deborah Lipstadt, a whole thread and found it fascinating. It’s very long, but you may wish to dip in if you have any interest in the history of Poland in the past century. Note the nationalist Jew or Jews on the thread throwing the anti-Semite epithet around promiscuously. There are some excellent comments by readers at the end of this post on the old blog.

It is Better to Forget Some Things

Repost from the old blog. This is great stuff here – a debate on the Katyn Massacre. I tend to agree with Communist and anti-Zionist Israel Shamir’s assessment at the end, seconded by Joh Domingo and Treanor. The hullabaloo over the Katyn Massacre is, as Shamir suggests, a tempest in a teapot. 6 million Poles died in World War 2, most of them murdered in cold blood, and few thousand Polish officers is the worst crime in the war? Please. Polish nationalists have jumped all over this because it demonstrates the perfidy of the USSR, who imposed Communism on reluctant Poles. Even Stalin said imposing Communism on Poles was like putting a saddle on a cow. Part of the reason for the Poles’ reluctance to embrace Communism is their intense Catholicism. Far Rightwingers love Katyn because it shows that the true evil force in World War 2 was the Soviets, not the Nazis. This line of thinking is strongly tied in with anti-Semitism and pro-Nazism and appears in many different forms. Hitler was only trying to save the West from Communism. Jews took over in the USSR, killed some people, and then this set Hitler on some maniacal murder spree because his sensitive heart was so troubled by the murderous Jewish Bolsheviks. The USSR was getting ready to attack Germany and Germany pre-emptively attacked just in the nick of time. Anti-Communism, anti-Semitism and pro-Germanism all wrap together here like vines of ivy and picking them apart is no easy task. Part and parcel of this nonsense is the notion of the Holodomor, literally a “deliberate genocide” which was nothing of the sort. 1.5 million died in a famine that was mostly due to natural causes and partly due to the chaos of too-rapid collectivization, and partly to the kulaks’ destruction of 5 Kulaks were not innocent, most had formed armed gangs that killed members of collective farms, raped peasant women and committed mass sabotage. The Ukrainian famine occurred in the midst of a counterinsurgency. During that year, there was famine and there were famine deaths all over the USSR, even in big cities like Moscow. It was just a lot worse in the Ukraine. The famine was jumped on by Nazi William S. Hearst in league with Adolf Hitler and other Nazis. Pro-fascist Alexander Solzhenitsyn played his part. The figures were constantly revised upwards to 6-8 million dead, when the true figure is 1.5 million. There is a reason for this. Ukrainian nationalists were overwhelmingly pro-Nazi and many still are. The whole idea is to make the “Holodomor’ a higher figure than the Jewish Holocaust, for nefarious purposes. For more on the Holodomor, see my previous post. I wish the Hollywood Jews were as pro-Communist as they are always said to be, but I doubt if they are. I used to hang out in Hollywood for years on end, and I met some of these people. They aren’t Communists at all – they are just bourgeois liberals for the most part. The people who say that “Hollywood Jews” (coded as Commie fellow travelers) cover up the crimes of Communism because “Communists were Jewish”, is, frankly, a Nazi lie. The Killing Fields was a big Hollywood hit. Were the Chinese Maoists Jews too? How about the North Koreans? Jan Thomasz Gross’ book about Polish anti-Semitism is right on. Many Poles are anti-Semites; it’s just a fact. And large numbers of them gladly helped the Nazis to point out the Jews in their midst; on this one issue, occupiers and occupied often shared one hatred. But many rescued Jews during the war and the General Government tried to save Jews and was one of the first to blow the whistle on the Nazi project for the Jews. Like most things, the relationship between Poles and Jews is complicated. Polish nationalism is objectively anti-Semitic and probably has been for some time. Jews have a right to be wary about it. For more on this subject, see my previous post here. I am dubious about whether anyone is trying to stir hatred between Russians and Poles in order to put the NATO missiles in Poland. Russia is perfectly correct to be indignant about these missiles on its front door. How’s about if Russia sticks missiles in Mexico? Poles already don’t like Russians too much due to Communism. Cold Warriors have jumped all over Katyn as evidence of the evils of Communism. Why Stalin would order 4000 totally innocent Polish officers to be murdered for no apparent reason was always beyond me. Now we find out that the killers were Germans and Ukrainians. Ukrainian and Polish nationalisms, two vicious and insane ideologies, had been dueling during this period, with persecution, bigotry, ethnic cleansings and killings all around. In part it was a conflict between Catholics and the Orthodox, but Shamir wisely points out the class angle, always neglected in “class does not exist” America. That the Nuremberg Trials found that the Nazis committed the Katyn Massacre is now used by anti-Semites as more evidence of the evil project of the Jewish-controlled Nuremberg Trials to hang wonderful Nazi humanists and at the same time let the Jews’ genocidal Bolshevik Soviet buddies off the hook. The Nuremberg decision was a good one at the time. Whether new research has proved them wrong is not known. Exhumations show that some of the Polish officers killed at Katyn were killed with German weapons. Those sneaky Commies must have stolen German guns to blame the nice Nazi pacifists! It also appears that most of the people shot at Katyn had taken up arms against the Soviets who had moved into Eastern Poland. The Soviets were facing a very nasty insurgency there by Polish nationalists. There is quite a bit of Jewish-conspiracy mongering in the text below. Although Jewish conspiracies, like all sorts of other ethnic conspiracies, obviously exist, I don’t see much to indicate that Soviet Jews were behind the Katyn shootings or that Hollywood Jews are trying anti-Russian anymore than anyone else and trying to stir up Poland against Russia. By World War 2, the Jewish era of the NKVD was through – the heyday was 1936-1938. Besides, I am sick and tired of debating anti-Semitic “Bolshevik Jews” talk. Ferreting through the genealogies of Soviet leaders for drops of Jewish blood here and there smacks of anti-Semitism and seems to be a wrong-headed enterprise, unless one can prove that 1/4 Jewish blood somehow anoints one into the Tribe, I say let it rest. Lots of Jews don’t even like converts, I can imagine what they think of 1/4 Jews. Hollywood Jews are leftwing pacifists, anti-imperialists and soft Zionists. They are hardly agents of Tel Aviv or the neocons – if anything, they are their opponents. Joachim Martillo adds his comments to start off:

I tend to agree in terms of relations among nations and particularly in cases where the truth is extremely hard to determine or history is used to create hostility instead of understanding, but comprehending how the Katyn Massacre has been used historically from Nuremberg until today is worthwhile if only because it is still being used politically — Joachim.

Source: Our British reader, Martin Webster (once a prominent far-right leader) wrote about the Katyn film: Polish Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz. His technique for securing publicity for his book has been to stage provocative public meetings in Polish cities at which he accuses the Polish people in general and the Polish Catholic Church in particular, of responsibility for massacres of Jews during and after the German occupation. These meetings caused an uproar for, as Time magazine of 23rd January 2008 reported:

“……Poland, which lost about 6 million of its citizens in the war — half of them Jewish — prides itself on being the only country in Nazi-occupied Europe that did not have a collaborator government.

This kind of vilification of the Polish people by Zionist propagandists has been part of Israeli school curriculum for decades past and it has clearly inculcated among Israelis a hatred for Poland and its people. Shamir replied to Martin: Dear Martin, This is your mistake: “The people who run the movie business may not be too keen on allowing a prize to go to a film which places the blame for a notorious war crime on the Communists rather than the Nazis!” And this is an archetypal error of the Right. Your “The people who run the movie business” are Jews, and associated with them other forces. You think that for Jews, Nazis are forever the most evil force, while Commies are akin spirit. Jews are not such idealists as you think. “The people who run the movie business” are first of all American Jews, and they are fully siding with the US, so they want to eliminate every independent force and cause everybody, all mankind, to submit to the will of the US, and by proxy to their will. Russia is the real enemy for them, as well China or Iran, Cuba and Venezuela, but they are first of all enemies of Russia, the militarily strongest one. They want to cause more hatred between Russians and Poles in order to implant the US missile stations in Poland and move NATO troops eastwards. This is important real stuff, while the fight with Nazis is a nice entertainment. Nazis were defeated in 1945, and the modern far right is too weak to matter. “The people who run the movie business” will give this film an Oscar if it will help to undermine Russia’s independence. Joachim Martillo proposed to shift the blame for Katyn on the Jews: Here is the Katyn Massacre Recommendation/Order. Investigating Beria’s background leads to the same sort of confusion that is associated with Lenin’s ethnic heritage shown later to be in part Jewish. The signers of the massacre order are all reputed to have been members of the Kremlin Jewish Faction. From what I have read practically everyone up and down the chain of command in the killings of Polish leaders and intellectuals was Jewish. It takes a little digging to get the backgrounds, and I have yet to see it published in a popular journal. It took 90 years for the NY Times to admit that all the killers of the Czar and his family were Jewish. Probably around 2030 the NY Times will publish the complete story of the Katyn Massacres including who conceived the idea and advised Stalin. Shamir concludes on Katyn: This is far from clear who and how many were shot and when at Katyn. There is a whole literature of blame-shifting and denial, much of it in Russian, Polish, German. The Nurnberg Tribunal decided that the massacre was done by Germans, and denial of Nurnberg is illegal in many countries – but you may do as much as you wish, if you aim against the present enemy, the too-independent Russia. Probably you may also blame it on Muslims, or Palestinians – as it was almost done by Dershowitz. This Katyn Massacre was chosen by our enemy. Otherwise, who would give a damn about a few thousand soldiers and officers’ fate in the war where millions perished? More Poles died at Monte Cassino, not to mention Warsaw. What actually happened in Katyn? It is perfectly possible that as many as 4,0000 Polish officers were actually executed by the Soviets as enemies: do not forget that Napoleon executed 6,000 POW’s, the whole garrison of Jaffa, after they have surrendered. There was much bad blood between the Red Army and the White Poles: over 100,000 Red Army POW’s were killed or starved to death by the White Poles after 1920. On the other hand, some of the Poles exhumed in Katyn were undoubtedly killed by German weapons. The place could be a preferred place for mass killings, as the Babi Yar in Kiev was, and it was used by whoever was in power. As far as I understand, one may consider the background, Eastern Poland/Western Ukraine, a piece of land that was shifted from Austro-Hungarian empire to independent Poland after Versailles and to the Ukraine in 1939. There was extreme animosity between ruling Poles and peasant Ukrainians; the Ukrainians were harshly treated by their Polish masters, and this animosity caused severe persecution of the ethnic Poles when Polish rule was over. Whoever ordered the shooting the Polish officers – the Soviets or the Nazis – it was anyway done by the Ukrainians, the pro-Soviet Ukrainians or pro-German Ukrainians, for there was nobody else to do the job. In other words, Katyn fits well into Volyn, the place where tens of thousands of ethnic Poles were massacred by Ukrainian nationalists. One may compare it with the massacre of whites in Haiti after their colonial rule was over; and many other unpleasant events in human history. I agree with our Polish friend Marek G, with Treanor and Joh Domingo: it is better to forget some things, using the Greeks’ example: they had a capital punishment cure for those with over-long memories. It is better for Russians and Poles to be good neighbours; but the enemy wants them to fight. Likewise, the enemy wants the Arabs to fight Iranians. The rest of the discussion appears here.

Who Were the Real Terrorists in Kielce 1946?

This is a repost from the old blog by a guy I used to publish as a guest author – the mysterious Eastern Orthodox expatriate US academic Stojgniev O’Donnell (a pseudonym). I kept warning the guy about his anti-Semitism (we don’t publish anti-Semitism here and we deny the Jews and Judeophiles who lie and say we do) but you know, these guys just can’t seem to knock it off. He’s basically coming from the POV of an Orthodox Christian Polish or Pan-Slavic nationalist. I believe the guy was an academic or was a grad student in the US, had bad experiences Jewish colleagues, and they either tried to run him out or fired him, I forget. Anyway, he left the US and has been holing up in, I think Poland lately. He’s afraid that Jews are out to destroy his career in the US, and I guess they are. I have no contact with him anymore. He writes pretty well. Unfortunately, this mindset is very common among many Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Bulgarians, Romanians, Serbs, etc. It’s a combination of Pan-Slavism and Pan-Orthodoxism and it is best on display in Russia with nationalist types. It’s not going away! This essay is anti-Semitic and I put lots of comments in there. Still, because the history of Jews and Poles has been so tragic, it is useful to publish the Polish side of the affair in an effort to try to understand the roots of the problem. This essay deals with a pogrom of Jews in Kielce, Poland, in 1946, after World War 2 was over, from a Polish nationalist point of view. Although I have not read it, Jan T. Gross’ Fear – Anti-Semitism After Auschwitz is supposed to be an excellent work that deals comprehensively with the terrible Kielce pogrom. Out of a pre-war Jewish population in Kielce of 25,000, only about 200 Kielce Jews survived the war. The surviving Jews returned from the forests and camps and found that Poles had stolen their homes. This was the setting in which the famous pogrom took place. It is fascinating how Jewish Zionists can rage beet-red about “Poles stealing the homes and land of Jews”, while being oblivious to the nightmarish Jewish state occupying Palestine, which has stolen every inch of land it illegally claims. Although only 39 Jews were killed in the pogrom (relatively few compared to other pogroms), the Kielce Pogrom had great significance for Polish history. After WW2 ended, many Jews had hopes of continuing to live in Poland. For many of them, Kielce ended all of that. As Stephen Pollard notes, Kielce convinced many of them of the need for a Jewish state (this is actually a dubious assumption on the part of Zionist Pollard). Debate about the Kielce Pogrom and the Polish role in it has continued in recent years. A Polish commission in 2000 concluded that a mob of local Poles spontaneously attacked and killed the Kielce Jews as a result of “unfortunate coincidences of an historical nature”, and dismissed a conspiracy theory that the pogrom was instituted by the Soviet Union. Last month, on July 6, a memorial to the victims of the pogrom was laid in Kielce on the 60th anniversary of the pogrom. The Polish President’s office read a statement at the ceremony describing the pogrom as “a great shame and tragedy for the Jews and Poles”. This blog concurs completely in that sentiment. The essay below deals with an article by Adam Michnik, the Jewish editor or Poland’s largest newspaper. This article also sheds light on current Polish affairs and indicates that, alas, all is still not well between the Poles and the Jews. The piece makes some pointed critiques, which are commonly made, of secular, liberal Jews in the media using that forum to aggressively push a particular type of Jewish tribal agenda onto a non-Jewish population. Note the anti-Russian and anti-Soviet sentiment in O’Donnell’s piece, typical of Polish religious nationalism. Suffice to say that O’Donnell’s views are pretty typical of Slavic Eastern Orthodox Christians in Poland, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Belarus, Ukraine and Russia and to a much lesser extent among Orthodox Christians in Greece and the Arab World. Socially conservative yet anti-imperialist and to some extent anti-Western, these Orthodox have also had a tempestuous relationship with the Jews. These difficulties, and the reasons behind them, have of course been shrouded in fog by the Politically Correct theory of anti-Semitism, which holds that anti-Semitism is a form of mental illness, is not understandable by anyone but a psychiatrist or a prison warden, and occurs for no known reason at all. I call this the mystification of anti-Semitism, and while it serves ego-defensive purposes for the Jews and philo-Semites who have contrived this nonsense, it surely sheds little light on anti-Semitism. Furthermore, by promoting Zionism and the Jewish state (one of the worst mistakes the Jews have made in recent years) this mystification serves more nefarious ends. For it is Zionist dogma, elucidated by Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism himself, that the Gentiles will always hate the Jews, everywhere the Jews are, for eternity. Such it has been, such it is, such it will be. Hence the need for the armed gangster-state ghetto (It even has a wall around it!) called Israel. A further elaboration is that worldwide, an eternal epidemic of anti-Semitism has occurred, continues to occur, and most importantly, will always occur, ever since the Jews appeared on Earth, for no intelligible reason whatsoever other than merely a manifestation of evil. The insidious and disgusting sentiments working here? All Gentiles are anti-Semites. Anti-Semitism is incomprehensible other than as an infection of evil. Putting the two together, we realize that many ultranationalist Jews actually believe that all Gentiles are evil people. Hence, apparently on some level, they hate us (Israel Shahak said a majority of Israelis had a deep hatred of all Gentiles). And they accuse us of being “haters”. In truth, Jewish suffering has not been particularly unique. Throughout most of the history of feudal Europe, Christian serfs would have gladly traded places with Jews. Certainly there were pogroms and other forms of prejudice and racist hatred, but serfdom for the serfs themselves was one centuries-long pogrom. If one reviews the history of any ethnic group, tribe or nation, one will find that they have often been in conflict, often armed conflict, with various neighbors for various reasons. Wars have been ongoing, and many members of the tribe or nation were killed. The land was often overrun by invaders, often repeatedly, much of their land stolen, and many of their people killed. Painful as it may sound, the history of the Jews (until the 1940’s anyway) is probably not that much more painful that that of many tribes and nations. Even the extermination attempt in the 1940’s was not unique, sadly, as there have been many attempts to exterminate various ethnic groups. The Tutsis lost possibly 7 I am not an expert on Slavic Orthodox Christian anti-Semitism but in Poland, in general, Catholic anti-Semitism was religiously-based, or more accurately based on confessionalism (religious bigotry without religious belief). In a nutshell, the Poles wanted Jews to convert to Catholicism and intermarry with Poles. The Jews would do neither, and hence anti-Semitism ensued. The Chmielnicki Rebellion in the Ukraine from 1648-1654, during which about 20,000 Jews and 100,000 noblemen were killed, has achieved permanent victimology status amongst Jews as merely an outbreak of murderous anti-Semitism, and nothing else. That it was, but many Jews had formed a middle class that allied itself with the brutal feudal lords. The Jews were often the only face of feudal rule that the serfs ever saw. The rebellion was probably mostly just a peasant rebellion of serfs against the feudal lords and their allies. Many people were killed on all sides. Chmielnicki, who led the rebellion, actually implored the Jewish poor to join the fight against their brethren who were allied with the feudal classes. The Jewish poor refused. To this day, Chmielnicki is seen as a hero in the Ukraine, while Jews regard him as some kind of Hitler and see his fame as emblematic of anti-Semitism in the region. Chmielnicki is probably more akin to, say, Tupac Amaru, who led the Inca against the Spaniards in the late 1700’s, or Mao Zedong, or Ho Chi Minh, or Desallines in Haiti in 1804, or other leaders of peasant rebellions. It is useful to note that peasant rebellions, whether involving Jews or non-Jews, are typically bloody affairs. For example, in 1804, in the Haitian Slave Revolt, the Haitian slaves rose up against French slave-holding families in Haiti and killed most of the 25,000 population of them. This blog regards that wild massacre, as, in general, a great day for humanity (though the children of the slaveowners could have been spared). Another interesting aspect of the Chmielnicki Rebellion is that the Jews look at the rebellion and the 1600’s in which it occurred, as one of, as noted above, an insane outbreak of murderous anti-Semitism, and little else. From the Jewish point of view, this was the century in which people went nuts in the Ukraine and slaughtered Jews for no reason. Not much else happened of consequence in the region at that time. Never mind that the Jews killed were the public face of inhuman feudal brutality, as noted above. We need also to note that during this same period, Poland was wracked another terrible outbreak of anti-Semitism, but this occurred in the context of general chaos, wild warfare and multiple invasions of Poland by various foreign powers. During the period in which Jews narcissistically mourn their own losses as the only salient tragedy of the time, an incredible 1/3 of the population of Poland (the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) was exterminated. This is a population loss equivalent to the Jewish Shoah. So, while Jews were definitely being killed in Poland during this time, the Poles themselves were also being slaughtered like flies. Whether Jews were being killed to a greater extent than Poles is open to debate. The critical point here is that this was not so much only another wild outbreak of incomprehensible Nazi-like slaughter of Jews (the myopic Jewish view) but instead, it was simply a period of mass slaughter of the population at large by various actors for various reasons. The number of dead in the Chmielnicki Rebellion has also been exaggerated, which has been a general tendency of Ashkenazi Jews who have cultivated a victimhood epic. Exaggeration of one’s own losses, and the resulting embrace of victimhood, is probably a general human tendency and not limited to Jews. Jewish sources originally said that 2.4 to 3.3 million Jews were killed during Chmielnicki, and modern-day Jewish sources put the figure at 500,000. An Israeli historian has produced a more accurate figure of about 19,000 Jewish dead out of a population of 40,000. Nobles suffered much more, as they were virtually exterminated from the Ukraine – scarcely one survived. Nevertheless, one gets the impression that Jewish activists look at Poland in the 1600’s and see only dead Jews and no other corpses. A useful book that deals peripherally with Polish-Jewish and Ukrainian-Jewish relations is Primo Levi‘s “ If Not Now, When?” (review here) about a group of armed Jewish anti-Nazi partisans operating behind enemy lines in Belarus, Ukraine, Poland and Germany in World War 2. They meet up at one point with a group of Polish resistance fighters. The Jews air their grievances about Polish treatment of Jews to the Poles, who retort with a history of equally lamentable treatment of Poles at the hands of all sorts of invaders and local abusers. The Jews end up concluding that the Poles have been just as abused as the Jews have, but in their twisted way, many of the Poles took out their rage on the local Jews instead of on the real abusers. Both sides leave with a refreshed understanding of each other. By the way, I enjoyed Levi’s book and recommend it. With that background, we can move on to the piece. As usual, my comments, if any, will appear in bold brackets: I am no expert on the history of the events that took place in Kielce, Poland in July 1946 and resulted in the death of a group of Jews. And I have no intention of becoming an expert, for several reasons. First of all, I am convinced that the version of the Kielce events which is promoted by Jews as historical reality is, in fact, a clever distortion of the truth. [RL: I do not think that this is completely accurate, though the standard Jewish line includes various inaccuracies.] The aberrations include that 80, or 50, or however many, Jews were killed – no, it was 39 – and that the Polish army and police and gleefully joined in the killing – in fact, the Polish army fought off the mob for some time, and took the wounded to the hospital, although some other soldiers joined in the pogrom.] The Jewish version of the notorious “pogrom” has been crafted by Jews because of the propaganda value of its symbolism. Kielce is one of those shticks with which Jews love to thrash Poles. (Always the Jews glorify their distinctiveness. They can’t speak German unless it becomes “Yiddish.” They can’t get their butts kicked unless it’s a racist “pogrom”). [RL: For the record, Yiddish and German are distinctive languages. Yiddish is not even a dialect of German; it is a separate language altogether. Yiddish is actually a sort of a German-Slavic creole with many Hebrew words mixed in.] Life is too short to be distracted by what happened in Kielce. Some Jews were murdered by Poles. A Polish boy mysteriously disappeared for awhile (though he turned up unharmed after the violence) and there were rumors of ritual murder. Substantial evidence suggests that the Kielce “pogrom” was engineered by Soviets in Poland, who used the incident to slander postwar Poland in the international press, while at the same time shoring up and legitimizing the unpopular Soviet occupation, which was bitterly opposed by the vast majority of the Polish population. [RL: This view is quite popular in Poland, especially with Polish nationalists. A major Polish commission reviewed all evidence about this Soviet conspiracy theory and rejected it out of hand as unproven. There are many problems with the theory. The main one is that there is little, if any, hard evidence supporting it, only a cui bono theory that suggests that the Soviet Union could have benefited from it. Another mark against this theory is that, despite the blatherings of Jewish ultranationalists, the Soviet Union was not anti-Semitic at the time or prior, and was not until the disappointing “rootless cosmopolitan” campaign of 1948.] The reason I raise this topic is because of an interesting article on Kielce by Adam Michnik, the notorious Jewish “dissident” and contemporary media magnate. Michnik’s article appeared in his newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza: “Pogram Kielecki: Dwa rachunki sumienia” (3-4 July 2006, pp. 12, 13, 14 and 10-11 July 2006, pp. 22, 23, 24). How did Michnik (real name: Adam Szechter) go from poor dissident to publisher of the most powerful daily in postcommunist Poland? I leave it to the reader to draw his own conclusion. Michnik’s newspaper is a source of rabid anti-Polishness; anti-Christianity; political correctness; strident support of homosexuality, love parades, and social deviance; and propaganda for all of contemporary America’s and Western Europe’s wickedest nonsense on relativism and multiculti. Michnik occasionally and strategically writes with sympathy about the Catholic Church, which enjoys the backing of the great majority of the Polish population. [RL: Jewish hostility towards Christianity, to one degree or another, is often seen in even very assimilated US Jews, and is most pointed towards Catholicism, and not so much towards Protestantism. Jews have long memories, and Christian anti-Semitism in Europe was, for the vast majority of its history, Catholic.] We see this Catholic anti-Semitism in Latin America also. Typically, it took the form of a complaint that “Jews killed Jesus”. Hence the furor when Mel Gibson, a deeply conservative Catholic, made the movie,”The Passion”. Protestants in general have never cared much about Jews one way or the other, though lately many Protestant fundamentalists have become passionate Zionists.] Michnik’s people will pen some insignificant article on a minor religious celebration, illustrated perhaps with a color photo, while in the same issue publishing a couple of deeply ideological articles which seek to compromise the Polish Church. [RL: I confess it is beyond me why the secular, liberal, Westernizing Jews that tend to own media outlets so often play with fire in this way. We have seen so many reports like this of Jewish ethnic activists in the media aggressively pushing a particular secular, liberal, Westernizing Jewish agenda onto a non-Jewish population that it cannot possibly anti-Semitic fantasy. However, to dislike Jews due to the activities of these “media Jews” is a mistake. Many Jews, especially Orthodox Jews and particularly in Israel, are deeply conservative on social issues like multiculturalism, abortion, homosexuality, etc. They don’t have much in common with the species of liberal “media Jew” described above. Contrast the “media Jew” behavior with the mindset of Overseas Chinese, another minority very similar to Jews in that a tiny minority has often achieved huge economic power in a number of societies. Yet the Overseas Chinese tend to keep their heads down, assimilate, and not provoke the majority. Pogroms have occurred against the Overseas Chinese, as they have against Jews, which suggests an economic basis for at least some of these violent uprisings. Yet perhaps Jews could learn a thing or two from the Overseas Chinese about how to not go out of one’s way to provoke a majority population.] In the article on Kielce, Michnik demonstrates his mastery of the Jewish art of propaganda. He goes so far as to quote long passages about the Kielce “pogrom” written by Kielce Archbishop Czeslaw Kaczmarek and later delivered to the American ambassador in Warsaw (international Jewry at that time was agitating the West to defend Poland’s helpless, innocent Jews against racist Polish anti-Semitism). Archbishop Kaczmarek eloquently explains the Poles’ suspicion of Jews:

Here after the large-scale murder of Jews committed by the German government in recent time in Poland, also in Kielce, there was no negative antagonism towards Jews and there was no anti-Semitism. Everyone sympathized with the Jews, even their most determined enemies. The Poles had saved many Jews, and without Polish aid, not a single Jew would have survived” Jews are unpopular, even hated, throughout Poland. There is no doubt about that. Jews are hated by those Poles who belong to no political party, but also by those who belong to the ruling [communist] party – The origins of that antagonism are well known, but certainly they have no racial basis. Jews in Poland are the chief propagators of the communist system, which the Polish nation completely rejects.” Jews are everywhere in the government, in [Polish] institutions outside of Poland, in industry, in administrative offices, in the military, and everywhere in the most important, most influential positions. They control the nation’s press; they control all censorship today in Poland. They control the security apparatus and they are responsible for arrests (p. 13).

Something similar took place in other countries of the postwar Soviet bloc, as Jews in the name of communism and the brotherhood of nations with violence and terror “settled their accounts” with Christians. [RL: The Cardinal’s account is self-contradictory and problematic. As a Leftist, I don’t necessarily have problems with Jews being Communists. It was true that there were many Jews among the Communists in Europe and the Soviet Union, especially in leadership roles. These Jews were often outside of normative Jewish culture, religion and even mainstream Jewish identity. The notion that Jews in the Communist movement may have unfortunately used their power to attack their ancient enemies is a long-standing complaint of anti-Semites that deserves examination. Certainly in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s in the Soviet Union, the abuse of the Christian religion was almost taken to the form of a fetish. But note also that the institutional Christian churches in these Eastern Bloc states often opposed the Communist regimes. Jews as part of these regimes (and other government officials) consequently attacked these churches, as they attacked any other dissidents. The notion that Jewish Communists were attacking dissidents not as Communists first, but as Jews first, is problematical and remains to be proven. Many Communist Jews in the Eastern Bloc were probably trying to put into practice the noble Jewish tradition of being a “light unto nations”. They may have been misguided, but they were probably sincere about wanting a better world. Furthermore, many Eastern Bloc Jews probably saw Communism as a remedy for long-standing, often irrational anti-Semitism in the region. Note that in the 1960’s, the Polish Communist government could no longer be considered Jewish-dominated, and even orchestrated a disgusting anti-Semitic campaign called the Polish 1968 Political Crisis.] Here I should remind those foolish and naive Poles who worship America that the latter country does not allow any discussion or investigation of the Jews’ role in the communist terror. [RL: This is simply not true at at all. There are no laws against it. However, there is a taboo associated with the subject. The Nazis made much of the association between Jews and Communism, so anyone equating Jews with Communism since then has been, partly properly, seen as treading in Nazi footsteps.] According to the American academy, there was no collaboration between Jews and communists (I was recently told that point blank by one American professor). Michnik (along with a handful of other Jews) occasionally admits, however, that Jews truly were responsible for communist terror. [It’s not proper, as I have noted above, to ascribe all Eastern Bloc Communist repression to Jews. I believe that Jews were a minority even amongst, say, the Polish Communist Party. In the early days, even in Poland, Communism was actually fairly popular, despite what O’Donnell implies, especially among working-class Poles. Initially, conditions for workers and especially peasants were dramatically improved. Recall that Polish feudalism did not truly die until 1945, and it was the Communists who put the stake into feudalism’s dying heart once and for all. But the Polish Communists made a number of stupid mistakes, especially very heavy-handed repression, and by the mid-1950’s or so, much of their popularity had evaporated.] It is permissible in America for a Jew, but not for a non-Jew, to point out parallels between Jews and communists. The main point of Michnik’s article is that the Catholic Church is to blame for the murder of innocent Jews in Kielce. (The ultimate implication, then, is that such an institution cannot be legitimate). Michnik quotes other Poles in the Catholic hierarchy and points out the moral failings of their political incorrectness. And yet Michnik is so daring in his propaganda, so convinced of his skill at selling his “buy-one-get-one-free” illusion, that he is willing at times to argue the side of truth, i.e. the Polish point of view. Archbishop Kaczmarek’s explanation, as quoted by Michnik, is a balanced, unemotional explanation of the Jewish role in the postwar communist terror in Poland. Reading Archbishop Kaczmarek’s text, one understands that, for historical reasons, Poles will never ever trust a Jew. [RL: I think that is dubious. People have short memories, and Polish Communism is dead anyway.] Michnik quotes some words delivered by a certain Rabbi Kahane in Kielce at the ceremonious burial of the Jewish victims of “Polish terror.” Michnik doesn’t provide background information on Kahane, but I have in my mind a definite, colorful snapshot of a spiteful rabbi puffed up with pride and venom. Michnik, confident in his skill of disinformation, asks:

Polish reality, obligated at that moment, in 1946, to appeal publicly to the Jewish public for [Jews] to avoid cooperation with the communist regime imposed upon Poland, and especially with the security system, which was in fact for Poles a system of persecution? Was not the rabbi obligated to condemn the violation of human rights [in Poland], the persecution of people [from the non-communist, anti-Nazi underground], the excesses of censorship, the fake elections?

[RL: On the other hand, the only proper attitude of the Polish people towards Kielce itself is the statement of the Polish government at the July 7 ceremony discussed above – that it was a shame and a tragedy for both the Jews and the Poles.] In attempting to appear impartial, Michnik raises some legitimate, essential questions. Why were Jews silent when Jewish communists were arresting, persecuting, and murdering innocent Christians? [RL: We have dealt with the “Jewish Communists persecuted Christians” bit on this blog before. Recall that over 9 This essay of O’Donnell’s seems to be an example of a Polish phenomenon called [RL: It is interesting to note that 3 million non-Jewish Poles were killed in WW2. Poland lost an incredible 1/3 of its total population. That is 1/2 of the Jewish Shoah right there. 22 million Russians died in WW2. That is almost 4 times the number of deaths in the Shoah. Where are the “Russian Holocaust” Museums in America?] We live in a time of struggle with Jews. The inclination of the Jew is to lead the world to Armageddon. [RL: This is just rank anti-Semitic nonsense, but as far as the gangster, thuggish state of Israel goes, combined with its determined and often-fanatical opponents, there seems to be some truth in this. Which is another reason that state should have never been created.] As I have noted before, a great virtue for the Christian is knowing when and how to ignore Jews. [RL: I think it is important to note the ethnic biases which may be lurking in the propaganda of various ethnic groups. At that point, one can at least choose to ignore that propaganda or decide that it has an ethnic basis that may not be relevant to one’s own group.] One should never permit one’s life to be directed by Jews. Those non-Jews who spend their life in hatred of Jews are foolish, for their hatred is exactly what the Jew thrives upon – it confirms the Jew’s ethnocentrism. [RL: Unfortunately, I conclude that this is true. Anti-Semitism indeed feeds Jewish ethnocentrism, which then feeds further anti-Semitism, which then…get it? Albert Einstein, who was Jewish himself, noted that Jews were determined to be at war with the whole world and then were surprised when the world did not react favorably to them. Hostility towards outsiders, along with xenophobia and accompanying paranoia and a victimization fetish, go hand in hand with ethnocentrism. All ethnocentric groups (that means all humans, really) have the potential to display such tendencies. As a group becomes more ethnocentric, they will tend display these qualities more. Jews, being perhaps the most ethnocentric tribe on Earth, would be expected to display xenophobia and accompanying paranoia along with a penchant to see themselves as eternal victims, in spades. The solution, as noted by progressives from Marx on, is simply the assimilation of the Jews and the tearing down of all ghettos, physical and mental. Such is the road to liberation.] I pity those Americans who have, in contempt, adopted the pejorative name “kike.” Never have I heard a non-Jew use that word in conversation. I have encountered “kike” only among Jews, who are hoping and dreaming that someone would legitimize their ethnocentricity by calling them a “kike.” The name “Jew” is enough. Jew says it all. When a Jew mentions Kielce or Jebwabne, I simply smile and comment on the weather. I refuse to allow a Jew to dictate my thoughts. The point of this article is this: as the Jews become more powerful, they become more daring in their allusions. [RL: As Kevin MacDonald notes, as Jews increase their power over non-Jews, anti-Semitism seems to increase. It is this, not some incomprehensible sickness of the soul, that holds the key to our understanding of much anti-Semitism. The question then is, which way forward? Is there something to be said for the Overseas Chinese tendency to keep one’s head down and be discreet? Belligerence and overreach have caused the Jews untold heartache through time. Minorities prosper and live in peace at the whim of majorities, like it or not. Hence, pragmatism mandates reasonable discretion on the part of any minority.] Adam Michnik and other Jews have come to believe that Poles are so simple-minded that they can be persuaded that Kielce is proof of the inherent evil of Polish society and the Polish Church. The reality is that Michnik, in particular, and Jews, in general, are deceiving charlatans. It is in their nature to deceive non-Jews. Comments: I was taught somehow, possibly through the standard pro-Jewish Holocaust line, that Polish Jews had heavily collaborated with the Nazis in killing Jews. Let us note that the degree of Polish collaboration with Nazis in Occupied Poland is controversial. For some alternate views on the Nazi occupation of Poland that show that many Poles collaborated with the Germans and, more commonly, delightfully helped themselves to Jewish property after the Jews were gone, contradicting my general tone in this post, see here, here and here. It is true that some Poles participated in 22 massacres of Jews during the Holocaust and a number of Poles collaborated with the Nazis. But one point of view is that, unlike Lithuania, Ukraine or other East European states, Polish enthusiasm for collaboration and pogroms during the Holocaust was less than other East European nations. In fact, most Poles did not cooperate with the Nazi persecution of the Polish Jews at all, and most of the Jews who were killed in Poland were killed by Germans alone (with some exceptions such as the Jebwabne Pogrom). In the cases where the Nazis had “local” collaborators, it is more accurate to describe them as the Polish Government in Exile did in the famous letter below, as “the dregs of Eastern Europe”, rather than only Poles. In other words, Nazi collaborators in Poland came from a variety of East European nations. There are more Poles listed than any other national group in the Righteous Among Nations Award given by Israel for those who helped to save Jews during WW2. In Nazi-occupied Poland, hiding Jews was punished by the death penalty. Poland was the only Nazi-occupied country that formally instituted the death penalty for sheltering Jews. Nevertheless, as we noted above, more Poles saved Jews than any other national group. The Polish government in exile was the first government to tell the world of the existence of concentration camps and the Nazi policy to exterminate the Jews (a copy of that famous document is here). Anyone who insists, as one of my commenters did at the end of this piece, that the vast majority of Poles collaborated with the Nazi Final Solution, or that the Poles have always been some of the worst anti-Semites on Earth, needs to carefully read this remarkable 15-page historical document. This document, describing the reality of life in Nazi-occupied Poland in stark, brutal terms, focuses on the plight of the Jews, and describes the Nazi destruction of Polish Jewry in rich, detailed terms. The document could have been written by the ADL or the Israeli government. We should also note that the Polish government in exile was the only government that set up an organization specifically dedicated to saving the Jews of Poland – this organization was called Witold Pilecki, was the only person who volunteered to be imprisoned at Auschwitz and the first person to organize a resistance organization there. Those few Jews who survived (a horrifying 9 The reality of the Polish-Jewish dynamic in Occupied Poland was, as elsewhere in Nazi-occupied lands, more complex than the sound bites the propagandists feed us. Some Poles collaborated but many more did not. Some Poles killed Jews, and many more worked night and day to save them and fight Nazism. In that light, Jewish chauvinist propaganda depicting Poles as super-Nazi collaborators and the worst anti-Semites on Earth is not only erroneous but it is also disgusting and unfair. And this is the misguided agenda of Organized Jewry (exemplified here by Mr. Michnik). This agenda needs to be condemned alongside Poland’s historical anti-Semitism and the refusal of many Poles to take responsibility for Kielce. Kielce happened, 60 years ago, but it’s all over now. It’s time to put it to rest and move on towards Polish-Jewish healing instead of this endless, divisive pummeling of dead beasts. In that context, Jewish obsession with Kielce and other Polish horrors seems misplaced. The latest philo-Semitic notion is that “the world was silent” after Kielce – that seems highly dubious to me. Instead, Poles should be commended for refusing to collaborate in the Judaicide. Michnik’s harping on aberrations like Kielce would not appear to be conducive to rebuilding Polish-Jewish relations.

Jews Versus Lithuanians

Repost from the old site. More raw meat for you anti-Semitic beastie boys. From this Lithuanian nationalist site. It’s pretty familiar stuff, similar to Polish anti-Semitism after the war. Basically, they are claiming that the Jews helped the USSR when the USSR invaded Lithuania in 1940. It’s true that there were some arrests and killings in the Baltic States when the Soviets took over. All of the Baltic states have always hated Communism, possibly because it was imposed at gunpoint. In 1941, the Nazis invaded, and they occupied the place until 1944. It would seem to me that the Nazis were much worse as far as killing folks than the USSR, but that’s just a WAG. The Holocaust in Lithuania was one of the worst in any nation. There were about 200,000 Jews there when the Nazis invaded, and only 3- I guess I can see why the Jews welcomed the Red Army with open arms. The Holocaust here was a bit peculiar because the locals joined in the killing in a worse way than in most other Axis nations. In particular, the local police, and I believe, even regular citizens, joined in the frenzy. The Polish (AK) and Lithuanian partisans both fought each other here in what was one of the war’s sillier moments. Apparently the AK were Polish nationalists who had some territorial designs on Lithuania as a part of Poland. A lot of killing on all sides here, including civilians. Nasty fight. Apparently some Jews who served under Stalin in 1940 were responsible for killing some Lithuanians, and the nationalists want these Jews to be extradited from Israel, where they have taken refuge, on war crimes charges. No one has been able to try any Allies on war crimes charges during WW2. Otherwise we have to go after the bombers of Dresden and Frankfurt. History is written by the victors, and they also host the war crimes trials. That’s just the way it goes. If you don’t like it, don’t lose a war, or if you do, try to fight at least slightly civilized while you are in conflict. I really know little about the situation in Lithuania during WW2, and in particular, I am not able to rebut the nationalists’ charges, although I suspect that they are false. The Lithuanians killed 9

Poles, Ukrainians and Russians Versus Jews

Repost from the old site. More red meat for you anti-Semite lions and tigers. This post is in response to a commenter who commented that Ukrainians, Russians and Poles are the biggest anti-Semites of all because Jews dominated their economies for so long and because of the Jewish role in implementing Judeo-Bolshevism on the backs of an unwilling people.

Z comments: But the most antisemitic people in the world are Romanians.” I’d actually say that the Ukrainians, Russians, and Poles are actually more antisemitic that Romanians, if only because there were so many more Jews in those countries as compared to Romania. So many of the citizens in all of these Eastern European countries are antisemitic because Ashkenazi Jews dominated their economies for so long (as a non-native ethnic minority) and played such a major role in the repressive form of Communism that existed there…so can you really blame them for harboring ill-will toward them?

I respond: Ok, first of all, it’s not all Ukrainians who are anti-Semites. It’s much more prevalent amongst Poles. It’s true that Poles are anti-Semites for a variety of reasons: 1. They wanted Jews to convert to Catholicism. 2. Catholicism was doctrinally opposed to Judaism. 3. Jews refused to assimilate to Polish culture. 4. Jews often refused to learn Polish (though this has been overblown as many Jews did learn Polish). 5. Competition between poor Jews and poor Poles. 6. Role of Jews in Communism, which most Poles really hated. As Stalin said, bringing Communism to Poland was like putting a saddle on a horse. The main reason Poles opposed Communism was not that they were wonderful people or anything, but it was due to their Catholicism. The business about Jews promoting Communism mostly applies to the postwar period, so Poles can hardly use it as an excuse for their behavior during the war. Jews never dominated the economy of Poland at any time to my knowledge, unless you want to go way back in time 100’s of years. By the mid to late 1800’s, there was a massive population explosion of Polish Jews and this ended up impoverishing a large number of them. Let this be a lesson to all of those racialists, racists, nationalists and ethnic nationalist pro-natalists who say that having lots of babies is wonderful for the economy! Many Ukrainians are anti-Semites, but note that there was mass volunteerism when Germany invaded Ukraine. There were quite a few fighting with the Ukrainian Nazis (nationalists), yes, but there were vastly more fighting with the USSR and then in partisan bands. These partisan bands were full of Jews. Nowadays, many Ukrainians are anti-Semites because many are nationalists. The nationalist-Nazi line has gone over pretty well, but that’s mostly in the Western Ukraine. In the eastern Ukraine, there is not much anti-Semitism and they are pro-Soviet. This is part of the Holodomor crowd. It’s not really known how nationalist or anti-Semitic Ukrainians were from 1945-1990. The Ukrainian nationalists blow things way out of proportion. Keep in mind that many more Ukrainians joined partisan bands and volunteered for the Red Army than joined the nationalist bands. Note that the Red Army and the partisans were in a war to death with the nationalists – a terrible and gruesome war with atrocities on all sides. The Holodomor – Ukrainian nationalist crowd is associated with the nationalist bands who fought alongside the Nazis against the Red Army and partisan bands in WW2. To say that the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians still line up with the nationalist – Nazis against the partisans, or that it was always this way, is completely mistaken. Many Ukrainian peasants were quite happy to be rid of those kulak bastards, and peasants were the overwhelming majority in the Ukraine, not kulaks. Yes, there was a famine in the Ukraine, but life expectancy exploded in the Ukraine before and afterwards. This was a time of hardship, and people were just taking a lot of this horror in stride. I would guess that the vast majority of Ukrainians felt or later figured out that the Nazis were far worse for the Ukraine (and had an infinitely worse plan for the future) than Stalin ever did. During WW2 and even afterwards, most Ukrainians did not believe in this Holodomor bullshit, and most felt that about 2 million died. Ukraine lost 2 Russians do not hold it against Jews that they played a role in Communism. Communism is actually pretty popular in Russia right now, or at least it is not unpopular. The Russian nationalist fascists like Solzhenitsyn are not that common and even the Russian Nazis are usually socialists and even pro-Stalin. Stalin is positively regarded by most Russians today. There is resentment against Jews by Russians, but Jews never dominated the economy in either Ukraine or Russia except for now with the return to capitalism, so there is now some resentment due to their role in looting the USSR. Russians started hating Israel because the Israelis lined up with the West after WW2. That’s what that was all about. Also E European Jews (Zionists) were caught spying for the US over and over. The USSR always disliked Jewish nationalism so that was another reason they opposed Israel. But initially Stalin supported Israel when it looked like they were going to be pro-Soviet or even neutral. They turned pro-West real quick. This explains Stalin’s anti-Semitic turn in the USSR after the war. At one point in the late 40’s someone asked Stalin why he was persecuting the leaders of the Jewish organizations in the USSR and he said, “But you do not understand! They are all Zionists!” So he wasn’t going after them because they were Jews but because a lot of them were thought to be lining up with the West in the Cold War.

"Jewish Bolshevism"

Repost from the old site. I’m sure you antisemites are going to eat this post for breakfast, lunch and dinner. An excellent article by well-known Israeli Jewish columnist Sever Plocker (also known as Sever Plotzker), chief economics editor and deputy editor-in chief of the Israeli paper Yedioth Abaronot, recently appeared in the Israeli internet publication Ynet. Ynet is the website of the Yedioth Abaronot newspaper. The piece, Stalin’s Jews, is one of the best things ever written on the subject of the relationship between Jews and (European) Communism, particularly the Bolshevik and Stalinist variety practiced in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The subject is tendentious and very difficult for a sane progressive, let alone anyone else, to analyze and dissect. It is not commonly known that Hitler’s main beef against European Jews was that they were Communists. In fact, European Communism itself (Bolshevism) was regarded as merely a Jewish plot. There was a certain amount of evidence in favor of this theory, as is often the case, but the Jewish = Communist equation has always been problematic. Let it be known that this was Hitler’s (and his allies, including rightwingers in the US) principal beef against European Jews. Bolshevism was seen as a Jewish plot to conquer Europe in the service of the Jewish-controlled Soviet Union. Hitler was seen as a hero by many anti-Communists for his role in WW2. This is glossed as Hitler trying to save Europe from imminent Bolshevik takeover via the Soviet Union. The fact that Nazism (and all fascist movements) was first and foremost a ferociously anti-Communist (and by extension, anti-socialist, anti-liberal and anti-trade unionist) movement makes the sickening rightwing claim that Nazism was a leftwing socialist movement all the more painful, insulting and dishonest. The entirety of the World Left (with the shameful exception of Trotsky, who held that fascists were just as bad as any other capitalists and that Communists should be neutral in the war) mobilized against what they called The Great War Against Fascism. The Spanish Civil War, pitting Leftists, Communists and anarchists against fascists, was an early version of World War 2, and Hitler supported the fascists. All, or almost all, anti-Nazi and anti-fascist resistance movements in Occupied Europe during wartime were either led by Communists, or Communists played a major role. The Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, ignorantly portrayed by anti-Communists as a marriage of ideological allies, was nothing of the kind. Stalin knew that Hitler was going to attack the Soviet Union, and Stalin was simply trying to gain time and obtain a buffer zone. The fact that, as Eric Hoffer noted in The True Believer, in Germany in the 1920’s and 1930’s, various folks moved between the Nazis and Communists, is misleading. Anti-Communists use this anecdote to say that Communism and fascism are both forms of political fanaticism, and Communism and fascism are really just different forms of the same thing. This analysis ignores that for a long time before the Nazi Left purge with the Night of the Long Knives, the Nazis attempted to portray themselves as a left wing, or even socialist, movement, in order to divide and co-opt the Left. Hitler himself later admitted that this was all a cynical ploy in order to con workers into voting for the Nazi Party, which had no interest in them at all. To this day, if you spend much time around anti-Semites, the “Jewish Bolshevism” meme continues to ring very loud amongst a particular type of anti-Semite, especially those in the US and Europe. In Russia and Eastern Europe this is one of the principal forms of modern anti-Semitism. Since the “Jewish Bolshevism” theory has caused so much tragedy in our world, it is essential that we analyze it with clear minds. Truth is, many Jews were associated with Bolshevism and Stalinism in the Soviet Union. Centuries of 3rd class citizenship, pogroms and Czarist anti-Semitism caused many Russian Jews to be enthusiastic about the revolution that overthrew Czarism. The evidence of a significant Jewish role during one phase of the early Stalinist regime and in certain areas of government, is available in Plocker’s piece. In particular, during some of Stalin’s murderous purges in the 1930’s, Jews played a very large role, though they were mostly absent from the worst of the killing in 1937-38. It is true that the three heads of the NKVD, or Stalinist secret police, were Jewish. Under Genrikh Yagodha , who served from 1934-1936, Jews became briefly dominant in the NKVD, when 3 It was during the reign of Yezhov that the Stalinist purges entered their most deadly period. Any analysis that attempts to place Soviet Jews as predominant during Stalin’s Great Terror is simply false. Stalin, himself denounced as an anti-Semite by Trotskyites and militant Jews (Stalin’s so-called anti-Semitism was a major reason for the Stalin-Trotsky split in 1927, yet whether or not Stalin became anti-Semitic later is much more controversial) was surrounded by Jewish women during this period, yet he still purged many Jews from the party, mostly because so many of them were aligned with Trotsky. Jews were wildly overrepresented amongst Stalin’s worst executioners during a certain period in the 1930’s, even while they were not extremely overrepresented among Stalin’s regime in general. But after that period, Jews were only Initially, the Bolshevik Revolution was heavily Jewish. Here are some facts (keep in mind that Jews were The Bolshevik Party Central Committee had 9 members in 1917, of which 3 were Jews (3 In 1922, of the 44,148 members of the Bolshevik Party that had joined before 1917 (the Old Guard, as Lenin referred to them), 7. As you can see in the example above, non-Jews made up 6 In spite of the fact that many of Stalin’s top killers were Jewish, the role of Jews in the party began to decline dramatically after 1927-28. Some authors have termed 1917-1927 as the “Jewish era” of the party, since Jewish ideologues played a major role in the party’s thinking, and the party was involved in wild experiments in the areas of sexuality, the family, etc. For instance, divorce was made ridiculously easy. Attempts were made to get rid of the family unit via communal housing, child care (the communalization of child-raising) and dining halls, since the family unit was seen as bourgeois and the source of capitalism itself. Children’s rights were elevated to the point where kids were encouraged to rebel against and even to defy their parents. Homosexuality was legalized, and for a while, there was a freewheeling free love scene amongst party members, predictably abused by male party members as such scenes usually are. The Afghan Communist regime saw a similar and little-known freewheeling sex scene amongst party members, an amazing feature in such a deeply conservative society. Many of the conservative peasantry, many of whom hated the Russian Czarist ruling class for its abuse of them and were therefore attracted to the Communists, were appalled by the free love and anti-family features of the early Bolshevik Party. Stalin, though an atheist, came from a conservative Russian Orthodox background. As soon as he came into power, he started reversing the radical (“Jewish”) experiments in marriage and family life. Within a few years, all of that was all reverted and socially regressive legislation was in its place. Concomitantly, the role of Jews in the Communist Party began to decline. In the 1930’s, even where in one period, many of the leading killers were Jews, many of the victims were also Jewish. As noted above, many of those accused in Stalin’s show trials were Jewish and by the end of the 1930’s, Jews had been almost totally purged from the party. Only notorious Politburo member Lazar Kaganovich (a favorite bogeyman of anti-Semites) remained. Some Jews have noted that saying that Stalinism was good for the Jews is about as honest as Stalinist propaganda in general. These Jews say that Stalinism was only a little bit better for the Jews than the Holocaust, though that is surely an exaggeration. It is important to note that the Jews who committed terrible crimes under Stalinism had left the Jewish religion and were operating first and foremost as Communists, not as Jews. This is an essential point, because anti-Semites say that Communist Jews were killers because Jewish religion, culture or genes contains inherent and unchangeable murderous tendencies. We can rule out Jewish genes being murderous for now since we there is no evidence for this. Further, for centuries, Jewish culture has been represented more by murder victims than murderers. Likewise with Judaism. Granted, Judaism was associated with a lot of killing 2000-3000 years ago and at the moment, but in the interim, once again, it more a religion of the killed than a religion of killers. Further, almost all Communist Jews renounced both Jewish culture and surely Judaism in favor of Communist culture and Communism as a belief system. In fact, many agitated against “Jewish particularism” (Jewish cultural chauvinism) and there is no evidence that temples fared any better than churches. Leon Trotsky, asked if he were Jewish, said he was a citizen of the Soviet citizen and an internationalist – i.e., he refused to identify as Jewish. This was a typical mindset of Soviet Jewish Communists. Critics say that these Jews nevertheless retained a strong Jewish identity that informed their behavior but this is hard to prove. This makes the anti-Semitic rant that “Jewish Communists killed 20 million Russian Christians” particularly vicious. Considering that so many of the killers’ victims were Jews themselves, it is dubious how much, if any, killing was being deliberately targeted at “Christians” merely for the fact that they were Christians. In the Ukraine famine of the early 1932-33, about 110 million Soviet peasants were pitted against 10 million wealthy kulaks with a lot of peasant blood on their hands, who had been viciously and murderously exploiting feudal peasants for centuries. Land was collectivized, to the benefit of long-suffering peasants just released from feudal bondage. Kulaks reacted with violent, “Contra”-like attacks on the collective farms, killing peasants and farm animals, raping women and burning crops. The attempt here was to destroy Russia’s breadbasket and starve the peasants and by extension the nation. In this conflict, Soviet Jews lined up with 110 million peasants versus 10 million kulaks, one group being as “Christian” as the other. The Ukrainian famine in 1932-33 was a tragedy, to be sure. 1.5 million people died. But the kulaks, deliriously supported by the West, were trying to starve 120 million Soviet citizens. Would that have been better? A principal cause of the famine was Ukrainian peasants hoarding, withholding and possibly destroying the grain harvest from the state. In the years in question, ⅔ of Soviet grain production was not making it into national coffers, a prospect that harbored serious consequences for feeding the nation. It is only fair to note that there were also terrible weather conditions in 1932-33 in the Ukraine, and similar weather conditions had caused previous famines in the area. The number of Stalin’s victims has been grossly exaggerated by anti-Semites and anti-Communists. A mountain of lies, starting with William Randolph Hearst and the White Army, going to Hitler, Robert Conquest and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, extends in a logical line. Wild figures such as 20-110 million are tossed around. Even more outrageously, the Right argues that Stalin, and Communism in general, killed more people than fascism! Hard figures are tough to come by, but possibly 225,000 political prisoners died in labor camps from 1921-1953, another 900,000 were executed in the same period (an incredible 700,000 of those were in the purges of 1937-38) and 389,000 died in the resettlement of the Kulaks. That leaves about 1.5 million. A summary of those figures is here. All of those numbers are quite controversial, with a number of researchers, especially those associated with Robert Conquest, vociferously arguing that the real numbers are much larger. This historical debate may or may not be settled in my lifetime. Adding in the 1.5 million who died in the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 gives us a figure of 3 million. This includes most of the Leninist period in addition to almost all of Stalin’s reign. The purges in 1937-38 were not 10 As the conspiracy progressed, Trotsky’s clique negotiated with Nazi Germany in order to get their support for the counterrevolutionary coup that the Trotskyites were planning – a plan to kill the entire leadership of the party. In order to gain the Nazis’ support for the coup, the Trotskyites offered up the large parts of the USSR, including the Ukraine, which is what the Germans demanded for their support. What would have awaited the Ukrainians after they were handed over to the Nazis as part of the Nazi Lebensraum? The picture is here, and it is not pretty. The Ukrainians were better off under Stalin. The regime uncovered the plot in 1937-38 and at least some of those executed were involved in the plot. So the Western line that the purges were just a wild murder spree by Stalin “to consolidate power” is at least partly false. Based on what we know know, Stalin’s assassination of Trotsky in Mexico City in 1940 (now condemned around the world as an act of insane cruelty) was a completely reasonable act. Those figures are summarized here, from a report based on 9,000 pages of Soviet archives published by a large team of US and Russian authors between 1990-1993. The best-known of the authors were the Russian historians V.N. Zemskov, A.N. Dougin and O.V. Xlevnjuk. This groundbreaking report was subsequently met with an avalanche of refutations in published books, articles and reports from the anti-Communist Western media machine, all of which recycled the same piles of lies written previously. About 1.5 million died of famine in the Ukraine, a description of which is provided above. The 1.5 million figure is based on USSR archives. A higher figure of 4.5 million is arrived at by outrageously including as “deaths” people who were never even born. ½ of those who died in labor camps died during WW2, when there were mass shortages of food and medicine throughout the country, in a period where 24 million Soviet citizens died outside of labor camps in the War itself and ½ the country was in flames. At minimum, 1.6 million people died via political repression under Stalinism. 1.6 million dead is an awful lot of people, but it is not 110 million. Furthermore, under Czarist feudalism, so loved by the West that we actually poured money into the White Army to maintain this insane killing system, fully 3 times as many Russians died per year per capita, year in and year out, as died under Stalinism, even in its worst years. So Czarism was three times deadlier than Stalinism at its worst. Yet we hear not one word of Czarist killers or feudalist killers – all we hear is of Stalinist and Communist killers. By a reasonable accounting, even with all the Stalinist deaths, Stalin was still saving 1.5 million lives a year, or about 35 million lives by the time he died (the figure needs work, and any progressive who wants to work on it can email me). This was done by doubling life expectancy in the Soviet Union, which set a world record for a nation doubling life expectancy in the shortest period of time, a record broken only by Mao in 1976 with the doubling of life expectancy in China, who did the same for China with a much larger population. Both Stalin and Mao saved far more people than they killed. The present discourse about the Soviet Union under Stalin is simply insane. It’s true he killed many people, and there is no excuse for that. With Mao, the number of lives saved must be much greater than 35 million, even counting the disastrous famine of the Great Leap Forward that killed 15 million people. Anti-Communist pathological liars who reduce Soviet and Chinese rule to mass deaths are mass liars. Capitalism killed, and kills, far more than Stalin and Mao combined. Both rulers saved vastly more lives than they took. There is a reason for this distortion. 35 million lives saved, net, under Stalin should properly be contrasted with 15 million dead, net, by 2004 alone, in the transition to capitalism in Russia since in 1991. 13 years of transition to capitalism was far deadlier than 28 years of than Stalinism. Yet we hear not one word of capitalist killers, only of Communist killers. The dead person does not really care how he dies, whether of starvation, disease or a bullet. One thing that is clear is the outrageous injustice of anti-Semites continuing to bash present-day Jews with the “Commie killer Jew” label, a label with deep origins in Nazism. A look at the comments following Plocker’s article shows that the vast majority of Jews today reject and condemn the Jews who killed in Stalin’s name.

Schipper on Racialism, Ethnocentrism, Nationalism and Decolonization

James Schipper has always proven to be one of the most thoughtful commenters on this blog. He chooses his words carefully, and as EB White suggests in the Manual of Style, scarcely wastes a word. This comment was in response to the Mystery Solved post, and it is so great I am going to post it. I am curious why he calls White nationalists raci(al)sts. I assume he is trying to say that they are at once racists and racialists. That makes sense to me. WN’s are continuously saying that they don’t hate any other races; all they do is love their own kind. If that were the case, perhaps we would not mind. But the non-racist WN is a rare bird indeed. I know one fellow who might qualify, but he refers to Whites breeding with Blacks as “cross-species breeding.” That’s seems like a pretty racist thing to say. I will admit that some WN are more racist than others. I’ve met a couple that don’t seem to dislike Blacks, but that is rare. A fair number of WN are Asiaphiles, but they are always being denounced as traitors. Even Jared Taylor is something of an Asiaphile. Some have Amerindian in them, but they’re constantly being threatened with being thrown out of the movement. In short, the vast majority of them are quite racist individuals, and many are savage racists. That’s just a fact. Schipper suggests that ethnocentrism has nothing to do with race, but I even feel that Punjabis and Yemenis are members of my family, albeit distant cousins, yet Mexican Indians and Hmong are not. Am I mentally ill for thinking this way? I’ve recently expanded my view of my ethnic group to include most Caucasians, and it feels nice to include 1.5 million+ humans in your ethnic family. As far as the Mexican Indians and the Hmong, well, there’s friends and theirs family, right? Oaxacans and Hmong may be friends, but they can’t be family. It seems to me that a narrow ethnocentrism that focuses only on one’s nation leaves something to be desired. If I were a Slovenian, I would rather be a Pan-Caucasianist and count 1.5 billion relatives than be a Slovenian nationalist and only count 2 million. Schipper’s explanation of the rejection of White ethnocentrism as a rejection of White colonialism is an excellent one, and his summary of the crimes of White colonialism is chilling. I think most other ethnic groups would have done the same thing had they had the means, and they probably would have been crueler about it, but that doesn’t let us off the hook. One of the disgusting things about White nationalists is that they usually cheer on the worst excesses of White colonialism and imperialism. Either they think it was a great idea, or they can’t admit they were ever wrong. Anyway, it’s stomach-wrenching. His analysis of Hitler is excellent also, and I agree it’s bizarre to say that Jews aren’t White. Of course they are White! I agree that Hispanic is a nonsensical category. Around here, a huge number of them have lots of White ancestry. Many are anywhere from mostly White to about as White as I am. The internal racism of US Hispanics is much exaggerated by WN’s. WN’s insist that Hispanics are obsessed with race and love to be White. Truth is most of them don’t seem to care, and the whole subject is pretty touchy. The really White ones, if they have some money, are often proud to admit to Spanish ancestry, and you often hear Hispanics bragging about having ancestors with blue eyes or blond hair. When my Mexican-American neighbor was growing up in Morenci, Arizona in the 1930’s and 1940’s, she said whenever a baby was born, the first thing everyone asked was, “Que blanco?” “How White is it?” Among this particular group of rural working class SW US Hispanics in that period, Whiter skin was valued like gold. Nowadays, brown pride is all the rage. In the bars and all over town, you see Whiter Hispanics hanging out with, befriending, dating and marrying darker ones. At the lower end of the income spectrum, no one cares. Maybe at the higher end, people get touchier, but even there, you don’t hear about it much. I would surely consider any mostly-White Hispanic to be part of my family, and there are millions like this. Asians are not really a race, it is true, but there is a huge Macro-Asian race, along with smaller NE Asian and SE Asian races. I’d love to see Pan-Asianism take hold in Asians. If they could embrace 2 million or so humans as family members, what an interesting world it could be. Unfortunately, they probably dislike each other too much to do that. I myself never cared about White ethnocentrism until I moved to a majority-Hispanic town and was an obvious minority. Since then I’ve embraced White ethnocentrism thoroughly, and I feel so much better than in my previous deracinated state. Ethnocentrism of any kind definitely feels good, and deracination feels like crap. It’s like the difference between getting a religion and being an atheist. Even if atheism is scientifically rational, it surely feels terrible. Schipper: Let’s not confuse race and ethnicity. WN are not ethnocentrists, they are raci(al)sts. Of course, ethnocentricity and racialism are psychologically similar because in both cases our own group is put first and at the top. In one case it is our ethnic group and in the other it is our race. I’m white and so are Vladimir Putin, Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel and Silvio Berlusconi, but I certainly don’t think that they belong to the same ethnic group as I do. Ethnocentrism is indeed very common, but it doesn’t have anything to do with race. Until recently, Europe was an all-white continent and also filled with various ethnocentrics and chauvinists. The French liked to feel superior to the less civilized boches, the British felt superior to crazy continentals, the Poles thought that they were so much better than those half-Asian Russians, etc. Even smaller nations could be pretty chauvinistic. I have met plenty of smug ethnocentric Dutchmen. However, none of this had anything to do with race. White racism existed mainly in Western Europe and it arose in a colonial context. Since 1492, white racism became one of the ideological underpinnings of colonialism. By 1939, the white racists from Western Europe had conquered the entire Western Hemisphere, nearly all of Africa, Oceania and large chunks of Asia. Of course, not all colonialists were believers in white racial superiority. Some believed in the superiority of the Christian religion or the cultural superiority of Europe. It is this close relation between white racism and colonialism that made it contaminated. To some extent, the relentless denunciation of white racism is a reaction to colonialism. Decolonization was indeed necessary because it was a system of domination and privilege. Attacks on white racism are a form of mental decolonization. As to Hitler, he was a combination of anti-Semite, Aryan racist and German nationalist. Since Jews are white and most whites are not Aryans, it is quite wrong to see Hitler as a practitioner of white nationalism. All of Hitler’s crimes were committed against other whites. I don’t listen to people who tell me that Jews aren’t whites. Racism and nationalism are antithetical in multiracial countries. WNs in the US should feel more affinity with Russians, Frenchmen, Georgians, Greeks, Serbs, etc than with fellow American who are of a different color. People who put race above the nation are bad nationalists. WN in the US are bad Americans for the same reason that Catholics in the US who feel more affinity with Polish, Portuguese and Argentinian Catholics than with Americans of a different religion are bad Americans. If Jared Taylor feels more affinity with me than with Obama, then he is not a very good American Nationalists worthy of the name put their national identity above their religious, racial or other identities. WNs don’t do that. They don’t deserve to be called nationalists and should start calling themselves raci(al)sts. As to Hispanics, they are a totally artificial category of the American government. In Latin America, people see themselves as Colombians, Chileans, Cubans, Argentinians, etc, or racially they see themselves as white, Amerindian, black, mestizo, etc. More educated Latin Americans may feel part of a broader Latin American nation, but Latin Americans who see themselves as members of a Hispanic race don’t exist. That only happens after they arrive in the US. Do you really believe that Néstor Kirchner, Álvaro Uribe, Fidel Castro or Hugo Chávez see themselves as members of a mythical Hispanic race? Asians aren’t a race either. They certainly aren’t an ethnic group, even if we confine the term Asian to East Asians. It is just as absurd to believe that Koreans, Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos and Thais will all see themselves as part of one happy East Asian family as it is to believe that Poles, Swedes, Germans and Spaniards see themselves as members of one European nation. Just because people have the same type of eyes doesn’t make them one race or one ethnicity. I’m indulgent toward mild ethnocentricity as long as it is not combined with gratuitous hostility toward members of other ethnic groups. Somebody once said that the best friend is someone who is slightly inferior. Since he is only slightly inferior, we can feel affinity with him while still enjoying the sinful pleasure of feeling superior. Maybe it is the same with many ethnocentrics. They like to feel superior but also to be friends with people who aren’t co-ethnics.

Operation Barbarossa Revisionism Rears Its Head Again

From the The World According to AmericanGoy blog – WW2 Operation Barbarossa 1941 – the Real History version. American Goy is a critic of Israel and claims to be a progressive. I guess he’s a liberal anti-Communist of some sort. This is the more usual kind we were used to from the pro-Nazis, though now it seems to be going mainstream Far Right anti-Communist, unlike the typical stuff we deal with in the US I dealt with in a previous post here. This is the incredible argument that Stalin actually started WW2. Not Hitler, but Stalin. Hitler actually attacked the USSR to save all of Europe from Communism! Hitler was the savior of the West! Stalin was getting ready to attack all of Europe to convert it to Communism via armed assault. Yes, yes, I know. You are shaking your head. Did the USSR under Stalin ever support one armed revolution outside the USSR? Of course not. Did Stalin’s “revolution in one country” reject the Trotskyite support for simultaneous world revolution in all of the capitalist countries,to be spearheaded by the USSR, since converting several advanced capitalist countries to socialism was necessary for socialism to succeed? Of course it did. Socialism in one country meant building socialism in the USSR and leaving the rest for later, if ever. What this means is that while Trotskyites might have supported attacking all of Europe to convert it to Communism (actually they probably would have supported the local CP’s’ revolutions instead), it’s inconceivable for Stalinism. Never mind any of that. Never mind reality. There’s a book out, Icebreaker by Viktor Suvorov, written in 1990. Suvorov is a Soviet defector. Usually these guys have about zero credibility and many of them went to work for the CIA or the MI5 as soon as they got to the West. This book lays out the case for Operation Barbarossa revisionism. Suvorov has written another silly book, Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II. This book came out last year. More along these lines: Stalin’s War of Extermination, 1941-1945: Planning, Realization and Documentation by Joachim Hoffman (2001), Stalin’s Other War: Soviet Grand Strategy, 1939-1941 by Albert L. Weeks (2003). Hitler: Stalin’s Stooge, by James B. Edwards (2004), is truly absurd. Stalin brought Hitler to power as part of a grand plan to conquer Europe for Communism! Sheesh. Somewhat more normal is Pat Buchanan’s Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. This is standard rightwing isolationist, and somewhat anti-Semitic, doctrine. The US and UK caused the war by not allying with Hitler, the great anti-Communist fighter. The US racist right, of which Buchanan is a representative, was never comfortable fighting on the Western front. The Nazis said they were fighting for the Whites of the world, and the KKK and even most US Whites were pretty much de facto Nordicists at the time. Only 20 years before, the President of the US had signed the 1925 Immigration bill, intended to reduce immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, since Jews, Poles and Italians were genetically inferior to superior Nordics, who saw themselves as the only real Americans. Calvin Coolidge, in signing the bill, issued an explicitly Nordicist statement that was uncontroversial at the time. Nordicist books like Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race were all the rage at the time, especially among the US elite. There is a passage in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby where the White bluebloods are standing around at a party talking favorably about Grant’s book. The KKK at the time was explicitly Nordicist and especially disliked Italians and Catholics. Much of the US South was under the sway of more or less Nordicist segregationist doctrine. It’s easy to see how a de facto White Supremacist and even Nordicist and anti-Semitic White US society might feel uneasy about going to war with the most explicitly White Supremacist and Nordicist state that ever existed (Nazi Germany). Hence, the US had to be more or less kicked, dragging and screaming, into the Western Front war. We only got into the fight when the Japanese attacked us in the East. A few days later, we declared war on Germany too. The Holocaust had already been underway for a bit on December 7, 1941. The killings in Poland in the ghettos, mostly by starvation, had been going on for 1 1/2 years. The Polish government in exile had long been issuing urgent bulletins about the reality of Generalplan Ost in Poland, and especially its effects on the Jews. It’s hard to say how an anti-Semitic America felt about these reports, but we couldn’t be bothered to join the fight with manpower. To this day, the White nationalists in the US generally either more or less sympathize with the Nazis or at least say that the Western Front was not our fight, or, at the very least, a tragedy (Whites massacring each other for little reason). There have been a flood of Operation Barbarossa revisionist books that have come out since the USSR archives opened in 1990, and I don’t really know what to make of them. I will just leave you with the excellent rejoinder from the great Eastern Star blog, The Other Revisionism. I will just leave it up to J. Slavyanski to lay out the case. Some of these questions may never be solved; we may just have to reconcile ourselves to that. Much more reasonable is the book Gruesome Harvest by Ralph Franklin Keeling. It lays out in horrible detail the Morgenthau Plan, which called for the destruction of Germany and would have resulted in the deaths of many millions of Germans and a pre-industrial, primitive agricultural Germany with its knowledgebase, education, industry, wealth – its entire modern society – completely destroyed. A sort of modified Morgenthau Plan was actually put into place, resulted in mass starvation and malnutrition of millions of Germans, and probably killed millions of German civilians. After a while, the horror was evident, and the plan was revoked in favor of the Marshall Plan. Morgenthau was Jew and was Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury. His plan can be reasonably seen as World Jewry’s desire for mass revenge on the German people and a reverse genocide of Germans, in retaliation for the Holocaust. A good overview of the thinking involved is Ross Vachon’s great Semitism Run Wild essay. I am acquainted with Ross; he’s a good guy.

Where is the PIE Homeland?

There is a lot of debate about where the homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans was. I had thought for years that it was in the southern Ukraine, but that is not correct. Previously it was thought to be in Anatolia, but that theory seems to be losing support. It is true that the most ancient language within the Indo-European language family is Hittite. In fact, Hittite is so far removed from the rest that I have long advocated the term Indo-Hittite instead of Indo-European, to show how far removed Hittite is from the rest of IE. Hittite is of course a dead tongue, but it was formerly spoken in Anatolia. There were quite a few other now dead tongues spoken in Anatolia too, such as Luwian, etc. There are still quite a few advocates of various Anatolian theories, but I am not convinced. There are a few other far-out theories, including the “out of India” theory loved by the Hindutva Indian nationalists, who also insist that European civilization came from India too. Well! I certainly don’t think it did, and I surely hope it won’t come from there in the future, though a walk through downtown London smelling the curry in the air might suggest otherwise. India isn’t giving the world much but crappy, cheap-labor, job-stealing coders, tons of starvation of varying degrees amidst the world’s highest population of living and uneaten cows, probably the most evil religion on Earth and the world’s most passionate colonizers of 7-11 and gas station franchises. I don’t expect that to change in the future, Academy Awards be damned. A friend of mine insists that the PIE homeland is in the Baltics on the basis that Lithuanian is a very conservative tongue that supposedly has conserved more of PIE than anything else. I’m not sure sitting in one place and refusing to change proves an Urheimat. Anyway, Balto-Slavic seems to be a very early split-off from PIE, not part of it. There’s a strange theory out there called the Paleolithic Continuity Theory which suggests that PIE goes all the way back to the first proto-Caucasians that came out of Africa, which would be about 40-45,000 years ago in my estimation. This theory seems absurd because I don’t see how we could reconstruct that much so easily at such a time depth. The top theory for the PIE homeland is the Kurgan Hypothesis favored by the great female (!) scholar Marija Gimbutas. The earliest settlements in this area are in a region from north of the Sea of Avov in the Donets Basin of Southeastern Ukraine east from Rostov on Don through Kalmykia all the way to the Ural River north of the Caspian Sea. This area stretches from the north Black Sea to the north Caspian Sea and is just north of the Caucasus. The earliest cultures were the Samara and Seroglazovo cultures. Seroglazovo stretched from Rostov on Don across to the Ural River north of the Caspian. Another major settlement area was north of the Azov Sea in southeastern Ukraine. Samara was about 100 miles southeast of the city of Samara on the Middle Volga, 150 miles north of the far northwestern Kazakhstan border and about 400 miles north of the Caspian Sea. This general area is called the Pontic Steppe. Additional support for this comes from the recent findings of what seem to be typological affinities, probably borrowings, between PIE and the Northeast Caucasian languages, probably Proto-NE Caucasian. These include the tongue-twisting languages of Dagestan, Chechnya, etc. in the Caucasus. Dagestan and Chechnya are quite close to the Manych-Kuma Depression (a line running from Rostov to the Kalmykia-Dagestan border), one of the PIE homelands. This area between the Black and Caspian Seas from Rostov to Kalmykia is traditionally considered to be the boundary between Europe and Asia. This research takes a lot of time, and I do not get paid anything for it. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a a contribution to support more of this valuable research.

The French Expansionist State

Not many know this, but France has gobbled bits of out just about every one of its neighbors in recent history. Instead of the peace-loving state of liberte and egalite, France looks more and more like an imperialist, expansionist and even fascist state. A list: French Flanders: Annexed from the Southern Netherlands in 1668-1678. SW Flemish is spoken in this area, though it is going extinct due to France’s fascist one-language policy. French Basque Country: An independent state annexed by France in 1610. The Basque language is in very bad shape here due to France’s one-language policy. It’s in much better shape in Spain. There is an armed movement for independence here, a wing of the ETA, but it’s small compared to the ETA in Spain. The ETA mostly uses France as a R & R place to hide. Brittany: Conquered in 1488, and an independent Breton state was defeated and forcibly incorporated into France in 1532. There were repeated armed rebellions in the next few hundred years, all put down brutally by the French. The Breton language is not in very good shape here at all, even though it has 500,000 speakers. There are few children who speak it. Once again, France’s one-language policy is to blame. French Catalonia: Most Catalan is spoken in Spain, but part of the region is in France. Annexed in 1659 in the Reaper’s War. The rest of Catalonia was invaded and conquered again by Napoleon in 1810 until the French forced him out in 1814. Corsica: Recent expansion in 1770. There is an armed movement here with huge support that demands independence. I support them. Savoy: Annexed against its will in 1860. Alsace-Lorraine: Annexations back and forth between Germany and France. The final French land grab was in 1944. This really does seem like a part of Germany, but the Germans always had trouble with them, as the Alsatians never felt much part of Germany either. They didn’t support Nazism at all, but were nevertheless punished for being “Nazis” after the French annexed it after the war. Hell, 1/2 of France was “Nazi.” Why don’t the French punish 1/2 their country? Alsatians are disliked in France as Germans who are not true Frenchmen. Alsatians have been a pain for both nations and have never really felt a part of either. Ideally, they probably want some sort of autonomy. The Alsatian language is doing ok, despite the best efforts of France for many decades to crush it. Saarland: Failed attempt! Unbelievably, in the 1950’s, the French tried to bite off still more of Germany in the Saarland, which is located near the Rhine River and just north of Alsace. This land grab was stopped. The US unbelievably supported this effort. Germany only gained control back by agreeing to be colonized by the rest of the Allies, that is, to “share” its steel and iron resources in the area with the Allies. The final vestiges of French economic imperialism in the region did not end until 1981, and a treaty still mandates that French must be taught as the second language of choice in the schools. Despite defeats in the Napoleonic and both World Wars, the weakened, humiliated and obviously terminally insecure France just got bigger and bigger, while the UK was progressively diminished of territory, tech and money, probably mostly by the US. An interesting Marxist argument is that the US allowed the UK to get creamed economically in WW2 in order to usurp world capitalist control from the UK in order to transfer the throne to the US. That’s how cynical imperialist shits are. They will give their best ally a knife in the back in a New York minute just to filch some more of the loot. No honor among thieves, I guess. Why France wants Lorraine is beyond me. The place is a run-down backwater, full of grimy coal mines and welfare recipients. It’s got to be the poorest part of France. Who needs it? Parts of Lorraine, such of Thionville, are actually historically more part of Luxembourg rather than France or Germany. Doesn’t matter, France stole from the Luxes too.

Getting the Shit Out of the Water

That was the answer. What was the question? “What was the greatest public health achievement of the modern era?” The questioner was a journalist on PBS, and the respondent was a physician and a professor of public health. We didn’t start getting some kind of sewage treatment here in the US until about the mid 19th Century. Before that, I guess you took your chances. Considering that the Romans had basic sewage treatment 2000 years ago, it’s amazing that it took us this long to reinvent the wheel. The Vandals didn’t just deliver the final blows to an empire; they committed a crime against humanity itself. British nationalists who despise the Romans bore me. Go back to your “houseforts” and your insane and incessant warring. I’ve been dabbling in European history around the 1600’s-1700’s. There were periodic and horrific epidemics that would sweep Europe, sparing scarcely a soul. They hit from Poland to Sardinia at least. A particular region would be cleaned out, Final Solutioned. Pretty much everyone would be dead. Brand new folks would show up to colonize the exterminated towns. It looks like a number of these epidemics were due to poor sanitation. I guess shitty tasting water is something you can get used to. In Vietnam, the US military went into some village and put a sewage treatment system in. I don’t know what the water tasted like before, but after treatment, no one would drink the purified water. It didn’t have the same old taste they were used to.

Russia Admits There Was No Holodomor

Well, of course not. Even Solzhenitsyn, and there is no greater hater of the USSR and Stalin alive, admits that there was no Holodomor, casting the Holodomor Lie as a lie that only the West could believe. I am uncertain about some of the conclusions of this study, that Stalin deliberately starved people to death in order to export for industrialization. The claims of the Holodomor Ukrainian Nazis, or Ukrainian nationalists, or whatever they are, is that Stalin deliberately targeted Ukraine for genocide via famine in order to crush Ukrainian nationalism. This is exposed as the lie we always said it was. And the true figures for the famine are looking like 3.5 million dead, 1.75 million in the Ukraine and 1.75 million elsewhere. This is looking more like what observers on the ground were estimating. Keep in mind that Western journalists traveled through Ukraine at the height of this famine. They said things were tight all right, and there was a lot of hunger and little movement in a lot of the towns, but they saw few, if any, obviously starving people. One reporter saw one boy in line in a medical clinic in a Ukrainian city was obviously underweight. Most deaths were due to disease, not starvation. Sanitation and medical care were primitive at the time. At the time, it was estimated that 1-2 million Ukrainians died. But consider this! If Stalin’s industrialization process had not proceeeded as it did, Stalin could have never defeated the Nazis, and Russia killed 8 Now ponder that! Considering that under Stalin the Czarist death rate collapsed by 7

A Brief Look at the History of Art in the West, 300 BC – 1350 AD

Updated February 24. I added a few more things here. I’m just getting into the history of art, and most people don’t know the slightest thing about it either, so let’s take a little jaunt into art history and you’re welcome to come along on my journey. This will focus mostly on the history of art in the West. This post isn’t complete at all, but at least it gives you an overview of the subject. What it does in brief is gives a list of the finest art produced in the West from 300 BC until about 1400 or so, with a brief jaunt into the 1800’s. I only link to one of these works of art, but if you are interested in some of the greatest works of art ever produced by men, just copy paste the names of the works below into Google images and you should be able to get a look at what I’m talking about. I’m too lazy to track down links to all of these works, sorry. First of all, a previous post that suggested that there was little art in the Dark Ages was completely mistaken. What is true is that there was a decline in the great art and architecture produced by the Romans. Roman art came from the Greeks, and I think the Greeks were better sculptors. Great Greek buildings and statues include The Treasury of the Siphnians and Battle Between the Greeks and Giants (Delphi), Achilles or Spear Bearer, the Parthenon and the Temple of the Olympian Zeus (Athens), Temple of the Athena Nike (Acropolis), Aphrodite of Knidos, Hermes and the Infant Dionysus, the Mausoleum at Halikarnassos (out of this world), Warrior A, The Scraper, Venus de Milo, Gallic Chieftain Killing His Wife and Himself, Athena Attacking the Giants and Dying Gallic Trumpeter (Pergamon), Laocoon and His Sons, Nike of Samothrace and Hellenistic Ruler. Statues such as the Venus de Milo are some of the finest statues, albeit classical statues, ever made. They are very realistic; one could even say that they are hyper-realistic. It is better to say that Greek art was idealized realism. That is, it is more real than real. If you look at Greek statues of humans, they are more perfect than humans actually are. Anatomists have studied these statues and concluded that these statues are in fact more perfect than actual humans could be, down to the last detail. It’s an idealized and perfectionist vision of man and what he could be. Greek art, and the Roman art that followed, is very secular. This sets it apart from the art that followed in 1000 years following the Fall of Rome, in which art become focused solely on religion. So in this way, the Greeks and Romans were extremely advanced for their time. In contrast to the wildly religious-obsessed art of the Middle Ages, Greek and Roman art nearly avoids religion, as if it was not important. What was important, instead, was the secular, quotidian lives we live on Earth and all of the hopes, dreams, tragedies, comedies, joys, etc etc. of the human journey. In this crucial way, the Greeks and Romans were as modern as we were. If we could go back in time and air-drop cars and planes into their cities, I’m pretty sure they could go to town with them pretty fast. Quit thinking of these ancients as primitives. They were just like us! Some Greek art such as Gallic Chieftain Killing His Wife and Himself and Dying Gallic Trumpeter, while secular, is also histrionic is a staged sense. These are the exaggerated emotions of our films and plays, the timeless saga of man, his travails, conflicts and emotions. The point here is that the emotional content is wildly exaggerated in the way that it often is on stage in plays. Plays, like opera, since they lack the fancy sets of cinema, rely on exaggeration of emotion, to convey what they lack via fancy sets and multimillion dollar crews. The Greeks made some great tile art too, like Alexander the Great Confronts Darius III at the Battle of Isos and Stag Hunt. In a previous post I asked why the very early civilizations all built pyramids. The truth is not so surprising. A pyramid is the most basic and rational architectural structure to build. It’s a natural. If you empty salt onto a table, it ends up in a pyramid shape. A pile of about anything often ends up pyramidal. A pyramid is going to stay upright. Building large things other than pyramids that are going to stay upright is a lot more difficult. This is why the Roman invention of the arch was so essential. In architecture, the arch is an essential ingredient to any advanced building. If you see some of the reconstructed Roman structures in the context of the time, it’s as if they were built by aliens. That’s how far advanced they were beyond anything else of the time. I have seen interiors of large Roman structures that look like modern airport terminals (see the Central Hall of the Basilica Ulpia in Rome). Roman cities were laid out very rationally on perfect grids. They also made atriums, pillars, coliseums, on and on. Buildings had elaborate carvings made in them, often of men in combat. Roman paintings do exist, but due to the fact that they used wood and paints that decayed, little has remained. Most remaining Roman “paintings” were done with tiles. I have seen Roman paintings that achieve a look that was not achieved again until the 20th Century (see The Unswept Floor by Herakleitos). Pompeii has many of these. As with just about everything else, Roman art and architecture was out of this world. Some of the great statues, tilework, carved artwork on buildings, buildings and cities are Head of a Man, Aulus Metellus, Imperial Procession, Commodus As Hercules, Augustus of Primaporta, Gemma Augustea, the House of the Silver Wedding and the House of the Vetii (Pompeii), Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius, Battle Between the Romans and the Barbarians, Still Life (Herculaneum), the Colosseum, Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli and The Battle of Centaurs and Wild Beasts (at Hadrian’s Villa), Timgad in Algeria, the apartment blocks of Ostia, and the Arch of Titus, the Arch of Constantine and the Column of Trajan (all in Rome). The Pantheon in Rome may be one of the greatest buildings ever made, though the competition is tight. The Dome of the Pantheon is out of this world. It’s commonly said that Romans fell to barbarians, Germanic tribes. It’s true that they sacked the place, but it’s not true that the Dark Ages lacked art, as I noted above. What happened in the Dark Ages was a decline in the quality of art over that produced by the Romans and Greeks. Furthermore, art became very restricted. Paintings, usually done with tiles, have a dark, depressing and Hellish theme, overridden with a harsh moralism. The world was a cruel and nasty place, and if you didn’t watch it and pray all the time, you were going to Hell. Almost all paintings were of religious figures of one type or another. People often have a strange, otherworldly look. This is because as I noted in an earlier post on the Dark Ages, the Church had the only money at this time. If you wanted to get funded, you had to go to the Church and the Church would only fund Church-related stuff. Plus probably most art was being done in monasteries, as with most other productive activity beyond mere survival. The people looked strange because the Church frowned on realistic looking people. That looked like real life, and the Church did not want to portray real life. They only wanted to portray the otherworldly realms of religion. In this attitude we can see the common religious attitude that the worldly life is permanently tainted with sin and must be avoided as much as possible. Although this was a dark time for art and society, the focus on religion was reasonable. Truth was, life was so dark and dismal that the Church was where it was all going on. All art was about the Church because there was nothing else happening and life was really bad. All science, education, learning, reading, writing, wealth creation, art, architecture – it was all coming out of the Church. The money factor was crucial. Nowadays, if you want money, you go into business. Back then, you got into religion. The reason that things fell apart so much in the Dark Ages was the collapse of urbanization. Country folks and back to the landers may not like city life too much, but when cities collapse, most everything tends to go to Hell. By contrast, the greatness of Greece and Rome was actually related to their high level of urbanization. City life seems necessary for advanced civilization to occur. With urbanization, some crucial factors probably jell together that start to mandate civilizational advances. Characteristic of the time is large halos around everyone in the painting. It is accurate to say that art did not progress during the Dark Ages, that it actually went backwards. Nevertheless, much fine material was produced. Some of the excellent paintings, sculptures and buildings produced during the Dark Ages include the Church of Santa Sabina (Rome), the Church of Santa Costanza, the Mausoleum of the Galla Placidia, the Dome of the Baptistry of the Orthodox and the Church of San Vitale, the Transfiguration of Christ with Saint Apollinaris, First Bishop of Ravenna – a painting in the Church of Saint Apollinaire of Classe (all in Ravenna, Italy), the Hagia Sofia (Istanbul) – one of the finest buildings ever built, the first written Bibles such as the Rabbula Gospels from Syria, the Paris Psalter, the Ebbo Gospels and the great Crucifixion with Angels and Mourning Figures cover of the Lindau Gospels (all from France) and the Book of Kells from Scotland (Out of this world!), the Cathedral of Saint Mark (Venice), the Palace Chapel of Charlemagne (Aachen, Germany), ornaments from the Sutton Hoo burial ship (Suffolk, England), the Gummersmark brooch (Denmark), the Labro Saint Hammers (Gotland, Sweden) the burial ship from Oseberg (Oseberg, Norway), the Gero Crucifix from the Cologne Cathedral (Cologne, Germany) and the Church of Saint Cyriakus (Gernrode, Germany). Note that fine art was even produced up in Scandinavia. These people were not primitive by any means. The problem up there is that most art was created out of wood. There was plenty of that, but it doesn’t make very good art, and most important, it doesn’t last. For really great art, it helps to have some big rocks, and I think there are a lot more trees than rocks in Scandinavia. Greece looks like while God was creating the world, he took a break to throw rocks at Greece. The place is littered with stones. Hence all of the fine stone sculptures, buildings and cities of Greece. Great art continues in the High Middle Ages, such as the Church of the Monastery of Christ in Chora (Constantinople) and the painting Anastasis on its apse, the Doors of Bishop Benward at the Abbey of the Church of Saint Michael (Hildesheim, Germany), Doubting Thomas in the Abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos (Castile, Spain), Christ in Majesty in the Church of San Clemente (Tahuil, Catalonia, Spain), the Borgund Stave Church (Sogn, Norway), the Durham Cathedral (Scotland), the Church of Saint Etienne (Caen, France), the Speyer Cathedral (Speyer, Germany), the Church of Saint Ambrogio (Milan, Italy), the Cathedral Complex (Pisa, Tuscany, Italy), the Church of San Clemente (Rome), printed works such as the Worcester Chronicle (Worcester, England) and the Winchester Psalter (Winchester, England), the woven Bayeux Tapestry (Bayeux, Normandy,  France) and the Portable altar of Saints Kilian and Liborius from the Helmarshausen abbey (Helmarshausen, Saxony, Germany). The Leaning Tower of Pisa is also in the Pisa Complex. The tower is leaning not because it was top heavy, though it is, but because it was built on sand. It would have fallen over long ago without our efforts to shore it up. These efforts are vast and ongoing. We are tunneling under the building and shoring it up in various ways to keep it from falling. Right now things are so bad that it is so dangerous to be around the tower that visitors are forbidden from walking within toppling distance of the thing. One reason that the art above is so great, even those famous Bibles, is that monks would spend 20 years, 40 years, or a lifetime making say one Bible, one treasure box, painting one church. Not only that, but a whole team might work for many years on an object or interior church design. These monasteries were like miniature factories. They weren’t producing a lot, but no one else was either. They were very inefficient, but there was no competition. Gothic is in the High Middle Ages, and this is starting to head into the Renaissance, although everything is still about religion. Gothic had some superb works, and now we are looking at some of the finest churches of all, including the Cathedral of Notre-Dame (Chartres, France), another of the greatest buildings ever built, the Amiens Cathedral (Amiens, France), an incredible building, another Cathedral of Notre-Dame (Paris), a competitor with the Notre-Dame in Chartres and possibly better, another Cathedral of Notre-Dame (Reims, France), possibly the best one of them all, the Saint-Chapelle (Paris), yet another awesome building, and the Salisbury Cathedral (Wiltshire, England) – too much! Gothic architecture clearly produced some of the finest buildings that have ever been built. It’s characterized by tall, thin cathedrals with vast spires jabbing away at the sky. The purpose of those spires was to point towards heaven. The idea of the tall buildings was to make them closer to Heaven, and also the various monasteries and bishops were in competition with each other to see who could build higher buildings. The tall, thin shape that gets more pointed towards the top is the best way to build a tall building for the same reason that a pyramid is a natural form. A building that gets more pointed near the top is less likely to topple over than a top-heavy building that has as much weight at the top as at the bottom. One of those Gothic cathedrals actually had a building that did not get more pointed as it rose and that part of the building toppled over. How did they build those cathedrals? They used scaffolds. Often families of men, fathers, sons, grandfathers, multiple generations, would work on the buildings.  They usually worked for free or room and board. The Church told them, “Hey, if you guys work on this church your whole life, you will go straight to Heaven.” Yeah right. One purpose of the cathedrals was conversion. Life was pretty dismal in those days, and the life of a serf was bad. So you took a humble person and should him this wild cathedral, so beyond anything else he had ever seen that it may as well have been built by aliens, and you pretty much had a convert on your hands, so awe-struck was he. These cathedrals show us just how much money the Church had at this time. For all intents and purposes, the Church had all the money and no one else had a dime. It’s a truism that while the Roman Empire did formally fall, really it just morphed into the Roman Catholic Church. The fundamentalist crowd wonders why we care so much about separation of church and state. We care because back in those days, the Church was the state. English kings pondered for lifetimes ways to get the Church out of the business of running the damn country. No wonder Henry VIII threw the Church out and set up the Anglican Church. It was the only way to get free of this octopus and its tentacles. In the Late Middle Ages, great works continue, including the Exeter Cathedral (Exeter, Devon, England), a mind-boggling structure, the Ely Cathedral (Ely, Cambridgeshire, England), the dome of which makes you wonder how they even built it, the Cathedral of Palma (Mallorca, Spain), up there with the greatest and the Church of the Holy Cross (Schwabisch Gmund, Germany), the Virgin and Saint George, the altarpiece of the Church of San Francisco, Villafranco del Panades (Barcelona), the Shrine of the Three Kings (Germany), the Florence Cathedral (Florence), an incredible building, the Siena Cathedral (Siena, Italy), another awesome structure, the Life of John the Baptist on the doors of the Baptistry of San Giovanni (Florence), Giotto di Bondone’s Last Judgment on the west wall and Life of Christ and the Virgin on the north and south walls of the Arena Chapel and Duccio di Buoninsegna’s Maesta Altarpiece for the Siena Cathedral. Around 1340, one of the first works including landscapes and regular people with no religious significance was done, Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good Government in the City and Allegory of Good Government in the Country, two frescoes in the Sala della Pace in the Pallazo Pubbico in Siena. The moving away from religion and focus on our real world shows how the Late Middle Ages were leading into the Renaissance. The periods of the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance seem to blend together. The Renaissance ran from around 1350-1600. The Late Middle Ages are thought to be from 1300-1450, so there is definitely overlap. The truth is that the Late Middle Ages shade into and lead into the Renaissance. In the Renaissance, we get the first non-religious art since the fall of Rome. I don’t have much to say about the art of China and Japan except that it is good. It’s difficult to compare this art with the art produced in Europe. They all had their own styles  and it’s hard to say if any one of them is better than the other, but I don’t think that Japanese art is any better than what was being done in Europe at the time. Islamic art is actually very good, especially the tilework on the interior of mosques up on the domes. This is excellent art, and as good as what was being done in Europe. The only thing you can say about Islamic art is that their ridiculous religion bans them from drawing humans. I have seen some early Jewish art, but I wasn’t much impressed by it. Jews are very smart and many modern artists are Jews, so Jews can clearly make great art. The problem here is that like in Islam, Jews were forbidden to make graven images, and the forbidding of idol worship means you can’t draw people, and that tends to really limit your artwork. The fact that Islam has the same prohibition means to me that Islam has borrowed from Judaism. The art of Central America is interesting, and some of it is not bad. I don’t think it’s superior to European art, but I’m not sure if it’s inferior either. Some of the gold ornamentation is really great. I really hate to bag on Blacks here, but I should say something about African art. I was not very impressed with it. The best building was the Great Friday Mosque in Djenne, Mali, built in the 1200’s. It’s made of mud and wood. It’s ok, but compared to what was being built in Europe and the Arab World at the time, it’s not much at all. Afrocentrists like to go on about the Great Zimbabwe built around 1300. Yes, it’s a long wall made of stones with some conical structures here and there. If this is Africa’s greatest architecture, I don’t know what to say. It’s not much. However, I was very impressed by statue heads and masks out of Benin from 1400-1650 and continuing on to 1900. Some of that is excellent. It is usually made of brass. However, I am told that they were already coming under the influence of Europeans, especially Portuguese, and this spurred this nice art. I don’t care what influenced them. There is some cool art coming out of Benin around the time of European Renaissance. I’m not so impressed with the earlier stuff out of Yoruba or the very early stuff out of Nok in Nigeria. However, we must acknowledge that Nok was one the flashpoints for early African civilization and more was accomplished here sooner than anywhere else in Africa. At any rate, today Africans produce some superb art, especially African masks. Travelers to Africa with some cash often pick them up and it’s a great investment. I’d love to have one on my wall. In the 1800’s, all art and music was in the classical traditions. If you wanted to be an artist of a musician, you had to go to school and study the classics. That was really the only way to paint or make music. Hence, art and music had stagnated. The classical art and music had been taken to the limits and the best had already been done. Michelangelo and Beethoven were not going to be surpassed. There was nothing to innovate anymore. One of the first impressionist was Édouard Manet. His first impressionist painting, Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass) (1863) was a strange painting of a two clothed men eating a meal with a naked woman in a park. It caused a scandal because the people pictured were real people, not religious, historical, mythological, political or monarchic figures (the five permitted types). It was not really possible to paint a real person. All art had to be of one of the five types of persons above. The idea of painting a real person was ridiculous. Manet’s painting caused a scandal not because the woman was nude. It was ok to paint nudes if they were of the five types of persons allowed. The idea that someone would paint a nude of a real life person was outrageous. It was made even worse because people knew the names of those who were painted – the men were his brother, Eugene Manet, and his girlfriend’s brother and future brother in law, Ferdinand Leenhoff and the woman was Victorine Meurent, Manet’s favorite model and later an artist in her own right. Further, the subject matter was seen as shocking, nearly pornographic. What were the clothed men doing eating with the naked woman? It was as if they were both going to have sex with her at the same time in a menage a trois . What Manet did with that painting was like saying, “Screw you,” to the Art Establishment of the time. It was like punk rock, an act of artistic defiance. It was anti-art, anti-classical art, and anti-Art Establishment. Manet many and his supporters got banned from a major art exhibition in 1863, the Salon de Paris. The jury of the contribution to support more of this valuable research.

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