1. Introduction

 

The genocide of population of human beings has been an element of human history for thousands of years. According to archeologists, such killing took place already 12.000 years ago from the time of the agricultural revolution – the beginning of class society. The following is the percentage of killing of various groups. Of course the groups were small in numbers, from 20-30 people to larger groups of few hundreds. (See Table 1)

 

Table 1: Share of deaths from violence deaths (prehistoric archeological sites) ^[1]

Crow Creek (South Dakota); 1325 CE                                              60%

Nubia (site 117); 12000 - 10000 BCE                                               46%

N. British Columbia; 1500 BCE - 500 CE                                         32.4%

Sarai Nahar Rai (N. India); 1140 - 854 BC                                     30%

British Columbia; 500 - 1774 CE                                                     27.6%

British Columbia (30 sites); 3500 BCE - 1674 CE                          23%

Volos'ke, (Ukraine), 'Epipalaeolithic'; ca. 7500 BCE                     22%

Nubia: Qadan burials; 10000 BCE                                                 21.4%

Vasiliv'ka III (Ukraine); 9000 BCE                                                   21%

Illinois; 1300 CE                                                                               16.3%

Northeast Plains; 1325 - 1650 CE                                                 15%

Vedbaek (Denmark); 4100 BCE                                                     13.6%

Bogebakken (Denmark); 4300 - 3800 BCE                                  12%

Ile Teviec (France); 4600 BCE                                                        12%

CA-Ven-110 (S. California); 100 - 1100 CE                                   10%

Central California; 415 BCE - 227 CE                                            8%

Brittany; 6000 BCE                                                                          8%

Skateholm 1 (Sweden); 4100 BCE                                                 7%

S. California (28 sites); 3500 – 1380 CE                                       6%

Kentucky; 2500 - 3000 BCE                                                           5.6%

Central California; 1500 BCE - 500 CE                                         5%

Central California (2 sites); 2240 BCE - 1770 CE                         4%

Calumnata (Algeria); 6300 - 5300 BCE                                        4%

Nubia (near site 117), 12.000 - 10.000 BCE                                3%

Columnata (Algeria); ca. 6000 BCE                                             1.7%

 

For example, smashed skulls of a group of 27 people of African hunter-gatherers some 10,000 years ago were found in 2012 at Nataruk, west of Kenya's Lake Turkana. Most likely "the resources the people of Nataruk had at the time were valuable and worth fighting for, whether it was water, dried meat or fish, or gathered nuts." ^[2]

One of the first recorded cases of genocide was the genocide of Carthage. “In 146, Roman legions under Scipio Aemilianus, Cato's ally and brother-in-law of his son, razed the city, and dispersed into slavery the 55,000 survivors, including 25,000 women. Plutarch concluded: 'The annihilation of Carthage... was primarily due to the advice and counsel of Cato'(…) Rome decided on 'the destruction of the nation'.' Its policy of 'extreme violence', the 'annihilation of Carthage and most of its inhabitants', ruining 'an entire culture', fits the modern legal definition of the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention: the intentional destruction 'in whole or in part, [of] a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such'." ^[3]

Genocide of the local nations of Canaan is mentioned in the Jewish Bible: “When the Lord your God brings you into the land where you are entering to possess it, and clears away many nations before you...you shall utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them and show no favor to them. Furthermore, you shall not intermarry with them...For they will turn your sons away from following Me to serve other gods. Then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you and He will quickly destroy you. But thus you shall do to them: You shall tear down their altars, and smash their sacred pillars, and hew down their Asherim, and burn their graven images with fire.” ^[4]

“Only in the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave alive anything that breathes. But you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite and the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite, as the Lord your God has commanded you, so that they may not teach you to do according to all their detestable things which they have done for their gods, so that you would sin against the Lord your God.”^[5]

“Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”^[6]

Yet it would be a mistake to put all the genocides in one category. The forms, methods and scales of genocides have been dependent on the modes of production and the political regimes based on these different modes of productions. So far the evolution of the human species has gone from primitive Communism of the hunters-gatherers to the slave and Asiatic modes of production, Feudalism, Capitalism and after the Russian revolution the beginning of a socialist society.

The scope of the genocide committed in the hunters-gathers society was very small. The genocide in slave society is much smaller than the ones committed by the capitalists in the imperialist age. "Lloyd suggested that the city of Carthage may have held up to 200,000 inhabitants while Braudel put the population at a lower scale of around 100,000 people." ^[7] Thus the Roman killed about 75,000 people using swords and arrows. The Ottoman Empire killed 1.5 million Armenians using bullets. The Nazi killed many millions using developed industrial technology.

It is better to use the term genocide rather than Holocaust because Holocaust is a word of Latin origin meaning a human sacrifice bringing purification through fire. It can be interpreted as a plan by the Jewish God for purification of the Jews, a punishment for their sins, in other words blaming the victims.

Genocide is understood by most to be the gravest crime against humanity it is possible to commit. Genocide is a combination of a Greek word "genos" (race or tribe) with the Latin word "cide" (to kill). It is the mass extermination of a whole group of people, or at least an attempt to wipe them out of existence.

Many so called legal experts say that genocide is a complicated subject. In the real world since modern genocides happen in imperialists and local wars the victorious side is the one to decide whether genocide took place and by whom.

For example, most people will agree that Nazi Germany committed genocides and some of the Nazi leaders were prosecuted in Nuremberg as they deserved. Yet during the war Germany bombed British cities and the American and British bombed German cities-namely wiped out large groups of civilians. The most known case was of the city Dresden. The American even dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Churchill and Truman were not brought to trial as war criminals. They were the victorious states. If Germany was the victorious side, the British and the American leaders would be accused of genocide and rightly so. From the perspective of the international working class all the imperialist butchers that were responsible for the death of 100 million people were criminals.

The genocide of the Jews did not fall from the sky, instead it was rooted in the genocide of the people living in what is known today as Namibia by the German Empire, in the genocide of the Armenians, in the pseudo-racist science of social Darwinism, in the Anti-Semitism as a branch of social Darwinism, in the capitalist system based on exploitation and discrimination. Those who ask how could Germany that produced the like of Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Hoffmann, Brecht, and Heine, also has produced the Nazi regime are prisoners of the idealist philosophy and ignore the fact that the age of the Enlightenment was cruel to the Indians and the Africans. That the Nazi regime was one form of barbarism that destroyed culture result of the decay of the capitalist mode of production and the failure of the revolutionary wave of the 1920s-1930s to replace capitalism with socialism.

This small booklet deals with the question whether the genocide of the Jews was a unique event in history and if the answer is affirmative in what sense. At the same time it deals with the manipulative use of this event by the Zionists and their friends. And, in addition, this pamphlet deals with the question who are responsible for the genocide of the Jews. [8]

 

 

2. The Conditions of the Jews on the Eve of World War II

 

"In 1939, there were 16.6 million Jews worldwide, and a majority of them – 9.5 million, or 57% – lived in Europe. By the end of World War II, in 1945, the Jewish population of Europe had shrunk to 3.8 million, or 35% of the world’s 11 million Jews." ^[9]

The French bourgeois democratic revolution in 1791 gave full citizenship to the Jews. In England and Italy the Jews received full citizenship only in the 19^th century. In Imperial Russia, Jews were forced to settle only in certain areas known as the “Pale of Settlement’. The Polish Jews faced various discriminations after Poland was occupied by Tsarist Russia.

Most Jews in Russia and occupied Poland were poor. Only a small number – the Jewish upper class – was permitted to live in Moscow or St. Petersburg. Until the Russian revolution Jews suffered from pogroms. Also, by the end of the 19^th century, close to two million Jews had immigrated to the USA. The Bolshevik revolution emancipated the Jews in Russia. In Western Europe, the social upward mobility during the 19^th century of the Jews scared the non-Jewish petit bourgeois that was sympathetic to Anti-Semitism. In central Europe, many Jews assimilated into the existing nations. They saw themselves as German or French with Jewish religion. The specific term for this process is acculturation. The Jews in central Europe and in Russia kept a degree of connection using Yiddish and thus the Jews, to some degree, were a transnational community. As the Jews in West Europe became full citizens and saw themselves as patriots of the nation they lived in, they opposed the Zionist movement that got it supporters mainly from Russian areas including Poland. ^[10]

"Since the beginning of the Enlightenment, and its effects on the Jews, Jews had not only become consumers of European culture but also participated in creating it. Soon highly talented Jews became visible in the arts, in the sciences and in the humanities. At the end of the nineteenth century, Vienna, Berlin and Prague had turned into cultural centers with the strong participation of its acculturated Jewish elites. Persons of Jewish background were very prominent in the Viennese literary scene, especially among the playwrights, poets, journalists and psychologists.” ^[11]

In Britain, modern anti-Semitism developed around the same time as did its France and Germany, in the second half of the 19th century. It was further developed during the war of Britain against the Boers of South Africa. The Anti-Semites claimed that “Jewish capitalist interests” were against those of the British nation and the Empire in what was dubbed a “Jews’ war”. ^[12] This wave of anti-Semitism was felt during WWI, "the editor and journalist James Leopold Maxse was one of the most outspoken Anti–Semite of his time. In his conservative monthly The National Review, he wrote about the pro-German machinations of the “international Jew” and the “German Jew” in Britain. Maxse was no original thinker; he took his themes from the mainstream conservative press, in particular The Times." ^[13]

In France, the Anti- Semitism was expressed during the trial of the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus who was falsely accused of treason and initially sentenced to life in prison. Thus Anti-Semitism existed in Europe long before the Nazis.

Partial explanation for the connection between imperialism and Anti-Semitism is that prior to imperialism, industrial capitalists were not involved in the enterprises of the state and the state had to rely on Jewish capital. At the age of imperialism, the non-Jewish capitalists replaced the Jewish role of financing the state and thus the ruling classes had no need for Jews.

It is clear that in central Europe the assimilation and acculturation of the upper class Jews did not solve the Jewish question. If at all, it raised the envy and anger of the petit-bourgeoisie against the Jews. The full emancipation of the Jews can be realized in classless society when all racist ideologies will die natural death.

Let us not forget that this age of the “Enlightenment” was also the age of slavery of the Africans and the appearance of pseudo-science of social Darwinism. Opponents to Jewish ascension expressed their hatreds to the Jews with the language of science. They claimed that there was a scientific rationale for keeping Jews from continuing to climb the economic and social ladder as they endanger the existence of the superior races.

 

 

3. The Pseudo-Scientific Racist Theory of Social Darwinism

 

Between the fall of Rome and the age of “the Enlightenment”, religion was commonly employed by European rulers to justify territorial occupation of other peoples. For example the occupation of Palestine by the Crusaders against the Muslims was justified by the need to liberate the holy land. But during the early efforts to form national states in Europe, and the colonization of the Americas, a new ideology was needed to justify colonialism. The Enlightenment was a period when science in different natural fields like biology, chemistry, and astronomy replaced religious dogmas. Thus the rationale for occupation and repression of other people - colonialism - required a “scientific” explanation.

Genocide of native people by European capitalists began already at the commercial stage of capitalism. Dealing with the primitive accumulation of capital Marx wrote: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.” ^[14]

Charles Darwin, in his book, On the Origin of Species(1859), gave a scientific explanation of how evolution occurs. He was essentially correct, but incomplete. On the basis of more knowledge, and advances in genetics and molecular biology, many of Darwin's concepts have developed into the more complete modern theory of evolution.

The acceptance of the theory of evolution was manipulated for the pseudo-scientific Social Darwinism that had very little in common with Darwin’s theory apart from the name and a few basic concepts, which Social Darwinists misapplied. The false theory that there is a hierarchy of human species - 'races' became popular in Europe and America, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Herbert Spencer, an English philosopher in the 19th century was one of the most known Social Darwinists.

Spencer advocated the idea of the survival of the fittest and that, as in the plant in the animal world, the most competent people progress to the top. Governments should not hinder this natural social system. Businesses should be allowed to crash, people should be left to go hungry, and illness and death should be free to plague the weak. The standard of competition would guarantee that the ablest would surface as winners in the economic and social struggle.

According to Social Darwinism, not only was survival of the fittest seen as something natural, but it was also seen as morally correct. It was therefore natural, normal, and proper for the strong to thrive at the expense of the weak.

Social Darwinism justified imperialism, racism, and laissez-faire social and economic policies. Through colonial nationalism, and the popularity of science in Europe, USA and Australia, social Darwinism assisted racism and discrimination to grow throughout these continents and was used in their colonies.

“Broadly speaking, there have been three types of scientific explanations offered in putative support for racial discrimination, each of them having a lengthy history. One approach has been to claim that there are biological dangers involved in racial interbreeding. Indeed, it was precisely on the basis of this belief that in the United States and South Africa for many years there were statutory prohibitions against intermarriage. The first supposed evidence for this conclusion was provided in the mid-nineteenth century primarily by physicians, who claimed that, as a result of their mixed blood, "mulattoes" were considerably more susceptible to disease than either of their parents and thus exceptionally short-lived. In addition, were persons of mixed race to intermarry, according to leading anthropologists at the time, they became progressively less fertile, eventually becoming completely sterile.

In the early twentieth century, shortly after the scientific community's discovery of Gregor Mendel's work led to a new, exciting branch of biology, geneticists warned that the intermarriage of "far apart" races could produce what they called genetic "disharmonies". Charles Benedict Davenport, a world renowned researcher at the time, observed, for example, that if a member of a tall race, such as the Scots, should mate with a member of a small race, such as the Southern Italians, their offspring could inherit the genes for large internal organs from one parent and for small stature from the other, resulting in viscera that would be too large for the frame. Naturally these claims were not tenable for long, but they were soon replaced by assertions less easily disprovable, as some social scientists insisted that the children of mixed race parentage were morally and intellectually inferior to either of the parents.

Although belief in such genetic mismatches was once fairly widespread within the scientific community and cited specifically to rationalize various racially oppressive policies, this notion now enjoys far less credibility. However, while there has been absolutely no evidence that racial interbreeding can produce a disharmony of any kind, warnings of some kind of genetic discord are still far from entirely extinct. (…) Another trend in the scientific justification of racial discrimination has been the claim that prejudice is a natural and indeed an essential phenomenon necessary for the evolutionary process to be effective by ensuring the integrity of gene pools. In this view, evolution exerts its selective effect not on individuals but on groups, which makes it necessary for races to be kept separate from each other and relatively homogeneous if there is to be evolutionary progress. One anthropologist who adheres to this belief refers to the tendency to "distrust and repel" members of other races as a natural part of the human personality and one of the basic pillars of civilization.

Finally, the most common way in which science has been used to support racial discrimination is through pronouncements that some groups are systematically less well endowed than others in important cognitive or behavioural traits. This is not to say that there may be no group differences in these traits, but rather that at this point there are no clear conclusions, which in any event would be irrelevant to issues of social and political equality. Nevertheless, there is again a long history of the use of such claims for oppressive purposes. For the first quarter of the twentieth century, there was particular concern over the results of early intelligence tests, which supposedly demonstrated that Southern and Eastern Europeans were not only intellectually inferior to their Northern counterparts, but were also unfit for self-rule. Some of the most important scientists of the time explained that Nordics, characterized as they were by greater self-assertiveness and determination, as well as intelligence, were destined by their genetic nature to rule over other races." ^[15]

In the 19^th century craniometry – the practice of head measuring – was a racist practice aimed at justification of racial oppression.

"During the early 1800s, a physician from Philadelphia named Samuel G. Morton gathered and recorded the measurements of hundreds of human skulls to claim that there is a difference of brain size between the human races. He claimed that it is possible to identify any skull’s race by simply measuring it and pouring lead pellets into the skulls. This led him to claim that the highest brain capacity is Europeans, followed by Chinese, then Southeast Asians, American Indians, and lastly Africans and Australian aborigines. He used his influence as a scientist to make the case for black inferiority and was able to negotiate the annexation of Texas as a slave state."^[16]

This was the period when British colonialist settlers collected shrunk heads of aboriginals as decoration for their houses. Morton compared the faces of Africans, white Europeans and an orangutan and claimed that the African face is closer to an orangutan.

"Carl Victor and Friedrich Wilhelm Dammann’s published a photographic book that propelled the viewpoints and stereotypes of different races. Containing black and white photos along with brief captions describing physical and mental traits, the context of these depictions serve to relay the idea of a social Darwinian racial evolution from the Polynesians culminating with the Germanic race. Cesare Lombroso, the founder of anthropological criminology, claimed that there is a link to his “theory” of biological determinism was that skull and facial features were clues to genetic criminality and could be measured into quantitative research." ^[17]

Based on Morton’s craniometry of the different angles and measurements of Caucasians versus Africans skulls, Nott claimed that different races originated from different ancestors.

 

 

 

4. Anti-Semitism as a Branch of Social Darwinism

 

Racism, motivated by capitalist profit, existed before the existence of “Social Darwinism". The new form of racism is rooted in the 17^th century with the trans-Atlantic slavery of the Africans, the massacres of the Indians in the Americans and the genocide of the aboriginals of Australia in the 18^th century. "The indigenous people of Australia had been living on the continent for more than 65,000 years before English colonial settlers arrived in 1788. According to N. G. Bultin's estimation, there were between 1 and 1.5 million aboriginals in 1788, which is the year Britain began to colonize the continent. By 1901, however, less than 100,000 aboriginal people remained." ^[18]

While anti–Jewish feeling and ideas existed for centuries, race based Anti-Semitism “scientific” racism only fully developed in the last part of the 19^th century. [19] “Voltaire (1694-1778), the philosopher who excelled in his campaign against intolerance and bigotry, proved to be the most virulent anti-Semite. He wrote about the Jews: “We find in them only an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by whom they are tolerated and enriched.” ^[20] “As early as 1791, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Grattenauer expressed his opinion that baptism of the Jews would be useless, “just like washing the head of a negro to become white.” ^[21]

“The historian, Friedrich Christian Rühs (1781-1820), for example, unequivocally rejected the Jew’s demands for rights. He maintained that Jewry already constitutes a nation complete with laws and aristocracy (Rabbis) and, therefore, cannot be granted citizenship in a Christian state. Those Jews who were loyal to their political religion constituted “a state within a state” and, thus, were incapable of being loyal citizens of a German State. “A people cannot become a whole [in ein Ganzes] except through the internal coalescence [inniges Zusammenwachsen] of all the traits of its character, by a uniform manner of their manifestations by thought, language, faith, by devotion to its constitution.” And according to Rühs, this did not happen with the Jews.” ^[22]

“Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau (1816–1882), in his book, Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines [An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races], published between 1853 and 1855, he expounded a racial theory as an intellectual tool for the explanation of historic phenomena. Gobineau tried to explain all of human history – the rise and fall of kingdoms, governments as well as cultures – as the function of interaction among three extended races: the White, the Black, and the Yellow.... The ideological purpose of his book was to provide an explanation for the degeneration of human society that, according to the pessimistic opinion of Gobineau, was a fact. The degeneration is, according to him, due to the loss of racial purity. This is also what happened to the Aryans, the superior race who, in Gobineau’s mind, had been the source of exceptionally high cultural productivity.” ^[23]

"One of the early physical anthropological studies directly treating Jews was that of Richard Andree (1835-1912). In 1881 he claimed the existence of a Jewish prototype, and declared that environmental conditions are irrelevant in matters of race: “We all recognize the Jewish type. We immediately distinguish him by his face, his habits, the way he holds his head, his gesticulations or when he opens his mouth and begins to speak. And it is always possible […] to recognize even the most assimilated, because he always bears some of the characteristics of his race” ^[24]

From the 18^th century onwards, there were many English writers who used a racist image of the Jews. Charles Dickens portrait of Fagin in his Oliver Twist is clearly anti-Semitic. Richard Brinsley Sheridan introduces an unpleasant Jew, Isaac, in his comic opera, The Duenna (1775). A vicious and criminal Jew is painted by Daniel Defoe in Roxana (1724). Tobias Smollett's Adventures of Roderick Random, 1748 drew a portrait of the Jewish usurer in Isaac Rapine. Maria Edgeworth produced a gallery of rascally Jews in her early Moral Tales (1801).

The German Wilhelm Marr (1819-1904) was the one who coined the term Anti-Semitism in reference to the Jews as a race. Marr’s conception of anti-Semitism focused on the racial, not the religious, characteristics of the Jews. He established an organization, the League of Anti-Semites to fight the influence of the Jews. His political tract, “The Victory of Judaism over Germandom,” warned that “the Jewish spirit and Jewish consciousness have overpowered the world.” That the non-Jews must resist “this foreign power” before it was too late. Very soon “there will be absolutely no public office, even the highest one, which the Jews will not have usurped." ^[25]

It would be a mistake to assume that prior to racist Zionism the upper class Jews opposed racism. Among the slave traders were also Jews. “Speaking out against Black Pete (when whites pretend to be blacks) is part of what Rabbi van de Kamp calls his social mission, an effort that extends to reminding Dutch Jews of their ancestors’ deep involvement in the slave trade. In April, he is set to publish a book about Dutch Jewish complicity in the slave trade, an effort he hopes will sensitize Jews to slavery in general and to the Black Pete issue in particular.” ^[26]

During the civil war in the USA, the minister of treasury of the confederation was a Jew by the name of Judah P. Benjamin. The most known case was the Prime Minister of Queen Victoria, Disraeli who was the first to articulate the idea behind “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. “Disraeli’s myth-making about Jews was to have a lasting and toxic legacy. In Coningsby, he introduces a Jewish wise man, Sidonia, who sketches out a philosophy in which a hierarchy of race is the organizing principle of human affairs and in which Jews, operating through “subterranean agencies”, are the secret power behind world events. Cesarani writes that “no one had so far conjured up the image of the Jews as a potent global force”. Disraeli was the first to shape what would become the enduringly poisonous myth of a world Jewish conspiracy. […] Disraeli’s words would live on in the hearts of antisemites. In 1920 the English version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion cited Sidonia. In 1941, as the final solution was under way, Hitler quoted “The British Jew, Lord Disraeli” approvingly”. ^[27]

This of course does not justify in any way racism against Jews. It just proves that the position in class society determines the outlook of people and this is true for Jews as well as for non-Jews. It is not true that all Jews are responsible for oppression as much as the claim that Jews have suffered oppression for 2000 years is true. Jews have been on both sides of the class struggle on the reactionary as well as the progressive and revolutionary.

Anti-Semitism became one of the elements in the ideology of the Nazis. Some historians deny any connection between social Darwinism and Nazi ideology on the ground that the Nazis rejected any evolutionary theory. Nevertheless, Nazi racial theorists embraced racial evolution. "They not only taught that humans had evolved from primates, but they believed the Aryan or Nordic race had evolved to a higher level than other races because of the harsh climatic conditions that influenced natural selection. They also claimed that Darwinism underpinned specific elements of Nazi racial ideology, including racial inequality." ^[28]

The use of social Darwinism by the Nazis led to the killing of those who were considered unfit, among them invalids and mentally sick people. Edwin Black's “War Against the Weak” argued that “Nazi racial hygiene and its ultimate manifestations in the Holocaust were imported lock, stock and barrel from the USA, and that, indeed, it was US ruling elites who hatched the idea of creating a master Aryan race by selective breeding and then passed it along to the Nazis. More specifically, Black argues that the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) and the Carnegie Institution of Washington (CIW) funded much of the American-based movement, both at home and abroad, and so sat in the driver's seat guiding Nazi racial hygienists along their fateful path”.

This probably is not accurate yet. “Both in Europe and the USA; the incorporation of Mendelian genetics into much of eugenical thought (especially in the USA); and the role of eugenicists (particularly in the USA before 1933) in passing legislation legalizing compulsory sterilization, immigration restriction of those deemed genetically unfit, and the reaffirmation or strengthening of existing anti-miscegenation laws. Black is correct in pointing out the important role of major US philanthropies, such as the RF and CIW (also the Harriman family and the Kellogg Race Betterment Foundation” ^[29]

Most historians will agree that the Nazi-Anti-Semite ideology was based on racism. The annihilation of the Jews was justified by the need to strengthen the Aryan master races by purifying it from inferior blood of the Jews. Yet it is clear that Hitler himself did not believe that the Jews are a race. In a letter to Martin Bormann on February 3, 1945 he wrote “Our Nordic racial consciousness is only aggressive toward the Jewish race. We use the term Jewish race merely for reasons of linguistic convenience, for in the real sense of the word, and from a genetic point of view there is no Jewish race”.^[30]

Hitler hated the Jews for another reason. He hated them because he saw them as strong supporters of Bolshevism and socialism. “The German defeat was hard to swallow for many Germans, and for Hitler, too. In nationalist and right-wing conservative circles, the ‘stab-in-the-back legend’ became popular. According to this myth, Germany did not lose the war on the battlefield, but through betrayal at the home front. The Jews, Social Democrats, and Communists were held responsible.” ^[31]

Alfred Rosenberg, the chief Nazi ideologue, hated the Jews because during the Russian revolution he served in the camp of the whites. ”Though Nazism developed in a primarily “German” context, one must accord White émigrés, the flotsam and jetsam of world war and revolution from the East, a crucial role in the genesis of the ideology that played such a pivotal role in launching the Holocaust.” ^[32]

Furthermore while Hitler was racist toward the black Africans that he believed were a inferior race there was no attempt to annihilate the blacks in Africa but instead in the plans for the colonization of Africa, an apartheid regime was planned.

The inconsistency in Hitler's thinking and acting led to the conclusion of bourgeois historians that it is impossible to explain the genocide of the Jews. For example Ian Kershaw, the author of Hitler’s biography, wrote that it is impossible to fully understand the genocide of the Jews that “Auschwitz lies at the limit of explicability.” ^[33]

This should not surprise us because those who seek the roots of social and political practice in the sphere of ideas and not in the mode of production and the class struggle as the engine of history are unable to provide a scientific analysis of Nazism and the genocide of the Jews.

 

 

 

5. The Nazi Labor-Death Camps

 

It would be a mistake to assume that Hitler and the Nazi leaders after they took power had a clear plan to eliminate the Jews in Europe. Studying of the history of Auschwitz will reveal the process that led to the extermination of the Jews and others.

The most important camp was Auschwitz. In this camp, was the greatest number of victims, in particular Jews, Gypsies, Russians, and Poles. (About one million Jews were killed in Birkenau which was part of Auschwitz in the gas chambers.) In addition the camp was also a slave labor camp. It linked the death camps to the capitalist industry and profit. The camp was built in 1940. It was one of the first camps to use termination of life in gas chambers (the others were Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Lublin-Majdanek and Treblinka).

Initially, Auschwitz was used as a place for political opponents of the regime. The first stage on the road to the “final solution” was to declare the Jews as the enemies of the Aryan race. Until 1939, the regime expropriated the Jewish capital making the Jews poorly paid workers. In 1939, the Jews who were deported to the ghettos were still used as very cheap labor. Only after Nazi Germany had attacked the Soviet Union, the extermination of the Jews began. It first began with the so-called Einsatzgruppen – which were mobile killing units – and only after this stage the mass killing of the Jews in specialized killing centers began. We should keep in mind that until the war on the Soviet Union started in summer of 1941, the Nazis planned to settle the Jews outside of Europe (e.g. in Madagascar). Likewise, until 1941 the Nazis supported the idea of settling Jews in Palestine.

The Jewish genocide was first of all a product of the imperialist war and of the capitalist hate of the Russian revolution as the Marxist historian Enzo Traverso rightly pointed out.”It would have been an absolutely inconceivable event without the social, political, military and even psychological context created by the war on the eastern front. Only the Second World War allowed Hitler’s visceral hatred of Jews and his anti-communism to be welded together into a total war against ‘Jewish Bolshevism.” ^[34]

In this war against the non-capitalist relations of production, German imperialism used the same racist outlook combined with highly developed means of destruction used until then against native people only.

Auschwitz was both a death camp and a labor camp using super-exploited workers – Buna-Monowitz – where the German chemicals concern IG Farben had set up its production lines. “This dual function of the Auschwitz Lager synthesised in an emblematic way one of the chief contradictions that marked the whole process of extermination of the Jews: the quasipermanent conflict inside the SS between the advocates of extermination as the top priority (Himmler and Heydrich) and forces favourable to a more extended exploitation of the Jewish labour force concentrated in the camps (notably O. Pohl of the WVHA, the Central Office of Administration and Economy).” ^[35]

"These contradictions traversed the IG Farben concern itself. On the one hand, IG Farben had an interest in the exploitation of the Jewish labor force in the framework of ‘extermination through work’ (Vernichtung durch Arbeit). Yet at the same time it produced the Zyklon B necessary to the functioning of the gas chambers." ^[36]

The killing itself was based on advanced technology whose product was death. It expressed the connection between capitalist super-exploitation, war and death. Those workers who became too weak died or were killed while the war and the occupation of other countries provided a stream of slave labor to replace the dead workers. Thus the living super-exploited workers in their work in the camp created the condition for their death.

Leon Trotsky wrote on this issue: “In the epoch of its rise, capitalism took the Jewish people out of the ghetto and utilized them as an instrument in its commercial expansion. Today decaying capitalism is striving to squeeze the Jewish people from all its pores; seventeen million individuals out of the two billion populating the globe, that is, less than one percent, can no longer find a place on our planet! Amid the vast expanses of land and the marvels of technology, which has also conquered the skies for man as well as the earth, the bourgeoisie has managed to convert our planet into a foul prison.” ^[37]

Thus while the genocide of other people in the colonies took the forms of shooting, starvation and plagues, the extermination of the people in the labor-death camps was organized along the capitalist assembly line. Jews were sent in trains packed as animals, as raw material processed in the labor-death camps whose final product was death. The state bureaucracy was involved in this form of production of death because the economic system of Nazi Germany was a type of planned capitalism.

That is, "a combination of some of the essential characteristics of capitalism and at the same times a highly planned economy. Without in any way destroying its class character, a comprehensive planning mechanism was imposed on an economy in which private property was not expropriated, in which the distribution of national income remained fundamentally the same, and in which private entrepreneurs kept their prerogatives as in traditional capitalism. All this was done in a society dominated by a ruthless political dictatorship.” ^[38]

It was and was not a unique form of state capitalism. "Towards the end of 1941 Hitler realized that the German army would not defeat the Soviet Union in a lightning war as they had originally planned. The German army would require a workforce that would help in paving roads, clearing minefields, producing ordinance and equipment. The decision was thus made to temporarily leave Jewish prisoners alive in camps and ghettos in order to employ them for the German war effort. The extermination was renewed in its full intensity in the spring of 1942. By the winter of 1943 most of the Jews of Belorussia and almost half of the 2.5 million Jews of Ukraine had already been murdered. " ^[39]

By the end of 1941, the USA entered the war and Hitler realized that his hopes, based on the Haavara (transfer agreement with the Zionists) plus the opposition of the mainstream Zionist to the boycott of Germany because of this agreement, that the Jews will influence the USA government not to enter the war were unreal. Thus there was no use for him for the Jews when Germany had a large pool of Slavic non-Jewish slave labor.

 

 

 

6. Zionist Ideology as a Branch of Social Darwinism

 

In 1897, as modern Zionism was born, it adopted the racist image of the Jews. [40]

“The trope of the diaspora Jew as a pale, flaccid, yeshiva bocher, a parasite, an eternal alien, a nebbish. Zionism embraced the idea that this pathetic weakling (who was often to be blamed for antisemitism) needed to be Aryanized into the bronzed, muscular Hebrew farmer/warrior tilling the soil in the Galilee. The evolution of Jews as a people who lived by Torah and its commandments into a biological race with distinct characteristics, (the money Jew, the ghetto Jew, the swarthy, hook-nosed Jew) mirrors the worst canards of Anti-Semites, European fascists, and white supremacists." ^[41]

"The Zionists adopted the concept of Volk in terms of a nation-race as molded by the notion of Blood and Soil (Blut und Boden) – current in central Europe of the time. Accordingly they demanded the materialization of their nationality rights in a country of their own.” ^[42]

“In response to physical racial associations, political Zionism was coupled with the idea of the biological identity of the Jew. Discussions about the right of the Jews to their homeland in Palestine were actually discussions about their biological essence, which went above and beyond their religious, cultural, or even national arguments.” ^[43]

"The adherence of the Zionists to the nineteenth century notion of Blood and Soil as ground for their territorial rights is the statement by the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik at a press conference at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the beginning of 1934: “I too, like Hitler, believe in the power of blood.” In Bialik’s opinion, the Jewish race’s will-power and Jewish blood are what could successfully undermine “the remnants of paganism in the Christian world.” ^[44]

“Toward the turn of the twentieth century, when the Zionist movement granted a kind of approval to the national social alliance of Jews, rather than merely to their traditional religious or cultural uniqueness, the flood of studies that ascribed to Jews a biological essence as a race swelled. In the 1911 edition of the Jews of Today, Ruppin referred approvingly to Ignaz Zollschan’s (1877–1944) study, published in Vienna in 1909, as well as to studies by other Jewish scholars, such as Weissenberg, Judt, Elkind, Auerbach, Fishberg, and Sofer, and his (non-Jewish) teacher, the German anthropologist, von Luschan.” ^[45]

Nathan Birnbaum (1864–1937), one of the early supporters of Theodor Herzl who invented the term “Zionism” wrote: ”The insights and mental dispositions of a nation may not be explained otherwise than by the natural sciences. “Race is everything,” said our great race-member, Lord Beaconsfield [Benjamin Disraeli]. In the uniqueness of race, the uniqueness of the nation is enfolded. National variation is founded on racial differences. It is by virtue of race that the German or the Slav feels different from the Jew. In this antagonism one must look for the explanation that the Germans produced in the Song of the Nibelungen, and the Jews discovered in the Bible. It would have been absolutely wrong to state that the Nibelungen saga had produced the characteristic German spirit, and the Bible the Jewish spirit. This would be nothing short of a ridiculous exchange of cause and effect.” ^[46]

The Zionists were not only racists toward the Jews but against people in the colonies. No other than Herzl wrote: “Supposing His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return pledge ourselves to regulate the whole finances of Turkey. We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.“ ^[47]

He also wrote: “We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly” ^[48]

We should also be aware that the Zionists embraced the racist concepts of eugenical thought even toward Jews. “The application of racial categories to the Jews by Zionist physicians and anthropologists in the first half of the twentieth century has been the focus of several studies. In these studies ' nationalism' serves as the primary explanatory framework for Zionists' embrace of racial concepts both in Europe and in Palestine, concerning the repercussions of mixed marriages on Jewish racial qualities. Zionist racial discourse, and eugenic discourse in particular, cannot be interpreted in terms of 'nationalism' alone. In some contexts 'race' was used to establish Jewish unity, whereas in others it was used to establish diversity and hierarchy among Jewish groups. This contradictory use of 'race' is explained as stemming from the ambiguity of racial categories and from the tension between a nation-building project and a cultural project of Westernization which took place in the context of Zionist colonization in the Orient.” ^[49]

 

 

7. The Genocide of the Palestinians

 

The proof that genocide in this age of capitalism is one of the characteristic of imperialism is one the Zionists provide. "Between 1947 and 1949, at least 750,000 Palestinians from a 1.9 million population were made refugees beyond the borders of the state. Zionist forces had taken more than 78 percent of historic Palestine, ethnically cleansed and destroyed about 530 villages and cities, and killed about 15,000 Palestinians in a series of mass atrocities, including more than 70 massacres." ^[50]

The Zionist actions during the 1948 War, both in terms of the broader ethnic cleansing of Palestine and in the context of the multiple massacres of civilians by the settler colonialists was a genocide against the Palestinians, a term that is amply justified in relation to the definitions of Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention. [51]

The definition of genocide was developed by the Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in the 1930s and 1940s and was later codified in the December 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. "The word “genocide” was first coined by Polish lawyer Raphäel Lemkin in 1944 in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. (…) Lemkin developed the term partly in response to the Nazi policies of systematic murder of Jewish people during the Holocaust, but also in response to previous instances in history of targeted actions aimed at the destruction of particular groups of people. Later on, Raphäel Lemkin led the campaign to have genocide recognised and codified as an international crime." ^[52]

According to the UN convention, "genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

a. Killing members of the group;

b. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

d. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

e. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group" [53]

Yet the hypocrisy is celebrating. In the last years, the imperialist friends of Israel are using the definitions of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance document, known as IHRA, to shield Israel from criticism of its war crimes against the Palestinians. According to the IHRA the denial of the right of Israel to rule 82% of Palestine is an expression of Anti-Semitism. It gives the following example for Anti-Semitism: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” ^[54]

If the ethnic cleansing of 1947-8, when the majority of the Palestinian people were removed to create a Zionist state with Jewish majority is not racism, what is racism?

The actions of Israel in the 1967 occupied lands are no less than war crimes and genocide. "The list of well-documented crimes include indiscriminate, willful, and lethal attacks on civilians, inhumane treatment, collective punishment, deprivation of the right to a fair trial, closing off of entire regions and confinement of civilians within them, the use of human shields, home demolitions, illegal and arbitrary detention, torture, imprisonment of children, rape, looting, destruction of infrastructure, extrajudicial killings, deportation and exile of members of the occupied population, refusing to allow protected persons to return to their homes after hostilities, as well as the establishment of non-military settlements and the movement of Israel’s own Jewish citizens into these occupied areas. Apart from Israel’s actions during active hostilities, the daily functioning of the occupation and its goals and objectives are inherently unlawful as they continuously and without respite involve illegal expropriations of land, theft and destruction of crops and natural resources, theft and deliberately polluting and poisoning of water supplies, and impeding and even prohibiting the development of the occupied economy." ^[55]

 

 

 

8. Who Are the Guilty Parties for the Genocide of the Jews?

 

Of course Hitler and the Nazis are the major culprits, yet there are many others who were responsible for the genocide of the Jews. For example, the Germen capitalists who supported Hitler like IG Farben, Krupp, Thyssen, etc.

American and British imperialists supported Hitler until Britain entered the war and even then many of the capitalists continued to do business with Germany in spite of the concentration camps that began in 1935 in Dachau. The Olympic committee choice of Berlin in 1936 as the site of the Olympic game was an act of political support even though it knew of Dachau camp.

“Having rejected a proposed boycott of the 1936 Olympics, the sponsoring athletic and Olympic organizations of the United States and other western democracies missed the opportunity to take a stand that—some observers at the time claimed—might have given Hitler pause and bolstered.” ^[56]

Charles Higham, in his well-researched book “Trading With the Enemy: An Exposé of The Nazi-American Money-Plot 1933-1949”, documented numerous examples of how "American businessmen and government officials [dealt] with the Nazis for profit or through conviction throughout the Second World War: Ford. Standard Oil, Chase Bank and members of the State Department were among those who shared in the spoils. Meticulously documented and dispassionately told, this is an alarming story. At its center is 'The Fraternity', an influential international group associated with the Rockefeller or Morgan banks and linked by the ideology of Business as Usual.” ^[57]

“The Rockefellers' Chase National Bank (later the Chase Manhattan) was the richest and most powerful financial institution in the United States at the time of Pearl Harbor. The Rockefellers owned Standard Oil of New Jersey, the German accounts of which were siphoned through their own bank, the Chase, as well as through the independent National City Bank of New York, which also handled Standard, Sterling Products, General Aniline and Film, SKF, and ITT, whose chief, Sosthenes Behn, was a director of the N.C.B. Two executives of Standard Oil's German subsidiary were Karl Lindemann and Emil Helfferich, prominent figures in Himmler's Circle of Friends of the Gestapo-its chief financiers-and close friends and colleagues of the BIS's Baron von Schroder." ^[58]

“The attitude of the British government towards helping Jews escape the Nazi fury was carefully set down by Roosevelt’s intimate, Harry Hopkins in a meeting on 27 March 1943 between the President, Anthony Eden and others Eden said: We should move very cautiously about offering to take all Jews out of a country like Bulgaria. If we do that, then the Jews of the world will be wanting us to make similar offers in Poland and Germany. Hitler might take us up on any such offer and there simply are not enough ships and means of transportation in the world to handle them." ^[59]

The USA closed the gate before the Jews. In 1921 and 1924, the United States passed laws to sharply reduce the influx of immigrants into the USA. It allocated only small quotas to the people of southern and eastern Europe, and banned almost all immigration from Asia. These people were considered especially inferior and dangerous. These laws were not changed during the war.

The story of the St Louis ship tells the whole policy. " 900 Jews who fled Nazi Germany in 1939 on the MS St. Louis, which planned to stop in Cuba and then continue on in an attempt to gain entry into the United States. Unable to enter due to strict immigration quotas, the passengers were forced to return to Europe, where a number of countries accepted them as refugees; 254 of them were killed in the Holocaust." ^[60]

While the USA and Britain bombed German cities they refused to bomb the railways leading to the death camps. "Labor Zionist leaders in Palestine, Europe, and the United States repeatedly urged the Roosevelt administration and its allies to bomb the railway tracks and bridges leading to Auschwitz or the gas chambers and crematoria in the camp itself. Labor Zionist representatives were not the only Jewish officials to press for bombing; but they were among the earliest and most active of the bombing advocates. Sadly, the bombing never happened. (…) The deportations of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz had begun on May 15 1944. They continued through July 9. Some 440,000 Jews were transported in cattle cars over those rail lines to their death. In 1944, the Allies controlled the skies of Europe. They bombed railways and bridges, because the Germans used them to transport troops and military supplies. (…) On June 11, Gruenbaum reported on his efforts at a Jewish Agency Executive meeting, in Jerusalem. JAE chairman and future prime minister David Ben-Gurion presided over the meeting Ben-Gurion remarked at the meeting that he opposed asking the Allies to bomb Auschwitz because "we do not know what the actual situation is in Poland. Another member of the executive, Emil Schmorak, agreed, saying they should not request bombing because "It is said that in Oswiecim [the Polish name for Auschwitz] there is a large labor camp. We cannot take on the responsibility for a bombing that could cause the death of even one Jew." ^[61]

There were the various Anti-Semites in France and East Europe who helped the Nazis to exterminate the Jews. It was also the Zionist right and left that had responsibility for the mass killing of the Jews. The Zionists of course deny that there was any collaboration between the Nazis and the Zionists. As many people know by now, the Nazis minted a coin that on one side a swastika and on the other hand a Star of David. The Zionists cannot deny that such a coin was produced in Nazi Germany so their argument is that this coin was only Nazi’s propaganda.

"Images of the coin were shared on social media after it appeared on the Spanishhalyon blog in a post called "Zionism is Anti Semitism". The post claimed "Zionism cosied up to fascists well before the war and that even though they were a tiny minority among European Jewry, they were given a lead vocal role in implementing the purge of Jews from their European home using the exact same language as the anti-Judaic parties of the era". (…) But Paul Bogdanor, a historian who specialises in the Holocaust and antisemitism, insisted the coin was neither produced nor endorsed by any Jewish or Zionist group. (…)Mr Bogdanor said: “The image shows a coin struck by the Nazis in the 1930s to mark a series of articles published in the newspaper Der Angriff about a trip to Palestine by one of their agents. It was created by the Nazis to pretend that they wanted an ‘honourable’ solution to the ‘Jewish Question’ via the transfer agreement, which the Nazis later abandoned. “The coin was of course pure Nazi propaganda, like a rapist pretending to sympathise with his victim.” Mr Bogdanor also said those who use the image to discredit against Zionism today are ‘unscrupulously repeating Nazi propaganda’.” ^[62]

You have to believe in “Cinderella” and “Little Red Riding Hood” to accept this argument of Mr. Bogdanor who wrote among other articles published in the Zionist VC “Corbyn threat is much greater than far right” (January 25, 2019).

Let us begin with the facts: "In the spring of 1933 four people gathered on a platform of Berlin’s railway station ready to board a train for Trieste, where they were to take a ship bound for Palestine. What made this group unusual was the fact that it was composed of two couples, one Jewish, the other Nazi, only two months after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor of the German Reich and his first legislation against non-Aryans. Yet the two couples were travelling with the sanction of both the Nazi (National Socialist German Workers) Party and the Zionist Federation of Germany. They were engaged in a mission whose invisible fellow-traveller was the fate of German Jewry. The Nazis boarding the train were Baron Leopold Itz von Mildenstein and his wife. Von Mildenstein was a member of both the Nazi party and of Hitler’s elite bodyguard, the S.S. His Jewish travelling companions were Kurt Tuchler, an official of the Zionist Federation of Germany, who was also accompanied by his wife. What had brought them together on this journey to Palestine was their common desire, motivated by radically different objectives, to make Germany ‘free of Jews’, or, as the Nazis put it, Judenrein." ^[63]

Thus it was the initiative of the German Zionists to invite a SS officer, a Nazi propagandist, to Palestine in order to convince the Nazi regime to deport the Jews to Palestine. Following this visit the Nazis and the Zionist mainstream, led by Ben Gurion in Palestine, signed the Haavara agreement (Transfer).

“The Haavara (Transfer) Agreement, negotiated by Eliezer Hoofein, director of the Anglo-Palestine Bank, was agreed to by the Reich Economics Ministry in 1933, and continued, with declining German government support, until it was wound up in 1939. Under the agreement, Jews emigrating from Germany could use their assets to purchase German-manufactured goods for export, thus salvaging their personal assets during emigration. The agreement provided a substantial export market for German factories in British-ruled Palestine. Between November, 1933, and 31 December 1937, 77,800,000 Reichmarks, or $22,500,000, (values in 1938 currency) worth of goods were exported to Jewish businesses in Palestine under the program. By the time the program ended with the start of World War II, the total had risen to 105,000,000 marks (about $35,000,000, 1939 values).” [64]

Today the Zionists and their friends cannot hide this fact. So they have to argue that this collaboration was in the interest of the Jews and that it does not prove that the Nazis were friendly to Zionism. Rainer Schulze in defense of this agreement wrote: “For the Zionist Federation, it was a way to save Jews from the claws of an increasingly hostile regime and attract them to Palestine, while for the Nazi state signing an international agreement was further proof of its legitimacy, broke the Jewish movement of boycotting German goods, and helped the recovery of German exports at a time when the German economy was still in the depth of depression.” ^[65]

This of course does not prove that the Nazis were Zionists but it proves that the Zionists and the Nazis shared the same plan to remove the Jews from Europe to Palestine. It proves that the Zionists helped the Nazis to break the boycott and to legitimize the Nazi regime in the eyes of the Jews instead of preparing the Jews to join others in the struggle against the Nazis.

If it was a legitimate agreement why until 1935 the Jewish Agency masked its role in the Agreement and attempted to pass it off as an economic agreement between private parties?

"Shattering the boycott was a key motive for the German authorities in concluding the Transfer Agreement the Yishuv leadership was increasingly preoccupied with the economic advantages that would accrue to this community if the basis of Jewish life in Germany were eliminated." ^[66]

“During the 1930s, many Jewish leaders were aware of the contagious influence of German antisemitism on Eastern European antisemitism. Some believed that the anti-German boycott would have a deterrent effect on antisemitic elements in neighboring countries.27 Many more, however, believed that the Transfer Agreement could provide an example and a standard for all players in search of a way to expel Jews from their countries.” ^[67]

"Polish Jewry had good reason to fear that the Polish Government would view the Transfer Agreement as a model. Poland had already tried its hand at contracts of this kind: during the emigration of Jews from Poland to Palestine in the mid-1920s (the “fourth aliyah”), financial arrangements based on a principle similar to the Transfer Agreement had been made." ^[68]

The American Zionists did not even send food packages to the starving Jews in the ghettos in Poland more so a single bullet.

Aryeh Tartakower, who was in charge of aid work for the World Jewish Congress in America in 1940, said in an interview with the Israeli historian Shabatei Beit-Zv:

'We received a call from the American Government, from the State Department, and they brought to our attention that sending parcels to the Jews in Poland was not in the interests of the Allies... The first one to tell us to stop immediately was Dr Stephen Wise... He said: “We must stop for the good of England.'” ^[69]

On 19 September 1942 Militant, the paper of the U.S. Trotskyists, wrote:

“The State Department has meantime – so we are informed – suppressed information that it received from its consular agents in Switzerland. This information has to do with the treatment of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. Evidence of the greatest atrocities has occurred there in connection with the renewed campaign to exterminate all Jews. Rumour even has it that the Ghetto no longer exists, that the Jews there have been completely wiped out. The reason this report has been suppressed by the State Department is that it does not wish any mass protests here that will force its hand on policy” ^[70]

Nahum Goldmann, the head of the Jewish Congress, confessed in his article Jewish Heroism in Siege, published in 1963:

“We all failed. I refer not only to actual results – these at times do not depend on the abilities and wishes of those who act, and they cannot be held responsible for failures resulting from objective considerations. Our failure was in our lack of unwavering determination and readiness to take the proper measures commensurate with the terrible events of the times. All that was done by the Jews of the free world, and in particular those of the United States, where there were greater opportunities than elsewhere for action, did not go beyond the limits of Jewish politics in normal times. Delegations were sent to prime ministers, requests for intervention were made, and we were satisfied with the meager and mainly platonic response that the democratic powers were ready to make”…

“I do not doubt (and I was then closely acquainted with our struggle and with day-to-day events) that thousands and tens of thousands of Jews could have been saved by more active and vigorous reaction on the part of the democratic governments. But, as I have said, the main responsibility rests on us because we did not go beyond routine petitions and requests, and because the Jewish communities did not have the courage and daring to exert pressure on the democratic governments by drastic means and to force them to take drastic measures. I will never forget the day when I received a cable from the Warsaw Ghetto, addressed to Rabbi Stephen Wise and myself, asking us why the Jewish leaders in the United States had not resolved to hold a day-and-night vigil on the steps of the White House until the President decided to give the order to bomb the extermination camps or the death trains. We refrained from doing this because most of the Jewish leadership was then of the opinion that we must not disturb the war effort of the free world against Nazism by stormy protests." ^[71]

There was a reason why the Zionists like Ben Gurion and Stefan Wise did not want to apply pressure on the US government to open the gates. Their concern was with the Zionist project in Palestine. Opening the gates for the Jews endangered the Zionist project that required sending Jews only to Palestine.

No other than Ben Gurion said in 1938 in a meeting of Mapai Central Committee meeting: ''If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel.'' ^[72]

It is ridicules to believe that Hitler was a Zionist but it is true that in their actions the Zionists have responsibility for the genocide of the Jews.

The faith of the Jews was determined by the defeat of the revolutionary wave after the Bolshevik revolution. The crashing of the revolutionary wave led to the second world imperialist war and the genocide of the Jews was part of this war. The last revolutionary struggle was defeated in Spain by 1939, a defeat that was the opening of WWII.

The socialist revolution had many enemies from the Russian White monarchists, to the imperialists to the social-reformists and the centrists that tailed the reformists who served the imperialists and the Zionists.

 

 

 

9. The Uniqueness of the Genocide of the Jews

 

In “The Politics of Memory Jews and Roma Commemorate Their Persecution” by Roni Stauber and Raphael Vago they wrote: “Since the destruction of European Jewry, in which so many Europeans took part, had created a historical and moral obligation on the part of European countries, and particularly Germany, to the existence and safety of the new Jewish state, the Holocaust became a political asset.” [73]

How can genocide be a political asset?

It is a political asset as it provides Israel protection for the crimes it has committed against the Palestinians, the Arabs in Lebanon and Egypt and its support for murderous regimes around the world. As we shall see later on, the genocide of the Jews has been used also as a tool in the cold war and today in support of far right in Europe and in the USA against the progressive and more left-wing anti-racists.

Pro-Zionist historians insist that the genocide of the Jews was a unique historical event. Yet there is no common agreement to what made this event so unique. After all in the age of imperialism, prior to the genocide of the Jews, there were the genocides of the native people of Namibia and the Armenians. In addition there was the genocide of the Roma and Sinti that were mistreated by the Nazis in the same way as the Jews. If the genocide of the Jews was uniquely different from the genocide of the Namibians and the Gypsies, the Zionist have to explain in what sense? Is it the intentions to commit genocide? The scale? The methods? Or the results?

Imperialist states have an interest in supporting the Zionist claim of the uniqueness of the genocide of the Jews. A claim they began to support only after the second imperialist world war. During the war, as we noted, the ruling classes in Britain and the USA did not attempt to save Jews. In an interview the liberal Zionist historian Yehuda Bauer said in reply to the question "Why the USA and Britain did not save Jews?”:

“There were a number of reasons. There was an element of anti-Semitism, especially of course in the foreign offices of the two Western powers. I don't think that this element was really crucial, even though it certainly contributed. What was crucial was the fact that the Allies were afraid that if their struggle were in some way identified with the rescue of Jewish people, they would be accused by their own home constituency of fighting for the Jews and not for themselves. This may have been true for the United States, where anti-Semitism increased during the Second World War. But I don't think it was true for Britain, where anti-Semitism decreased during the war.” ^[74]

For years pro-imperialist historians claimed that the Allies knew of the mass killing of the Jews only in the second part of 1944. Yet it is clear that they knew of it already in 1942:

“Recently released documents show that the Allied forces were aware of the scale of the Holocaust some two years earlier than previously assumed. They did little to stop the deaths or rescue the victims. The unsealed United Nations files show that the US, UK and Russia knew as early as December 1942 that two million Jews had been massacred and millions more were at risk of being killed, Britain’s Independent newspaper reported on Tuesday.” ^[75]

After the war the claim that the genocide of the Jews was unique served the British and the American ruling class. The implication of this position is that if the genocide of the Jews is the worst evil in history, the systemic oppression of the native people by colonialism and imperialism are less significant. In addition, the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis justifies the military role of Israel against the Arab revolution.

The following is a typical Zionist definition of the genocide of the Jews taken from the Jewish Virtual Library:

“The eminent Jewish philosopher, Emil Fackenheim, offers a concise outline of the distinguishing characteristics of the Holocaust in his book, “To Mend the World”: The "Final Solution" was designed to exterminate every single Jewish man, woman and child. The only Jews who would have conceivably survived had Hitler been victorious were those who somehow escaped discovery by the Nazis. Jewish birth (actually mere evidence of "Jewish blood") was sufficient to warrant the punishment of death. Fackenheim notes that this feature distinguished Jews from Poles and Russians who were killed because there were too many of them, and from "Aryans" who were not singled out unless they chose to single themselves out. With the possible exception of Gypsies, he adds, Jews were the only people killed for the "crime" of existing. The extermination of the Jews had no political or economic justification. It was not a means to any end; it was an end in itself. The killing of Jews was not considered just a part of the war effort, but equal to it; thus, resources that could have been used in the war were diverted instead to the program of extermination. The people who carried out the "Final Solution" were primarily average citizens. Fackenheim calls them "ordinary job holders with an extraordinary job." They were not perverts or sadists. "The tone-setters," he says, "were ordinary idealists, except that their ideals were torture and murder." Someone else once wrote that Germany was the model of civilized society. What was perverse, then, was that the Germans could work all day in the concentration camps and then go home and read Schiller and Goethe while listening to Beethoven. Other examples of mass murder exist in human history, such as the atrocities committed by Pol Pot in Cambodia and the Turkish annihilation of the Armenians. But none of those other catastrophes, Fackenheim argues, contain more than one of the characteristics described above. Jews do not need to compete in a morbid contest as to who has suffered the most in history. It is important, however, to explain why the Holocaust is a unique part of human history." ^[76]

Emil Fackenheim is aware of the fact that the same criterion he used for the mass killing of the Jews applies also to the Gypsies and yet he simply mention it in half a sentence because it contradicts his position that the genocide of the Jews was unique.

The American Memorial of the Holocaust does speak on the suffering of the gypsies but belittle their suffering for the same reason:

“Among the groups the Nazi regime and its Axis partners singled out for persecution on so-called racial grounds were the Roma (Gypsies)”. The fate of Roma in some ways paralleled that of the Jews. Under the Nazi regime, German authorities subjected Roma to arbitrary internment, forced labor, and mass murder. In the autumn of 1941, German police authorities deported 5,007 Sinti and Lalleri Gypsies from Austria to the ghetto for Jews in Lodz, where they resided in a segregated section. Nearly half of the Roma died within the first months of their arrival, due to lack of adequate food, fuel, shelter, and medicines. In general, the German police deported Roma in the Greater German Reich to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the camp authorities housed them in a special compound called the "Gypsy family camp." In the so-called Gypsy compound, entire families lived together. Some 23,000 Roma, Sinti, and Lalleri were deported to Auschwitz altogether. SS medical researchers assigned to the Auschwitz complex, such as SS Captain Dr. Josef Mengele, received authorization to choose human subjects for pseudoscientific medical experiments from among the prisoners. Mengele chose twins and dwarves, some of them from the Gypsy family camp, as subjects of his experiments. Approximately 3,500 adult and adolescent Roma were prisoners in other German concentration camps; medical researchers selected subjects from among the Roma incarcerated in Ravensbrück, Natzweiler-Struthof, and Sachsenhausen concentration camps for their experiments, either on site in the camps or at nearby institutes. It is not known precisely how many Roma were killed in the Holocaust. While exact figures or percentages cannot be ascertained, historians estimate that the Germans and their allies killed around 25 percent of all European Roma. Of slightly less than one million Roma believed to have been living in Europe before the war, scholars believe that the Germans and their Axis partners killed up to 250,000”.

“After the war, discrimination against Roma continued throughout Central and Eastern Europe. The Federal Republic of Germany determined that all measures taken against Roma before 1943 were legitimate official measures against persons committing criminal acts, not the result of policy driven by racial prejudice. This decision effectively closed the door to restitution for thousands of Roma victims, who had been incarcerated, forcibly sterilized, and deported out of Germany for no specific crime. The postwar Bavarian criminal police took over the research files of the Nazi regime, including the registry of Roma who had resided in the Greater German Reich. Only in late 1979 did the West German Federal Parliament identify the Nazi persecution of Roma as being racially motivated, creating eligibility for most Roma to apply for compensation for their suffering and loss under the Nazi regime. By this time, many of those who became eligible had already died." ^[77]

What does it mean “The fate of Roma in some ways paralleled that of the Jews”? Why give a low estimation of the killed gypsies? Compare this account to another account by non-Zionist that tells us: “The murder of around 500,000 of Europe’s Roma and Sinti by the Nazis and their collaborators during the second world war is a little-known aspect of the atrocities committed during this period. In the immediate postwar period, war crimes against Roma were not prosecuted. Survivors struggled to get recognition and compensation for the persecution they experienced. Roma victims were also not acknowledged in monuments commemorating the Nazis’ victims. A number of Jewish survivors, including Hermann Langbein, described witnessing horrific conditions in the “Gypsy” camp. He said: ‘The conditions were worse than in other camps … the route between the huts was ankle deep in mud and dirt. The gypsies were still using the clothes that they had been given upon arrival … footwear was missing … The latrines were built in such a way that they were practically unusable for the gypsy children. The infirmary was a pathetic sight’. Another witness, Dr Max Benjamin, a Jewish man from Cologne who was a doctor at the “Gypsy” hospital in Auschwitz, gave an account to the Library of the “liquidation” of the “Gypsy” camp in August 1944: “[In] one fell swoop every single one of the gypsies who represented the population of this camp was chased into the gas chambers. Of the 23,000 people who passed through the “Gypsy” camp at Auschwitz, 21,000 died – of starvation, ill-health or were murdered in the gas chambers or by other means.” ^[78]

Thus it seems that the fate of the Gypsies has been even worse than of the Jews as Germany recognized the genocide of the Jewish and has compensated the survivors. The first time a German leader recognized Nazi persecution of the Roma on racist grounds was in 1982, more than 30 years after the then West Germany acknowledged the murder of 6 million Jews and began to pay compensation to Israel.

Other writers in their attempt to justify the argument that the genocide of the Jews was unique have argued that it was a unique event because of the genocidal intent of the Nazis. ”That is to say, Nazism was an organized human and social event which is an integral part of its purposive behavior was the total eradication of world Jewry.” ^[79]

If the intention, i.e. the subjective element to commit genocide is the test, than Stalin policy in the Ukraine in 1932-33 that resulted in the death of millions motivated by his plans for a quick industrialization of Stalinist Russia was not a genocide as Stalin did not intend to kill so many Ukrainians.

“The Ukrainian famine—known as the Holodomor, a combination of the Ukrainian words for “starvation” and “to inflict death”—by one estimate claimed the lives of 3.9 million people, about 13 percent of the population.( the Ukrainian nationalists claim it cost the lives of 20 million) And, unlike other famines in history caused by blight or drought, this was caused when a dictator wanted both to replace Ukraine’s small farms with state-run collectives and punish independence-minded Ukrainians who posed a threat to his totalitarian authority. The Ukrainian famine was a clear case of a man-made famine,” explains Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University and author of the 2018 book, Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine. He describes it as “a hybrid…of a famine caused by calamitous social-economic policies and one aimed at a particular population for repression or punishment.” ^[80]

Yet in this period of the honey moon with Ukrainian nationalists the Zionists say that Stalin committed genocide. Kulanu MK Akram Hasson proposed the bill, which states: “The Knesset declares December 6 as the Remembrance Day for the Ukrainian Genocide (‘the Holodomor’).” The prime minister and education minister may hold public ceremonies and educational activities, respectively, on that day." ^[81]

For those who are not familiar with the history of right wing Zionism in the Ukraine it is important to know that Zabotinsky, the historical leader of this wing of Zionism, supported the nationalist Petliuria that his soldiers murdered up to 30,000 Jews. In 1926, Scholem Schwarzbard, a Jewish anarchist, killed the UPR’s leader Symon Petliura in a Paris street in revenge for the pogroms. The trial that followed became a cause celebre, one concerned less with Schwarzbard’s’s guilt and more with Petliura’s responsibility for the pogroms. Schwarzbard was acquitted as having committed a "crime of passion".

Robert Gessner met Zabotinsky in 1935. He wrote about Zabotinsky: “He announced he would speak frankly, so that Revisionism would be made clear. The skin under his eyes contracted, his lower lip went out, the jaw stiffened. "Revisionism," he began, "is naive, brutal and primitive. It is savage. You go out into the street and pick any man — a Chinaman — and ask him what he wants and he will say 100 percent everything. That's us. We want a Jewish Empire. Just like there is the Italian or French Empires on the Mediterranean, we want a Jewish Empire. (…) To protect the Ukrainian Jews Jabotinsky proposed to organize and arm a Jewish gendarmerie to follow in the rear of Petlura's army and after a Jewish town has been captured protect its population from pogroms. I pointed out that it had been Petlura himself who had conducted the bloody pogroms on all of his expeditions into the Ukraine. "No, " the Fuehrer disagreed, " I don't believe Petlura himself was anti-Semitic. He came from a healthy, peasant stock. It was his soldiers who got out of control." Jabotinsky was and is today proud of having signed a cooperation pact with a general who he admitted had no control over his own pogrom-rioters, while on the other hand the Jewish villages, that he purported to be the protector of, were at that time under the Bolsheviki who had already guaranteed and protected Jewish lives and property.” ^[82]

Clearly this position is motivated by the Israeli government's close relation with the Anti-Semite East European governments that support Israel crimes against the Palestinians. These governments belong to the camp that hate Jews and love Israel.

This criterion of an organized intention to kill all people is problematic for another reason, because it is not unique to the Jews. Take the example of Namibia. ”A handful of historians had uncovered a horrifying story. Some saw Germany's behavior in South-West Africa as a precursor of German actions in the Holocaust. The boldest among them argued that South-West Africa was the site of the first genocide of the 20th century. “Our understanding of what Nazism was and where its underlying ideas and philosophies came from,” write David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen in their book The Kaiser's Holocaust, “is perhaps incomplete unless we explore what happened in Africa under Kaiser Wilhelm II.” (…) One scientist who studied race in Namibia was a professor of Josef Mengele - the infamous “Angel of Death” who conducted experiments on Jews in Auschwitz. Heinrich Goering, the father of Hitler's right-hand man, was colonial governor of German South-West Africa.” After a violent dispute over ownership of land “Wilhelm II sent not only new orders but a new leader to South-West Africa. Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha took over as colonial governor, and with his arrival, the rhetoric of forceful negotiations gave way to the rhetoric of racial extermination. Von Trotha issued an infamous order called the Vernichtungsbefehl—an extermination order. The Herero are no longer German subjects,” read von Trotha's order. “The Herero people will have to leave the country. If the people refuse I will force them with cannons to do so. Within the German boundaries, every Herero, with or without firearms, with or without cattle, will be shot. I won’t accommodate women and children anymore. I shall drive them back to their people or I shall give the order to shoot at them. German soldiers surrounded Herero villages. Thousands of men and women were taken from their homes and shot. Those who escaped fled into the desert—and German forces guarded its borders, trapping survivors in a wasteland without food or water. They poisoned wells to make the inhuman conditions even worse—tactics that were already considered war crimes under the Hague Convention, which were first agreed to in 1899. (German soldiers would use the same strategy a decade later, when they poisoned wells in France during World War I.) In the course of just a few years, 80 percent of the Herero tribe died, and many survivors were imprisoned in forced labor camps. After a rebellion of Nama fighters, these same tactics were used against Nama men, women, and children.” ^[83]

"In 1985, the United Nations' Whitaker Report classified the event as an attempt to exterminate the Herero and Nama peoples of South West Africa, and as one of the earliest attempts at genocide in the 20th century. In 2004, the German government recognized and apologized for the events, but ruled out financial compensation for the victims." ^[84]

Can anyone who is not racist argue that the killing of 80% of the Herero tribe was not a social event which is an integral part of its purposive behavior was the total eradication of the Herero? Those historians who claim that the intention of the Nazis to kill all the Jews is what made the genocide of the Jews unique are likely to shift their argument and say that in Namibia the German killed only tens of thousands while in the case of the Jews the Nazis killed 6 million.

We can agree with them that change of quantity can be a qualitative change but what then about the Africans?

“The four hundred-year history of captured Africans and their descendants has many similarities with the Holocaust experiences of European Jews – and other victims of mass atrocities.

These include:

* Dehumanization and vilification

* Forced marches and migrations

* Slave (forced, unpaid) labor

* Stolen property

* Mass incarceration

* Torture

* Medical experimentation

* Discrimination by law and custom

* Ethnic cleansing (race riots)

* Lynchings and other forms of terrorism

* Mass murder

* Long-lasting psychological effects (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) on survivors – and their descendants. (…)

From 10 to 12 million African men, women and children were kidnapped from their homes. They were forced to march as much as 1000 miles to the sea. There they were held in underground dungeons for up to a year. The kidnapped people were packed below decks as cargo on 54,000 slave ship voyages to the Americas. They were usually shackled and unable to move. They lay in each other’s feces, urine and vomit during the 60 to 120 day trip. These trips, called “The Middle Passage,” made up one of the largest forced migrations in world history. When they arrived in America, men, women, and children – even infants – were put on the auction block at slave markets. They were handled by the buyers as if they were cattle. The buyers poked and prodded and pulled the Africans’ mouths open. Some buyers forced the captives to remove all their clothes in public, so they could be examined for defects. Children were often sold away from their parents and husbands from their wives.” ^[85]

“Between 10 and 16 million Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic between 1500 and 1900. But this figure grossly understates the actual number of Africans enslaved, killed, or displaced as a result of the slave trade. At least 2 million Africans--10 to 15 percent--died during the infamous "Middle Passage" across the Atlantic. Another 15 to 30 percent died during the march to or confinement along the coast. Altogether then, for every 100 slaves who reached the New World, 40 died in Africa or during the Middle Passage.” ^[86]

In other words between 4 to six million were killed during the Atlantic Slave trade even before the slaves reached the Americas!

 

What about the Indians of the Americas?

 

While the USA government loves to accuse Nazi Germany of the crimes the Nazis committed, it has failed to recognize its own responsibility for the genocide of the Indians. The argument of those who deny the American responsibility to the genocide of the Indians is that the Native Indians died from viruses and there was no intention to eradicate the Indian native population.

Those who recognize that the USA and other European states are responsible for genocide have pointed out that 75 million people lived in the Western Hemisphere in 1491. The death toll from epidemic disease – which the white settlers transmitted to the Indians and refused to give them medicines – was 70, 80, or even 90 percent.

“As applied to indigenous people of North America, the term genocide was not used much, if at all, until the mid-1970s. During the classic period of modern Indian militancy from the occupation of Alcatraz in 1969 to Wounded Knee in 1973, activists sought to educate the American public about an ongoing history of U.S. oppression, but they did this by calling attention to massacres, broken treaties, and racism and rarely if ever invoked the language of genocide. An early use of genocide can be found in the 1974 “Declaration of Continuing Independence” produced by the First International Indian Treaty Council, which in addition to themes of sovereignty and broken treaties, noted that there is “only one color of Mankind in the world who are not represented in the United Nations; that is the indigenous Redman of the Western Hemisphere” and recognized that this absence “comes from the genocidal policies of the colonial power of the United States.” ^[87]

 

What about the Indians of Bengal?

 

What about the mass killing of the Indians of Bengal where 3 million were starved to death as a result of intentional policy of the British government because Churchill suspected that the Bengalis had sympathy for Japan?

“Although all these massacres were deadly in their own right, the deadliest one to occur after 1771 was in 1943, when three million people died and others resorted to eating grass and human flesh in order to survive. Winston Churchill, the hallowed British War prime minister … was disturbingly callous about the roaring famine that was swallowing Bengal’s population. He casually diverted the supplies of medical aid and food that was being dispatched to the starving victims to the already well supplied soldiers of Europe. When entreated upon, he said, “Famine or no famine, Indians will breed like rabbits.” The Delhi Government sent a telegram to him painting a picture of the horrible devastation and the number of people who had died. His only response was, “Then why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?”" ^[88]

“In a shocking new book, Churchill's Secret War, journalist Madhusree Mukherjee blames Mr Churchill's policies for being largely responsible for one of the worst famines in India's history. It is a gripping and scholarly investigation into what must count as one of the most shameful chapters in the history of the Empire. The scarcity, Mukherjee writes, was caused by large-scale exports of food from India for use in the war theatres and consumption in Britain - India exported more than 70,000 tonnes of rice between January and July 1943, even as the famine set in. This would have kept nearly 400,000 people alive for a full year. Mr Churchill turned down fervent pleas to export food to India citing a shortage of ships - this when shiploads of Australian wheat, for example, would pass by India to be stored for future consumption in Europe. As imports dropped, prices shot up and hoarders made a killing. Mr Churchill also pushed a scorched earth policy - which went by the sinister name of Denial Policy - in coastal Bengal where the colonists feared the Japanese would land. So authorities removed boats (the lifeline of the region) and the police destroyed and seized rice stocks.” ^[89]

Other writers have emphasized the high level of the state bureaucracy involve in the mass killing is what made the genocide of the Jews unique: “The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic extermination of six million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators as a central act of state during the Second World War; as night descended, millions of other peoples were swept into this net of death. It was a crime unique in the annals of human history, different not only in the quantity of violence-the sheer numbers killed-but in its manner and purpose as a mass criminal enterprise organized by the state against defenseless civilian populations. The decision was to kill every Jew everywhere in Europe: the definition of Jew as target for death transcended all boundaries. The concept of the annihilation of an entire people, as distinguished from their subjugation, was unprecedented; never before in human history had genocide been an all-pervasive government policy unaffected by territorial or economic advantage and unchecked by moral or religious constraints.” ^[90]

Once again the above claim ignores the genocide of the Gypsies that were murdered in the same way by the same state bureaucracy using the same method and with the same intend to eliminate the Gypsies. For the USA, the Gypsies do not count after all they did not form a state that can serve the interest of the USA.

Yet it is true of course that the Nazi’s state bureaucracy was involved in the organization of the very effective horrifying killing process of millions of people and this needs an explanation that was provided in chapter five.

 

10. The Use of the Holocaust

 

Today there is a witch hunting of those courageous people who dare to defend the Palestinians against the systematic repression of the Zionist state. In Britain the Labour Party is part of this witch hunting. In the USA, the more radical minded congresspersons in the Democratic Party are accused of Anti-Semitism.

This should not surprise us as in the past people who were suspected as defenders of the Soviet Union were accused as Anti-Semites. Soviet Jews were used by the US foreign policy against Stalinist Russia. Every US president since Nixon has made the Soviet Jews a central topic at summit meetings. The Congress passed legislation that restricted trade with Stalinist Russia. The US did not want the Soviet Jews to immigrate to the USA but to Israel to provide her with more soldiers to oppress the Palestinians.

Literature on the genocide of the Jews that was produced during the Cold War and even after the collapse of the Stalinist block served American imperialism as the Soviet Union repression of Zionism was compared to the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis. This literature on the genocide of the Jews was used to rehabilitate the forces of the right wing nationalist anti-communist and portrait them as “freedom fighters”.

“This was most evident at the opening ceremony of the U. S. Holocaust Museum on April 22, 1993. Under pressure from the U. S. government, heads of state from eastern European governments were invited to sit on the platform. Elie Wiesel threatened to boycott these ceremonies, as he considered President Trudjman of Croatia to be an unrepentant supporter of the fascist Utasha forces, an affront to the memory of the victims of racist genocide. Recently, the Holocaust Museum was called anti-Christian because it has not gone far enough in minimizing the harmful role of the Catholic Church. Judith Miller reported that this attack was led by Elliott Abrams and a small group of right wing Jews who are allied with Evangelical Christians. (…) Anticommunism and Cold War politics, for example, have led to minimization of the collaborationist role played by the Polish government's underground and its political organizations during World War II. This allows the picture of the Polish underground as fighters against the Nazis and defenders of the Jews to go unchallenged." ^[91]

"The Museum does not mention that church leaders administered the Nazi puppet states of Croatia and Slovakia, nor that the Catholic Church pipeline was used to smuggle Nazis out of Europe to safety in Latin America. Instead, when it discusses the Vatican, the resource room only quotes Pope Pius XII's 1942 Christmas Eve broadcast in which he expresses sorrow for the "hundreds of thousands who through no fault of their own and solely because of their nation and race, have been condemned to death or progressive extinction." ^[92]

"Finally, in the Museum's exhibit on the 1946 Kielce pogrom, which played a decisive role in the decision of Polish Jews to migrate, there is no mention of the complicit behavior of the Catholic Church. On the day of the pogrom, the local church leader, Bishop Kaczmark, refused to intercede. A week later, in a prepared statement, Cardinal Hlond blamed the Jews and failed to condemn the murders, while Bishop Wyzszynski, who would later become Poland's Primate, stated, "The Germans murdered the Jewish nation because the Jews were the propagators of communism." ^[93]

Yehuda Bauer wrote on this subject: "I wish to express my deep concern about repeated attempts to equate the Nazi regime’s genocidal policies, with the Holocaust at their center, with other murderous or oppressive actions, an equation that not only trivializes and relativizes the genocide of the Jews perpetrated by the Nazi regime, but is also a mendacious revision of recent world history. The European parliament passed a resolution (April 2, 2009) determining August 23, the date on which in 1939 the infamous Ribbentrop-Molotov agreement was signed between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, as a date of remembrance to victims of both regimes. This follows a similar resolution passed by the Senate of the Czech Republic on June 3, 2008, which declared that the “crimes against humanity committed by the Communist regimes throughout the continent must inform all European minds to the same extent (sic!!-YB) as the Nazi regime’s crimes did.” ^[94]

Following the Ribbentrop-Molotov agreement many anti-communists have claimed that Stalin’s regime was fascism. A number of social democrats in the United States like Norman Thomas, accused the Soviet Union in the 1940s of decaying into Red fascism. He wrote: "Such is the logic of totalitarianism", that "communism, whatever it was originally, is today Red fascism."^[95]

In the real world, while Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany were totalitarian regimes Stalinist Russia was not a fascist state but a workers state where a parasitic bureaucratic counter revolutionary stratum took over and destroyed the Bolshevik revolution. For the purpose of this booklet the difference was expressed among others in the attitude toward the Jews.

After the Stalinist annexation of the "Baltic States, eastern Poland, Bessarabia, and Northern Bucovina in 1939-40, the Soviet Union had the largest Jewish population in Europe. The fact that the Soviet Union had the greatest number of Jews who survived World War II has aroused Jewish sympathy during the Holocaust. In contrast to other European countries, only part of the USSR was occupied by German armies. Therefore, Jews could find refuge in the unoccupied regions. Some Western scholars have argued that Stalin government had a specific policy designed to rescue Jews from the danger of annihilation. This was useful propaganda aimed at Western audiences, maintained that millions of Jews owed their lives to Soviet rescue operations during the Holocaust. Although there is no doubt that many Jews found refuge behind Soviet lines or were rescued by advancing Soviet troops when they entered Eastern Europe, the claim that the Soviet government had a preferential policy regarding the endangered Jewish population, is a myth." ^[96]

"In 1943 Solomon Mikhoels and Itzik Feffer a military reporter with the rank of colonel and vice chairman of the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) visited the USA. James N. Rosenberg, American Jewish leader, declared that Russia saved over ten times as many Jews from Nazi extermination as all the rest of the world put together. Emphasizing that he based his estimate of those saved on facts gathered by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Mr. Rosenberg quoted the organization’s journal as reporting that “of some 1,750,000 Jews who succeeded in escaping the Axis since the outbreak of hostilities, about 1,600,000 were evacuated by the Soviet Government from Eastern Poland and subsequently occupied Soviet territory and transported far into the Russian interior and beyond the Urals. About 150,000 others managed to reach Palestine, the United States, and other countries beyond the seas." ^[97]

However after 1948 when a large segment of the Jewish population in Stalinist Russia showed sympathy to Israel, Stalin repressed not only the Zionists but Jews in general. The same Solomon Mikhoels and Itzik Feffer were executed and 1951-53, a group of Jewish doctors were accused of a conspiracy to poison Soviet leaders. A few weeks after the death of Stalin, the new Soviet leadership said there was a lack of evidence and the case was dropped.

Stalinism used Anti-Semitism as a political weapon against the revolutionary opposition to Stalinism led by Trotsky. However, the totalitarian Stalinist regime saved many Jews during the WIII and it is a lie that it was involved in genocide of the Jews.

 

 

11. So What Is Unique About the Genocide of the Jews?

 

The Israeli Historian Yehuda pointed out to the problem of the argument of the uniqueness of the Holocaust: "If what happened to the Jews was unique, then it took place outside of history, it becomes a mysterious event, an upside-down miracle, so to speak, an event of religious significance in the sense that it is not man-made as that term is normally understood?” ^[98]

The Zionist contradict themselves when they argue that the Genocide of the Jews was a unique event in history and at the same time argue that Israel is the only place that Jews can find protection in a case of another Holocaust. If the Jewish Holocaust was so unique that is outside of history it cannot repeat itself. If it can repeat itself, then it must be similar to other genocides.

Leaving logic aside, it is a lie that Israel is protecting the Jews. "Post 1945 there was one regime that murdered Jews because they were Jews and in particular because they were left-wing Jews. In Argentina between 1976 and 1983 3,000 of the Disappeared Ones were Jewish, 10% of those murdered by the fascists. Yet there was not one word of protest from Israel. Quite the contrary, it would seem that Israel was actually advising these torturers on 'counter-insurgency'. (…) they interviewed in Europe Mr. Peregrino Fernandez, a policeman who broke down and confessed that much of the atrocities committed by him and his cronies. Peregrino, during the lengthy confession, gave details of how Herzl Inbar, minister counselor of the Israeli Embassy in Argentina, gave "counterinsurgency instructions.” ^[99]

In 1981 the American Jewish Congress, a thoroughly Zionist body, sent a delegation to General Viola, who was then head of the Junta. As befits a Zionist organization, they found a great deal in common with anti-Semites, even of the most murderous kind:

"Delegation members appeared impressed with General Viola’s knowledge of Jewish affairs, which he said, came from his contacts with Daia, the representative organisation of Argentinian Jews, as well as from Israeli diplomats in his country and family and personal ties.’ [Jewish Chronicle, 27.3.1981. ‘Viola Gives Pledge of Anti Hate Action]” ^[100]

“The first Rabin Government (1974-1977) did not balk at hosting Apartheid South Africa’s Prime Minister John Vorster in April 1976. He had been a member of a pro-Nazi group during World War II. The visit was part of Israel’s security relations with the apartheid regime. During his visit, Vorster laid a wreath at Yad Vashem. The apartheid regime tried to develop chemical weapons that would harm black Africans only, including the fertility of African women. (…) Between 1973 and 1991, Israeli governments and the IDF sold weapons and training to Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, a regime that committed crimes against humanity, disappeared thousands, and tortured tens of thousands (Among them Left wing Jews ) The Pinochet regime brought torture to new heights of cruelty, unseen in modern history. The State of Israel was not interested in this regime’s ties with Nazi war criminals; Pinochet had granted asylum to senior Nazi criminal Walter Rauff, the inventor of the mobile gas chamber. One of the regime’s central torture centers was Colonia Dignidad, a Nazi and neo-Nazi colony in southern Chile. On top of that, Israel also engaged in public relations efforts for Pinochet in Washington." ^[101]

While bourgeois historian debate over the question what makes the genocide of the Jews unique an Armenian Poet Anoush Ter Taulian in her poem “Not Everyone Who Looks White is White” has found the key to the question:

"If you look beneath my skin tone, you will see

My indigenous Armenian marginalized reality

Granddaughter of pained survivor

Black, brown, red, yellow skinned indigenous people

Share the same fate

Of genocide, displacement and racial hate.

It is not my people’s shame that Ottoman Turks

Wore necklaces of Armenian women nipples in 1915.

Just like American soldiers wore nipple necklaces

When they killed Native women in Sand Creek 1865.

Demented conquerors deny genocides

Offer no reparations, just fake history

Leaving millions of ghost spirits

Seeking justice.

When I say that I am a Woman Of Color

I am sometimes ignored, mistrusted and

Mislabeled white by those who know little

About world history and geography

Whiteness is just a construct

So many try to fit into for the privilege it accords

My indigenous origin, though not obviously visible

Survives inwardly in infinite depth

My light skinned African American, Latina, Native, Asian

And mixed race sisters also face identity challenges,

But unlike them, I have no fixed category

Western Asian, Native of Near East?

Some WOC groups just put Arab and mistakenly

Leave out other Near/Middle Eastern peoples of color

I do not want to be other.

I want my WOC herstory included –

I arise indigenous Armenian

Birthed from sacred Mt. Ararat

Cultural identity of all Armenians Guardian spirit

Apricot blossomed Anatolian plain

Ethereal duduk flute music

Wandering like Armenian refugees exiled

Forced death marches by Ottoman Turk murderers

Who savored the stench of 2 million dead

Stolen indigenous land and homes

Eastern Turkey is really Occupied Western Armenia

3,000 years of culture wiped out

Barb wired Mt.Ararat under Turkish control

Escaped, terrorized Grandmother refugee

Hiding her secrets in the oven

Circles my inter-generational trauma

Displaced identity

I cringe when I am mislabeled European

Mistakenly connected to US slave past

My grandmother was a sex slave in a Turkish harem

The naked slave master whipping her tears

Under pretext of holy jihad against Christians

Ottoman Turks tried to wipe out all Armenians

Armenian school teachers hung from mulberry trees

Police skinning Armenians alive screaming

Traumatized refugee survivors came

Under Asian quota changed to white

So they could have homes prove they were ok

Real identity, there but not there

Tried to bury past humiliation, shame

Under blending/passing,

While the spirits of raped slave brides

And stolen Armenian children keep surfacing

Lost memory of indigenous past

Offerings to river and tree Spirits

Little acknowledgement of whose

Genocided indigenous land we occupy now

In the US I am a light skinned woman of color privilege

I am not profiled, harassed or murdered by racists

But I am not in denial of my indigenous heritage

Have to constantly explain my non-white ancestry and responsibilities

If you put me in the “white boat” you are just

Helping white supremacists who are afraid

Of dark-skinned people taking over and

Want to claim light skinned people of color as white.

I have jumped out of the boat

In solidarity with all indigenous freedom struggles

Hoping we can help each other resist assimilation

I welcome support to counter Turkey’s constant attempt to squash the truth

So called democratic US covers up and hides Turkey crimes of genocide

Who knows that US white controlled

Corporations doing business with Turkey

Like Coca Cola, Pfizer, GE and Lockheed

Lobby US Congress not to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide?

I choose to elevate my ancestral truth

I resist assimilation to honor my ancestors

Who died to save Armenia

Treasured interviews of Armenian Genocide survivors

Like Vartouhi with blue tattoo marks on her face

Signifying Kurdish abduction.

My body damaged by bomb/mine explosions heavy metal

In 90’s when joined armed self-defense struggle

To liberate Armenian Artsakh (Nagorno Karabagh) from Azeri control

Our blood soaked homeland

Far flung diaspora of exiled descendants

Swinging between language/culture

Connections/ disconnections

Remaining small Eastern Armenia Republic

Blockaded, impoverished, needing aid

Migrating storks still returning building

Magnificent 10ft rebirthing nests

Storks nests in our hearts

Opening and closing Armenia" [102]

The mass killing of the Jews is indeed unique because it was the first time in modern history that the European capitalist system carried out intentionally genocide of white Europeans. For this reason people know so little about the genocide of people of color.