Amerika

Although this view is not shared by all on the Alt Right and by increasing many on the Left, a sane look at history sees the Holocaust as tragedy; worse, it was an avoidable tragedy.

It is tragic on many levels. First, it contradicts the nationalist ideal of relocating people to their countries of origin where they are the founding group. Second, it commits “un-Aryan” acts such as working people under bad conditions, which also led to low-quality labor.

Finally, it simply shows a misunderstanding of how the world works. Each group acts in its own interest, and so it is foolish and illogical to expect foreign groups to behave as the national group does.

None of these were mysteries to Theodor Herzl, who had witnessed the Dreyfuss Affair and realized that anti-Semitism was a product of diversity. He converted to nationalism as a result, and advocated a return to Israel in order to avoid future pogroms:

Herzl concluded that anti-Semitism was a stable and immutable factor in human society, which assimilation did not solve. He mulled over the idea of Jewish sovereignty, and, despite ridicule from Jewish leaders, published Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State, 1896). Herzl argued that the essence of the Jewish problem was not individual but national. He declared that the Jews could gain acceptance in the world only if they ceased being a national anomaly. The Jews are one people, he said, and their plight could be transformed into a positive force by the establishment of a Jewish state with the consent of the great powers. He saw the Jewish question as an international political question to be dealt with in the arena of international politics.

Viewed in the context of history, the Holocaust was just another pogrom, but conducted with more efficiency thanks to state support as opposed to local authority or state unofficial approval of what were essentially lynch mobs.

The core of Herzl’s argument is that diversity pits groups against one another. National groups have a need to defend their values, genetics and culture. When another group is present, that group becomes a threat, and is scapegoated in times of instability.

To this we can add the symptoms of this problem, including that different cultures are naturally incompatible, which leads to alien groups participating in destructive activities without being fully aware of the negative backlash to come:

While in 1934 38.5% of the top officials in the NKVD were Jews, this number was decreased to 31.9% in July 1937, 3.9% in September 1938 and 3.5% in January 1940.

The NKVD was a Soviet secret police organization that removed ideological non-conformists and purged the Soviet Union of many of its best and brightest. For a group that comprised a small fraction of the Soviet population, 38.5% participation was huge, and resulted — in a gentler form of what happened in Nazi Germany — in a purge of Jewish participants in the system.

Jews were heavily active in far-Left organizations in general, leading to an association of these groups with Jewishness:

Jews were proportionately overrepresented in the RSDWP from the start. Apart from being active in the party’s Jewish faction, the Bund, which sought to mobilize the “Jewish street” by conducting propaganda activity in Yiddish, Jews comprised a significant proportion of the party’s “Russian” contingent. These acculturated Jews generally inclined toward the Mensheviks rather than the Bolsheviks, but even among the latter, there were not a few Jews. In early 1917, their numbers reached just under 1,000 out of a total of 23,600. Most important, they were highly overrepresented in the Bolshevik leadership. Significant figures included Iurii Kamenev, Maksim Litvinov, Karl Radek, Iakov Sverdlov, Leon Trotsky, and Grigorii Zinov’ev. This was so blatant that anti-Bolsheviks frequently associated the party with Jews in order to contaminate the party’s public image.

…Jews remained overrepresented in the party rank and file. Representing just 1.8 percent of the total population in the 1926 census, Jews comprised 5.2 percent of party members in 1922 and 4.3 percent in 1927; in Belorussia, they accounted for 24 percent of the party membership. The proportional decline did not signify an absolute decrease, as total membership rose in this period from slightly more than 400,000 to almost 800,000. Of the Jewish party members in Ukraine, 67.5 percent were classified as workers and 28.8 percent as white-collar employees; in Russia, 47.8 percent were workers and 48 percent were white collar. The size of the party continued to grow until 1933, when there were more than 2.2 million full members; it then fell, topping the 2 million mark again only in 1941. In both 1922 and in 1927, Jews were the sole ethnic group, with women comprising more than 20 percent of its membership (24.1% in 1922 and 23.0% in 1927).

…Extrapolation leads to the conclusion that Jews remained, into the 1960s at least, the most party-saturated nationality in the Soviet Union, and in terms of absolute numbers, the largest non-Slavic group of Communists, with the possible exception of the Tatars. At the same time, the party saturation of the Soviet Jewish community fell from about 300 percent of the national average in 1940 to between 140 and 180 percent in 1965. However, once the Jewish emigration movement gained momentum, and the Jewish population continued to drop as a result of both emigration and negative natural growth, the percentage of Jewish Communists among all party members nationwide fell progressively, although in certain areas their proportion in the Jewish community actually grew.

This showed Jews as over-represented in both the Revolution and the ruling parties that came in its aftermath until Stalin began his purges, most of which were apparently bloodless, that removed Jews from power and made anti-Semitism part of the official doctrine of the Soviet Union.

At that point, however, the idea had been cemented in European imagination that Jews were the driving force behind the Bolshevik revolution, and this idea remained consistent for some time, especially given high Jewish participation in Communist and Socialist organizations in the West.

Today we are beginning to see discussion of this portion of that segment of history, including an acknowledgement of the high number of Jews involved in war crimes in the Soviet Union:

An Israeli student finishes high school without ever hearing the name “Genrikh Yagoda,” the greatest Jewish murderer of the 20th Century, the GPU’s deputy commander and the founder and commander of the NKVD. Yagoda diligently implemented Stalin’s collectivization orders and is responsible for the deaths of at least 10 million people. His Jewish deputies established and managed the Gulag system.

…Many Jews sold their soul to the devil of the Communist revolution and have blood on their hands for eternity. We’ll mention just one more: Leonid Reichman, head of the NKVD’s special department and the organization’s chief interrogator, who was a particularly cruel sadist.

In 1934, according to published statistics, 38.5 percent of those holding the most senior posts in the Soviet security apparatuses were of Jewish origin. They too, of course, were gradually eliminated in the next purges. In a fascinating lecture at a Tel Aviv University convention this week, Dr. Halfin described the waves of soviet terror as a “carnival of mass murder,” “fantasy of purges”, and “essianism of evil.” Turns out that Jews too, when they become captivated by messianic ideology, can become great murderers, among the greatest known by modern history.

Sever Plocker, the author of this piece, makes an important distinction here: Communism is a “messianic ideology” which converts Jewish tendencies toward trying to do good into apocalyptic visions. This appeal snared many in the West, such that in the 1930s most “intellectuals” had Communist sympathies.

In fact, in America, the composition of the Communist party was very similar to the frequency of Jewish participation as found in the Soviet Union:

The so-called “Old Left” was led by the Communist Party (CPUSA), and that organization almost collapsed after 1956, when its members learned, to their sorrow, that the Soviet state they had been worshiping for decades was, under Joseph Stalin, actually a murderous tyranny.

…In 1939, according to Professor Klehr, some 40 percent of the 39,000 CPUSA members were Jewish, and concentrated in big cities, New York in particular. Half of the party’s cultural apparatus, centered in New York, was Jewish, added Tony Michels.

When Henry Wallace ran for president on the Communist-inspired Progressive Party ticket in 1948, about one third of his vote came from Jews.

This furthered the view among Western leaders that Jews were associated with Communism, and was information that the Nazis were almost certainly aware of. Douglas Reed writes of the international opinion regarding Jewish participation in Bolshevism and Communism:

At the time, the facts were available. The British Government’s White Paper of 1919 (Russia, No. 1, a Collection of Reports on Bolshevism) quoted the report sent to Mr. Balfour in London in 1918 by the Netherlands Minister at Saint Petersburg, M. Oudendyke: “Bolshevism is organized and worked by Jews, who have no nationality and whose one object is to destroy for their own ends the existing order of things.” The United States Ambassador, Mr. David R. Francis, reported similarly: “The Bolshevik leaders here, most of whom are Jews and 90 percent of whom are returned exiles, care little for Russia or any other country but are internationalists and they are trying to start a worldwide social revolution.” M. Oudendyke’s report was deleted from later editions of the British official publication and all such authentic documents of that period are now difficult to obtain. Fortunately for the student, one witness preserved the official record.

This was Mr. Robert Wilton, correspondent of the London Times, who experienced the Bolshevik revolution. The French edition of his book included the official Bolshevik lists of the membership of the ruling revolutionary bodies (they were omitted from the English edition).

These records show that the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party, which wielded the supreme power, contained 3 Russians (including Lenin) and 9 Jews. The next body in importance, the Central Committee of the Executive Commission (or secret police) comprized 42 Jews and 19 Russians, Letts, Georgians and others. The Council of People’s Commissars consisted of 17 Jews and five others. The Moscow Che-ka (secret police) was formed of 23 Jews and 13 others. Among the names of 556 high officials of the Bolshevik state officially published in 1918-1919, were 458 Jews and 108 others. Among the central committees of small, supposedly “Socialist” or other non-Communist parties (during that early period the semblance of “opposition” was permitted, to beguile the masses, accustomed under the Czar to opposition parties) were 55 Jews and 6 others. All the names are given in the original documents reproduced by Mr. Wilton.

Maybe all of these guys were anti-Semites; maybe they were not, or the truth was somewhere in the middle. It is important to avoid committing the fallacy of accidentally cherry-picking data, because as anyone can figure with some basic math, most Jews were not involved.

It may be that Jews have a higher rate of Leftism. There is an idealism in the Jewish faith and culture that always seeks a pacifism and balance, as one would expect from a mercantile and not warrior society, combined with an honest goodwill. In my experience, most people of Jewish heritage have been generous, thoughtful and highly opinionated, and these characteristics taken together lead toward a proclivity toward idealistic beliefs such as egalitarianism, and anyone who looks seriously at egalitarianism realizes that it is unstable without socialism, which in turn requires a strong state to protect it, much as we now have in the West.

These documents are not mentioned here to fuel the anti-Semites, but instead to do the exact opposite: to point out that wherever a group is foreign among a national culture, it will feel like an outsider, and thus be inclined toward political activity, at which point it will act out its own cultural mandate rather than that of the host culture. This is why diversity does not work: each group works in self-interest, and according to its own inclinations, as Herzl noted long ago.

To avoid future Holocausts, we need some clarity on this issue so that it can be fairly discussed without devolving into the kind of scapegoating that leads to pogromism. Then, we need a safe homeland for Jews, which means an Israel without rampaging Palestinians blowing themselves up on buses and at cafes. This assertion proves controversial for the West, which being Leftist has aligned itself with the underdog in the Palestinians instead of the more successful Jewish population in Israel.

It would also make sense for Jews in the West to right now start abandoning radical Leftism. With a Jewish candidate for president, Bernie Sanders, running on a socialist platform, and Jews making half of the donations to the Democrat party, Jewish visibility as a voice of the Left endangers them as cultural backlash collides with the Left. People have seen what our future would be like under the Obama-Clinton regime, and are starting to realize how much the Left has re-shaped American and European society over the past century, and the radical response seen with the election of Donald J. Trump and Brexit signifies that the pushback is still in its infancy but gaining strength rapidly.

As we transition from failed liberal democracy and the socialist state, we run a high risk of re-enacting old and bad patterns including pogroms. It is better to face this issue honestly now than to allow the possibility of violence to emerge unchanged and bloodthirsty as it does when a scapegoat is successfully created.

Tags: atrocities, bolshevism, communism, David R. Francis, Douglas Reed, genocide, Genrikh Yagoda, jewish, jews, joseph stalin, judaism, Lavrentiy Beria, Robert Wilton, russia, soviet union, war crimes