Today, April 29, is also Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Rememberance Day.

That is a stunning irony.

Now I wonder if my article is inappropriate.

Certainly not inappropriate. You do no dishonor to those remembering the Holocaust, because your post does not take the view that the Holocaust "wasn't so bad, because look what others suffered!"

The whole point of remembering the Holocaust is to make sure that such events are prevented whenever possible. Unofrtunately, we don't seem to be very good at that... keep an eye on Zimbabwe, which has a number of the "danger signs" pointing to a leadup to genocide.

I do not respond well to photographs, which tend to sensationalize information about events and thus cloud one's ability to think in a calm and rational manner. This is especially true of photographs of massacres, individual dead bodies, and similar stuff. In my experience, these are typically included for purposes of propagandizing on behalf of one side or another in regard to a country at war or in the midst of major civil disturbances.

Mass killings have been commonplace throughout history. We came into everyday consciousness of them in the 20th century with the spread of mass communications, accompanied by the rise of governments that tolerated mass killings of civilians by their armed forces or centrally planned mass killings as part of state policy.

Ara and Dean, I know you both feel strongly about this stuff. In your case, Ara, I understand that your grandfather was Armenian, and I assume that constant awareness of the mass killings of Armenians in far eastern Turkey in April 1915 was bred into you with your mother's milk.

What do you expect to accomplish? Nobody is going to force the Turkish government of 2003 to evacuate any portion of their national territory to create a Greater Armenia that has not existed for a thousand years or more, merely because of a systematic set of criminal acts of a predecessor Turkish government committed 88 years ago. Among other considerations, modern Turkey is more important to the west in general than the combination of all the Greeks in the world and all the Armenians in the world, combined. You think not? Than watch what the United States does and not what the United States says.

Despite the German Nazi mass killings of six million Jews, there is nonetheless is a more or less complete Germany today, and an Austria, too. Despite the genocide practiced on this continent against hundreds of Indian tribes who were purposely starved, had their lands stolen and were pushed into concentration camps ("reservations", if you must), there very much are a viable and complete United States of America and an equally viable and complete Canada. Despite what was probably the most monumental campaign of mass killings in human history by their 20th century leaders, there are still a complete Russia, China, Cambodia, and so on.

I think the worst thing that has happened to the Jewish nation was the European holocaust of 1945, in that the ongoing response to it has become almost as nationally debilitating as the mass killings themselves. It has been turned into a pathetic, ghastly and endless retelling of human misery for which there is no answer, and no amelioration, on a scale which all but warps entire peoples.

Another excellent example of what I am trying to describe are the shia Muslims of Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere, who annually and agonizingly celebrate the martyr's death of Muhamad's grandson Hussein at the hands of soldiers of the kalif Yazid in 680. Ever since, the young men of the shia ("faction") have gone into the streets, marching, chanting and flagellating themselves into bloody pulps with whips, chains, knives and anything else than can cut skin. Will they every get over that affront to justice? Of course not. Will they ever rise to anything beyond it? Of course not.

I think there comes a time when the past must be set aside in favor of the present and the future. There must be something in the long Armenian story beyond the murders in eastern Turkey. There must be something in the long Jewish story beyond the Nazi death camps.

The only people who, I think, have found a way to deal with suffering on this scale are the Japanese. The US Army Air Force, through incessant and increasingly devastating long-range bombing from late 1944 through early August 1945, pulverized almost all the Japanese cities and killed almost certainly more than a million civilians. Yes, we were at war with them, but that is not at question.

The point here is that the Japanese quickly adjusted to the new situation. They rebuilt their cities into urban centers equal to or superior to those anywere else on the planet. They created an entirely new epoch in their history with a written constitution, civil control over the military and equal rights for women. They went on to all but worldwide economic mastery. All in a single generation. I judge them a truly superior culture, partly on the strength of this national characteristic, which is best described by the German noun "Sachlichkeit", which translates loosely into the English word "objectivity", but which describes their icy ability to analyze their national situation and remake their own society from inside out.

To almost the same degree, I would credit the Chinese. After Mao died, they took down most of his statues (treating them with more respect than the Russians did with their Lenin and Stalin statues). But they did this quietly, with no fuss, as befitted the passing of any other emperor in their long history, and got on with life and the building of a better China.

I hope the Armenians, Jews, shia Muslims and others who self-identify as "victims" grow out of their victimhood to become something better, longer lasting, and more useful in the coming great ages of the world.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

The figure of 6 million holocaust dead is hotly disputed in revisionist quarters, as are the Auschwitz gas chambers and ovens, the soap from human fat, the lamp shades from skin eta alia. The objective evidence for all these has been shown to be open to serious question. But holocaust questions are not permitted in Germany, where thousands are imprisoned for this apostasy.

Of course, hundreds of thousands dead ... millions dead ... it is all the same in essence. Whatever the truth of the holocaust, genocide occurred and that is an enduring scar on every German heart. But genocide is always with us and takes more than one form. The dispossession and genocide of white Europeans and Americans is taking place as we live and breath today. The weapons are cultural, not military. But the effect will be felt just the same in as little as five decades in some countries. It is happening in silence and without mainstream political objection, such is the fear among whites of causing offence. The causes are various, but of those that are political in character nearly all, sadly, are jewish-inspired.

I ask, as we remember those who suffered and died in the camps during WW2, for some understanding to attach to white Europeans and Americans who see the coming disaster and recoil. They may not all be articulate or sympathetic individuals. They may even, some of them, be motivated by hate and fear. It does not matter. They are witness to the forced passing of their race. It is worth making the effort to understand.

Arnold: Although some will call you hard-hearted, I think you raise perfectly legitimate questions that, I think, most holocaust survivors--and their children--raise for themselves regularly. The question is, when is remembrance a healthy thing that we keep in our hearts so we are ready to fight against it happening again, and when is it a sort of pornographic self-indulence?

I think this is worth discussing.

Mr. Yates, on the other hand, may have just made that impossible, if anyone else should make the mistake of responding to him.

I just can't help asking the wider audience this: do you suppose Mr. Yates voted for Buchanan, or for Nader? Tough call, wouldn't you say?

The Red-Brown coalition lives.

Mr Yates,

Just because I think it would be a good idea for victim peoples to escape from the clutches of the past and build a new future, does not mean that I think these mass killings did not take place. Nor does it mean that I wouldn't hang the perpetrators if I had them in my power.

In fact, the killings were conducted under circumstances so disgusting and sub-human that American soldiers in World War II, viewing the insides of real Nazi concentration camps near the end of the war, were so furious that they literally beat to death some of the SS guards by smashing in their skulls. That brother, is American style pissed-off with a vengeance.

I can see someone committing largescale crimes out of arrogance or insanity. But when some group such as the Hitler Gang and their would-be successors systematically try to hide the evidence of these crimes, then I can only curl my lips in disgust. I shoot with and talk with a lot of law enforcement guys, who tell me that hiding evidence almost always is a clear sign of guilt or complicity.

Are you not aware that the real Nazis left mountains of evidence behind when they abandoned the killing centers in Poland in 1944? Don't you know that a small army of former Nazi officials put together detailed information that confirmed the deaths and purposeful starvation when they were caught by the Allies at the end of World War II?

As for the "passing of the white race", what in hell are you talking about? We all but rule this planet, with a level of power never before amassed or even dreamt of throughout human history.

Moreover, the economies, cultures, and governmental models prevalent in major non-white countries such as Japan are Europeanized and Americanized to a degree that they are indistinguishable from us in all except skin color, written and spoken language, and some of the major flashing electric signs on Tokyo's great Ginza.

So where are all these Jewish-inspired conspiracies you hint at? Or is this just another piece of fakery such as the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"? I think you are pushing a sort of flat-earth society level of hatred which most people can see through. But it's your business, I suppose, if that's how you get your jollies.

(Dean, what's this red-brown coalition you referred to? Hitler's favorite colors, or something?)

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

To Dean: I followed the link from "Cut on the Bias" to you to read this genocide piece.

To Arnold: I think that you are attributing some elements of American victimhood society onto the Jews and the Armenians that really don't appear in those two ethnic groups. I don't think that either of the two are demanding that they receive some sort of justice from Germany or Turkey. They aren't saying that they are being held back because Great-grandpop was slaughtered years ago, so that now they are waiting for some reparation to make up for their losses. They aren't failing to strive for success because of a victim attitude. What they really are seeking are two separate goals.

One is international recognition of what happened to their recent ancestors. They don't want history to forget that millions were slaughtered in a systematic way solely because those individuals were of a particular ethnic group, and that group happened to be their own. It is the same idea as a memorial to soldiers years after a war; people forget about the sacrifice that was made generations ago, and those who are sympathetic to the veterans and the fallen want to make sure that history does not forget. The Jews have succeeded in this task quite well over the last sixty years. The Armenians, however, are still trying to raise consciousness almost ninety years later.

The second goal is more altruistic in nature: to alert the current generation of past atrocities so that genocide will never happen again. That is why many Jews were vocal about the mass killings in Rwanda and Yugoslavia during the nineties. They desire to protect not only their own ethnic group, but new victim groups as well.

I just don't see any Armenian or Jew who is not striving to reach his or her full potential, much less one with a victim attitude that prevents him from being self-motivated. Perhaps there is some factual data that you perceive that I do not.

Yeah, I suppose that "Red-Brown alliance" reference was oscure. But it's a meme that's worth spreading. I'll post an article about that momentarily. But it's a reference to Steven Schwartz' The Two Faces of Fascism article. Not that I agree with all of it, but... well hell, I'll post an article about it, like I said.

Let's get back to the real discussion: the social ramifications of genocide and genocide remembrance. As opposed to how the Armenians are secretly pulling the puppet strings of the Turkish government....

Dean,

Outstanding post. I think it's important to commemorate these modern instances of genocide if, for no other reason, than to remind ourselves of how thin the veneer of civilization really is.

Arnold,

Armenians and others can speak for themselves, but as a Jew I take strong issue with your criticism. Sixty years ago, in the heart of "civilized" Europe, Jews were exterminated while the rest of the world did nothing. In Eastern Europe, the heart and soul of the Jewish world, with a flowering culture going back hundreds of years, was entirely wiped out. After that did Jews wallow in their misery? Hell no.

In Palestine, Jews fought for and won the right to establish a sovereign Jewish state in their ancient homeland -- the culmination of a 2,000 year dream. That country is now the only democracy in the region, with a market economy and robust high-tech industry, that is struggling against tremendous odds to achieve peace with neighbors who have a history of striving to destroy it.

In the United States, American Jews have achieved a prominence in such areas as the arts, sciences, business, politics, law, and academia far out of proportion to their numbers. In Russia, Jews who under 70 years of communist oppression were forbidden almost any expression of the religious or cultural identity, are now flocking to Jewish community centers where they can begin to reconnect with their peoplehood.

If part of our identity is not to forget the 6 million of our people who were killed, while our parents and grandparents were lucky enough to survive, I'm not sure who you are to find fault in that.

Finally, I find your comparision of post-war Japan to victims of genocide baffling. Imperial Japan launched a brutal war of aggression, and engaged in horrible atrocities against conquered peoples and prisoners of war who they considered essentially subhuman. That Japan after being utterly defeated and conquered rejected its militaristic culture and became a good global citizen is to its credit. But it is entirely irrelevant to how Armenians or Jews ought to remember their own experiences of being slaughtered.

Arnold,

I appreciate your comments.

However, nothing I have ever said, here or on my site, or anywhere, should ever have given you the idea that I consider myself a victim, either as an Armenian or as a Jew.

And one last thing: don't confuse forgiveness (which I have granted) with forgetting (which I will never do).

I'd like to tack on a very minor point. Dean's inclusion of kindly old Uncle Ho in his list of 20th century mass murderers is the very first mention of this sad truth that I have ever seen from any American whether scholar, journalist, pundit, or barroom blathermonger. Just for the record--Ho Chi Minh, as a long-term agent of Stalin's Comintern, apparently felt obliged to carry out his own liquidation of the kulaks when he took power in Tonkin China. His method was ingenious. He simply posted soldiers around the dwelling of every farmer who owned more than one hectare of land and kept the inhabitants under house arrest until they starved to death. Thus the platoons of useful idiots among the commentariat were able to say with a straight face that there was no bloodbath. Thanks to Dean for alluding to the discreet charm of the Tonkinese elite.

The most conservative figures I've found for Vietnam suggest that Ho Chi Minh killed 65,000 political dissidents in the first ten years or so after the last helicopter left Saigon. Most sources I've seen put the figure of dead at about 10 times that number, including those who underwent forcible relocation or were killed attempting to flee to places like Cambodia or Thailand.

The number of people interned in Veitnam for decades in "re-education camps" is similarly only guessed at. In fairness, these camps should probably be thought of more like the frighteningly brutal but survivable Chinese Laogai than as Stalinist or Nazi-style death camps.

Since Vietnam is still a repressive dictatorship, we may never know the real numbers. Sadly, however, many still think of Ho as a hero who "admired the Declaration of Independence," as opposed to the KGB operative and Comintern flack that he was.

But he's just another in a long line of villains. Was he worse than Robert Mugabe, for example? It remains to be seen.

People like to tell me that hate is terrible emotion, bad for the soul. I say that if you cannot hate people like Pol Pot, Robert Mugabe, Idi Amin, Haile Mariam Mengistu, Saddam Hussein, or Kim Il Jong, you've forgotten why God gave us the capacity to hate.

Would someone take a look at this and comment for the record. I'd appreciate any links to studies that either corroborate or destroy this woeful interpretation of history.

"Meet the Jewish people who murdered over 20 million innocents in Russia from 1917-onward, long before Hitler came to power. Yes, Virginia, Hitler was largely responding to that murder event with his own Holocaust [tm, the Jewish community]. And yes, Virginia, we know that your history teacher never mentioned the Bolshevik holocaust -- neither did ours. "

1. Vladimir I. Lenin (1870-1924): first Premier of the USSR; Marxist theoretician; a lawyer; founder of the Bolsheviks (1903); supreme dictator of early Bolshevik regime; founder of the Comintern; author of the Marxist handbook "State and Revolution"; Lenin was one-quarter Jewish, and was married to a Jewess.

2. Joseph Stalin (1879-1953): an early Bolshevik; supreme dictator of Soviet Union from 1927-1953. After V. Lenin's death, and prior to 1927, the Bolshevik regime was run by a triumvirate composed of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin. Stalin was the editor of the Bolshevik newspaper, Pravda ("Truth"). Stalin, like Lenin, was married to a Jewess. Stalin was not a vigorous supporter of forcing Communism upon other countries -- unlike Trotsky -- a feature which likely prevented a Soviet assault upon various Western countries. [Not Jewish]

3. Leon Trotsky (aka Bronstein) (1879-1940): Trotsky was a Menshevik; was Commissar of Foreign Affairs; supreme commander of the Soviet Red Army; member of Politburo; he rebelled against Stalin and his supporters and was murdered by Stalin for that reason. Trotsky strongly advocated the idea of global -- not simply local -- Marxist revolution.

4. Lazar M. Kaganovich (1893-1991): a prime director of mass-murder for Stalin; held a series of vocations, including commissar of transport, heavy industry and the fuel industry; a Politburo member; he was Stalin's brother-in-law and also his chief advisor; many execution orders bore Kaganovich's signature [1], evidence that he had the power to order the deaths of civilians [2]. During the 1930s, he was in charge of the deportations of "enemies of the state" to Siberia; was nicknamed the "Wolf of the Kremlin" because of his penchant for violence. He was considered by many to be the most powerful and important man under Stalin. Died of
old age in Moscow.

5. Grigory Zinoviev (aka Apfelbaum; aka Radomyslsky) (1883-1936): great pal of Lenin; member of the Central Committee; chairman of the Comintern; member of Politburo; executive of secret police; first president of the Third International; A. Lunacharsky called him "one of the principal counsellors of our Central Committee and (he) belongs unquestionably to the four or five men who constitute the political brain of the Party."

6. Grigori Y. Sokolnikov (1888-1939): a Bolshevik; friend of Trotsky; Commissar of Finance; a diplomat; member of the "Left Opposition"; Soviet ambassador to England; creator of the "chervonetz," the first stable Soviet currency; was part of "Russian" delegation that signed the Brest-Litovsk treaty in 1918; member of the Central Committee and Politburo.

And it goes on and on......thanks for your help. PS Be sure to set the "threshold" filter to -1 or you'll miss my inarticulate and ineffective responses to these "facts". PS..I've never seen anything like this.

Link........http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.php

Dean,
Outstanding post and commentary. Just wanted to post about an amazing book by Peter Balakian (an Armenian American), Black Dog of Fate. Born and raised in NY, the book is about Mr. Balakian's journey to awareness and contemplation of the Armenian holocaust as survived by members of his immediate family. I cannot convey how powerful the book is in describing this quest. It was given to me by an Armenian friend and she thought I would appreciate it; I never knew the depth of the atrocities in Turkey until I read this about five years ago. Well worth checking out!

Chuck
Houston, TX

[quote]The only people who, I think, have found a way to deal with suffering on this scale are the Japanese. The US Army Air Force, through incessant and increasingly devastating long-range bombing from late 1944 through early August 1945, pulverized almost all the Japanese cities and killed almost certainly more than a million civilians. Yes, we were at war with them, but that is not at question.

The point here is that the Japanese quickly adjusted to the new situation. They rebuilt their cities into urban centers equal to or superior to those anywere else on the planet. They created an entirely new epoch in their history with a written constitution, civil control over the military and equal rights for women. They went on to all but worldwide economic mastery. All in a single generation. I judge them a truly superior culture, partly on the strength of this national characteristic, which is best described by the German noun "Sachlichkeit", which translates loosely into the English word "objectivity", but which describes their icy ability to analyze their national situation and remake their own society from inside out. [/quote]

This is deeply, deeply misleading. Dispensing with the entire idea of justification and culpability allows one to draw lines of moral equivalence between the situation of the Japanese and the Armenians (for example). Whether that was your intent, it was implied and is simply not true.

Setting that aside, you ascribe to the Japanese something that was not entirely their doing, and I'm curious why?

They hardly remade their society "from the inside out". From your erudite and cogent post, you must know of course that the Japanese didn't write their constitution, the Americans did in 1945. They didn't (re)build the basic structures of their society at all by themselves.
In fact, one might argue that the erasure of their society through the bombing mentioned above might have FACILITATED the wholesale rewriting of mores and norms that were otherwise ingrained. In fact is was rather draconian postwar American administration that broke the back of the cult of the military in 1945-46.

Their economic miracle was an impressive example of collective behavior, but their inability to sustain their prosperity implies that the results proceeded wholly or significantly from particular late 20th-C conditions than any inherent change to their 'national character' - which remains pretty much unchanged in terms of widespread xenophobia, racism, misogyny, etc.

What country, on sober reflection, wouldn't like a chance to erase everything and "do over"?

I don't mean to hijack the thread. But I object to the inclusion of the Japanese in an 'oppressed peoples' context, and I think to do so cheapens the original important point of the text.

Dear Cat, please do not worry. There are no facts that lunatics consider sufficent proof. Any fact you produce is merely more proof of how widely the Jewish power is spread.

If you produce the ghost of Lenin saying "I was not motivated by racial hatred, but merely by love of power and, of course, belief in the ideology" that would not be enough. (Incidentally, Lenin may have been 1/4 converted Jew (this was always a rumor in Russia), but he was definitely at least 3/4 Russian. If he had been organizing the extermination of the Russian people, wouldn't he have to start with himself?)

If you show them hard numbers which prove that, in Stalin's camps, Jews were killed disproportinatley to the population (and among the Chilean disappeared, BTW), they will just marvel at your credulity and move on.

I have an explaination for these people that works for me. If you believe you are responsible for yourself, and you have some problems, then the obvious solution is to work hard to fix them. If you believe that "the Jews did it!" whatever "it" is, then there is no need to work hard. Hatred is just so much easier than hard work, that I really don't believe it's likely any one of them would look at facts and say "Oh, OK". If they were capable of dealing with reality, they would have done it by now.

So, a very long post (sorry, Dean) to basically say, please don't bother. They aren't worth a second of your time.

I am simply horrified at the attempt to make the Japanese "victims" and praise their postwar adjustments. Leaving aside the fact that the Americans forced change on them, there is the more uncomfortable problem that large elements of Japanese society deny the rape of Nanking, the outrageous behavior of their soldiers, the genocidal experiments on humans in China, the concentration camps where POWs died at rates many times those of POWS in Nazi camps. Indeed, it is my understanding that many of the participants in Dr. Ishi's tortures and experimentation in China are alive, well, and unpunished today.

Without the A-bomb, the defeat of Japan would have made the Fall of Berlin look like a bloodless cakewalk.

Ara,

I never forgive and always forget, turning on its head your calculus of responses to monstrosities that occur in human affairs from time to time. Or more accurately, with great regularity.

Back in the early 1940s, when I was a kid of 7 going on 11, I was part of the cheering section as the awesome powers of the United States, the Soviet Union and the British Empire smashed and pulverized Germany and Japan to death. (Nobody gave much thought to the Italians, whom most Americans of that era regarded as comic opera buffoons who had done the Allies a service by joining the Axis.)

So when we heard that the mighty 8th Air Force or RAF's Bomber Command had just burned out an entire German city and killed a large part of the population there, you can be damned certain we cheered them on. Same with Japan and the B-29 Superfortresses based on Tinian and Guam. Same with the mighty Soviet armies and what they did to everything German east of the Elbe River.

Then, when it was over, all this stopped. There was no need for forgiveness, because our side had virtually destroyed everything there was to destroy in Hitler's Germany and Tojo's Japan. One year afterward, they hanged most of the prominent Nazi leaders at Nuremberg, and most Americans were losing interest in this stuff even by then.

Then came the surrender of the Jap leaders to MacArthur and Nimitz aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. My older cousins and various uncles were coming home home from theaters of war all across the planet. (My father had seen active service in the AEF in World War I, and was too old for World War II.)

All this meant forgetting the damn war and getting back to a baseball season with real players in place of the stumblebums who filled in during wartime; new models of Detroit Iron for civilian use for the first time in four years; the end of food and gasoline rationing; the start of the biggest and most continuous economic boom since the stock market crash in 1929. It was a return to normalcy, man! Nobody wanted to care about the fucking war anymore.

Anyway, Ara, I really could not imagine collecting gruesome pictures of grinning Turks hanging dead Armenians from their heels over a bridge. Is this pitiful crap really what the Armenian National Committee of San Francisco spends its time on?

If so, pretty soon they will sound like the Serbs, who can't seem to get over the fact that the Turks beat their shit out of their people at Kosovo Polje -- the field of the blackbirds -- in the Balkans, which began the breakup of their short-lived medieval empire. Look at what that led to 10 years ago.

The Jews have got two minor festivals, Chanuka and Purim. (Minor because neither is written up in Tora; I learned all this in Israel when my wife and I studied there.)

Chanuka fired up my imagination. Because it is an epic story of how this small people beat the shit out of the Greeks and Syrians about 200 years before Jesus came along. They killed all of them they could find in Jerusalem, purified their great temple, and made an independent state until the Roman power shredded it about 250 years later. And they did this on their own. No ancient equivalent of the USA to give them backing. That was truly worth celebrating.

Then there's Purim. Mostly a story about how one of the King of Persia's court whores (Esther), while in the sack with the boss, convinced him to kill this anti-Jewish minister Haman and all his sons. Well, what kind of victory was that? Even if I were a believer, I wouldn't waste my time on this one.

Anyway, Ara, the point is, find some victory in Armenian history, or Jewish history if you prefer, and celebrate that. Otherwise, you'll spend your life like some of the pathetic ex-Confederates and their widows after 1865, bemoaning the Cause in parlors with Robert E Lee's photo up on the wall. When they should have gotten on with the job of building railroads, factories and new money, Yankee style.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

Nobody should apologize for adding constructive comments to any thread here on Dean's World. I only expect apologies for boorish behavior, of which we have had none.

What is so cringeworthy about discussing the Jews and communism is that you can't open your yap without either some ill-informed idiot talking about how the Jews are behind countless evils in the world (as if Jews could ever agree with each other on anything, let alone plot world domination), or some Jewish or Jew-friendly person getting his hackles up because he thinks you're one of the former.

Now the fact is that there were a disproportionate number of Jews and Jewish-descent people involved in the Communist movement. Marx's father was a Jew who converted to Christianity. Lenin was part Jewish. So was Trotsky. Indeed, although I don't know for certain, I would not be in the least bit surprised if all the figures named by Cat above were partially or wholly Jewish in ancestry.

If you look at the history of Communism in the West, the picture is even more surprising. Many, many, many of the leaders of the Communist movement, going all the way back to Rosa Luxembourg, were Jewish. Jews were found in the Communist movement in numbers far out of proportion to their presence in the general population.

Two indispensible books to read that look at this phenomenon are:

Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey by David Horowitz, an ethnic Jew and former Marxist.

Commies, by Ron Radosh, an ethnic Jew and former Marxist.

Horowitz' book will undoubtedly be used as primary source material by historians for centuries. Radosh's book is less in-depth, but has a broader scope and is also worth reading. While neither focuses his work on the Jewish angle, both discuss it. Horowitz in particular deals with it at length. He is an incendiary character, but he is also fiercely intellectually honest, and as tough on himself as he is on anyone else. I find his book simply amazing. I've read it twice and will probably read it at least one more time before I die.

There are some basic things to remember when contemplating the Jewish-Communist connection--and yes, there really is one--before engaging in dialog about it:

1) Most Jewish-descent Communists looked on their Jewish ancestry as either a complete irrelevancy or with contempt. Lenin was highly antisemitic, as was Marx. Lenin liked to refer to ideas he hated as "dirty Jewish" ideas.

2) Almost all Jewish-descent Communists were atheists who utterly rejected the faith of their forefathers.

3) There is no, absolutely NO, evidence of any conspiratorial get-together of Jews to cook up a worldwide Communist movement.

A lot of this goes into phrasing. Would it be fair to say that Germany conducted the Holocaust? I generally try not to say it that way, since the overwhelming majority of Germans today had absolutely nothing to do with it--those who did would be over 80 today. Which is why I increasingly try to say the Nazis did it.

Similarly, could you say that Jews cooked up Communism? Well, if you consider the half-Jewish son of a man who converted to Christianity to be Jewish, then yes, you could say that and be technically correct. Could you say that Jews were hugely influential in the Communist movement? Well, if by that you mean, "there were a lot of people of ethnically Jewish descent hanging around the Bolshevik leadership," then yes, I'm afraid you would be correct.

Notably, however, they treated non-Communist Jews as badly as every other non-Communist. They despised Judaism and just being faithful to the Jewish faith would get you branded a counter-revolutionary and likely killed during the revolution. After the revolution, Jews who kept the faith were oppressed much as they always had been in Russia. And when Stalin came to power, it got even worse.

Indeed, just before he died, Stalin ordered the mass exile to Siberia of just about every Jew in the Soviet Union. Had he not died within a day or two of giving that order, and had the Politburo not decided to rescind the order in the days after Stalin's death, he would likely have gone down in history for creating the Second Holocaust, because probably about as many Jews would have died had that order been carried out.

You could, literally, write a book about the relationship of the Jews to Communism. Indeed, at least one Rabbi has said, rather controversially, that Judaism has had three children: Christianity, Islam, and Marxism. I think the main reason that such a book hasn't been written is that most Jews--rightly I think--have feared what crazy Goyim would say about it.

Given that Jew-haters are increasingly discussing the phenomenon on their own, however, perhaps it's about time for historians and sociologists to take a hard look at this phenomenon. Someone needs to dispel the mythology around it. It's always been there, but the internet seems to be amplifying it (Yay internet. Boo internet. Ya know?). Someone should look at this with an unjaundiced eye and set the record straight.

I'd love to write such a book myself, although I'd probably want at least one Jewish co-author. But I doubt anyone would give me a contract to write such a book.

to Steve Lieb,

Why do I pump up the Japs so much? Because I admire them. In my mind, they represent every kind of national virture that other smaller peoples ought to emulate in order to make it in a dangerous, greedy, hypocritical world in which big powers get away with what they can and small ones suffer what they must.

In order to facilitate the process of admiring them, I have to ignore whatever bad crap they did to the Chinese, etc. Like most everyone else, I have selective prejudices and differentiate between Goodthink and Badthink. Simple as that.

to Bob Lucas,

I'm an altruist, and I think the important thing is to see to it that my family and friends don't get massacred. Let the rest of the world take care of itself.

If the Jews of Israel had any smarts, they would have expelled at the Arabs from Gaza, Judea and Samaria in June 1967, and spent less time sorrowing over long-done Nazidom. The enemy of the present is a hell of a lot more important than the enemy of the past.

Now, maybe, they will be forced into some strategic situation which will leave them defenseless except for the 175 or more thermonuclear weapons and Jericho III longrange missiles they have been designing, refining and accumulating for the past generation. That will be the end of them, as well as all the Arab cities and their populations. Simple as that.

---

Remember what I've said here. All of you. It's a tough, increasingly crowded and unforgiving world out there. Fifty years after you're dead, only a few people in your immediate family will know you ever even lived. Anyway, the local land use authorities will pull up your tombstone as soon as they need the land for a new expressway.

So forget the ancient tales. Live for yourselves, your immediate families, and your immediate futures. It's all you've got. It's all your ever going to get. You get nothing but a limited amount of time, and that passes quickly. If you get a little money, invest it carefully. If you get a little love, cherish it. If you develop friendships, nurture them. Stop choking your minds about righting ancient wrongs. They're nothing themselves but inscriptions on other kinds of tombstones that the rain, wind and history make illegible and meaningless in no time at all.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

to Bob Lucas,

I mis-typed that stuff about being an altruist. I've hated altruism every since I learned how to spell it. So change my statement to:

"I am not an altruist."

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

"So forget the ancient tales. Live for yourselves, your immediate families, and your immediate futures. It's all you've got. It's all your ever going to get."

I have to disagree vehemently with this. The surest way to endlessly repeat mass slaughter is to forget what happened in the past.

Not only that. History and culture are accumulative. If you know nothing farther back than your parents and look no farther forward than your "immediate future," you are intellectually and emotionally and culturally impoverished, and that doesn't lead to building a workable society.

So forget the ancient tales. Live for yourselves, your immediate families, and your immediate futures. It's all you've got. It's all your ever going to get. You get nothing but a limited amount of time, and that passes quickly.

Under this view anyone who sacrifices him or herself for a great cause is a sucker. They've screwed their immediate family and sacrificed their immediate future. While that may be, in some sense, a "rational" way of looking at things (akin to why bother to vote since one vote never makes a difference anyway), if everyone chose that path, human civilization, let alone democracy and freedom, never would have developed. Instead, we'd be living in a tribal society with little more than inter-family conflict to keep us going.

Yehudit and NYer,

Disagree all you want. The mass slaughters will continue periodically and regularly no matter what you say or do, and if you cannot get used to this, you will have no peace until you descend into your graves. The unlucky or stupid ones get caught up in these events. The get killed, or live out the rest of their lives in tragedic and endless mourning. There is no moral or lesson to be drawn from any of this except to be somewhere else, or find a way to escape if you are there. And yes, it always is better to be a survivor than a victim. Kill or be killed. You will live. The other man will not. And that is good. Unless you are a masochist.

You're worrying about being reduced to a tribal society? What in hell do you imagine you're living in now? Ask any Afro-American driver committing DWB (driving while black) on a highway patrolled by white cops. Ask any white living on the fringes of a black ghetto. Ask any Arab picking oranges in an Israeli grove for small change. Ask any of the remaining Jews living in Moslem countries. Ask the Catholics and Orangemen of Northern Ireland. (Any of you seriously imagine peace breaking out there?) Ask any overseas Chinese living in Vietnam, Malaysia or Indonesia. Or the Kurds of four different countries. Ask the white farmers being run off their lands in Zimbabwe, or the Afrikaner whites who just lost their entire country to international political correctitude in South Africa. Ask any Christian trying to freely practice his religion in any Moslem country (until a local mob blows up the church). Or if you think you can talk with the dead, go commune with the spirits of all the Jews of all the diasporas of Europe, southwest Asia and North Africa spread over the past 2000 years. They will all tell you all you need to know about the great universal spirit of all mankind.

When you think about all this, maybe you better spend a little more time taking care of your own tribe. While you still have one. And let everyone else worry about theirs.

If both of you live in the United States -- and you both write with the naivete of the comfortably untested -- then you have relatively great freedom, and you can escape from the tribalisms of all the rest of humanity. That's because this society is wealthy, with 3.6 million square miles of territory, all but limitless resources, markets, opportunities and places to which you can escape with promises of flushing toilets, McDonald's franchises that keep regular hours and are subject to pure food inspections, and nobody is much interested in your business so long as you keep your noses out of theirs. Strip away that wealth or start crowding these people too much, and you'll find out the hard way what happens to the Rights of Man under rocky circumstances.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

Everyone,

Never discredit victimhood.

Jews, Armenians, Gypsies, Russians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Rwandans, Native Americans...we finally have some pain to share. Nothing tests friendships more than hard times. And nothing brings people together more than shared pain. (9/11 anyone?)

Revisionists can go to hell: ALL initial genocide estimates are ALWAYS TOO LOW. Poor records skip those who aren't documented, and pass into historical oblivion. Never attempt to assuage someone's pain by telling them they haven't truly suffered.

Of all the Holocausts, Nazi Germany's was by far the cruelest. I seriously can't think of gas chambers outside the holocausts. The Jews are also "special" since the Holocaust wasn't the only event. Throughout history, everyone has hated the Jews. Put a lawyer, a bad singer, a homosexual, an Arab, an American, a Chinese man, and a black man in an elevator, and the Jew is guaranteed to die first. Anti-semitism is more than the Holocaust!

Icy as it may be, every genocide happened for different reasons. "Progress", was at least an explanation, however evil. But Jews were killed because they simply were Jews. Nazis didn't invent anti-semitism people!

Jewish pain didn't end there. Nazi government offices burned family records. Now I have no history.

It must never happen again. Ever

For anyone.

ditariel

But you know it will, otherwise you wouldn't have written this stuff with the admonition,

"it must never".

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

And what is this crap about "I have no history"?

You're alive, aren't you? Unless your as old as I am (69) your parents didn't bring you into the world until some time after the Nazi era was burned into the ashheaps of every German city. So do you have a mother and father? Siblings? Friends? How much history do you think you are entitled to?

My family has been around here since a little after the American civil war in the 1860s. But I only know my father and mother, and somewhat less about their fathers and mothers. Remember the general rule. You come alive, live, die. All within about 50-100 years. Your grandchildren will know who you were. After that you will be only a vague, ignored or forgotten memory. This is what happens unless you did something real exceptional in your life. Remember what Warhol said once. "Everybody gets 15 minutes of fame". And nothing much else after that, I would expect.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

If both of you live in the United States -- and you both write with the naivete of the comfortably untested -- then you have relatively great freedom, and you can escape from the tribalisms of all the rest of humanity. That's because this society is wealthy, with 3.6 million square miles of territory, all but limitless resources, markets, opportunities and places to which you can escape with promises of flushing toilets, McDonald's franchises that keep regular hours and are subject to pure food inspections, and nobody is much interested in your business so long as you keep your noses out of theirs. Strip away that wealth or start crowding these people too much, and you'll find out the hard way what happens to the Rights of Man under rocky circumstances.

I essentially agree with you on this. But I think in this country we've largely managed to overcome the tribal norm and achieve something greater, largely because of the courage and sacrifices of our ancestors. The Pilgrims who fled religous persecution in Europe. The colonists who fought and won the Revolutionary War. The Founding Fathers who gave us the Constitution. The Civil War generation who fought a bitter war over whether we'd stay one nation and abolish slavery. The entrepeneurs and workers who created a great economy. The World War II generation who fought and defeated fascism. The Cold War generation who fought and defeated Communism. Now, people from all over the world dream to come to this country and make a better life for themselves and their children. Many achieve this, and their children and grandchildren become as American as descendants of Mayflower passengers.

And in the past 50 years democracy, freedom, and wealth have spread to parts of the world that have not previously experienced them -- Japan, South Korea, South America, and now perhaps Eastern Europe.

You may believe that this is just an uncharacteristic blip and that this country and the rest of the world will eventually revert to our natural state of tribal conflict, slavery, and genocide. I believe that we're gradually making progress and that some day maybe the descendants of the people you talk about will have the opportunity to live the way Americans take for granted. Maybe I'm too naive, and maybe you're too cynical.

Under this view anyone who sacrifices him or herself for a great cause is a sucker. They've screwed their immediate family and sacrificed their immediate future. While that may be, in some sense, a "rational" way of looking at things (akin to why bother to vote since one vote never makes a difference anyway), if everyone chose that path, human civilization, let alone democracy and freedom, never would have developed. Instead, we'd be living in a tribal society with little more than inter-family conflict to keep us going.

NYer's point is pretty strong.

Especially because he just described, pretty succinctly, the Arab world view that Arnold tends to otherwise lack respect for.

Food for thought, eh?

I think Arnold has described for me why I will never be a huge fan of Ayn Rand, as much as I might agree with her on some issues.

Can Western Civilization transcend the practice of genocide? I think it can.

On the other hand, I would actually disagree that Jews are the most hated people in history. I think that's been picked up over the last century, mostly. I think the real story of the Jews is that they've survived the periodic attempts to wipe them out that every people that has ever existed has gone through. Their remarkable story is one of survival through all that, making them some of the toughest and most resilient sons of bitches in human history.

But then, I don't have a whole lot of respect for people who get into the "who's the biggest victim" game. That way lies the madness that Arnold complains about. Paranoia, mistrust, withdrawing only to your immediate family and friends, no love for anything or anyone beyond yourself and your own exclusive group.

"We're the biggest victims ever" is a kind of awful mentality, really, isn't it?

I'm hardly a socialist or a communist, but I know something about history and the lives of Jews in Russia in the 19th and early 20th century. Unremiting poverty, pogroms by the official forces (at least the cops in the KKK put sheets on over their uniforms - in Russia the Czar's troops came raping and pillaging in full uniform), official discrimination in education, Jews being restricted from living in the major cities, economic opportunities deliberately suppressed.

If I was a Jew living in Russia a hundred years ago, in 1903, when Jews were slaughtered in Kishinev, who knows what political path I might have taken?

ARISE and go now to the city of slaughter;
Into its courtyard wind thy way;
There with shine own hand touch, and with the eyes of
shine head,
Behold on tree, on stone, on fence, on mural clay,
The spattered blood and dried brains of the dead.
Proceed thence to the ruins, the split walls reach,
Where wider grows the hollow, and greater grows the
breach;
Pass over the shattered hearth, attain the broken wall
Whose burnt and barren brick, whose charred stones reveal
The open mouths of such wounds, that no mending
Shall ever mend, nor healing ever heal.
There will thy feet in feathers sink, and stumble
On wreckage doubly wrecked, scroll heaped on manuscript,
Fragments again fragmented—
Pause not upon this havoc; go thy way.
The perfumes will be wafted from the acacia bud
And half its blossoms will be feathers,
Whose smell is the smell of blood!
And, spiting thee, strange incense they will bring—
Banish thy loathing—all the beauty of the spring,
The thousand golden arrows of the sun,
Will flash upon thy malison;
The sevenfold rays of broken glass
Over thy sorrow joyously will pass,
For God called up the slaughter and the spring together,—
The slayer slew, the blossom burst, and it was sunny
weather!
Then wilt thou flee to a yard, observe its mound.
Upon the mound lie two, and both are headless—
A Jew and his hound.
The self-same axe struck both, and both were flung
Unto the self-same heap where swine seek dung;
Tomorrow the rain will wash their mingled blood
Into the runners, and it will be lost
In rubbish heap, in stagnant pool, in mud.
Its cry will not be heard.
It will descend into the deep, or water the cockle-burr.
And all things will be as they ever were.

H.N. Bialik, "The City of Slaughter"

[Dean said, in reponse to a post by Yates
claiming that the 'white race' is in danger
and evil Jews are leading the plot.]
>I just can't help asking the wider audience this:
> do you suppose Mr. Yates voted for
> Buchanan, or for Nader? Tough call, wouldn't
>you say?

I would say that you are blowing your evident
dislike of Buchanan and Nader way out of
proportion. Buchanan, for example, may have
had a campaign worker (now resigned or fired)
who had said or written something suggesting
that the campaign worker had a bigoted attitude
about some group. Propagandists like to take
something like this and suggest that the entire
party that they hate is fully composed of
neo-Nazis. But the truth is that there is no
group large enough to be politically significant
(significant enough for you to have been
propagandized against them) that does not have
somewhere in it someone with a distasteful, bad
idea. If you are the mental prisoner of brainwashing,
you might not notice the difference between a party
or faction that contains one racist
(i.e. all of the parties and factions)
and a party that is built around severe racism.

There are special tiny political parties for
and of people who openly agitate in Mr. Yates'
manner--please forgive me for not linking to them.
If you want to know what real, sincere hate is,
take a look at those sometime, and notice the
differences between them and Buchanan and Nader,
if you are still capable of seeing them.

We should see such differences and
react to them in proper proportion.

My point, made mostly sarcastically and in jest, would be that anti-semitism has become pervasive on the far right and, as we have seen recently, on the far left. It's been hidden on the far left for various reasons, but it's been unveiled to a rather disturbing degree since 9/11.

No, not all Buchananites or Naderites are anti-semites. But the incidence of such problems among those fringe groups seems considerably higher than the national average.

People who claim that Israel is practicing a "holocaust" against the Palestinians or that Sharon is a "terrorist" are a good example of this.

I was stunned, while reading your article. Yes, the struggle of memory against forgetting... no doubt one of humankinds greatest internal struggles.

Thank you for helping us remember.

An excellent post.

Interested readers may find the work on 20th century democide at http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/welcome.html
informative.

This is a great debate and I enjoy reading everyones comments.

I have to add that in the case of the Armenian genocide it is not a issue of religion, revenge, or wealth, but a fight for recognition.

I also am sorry that some mass exterminations are forgoten even to this day. The killing of mass Chinese is a forgotten genocide, which took place during WW2 in Nanking.

Any genocide no matter how insignificant should be remembered because you never when your etnic group could be a target of hate.

What pain are you talking about??I am talking about you armenians!!You killed hundreds of babies,thousands of women,and demolished thousands of villages in Eastern Turkey.But nobody in all over the the world,do not know that because of your efforts in media,internet...But put that in your mind,you dont have that power for dividing Turkey!!You are nothing but a small country with full of murderers!! The world do not see how murderer you are!!Whatever you do,does not make any sense!!Because GOD SEES EVERYTHING!

I am researching the Armenian Genocide for a school presentation. I am in 11th grade and if anyone would like to share information on the genocide please e-mail me and it would be greatly appreciated.

ChokeThePsycho@aol.com