This is part 2 of a 5-part series called “The Case For Ukraine”. For Part I, click here.
3. HISTORIC JEW HATRED
No argument.
No debate.
They did it. They collaborated. They slaughtered. They killed before and after the Germans came and went. Yes, even after the death camps in 1946. They’ve celebrated Khmelnitsky, Bandera and Petliura - leaders with rivers of Jewish blood on their hands, although the second has been stripped of his hero status by the Ukrainian courts.
Pogrom after horrific pogroms, for hundreds of years, with a special brand of gruesomeness the Germans lauded and utilized in their quest to exterminate the Jewry: burying people alive and throwing the young corpses to feed pigs and dogs. And much much more.
But...
The "they" of yesterday is not the living "they" today. Is Putin's devastation of millions of innocents for the crimes of their brutal forefathers they never met a justifiable justice?
Obliteration of hospitals, schools, and homes of young fathers, mothers and children because someone's great-grandparents practiced what every European country did at some point in history?
Is any other European nation absolved of guilt from abhorrent anti-Semitic history, plus or minus a few synagogue burnings, Kristallnachts, and ghettos?
Since the 12th century, Jews have been slaughtered in every corner of Europe. The English famously kick-started officially sanctified antisemitism by way of Jewish expulsion in 1290. If revenge, generations later, feels sweeter than honey, shouldn’t Putin's war machine be pointed at the Queen, first?
And what of Spain and Portugal - collectively murdering hundreds of thousands in the 300 brutal years of the Inquisition, with those they spared forced into baptism, effectively eradicating Jewish DNA by religious (Catholic) genocide.
Portugal, under official decree, separated all Jewish children from their parents, shipped them off to an island and then slaughtered each one. Where is that Russian brand of social justice in the form of "for-the-children" missile over the Iberian Peninsula? Where is the equivocal outcry for justice by American conservatives quick to condemn Ukraine? Or, is buried Jew hatred uninteresting since it can’t be part of apology acrobatics for Putin?
Over the course of the last twenty centuries, Catholic Church's famous installation of Jews as "Christ Killers" is responsible for umpteenth pogroms, synagogue burnings, murders, rapes and massacres of Jewish communities throughout the entire European continent. Tragic Jewish history was entirely underwritten by papal edicts, Catholic rulers, Christian monarchs and Protestant leaders from Martin Luther to small town friars and priests. Surely, Putin would be justified in an immediate invasion of the Vatican and annexation of every Church in Christendom.
Poland - the worst anti-Semitic actor, second only to Germany, with well-documented history of aiding Germans in identification of Jews for slaughter and death camps. One of the worst pogroms in history of Poland, happened in July of 1946 in Kielce, post-Hitler, post-death camps, post- Holocaust in vivid crematorium colours. The same religiously-bred lethal anti-Semitism simmers just under surface today, while the Polish government officially denies generational Jew hatred its well known for.
Moldova, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania - devoted practitioners of Jew hatred through the ages, with particular enthusiasm for Jewish body bags and murder of Jews before Hitler's arrival.
All 22 Arab states ethnically cleansed Jews from their lands. 900,000 Jewish citizens were forcibly driven out of their ancestral homes in the middle of the 20th century, leaving everything they knew, loved and ever possessed behind. Where is the outrage? Where is the revenge war? Where is Putin's heroism to avenge Jews from this horrific, largest-ever ethnic cleansing?
Prior to Hitler’s entry to Paris, the French police under the instruction of the Vichy government, rounded up all Parisian Jews and placed them in the Vélodrome d'Hiver without any food, water or sanitary facilities. Aiding Hitler so he wouldn’t waste too much time on Jew-searching before he shipped them off to Buchenwald and Dachau. This act, to voluntarily identify Jews and bring them directly to slaughter, surely rivals anything the Ukrainians might’ve done.
Ever wonder why Prague is beautiful and architecturally preserved?
Czechoslovakia devised an ingenious plan to save its hide from Hitler’s imminent onslaught: The Jewish community was proactively offered to Hitler in exchange for preservation of the county’s architecture from German bombings. Czech Jews were promptly shipped off to be massacred in nearby Auschwitz by way of a Czech murder house, Thereseinshdat. A quick trip to that country reveals not only the untouched ugly beauty of Prague but the government’s shocking cash-cow tourist trap through the besieged Jewish Quarter; a section of Prague mercilessly showcasing dead Czech Jews, their cemeteries, their ceased synagogues and homes.
The herding public's entry fees pack government pockets in return for a trek through the dead Jewish world, the very dead the Czech sacrificed, slaughtered and robbed of assets, dignity and life. Zero contrition, zero sting of conscience, zero repentance. Dead Jews are good for the Czech economy. Putin should get the memo.
The Arrow Cross Party of Hungary gave Hitler a run for his money. Prior to his arrival in the country, Hungarian government rounded up Budapest Jews along the Danube shores. All plunged into the dirty river after single-bullet gun shots by fellow Hungarians.
Hitler, then, had nothing to do with Hungary’s thirst for dead Jews. Arrow party’s ideology was aligned with Fascism, something its leaders called "Hungarism". It combined anti-capitalism, anti-communism and a special type of anti-Semitism, called a-Semitism. The latter advocates Judenfrei, a society completely free of Jewry. This was preferable to anti-Semitism which allowed Jews to exist with limited rights. The existence of Jews, the party leaders argued, was incompatible with European society.
That was then. And this is now…
The Jobbik Party of Hungary, which enjoys a whopping 20% of the country’s vote, is the heir apparent to Hitler’s Nazi Party prior to World War II. They skillfully comingle ancient canards about Jews and hatred of Israel in virulently anti-Semitic rhetoric to produce proud and loud racism like this: “I think now is the time to assess…how many people of Jewish origin there are here, and especially in the Hungarian parliament and the Hungarian government, who pose a national security risk to Hungary.” _Marton Gyongyosi, M.P., Leader of Jobbik’s Foreign Policy Cabinet, Nov. 2012.
European Jewish Congress considers The Jobbik a neo-Nazi faction. Unlike unfounded claims about Ukrainian populations, The Jobbik Party is officially Hungary's second-largest party in the National Assembly. Where is the conservative call for the demolition of Hungary?
African-American slavery is not such a distant memory. Yet, history books are notably free of modern-day revenge wars for horrific crimes committed on our North American soil. Does Putin have a case for the invasion of the US, while holding white Americans responsible for the fascist sins of the slave owners? And what should he do about white South Africans?
If one is hungry for retribution for crimes against the Jews, shouldn't Germany be the first stop for Putin's tanks? If denazifying is the primary goal, his first battle should be in Deutschland where, last week, leaflets calling for liquidation of Jews by 2023 were distributed.
The illusionary position that hero Putin is fighting a war to right past wrongs of 1940s Ukraine towards the Jews is an argument of sad desperation, unmitigated creativity and vast self-indulgence. Putin just completed displacing thousands of Ukrainian Jewish children from their homes. He hired the Wagner Group to kill the Jewish President of Ukraine. The Wagner Group is a Russian-based private army for hire, named after Richard Wagner, the German idea-architect of Hitler’s Final Solution for the extermination of all Jews.
In his long daily speeches to his public, the Russian Tsar never appeals to historical Jewish sensitivities or the Jewish dead in Ukraine. Let’s get real; no gentile leader, in history, has ever fought retribution wars for Jews. Certainly, not any ex-KGB agents (Putin) in charge of hunting down Jews in the Soviet Union where they were identifiable by their passport's fifth column and subjugated to totalitarian quotas for 70+ years.
It must be noted, Israel’s Yad Vashem documents 2673 Ukrainians as the Righteous (Gentiles) Amongst Nations who saved/hid/rescued Jews in Hitler’s Europe. One of the highest counts on record. 2673 Ukrainians to Russia’s 215…
4. RUSSIA HAS NO BABI YAR
Babi Yar, contrary to popular belief, is a mass Jewish grave at the hands of German Nazis, not Ukrainian Nazis. Likewise, contrary to popular belief, Babi Yar happened in the Soviet Union, under Stalin, under Soviet governance and subjugation of Ukraine. And most arguably, because of Stalin’s disastrous pack with Hitler which kick-started WW2.
The world first learned of Babi Yar in 1961 when a prolific poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, wrote his most famous work "Babiyy Yar", in which he denounced Soviet distortion of historical facts regarding the Nazi massacre of the Jewish population of Kiev in the fall of 1941. In that poem, he also addressed the wide-spread, state-sponsored anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. The accepted Soviet policy for the Holocaust in Russia was to dismiss it as part of general atrocities by the Germans against all Soviet citizens. In other words, to avoid mentioning it at all costs.
The word "Holocaust" didn't exist. Jewish death camps were never mentioned. 6 Million dead - never whispered, not on the streets, not by school text books and not in any serious reflection on Nazism.
Unmistakably, Yevtushenko’s "Babiyy Yar" spoke not only of the Nazi atrocities, but the Soviet government's own persecution of Jewish people. Until that courageous publication to awaken millions, Russia had no Babi Yar, and not because of its benevolence towards the Jews, but because the Germans were averted from reaching Moscow in order to save ethnic Russians. And because Russian rulers couldn't allow any compassion towards Jewish populations, dead or alive, in Kiev or anywhere else. No Babi Yar, no Auschwitz, no Holocaust.
Babi Yar is a landmark of one of the largest mass shootings in history of mankind; 34,000 Jewish men, women and children were herded into a ravine, stripped naked, and shot by the German Nazis when they entered the Soviet Union.
Russia owns Babi Yar, not just as part of historical borderlines, but because of its own barbaric treatment of Jews, just as the prolific Yevtushenko elucidated in his epic poem.
(Watch for parts 3-5 of this article published in the oncoming days.)