{"id":123687,"date":"2018-09-23T07:36:28","date_gmt":"2018-09-23T15:36:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=123687"},"modified":"2023-08-14T04:33:14","modified_gmt":"2023-08-14T12:33:14","slug":"socialist-racism-ethnic-cleansing-and-racial-exclusion-in-the-ussr-and-israel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=123687","title":{"rendered":"Socialist Racism: Ethnic Cleansing and Racial Exclusion in the USSR and Israel"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><script>!function(r,u,m,b,l,e){r._Rumble=b,r[b]||(r[b]=function(){(r[b]._=r[b]._||[]).push(arguments);if(r[b]._.length==1){l=u.createElement(m),e=u.getElementsByTagName(m)[0],l.async=1,l.src=\"https:\/\/rumble.com\/embedJS\/uajap1\"+(arguments[1].video?'.'+arguments[1].video:'')+\"\/?url=\"+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+\"&args=\"+encodeURIComponent(JSON.stringify([].slice.apply(arguments))),e.parentNode.insertBefore(l,e)}})}(window, document, \"script\", \"Rumble\");<\/script><\/p>\n<div id=\"rumble_vbt9th\"><\/div>\n<p><script>\nRumble(\"play\", {\"video\":\"vbt9th\",\"div\":\"rumble_vbt9th\"});<\/script><\/p>\n<p><A HREF=\"https:\/\/www.academia.edu\/4762701\/Socialist_racism_Ethnic_cleansing_and_racial_exclusion_in_the_USSR_and_Israel\">Otto Pohl writes<\/a>: <\/p>\n<p>During the 1970s, both the Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks in Soviet Central<br \/>\nAsia compared their plight to that of the Palestinians. The Stalin regime deported<br \/>\nboth the Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks from their homelands to dispersed<br \/>\nsettlements in Central Asia. The similarities between the Soviet policies of expelling<br \/>\nand permanently excluding the Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks from<br \/>\ntheir homelands and similar Israeli policies towards the Palestinians are not entirely<br \/>\ncoincidental. The Zionists based their mass expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 and<br \/>\nsubsequent prohibition on allowing them to return to their homes in part on the<br \/>\nSoviet model. The similarities between the two instances of ethnic cleansing are due<br \/>\nin large part to this conscious emulation of Stalin\u2019s methods by the Zionists.<\/p>\n<p>Historical comparisons of ethnic cleansing are still quite rare and have only<br \/>\ntouched on a handful of cases. Presently, scholars define ethnic cleansing as the<br \/>\nforced removal of ethnically defined populations from specific territories.1 More<br \/>\nimportantly the cases compared have been limited. In the case of Stalin\u2019s repressions,<br \/>\nthe comparison most usually made is to Nazi crimes. These comparisons<br \/>\nhave taken on a highly ideological color. While a few scholars such as Stephane<br \/>\nCourtois have sought to put Stalin\u2019s crimes on an equal moral plane with those of<br \/>\nHitler, many have resisted the comparison.2 A whole slew of arguments have been<br \/>\ncrafted by academics as to why the Stalin regime\u2019s deliberate killing of between 13<br \/>\nand 15 million people is morally less significant in comparison to Hitler\u2019s killing of<br \/>\nbetween five and six million Jews. The details of these arguments\u2014which all boil<br \/>\ndown to systems of relativistic morality based not upon actions, but motivations<br \/>\nand the identity of the victims\u2014are less important than the motives of those making<br \/>\nthem.<br \/>\nThe proponents of this position fall into two broad categories. Some of those<br \/>\nespousing these arguments are driven by a desire to rehabilitate the USSR and the<br \/>\nfailed dream of socialism.3 To this end, they seek to transform the victims of state<br \/>\nmurder by the Soviet government into something else, such as the unintentional<br \/>\nresults of policies necessary to consolidate and defend the gains of the Great October<br \/>\nRevolution.4 The political power of these few remaining supporters of the Soviet<br \/>\nsystem is considerably less than the other group that minimizes Stalin\u2019s crimes.<br \/>\nThis other group is driven by support of a viewpoint that seeks to make the<br \/>\nShoah absolutely unique in order to establish the position of Jews as the ultimate<br \/>\nvictims in world history. This position is generally linked to support of the Zionist<br \/>\nproject in Palestine and the continuing dispossession and repression of its native<br \/>\nArab population. Zionism is defined here to mean an ideology aimed at creating a<br \/>\nsecure Jewish majority state in the territory of the former British Mandate of Palestine.<br \/>\nA number of Western academics seeking to minimize Stalin\u2019s crimes fall into<br \/>\nthis category.5<br \/>\n Many of them are not Jewish, but espouse a position of \u201cHolocaust<br \/>\nuniqueness\u201d regarding ethnically motivated state killings that depicts Jews as \u201cworthy<br \/>\nvictims\u201d and Eastern Europeans and Muslims as \u201cunworthy victims.\u201d6 Negative<br \/>\nstereotypes of these two groups are still sometimes promoted in Western<br \/>\nacademia in ways that are considered completely unacceptable regarding Blacks,<br \/>\nHispanics, and Jews.<br \/>\nThis concerted effort to oppose any comparison between the atrocities of the<br \/>\nUSSR and Nazi Germany is perhaps the single greatest factor in the paucity of any<br \/>\ncomparative studies of Soviet ethnic cleansing. The similarities between Nazi policies<br \/>\nof extermination and Stalin\u2019s ethnic cleansing are obvious enough to make<br \/>\ncomparison of the two a natural starting point in contextualizing the two events.<br \/>\nThey both occurred during World War II, they both involved the wholesale roundup<br \/>\nand forced deportation to deadly conditions of whole populations based upon<br \/>\nancestry, and both deflected large amounts of military material and personnel away<br \/>\nfrom the war effort. Prevented from making this first obvious comparison, however,<br \/>\nhistorians never moved on to make other more interesting comparisons between<br \/>\nStalin\u2019s deportations and other cases of ethnic cleansing. The hostile<br \/>\nintellectual climate to such comparative work greatly retarded scholarship. As a<br \/>\nresult, such work is about a decade behind where it should be&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>One case of ethnic cleansing that is connected with the Stalinist deportations and<br \/>\nthe Ottoman and Nazi cases as well, but remains absent from both Naimark and<br \/>\nWeitz, is the Nakbah. Al Nakbah, Arabic for \u201cThe Catastrophe,\u201d refers to the mass<br \/>\nexpulsion of the Palestinian Arabs from their homeland in 1948. The connections<br \/>\nbetween this case of ethnic cleansing and the Nazi and Ottoman regimes are obvious.<br \/>\nPalestine had been under Ottoman rule for centuries before becoming a British<br \/>\nMandate. The Shoah created hundreds of thousands of displaced European Jews<br \/>\nwho subsequently migrated to Palestine. Early in its existence, a full one-third of<br \/>\nIsrael\u2019s population consisted of Holocaust survivors. The Nazi extermination of<br \/>\nJews also provided Israel and its supporters with its most effective propaganda<br \/>\nweapon to justify the expulsion of the Palestinians. Less obvious, but arguably more<br \/>\nimportant, are its connections with Soviet ethnic cleansing. Aside from the previously<br \/>\nnoted fact that many of the same people attempting to minimize Stalin\u2019s crimes<br \/>\nalso seek to minimize or deny Israeli ethnic cleansing and racism, the two events<br \/>\nshare a number of historical connections. They also share significant similarities<br \/>\nand parallels. These connections and similarities, however, have been almost completely<br \/>\nignored by scholars. This lack of attention is unfortunate since the connections<br \/>\nstill continue to exist and play a very real part in the continued suffering of the<br \/>\nChechens, Palestinians, and other victims&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Ben-Gurion greatly admired the Soviet Union under Stalin as a model for building<br \/>\na strong state and sought to emulate this success in Israel. Most Labor Zionists<br \/>\nshared his enthusiasm for the Soviet experiment. Both the Soviet and Israeli states<br \/>\nalso espoused a socialist rhetoric dedicated to equality while practicing forms of<br \/>\nracial discrimination similar to apartheid in South Africa. After 1949, Soviet-Israeli<br \/>\nrelations deteriorated steadily, particularly over the issue of the Israeli government<br \/>\nencouraging the emigration of educated and skilled Jews from the USSR.19 Moscow<br \/>\nfound this policy unacceptable on practical and ideological grounds. First,<br \/>\nthey desperately needed these workers to rebuild the Soviet Union in the wake of<br \/>\nWorld War II. Second, it implied that the USSR was not a fully socialist state that<br \/>\nhad solved all nationality problems within its borders, including the existence of<br \/>\nanti-Semitism. Such an insult could be tolerated only so long.<br \/>\nThis deterioration of relations continued throughout the next several decades. In<br \/>\n1955, Czechoslovakia signed an arms deal with Israel\u2019s chief enemy, Nasser\u2019s Egypt.<br \/>\nIn 1956, the USSR along with the United States opposed the joint British, French,<br \/>\nand Israeli assault on Egypt to seize the Suez Canal. During the 1967 and 1973<br \/>\nwars, the USSR supported the Arab states against Israel diplomatically and militarily.<br \/>\nFinally after 1974, the USSR began to provide official support to the PLO.<br \/>\nDespite these events, the Soviet government continued to support the existence of<br \/>\nIsrael as a Jewish state within its 1949\u20131967 borders.20 These later events have,<br \/>\nhowever, prevented historians from realizing the full ramifications of the close Soviet-Israeli<br \/>\nrelations on Israeli policies during the creation of the state&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>In contrast, despite the wishes of the Zionists, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine<br \/>\nremained incomplete. About 150,000 Palestinian Arabs out of a population of<br \/>\n900,000 remained in the territory that became Israel.67 Unlike the Soviets, the Zionists<br \/>\noperated under a number of constraints that made their job more difficult. First,<br \/>\nthe Arabs were not an insignificant minority of Palestine\u2019s population. Rather they<br \/>\nformed a two-thirds majority of Palestine\u2019s population in 1947. They were 42%<br \/>\neven in the territory apportioned to be a Jewish state.68 Second, although hopelessly<br \/>\noutgunned, they did have some military organization and some support in this matter<br \/>\nfrom other Arab states. They could thus put up some resistance to the expulsions.<br \/>\nFinally, like in the case of the Ottoman deportation of the Armenians, the<br \/>\nhigh international profile of certain cities protected the Palestinian residents from<br \/>\nexpulsion. This is most evident regarding the Christians of Nazareth and can be<br \/>\ncompared to the protection by international attention afforded to Armenians in<br \/>\nIstanbul, Izmir, and Jerusalem during World War One.69 After the fighting ceased,<br \/>\ninternational scrutiny served to protect most of the Palestinian population remaining<br \/>\nunder Israeli rule from further expulsions. The Zionists thus had to be content<br \/>\nwith an 80% success rate in their ethnic cleansing versus the near 100% success of<br \/>\ntheir Soviet models.<br \/>\nBoth the Soviets and Israelis engaged in a number of massacres in the course of<br \/>\nethnic cleansing during the 1940s. The purpose of these massacres, however, differed.<br \/>\nIn the Soviet case, the NKVD physically liquidated communities that proved<br \/>\ntoo burdensome to deport. That is, the massacres served to remove the last remaining<br \/>\ntargeted communities that had not been loaded onto trains and deported from<br \/>\ntheir homelands. The most famous case was the village of Khaibakh in the ChechenIngush<br \/>\nASSR. Poor weather conditions prevented the NKVD from being able to<br \/>\ndeport the Chechens from the village of Khaibakh. Instead of loading these villagers<br \/>\nonto trains, the NKVD herded over 700 Chechen men, women, and children<br \/>\ninto barns and sheds and set the structures on fire.70 The vast majority of these<br \/>\nunfortunates perished in the flames. Khaibakh remains a rallying cry of Chechen<br \/>\nnationalists to this day.<br \/>\nIn contrast, the Zionists massacred Palestinians in 1948 to cause their flight in<br \/>\nfear from areas that became Israel in 1949. Rather than serve to complete the process<br \/>\nof ethnic cleansing, these atrocities served to start it from certain areas. The<br \/>\nmost famous of such massacres occurred at Deir Yasin on 9 April 1948.71 Irgun and<br \/>\nLEHI forces rounded up over 200 Arab men, women, and children from this village<br \/>\nand killed them in order to terrorize other Palestinians into leaving land coveted by<br \/>\nthe Zionists. This policy had great success. Many of the Palestinians that fled their<br \/>\nhomes in 1948 did so specifically because they feared Zionist forces would repeat<br \/>\nthe events of Deir Yasin in their villages. Like Khaibakh for the Chechens, Deir<br \/>\nYasin is a symbol of national tragedy for the Palestinians. They commemorate the<br \/>\nmassacre every April 9.<br \/>\nThe internal nature of the Soviet deportations versus the external nature of the<br \/>\nIsraeli expulsions is another key difference between the two cases. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Otto Pohl writes: During the 1970s, both the Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks in Soviet Central Asia compared their plight to that of the Palestinians. The Stalin regime deported both the Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks from their homelands to &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=123687\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,29660],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-123687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-israel","category-soviet-union"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=123687"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":149896,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123687\/revisions\/149896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=123687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=123687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=123687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}