{"id":72013,"date":"2015-07-31T15:52:34","date_gmt":"2015-07-31T23:52:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=72013"},"modified":"2015-07-31T16:00:46","modified_gmt":"2015-08-01T00:00:46","slug":"communist-genocide-is-fine-nazi-genocide-bad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=72013","title":{"rendered":"Communist Genocide Is Fine, Nazi Genocide Bad"},"content":{"rendered":"

Communism and Nazism committed massive genocides in the 20th Century with Communism killing far more than Nazism, but only Nazi genocides receive memorials and movies today. The genocides that Jewish communists carried out for Stalin<\/a> are rarely discussed. <\/p>\n

Different groups have different interests. It served the interests of Lithuanian nationalists to side with the Nazis against the Communists just as it served the interests of Lithuanian Jews to side with the Communists against the Nazis. <\/p>\n

From Slate<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In a new party line, institutions of the contemporary Lithuanian government now portray Nazi-aligned nationalists as anti-Soviet heroes and anti-Nazi partisans\u2014in particular the Jewish ones\u2014as traitors. Arad lives under the cloud of an open-ended investigation by Lithuanian prosecutors for crimes against humanity committed in the final days of World War II, when he allegedly executed Lithuanian anti-Communists, including civilians, for Stalin\u2019s secret police. <\/p>\n

…That Russian Jews had been wildly overrepresented in the generation that led the Bolshevik Revolution is indisputable. <\/p>\n

…After the War, Lithuania was reincorporated into the USSR and Soviet authorities suppressed the truth about the significant Jewish role in the partisan resistance and the remarkable degree of local Christian collaboration with the Nazis.<\/p>\n

…The investigation also succeeded in muddling the historical narrative by positing a moral equivalence: Lithuanian paramilitaries may have paved the way for the Nazi\u2019s Holocaust, but Jewish partisans had committed atrocities that helped pave the way for the Soviet \u201cgenocide.\u201d <\/p>\n

…In present-day Eastern Europe, Katz explained in his Brooklyn accent, \u201cHolocaust denial\u201d is being replaced by a seemingly respectable \u201cHolocaust obfuscation.\u201d Lithuania and other Eastern European countries are embracing a \u201cdouble genocide\u201d theory that posits that both the Nazis and Soviets committed genocide. What the hypothesis lacks in intellectual honesty, it makes up for in political expediency. By positing twin genocides, Lithuanians become victims\u2014and \u201cJudeo-Bolsheviks\u201d become perpetrators\u2014in a second, mirror-image holocaust. As Ephraim Zuroff of the Wiesenthal Center summarized, \u201cIf everyone is guilty, then no one is guilty.\u201d To Leonidas Donskis, a part-Jewish Lithuanian intellectual who has served in the European Parliament in Brussels where he has opposed official Nazi\/Soviet equivalence resolutions, the ultimate purpose of the \u201cdouble genocide\u201d theory is to allow Eastern European ultra-nationalists to \u201cportray the people who were killing the Jews as people who fought the Soviet regime. [It is] dangerous nonsense.\u201d As an added bonus, this historical narrative nicely fits the present moment in which Lithuania is (justifiably) more worried about Putin\u2019s Russia than Merkel\u2019s Germany.<\/p>\n

…Heading back into Vilnius, the young couple mulled their nation\u2019s bloody history. \u201cThe Nazis were bad; the Soviets were worse,\u201d the artist offered matter-of-factly. \u201cMy grandmother remembered the war,\u201d the architect added. \u201cShe always said the Germans were polite and the Russians weren\u2019t.\u201d When I pressed her on her Soviets-were-worse-than-the-Nazis assumptions, the most she would concede was a post-modern gloss that it was all a matter of perspective. \u201cIt depends who you were: the Nazis were worse for Jews, the Soviets were worse for Lithuanians.\u201d The blithe, implicit assumption was that Lithuanian Jews were not Lithuanians.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Communism and Nazism committed massive genocides in the 20th Century with Communism killing far more than Nazism, but only Nazi genocides receive memorials and movies today. The genocides that Jewish communists carried out for Stalin are rarely discussed. Different groups … Continue reading →<\/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":[26121,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-communism-2","category-jews"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72013","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=72013"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72013\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72020,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72013\/revisions\/72020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=72013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=72013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=72013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}