Mr. Thomas, I'm basically in agreement with your ideas on Communism, and the Jewish component in the Bolshevik movement can't be argued. But I do have an issue with this paragraph in your post:
"...that "intense passion for revenge" manifested itself in 1941, when Ukranians, Belorussians, Russians, etc flocked to join the Einsatzgrueppen so they could freely take vengeance on the bloodthirsty killers who had massacred them. Last year I interviewed a former Swabian Wehrmacht corporal who served on the Eastern Front. Every time they overran a Soviet unit, the SS liason asked in Russian "Who is the Kommissar"? All of the captives, who presumably spoke no other German, turned and pointed, saying "Da ist der Jued". The commissars were quickly tried and shot. That's revenge as Kaganovich deserved to get it."
I must confess to being uneasy about the tone that manifests itself in this passage. I'm not going to stoop so low as to accuse you of anti-Semitism (which, I agree, is an abused term). Yet, unless I'm mistaken, you seem to be at least implying that the murder by German mobile killing units of more than a million people was in some way justified simply because of the crimes of Jewish Communists. And whether or not the admittedly mistreated Ukrainians, Belorussians, Ruthenians, et al were motivated by vengeance, the fact remains that the vast majority of those murdered by the Einzantsgruppen were not "Commissars". They were old men, babies, women, children, rabbis, craftsmen, artisans, the Orthodox, Zionists, Bundists- human beings who certainly were not guilty of any crime that justified being robbed, humiliated, physically molested, lined up in anti-tank ditches and butchered. Trotsky, Kaganovich, Ehrenburg, and Dzerzhinsky were criminals. I sincerely hope that you don't believe it was acceptable to use a million human beings as stand-in scapegoats for the crimes of a relatively small group of men. No offense intended, but there is a moral equivalence expressed in this post that I find objectionable, to say the least.
The starvation of Ukrainian kulaks and the existence of the gulags cannot be justified as "revenge" for the abuse of Jews by the Czars. Nor can Babi Yar or Kovno be justified as "revenge" for the abuse of the Russian people by the Bolsheviks, many of whom were apostate Jews. A man's crime is his own. To suggest otherwise is to think the same way as the mass-murdering, collectivist left has thought since 1789.
Also, you single out Russian Bolshevism, with its Jewish component, as the worst example of Communist tyranny. But what about the Chinese Communists, who murdered fifty million people? What about Pol Pot? What about Mugabe? They weren't Jews. There is no discernable "Jewish influence" in the crimes perpetrated by these men and their associates. Is Communism and collectivism bad, or is it only bad when it is practiced by atheists of Jewish ethnicity?
I have no problem acknowledging the Jewish ethnicity of many of many Bolsheviks. I don't deny that their experience as Jews in Czarist Russia probably had a good deal to do with their animus toward the Russian people, their religion, and their institutions. I have no problem acknowledging this because their crimes were their reponsibility, not mine, not any monolithic bloc ("the Jews")- and not the responsibility of the innocents murdered by the Einzantsgruppen or their Slavic flunkies, either.
(By the way, I can scarcely believe that you singled out a socialist and Pol Pot apologist like Noam Chomsky for praise. Why, because he's anti-Zionist? Come on. Are you anti-Communist or not?)
I intended no personal aspersions or offense in this post, sir. Just seeking a little bit of clarification!
by Jesse Lamovsky on August 23, 2003 at 5:39 PM