Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust, by Jeffrey Veidlinger. 2021. Metropolitan Books, New York

Jeffrey Veidlinger: 1919 Pogroms, During the Russian Civil War, Egregiously Mystified and Inserted Into the Later German-Made Holocaust

This highly touted book is more of the same Judeocentric fare, wherein Jews are just scapegoats (e. g, p. 216). In other words, Jews never do anything wrong (others only imagine that Jews do wrong), and Jews are nothing more than perpetual victims. I now ignore many other flaws that I could point out, and instead focus on a few noteworthy items.

EXAGGERATED POGROM DEATH TOLL

Veidlinger comments, “The numbers are contested, but a conservative estimate is that forty thousand Jews were killed in the riots and another seventy thousand subsequently perished from the wounds, or from disease, starvation, and exposure as a direct result of the attacks. Some observers counted closer to three hundred thousand victims. Although that higher figure is likely exaggerated…” (p. 5. Emphasis added). The author forgets that this region was at war and does not explain how the collateral losses (e. g, p. 308) can validly be lumped together with the intentional pogrom killings. Sounds like the author is padding the pogrom total. For more on this, see:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2023/04/20/nahum-gergel-pogroms-in-ukraine-in-1919-detailed-study-minimal-polish-complicity-pogrom-death-tolls-exaggerated/

NOT ONLY JEWS WERE VICTIMS OF POGROMS. BUT STILL ONLY JEWS COUNT

The author finally provides some context, in terms of the Russian Civil War, “This war, from 1918 to 1921, led to the loss of about one million people in Ukraine through famine, disease, and military violence.” (p. 15). Yes, but all we hear about are the Jews.

When it comes to minorities, Veidlinger makes these revealing statements, “Jews were not the only ethnic or religious minority targeted–Armenians, Mennonites, Muslim Crimean Tatars, as well as Ukrainians themselves, suffered heavily. But Jewish civilians alone were singled out for persecution by virtually everyone.” (p. 16). Really? This sounds like another Jewish-invented meritocracy of suffering, reminiscent of the one that Jews regularly use to elevate the Holocaust above all other genocides. Veidlinger presents not a shred of evidence to support his expansive argument: There is no detailed tally of which groups were targeted by which other groups. But as long as the narrative serves Jewish-victimhood purposes, who cares?

IMPLICITLY ENDORSING HOLOCAUST DENIER ARGUMENTS!

For the longest time, Jews had told us to ignore the Holocaust deniers that had been highlighting pre-WWII newspaper accounts of Jews facing extermination, and of the iconic 6 million figure having nine lives that had long preceded the actual German-made Holocaust. Jews assured us that all this meant nothing. The Jewish fear was that it could imply that the 6 million Jews that died in the Holocaust were also made-up, and simply a repetition of old newspaper fables.

Now–lo and behold–Veidlinger resurrects these old newspaper tales and now they suddenly do mean something. He endorses them, “But the evidence is clear that the murder of six million Jews in Europe was not only conceivable but feared as a distinct possibility for at least twenty years before it became a reality. On September 8, 1919, for instance, the New York Times reported on a convention held in Manhattan to protest the bloodshed then underway in eastern Europe. UKRAINIAN JEWS AIM TO STOP POGROMS, the headline read; MASS MEETING HEARS THAT 127,000 JEWS HAVE BEEN KILLED AND 6,000,000 ARE IN PERIL. The article concluded by quoting Joseph Seff, president of the Federation of Ukrainian Jews in America: ‘This fact that the population of 6,000,000 souls in Ukrainia and Poland have received notice through action and by word that they are going to be completely exterminated–this fact stands before the whole world as the paramount issue of the present day.'” (p. 6. ALL CAPS in original).

Clearly, the extermination of Jews by Ukrainians is purely a media invention, yet Veidlinger takes it seriously! He effectively tells us that the extermination of Jews (including the iconic 6 million figure: see above) was a common expectation and implies that the Germans under Hitler simply happened to be the ones that beat the Ukrainians to the punch! That’s pretty creative Judeocentric imagination, for which I must give Veidlinger credit. It is the logic of wonderland, the elevation of Jewish victimhood to new absurdities, and is the flattening of history with a vengeance. Moreover, German guilt-dilution wins once again. Hitler must be happy.

The only difference between Veidlinger and the Holocaust deniers is this: Whereas Veidlinger takes both sets of 6 million Jewish victims as real, the Holocaust deniers reject the factuality of both.

CONFLATING THE 1919 POGROMS WITH THE LATER HOLOCAUST. TRIVIALIZING THE HOLOCAUST

The message is clear. Author Veidlinger force-fits the pogroms into the later Holocaust. This, as intended, mystifies Jews as perpetual victims. Enough of this farce. Please see the many essential differences between the 1919 Ukrainian pogroms and the German-made Holocaust:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2023/04/20/pogroms-in-ukraine-in-1919-false-equivalence-with-the-later-nazis-non-jewish-victims-of-pogroms-ignored-the-forgotten-mennonites-khmelnytsky-uprising-provoked-by-jews-1918-polish-ukrainian-war-a/

In recent years, Jews have complained about Holocaust trivialization–the conflation of minor and relatively unimportant acts with the German murder of 6 million Jews. Now Veidlinger does the exact same thing. Then again, Jews have no problem trivializing the Holocaust when it serves their purposes.

Ironic to Veidlinger’s fabulous rewriting of history, the Nazis were the first to realize that street antisemitism does not inspire anybody, and that conducting pogroms will not solve the Jewish problem! Furthermore, Jews themselves, when going through the Holocaust, belatedly realized that what they were going through was not another round of pogroms and persecutions, but something infinitely worse.

JEWS WANTED TO PRESERVE THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE. NO INDEPENDENT POLAND (1918). NO INDEPENDENT UKRAINE

The Jews were conspicuously allergic to the emancipatory goals of the peoples struggling under Russian rule. Veidlinger comments, “Moyshe Litvakov of the United Jewish Socialist Workers’ Party argued that it was ‘tearing the living body of Russia to piece.’ Jewish religious leaders and Jewish nationalists also had reason to fear the proclamation of an independent Ukraine. The breakup of the Russian Empire, which had housed the world’s largest population, threatened to cut off Ukrainian Jews from their coreligionists in Russia and Poland, potentially severing ties between rabbinical leaders and their followers and erecting borders between communities. Finally, upwardly mobile Jews had long viewed Russian fluency as a path toward career advancement and valued access to Russian markets. Many saw their fortunes better served within a large multinational empire than as a minority within a nation-state, regardless of how tolerant it claimed to be.” (p. 61).

Suddenly the Jews, who had long whined about being so oppressed by the tsar, did not mind the continued existence of the Russian Empire and its oppression of the Poles and the Ukrainians. And it meant nothing to them that the Russian Empire was anything but “tolerant” to Poles or Ukrainians. Looks like Jewish selfishness was afoot once again.

Jews also had a variety of motives for wanting to preserve the Russian Empire and to thereby oppose the resurrection of any Polish state. See:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/antiassimilation-jewish-real-reason-karlip/

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2021/05/15/jew-on-jew-violence-are-these-pogroms-too-jewish-polish-relations-two-sides-jewish-privileges-in-the-early-soviet-imposed-communist-government-crypto-jews-nalewajko-kulikov/

So much for the pretext of “tolerance”. How many times have we heard that one before?

Nowadays, Jews regularly dump on Roman Dmowski, as does the author. (p. 183). But no matter. If Jews found it in their interest not to support the resurrection of the Polish state (which happened in 1918 in spite of them), then neither Dmowski nor any other Pole needed to find it in their interest to welcome the Jews in the new Poland. So much for the Orwellian construct of “Jewish Poles and non-Jewish Poles”.

THE USUAL SELECTIVE COMPLAINT ABOUT COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY AND INNOCENT VICTIMS

The author (e., g, pp. 191-192) repeats many other Jews that incessantly complain about innocent Jews dying in the pogroms, because, after all, not only Jewish Communists were killed. But this collective guilt worked both ways. Jewish Communists killed not only the goyim that had done wrong to Jews, but also many innocent goyim that never had harmed a Jew. Just as a Jew could be killed solely for being a Jew, so also a goy could be killed solely for being a goy.

Violence begats violence. When Jews supported a movement (Communism) that depends upon revolutionary violence, they lost the moral high ground. They sent a clear message that violence is a legitimate means of expressing political differences, and thereby invited others to act out their heretofore-peaceful grudges by doing violence to Jews.

The Jews painted a target on their back. When Jews supported a movement (Communism) that actively practiced collective responsibility (kill all bourgeoisie, and not just bad bourgeoisie individuals), they endorsed group polarities, which included collective responsibility that became directed back at them.