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

Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, edited by Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick. 2009. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York

Double Genocide Validated: Exposing the Fallacious “Credit” Given to Communism For Not Exterminating An Entire People

Holocaust supremacists get a conniption whenever the crimes of the Communists and those of the Nazis (against Jews that is) are compared. They insist (contrary to the evidence) that the Nazis were out to exterminate all Jews–all the while the Communists had no comparable policy against any of the peoples they targeted. This is supposed to make Communism so much “less bad” than Nazism that we cannot give it any significant attention. In addition, we cannot use the forbidden term double genocide.

Apart from being a Jewish-serving value judgment, this entire argument presupposes that Hitler and Stalin had identical capabilities. They did not. As elaborated below, Stalin had a vast geographic land area, effectively a huge ghetto that Hitler did not have, and to which he could send objectionable people into permanent internal exile.

STALIN, UNLIKE HITLER, DID NOT EXTERMINATE ENTIRE GROUPS OF PEOPLE–BECAUSE HE DID NOT HAVE TO!

Double genocide validated: Joerg Baberowski and Anselm Doering-Manteuffel write, “Why, though, did the Stalinist spiral of violence never descend into industrially organized mass murder? Because the Bolsheviks had an alternative solution. They could and did send stigmatized collectives to Central Asia and, in this way, deliver then from the ‘danger zone’. However, the ethnic and social ‘reordering’ of Soviet society was only possible because those in power created new spaces of ambivalence in the Asian parts of the Soviet Union. Central Asia became a reservation of outcasts; it became a ghetto for enemy nations and ‘socially foreign elements’. Thus could the Bolsheviks refrain from the complete physical annihilation of their imagined enemies.” (pp. 226-227).

That’s not all. The Soviet Union also had an urgent long-term need for a large number of forced laborers to develop the vast remote regions of the Soviet Union. For this reason alone, Stalin much preferred exile for forced labor to physical extermination. See:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2024/06/24/ruthless-communism-not-exterminatory-pioneering-forced-labor-happened/

DOUBLE GENOCIDE VALIDATED. CLASSICIDE: THE COMMUNIST TARGETING OF THE BOURGEOISIE

Both the Nazis and the Communists targeted groups collectively but, because the Communists never targeted Jews collectively, they get a pass.

Sheila Fitzpatrick and Alf Luedtke comment, “In the Soviet case, exclusion was on grounds of class, not race. From 1918 to 1936 a legal category of stigmatization–lishentsy, or those deprived of vote, often on grounds of class–existed. If you were a lishenets–and even sometimes even if you were not, but were nevertheless suspected of bad class origins or attitudes–you were generally deprived not just of the right to vote but also access to higher education, membership of the Communist Party, and the Komsomol, and state housing; liable to special punitive taxation, disadvantaged in court (which operated according to the principles of ‘class justice’), and always vulnerable to being fired from your job (especially a white-collar one) in one of the periodic institutional purges held in the 1920s and early 1930s.” (p. 279).

DOUBLE GENOCIDE VALIDATED: COLLECTIVE GUILT IN DEPORTATIONS

Baberowski and Doering-Manteuffel comment, “Molotov admitted years later, in an interview with journalist Feliks Chuev, that he and Stalin were not concerned with individual guilt or responsibility of the deported. People who belonged to an enemy nation, he maintained, represented a potential danger to the Soviet order. As such, they had to be deported.” (p. 222).

DOUBLE GENOCIDE VALIDATED. NAZISM AND COMMUNISM WERE TWINS

Yoram Gorlizki and Hans Mommsen write, “The Nazi and Bolshevik regimes shared many features in common. Both were autocratic police states which within months of coming to power had cracked down on opposition groups and imposed severe restrictions on civil liberties. In both the state made far-reaching demands on its citizens and placed severe limits on the private sphere.” (p. 46).

Browning and Siegelbaum write, “”Nevertheless, it seems incontestable that both regimes assumed the right to ascribe identity and impose categorization for the purpose of social engineering through exclusion and purification, and that they did so with unfettered use of force and violence.” (p. 264).

THE FAILURE OF COLLECTIVE OWNERSHIP UNDER SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM

Jason R Browning and Lewis H. Siegelbaum write, “One might imagine that the mirror image of the kulak was the collective farmer (kolkhoznik), but most often one finds that term used in a neutral sense. Perhaps this was because in ideological terms collective farms constituted an intermediately form of property between individual ownership (represented by edinolichniki, who as late as 1936 still comprised between 10 and 15 percent of all peasant households) and fully socialized–that is, state–property. Indeed, the attention that peasants lavished on their household plots at the expense of collective farm duties mocked this ideological formulation.” (p. 242).

THE NAZI GERMAN SS WAS HUGE

Peter Fritzsche and Jochen Hellbeck comment, “Nearly 800,000 German men, more than 1 percent of the total population of ‘Greater Germany’, joined the SS between 1931 and 1945…” (p. 333).

CONCLUSION

The double genocide validated, as a result of this book, should be widely publicized.