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

Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum. 2003. Doubleday, New York, London

Stuck Up Holocaust Still Overshadows the Gulag, Based on the Usual Bogus Judeocentric Arguments

This book, written by a Jewish author, has won several awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. Owing to the book’s popularity, its mixed message on Holocaust supremacy, as weaponized and used against the memory of the victims of the gulags, must be untangled and critically examined. That is what I do. (After author Anne Applebaum wrote this book, she has moved in a more anti-Polish direction.)

UPDATE USING GOOGLE RESULTS: HOLOCAUST VICTIMS VS. COMMUNIST VICTIMS IN DIRECT VICTIM COMPETITION

Since this book was written some years ago, we must ask how much exposure on the internet there is for the two victim groups today. Check https://www.google.com/. The results are instructive (done 11/03/2024):

“Holocaust” has 170,000,000 mentions; “gulag” has 10,700,000 mentions. This is a 16-fold Jewish advantage. But wait. It gets better.

“Holocaust Remembrance Day” has 835,000 mentions; “Black Ribbon Day” has 37,200 mentions. This is a 22-fold Jewish advantage.

Let us compare two museums that are located in Washington, D. C. Both enjoy the prestige of being located in the U. S. capital, and both are accessible by a large pool of tourist visitors. But so what? On Google, the “United States Holocaust Memorial Museum” has 1,030,000 mentions, while its abbreviation (“USHMM”) enjoys 1,380,000 mentions. The “Victims of Communism Museum” has only 4,740 mentions. This is a staggering 217-fold  and 291-fold Jewish advantage.

Note, furthermore, that these disparities are not simply reducible to different degrees of activism or newsworthiness. The Armenian Genocide is not rarely in the news, and the Armenians have expended a commendable degree of effort to promote public knowledge of their genocide. So the Armenian Genocide is the second best known genocide after the Holocaust. But it is VERY distant second! “Armenian Genocide” gets 2,400,000 mentions on Google compared with 170 million mentions for “Holocaust”. This is a 71-fold Jewish advantage. In other words, the considerable Armenian activism has produced only a minor dent in the Holocaust’s hegemony over the public imagination.

So much for the myth that a level playing field exists for the mention of various genocides. And, yes, it is a zero-sum game.

STUCK UP HOLOCAUST DEFLATED: WHY THE COMMUNISTS, UNLIKE THE NAZIS, DID NOT “EXTERMINATE ENTIRE PEOPLES”

Now back to this book. Author Applebaum asks the central question relevant to the presumed special-ness of the Holocaust–the supposed “total extermination of Jews”. She writes, “Given the climate of the time, the cruelty of the war, and the presence, a few thousand kilometers to the west, of another planned genocide, some have wondered why Stalin did not simply murder the ethnic groups he so despised. My guess is that the destruction of cultures, but not of the people, suited his purposes better. The operation rid the USSR of what he thought of as ‘enemy’ social structures: bourgeois, religious, and national institutions that might resist him; educated people who might oppose him. At the same time, it also preserved more ‘units of labor’ for future use.” (p. 430. Emphasis added).

Exactly right! In fact, the vast, undeveloped regions of the USSR had created a massive and chronic need for forced laborers, which by itself strongly discouraged the physical extermination of “enemy peoples” (with exceptions such as Katyn). See:

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

The Soviet Union, unlike Nazi Germany, enjoyed vast territories to which they could send “enemy peoples” into internal exile without any need to exterminate them. See:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2024/06/06/revisited-double-genocide-validated-now/

Yet, despite all this, Jews still get credit for being the “only” peoples (supposedly) subject to a total planned (not realized)  extermination! Jews get all the attention.

THE STUCK UP HOLOCAUST RULES AFTER ALL

Applebaum does an about-face, and depreciates the gulags in favor of the sacrosanct Holocaust. She writes, “Nevertheless, the Soviet camp system as a whole was not deliberately organized to mass-produce corpses–even if, at times, it did.” (p. xxxix). Oh, no? Surely Stalin knew, or should have known, that the gulags were barely compatible with sustaining life, especially for long sentences. And the “mass production of corpses” did happen in the gulags. It just took longer!

As for the systematic mass murders of groups, Applebaum should go back and re-read what she had written on page 430 (quoted above) on why Stalin was strongly discouraged from conducting a rapid Nazi-style “mass production of corpses” of any group. This may cure her of her stuck up Holocaust.

The author then repeats standard Holocaust-supremacist orthodoxy as she comments, “With an extremely small number of unusual exceptions, no Jew in Nazi Germany could change his status…” (p. xxxviii). Of course, she does not define “a small number of unusual exceptions”, but at least we are making progress over those many Jews that asserted that NO Jew could change his status in Nazi Germany. Even so, this quibbling from “NO Jews” to “FEW Jews”  constitutes a changing of the argument and a moving of the goalposts, and it, too, fails. In actuality, there were thousands of Jews in the Third Reich that the Nazis spared by arbitrarily re-defining them as non-Jews. See:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2023/11/01/bulletin-the-holocaust-was-not-exceptional-and-does-not-deserve-any-special-attention/

On the other hand, we must ask how FEW were the “enemies of the people” under Communism that got “genuinely” rehabilitated. See:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2024/07/17/the-odd-official-gulag-statistics-falsified/

STUCK UP HOLOCAUST: MIND-READING BY AUTHOR ANNE APPLEBAUM: A WORD SALAD IN SUPPORT OF HOLOCAUST SUPREMACY

The author rattles off this multiply-untrue messaging, “…no Jew inside a camp could reasonably expect to escape death, and all Jews carried this knowledge with them at all times. While millions of Soviet prisoners feared  they might die–and millions did–there was no single category of prisoner whose death was absolutely guaranteed”. (p. xxxviii). Bunk!

Applebaum is talking total Judeocentric nonsense. The author knows, or should know, that a significant fraction of all Jewish arrivals at the “death camps” were diverted into forced labor–giving them real hope of survival, and in fact hundreds of thousands of them outlasted the Third Reich. As for expectation of death, most Jews in the ghettos, far from living under constant fear of death, were very slow to grasp the reality of the unfolding Holocaust. In fact, most Jews arriving at the death camps did not even realize their impending death until they were at the very doors of the gas chambers! See:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2022/12/27/auschwitz-gas-chambers-demystified-a-nazi-collaborating-jew-was-not-driven-by-fear-of-death-polish-collaborators-not-needed-in-the-nazi-hunt-for-the-jews-fugitive-jews-betrayed-other-fugitive-jews/

Taking the expectation of death further, we must ask how many gulag inmates resigned themselves to dying in the gulags, especially considering the arbitrary judgments of the Communist authorities. And I doubt that any dying gulag inmate was particularly concerned with technicalities such as which “enemy group” he or she belonged to.

REMOVING THE TOOTH FILLINGS OF NON-JEWISH VICTIMS

One aspect of the mystification of the stuck up Holocaust is the frequent exclusive reference to the Nazi German removal of the gold fillings of the Jewish victims before they were cremated. However, not mentioned is the fact that the Nazis also pulled the fillings of non-Jewish (as Slavic) victims before cremation. See:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2023/09/19/no-artificial-dichotomy-death-camps-and-concentration-camps-death-toll-uncertain-mauthausen-gas-chambers-polish-intelligentsia-exterminated-poles-and-not-only-jews-had-their-teeth-exploited-jewi/

So it was with the gulags. The bodies of the gulag victims were exploited for their tooth fillings–officially as well as unofficially. Applebaum comments, “All of this sounds very civilized–except that another order gave camps permission to remove the dead prisoners’ gold teeth. These removals were meant to take place under the aegis of a commission…The gold was supposed to be taken to the nearest state bank. It is hard to imagine, however, that such commissions met very frequently. The more straightforward theft of gold teeth was simply too easy to carry out, too easy to hide, in a world where there were too many corpses.” (p. 343).

But so what. The stuck up Holocaust still rules!