[lbo-talk] lynching\"Andie"s post

andie nachgeborenen andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com
Fri Dec 19 22:56:17 PST 2003


This is taking the postmodern silliness about difference too far, Of course there were lots variations and lots of distinctions to be made if you are going to get fine grained. Of course there were noble and heroic Poles and Lithuinians and Ukrainians ans Germans who took great risks to do the right thing. Of course most ordinary people of those groups never killed anyone, and would have been appalled by the proposal that they do it, even if they were -- as most of the gentiles in those groups were -- antisemites.

Nonetheless my statements are accurate at the level that they are presented. There are rough variations in degrees of antisemitism, and there are other ways of measuring these than by polls. I won't dignify with a response your sneers at my research and your comments on my allegedly echoing US stereotypes without thinking. People can judge for themselves how informed I am. I do not pretend to be a scholar of the Holocaust, but I have read a fair amount on the subject. I rely a lot on Hillberg, whose work seems to be scrupulous, careful, and fair-minded, unlike a lot of the crap in the Holocaust industry.

For example, it indicates a certain level popular antisemitism that when the Nazis entered Kaunas, the local gentile population rose in a pogrom, with hundreds slowly beating their neighbors the Lithuanian Jews to death in the streets with clubs, while thousands looked on smiling and cheering, as can be seen in photographs and is reliably attested to in eyewitness reports.

That tells you something, just as the postcards of smiling crowds at Southern lynchings in the US tells you something about white Southern attitudes towards blacks. It's a geberalization, not true of all white Alabamans (to pick on one state), but true enough, to say that they were as a group virulent racists in the period from, say 1800 through 1970. (I grew up in the South in the 1960s, and had a black girlfriend in the early 70s. It would have been worth our lives or severe physical harm to walk hand in hand, much less kiss in public, on the Virginia side of the line in 1971.)

This did not happen in Denmark, for example, where the King came out wearing the Yellow Star,a nd the Jews were eventuually all saved. So, no, I have no problem with saying that the Lithuanians were rabid antisemites (with some honorablr exceotions), and the Danes were not.

I am not saying that this is genetic or inalterable or a reason to hold an everlasting grudge. The Germans, to use another ethnic stereotype, have done an amazingly good job of eradicating antisemitism, formerly pervasive, in German popular culture. The Poles have not. On the contrary. Not the Lithuanians. You may have confused me with Goldhagen, an ethnic bigot and a fraud of the worst order. I do not share his views.

But ethnicities and national cultures exist, although not inalterably or uniformly without contradiction. If you fail to see this you are missing a lot of what Marx missed when he prematurely declared that the workers have no country. They do, and it matters. As an internationalist. I don't like it any better tahn you do. But going all postmodern si not going to make the facts go away.

--- Paul <paul_ at igc.org> wrote:
> Pls don't take this the wrong way - I admire many of
> your posts as well
> thought out and well informed. But I was VERY
> disappointed with this one.
>
> 1. I suppose I can live with sociological
> generalizations about ethnic
> groups attitudes based on polls, etc. But I really
> think it crosses the
> line when one speaks of ethnic groups "doing"
> things. People do
> things. State entities 'do' things. 'THE
> Ukrainians did this', 'The Poles
> did that' 'THE Lithuanians were the worst'....where
> does this go? When you
> hear the first part of a sentence that starts with
> 'THE Jews did...' what
> is your first reaction -- there is no such thing as
> 'THE Jews' in that sense.
>
> 2. This post is also truly misinformed. (To my
> mind, a secondary sin
> compared to the first.) Yes, I am aware that your
> statements conform
> EXACTLY to the standard, conventional history as
> told by AMERICANS of the
> inter-ethnic relations during the holocaust. (You
> rightly point out
> yourself the accuracy of such self-histories among
> American ethnic groups,
> so why do you fall for this?). Check out, for
> example, the actual written
> and oral histories of the Jewish holocaust survivors
> themselves (again, NOT
> the syntheses provided by American historians).
> There are lots, just on
> the web - such as the translations from chapters of
> Yizkor books prepared
> after the war by the Landsmanshaften (the memorial
> books prepared in
> Yiddish by the former Jewish residents of these
> towns) or Yale's Holocaust
> Oral History project sponsored by Steven Spielberg.
> (If you want to go
> back a bit in time, try reading 'Economic Origins of
> Antisemitism: Poland
> and Its Jews in the Early Modern Period' by Hillel
> Levine.)
>
> I think you will find that this is an extremely
> complicated subject in
> which there can be found some of the worst and best
> examples of
> humanity. If one MUST make negative generalizations
> about the WORST of
> human behavior, I think you will find it correlates
> with specific
> historical, economic and political conditions and
> NOT ethnic groups -
> despite the official version told in America.
>
> So, for example, in Poland there was an enormous
> difference between rural
> and urban areas in all matters including ethnic
> relations. It is in rural
> eastern Poland (part of the original Pale) that one
> finds a
> disproportionate amount of the incidents involving
> ethnic Poles (such as
> the notorious Jedwabne incident near Lomza that Jan
> Gross writes about and
> that Michael posted), although there are also
> positive individual incidents
> from that very region, indeed that very village. In
> particular, these
> incidents came immediately after the 1939-41 Soviet
> occupation of eastern
> Poland - some of these very same areas of eastern
> Poland had been briefly
> occupied by the Germans in the first weeks of the
> war and had NOT yet seen
> a breakdown in Polish\Jewish relations (indeed the
> two groups were serving
> together in the integrated regional units of Polish
> Army fighting the
> Germans, as they had fought together in Lomza
> province in the Polish
> uprisings of the 1860's against the Russians). In
> short, the presence (or
> absence) of collaboration with the Nazis, as well as
> the location and
> timing of that collaboration in the holocaust
> corolates very closely with
> specific material conditions (history, politics,
> class structure) and NOT
> with ethnicity. Even within the same province, even
> the same village.
>
> [BTW, the camps were NOT established in Poland
> because of Polish
> anti-semitism (and there were many outside Poland).
> Auschwitz and a number
> of similar camps were established in early 1940 for
> the liquidation of the
> ethnic POLISH educated classes - their plight is
> under-recognized in the
> West. Jews were collected in newly created Ghettos
> and were not sent en
> masse to these camps until two years later in 1942.
> It is generally
> assumed that the delay was tactical - the ethnic
> Polish leadership class
> was the first threat to the occupation and, above
> all, no large scale moves
> would be made on mass extermination of Polish Jews
> while the US was still
> teetering on declaring war.]
>
> You also cite 'THE Ukrainians' ("terrible too").
> You don't say what you
> mean but usually, in America, this refers to the
> Ukrainian Division of the
> SS formed under Bendara and the pro-Fascist UKA of
> the Western Ukraine who
> along with related groups served as guards in the
> camps. This is a tiny
> group from which to generalize an ethnic slur (how
> many camp guards and
> Ukrainian policemen do you think there really
> were?). And there were
> similar SS Divisions from the Netherlands, Norway,
> etc., yet no one thinks
> of slurring these ethnic groups. But now the ethnic
> generalizations get
> REALLY complicated since western Ukrainians formed
> their collective
> identity more in the U.S. than in eastern Europe.
> Western Ukraine was ruled
> variously by Austria-Hungry, Poland and the Soviet
> Union many considered
> themselves Ruethanians, Rus and various groups of
> mountain Ukrainians until
> they arrived in the U.S. or until after the war when
> they all became part
> of the new boundaries of the Ukrainian SSSR. So
> which western Ukrainians
> get the collective ethnic blame? And if there is
> collective Ukrainian
> blame, is there collective Ukrainian credit? I
> believe a million and a
> half Jews in the Ukraine were saved from the Nazis
> (I don't have the number
> handy) even though 99% of their home villages and
> towns were occupied. The
> local Ukrainian authorities recognized the special
> danger the encroaching
> Nazis posed and gave them priority in what were
> strictly controlled
> civilian evacuations (for example in the desperate
> evacuations by boat from
> besieged Odessa, or from Kiev) - not so easy to do
> when almost everyone
> would also like to get out.
>
> I think you were on the right track when you
> expressed skepticism over
> ethnic nationalist histories as written (re-written)
> by ethnic groups in
> the U.S . I would add skepticism over ethnic
> histories period. But if one
> must go into it, one HAS to go to the original
> sources (or at least look at
> dissident sources too). Every fact in your post
> accurately reflects the
> standard history (stated or implied) we get today in
> the US. Yet I could
> show you (to your satisfaction!) that every bit of
> it was factually false
> or misleading. This is probably true with most US
> versions of an ethnic
> group's history.
>
> But please, negative ethnic generalizations based on
> selective histories
> written by other ethnic groups...well, you get the
> point. One can properly
> grieve without looking for ethnic blame.
>
> Paul
>
>
>
> At 08:34 AM 12/19/2003 -0800, you wrote:
>
>
> >I don't have the evidence at my fingertips, but I
> have
> >seen surveys showing astounding levels of
> antisemitism
> >in Poland -- a country where there are, as I say, a
> >lmost no Jews any more. And there are anecdotal
> things
>
=== message truncated ===

__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Free Pop-Up Blocker - Get it now http://companion.yahoo.com/



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list