…by Jonas E. Alexis
David Duke’s The Secret Behind Communism begins with a quotation from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, which reads in part:
“The October Revolution was not what you call in America the ‘Russian Revolution. It was an invasion and conquest over the Russian people. More of my country men suffered horrific crimes at their bloodstained hands than any people or nation in the entirety of human history. It cannot be overstated. Bolshevism committed the greatest human slaughter of all time. The fact that most of the world is ignorant and uncaring about this enormous crime is proof that the global media is in the hands of the perpetrators.”[1]
Here Solzhenitsyn is implicitly squaring off with the entire Holocaust establishment, which posits the historically risible claim that the Holocaust is unique. This doctrine simply states that nothing in the history of mankind can be compared to the Holocaust. The late Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner declared that “the Holocaust…was unique, without parallel in human history.”[2] Daniel Goldhagen made similar claims in his book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, a completely fraudulent piece of propaganda that has been widely discarded and debunked by competent scholars.[3] French Jewish historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet espoused similar views.[4]
Many Jewish writers indirectly advocate this form of doctrine in one way or another. For Deborah Lipstadt, downplaying the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust is to be a Holocaust denier.[5] German historian Ernst Nolte made the mistake of comparing the Holocaust to other crimes that have committed in history, such as Stalin’s extermination of the Russian people, the Armenian genocide, and Pol Pot’s crimes against humanity.
For this, Lipstadt labeled him a Holocaust denier. Historian Joachim Fest defended Nolte on historical and rational grounds, and received the same treatment.[6] Some Jewish historians, however, does not subscribe to this view.
Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer, while declaring that the Holocaust is an important chapter in human history and that “the depth of pain and suffering of Holocaust victims is difficult to describe,” admits that “the Holocaust is certainly not unique, because ‘indescribable’ human suffering is forever there and is forever being described.”[7]
What we are saying here is that the “uniqueness” doctrine is an ideology, one that has no foundation in historical scholarship, but only exists in the minds of people like Lipstadt. It is maintained not because it is intellectually and morally satisfying and historically plausible, but because it seeks to preserve certain ideological inaccuracies.
Paul Hollander, a Jewish scholar and writer who fled his native Hungary because of political persecution, subscribes to the same ideology, declaring that the Nazis should never be compared with the Soviets on “moral equivalence” because, among other things, “Communist regimes, unlike the Nazis, did not seek to murder children.”[8] Hollander knows better, and here is what he never told his readers.
By 1937, two years before Hitler came to power, Stalin had already starved and executed as many as ten million peasants.[9] This period in history—from 1929-1937—is known as the Red Holocaust.[10] By 1938, a total of 9.7 million perished, and from 1939 until 1953, another 9 million lost their lives.[11]
From 1937-1939, Stalin executed 50,000 clergymen alone.[12] Stalin’s terrorism began as early as 1918, when “he ordered the execution of all suspected counter-revolutionaries. Stalin burned villages in the countryside to intimidate the peasants and discourage bandit raids on food supplies a decade before he became Red tsar.”[13]
Even after World War II, Stalin did not stop terrorizing the peasants.[14] Minority groups such as the Greeks, Germans, Turks, Orthodox Christians, Lithuanians, and Vlasovites also fell prey to Stalin’s ethnic cleansing.[15]
There is no way that the “uniqueness” doctrine can square historically with Stalin’s Red Holocaust. As Rosefielde notes, “Communism is indelibly stained by the Red Holocaust. Nonetheless, the will to deny, blur, soften, mitigate and pardon communist high crimes against humanity persists for complex personal, partisan, academic, cultural, political and pragmatic reasons.”[16]
According to Rosefielde, Stalin was involved in the ethnic cleansing of the peasants by violent means, including executions, terror, and starvation, beginning with an attempt in 1917.[17] As he puts it, “The peasantry was the Bolsheviks’ first and primary target, because it did not fit Lenin’s Marxist paradigm, founded on the criminalization of private property, business and entrepreneurship.”[18] We see the same pattern in Communist China, where Mao “forcibly collectivized the peasantry.”[19] In the end, Communist China was responsible for the death of at least forty million.[20]
It is clear by now that the “uniqueness” doctrine holds no historical validity. Yet by espousing it, people like Lipstadt, Hollander, Neusner, and others open themselves up for various cultural interpretations which say that Jewish blood is more important than Gentile blood. This harmonizes with Talmudic reasoning, and there are examples of rabbis who espouse and even practice that belief system:
“Rabbi Yitzhak Ginzburg of Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus/Shechem, after several of his students were remanded on suspicion of murdering a teenage Arab girl: ‘Jewish blood is not the same as the blood of a goy.’ Rabbi Ido Elba: ‘According to the Torah, we are in a situation of pikuah nefesh (saving a life) in time of war, and in such a situation one may kill any Gentile.’”[21]
On another occasion, the rabbi declared, “If every single cell in a Jewish body entails divinity, and is thus part of God, then every strand of DNA is a part of God. Therefore, something is special about Jewish DNA…If a Jew needs a liver, can he take the liver of an innocent non-Jew to save him? The Torah would probably permit that. Jewish life has an infinite value. There is something more holy and unique about Jewish life than about non-Jewish life.”[22]
Historically and intellectually, this “uniqueness” doctrine is an abomination, and even Jewish author and journalist D. D. Guttenplan thinks that the argument works against those who promote it. But ideologically it is useful, since it puts Jewish suffering above any other suffering in human history, giving Jews a power no other ethnic group has. If you don’t think that this ideologically is intellectually crippling academe, then consider this.
When noted historian Norman Davies challenged the accepted views of both the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland and the Stalinist regime in Soviet Union, he was ultimately denied tenure at Stanford University. His accusers were mainly Jewish historians Lucy S. Dawidowicz and Abraham Brumberg. A Stanford University article reads:
“Davies’s works have been criticized at Stanford and elsewhere, by such experts as Lucy S. Dawidowicz (author of The War Against the Jews: 1933-1945) who said they felt Davies minimized historic anti-Semitism in Poland and tended to blame Polish Jews for their fate in the Holocaust. Davies’ supporters contend that Poles suffered as much as Jews did in the war and could have done very little to save any of the 3 million Jews living in Poland at the time of the Nazi invasion in 1939. Davies had sought $3 million in damages from the university for what he called fraud, misrepresentation, breach of contract, discrimination and defamation.”[23]
Davies eventually moved to England, where he taught history at the University of London and later became a fellow at Oxford.
Davies is not an obscure historian. His scholarly works include God’s Playground: A History of Poland (in two volumes); Europe: A History; No Simple Victory: World War II in Europe, 1939-1945; and Heart of Europe: The Past in Poland’s Present.
Yet in 2005, Davies dropped a historical bomb that has devastated the Holocaust establishment, writing a sharp critique of both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, which was published by the Sunday Times.
Davies, like many other historians, demolishes the “uniqueness” doctrine. This particular thesis has no moral or ethical value other than to pursue ideological and political interests. It is not about historical truth, but about pursuing or preserving a completely false premise that has no factual foundation—only those who need the Holocaust to be unique consider it so and will fight to the death to protect it.
This became clear in 2011 when “Jewish leaders and political groups in Germany condemned a proposed national day of remembrance for the 12 million ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern Europe after World War II.”154 The Black Book of Communism tells us that Communism is responsible for taking the lives of approximately one hundred million people.[24]
So can the Holocaust establishment truthfully document that the Holocaust is unique? No. In that sense, Alexander Solzhenitsyn has a point. He was brave enough to point out who was behind the Russian invasion. This is one reason why Jewish historians like Richard Pipes do not like Solzhenitsyn that much. If Solzhenitsyn is right, then Pipes’ book, The Russian Revolution, could have easily been put under the label: The Jewish Revolution in Russia.
A few years before Solzhenitsyn’s death in August 2008, Pipes attacked him in print. Regarding Solzhenitsyn’s Deux Siecles Ensembles: Juifs et Russes avant la Revolution (“Two Hundred Years Together: Jews and Russians before the Revolution”), which has only been published in France because no publisher will print it in the English-speaking world, Pipes has nothing good to say about the book other than that it was “something more than a personal statement yet less than a work of scholarship.” Not only that, he stated that the charge of anti-Semitism leveled against Solzhenitsyn “was not entirely unmerited,”[25] based largely on how Solzhenitsyn…