‘Double Genocide’ has become the deadliest form of denial
after liberation.
report on the Shoah
THE 70TH anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz approaches amid a disturbing new cover-up of Holocaust history. Across Eastern Europe, the notion of a “Double Genocide” — the idea that there were two equal holocausts, Soviet and Nazi -— has been pushed by governments and nationalist elites in the media and arts.
The concept suggests that Jews were communists, and participated in the communist crimes against their countries — which must equally count as “genocide”.
Therefore, the Holocaust should be reconceived as one of two equal catastrophes, one of them allegedly involving major Jewish culpability.
It was enshrined, in much more subtle and polite language, in the 2008 Prague Declaration and promoted by a commission sponsored by the Lithuanian government. Some European Union countries have even passed laws effectively criminalising opposing views, among them Hungary and Lithuania in 2010 and Latvia in 2014. It is all sugared over with investment in “Jewish” and “Yiddish” events attractive to some Western Jewish academics and community leaders who can be intoxicated with junkets in the new “eastern European playground”.
Frighteningly, the bogus narrative has been been moving westward, usually adopted as a small political price for East European countries “hating the Russians properly”.
Let there be no mistake: the horrendous crimes of Stalinism need to be exposed, and the contemptible policies of today’s Putinism need to be countered, but not by downgrading the Holocaust at the whim of ultra-nationalist elites and their often antisemitic supporters.
In May 2014, Baltic nationalists sneaked a resolution into the United States Congress calling for a new mixand-match memorial day (Aug 23) for Soviet and Nazi victims jumbled together, which would inevitably lead to the demise of Holocaust Remembrance Day.
In the UK, the government failed to reply to a dying UK Holocaust survivor who asked that his government raise objections to Latvia’s annual homage to its pro-Nazi Waffen SS forces.
Nearly all the West’s media have stayed silent over Ukraine’s Poroshenko government declaring a national holiday glorifying the country’s most vicious Holocaust collaborator, Stepan Bandera.
The fact remains that Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet Army, which crushed Hitler’s eastern armies and (belatedly) halted the Holocaust. For most trapped Jews, rescue by the Soviets was the one slim hope of survival.
The grand Anglo-American-Soviet alliance that brought down Hitler is one of the most significant achievements of Western civilisation.
If “Double Genocide,” effectively the newest and deadliest incarnation of Holocaust denial, is not effectively countered, the legacy of history will be falsified in our own lifetime.
The news was ignored because it failed to further the war effort
Dovid Katz, editor of DefendingHistory. com, is based in Lithuania. His new book ‘Yiddish and Power’ is published by Palgrave Macmillan (UK). www.dovidkatz. net