My close friend, Marek Chodakiewicz, is a serious historian of World War II, the Holocaust, and the Nazi and Soviet occupations of his native land. He is an intelligent, balanced, and honest scholar, who does not indulge in nationalist myth-making, is willing to slay sacred cows, and is not devoid of appreciation for the moral complexity that faced the Jewish and Polish people under foreign occupiers. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)–a money grubbing supposed civil rights organization run by the morally challenged Morris Dees–has decided to attack him, as they have attacked so many others, for deviating from leftist orthodoxy in a ruthless campaign of censorship:
Many of Chodakiewicz’s controversial writings about Jews predate his appointment to the museum board. In a 2003 book, After the Holocaust: Polish Jewish Relations in the Wake of World War II, he argued that postwar violence directed at Jews in Poland was seldom due to anti-Semitism. Instead, he cited other factors: Poles’ resistance to Jewish communists; self-defense against Jews who wanted to murder Poles who had collaborated with the Nazis; and thwarting efforts by Jews to reclaim property seized by the Nazis and later taken by Poles.
Chodakiewicz also maintained in the book that 400 to 700 Jews were murdered in Poland after the war; other estimates place the toll at 1,500 or higher. And he argued that Jewish communists killed more Poles after the war than vice versa.
In an article about Chodakiewicz’s book for a newspaper in Israel, Laurence Weinbaum, a historian, one-time Fulbright scholar and executive director of the Jerusalem-based World Jewish Congress Research Institute and the Israel Council of Foreign Relations, wrote that Chodakiewicz and “like-minded historians … are hard at work explaining why the murdered — not the murderers — are guilty.” Chodakiewicz, Weinbaum added, is a historian with “twisted views.”
I have read the book. The scholarship is impeccable. It has hundreds of footnotes per chapter. It cites sources in Russian, English, Polish, Ukrainian, and even Hebrew. It literally researches and reports on each and every reported violent death in Poland from 1944-1947.
The Holocaust was a great crime not only against Jews, but also against Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs, Belarussians, and others. If the essence of the crime was mass murder of innocent civilians for ideological and racist reasons–which I think it was–then the mass murder of Polish Christians, often by Russian or Jewish communists in post-war Poland, is also a crime worth studying in a rigorous way. Such scholarship does not detract from or minimize the Holocaust against the Jewish people. Context is everything in history, including context necessary to understand the magnitude of the Nazi mass murder of Jews. But an event shorn of all context is not historical but mythological or religious: beyond discussion, beyond comparison, beyond understanding, beyond reason. This is not healthy. This is not history.
The real history of World War II has been eclipsed by a fairly recent focus in popular culture almost exclusively upon the Holocaust. This focus has come about through the exclusion of understanding of other Nazi crimes, Japanese crimes, Soviet crimes, and most other aspects of the war. The popular history of the Holocaust has been especially distorted to render the perpetrators beyond human and their victims beyond reproach, even when some of those same victims (or would-be victims) were also victimizers in the uniforms of the NKVD in Poland from 1944-1947. In the post-war milieu of Poland and Eastern Europe, no doubt there were many crimes perpetrated, whether by anti-semitic Polish nationalists, ordinary bandits, rape-addicted Red Army soldiers, or overly zealous Jewish “Avengers.” But this layered story, where the evil Europeans of the Holocaust were now victims is inconvenient, and it has been suppressed.
There is no excuse for mass murder of innocents. This should not be controversial. But to discuss these others victims is considered suspect, whether those innocents were Poles killed by German Nazis, Poles killed by Jews, Ukrainians killed by Poles, Poles killed by Ukrainians, Germans killed by Russians, or any of the other permutations of ideological mass murder that marked the middle of the 20th Century. It is a narrow ideological goal that takes one especially effective species of such mass murder–the Nazi mass murder of the Jews–to exclude, ignore, and downplay other instances of civilian genocide, not least that of the long-suffering Poles, who endured a situation where the erstwhile Jewish victims of the Nazis (in recently donned and also threadbare Soviet uniforms) were also in some cases the victimizers of the Poles–Poles who were themselves also victimized by the Nazis alongside the Jews simultaneously during 1939-1944.
Chodakiewicz’s crime is that he speaking the truth. And that truth threatens the agenda of a certain kind of leftist, a leftist that hates Christianity, hates America, hates Europe, and hates the white race. Such leftism needs the Holocaust to have primacy over all other history because this viewpoint renders the Nazis as uniquely diabolical in history, the apotheosis of the genetically evil Western World. It is the same leftism that defames the Catholic Church, the Spanish conquistadors, the soldiers of the Confederacy, and the brave knights of the Crusades. The leftism comes first; facts and context are secondary.
As a result of leftist dominance in academia and the media, an unnuanced series of concepts about the Holocaust have become etched in stone as conventional wisdom. The most central such myth is that of a completely perfect victim sacrificed by a completely evil and irrational perpetrator. As such, the official Holocaust of the Left becomes the mirror-image of the Christian Passion story: the perfect and blameless Lamb (then Jesus, but now the Jews) slaughtered by the hateful Jewish mob (Christian Nazis) with the acquiesence of the amoral Romans (Polish, Russian, French, and other Christian Europeans who did not do enough to stop the mass murder). After all, what else was Hitler’s Pope or Hitler’s Willing Executioners all about?
Scholarship, such as Chodakiewicz’s, that shows the perpetrators too sometimes were victims of evil, and that Jews too were sometimes bystanders, and that their cousins in NKVD uniforms killed even more people than the Nazis did in the Ukraine and Poland and Russia, would pull down the entire edifice of leftism which depends upon a very particular and quasi-religious Holocaust story, as summarized above.
The SPLC and its allies seek to suppress and marginalize scholarship such as Chodakiewicz’s–rather than refute it–because his work teaches implicitly that all people everywhere may commit evil and mass murder in the name of modern ideology of one kind or another. In other words, his words may reveal that the Western World, far from being evil to the core, was in much better shape before it tasted modernism, ideology, secularism, and the various poisonous fruits of the Enlightenment.
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I think you post was correct with regards to the American MSM. But in other countries this sort of thing is being discussed.
Here is an article from the BBC discussing American Professor Norman Finkelstein’s theory of the “Holocaust Industry”. I don’t think we’d see that here.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/619610.stm
This one surprised me the most. An opinion piece in an Israeli newspaper called “Stalin’s Jews” that ties into your NKVD theme of Jewish communists.
“Yagoda diligently implemented Stalin’s collectivization orders and is responsible for the deaths of at least 10 million people.”
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3342999,00.html
Attacking legitimate history about the Holocaust just because it deviates from the accepted narrative is the worst possible strategy for combating Holocaust deniers. It just makes people more willing to entertain the possibility that the “history” written by the crazies and the Jew-haters might also be legitimate.
Just some comments on terminology. You called Dees a child-molester, without the “alleged”. From the link, it seems that his wife accused him, in their divorce proceedings, of having sex with his underage step-daughter. Divorce proceedings can get pretty rough. Is there really evidence that he did it? And how old was the “child”? Seems like anyone under 18 is called a child nowadays if an adult has sex with her.
Agreed about all that treacly Holokitsch, but again, terminology: Cynthia Ozick has written that the correct answer to the question, “How many non-Jews died in the Holocaust?”, is, “None”. The Shoah refers specifically to the German destruction of the Jews, not to the mass murder of Poles, Gypsies, homosexuals, etc. that happened at the same time and place. I really like that way of looking at it, and yes, I know it goes against popular usage of the word so I’m not expecting anyone else to follow it. My opinion diverges from Ozick’s, though, in that I conclude from that premise that Jews should not harangue the goyim (at least those not descended from the perpetrators) about our own private calamity. It’s not the gentiles’ job to feel sorry about the Jews.
More terminology. I can guess what you mean by “ideology” as a phenomenon of the Enlightenment. I’m a little skeptical, though, how it could be defined so as to exclude, in any but an ad hoc way, western Christianity in the High Middle Ages, for instance.
I cleaned that up. I find Dees detestable, but agree that the evidence of his sexual depravity while substantial is not terribly relevant nor incontrovertible.
Agreed about all that treacly Holokitsch, but again, terminology: Cynthia Ozick has written that the correct answer to the question, “How many non-Jews died in the Holocaust?”, is, “None”.
Actually, the correct answer is trh opposite of whatever a gentile says. If a gentile says that the Holocaust refers only to Jewish suffering, that is offensive and wrong. If a gentile says that the Holocaust refers to the suffering of Jews and others, THAT is offensive and wrong. We can’t win.
Whoops — “the opposite” instead of “trh opposite”.
Without defending the SPLC’s attack on what I agree seems to be a legitimate scholarly work, I think your general remarks considerably overstate the case. While it is quite true that there was violence committed by every group against every other group during and after WWII, there is simply nothing that compares to the Holocaust against the Jewish people. The reason is that the destruction of the Jews was a carefully planned, industrially organized deliberate policy of a powerful government. Most of the other types of violence you are talking about were sporadic, localized and/or unsanctioned by any authority. To try to build some sort of moral equivalence between the one and the others is basically absurd. If that was the nature of the SPLC’s objections, then I can at least understand their point even if I may not agree that it applies in this case.
H.L. Mencken said that the average person is neither very good nor very bad. He wants to be good, and he is if it doesn’t cost him much. He is rarely tempted to be very bad; few people have the opportunity under normal circumstances to rob a bank, or kill someone and get away with it.
War and extreme civil strife are game changers. Then people have the chance to be very good, although it is likely to cost them; and plenty of opportunity to be very bad.
World War II (like most wars) showed who was who. Almost everyone was bad, though in some cases it was arguably choosing against the a worse possibility.
The Germans are the designated villains. And on the whole, they were villainous. But the Japanese were far more dreadful in their treatment of captured Allied soldiers. And Uncle Joe Stalin ordered that anyone who deserted from the front ranks in the battle to repel the German invasion was to be immediately shot without trial by the soldiers to their rear. It prompted the single witty remark by Stalin ever recorded: “In my army, it takes more courage to retreat than to advance.”
I was all set to buy it, and then got the shock: it’s $366 for the book!
http://www.amazon.com/After-Holocaust-Marek-Jan-Chodakiewicz/dp/0880335114
Don’t forget the good ol’USA which engaged in a sadistic orgy of starvation and rape in post-war Germany (killing anywhere from 2.5 to 10 million Germans, depending on whom you believe).
“It prompted the single witty remark by Stalin ever recorded: “In my army, it takes more courage to retreat than to advance.””
Witty it was but not singular. When advised that challenging the Catholic religion was geopolitically unwise, Uncle Joe Stalin keenly replied, “How many divisions does the Pope have? ”
Which reminds me of the old Russian joke.
Stalin knew his days were coming to an end and he knew not what to bequeath to his successor Nikita. He decided on three envelopes, telling Nikita that they were to be opened only during a dire crisis.
In short time, crisis one unfolded and leader Nikita eagerly opened the first envelope. “Blame it all on Uncle Joe,” it read.
Another crisis soon followed. Nikita readily opened the second envelope and it again read, “Blame it all on Uncle Joe.”
Not a moment passed before yet another crisis confronted Nikita. He looked anxiously inside. “Get yourself three envelopes,” read the words.
Oosbree, what is your source for that? I don’t believe there is any evidence of that.
As for “Sanity Injection’s” point, I would ask what does he make of the mass murder of Ukrainians in the 1930s when such bystanders as Elie Weisel said and did nothing to stand up for the so-called Kulaks, including dangerous “enemies of the people” who were infants at the time.
…the destruction of the Jews was a carefully planned, industrially organized deliberate policy of a powerful government. Most of the other types of violence you are talking about were sporadic, localized and/or unsanctioned by any authority. To try to build some sort of moral equivalence between the one and the others is basically absurd.
Nothing you said is in any way relevant to any moral question. Industrialization has nothing to do with right and wrong.
The reason is that the destruction of the Jews was a carefully planned, industrially organized deliberate policy of a powerful government.
The destruction of the American people is a carefully planned, organized, deliberate policy of a powerful government. But that doesn’t seem to bother you.
Obviously, you’re not one of us.
Mr. Roach – I thought we were talking about World War II. Now you are having to expand your timeframe back to the 1930s in order to address my point? That being said, I agree the Holodomor was the closest analogue to the Holocaust. The government certainly meant for the Ukrainians to starve to death, although unlike the Holocaust they did nothing to positively ensure that fact. If you doubt the distinction, ask yourself whether you would prefer to starve to death in your own home with your family or in a filthy concentration camp while watching your fellow prisoners tortured and executed.
I’m also not sure what you exoected Elie Wiesel to do to help the Ukrainians in the 1930s when he was a small child.
As for ben tillman’s comments – what on earth are you talking about? You appear to be making wild assumptions about my views on domestic politics, although if you had bothered to read my blog you’d recognize the absurdity of your statement. So if by “one of us”, you mean someone who goes around making unfounded accusations against total strangers, then no, I’m not one of “you”. Thank goodness.
The Holocaust was partially a reaction to the Soviet mass murder of its own citizens and a fear that the same was in store for the German people.
I don’t see why from a moral standpoint it matters if mass murder occurs before or during a war.
The Soviet mass murder of all kinds of people continued throughout the war incidentally, and includes the mass murder of Germans in East Prussia and Eastern Europe in their mass expulsion back into Germany, as well as the mass murder of Poles and Hungarian nationalists. I believe these atrocities do compare to the Holocaust both in numbers and in brutality. Literally 1-2mm Germans died at Soviet hands in the course of this episode. Is 1-2mm not in line with 6mm? Plus, while we’re on the subject, 10-20 mm Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarussians died at German hands during the war. That seems to me to compare to the Holocaust against Jews too. Indeed, in purely numerical terms, it exceeds it, and Plan Ost was an official Nazi policy. So you want to elevate this one admittedly brutal and serious episode above all others, but the only basis for doing so is (a) the high per capita losses compared to other groups (though Gypsides had a similar loss of 90% or more) and (b) the extreme degree of promotion in literature and film that the Holocaust has compared to atrocities against Germans, Poles, Belarussians, Russians, Ukrainians, Gypsies, etc.
Sanity Injection, you owe it to yourself to read Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life. He’s no crackpot either but a scholar from the University of Chicago .
“The Holocaust was partially a reaction to the Soviet mass murder of its own citizens and a fear that the same was in store for the German people.”
Please find me a shred of evidence to support this startling statement. How is killing Jews – many of them German citizens – a “reaction” to the Soviet terror – or how would it be expected to somehow forestall such treatment under the Soviets? Unless you are falling back on the Jews=Communists canard, in which case I must remind you that the Germans happily executed lots of wealthy Jewish capitalists and persecuted those who had made substantial contributions to German nationalism, like the Jewish German who invented gas warfare.
All of the evidence I have seen clearly indicates that the Final Solution was motivated by the Nazis’ desire for racial and ethnic purity and not in any way associated with what Stalin or the Soviets were or were not doing. Far from being a “reaction” to Stalin’s 1930s purges, the Holocaust didn’t really get going until the eastern offensive when Germany found itself in control of a vast new population of Jews and other “subhumans”.
Seriously, I am not one to throw around charges of anti-Semitism in a civilized debate, but when you make statements like that that have no basis in historical fact, you open yourself up to the charge.
Read Christopher Browning, particularly Path to Essays on the Origins of the Final Solution. I’m not saying they were morally permissible on this basis, and I agree completely on the illogical and moral horror of executing random Western European and Stetl Jews for what some of their coethnics were doing thousands of miles away in Russia, only that Nazi rhetoric was replete with the equation of Jews and Communists and talk of “we must do this to them or they’ll do it to us” and related talk about how much worse the Germans would be compared to what the Soviets had done in Ukraine, etc.
My only response is to note that the rhetoric the Nazis used to justify their crimes was rarely the same as their actual motivations. Keep in mind that the Nazi Party itself had socialist roots and it wasn’t until the purge of 1934, after Hitler had come to power with conservative backing, that the “socialist workers” aspect of the NSDAP was eliminated. It’s a mistake to view the Nazis as predominantly motivated by anti-Communism, though that was and is a widely promulgated idea among those who would defend them. The Nazis were racist nationalists first and foremost, beyond any economic ideology. They certainly embraced anti-Communism with great effect, but it was never their fundamental motivation.
For the Nazis the “Jewish problem” had nothing to do with the Soviet Union and everything to do with the goal of creating a racially pure Volk. The war on the Eastern Front had the effect of exacerbating the problem and making mass relocation of the Jews no longer feasible, hence the Final Solution. But it is simply not factual, based on the many records we have of high-level Nazi discussions and meetings, to suggest that the Holocaust was intended as some sort of retaliation against the Soviet Union or international Communism, though certainly those themes may have been stressed in Nazi propaganda.
The Holocaust was partially a reaction to the Soviet mass murder of its own citizens and a fear that the same was in store for the German people.
there is a balance in history, that whenever one side overplays its hand, it gets overplayed in the next round
you couldn´t have the Holocaust without the Russian Revolution and also a general perception that this Revolution amounted to a Jewish takeover of the Czarist Empire
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