ULTRA-NATIONALISTS AND ANTI-SEMITES

By Michael Faulkner – November 08, 2009

We are living in dark and troubling times. The past year has seen the financial system teetering on the brink and saved from total collapse only by a transfusion of billions of public funds. The politicians responsible for the bail-out seem content to allow the banks to resume business as usual at taxpayers’ expense.  The really hard times, when those least able to afford it will have to pay for the folly of those responsible, are yet to come. The MP’s expenses scandal, though small-scale compared to the bankers’ mismanaged and misappropriated billions, has resulted in Westminster politicians becoming almost as despised as bankers. In another sign of the times the political system has been further debased by the election of two fascist thugs to the European Parliament, one of whom has been treated to a spot on BBC TV’s Question Time. The sound of alarm bells ringing can no longer be ignored.

More alarming is the alliance the Tories have struck in the EU with some of Europe’s most unsavory people – Polish and Latvian ultra-nationalist parties with strong anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi associations. And perhaps most alarming of all is the fact that the Tories and many others seem to find this quite acceptable. Where one might have expected outrage, instead there have been indignant attacks on critics of the ultra-nationalists, who are accused of maligning honorable men and repeating “Soviet era” slanders against them. At the centre of this controversy are two parties belonging to the new right-wing grouping, the European Conservatives and Reformists, with which the Tories have chosen to ally themselves. They are The Polish Law and Justice Party and the Latvian For Fatherland and Freedom party. The ECR is led by the Polish politician, Michal Kaminski, who was a guest at this year’s Tory Party conference.

Kaminski is a fervent Polish nationalist.  As a teenager during the last years of communist rule, he belonged to the neo-fascist movement, National Revival of Poland, and wore the fascist symbol “Chroby Sword”. The NOP pledged that “Jews will be removed from Poland and their possessions confiscated.” As very few Jews remained in Poland after the Nazis had murdered 3 million of them in the Holocaust, it is clear that the NOP found even the few who remained too many for their liking. But Kaminski now claims to regret his past association and rejects the charge of anti-Semitism. He says that there was no evidence of a neo-fascist tendency at that time and that it was “a party which was Catholic and nationalist orientated.” Well, yes – and as everyone knows, Polish Catholic nationalism has always been entirely free from anti-Semitism!

While some may be inclined to forgive youthful indiscretion, his more recent pronouncements are less easily disposed of. As is now well known, in 1941 at Jedwabne 300 Jews were massacred by Poles, who herded them into a church and burned them to death.  In 2001 Aleksander Kwasnieweski, then President of Poland, publicly apologized on behalf of the Polish nation for this atrocity. It was a horrific act, differing only in scale from  the greater catastrophe then engulfing Polish Jewry. Any reasonable person would consider Krasnieweski’s apology entirely appropriate. Not so Kaminski. He said at the time that he would only apologize for Jedwabne when “someone from the Jewish side will apologize for what the Jews did during the Soviet occupation from 1939 to 1941 – for the mass collaboration of the Jewish people with the Soviet occupier.” His hostility to those suspected of pro-Soviet sympathies may also account for his admiration for former Chilean dictator Pinochet, whom he visited during the latter’s detention in London in 1999. He described the visit as “the most important moment of my life.” Such sentiments will surely endear him to the general’s many admirers in the Tory Party, including Margaret Thatcher and Norman Lamont.

The Tories and their supporters – unfortunately including some in the Jewish community – are desperate to play down the political implications for their EU alliances, of anti-Semitism that is deep-rooted in many parts of Eastern Europe and rampant in Latvia, Lithuania and the Ukraine. It is pervasive in all nationalist political organizations. Anyone who tries to pretend that it is not an issue in Poland and that Kaminski and his ilk are entitled to a clean bill of health, is refusing to face the facts. Anti-Semitism has a long history in Poland. Consider this: “Only by the greatest possible reduction of the number of Jews, especially in the towns, can the Jewish problem be solved. The Polish Government must therefore aim at a solution of the problem by a large-scale and planned emigration of the Jews.” Excepting a few words, this could have come from the minutes of the Wannsee Conference. It was actually written in 1939 by Stefan Litauer, Polish President of the Foreign Press Association in London.

The Latvian case is even more alarming. If anyone had suggested a few years ago that excuses would be made by British politicians for EU politicians who applauded Waffen-SS veterans marching to commemorate their engagement on the side of Nazi Germany against the allies of Britain and the US in the Second World War, they would not have been believed. But the Tories’ new allies in the Latvian Fatherland and Freedom Party are enthusiastic supporters of such parades, which are well-attended annual events in Riga. The Latvian Legion of the Waffen-SS, between 1941 and 1943, murdered most of Latvia’s 70.000 Jews and thousands more who had been deported from other parts of Europe. Robert Zile of the Fatherland and Freedom party honors the legionaires, who were supposedly conscripted against their will, as “tragic heroes.” He is echoed by his Tory defenders here who argue that they were only fighting for their country.

Behind all this lies an insidious historical revisionism that goes back to the 1980s. Essentially it postulates a moral equivalence between Nazism and Soviet Communism. Put simply, this amounts to the claim that both regimes were totalitarian tyrannies responsible for the deaths of millions and that therefore there is nothing to choose between them. Sometimes it is reduced even further to the charge that as Stalin supposedly killed more people than Hitler, Communism was worse than Nazism. This line of argument can only be effectively challenged by recognizing that Stalinism was indeed a tyranny under which millions suffered and perished. Soviet actions in the Baltic states and eastern Poland between 1939 and 1941 were brutal and caused great suffering. There were indeed atrocities such as the massacre at Katyn. But, to suggest that this was equivalent to the horrors of the Nazi occupation and the genocide against the Jews and other victims of the Holocaust, is an assault on historical truth. It is not a matter of polite debate.

The relative ease with which crude Holocaust denial can be refuted has deflected attention from the more dangerous revisionism associated with the German historian, Ernst Nolte. He argued in the 1980s that the primary assault on the western bourgeois order was Bolshevism immediately after the First World War. It was Bolshevism, he said, that first justified the physical annihilation of enemies in the name of class struggle. Nazism, he claimed, was a secondary, reactive movement which sought to mobilize the threatened middle classes against the real threat posed by Bolshevism. He even seemed to suggest that during the Second World War, Hitler’s belief that the Jews were behind Bolshevism, provided an explanation, if not an excuse, for the Holocaust. From this it is only a small step to the conclusion that Bolshevism was indeed Jewish, and that resistance to it involved a war against the Jews. The nationalism of many Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Latvians was, and (despite the absence of Jews) remains, anti-Semitic and susceptible to such perverse reasoning.

It is vital that such assaults on historical truth are vigorously challenged and defeated. There is no room for compromise with those who try to excuse the perpetrators of Nazi barbarism as patriots fighting for freedom against Soviet tyranny. To their shame, some, who should know better, seem so keen to see the Tories re-elected that they are prepared to go along with this.  It is worth re-iterating a few simple truths.

What was the Second World War about? It was a titanic struggle against the most barbaric tyranny the world has ever known. In that struggle six million Jews perished. They were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. In that struggle Britain and the United States were allied to the Soviet Union which for more than three years, virtually alone, took on the full force of the Wehrmacht. Twenty five million Russians lost their lives. Stalin was a ruthless dictator whose crimes can never be excused. Nevertheless, the Soviet people and the Red Army under his leadership - in Churchill’s words - “tore the guts out of the Nazi war machine” and played by far the largest part in saving humanity from barbarism. We should never forget it.