No Polish Quisling Because Poles Unworthy Fallacy Kay

Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, by Alex J. Kay. 2014

Post-Barbarossa Genocides. The Term Holocaust Politicized. The Fallacy of “No Polish Quisling Because The Germans Thought Poles Too Low To Deserve One”

This work takes the position that Hitler’s invasion of the USSR was doomed from the start. Within a few weeks of June 22, 1941, the OSTHEER was already experiencing higher-then-expected casualties from the then-disorganized Soviet resistance. It also soon became apparent that the ability of the rearward units of the Red Army to regroup had been greatly underestimated. In addition, the ability of Soviet industry to mobilize and expand had hardly even been seriously considered.

ORWELLIAN MONOPOLIZATION OF THE TERM HOLOCAUST—EVEN DERIVATIVES OF THIS TERM ARE VERBOTEN

Consider some implications of Holocaust supremacism. The very word Holocaust, after some challenges, came to refer exclusively to Jews. Even the use of qualified-terms such as “Gypsy Holocaust” (Black Holocaust) still maintained the notion that the Jews’ Holocaust is a privileged genocide, and that all other genocides are second-class genocides.

As it turns out, even THAT can be too much an infringement on the standard reigning Judeocentric meritocracy of genocides. For example, Martin Holler complains that, “Furthermore, I will omit fashionable political expressions such as PORRAIMOS or ‘Gypsy holocaust,’ [note the lower-case ‘h’; itself Orwellian] which are inexact and confusing. PORRAIMOS (from PORROVAV—to devour) evokes at least in some Romani dialects associations of sexuality, while ‘Gypsy holocaust’ uses the Hebrew word polemically in order to underline parallels between the Nazi persecution of Jews and ‘Gypsies.’” (p. 281) How awful! And if use of the very term Holocaust, in reference exclusively to Jews, is not political in nature, then what is?

“JEWS TO MADAGASCAR”: NOT A POLISH IDEA. EMBRACED EVEN BY SOME JEWS!

According to the drift of some authors, the post-Pilsudski Endek-style OZON Polish government came up with the ‘Jews to Madagascar’ idea, and then Nazi Germany picked up this brilliant anti-Semitic Polish invention–until wartime events made it unworkable, and physical extermination was substituted. This narrative is yet another attempt to associate Poland with Nazi Germany, and is categorically false.

The Jews to Madagascar idea is actually quite old. It goes at least as far back as 1885 (Paul de Lagarde). In the late 1930s, not only the Polish government, but also the French and British governments, and even the JOINT Distribution Committee, seriously considered the Jews to Madagascar idea. (Leonid Rein, p. 234). Note that JOINT is a Jewish organization.

WHICH SOVIET JEWS WERE FIRST TARGETED?

The question still exists, among scholars, about whether the order to destroy all Soviet Jews already existed before the first guns were fired on the Russian front. Author Leonid Rein (p. 223) points out that no such order has ever been found, and that Major Weiss’ claim of the existence of such an order was likely a postwar-trial defensive fabrication. (p. 223). The earliest-known actual order, concerning Jews, was Reinhardt Heydrich, dated July 2, 1941. It demanded only the killings of Jews in party and state positions. (p. 223). All-out killings of Jews, regardless of age or gender, did not begin until several weeks after the start of Operation Barbarossa. (Kay et al., p. 318).

THE FALLACIOUS DUALISM BETWEEN THE “RATIONAL” NAZI GENOCIDE OF SLAVS AND THE “IRRATIONAL” NAZI GENOCIDE OF JEWS

One of the standard memes, used to justify Holocaust supremacism, is the one about Slavs murdered for “rational” reasons (e. g, taking their land for the purposes of LEBENSRAUM) while Jews were murdered for “irrational” reasons (as an end in itself). However, both sets of victims are just as dead. In addition, it does not follow that an “irrational” genocide is one iota more worthy of recognition than a “rational” genocide.

As it turns out, the Holocaustspeak dichotomy between “irrational” and “rational” genocides collapses when confronted with the facts. Author Alex J. Kay tacitly recognizes as much as he comments, “The explicit reference to the decimation of the Slavic population during the campaign against the USSR demonstrates that although economic motivations lay at the core of proposals to starve millions of Soviet citizens to death, racial considerations shaped the discourse when it came to what was deemed possible or not. It is barely imaginable that the starvation policy would have met with such a consensus within Germany’s military and political elite had it been directed against, for example, the French or the Norwegian populace.” (p. 112). In addition, the flip-sign of the coin forces us to remember that the Shoah likewise had a “rational” component–in the form of Nazis benefitting from the belongings and wealth of the murdered Jews.

A MORE SYSTEMATIC NAZI-GERMAN GENOCIDE OF SLAVS WAS PREVENTED BY LOGISTICS, NOT BECAUSE NAZIS WERE “SOFT” ON SLAVS COMPARED WITH JEWS

Initial German plans called for the direct and indirect murder of some 30 million Slavs. (Kay, pp. 111-on). One must ask why Slavic losses, however considerable, failed to reach this level? Kay answers, “With insufficient numbers of security troops and a military situation that rapidly began to deteriorate, it proved impossible to cordon off whole regions and simply bring about the death of millions of people through starvation. In the event, countless Soviet civilians took to the country roads in search of food, and trade on the black market thrived.” (p. 115). The informed reader remembers that the Poles also thwarted systematic German-imposed genocidal starvation implementing an underground black market.

NAZIS DELEGITIMIZE SLAVS AS WELL AS JEWS. BELARUSIANS WERE ABOVE POLES IN THE NAZI HIERARCHY. QUISLING DESPITE UNTERMENSCHEN

There are several stages in the conduction of genocide, and the dehumanization of the targeted group is one of the first ones. Author Stephan Lehnstaedt recognizes this process as encompassing Slavs no less than Jews. He writes, “In their [Nazi] eyes, the local population of Belarusians and Jews consisted only of subhuman beings (UNTERMENSCHEN) not worth caring about. At first they were just defeated enemies whose country was to be conquered. But even before the occupation, Nazi propaganda created a certain image of these people, one that was spread word of mouth and amplified by Nazi scholarship. In official announcements, the Belarusians were declared to be a mixture of eastern Baltic and eastern European races, and they were viewed with disdain, though on the Nazi racial scale—because of some Nordic ‘additives’—they were above Poles, notwithstanding their alleged lesser intellectual abilities compared with other Slavs. And despite the establishment of a minor collaborating regime, most of the occupiers saw Belarusians as subhuman beings.” (pp. 246-247; Emphasis added).

Now, if Belarusians were above Poles, in Nazi-German thinking, and Belarusians were systematically exterminated, as they were, it follows that, given more favorable circumstances, the Germans would have exterminated many more Poles than “only” the 3-5 million that they did.

It is sometimes argued that there was no Polish Quisling because the Germans did not want one, and because the Germans thought of the Poles as too far beneath them to “deserve” a collaborationist government. Both premises are false. First of all, the Germans did seek, but failed, to find a willing Polish Quisling. Second, as the Belarusian example shows, merely being thought an UNTERMENSCHEN does not prevent a Quisling government, at least not necessarily.