German Guilt Diffusion SMOKING GUN Pogrom Trivialities Mixed With 6 Million Dead Jews Kopstein

Intimate Violence: Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust, by Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg. 2018.

SMOKING GUN: German Guilt Diffusion. Molehills (Mob Violence), Made Into Mountains, Clumsily Serve This Purpose

The attempt to shift the blame for the Holocaust away from the Germans—where it belongs—has gotten so desperate that the roughing-up and killing of a few Jews, by non-Germans, and based largely on archival sources of unclear credibility, is now conflated with the systematic German murder of 6 million Jews. Such are the pathetic depths to which Holocaust scholarship has fallen.

VERY SHODDY

This book does not even bother to identify how many Jews were purportedly killed in each of the 200 alleged locations in Poland and Ukraine, much less the basis for ascertaining the veracity of the allegations. It also mixes Jedwabne (p. ix), which happened well after the Germans occupied the area, with alleged killings that allegedly happened during the chaotic days following the German invasion of its erstwhile Soviet ally.

ORWELLIAN TECHNIQUES OF CONNECTING TRIVIAL AND UNCONCERTED INDIVIDUAL JEW-KILLINGS WITH THE GERMAN-MADE HOLOCAUST

More than anything else, this book is a lesson in Holocaustspeak. Kopstein and Wittenberg use the following rhetoric to lump all Jew-killings together, “Two tragedies befell the Jews of Eastern Europe after the outbreak of World War II. The first and by far the best known and exhaustively researched is the Holocaust, the Nazi extermination effort. The second is ‘the violent explosion of the latent hatred and hostility of local communities’ (Zbikowski 1993, p. 174).” Nice, inflammatory words. And, with the “two tragedies” Orwellian wording, trivial alleged Polish-Ukrainian individual killings of Jews are now functionally elevated to the same footage as the German murder of 6 million Jews.

SMOKING GUN: THE OVERT AND DELIBERATE DIFFUSION OF GERMAN RESPONSIBILITY

But wait. It gets even better. Kopstein and Wittenberg give away the store as they write about recent changes in the understanding of the Holocaust in academia, “This revised view of the Holocaust, one that concentrates on the local and the personal, expanded the focus of research from the death camps to killing fields across Europe, and FROM ALMOST EXCLUSIVE FOCUS ON GERMANS TO THE ROLE OF NON-GERMAN CIVILIANS IN THE PLANNING AND KILLING.” (p. 128. Emphasis added). It most certainly does.

How nice that, for essential purposes, Poles and Ukrainians now find themselves on the same side as the Germans during WWII. Hitler must be smiling in his grave.

AN OPEN DENIAL OF POLES AND UKRAINIANS EXPERIENCING GENOCIDE

Kopstein and Wittenberg remove all doubt, to the reader, as to where they are coming from. They comment, “Contrary to the claims of the nationalists [Reviewer’s note: A standard, pejorative editorial buzzword], however, local civilian populations were not victims of the war in the same way as Jews were. [Reviewer’s alert: The standard victimhood hierarchy and Holocaust supremacism.] Ordinary Poles and Ukrainians MAY HAVE DIED at the hands of both the Germans and the Soviets, but some also willingly killed Jews, both in collaboration with and independently of the Germans.” (pp. 20-21; Emphasis added).

How glad the millions of German-murdered Poles in the Polokaust, and the millions of Ukrainians murdered in the HOLODOMOR, must feel to learn that they only MAY HAVE DIED, or that they did not die in quite exactly the same way as the much-hallowed Jews.

Evidently Kopstein and Wittenberg’s Judeocentric mindset is so extreme that only Jews matter. It is no more complicated than that.