Katyn Was Genocide Glaser

Victims of Politics: The State of Human Rights, by Kurt Glaser.

Katyn Was a Form of Genocide–As Recognized By These German Scholars. No Dichotomizing of the Holocaust and the Many Other (Seldom-Mentioned) Genocides

German authors Glaser and Possony present, in this one volume, a large body of examples of human injustices. Although the authors display a pro-German slant that at times veers into German revanchism, and have glaring omissions in data, they give the reader information seldom encountered in English-language publications.

LONG BEFORE TSARIST RUSSIA: THE FIRST RECORDED DEPORTATION OF KRESY POLES EASTWARD

Probably the first recorded de-Polonization of the Kresy (Poland’s pre-WWII eastern borderlands) goes back nearly a thousand years: “Czar Yaroslav I used vyvod [relocation of an entire group] in 1031 when he moved large groups of Poles from northern Galicia to sparsely settled grounds in central Russia.”(p. 416).

GERMAN DISCRIMINATION AGAINST POLES IN THE FACE OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Interestingly, Glaser and Possony discuss the German discrimination against Polish workers in the Ruhr area (1870-1914): “In the Ruhr, as elsewhere in the [Second] Reich, Poles were victims of the Prussian Germanization policy designed for the eastern provinces, which forbade official use of the Polish language.” (p. 305). Here Glaser and Possony are using the term “eastern provinces” as a euphemism for German-conquered areas of Poland (conquered during, and even before, the Partitions).

NOT ONLY THE JEWS–MANY DIFFERENT VICTIMS OF GENOCIDE

By way of introduction to genocide, Glaser and Possony comment: “Members of all ethnic groups and believers of all religions have been victimizedby the terror machine, but various groups were victims of ethnic genocide in the proper sense, among them the Balts, Chechen, Chinese, Crimean Tatars, Finnish Ingrians, Greeks, Ingush, Jews, Kalmyks and eastern Mongolians, Koreans, Meskhetians, Poles (e. g., the Katyn murders), Ukrainians, Volga and other Germans…” (p. 41).

KATYN GENOCIDE A FORM OF ARISTOCIDE (TARGETED DESTRUCTION OF THE CREAM OF A NATION)

Even though this book was written decades ago, it is timely in view of the fact that it was only in its dying days that the Soviet Union admitted its guilt for the Katyn massacre and, to this day, its Russian successor refuses to admit the fact that Katyn was a genocidal act. Glaser and Possony coin the term aristocide (Greek aristos=best + –cide), and, recognizing it is a subset of genocide, write: “A Chronology of Genocide…Aristocide Against Poles: The attempted extermination of the Polish intellectual elite, begun in 1940 by the Soviets at Katyn, was continued by the SS, notably in the Lvov [Lwow, Lviv, Lemberg] areas.” (p. 527). In actuality, both Soviet Communist and Nazi German aristocide and genocide against the Poles goes back much earlier–to the very first hours of World War II in September 1939.

Glaser and Possony elaborate on the various Soviet genocides against the peoples of the USSR itself, but conspicuously avoid putting Katyn into its proper context (which was the first WWII de-Polonization of the Kresy, consisting of the genocidal deportation of 1.5 million Poles from Soviet-conquered eastern Poland, in1939-1941. Most of these Poles survived, and the scale of deportations was limited, ONLY because of the German attack on its erstwhile Soviet ally in 1941). Glaser and Possony also fail to mention the genocidal murder of 2-3 million Poles (including half of Poland’s intelligentsia) by the Germans during WWII.

FALLACIOUS HOLOCAUST SUPREMACIST ARGUMENT (GET KILLED FOR WHO YOU ARE VERSUS GET KILLED FOR WHAT YOU DID)

It is often nowadays claimed that Jews during the Holocaust were unique in facing extermination not for what they did but for who they were. In contrast, Glaser and Possony make it clear that, to a large extent, the victims of Soviet genocide also perished not for what they did but for who they WERE: “The thesis that the term ‘genocide’ does not apply to the phenomenon now known as Gulag Archipelago is a piece of sophistry that must be rejected…at least during Stalin’s time, large numbers of people were killed who engaged in no political activity at all but were regarded as potential political opponents… A major campaign was waged for the ‘liquidation of Kulaks as a class’ after the ‘bourgeoisie’ and the ‘capitalists’ had been liquidated. This raises the question why social class is not included in the categories of people who must be protected against genocide. Lenin and Stalin were open advocates of ‘class genocide.’”(p. 39).

MISCELLANEOUS FACTS

Glaser and Possony tend to support the view that most social change comes not from liberal enlightenment as much as changing economic conditions: “Slavery is incompatible with a modern industrial economy: it was efficiency more than Christianity that moved Czar Alexander II to free the serfs of Russia in 1861. It can be speculated that even had there been no Civil War, slavery would not have survived indefinitely in the American South.”(p. 462).

Glaser and Possony cannot be accused of pro-Polish sympathies in their candid though incomplete accounts of the genocide of Poles, as at Katyn. They one-sidedly cite anti-Polish Ukrainian nationalist propaganda as fact (pp. 100-102, 422), and treat the Polonophobic comments of arch-Polonophobe Lloyd George (p. 9, 417) with complete credulity.

In common with German revanchists, Glaser and Possony portray the Germans as victims of Nazism (p. 23). They would actually have the reader believe that Hitler basically conned his way into power (p. 496). Never mind the fact that the Germans wanted to believe that they were a master race, and that they were victims of the newly-resurrected Polish state, of Germany’s WWI enemies (who actually DARED to defeat them), and, above all, of the Jews. And never mind the fact that it was an overwhelming majority of Germans (89%) that voted the Nazis into power in free elections, and that what Hitler stood for had been widely known for over ten years (since at least the publication of Mein Kampf).

Glaser and Possony (p. 528) repeat the canard that 2.11 million Germans perished during the expulsions following WWII. While lamenting the German expellees, and discussing the annexation of the Kresy by the Soviet Union after WWII (p. 422-424), they fail to mention the fact that the Kresy Poles (who had not by now perished in the Soviet and Ukrainian-nationalist genocides) ALSO underwent harsh unilateral expulsion and lost their centuries-old domiciles without due process of law!