The Holocaust Historiography Project

Quotes from JHR Volume 17 number 6

'Holocaust Mono-Culture'

“In the terrible tragedy of the [Second World] war there is a unique element: the deportation and murder of Jews and resistance fighters by the Nazis. But that lasted four years altogether. The much greater crime of the Soviet Gulags took place over decades, and cost the lives of millions. Millions also perished in the Chinese camps, and there have been terrible genocides in Cambodia and Vietnam. None of these crimes has ever received the same consideration as the annihilation of the Jews. And this is a kind of mono-culture, which I find shocking.”

— Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of France’s National Front party, quoted in Der Spiegel, No. 46/1996.


“From such a defeat [May 1945], one does not recover any longer, as peoples formally recovered after great battles like Jena or Sedan. Such a defeat marks a turning point in the life of nations.”

— Ernst Jünger, 1945


War: Threat to Liberty

“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxers; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people … [There is also] an inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and … degeneracy of manners and of morals … No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

— James Madison


'Blameless Victims?'

“… Nowhere is the question asked: to what extent are Jews themselves responsible for the hostility displayed toward them? Since the holocaust, Jewish leaderships the world over have proclaimed the view that as the visible objects of persecution, the Jews are blameless victims. It was not always thus.

“One of the earliest scholarly examinations by a Jew of the causes of Jewish persecution, written by Solomon ibn Verga in the early 16th century, drew attention (in the context of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain [1492]) to the inevitable consequences of patterns of behaviour which inspired envy and reeked of ostentation.

“Nor have Jews always been particularly wise in their political decisions. The Chmielnicki massacres of 1648-56 were in large measure the result of an ill-fated alliance between the Jews of Poland and the Polish nobility, and of consequential Jewish complicity in that nobility’s persecution of the Ukrainian peasantry…

“Part, at least, of the explanation of anti-Jewish prejudice in contemporary Eastern Europe is to be found in the popular image of the Jews are purveyors of communism and allies of Stalin; this image is of course distorted, but reflects a certain unpalatable truth.”

— Geoffrey Alderman, professor of politics and contemporary history, University of London, in “Blameless Victims?,” The Times Higher Education Supplement (London), Oct. 22, 1993.


Coming Battle

“America’s battle is yet to fight; and we, sorrowful though nothing doubting, will wish her strength for it. New Spiritual Pythons, plenty of them, enormous Megatherions, as ugly as were ever born of mud, loom huge and hideous out of the twilight Future on America; and she will have her own agony, and her own victory, but on other terms than she is yet quite aware of.”

— Thomas Carlyle


“My conclusions about the late [First World] war remain as follows: (a) that the American pretense of neutrality down to 1917 was dishonest and dishonorable, (b) that the interests of the United States were actually on the side of Germany, and against both England and France, (c) that the propagation of the notion to the contrary was a very deft and amusing piece of swindling … Every day I meet some man who was hot for the bogus Wilsonian idealism in 1916 and 1917, and is now disillusioned and full of bile. Such men I do not respect.”

— H. L. Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun, June 12, 1922.


Double Standards

“The [1940] massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn forest may have been condemned at Nuremberg as a crime against humanity, yet the man who signed the order, NKVD official Petr Soprunenko, is living peacefully in Moscow as an old-age pensioner. So are Dmitri Kopylansky, Raul Wallenberg’s MGB interrogator, and General Pavel Sudoplatov, Trotsky’s murderer, to name just a few. Are we to forgive them all, without even a court hearing? Are we to accept what the world firmly rejected 45 years ago?

“This is what I call “morally appalling": the double standards we seem to accept so easily. Why, may I ask, is murdering in the name of National Socialism a crime against humanity while murdering in the name of International Socialism is not? Why did Rudolf Hess die in Spandau prison, whereas Boris Ponomarev can live out his last years in a comfortable Moscow apartment? Is there no limit to our hypocrisy? No sooner is some bloody monster like the former East Germany’s Erich Honecker put on trial than many of the same people who applaud hunting down elderly Nazi war criminals are up in arms pleading in the name of humanity his old age and poor health. If those are our moral standards, why are we so shocked by the atrocities committed in Bosnia? What else did we expect from the former Communist leaders of the former Yugoslavia?”

— Vladimir Bukovsky, author, writing in Commentary, October 1993, p. 12.


Absurd

“The notion that a modern society must also be prepared to establish itself as a multicultural society, with as many cultural groups as possible, is one that I regard as mistaken. One cannot belatedly transform Germany, with its thousand-year-old history since Otto I, into a melting pot … To turn Germany into a immigration country is absurd. That could lead to us being swamped.”

— Helmut Schmidt, former German Chancellor, in the Frankfurter Rundschau, Feb. 12, 1992. Quoted in Nation u. Europa (Coburg), Jan. 1999, p. 32.