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Kevin MacDonald's review of a book by J. Schatz, "The Generation: The Rise
and Fall of the Jewish Communists of Poland" (1991)
in Kevin MacDonald, THE CULTURE OF CRITIQUE: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish
Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements, Westport,
Connecticut & London, 1998. Page numbers are in MacDonald's book. Comments
by Peter Myers {thus}, May 7, 2001. {Poland's post war Communist government
was Jewish-dominated; the 1967 Middle East War forced Poland's Jews to finally
choose between Zionism and Communism. Removal of Jews from the leadership
allowed Poles to take over, who would later be more amenable to Solidarity. Jews
created Communism, but the Jew-Gentile divide later destroyed it.}
{p. 61} Communism and Jewish Identification in PolandÂ
Schatz's (1991) work on the group of Jewish communists who came to power in
Poland after World War II (termed by Schatz "the generation") is
important because it sheds light on the identificatory processes of an entire
generation of communist Jews in Eastern Europe. Unlike the situation in the
Soviet Union where the predominantly Jewish faction led by Trotsky was defeated,
it is possible to trace the activities and identifications of a Jewish communist
elite who actually obtained political power and held it for a significant
period.Â
The great majority of this group were socialized in very traditional Jewish
familiesÂ
"... whose inner life, customs and folklore, religious traditions, leisure
time, contacts between generations, and ways of socializing were, despite
variations, essentially permeated by traditional Jewish values and norms of
conduct.... The core of cultural heritage was handed down to them through formal
religious education and practice, through holiday celebrations, tales, and songs,
through the stories told by parents and grandparents, through listening to
discussions among their elders.... The result was a deep core of their identity,
values, norms, and attitudes with which they entered the rebellious period of
their youth and adulthood. This core was to be transformed in the processes of
acculturation, secularization, and radicalization sometimes even to the point of
explicit denial. However, it was through this deep layer that all later
perceptions were filtered. " (Schatz 1991, 37-38)Â
Note the implication that self-deceptive processes were at work here: Members of
the generation denied the effects of a pervasive socialization experience that
colored all of their subsequent perceptions, so that in a very real sense, they
did not know how Jewish they were. Most of these individuals spoke Yiddish in
their daily lives and had only a poor command of Polish even after joining the
party (p. 54). They socialized entirely with other Jews whom they met in the
Jewish world of work, neighborhood, and Jewish social and political
organizations. After they became communists, they dated and married among
themselves and their social gatherings were conducted in Yiddish (p. 116). As is
the case for all of the Jewish intellectual and political movements discussed in
this volume, their mentors and principle influences were other ethnic Jews,
including especially Luxemburg and Trotsky (pp. 62, 89), and when they recalled
personal heroes, they were mostly Jews whose exploits achieved semi-mythical
proportions (p. 112).Â
Jews who joined the communist movement did not first reject their ethnic
identity, and there were many who "cherished Jewish culture . . . [and]
dreamed of a society in which Jews would be equal as Jews" (p. 48). Indeed,
it
(p. 62) "... was common for individuals to combine a strong Jewish identity
with Marxism as well as various combinations of Zionism and Bundism. Moreover,
the attraction of Polish Jews to communism was greatly facilitated by their
knowledge that Jews had attained high-level positions of power and influence in
the Soviet Union and that the Soviet government had established a system of
Jewish education and culture"
 (p. 60). "In both the Soviet Union and Poland, communism was seen
as opposing anti-Semitism. In marked contrast, during the 1930s the Polish
government developed policies in which Jews were excluded from public-sector
employment, quotas were placed on Jewish representation in universities and the
professions, and government-organized boycotts of Jewish businesses and artisans
were staged" (Hagen 1996). Clearly, Jews perceived communism as good for
Jews: It was a movement that did not threaten Jewish group continuity, and it
held the promise of power and influence for Jews and the end of state-sponsored
anti-Semitism.Â
At one end of the spectrum of Jewish identification were communists who began
their career in the Bund or in Zionist organizations, spoke Yiddish, and worked
entirely within a Jewish milieu. Jewish and communist identities were completely
sincere, without ambivalence or perceived conflict between these two sources of
identity. At the other end of the spectrum of Jewish identification, some Jewish
communists may have intended to establish a de-ethnicized state without Jewish
group continuity, although the evidence for this is less than compelling. In the
pre-war period even the most "de-ethnicized" Jews only outwardly
assimilated by dressing like gentiles, taking gentile-sounding names (suggesting
deception), and learning their languages. They attempted to recruit gentiles
into the movement but did not assimilate or attempt to assimilate into Polish
culture; they retained traditional Jewish "disdainful and supercilious
attitudes" toward what, as Marxists, they viewed as a "retarded"
Polish peasant culture (p. 119). Even the most highly assimilated Jewish
communists working in urban areas with non-Jews were upset by the Soviet-German
nonaggression pact but were relieved when the German-Soviet war finally broke
out (p. 121) - a clear indication that Jewish personal identity remained quite
close to the surface. The Communist Party of Poland (KPP) also retained a sense
of promoting specifically Jewish interests rather than blind allegiance to the
Soviet Union. Indeed, Schatz (p. 102) suggests that Stalin dissolved the KPP in
1938 because of the presence of Trotskyists within the KPP and because the
Soviet leadership expected the KPP to be opposed to the alliance with Nazi
Germany.Â
In SAID (Ch. 8) it was noted that identificatory ambivalence has been a
consistent feature of Judaism since the Enlightenment. It is interesting that
Polish Jewish activists showed a great deal of identificatory ambivalence
stemming ultimately from the contradiction between "the belief in some kind
of Jewish collective existence and, at the same time, a rejection of such an
ethnic communion, as it was thought incompatible with class divisions and
harmful to the general political struggle; striving to maintain a specific kind
ofÂ
(p. 63) " Jewish culture and, at the same time, a view of this as a mere
ethnic form of the communist message, instrumental in incorporating Jews into
the Polish Socialist community; and maintaining separate Jewish institutions
while at the same time desiring to eliminate Jewish separateness as such"
(p. 234). It will be apparent in the following that the Jews, including Jewish
communists at the highest levels of the government, continued as a cohesive,
identifiable group. However, although they themselves appear not to have noticed
the Jewish collective nature of their experience (p. 240), it was observable to
others - a clear example of self-deception also evident in the case of American
Jewish leftists, as noted below.Â
These Jewish communists were also engaged in elaborate rationalizations and
self-deceptions related to the role of the communist movement in Poland, so that
one cannot take the lack of evidence for overt Jewish ethnic identity as strong
evidence of a lack of a Jewish identity. "Cognitive and emotional anomalies
- unfree, mutilated, and distorted thoughts and emotions - became the price for
retaining their beliefs unchanged.... Adjusting their experiences to their
beliefs was achieved through mechanisms of interpreting, suppressing, justifying,
or explaining away" (p. 191). "As much as they were able to skilfully
apply their critical thinking to penetrative analyses of the socio-political
system they rejected, as much were they blocked when it came to applying the
same rules of critical analysis to the system they regarded as the future of all
mankind" (p. 192).Â
This combination of self-deceptive rationalization as well as considerable
evidence of a Jewish identity can be seen in the comments of Jacub Berman, one
of the most prominent leaders of the post war era. (Two communist leaders who
dominated Poland between 1948 and 1956, Berman and Hilary Minc, were Jews.)
Regarding the purges and murders of thousands of communists, including many Jews,
in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, Berman states:Â
"I tried as best I could to explain what was happening; to clarify the
background, the situations full of conflict and internal contradictions in which
Stalin had probably found himself and which forced him to act as he did; and to
exaggerate the mistakes of the opposition, which assumed grotesque proportions
in the subsequent charges against them and were further blown up by Soviet
propaganda. You had to have a great deal of endurance and dedication to the
cause then in order to accept what was happening despite all the distortions,
injuries and torments." (In Toranska 1987, 207)Â
As to his Jewish identity, Berman responded as follows when asked about his
plans after the war:Â
"I didn't have any particular plans. But I was aware of the fact that as
a Jew shouldn't or wouldn't be able to fill any of the highest posts. Besides, I
don't mind not being in the front ranks: not because I'm particularly humble by
nature, but because it's not at all the case that you have to project yourself
into a position of prominence in order to wield real power. The important thing
to me was to exert my influence, leave my stamp on the complicated government
formation, which was being created, but without projecting myself. Naturally,
this required a certain agility." (In Toranska 1987, 237)Â
Clearly Berman identifies himself as a Jew and is well aware that others
perceive him as a Jew and that therefore he must deceptively lower his public
profile. Berman also notes that he was under suspicion as a Jew during the
Soviet anti-"Cosmopolite" campaign beginning in the late 1940s. His
brother, an activist in the Central Committee of Polish Jews (the organization
for establishing a secular Jewish culture in communist Poland), emigrated to
Israel in 1950 to avoid the consequences of the Soviet-inspired anti-Semitic
policies in Poland. Berman comments that he did not follow his brother to Israel
even though his brother strongly urged him to do so: "I was, of course,
interested in what was going on in Israel, especially since I was quite familiar
with the people there" (in Toranska 1987, 322). Obviously, Berman's brother
viewed Berman not as a non-Jew but, rather, as a Jew who should emigrate to
Israel because of incipient anti-Semitism. The close ties of family and
friendship between a very high official in the Polish communist government and
an activist in the organization promoting Jewish secular culture in Poland also
strongly suggest that there was no perceived incompatibility with
identifications as a Jew and as a communist even among the most assimilated
Polish communists of the period.Â
While Jewish members saw the KPP as beneficial to Jewish interests, the party
was perceived by gentile Poles even before the war as "pro-Soviet,
antipatriotic, and ethnically 'not truly Polish' " (Schatz 1991, 82). This
perception of lack of patriotism was the main source of popular hostility to the
KPP (Schatz 1991, 91). On the one hand, for much of its existence the KPP
had been at war not only with the Polish State, but with its entire body politic,
including the legal opposition parties of the Left.Â
On the other hand, in the eyes of the great majority of Poles, the KPP was a
foreign, subversive agency of Moscow, bent on the destruction of Poland's
hard-won independence and the incorporation of Poland into the Soviet Union.
Labelled a "Soviet agency" or the "Jew-Commune," it was
viewed as a dangerous and fundamentally unPolish conspiracy dedicated to
undermining national sovereignty and restoring, in a new guise, Russian
domination. (Coutouvidis & Reynolds 1986,115)Â
The KPP backed the Soviet Union in the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-1920 and in
the Soviet invasion of 1939. It also accepted the 1939 border with the USSR and
was relatively unconcerned with the Soviet massacre of Polish prisoners of war
during World War II, whereas the Polish government in exile in London held
nationalist views of these matters. The Soviet army and its Polish allies
"led by cold-blooded political calculation, military necessities, or both"
allowed the uprising of the Home Army, faithful to the non-communist.Â
(p. 65) "Polish government-in-exile, to be defeated by the Germans
resulting in 200,000 dead, thus wiping out "the cream of the anti- and
non-communist activist elite" (Schatz 1991, 188). The Soviets also
arrested surviving non-communist resistance leaders immediately after the war.Â
Moreover, as was the case with the CPUSA, actual Jewish leadership and
involvement in Polish Communism was much greater than surface appearances;
ethnic Poles were recruited and promoted to high positions in order to lessen
the perception that the KPP was a Jewish movement
(Schatz 1991, 97). This attempt to deceptively lower the Jewish profile of the
communist movement was also apparent in the ZPP. (The ZPP refers to the Union of
Polish Patriots - an Orwellian-named communist front organization created by the
Soviet Union to occupy Poland after the war.) Apart from members of the
generation whose political loyalties could be counted on and who formed the
leadership core of the group, Jews were often discouraged from joining the
movement out of fear that the movement would appear too Jewish. However, Jews
who could physically pass as Poles were allowed to join and were encouraged to
state they were ethnic Poles and to change their names to Polish-sounding names.
"Not everyone was approached [to engage in deception], and some were spared
such proposals because nothing could be done with them: they just looked too
Jewish" (Schatz 1991, 185).Â
When this group came to power after the war, they advanced Soviet political,
economic, and cultural interests in Poland while aggressively pursuing
specifically Jewish interests, including the destruction of the nationalist
political opposition whose openly expressed anti-Semitism derived at least
partly from the fact that Jews were perceived as favoring Soviet domination.
The purge of Wladyslaw Gomulka's group shortly after the war resulted in the
promotion of Jews and the complete banning of anti-Semitism. Moreover, the
general opposition between the Jewish-dominated Polish communist government
supported by the Soviets and the nationalist, anti-Semitic underground helped
forge the allegiance of the great majority of the Jewish population to the
communist government while the great majority of non-Jewish Poles favored the
anti-Soviet parties (Schatz 1991, 204-205) The result was widespread
anti-Semitism: By the summer of 1947, approximately 1,500 Jews had been killed
in incidents at 155 localities. In the words of Cardinal Hlond in 1946
commenting on an incident in which 41 Jews were killed, the pogrom was "due
to the Jews who today occupy leading positions in Poland's government and
endeavor to introduce a governmental structure that the majority of the Poles do
not wish to have" (in Schatz 1991, 107).
The Jewish-dominated communist government actively sought to revive and
perpetuate Jewish life in Poland (Schatz 1991, 208) so that, as in the case of
the Soviet Union, there was no expectation that Judaism would wither away under
a communist regime. Jewish activists had an "ethno political vision"
in which Jewish secular culture would continue in Poland with the cooperation
and approval of the government (Schatz 1991, 230). Thus while the
government campaigned actively against the political and cultural power of the
Catholic Church, collective Jewish life flourished in the post war period.
Yiddish and Hebrew language schools and publications were established, as well
as a great variety of cultural and social welfare organizations for Jews. A
substantial percentage of the Jewish population was employed in Jewish economic
cooperatives.Â
Moreover, the Jewish-dominated government regarded the Jewish population, many
of whom had not previously been communists, as "a reservoir that could
be trusted and enlisted in its efforts to rebuild the country. Although not old,
'tested' comrades, they were not rooted in the social networks of the
anti-communist society, they were outsiders with regard to its historically
shaped traditions, without connections to the Catholic Church, and hated by
those who hated the regime. Thus they could be depended on and used to fill the
required positions" (Schatz 1991, 212-213).Â
Jewish ethnic background was particularly important in recruiting for the
internal security service: The generation of Jewish communists realized that
their power derived entirely from the Soviet Union and that they would have to
resort to coercion in order to control a fundamentally hostile non-communist
society (p. 262). The core members of the security service came from the
Jewish communists who had been communists before the establishment of the Polish
communist government, but these were joined by other Jews sympathetic to the
government and alienated from the wider society. This in tum reinforced the
popular image of Jews as servants of foreign interests and enemies of ethnic
Poles (Schatz 1991, 225).Â
Jewish members of the internal security force often appear to have been
motivated by personal rage and a desire for revenge related to their Jewish
identity:Â
" Their families had been murdered and the anti-Communist underground
was, in their perception, a continuation of essentially the same anti-Semitic
and anti-Communist tradition. They hated those who had collaborated with the
Nazis and those who opposed the new order with almost the same intensity and
knew that as Communists, or as both Communists and Jews, they were hated at
least in the same way In their eyes, the enemy was essentially the same The old
evil deeds had to be punished and new ones prevented and a merciless struggle
was necessary before a better world could be built." (Schatz 1991, 226)
As in the case of post World War II Hungary (see below), Poland became
polarized between a predominantly Jewish ruling and administrative class
supported by the rest of the Jewish population and by Soviet military power,
arrayed against the great majority of the native gentile population. The
situation was exactly analogous to the many instances in traditional societies
where Jews formed a middle layer between an alien ruling elite, in this case the
Soviets, and the gentile native population (see PTSDA, Ch. 5). However this
intermediary role made the former outsiders into an elite group in Poland, and
the former champions of social justice went to great lengths to protect their
own personal prerogatives, including a great deal of rationalization and
self-deception (p. 261). Indeed, when a defector's accounts of the elite's
lavish lifestyle (e.g., Boleslaw Bierut had four villas and the use of five
others [Toranska 1987, 28]), their corruption, as well as their role as Soviet
agents became known in 1954, there were shock waves throughout the lower levels
of the party (p. 266). Clearly, the sense of moral superiority and the
altruistic motivations of this group were entirely in their own self-deceptions.Â
Although attempts were made to place a Polish face on what was in reality a
Jewish-dominated government, such attempts were limited by the lack of
trustworthy Poles able to fill positions in the Communist Party, government
administration, the military and the internal security forces. Jews who had
severed formal ties with the Jewish community, or who had changed their names to
Polish-sounding names, or who could pass as Poles because of their physical
appearance or lack of a Jewish accent were favored in promotions (p. 214).
Whatever the subjective personal identities of the individuals recruited into
these government positions, the recruiters were clearly acting on the perceived
ethnic background of the individual as a cue to dependability, and the result
was that the situation resembled the many instances in traditional societies where
Jews and crypto-Jews developed economic and political networks of coreligionists:
"Besides a group of influential politicians, too small to be called a
category, there were the soldiers; the apparatchiks and the administrators; the
intellectuals and ideologists; the policemen; the diplomats; and finally, the
activists in the Jewish sector. There also existed the mass of common people
- clerks, craftsmen, and workers - whose common denominator with the others was
a shared ideological vision, a past history, and the essentially similar mode of
ethnic aspiration" (p. 226).Â
It is revealing that when Jewish economic and political domination gradually
decreased in the mid- to late-1950s, many of these individuals began working in
the Jewish economic cooperatives, and Jews purged from the internal security
service were aided by Jewish organizations funded ultimately by American Jews.
There can be little doubt of their continuing Jewish identity and the
continuation of Jewish economic and cultural separatism. Indeed, after the
collapse of the communist regime in Poland, "numerous Jews, some of them
children and grandchildren of former communists, came 'out of the closet'"
(Anti-Semitism Worldwide 1994, 115), openly adopting a Jewish identity and
reinforcing the idea that many Jewish communists were in fact crypto-Jews.Â
When the anti-Zionist-anti-Semitic movement in the Soviet Union filtered down to
Poland following the Soviet policy change toward Israel in the late 1940s, there
was another crisis of identity resulting from the belief that anti-Semitism and
communism were incompatible. One response was to engage in "ethnic
self-abnegation" by making statements denying the existence of a Jewish
identity; another advised Jews to adopt a lower profile. Because of the very
strong identification with the system among Jews, the general tendency was to
rationalize even their own persecution during the period when Jews were
gradually being purged from important positions: "Even when the methods
grew surprisingly painful and harsh, when the goal of forcing one to admit
uncommitted crimes and to frame others became clear, and when the perception of
being unjustly treated by methods that contradicted communist ethos came forth,
the basic ideological convictions stayed untouched. Thus the holy madness
triumphed, even in the prison cells" (p. 260). In the end, an important
ingredient in the anti-Jewish campaign of the 1960s was the assertion that the
communist Jews of the generation opposed the Soviet Union's Middle East policy
favoring the Arabs.Â
As with Jewish groups throughout the ages (see PTSDA, Ch. 3), the anti-Jewish
purges did not result in their abandoning their group commitment even when it
resulted in unjust persecutions. Instead, it resulted in increased commitment,
"unswerving ideological discipline, and obedience to the point of
self-deception.... They regarded the party as the collective personification of
the progressive forces of history and, regarding themselves as its servants,
expressed a specific kind of teleological-deductive dogmatism, revolutionary
haughtiness, and moral ambiguity" (pp. 260 261). Indeed, there is some
indication that group cohesiveness increased as the fortunes of the generation
declined (p. 301). As their position was gradually eroded by a nascent
anti-Semitic Polish nationalism, they became ever more conscious of their "groupness."
After their final defeat they quickly lost any Polish identity they might have
had and quickly assumed overtly Jewish identities, especially in Israel, the
destination of most Polish Jews. They came to see their former anti-Zionism as a
mistake and became now strong supporters of Israel (p. 314).Â
In conclusion, Schatz's treatment shows that the generation of Jewish
communists and their ethnically Jewish supporters must be considered as an
historic Jewish group. The evidence indicates that this group pursued
specifically Jewish interests, including especially their interest in securing
Jewish group continuity in Poland while at the same time attempting to destroy
institutions like the Catholic Church and other manifestations of Polish
nationalism that promoted social cohesion among Poles. The communist
government also combated anti-Semitism, and it promoted Jewish economic and
political interests. While the extent of subjective Jewish identity among this
group undoubtedly varied, the evidence indicates submerged and self-deceptive
levels of Jewish identity even among the most assimilated of them. The entire
episode illustrates the complexity of Jewish identification, and it exemplifies
the importance of self-deception and rationalization as central aspects of
Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy (see SAID, Chs. 7, 8). There was
massive self-deception and rationalization regarding the role of the
Jewish-dominated government and its Jewish supporters in eliminating gentile
nationalist elites, of its role in opposing Polish national culture and the
Catholic Church while building up a secular Jewish culture, of its role as the
agent of Soviet domination of Poland, and of its own economic success while
administering an economy that harnessed the economy of Poland to meet Soviet
interests and demanded hardship and sacrifices from the rest of the people.Â
(p. 98) Jews thus achieved leading positions in these societies in the early
stages. but in the long run, anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union and other Eastern
European communist societies became a well-known phenomenon and an important
political cause among American Jews (Sachar 1992; Woocher 1986). As we have seen,
Stalin gradually diminished the power of Jews in the Soviet Union, and
anti-Semitism was an important factor in the decline of Jews in leadership
positions in Eastern European communist governments.Â
The cases of Hungary and Poland are particularly interesting. Given the role of
Jewish communists in post war Poland, it is not surprising that an anti-Semitic
movement developed and eventually toppled the generation from power (see Schatz
1991, 264ff). After Nikita Khrushchev's de-Stalinization speech of 1956 the
party split into a Jewish and anti-Jewish section, with the anti-Jewish section
complaining of too many Jews in top positions. In the words of a leader of the
anti-Jewish faction, the preponderance of Jews "makes people hate Jews and
mistrust the party. The Jews estrange people from the party and from the Soviet
Union; national feelings have been offended, and it is the duty of the party to
adjust to the demands so that Poles, not Jews, hold the top positions in Poland"
(in Schatz 1991, 268). Khrushchev himself supported a new policy with his remark
that "you have already too many Abramoviches" (in Schatz 1991, 272).
Even this first stage in the anti-Jewish purges was accompanied by anti-Semitic
incidents among the public at large, as well as demands that Jewish communists
who had changed their names to lower their profile in the party reveal
themselves. As a result of these changes over half of Polish Jews responded by
emigrating to Israel between 1956 and 1959.Â
Anti-Semitism increased dramatically toward the end of the 1960s. Jews were
gradually downgraded in status and Jewish communists were blamed for Poland's
misfortunes. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion circulated widely among party
activists, students, and army personnel. The security force, which had been
dominated by Jews and directed toward suppressing Polish nationalism, was now
dominated by Poles who viewed Jews "as a group in need of close and
constant surveillance" (p. 290). Jews were removed from important positions
in the government, the military, and the media. Elaborate files were maintained
on Jews, including the crypto-Jews who had changed their names and adopted
non-Jewish external identities. As the Jews had done earlier, the anti-Jewish
group developed networks that promoted their own people throughout the
government and the media. Jews now became dissidents and defectors where before
they had dominated the state forces of Orthodoxy.Â
The "earthquake" finally erupted in 1968 with an anti-Semitic campaign
consequent to outpourings of joy among Jews over Israel's victory in the Six-Day
War. Israel's victory occurred despite Soviet bloc support of the Arabs, and
President Gomulka condemned the Jewish "fifth column" in the country.
(p. 99) Extensive purges of Jews swept the country and secular Jewish life (e.g.,
Yiddish magazines and Jewish schools and day camps) was essentially dissolved.
This hatred toward Jews clearly resulted from the role Jews played in post war
Poland. As one intellectual described it, Poland's problems resulted essentially
from ethnic conflict between Poles and Jews in which the Jews were supported by
the Russians.
The problems were due to "the arrival in our country . . . of certain
politicians dressed in officer's uniforms, who later presumed that only they,
the Zambrowskis, the Radkiewiczes, the Bermans, had the right to leadership, a
monopoly over deciding what was right for the Polish nation."
The solution would come when the "abnormal ethnic composition" of
society was corrected (in Schatz 1991, 306, 307). The remaining Jews "both
as a collective and as individuals . . . were singled out, slandered, ostracized,
degraded, threatened, and intimidated with breathtaking intensity and . . .
malignance" (p. 308). Most left Poland for Israel, and all were forced to
renounce their Polish citizenship. They left behind only a few thousand mostly
aged Jews.Â
The case of Hungary is entirely analogous to Poland both in the origins of
the triumph of communist Jews and in their eventual defeat by an anti-Semitic
movement. Despite evidence that Stalin was an anti-Semite, he installed Jewish
communists as leaders of his effort to dominate Hungary after World War II. The
government was "completely dominated" by Jews (Rothman and Lichter
1982, 89), a common perception among the Hungarian people (see Irving 1981,
47ff). "The wags of Budapest explained the presence of a lone gentile in
the party leadership on the grounds that a 'goy' was needed to tum on the lights
on Saturday" (Rothman & Lichter 1982, 89). The Hungarian Communist
Party, with the backing of the Red Army, tortured, imprisoned, and executed
opposition political leaders and other dissidents and effectively harnessed
Hungary's economy in the service of the Soviet Union. They thus created a
situation similar to that in Poland: Jews were installed by their Russian
masters as the ideal middle stratum between an exploitative alien ruling elite
and a subject native population. Jews were seen as having engineered the
communist revolution and as having benefited most from the revolution. Jews
constituted nearly all of the party's elite, held the top positions in the
security police, and dominated managerial positions throughout the economy. {end
selection}
More from Kevin MacDonald's book: The Culture of Critique.
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http://www.amazon.com/
To order J. Schatz, The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Communists
of Poland from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/
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