Double genocide theory

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For another use, see Double genocide theory (Rwanda).

According to the double genocide theory (Lithuanian: Dvigubo genocido požiūris, lit. 'Double genocide approach'), two genocides of equal severity occurred in Eastern Europe: the Holocaust against Jews perpetrated by Nazi Germany and a second genocide by the Soviet Union. The theory first became popular in post-Soviet Lithuania, in discussions about the Holocaust in Lithuania.[1] A more explicitly antisemitic version of the theory accuses Jews of complicity in Soviet repression and characterizes local participation in the Holocaust as retaliation, especially in Lithuania, eastern Poland, and northern Romania.[2][3][4][5] Double genocide theory has been criticized by scholars as a form of Holocaust trivialization.

History

After the fall of the Soviet Union, many post-Soviet states, particularly the Baltic states, built memorials to victims of the Soviet occupation, awarded posthumous honors to Nazi collaborators, and devoted public resources to historical committees that prioritized their nations' suffering under Soviet occupation over the suffering of their nation's Jews under Nazi occupation.[6][7]

In Lithuania, the

Soviet occupation. According to Ljiljana Radonić, a political scientist specializing in national memory, said that "the way in which Jewish victims are portrayed there shows that this reference to the Holocaust is merely perfunctory."[8] In Lithuania's state Jewish museum's main building, a plaque asserts that "The first killings of Jews have been performed in the context of the war chaos." In this context, some basic postulates of the double genocide theory were developed. Lithuanian nationalists, backed by the state, falsely asserted that various nationalist collaborators were anti-Soviet heroes, that Jewish victims were merely collateral damage in the fog of war, and any documentation that counters this is Soviet propaganda.[9] However, the historical record shows that Lithuanian Jews were targeted for extermination - based on their ethnicity - by both the Nazis and local nationalist forces, with local nationalists taking a leading role in the genocide.[10]

Lithuanian Historian Vytautas Berenis commented that the double genocide theory has considerable influence in Lithuanian historiography and journalism. Berenis states that Lithuanian nationalists excuse their country's collaboration by asserting that collaborators were merely retaliating against "

Lithuanian Communist Party were ethnic Lithuanians, while 16.24 percent were Jews - but nearly all the victims of nationalist atrocities were Jews.[11][12] Poet and dissident Tomas Venclova criticized the concept of double genocide in his 1975 essay "Žydai ir lietuviai" ("Jews and Lithuanians") and subsequent publications. According to Venclova, the theory obscures the role of Lithuanians in crimes against humanity committed in Lithuania by assigning all guilt to non-Lithuanian actors.[13]

In 2010, political scientist Evgeny Finkel commented: "There is hardly any country in the vast region from Estonia in the north to Kazakhstan in the south in which either the authorities or the opposition have not seriously considered the idea of officially recognising past sufferings as genocides, often finding creative ways to reconcile the legal definition of the concept ... and the historical record."[2]

Analysis

According to Michael Shafir, the double genocide theory is at worst Holocaust obfuscation.[14] Political scientist Clemens Heni [de] sees it as a form of Holocaust trivialization.[15] Historian Alexander Karn writes that the idea of double genocide "hinge[s] upon the erasure of Lithuanian participation in the Holocaust".[16] Ethnologist Carole Lemée sees it as a symptom of persistent antisemitism.[17]

American Yiddish scholar Dovid Katz describes double genocide theory as a form of Holocaust revisionism, whose debate is prompted by a "movement in Europe that believes the crimes—morally, ethically—of Nazism and Communism are absolutely equal, and that those of us who don't think they're absolutely equal, are perhaps soft on Communism."[18] According to Katz, the double genocide theory is "a relatively recent initiative (though rooted in older apologetics regarding the Holocaust) that seeks to create a moral equivalence between Soviet atrocities committed against the Baltic region and the Holocaust in European history."[18] Katz further writes that "the debate has garnered political traction/currency since the Baltic states joined the European Union in 2004. Since joining the EU, the Baltic states have attempted to downplay their nations' massive collaboration with the Nazis and to enlist the West in revising history in the direction of Double Genocide thinking."[18] Katz recommends that "states in the region honor the victims of Communism and expose the evils of Communism as unique issues, 'without the equals-sign'."[18]

Bloodlands and the Holocaust uniqueness debate

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010) drew scholarly criticism for being seen as suggesting a moral equivalence between Soviet mass murders and the Nazi Holocaust. Historian Richard J. Evans commented: "It seems to me that he is simply equating Nazi genocide with the mass murders carried out in the Soviet Union under Stalin. ... There is nothing wrong with comparing. It's the equation that I find highly troubling."[19] Efraim Zuroff refers to the book as "the equivalency canard".[20] In a public debate in The Guardian starting in September 2010, Zuroff accused Snyder of providing a scholarly basis for "the historically-inaccurate 'double genocide' theories" by emphasizing the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and deflecting the full blame from the major culprit of World War II.[21] Katz commented that "Snyder flirts with the very wrong moral equivalence between Hitler and Stalin",[19] to which Snyder responded: "I coincide with Zuroff and Katz on the centrality of the Holocaust, but we must not overlook how Stalin enabled Hitler's crimes."[22] Katz says that Snyder's historical reassessment of the Nazi–Soviet pact coincides with Baltic ultranationalist agendas.[23]

According to historian

conservative intellectuals such as Ernst Nolte and the Holocaust uniqueness debate, the attempts to link Soviet and Nazi crimes, citing books such as Snyder's Bloodlands as prominent examples, are "as politically tricky today as it was then. As it seems to reduce the responsibility of the Nazis and their collaborators, supporters and claqueurs, it is welcomed in rightist circles of various types: German conservatives in the 1980s, who wanted to 'normalise' the German past, and East European and ultranationalists today, who downplay Nazi crimes and up-play Communist crimes in order to promote a common European memory that merges Nazism and Stalinism into a 'double-genocide' theory that prioritises East European suffering over Jewish suffering, obfuscates the distinction between perpetrators and victims, and provides relief from the bitter legacy of East Europeans' collaboration in the Nazi genocide."[24]

Memory politics and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe

Red Holocaust was coined by the

post-Communist states in an attempt to erase fascist crimes and local participation to the Holocaust, and use their imagery to represent real or imagined crimes of Communist states as memory appropriation.[31]

According to American ethnographer and Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the

neoliberal capitalism. She says that any discussion of the achievements by Communist states, including literacy, education, women's rights, and social security is usually silenced, and any discourse on the subject of communism is focused almost exclusively on Joseph Stalin's crimes and the "double genocide thesis", an intellectual paradigm summed up as such: "1) any move towards redistribution and away from a completely free market is seen as communist; 2) anything communist inevitably leads to class murder; and 3) class murder is the moral equivalent of the Holocaust." By linking all leftist and socialist ideals to the excesses of Stalinism, Ghodsee posits that the elites hope to discredit and marginalize all political ideologies that could "threaten the primacy of private property and free markets".[32]

In The Holocaust/Genocide Template in Eastern Europe (2020), political scientist Ljiljana Radonić discusses how "the 'memory wars' in the course of the post-Communist re-narration of history since 1989 and the current authoritarian backlash" and how "'mnemonic warriors' employ the 'Holocaust template' and the concept of genocide in tendentious ways to justify radical policies and externalize the culpability for their international isolation and worsening social and economic circumstances domestically."[33] In this sense, "the 'double genocide' paradigm ... focuses on 'our own' national suffering under – allegedly 'equally' evil – Nazism and Communism".[33] Radonić posits that this theory and charges of Communist genocide come from "a stable of anti-communist émigré lexicon since the 1950s and more recently revisionist politicians and scholars" as well as the "comparative trivialization" of the Holocaust that "results from tossing postwar killings of suspected Axis collaborators and opponents of Tito's regime into the same conceptual framework as the Nazi murder of six million of Jews", describing this as "an effort to demonize communism more broadly as an ideology akin to Nazism".[33]

Notable cases

In 2006, historian Yitzhak Arad, who was a prisoner of the Vilna Ghetto and escaped by joining the Soviet partisans,[34] was labelled an "NKVD storm trooper" by Lithuanian newspaper Respublika. In 2008, two elderly Jewish women were investigated for their partisan activities. Arad cited those prosecutions as flowing from the double genocide theory, whose concept is described as follows: "In order to justify the participation of Lithuanians in the mass murder of Jews, there was a perceived need to invent Jews who similarly killed Lithuanians."[35] In response to the investigations,[36] Katz described this as a form of Holocaust obfuscation, another term for the double genocide theory, that "involves a series of false moral equivalences: Jews were disloyal citizens of pre-war Lithuania, helped the Soviet occupiers in 1940, and were therefore partly to blame for their fate. And the genocide that really matters was the one that Lithuanian people suffered at Soviet hands after 1944."[37]

The

Chetnik movement." Another example is the well-known photograph of prisoners from the Buchenwald concentration camp, which was displayed in the section devoted to a Communist-era camp for political prisoners on the Adriatic island of Goli Otok, describing it as "the example of living conditions of Goli Otok prisoners", and not correcting it after the misrepresentation was exposed. After an outcry from Holocaust historians, a small note was taped underneath the display caption that read: "Prisoners' bunk-beds in the Dachau camp." According to Subotić, this form of revisionism "has become so mainstream and state sponsored that in 2018 Croatian president Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović called for the creation of an international commission to determine the truth about the camp between 1941 and 1945, 'but also after' – indicating that the narrative that Jasenovac was a communist camp after the war was now accepted at the pinnacle of power."[31]

See also

References

  1. S2CID 158144987
    .
  2. ^
    S2CID 144068609. In the Baltic States—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—many people view the communist era, and especially the 1940s, as the period of Soviet genocide against the local population. Furthermore, some Baltic intellectuals and political figures, such as the prominent Lithuanian writer Jonas Mikelinskas [lt
    ], argued that the region was subject to 'double genocide'—the one perpetrated by the Soviets, and the Holocaust committed by Nazi Germany. Supporters of this theory, which became very popular in the mid-1990s, claimed that Lithuanian Jews actively participated in the repression of the local population, and therefore the collaboration with the Nazis and participation in the Holocaust were merely acts of revenge.
  3. S2CID 216139226
    . Its latest iteration centers on east-central Europe—and especially in Lithuania—in the form of the 'double-genocide thesis' which posits that the Soviet and Nazi regimes committed genocides of equal gravity against the Baltic, Slavic and Jewish inhabitants of what Timothy Snyder calls the 'bloodlands'.
  4. ISBN 978-3-319-78589-9
    . According to this 'theory,' there were two major genocides in Lithuania, the Soviet one (consisting of deportations and repressions) and the Holocaust. Both were extremely tragic events, and, according to some defenders of memory, they should be even viewed as equal. Yet some proponents of this 'theory' took the argument even further than merely asserting that there were two equally tragic developments in Lithuania. They argued that some Lithuanian Jews supported the occupying Soviet forces, and those Lithuanians who were participating in the Holocaust, were retaliating for the losses experienced during the first Soviet occupation. In other words, some Jews were participating in the 'Soviet genocide' against the Lithuanians. Needless to say, this 'theory' is flawed on many different levels. However, it did reflect a relatively popular way of thinking in the mid- and late 1990s.
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  11. ^ Berenis, Vytautas (2000). "Holokaustas ir lietuviu istorine samone" (PDF). Politologija (in Lithuanian). 3 (19): 3–24. Lietuvių istoriografijoje didelę įtaką turi 'dviejų genocidų' teorija, kuri, galima sakyti, yra vyraujanti. Šia prasme 'dviejų genocidų' arba 'dvigubos simetrijos' teorijos istoriniai argumentai yra tokie: 1) žydai aktyviai dalyvavo komunistiniame judėjime; 2) žydai laukė Raudonosios Armijos atėjimo, vadinasi ir, Lietuvos okupacijos; 3) žydai dalyvavo komunistų represijose ir dirbo represinėse struktūrose. Tokie argumentai, kaip mano autoriai, turėtų paaiškinti 'spontanišką' lietuviųlceršto proveržį pirmosiomis karo dienomis. Reikia pripažinti, kad ši, nors dar ir reanimuojama koncepcija, neturi didelės įtakos lietuvių istoriografijoje. Bet ji gaji istorinėje publicistikoje, teigiant, kad 1940 m. žydai suvaidino pragaištingą vaidmenį ir susikompromitavo kaip Lietuvos piliečiai bei neteko vietos gyventojų pasitikėjimo. Argumentuota faktų kalba buvo įrodyta, kad didžioji žydų dalis nepritarė bolševikinei santvarkai Lietuvoje arba netrukus ja nusivylė. Faktais buvo įrodyta, kad 1941 m. birželio 14 d. trėmimai palietė nemažai Lietuvos žydų.
  12. ISSN 1822-2242. CEEOL 254316
    . Toks vertinimas susilaukë arðios reakcijos lietuviø emigracijo-je JAV. Tarnavæ lietuviø savisaugos batalionuose, policijoje ar savi-valdoje, jie turëjo savo 1941–1944 m. aiðkinimo schemà. Lietuvai at-gavus nepriklausomybæ ir pradëjus diskutuoti ðiais klausimais,iðeiviø vertinimas persikëlë á vietiná istoriografiná diskursà. Ben-drais bruoþais þydø þudymo politika 1941–1944 m. bei lietuviø daly-vavimas joje buvo aiðkinamas ir vertinamas pagal teorinæ 'dviejøgenocidø' schemà: 1. Þydai aktyviai dalyvavo komunistiniame ju-dëjime; 2. Jie laukë Raudonosios armijos atëjimo, vadinasi – ir Lie-tuvos okupacijos; 3. Þydai aktyviai dalyvavo lietuviø represijose irdirbo NKVD struktûrose.Tokie 'argumentai', kaip mano tokio poþiûrio ðalininkai, turë-jo paaiðkinti spontaniðkà lietuviø kerðto proverþá prieð þydus pir-mosiomis karo dienomis, bandyti pateisinti kolaboravimà su na-ciais okupacijos metais. Savo 'istoriografinæ gynybà' jie bandëpagrásti dviem argumentais: lietuviai prisidëjo likviduojant tik þy-dus komunistus, o masines þydø þudynes organizavo vokieèiø na-cistai ir jose dalyvavo tik lietuviø visuomenës 'padugnës'.Dabartiniai lietuviø istorikai argumentuotai, faktø kalba pa-neigë mità, kad þydai sudarë daugumà Lietuvos komunistø vietinë-se valdþios ir represinëse struktûrose. Pavyzdþiui, Lietuvos istorikaifaktais árodë, kad 'dviejø genocidø' teorija yra klaidinga, o 1940 m.spalio mën. Lietuvos komunistø partijoje 68,49 proc. buvo lietuviø,16,24 – þydø, 11,97 – rusø. NKVD struktûrose 1941 m. birþelio mën.pradþioje 52,2 proc. sudarë rusai, 31,2 proc. – lietuviai, 16,6 proc. –þydai, Lietuvos komjaunimo organizacijoje þydai sudarë 23,8 proc.
  13. ISSN 1392-0588. CEEOL 207959
    . Lietuviai taip pat linkę save suvokti vien kaip dviejų totalitarinių režimų, t. y. nacių Vokietijos ir Sovietų Sąjungos, auką ir vis dar vengia atidžiau įvertinti savo vaidmenį karo metų įvykiuose bei pripažinti lietuvių padarytus nusikaltimus. Panašiai kaip J. Haslingeris Austrijoje, Tomas Venclova Lietuvoje kritikuoja tautiečiams būdingą bet kokios kaltės neigimą ir vis dar gają 'dviejų genocidų' teoriją. Kritiškas požiūris išdėstomas viename garsiausių jo esė 'Žydai ir lietuviai' (1975) ir plėtojamas vėlesnėse publikacijose.
  14. ^ Shafir, Michael (Summer 2016). "Ideology, Memory and Religion in Post-Communist East Central Europe: A Comparative Study Focused on Post-Holocaust". Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies. 15 (44): 52–110.
  15. ^ Heni, Clemens (26 October 2009). "The Prague Declaration, Holocaust Obfuscation and Antisemitism". Wissenschaft und Publizistik Als Kritik. Retrieved 28 January 2022. ... in trivializing the Holocaust by framing this process as a study of totally 'equal' totalitarian regimes, or, as it has been called for short by critics, 'red equals brown.'
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    . A coining of communism as 'red Holocaust,' as had been suggested by the Munich Institut fur Zeitgeschichte, did not find much ground, neither in Germany nor elsewhere in international discussions.
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  28. ISBN 978-0-803-29000-6
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  29. ^ a b Shafir, Michael (Summer 2016). "Ideology, Memory and Religion in Post-Communist East Central Europe: A Comparative Study Focused on Post-Holocaust". Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies. 15 (44): 52–110. Quote at pp. 64 and 74.
  30. ISBN 978-0-253-03274-4
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  31. ^ a b Subotić, Jelena (18 November 2019). "How Holocaust Memory was Hijacked in Post-Communist States". Balkan Insight. Retrieved 3 August 2021.
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  34. ^ Malinauskaite, Gintare. "Reversed Memories of the Second World War War". Holocaust Memory and Antisemitism in Lithuania: Holocaust Memory and Antisemitism in Lithuania. Proceedings / International conference “Antisemitism in Europe Today: the Phenomena, the Conflicts” 8–9 November 2013 Organized by the Jewish Museum Berlin, the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” and the Center for Research on Antisemitism Berlin. Jüdisches Museum Berlin. p. 5.
  35. ^ Lazare, Daniel (9 September 2014). "Timothy Snyder's Lies". Jacobin. Retrieved 4 August 2021.
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  37. ^ "Prosecution and persecution – Lithuania must stop blaming the victims". The Economist. 21 August 2008. Retrieved 28 January 2022.

Bibliography

External links
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