[Marxism] Michael Karadjis - Holocaust revisionist

["David Quarter" <davidquarter@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[Forwarded from Jim Yarker...]


It has been a real education to follow your commentary on the "Marxism" list
of late.  I say education not because your posts are particularly
fact-driven - actually they're rife with spectacular falsehoods - but rather
because we learn from them that Holocaust revisionism is now considered fair
game in the arsenal of "left" debate on Yugoslavia, and on a "Marxist"
discussion list no less.

I recognized your name as that of the author of a particularly stenchy
apologia for the KLA which was posted at Z-net during the Nato bombing of
Yugoslavia, and which makes for interesting reading 4 1/2 years on, after
the KLA/KPC Kristallnacht against the non-Albanian - and quite a bit of the
Albanian - population of Kosovo.

More recently, in your reflections at the "marxism" list, you inform us that
Franjo Tudjman's HDZ régime in Croatia was "anti-Ustashe" and to support
this risible claim you refer to the assassination of neo-Ustashe leader Ante
Paradzik in Sept. 1991.  Indeed, whoever *heard* of infighting among
fascists?  I suppose that by an identical logic we could conclude that
Croatian Axis dictator Ante Pavelic was "anti-Ustashe" also since he had the
3 Ustasha accomplices convicted in the 1934 assassination of King Alexander
arrested and sent to death camps immediately upon their return to Zagreb in
1941.  Isn't revisionism fun?  There was of course another assassination
which took place in Croatia in 1991, of which you spare your readers
mention, namely that of the *genuinely* anti-Ustashe Croat police chief of
Osijek, Reihl-Kir, who'd laboured with courage and good faith to protect the
Serb citizens in his district, and whose bravery earned him an early death
at the hands of the thug Antun Gudelj, who enjoyed close ties to the Ustashe
para leader and senior HDZ party member Branimir Glavas.  Gudelj was
"amnestied," for his triple murder (his other victims included negotiators
on a peace mission), the result of pressures by Tudjman's governing
"anti-Ustashe" party on the Croatian judiciary.  The "amnesty" generated
international scandal and outcry, though perhaps not among the brain trust
of GreenLeft.

Perhaps in your future musings at "marxmail" you can explain to us how,
under the aegis of this "anti-Ustashe" government, *higher* pensions were
paid to Ustashe killers than to Partizan veterans?  And why notorious
Ustashe criminals, whose diasporic milieux had funded Tudjman's party, were
brought back from exile and awarded sinecures in government and the
diplomatic corps?  Or why the president of this "anti-Ustashe" régime made
the public and appalling proposal to make the memorial park at Jasenovac
(the "Yugoslav Auschwitz," to borrow the term of Vladimir Dedijer) a joint
burial ground for the victims of the Ustashe as well as of their Ustashe
killers and torturers?

You explain to readers of "marxmail" how the pro-nazi holocaust in NDH
Croatia in 1941-45 was merely the work of a tiny handful, that Croatian
fascism had no mass base or mass involvement, contrary to Serb "myth" so
naively accepted on the "left." And you explained to the readers of your
party rag Greenleft a while back about how Belgrade was the first city in
Europe to be declared Judenrein, viz. free of Jews.   It was indeed, though
it wasn't *made* Judenrein by the Serbs but by the German Nazi occupiers,
who prior to occupying Serbia bombed Belgrade mercilessly for 3 days,
killing many 1000's of Serbs in "punishment" for their overthrow of "their"
monarchy (as you like to put it) and the abrogation of the Tripartite Pact,
which had been marked by massive celebratory street demonstrations.   You
spare Greenleft and Marxmail readers this trivia of course, since it fails
to buttress your perverse and mendacious thesis of "symmetry" in Serbian and
Croatian collaborationism and responsibility in the Holocaust, in the
symmetry of Ustashe and Cetniki, etc.

Historians like Michael Berembaum have shown that in fact in the countries
where there *wasn't* any mass base of support for the nazis' Holocaust
project, the Germans had to take on practically *all* the work of it
themselves, with occupied Serbia being one of the clearest examples.   The
sheer technical challenge of the German implementation of the Final Solution
for Serbia's Jews compelled pioneering experiments in the use of technology
like mobile gas vans, i.e. of labour-saving methods designed to make mass
killing possible by a loyal cadre of *German* military technicians and
administrators.  You spare your chump readership of admirers this trivia
too, having successfully implanted in their minds that all this was carried
out by some Serb analogues of the Ustashas, ie "Cetniks" or whatever.
By contrast, the German Nazis were able to successfully "subcontract" and
entrust the entire Holocaust project on the territory of NDH ("Independent"
Croatia) to the local Ustashas and Handjars of Croatia/Bosnia.  And this
project zealously began in the spring of 1941, well before the Wannsee
Conference at which the Germans' own "Final Solution" was formulated, and
without the labour-saving technology the Nazis used.  This made the Croatian
Ustashe the real "keeners" and précoces of the Holocaust project, the
authors of its "first chapter" as historian Barry Lituchy has noted.  It's
widely documented that to the extent that German nazi and Italian fascist
diplomacy interceded in the Ustashe killing operations, it was by way of
trying to tame the zeal of the killers - which was becoming an
embarrassment - and not of trying to augment it.

So how did this tiny handful of indigenous fascists, lacking any mass base
and without any direct participation by Nazi and Italian troops, slaughter
600,000 Yugoslav citizens on the territory of NDH, the majority Serb, but
including a majority of Croatia's and Bosnia's Jews and Roma, in their death
camp system, while the Axis occupiers chastised them for their "excesses"?
(the figure of 600,000 was made public by the Republic Commission of
*Croatia* for Establishing Crimes Committed by the Occupier and its
Collaborators, that is, it was made public by a commission operating in
Socialist Yugoslavia in the Tito era, which I notice you hold up as a
paragon of progressiveness and ethnic tolerance in contrast to Milosevic's
"nationalist" Serbia, so I will assume you accept it).

This holocaust was much less high-tech than anything the nazis operated in
Poland.  How did the tiny band of fascists lacking any mass base pull it
off?  How is it that 100's of catholic clerics got recruited into the
killing machine, and even became death camp commanders, helping in the
primitive slaughter of inmates with mallets and knives, while the Catholic
primate accepted appointment to be vicar of the NDH armed forces?  Why did
the Croatian Peasant Party leader and then-Yugoslav vice-president Macek
hail the appearance of the "Independent State of Croatia" whose Ustashe
leadership were escorted into Zagreb by Axis troops (and which would not be
the last time that a Croatian politician would hail the destruction of
Yugoslavia while being a member of the Yugoslav presidency)?  How were the
tiny handful able to man and operate the complex hub of death camps, and
administer the countless death marches, village pogroms, and transit centres
(over 3000 of the latter have been documented by Partizan veteran and former
head of the Yugoslav Military Archives, Col. (Ret'd) Antun Miletic, a
Croat).   How was the "Independent State of Croatia" able to raise an army
of 45,000, a home guard of 100,000 (which participated in the roundup of
Serb and Jewish "communists") a gendarmerie of 100,000, an urban police of
5000 agents, and Ustashe militia detachments organized in 37 active
battalions and 27 battalions of reservists?  How is it that *2/3* of the
deputies from Croatia's Peasant Party who were named to Pavelic's
Ustashe-controlled NDH Sabor *assumed their seats*?  Why is that in the 1945
Constituent Assembly elections held *after* the Liberation thoughout the
Yugoslav federation, "huge" numbers of voters had their names struck from
the voter lists in Croatia for "wartime Ustasa activity," as anti-communist
historian John Lampe complains?   In Slavonia the figure was 40% (should
that inform us at all about events in Slavonia in the 90's, like Kir's
assassination?).  In Serbia as a whole the figure was under 5%.  These were
determinations made early in the Communist period under Tito (your paragon
and gold standard, remember?).

No-one disputes that there was an anti-fascist resistance in Croatia too,
but the debate isn't served well by just pretending that no mass base for
clerical fascism existed there then, nor in the 90's.  It's like pretending
that jingoism has no real hold on people's political psyche in America.

It's just Holocaust revisionism to claim that the Ustashe movement had no
mass base or extensive collaboration in Croatia and that the Serbs - alone
among the peoples decimated in the Holocaust - should just forget what
happened in NDH Croatia and move on since it has no relevance to the
situation in the 90's.  It's *only* the Serbs who are supposed to renounce
their victimhood in the Holocaust, and it's a measure of the degeneration of
the "left" that a discourse like this - which would be considered completely
out of line with respect to *any* other people and country touched by the
Holocaust and even be prosecutable as hate literature and Holocaust denial
in some countries - is considered even remotely acceptable.  And this is on
a "marxist" list. It's scandalous, and it's sickening.  Who in the Western
left would try to justify paying nazi killers pensions superior to those
being paid to anti-fascist resistance fighters?  Would you call for it in
Australia, would your admirer and fellow "marxmail" subscriber Les Evenchick
call for it in the USA?

But then you extended this Holocaust revisionism, drawing an explicit equal
sign between the Cetniki and the Ustashe.  Someone had posted on the Ustashe
revival and rehabilitation and nostalgia going on in Croatia in the 90's and
you wrote, and I'm virtually quoting verbatim, "the same thing is going on
in Serbia with Cetnik symbols and memorabilia." So? The Cetniki *fought* the
nazis and the Ustashe and perished doing so, as did the Partizans in greater
numbers, and the large majority of *both* resistance movements were Serbs.

And the "marxist" Karadjis is equating the NDH holocaust with the Cetniki?
And the paying of pensions to these nazi Ustashe murderers and the honouring
of their leaders and bringing them out of exile and appointing them to gov't
sinecures in the 90's is no different than the reappearance of Cetnik
symbols in Serbia?  It was the same on both sides, you say (to high-5's from
your "marxist" pals like Evenchick).  Hitler's Mein Kampf was a best-selling
book in Croatia in 1999.  So are members of tiny, marginal militias the only
people who read in Croatia?  How did this happen?  Who voted the neo-Ustashe
HDZ into power, with its secessionist racist program in 1990?  The Croatian
Serbs whom you sleazily broadbrush as "Cetniks" voted overwhelmingly in that
election for the Croatian section of the League of Yugoslav Communists, viz
for a left party who opposed secession.  Even the mayor of Dubrovnik
acknowledged this in cross-examination by Milosevic in The Hague.  So was
this part of their descent into "19th century chauvinism," as opposed to
their forward-looking Croat compatriots who were voting HDZ, dusting off the
chequerboard flag and readying to rename streets after Ustashe murderers
like Budak?  Evidently Croatia's Serbs should have accepted with alacrity to
live under that chequerboard flag, just as it would be reasonable to expect
Poland's Jews to live under the swastika, take loyalty oaths to it, etc.

Poland had 2 recognized anti-Nazi gov't's during WWII - the London-based
exile gov't, which Churchill wanted recognized as the sole legitimate gov't
by the Allies, and the Soviet-backed gov't formed in Lublin, which included
partisan forces.  They were *both* anti-nazi, though they weren't *both*
socialist, of course.  I wouldn't take seriously a "marxist" who tried to
pretend that the London-based Polish gov't in exile was "nazi" or the "same"
as the nazis, and who equated nostalgia for its leaders with nostalgia for
Hitler, any more than I'd take seriously equating DeGaulle's Free French
with the Nazis, etc.

Now your admirer Evenchick, whose Green Party's candidate for president in
2000 didn't utter one word of denunciation of the Nato aggression on
Yugoslavia in 1999 (even though the bombing coincided with the initiation of
his presidential campaign, but hell, why should that matter, just because he
was applying for the job of commander in chief of his country's armed forces
is no reason to have an opinion or anything...), is on a high horse about
white nationalists and neo-nazis, and gratuitously suggesting that defenders
of Milosevic might want to sign up with them.  Would've been nice to hear
from him and you on this subject when a Croatian diplomat on the payroll of
Tudjman's "anti-Ustashe" HDZ gov't was touring around the U.S. speaking at
meetings of Holocaust-deniers, white supremacists and neo-nazis as part of
his *salaried functions.*  Even writers for *mainstream* media outlets, incl
mainstream Jewish media outlets, voiced concern in the early 90's about the
rehabilitation and recrudescence of Ustashism in Croatia.  Guess they were
just less enamoured of the "right of self-determination" for nazis than were
"marxists" like Karadjis and Evenchick.

I'd actually given passing thought to subbing up and sending out something
which rewrites the history of WWII Poland and Belarus in the *same terms*
that your négationnisme rewrites the history of WWII Yugoslavia, just to see
if you or any of your fan club would "get it." You know, I could talk about
the Jewish "myth" of resistance and persecution and uprisings, of how the
London exile Poles were just as bad as the Nazis, how the Nazis had no
support from ordinary Germans and so it's wrong to put any responsibility on
Germany, like the professional victims and cry-babies at the Claims
Conference did, etc etc and maybe for good measure I could throw in some
egregious lie to the effect that contrary to "myths" nursed by "the left"
the largest number of resisters in territories occupied by the Reich were
Germans, and that the Jews were equally compromised as collaborators.
Perhaps the Zionist Irgun's proposal to enter the war on the side of the
Nazis would be a serviceable canard for "showing" that Eastern European
Jewry didn't resist, had as much responsibility as the Germans, etc.

But I have feeling that "marxmail"'s moderator, who's been very "moderate"
indeed in waving through your négationniste dreck, would be less
accommodating to such a missive, since as we both know, when one's revising
and airbrushing chapters of the Holocaust where Serbs are *not* the
principle victims, one isn't cut the same slack.

Up until the 1980's, we had mainly powerful Western institutions, the
Vatican, and fascist Balkan émigrés and revanchists to thank for the
occultation of the Serb holocaust, and for the denial of relief and
recognition to its victims (a denial which has been facilitated by the
German gov't claim that their nazi troops and administrators didn't set up
or run the camps - *Croatians did*).  Since the 90's, we have legions of
"lefts" to thank as well, as you sadly remind us.  The only difference
between you and the David Irving's and Robert Faurisson's is how nicely you'
re being treated by Western "marxists." What a disgrace, but - I repeat - an
education as well.

Jim Yarker

Québec



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