Double genocide theory

The double genocide theory (Lithuanian: dviejų genocidų teorija)[1] is the idea that two genocides of equal severity occurred in Eastern Europe, the Nazi Holocaust against Jews and a second genocide that the Soviet Union committed against the local population. The theory first became popular in the Baltic States during the 1990s. Some versions of the theory furthermore accuse Jews of complicity in Soviet repression and therefore characterize local participation in the Holocaust as retaliation.[2][3][4] Alexander Karn states that the idea of "double genocide... hinge[s] upon the erasure of Lithuanian participation in the Holocaust."[5]

For another use, see Double genocide theory (Rwanda).

Background

According to political scientist Douglas Irvin-Erickson, "genocide discourses [are] highly effective in conferring moral capital upon certain actors in a conflict", a factor that increases the likelihood of a genocide frame being invoked by political actors.[6] 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]

Postulates

Writing in 2000, Vytautas Berenis argues that the double genocide theory has considerable influence in Lithuanian historiography. It consists of the following postulates:

  1. Jews actively participated in the Communist movement;
  2. Jews welcomed the Red Army when it invaded Lithuania in 1940;
  3. Jews took part in Communist repressions

However, Berenis argues that this theory is incorrect because most Jews did not support Communism and many Lithuanian Jews were victims of Soviet deportations. In October 1940, 68.49 percent of members of the Lithuanian Communist Party were ethnic Lithuanians, while only 16.24 percent were Jews.[1][7]

Analysis

Lithuanian poet and anti-communist dissident Tomas Venclova criticized the "double genocide" concept 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.[8] French ethnologist Carole Lemée sees double genocide theory as a symptom of persistent antisemitism.[9]

According to Michael Shafir, the double genocide theory is at worse Holocaust obfuscation.[10] Dovid Katz considers it "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."[11] 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."[11] Katz wrote 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."[11] 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.'"[11]

According to historian Thomas Kühne, going back to the Historikerstreit, conservative intellectuals such as Ernst Nolte and the Holocaust uniqueness debate, the attempts to link Soviet and Nazi crimes, citing books such as Timothy 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."[12]

According to anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee, efforts to institutionalize the "double genocide thesis", or the moral equivalence between the Nazi Holocaust (race murder) and the victims of communism (class murder), in particular the recent push at the beginning of the global financial crisis for commemoration of the latter in Europe, can be seen as the response by economic and political elites to fears of a leftist resurgence in the face of devastated economies and extreme inequalities in both the East and West as the result of the excesses of neoliberal capitalism. She argues that that any discussion of the achievements under communism, 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 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 concludes, the elites in the West hope to discredit and marginalize all political ideologies that could "threaten the primacy of private property and free markets."[13]

In The Holocaust/Genocide Template in Eastern Europe, 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."[14] In this sense, "the 'double genocide' paradigm [...] focuses on 'our own' national suffering under – allegedly 'equally' evil – Nazism and Communism [...]."[14] Radonić argues 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."[14]

Red Holocaust

The term communist holocaust has been used by some state officials and non-governmental organizations to refer to mass killings under Communist states.[15][16][17] The term Red Holocaust was coined by the Institute of Contemporary History (Munich Institut für Zeitgeschichte) at Munich.[18][19] Soviet and Communist studies scholar Steven Rosefielde also referred to a "Red Holocaust" for all "peacetime state killings" under Communist states.[20]

According to German historian Jörg Hackmann, this term is not popular among scholars in Germany or internationally.[19] Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine writes that usage of this term "allows the reality it describes to immediately attain, in the Western mind, a status equal to that of the extermination of the Jews by the Nazi regime."[21][22] Michael Shafir writes that the use of the term supports the "competitive martyrdom component of Double Genocide."[22] George Voicu states that Leon Volovici has "rightfully condemned the abusive use of this concept as an attempt to 'usurp' and undermine a symbol specific to the history of European Jews."[23]

See also

References
  1. Berenis, Vytautas, 'Holokaustas ir lietuviu istorine samone,' Politologija, 3 (19) (2000): 3-24. https://etalpykla.lituanistikadb.lt/object/LT-LDB-0001:J.04~2000~1367158931191/J.04~2000~1367158931191.pdf "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."
  2. Finkel, Evgeny (2010). "In Search of Lost Genocide: Historical Policy and International Politics in Post-1989 Eastern Europe". Global Society. 24 (1): 51–70. doi:10.1080/13600820903432027. 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, 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. Budrytė, Dovilė (2018). "Memory, War, and Mnemonical In/Security: A Comparison of Lithuania and Ukraine". Crisis and Change in Post-Cold War Global Politics: Ukraine in a Comparative Perspective. Springer International Publishing. pp. 155–177. 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.
  4. Moses, Anthony Dirk (2012). "The Canadian Museum for Human Rights: The 'Uniqueness of the Holocaust' and the Question of Genocide". Journal of Genocide Research. 14 (2): 215–238. doi:10.1080/14623528.2012.677762. 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’.
  5. Karn, Alexander (2015). Amending the Past: Europe's Holocaust Commissions and the Right to History. University of Wisconsin Press. p. 141. ISBN 978-0-299-30554-3.
  6. Irvin-Erickson, Douglas (2017). "Genocide Discourses: American and Russian Strategic Narratives of Conflict in Iraq and Ukraine". Politics and Governance. 5 (3): 130–145. doi:10.17645/pag.v5i3.1015.
  7. Berenis, Vytautas (2006). "Istorinė tradicija ir moderniosios istorijos iššūkiai". Kultūrologija (in Lithuanian) (13): 10–28. ISSN 1822-2242. 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.
  8. Eidukevičienė, Rūta (2011). "Lietuvos istorijos ir istorinės atminties tematizavimas naujausioje austrų literatūroje" (PDF). Darbai ir dienos (in Lithuanian) (56): 9–33. 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
  9. Lemée, Carole (2018). "History-memory of Litvak Yiddish spaces after the Holocaust. Between worlds of life and worlds of assassination". Ethnologie française. 170 (2): 225–242.
  10. 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.
  11. Liedy, Amy Shannon; Ruble, Blair (7 March 2011). "Holocaust Revisionism, Ultranationalism, and the Nazi/Soviet 'Double Genocide' Debate in Eastern Europe". Wilson Center. Retrieved 14 November 2020.
  12. Kühne, Thomas (May 2012). "Great Men and Large Numbers: Undertheorising a History of Mass Killing". Contemporary European History. 21 (2): 133–143. ISSN 0960-7773. JSTOR 41485456.
  13. Ghodsee, Kristen (2014). "A Tale of 'Two Totalitarianisms': The Crisis of Capitalism and the Historical Memory of Communism" (PDF). History of the Present. 4 (2): 115–142. doi:10.5406/historypresent.4.2.0115. JSTOR 10.5406/historypresent.4.2.0115.
  14. Radonić, Ljiljana (2020). The Holocaust/Genocide Template in Eastern Europe. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-000-71212-4.
  15. "Friendship Act (HR3000)". Act of 1993 (PDF). United States Congress. p. 15 at §905a1. Retrieved 14 November 2020 – via U.S. Government Publishing Office.
  16. Rauch, Jonathan (December 2003). "The Forgotten Millions: Communism is the deadliest fantasy in human history (but does anyone care?)". The Atlantic. Retrieved 14 November 2020.
  17. "History of Communism". Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. 2010. Archived from the original on 31 January 2010. Retrieved 14 November 2020.
  18. Möller, Horst (1999). Der rote Holocaust und die Deutschen: die Debatte um das "Schwarzbuch des Kommunismus" [The Red Holocaust and the Germans: The Debates on the "Black Book of Communism"] (in German). Munich: Piper Verlag. ISBN 978-3-492-04119-5.
  19. Hackmann, Jörg (March 2009). "From National Victims to Transnational Bystanders? The Changing Commemoration of World War II in Central and Eastern Europe". Constellations. 16 (1): 167–181. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8675.2009.00526.x. 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.
  20. Rosefielde, Steven (2010). Red Holocaust. London: Routledge. p. 3. ISBN 978-0-415-77757-5.
  21. Goslan, Richard Joseph; Rousso, Henry, eds. (2004). Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-0-803-29000-6. Quote at p. 157.
  22. 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.
  23. Voicu, George (2018). "Postcommunist Romania's Leading Public Intellectuals and the Holocaust". In Florian, Alexandru (ed.). Holocaust Public Memory in Postcommunist Romania, Studies in Antisemitism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. pp. 41–71. ISBN 978-0-253-03274-4. Quote at p. 46

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