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Michael Shafir, “The Nature of Postcommunist Antisemitism in East Central Europe: Ideology’S Backdoor Return” in Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism (JCA), Vol

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Michael Shafir, “The Nature of Postcommunist Antisemitism in East Central Europe: Ideology’S Backdoor Return” in Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism (JCA), Vol PROOF ONLY of Michael Shafir, “The Nature of Postcommunist Antisemitism in East Central Europe: Ideology’s Backdoor Return” in Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism (JCA), vol. 1, no. 2, Fall 2018, pp. 33-61. The final version (version of record) is available exclusively from the publishers at: http://journals.academicstudiespress.com/index.php/JCA/article/view/116 JCA 2018 DOI: 10.26613/jca/1.2.12 PROOF: The Nature of Postcommunist Antisemitism in East Central Europe: Ideology’s Backdoor Return Michael Shafir Abstract This article analyzes contemporary antisemitism and Holocaust distortion in Eastern Europe. The main argument is that Brown and Red, Nazism and Communism, respec- tively are not at all equal. In Eastern Europe, in particular, antisemitic ideology is grounded on the rehabilitation of anticommunist national “heroes.” The history of the Holo- caust is thereby distorted. Based on Maurice Halbwachs’s theory of “social frameworks,” the author shows how “competitive martyrdom,” the “Double Genocide” ideology, and “Holocaust obfuscation” are intertwined. Empirically, the paper examines these concepts in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Hungary, Serbia and Croatia, and Romania. Keywords: Double Genocide, Holocaust Distortion, East European antisemitism, Holocaust, Gulag, anticommunism, national identity INTRODUCTION everywhere subjected the Holocaust to oblivion We are currently facing a huge struggle over or, at best, to manipulation. To use Shari Cohen’s history and collective memory of the twenti- terminology,2 they indulged in “state-organized eth century. Antisemitism plays a crucial role national forgetting.” in this struggle, as we see tendencies to com- New regimes are engaged in what has pare or equate the Holocaust to the history of been termed the search for a “usable past.” As Communism. Therefore, we need to investi- Jacques Rupnik observed in the early 1990s, the gate East European trends in particular. The “demolition of [communist] statues, restoration Holocaust, as Yehuda Bauer repeatedly told of former denomination to streets” then us,1 would have never become possible in the witnessed all over the former Soviet zone of absence of an ideology that both prompted and influence was nothing “but the exterior aspects justified it. Its “basic motivation was purely of the search for a ‘usable past,’ whose force is ideological, rooted in an illusionary world proportional to the fragility of national identity of Nazi imagination, where an international and uncertainty in face of the future.”3 The Jewish conspiracy to control the world was search for a “usable past” is particularly strong in opposed to a parallel Aryan quest.” The defeat societies uncertain of what should replace their of the Nazis led to a partition of Europe. left-behind identity and who should be chosen In the postcommunist era, the legacy of to symbolize the new identity. This is precisely Stalinism often meant the nearly explicit reha- the case of East Central Europe after the fall of bilitation of prominent anticommunist figures, communism. The West (or what they believed such as Marshal Ion Antonescu in Romania’s case the West stood for) was only an exogenous, and or (less obvious) Roman Dmowski in Poland’s therefore insufficient, legitimation instrument. case. As is well known, communist regimes Which past was deemed as worthy to be “used” Michael Shafir or “re-used” from among the indigenous pasts than witness a deideologization of a region was just as important. What Romanian histo- saturated with ideology in the Stalinist period, rian Andrei Pippidi called the “macabre comedy ideology returned to the region as powerfully of posthumous rehabilitations all over Eastern as ever. It did so, however, via the back door. Europe after 1989” demonstrated that the past More precisely, it waged what Dan Stone and was undergoing a process of being reshaped “by (independently) the author of these lines termed partisan passions, with each political family as “wars of memory.”6 introducing in the national pantheon those Most former communist countries are historic figures in whom it can recognize itself currently witnessing a “competitive martyrdom” or whom it abusively claims [as its own].” struggle between the memory of the Holocaust The 1990s were a time when “all Central East and that of communist oppression. Coined by European countries” rejected “the Soviet model, several scholars in the context of debates around searching for an own (old or new) national the extent, limit, or the desirability of emulating identity,” a time when historians and politicians the alleged7 postwar de-Nazification in Western competed “for the reinterpretation of the past.”4 Europe, competitive martyrdom is a complex This competition, however, entailed an ideo- issue, influenced not only by the immedi- logical remix above all. Against the background ate communist past and its treatment of the of the communist tabula rasa regarding the Holocaust in official history but also, and above Holocaust, why should Iron Guard leader all, by sociopsychological factors linked to col- Corneliu Zelea Codreanu and Marshal Ion lective memory and to the social frameworks of Antonescu, Admiral Miklós Horthy and Arrow the memory8 of specific groups within society. Cross leader Ferenc Szálasi, Slovakian President One such element is the “cognitive” or “mental Jozef Tiso, Croat Ustasha leader Ante Pavelić mapping” of the actors.9 Under “actors,” we or (though the historical context is somewhat mean politicians and cultural elites strategically different) the Slovene Domobranci not placed to articulate collective perceptions, but reemerge as “model figures” of national heroes, we also mean those under their influence. All whose only fault rests in their having supported of these are both subjects and objects when it or allied themselves with those who were fight- comes to the forging of what is called collective ing communism and/or the traditional enemy or historic memory.10 of their nation? Why, furthermore, would even After World War II, antisemitism was lesser historically tainted figures such as those by and large denounced everywhere, except of Roman Dmowski5 not reemerge as the for the lunatic fringe. Yet it survived under valiant defenders of their nations? Their crimes different guises, from outright denial and having been ignored, why shouldn’t the Baltic comparative trivialization in the West to anti- Waffen-SS volunteers who fought the Soviets cosmopolitanism and anti-Zionism in the East. emerge as hero models, as it was hardly common In East Central Europe, it resurged after the knowledge that the same people participated in fall of communism, particularly in different the extermination of Jews even before the Nazis’ modalities of Holocaust denial, which aimed to arrival to oversee the massacres and that they wash away the “dark pasts”11 of collaboration, served as guards in extermination camps? though more common and more vulgar forms However, the ideological remix called for (desecration of cemeteries, violence against the transformation of these interwar and war- Jews, and more) emerged as well. Outright time leaders into patriots defending the same denial was successfully imported from the West values as those of the West, and thus implicit almost as soon as the former regime had disap- democrats who had fallen victims to the peared.12 Side by side, regionally specific forms West’s betrayal, epitomized at Yalta. Rather of old and new forms of antisemitism developed 34 Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism The Nature of Postcommunist Antisemitism in East Central Europe: Ideology’s Backdoor Return in the first decade or so. Deflective negationism, that employ “institutionalized rituals that for example, transferred the responsibility for express” their members’ “approach to providing the perpetuation of crimes to members of other a [common] framework for citizens to relate nations and minimized own-nation participa- to their histories.”18 While in the early 1990s tion in them to insignificant local “aberrations”; the Western mnemonic regime was largely the deflection comprised either attribution of constructed on “the one and only negative responsibility to Germans alone or to “fringes” myth of remembrance” based on what Jeffrey in one’s own society, but also the transformation Olick called “the politics of regret,”19 the East of victims (the Jews) into perpetrators. A more Central European collective memory sought to recent, but particularly blatant, example was attribute guilt rather than assume it, substituting offered by Polish Premier Mateusz Morawiecki’s a positive myth of anticommunist resistance claim that not only Poles but Jews as well could for the negative myth of the Holocaust, which be counted among the “perpetrators” of the emphasized bystanding and collaboration.20 Holocaust.13 A breed between outright and Once more, the legend of the Żydokomuna was deflective negationism, selective negationism revived for this purpose, though one may doubt excluded any participation of one’s own nation, that it had ever died. presenting it as some sort of lonely island in Consequently, a new ideological formula was a stormy ocean. While encompassing many sought, one likely to squeeze in unsanctioned forms encountered in the West as well, compar- by the joint regime of remembrance; a formula ative trivialization sought to demonstrate that that managed to enlist the support of figures the Holocaust was neither without precedent in hardly likely to be suspected of antisemitism humankind’s history nor did it stop with the (as in the case of the deniers) or of subjectivity, end of World War II. Communization, accord- ill will or ignorance (as in that of the trivializers). ing to some of these latter versions, had been The 2008 Prague Declaration, signed (if not a continuation of state-organized crime on par co-initiated), among others, by such prominent with the Holocaust and even worse.14 former anticommunist dissidents as the former Three interlinked features characteristic Czech and Lithuanian presidents Václav Havel of postcommunist antisemitism in the region and Vytautas Landsbergis, fit the bill from this were born as a result.
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