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https://jewishlink.news/babi-yar-and-the-holocaust-moscow-tried-to-bury/

On September 29-30, 1941, the eve of Yom Kippur, the Germans murdered 33,771 Jewish men, women and children in Babyn Yar (Babi Yar), almost four miles from the center of Kiev, the capital of the Soviet Ukrainian Republic. Although Babi Yar was “not the largest Holocaust-era mass murder site on Soviet soil,” it was significant for two reasons, explains historian Shay Pilnik, director of the Emil A. and Jenny Fish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Yeshiva University. Kiev, with a Jewish population of 160,000, was “the hub for Jewish culture” and the first European capital to become Judenrein (free of Jews) during the Holocaust.

Babi Yar’s Uniqueness

Pilnik quotes historian Lucy Dawidowicz, who remarked that the “unprecedented” pace of the killings, which occurred within 36 hours, is the second reason for Babi Yar’s importance. The numbers established “a record in the annals of mass murder,” she said. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, the total capacity of the four gas chambers and crematoria was a maximum of 6,000 a day at its peak.

Another justification for Babi Yar’s uniqueness, Pilnik said, was that although the site “was not the largest killing field during World War II in the Soviet Union, the approximate number of 100,000 dead in Babi Yar, the overwhelming majority of whom were Jewish, helped establish Babi Yar’s position as the centerpiece of the Holocaust in the USSR.”

Murders continued at Babi Yar for a number of months, Dawidowicz said, but never to the extent as on September 29-30, when 33,771 Jews were slaughtered simply because they were Jews. Pilnik estimates “a minimum of 10,000 non-Jews” were murdered, “among whom were Russians, Ukrainians, and Roma,” who were buried on the site.

In an era when intellectual and artistic life is increasingly being distorted by political dogmatism, Julien Benda’s Treason of the Intellectuals is a classic that speaks with a new and extraordinary urgency. Benda’s essay, published by ERIS in a new translation by David Broder, offers an incisive account of interwar Europe that ranges from the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche and Georges Sorel to the activities of Charles Maurras and Benito Mussolini. It also serves, however, as a remarkably timely warning against the seduction of modern intellectuals by tribal loyalties and antipathies.

Rather than detaching themselves from communal ties as their forebears had done, Benda argues that twentieth-century European intellectuals willingly subordinated the disinterested pursuit of truth to the servicing of group interests (particularly the interests of their own nations and social classes). Partisan agendas had a corrosive effect not only on moral and political philosophy, but also on the writing of history and fiction. With its penetrating analyses of nationalism and of the tensions between group identity and intellectual freedom, Treason of the Intellectuals is as necessary a book in the twenty-first century as it was in the twentieth.

If one were to look for a unifying theme in the books and journalism of Diana West, one would quickly discover that West, by turn, is provoked, curious and relentless when it comes to campaigns of deception continuously run in media, politics, culture and academia to influence and manipulate. Such deceptions depend on twisting or, worse, omitting key facts or, almost worse than that, the lazy journalism that is no better than deception’s echo chamber.

In Wake Up and Smell the Culture and other selected essays, West skewers numerous counter-narratives and episodes of “court history,” shining a light on lost context and hidden facts. With characteristic verve, West delves, for example, into the pre-WWII origins of “America First” (no, it was not pro Nazi); examines the very real clues to “Pizzagate” (no, it was not “fake news”); and proves how conservatives to this day have been duped into carrying on Josef Stalin’s assault on Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who, as readers of American Betrayal (2013) will recall, is one of West’s historical heroes.

Indeed, in the tradition of The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy (2019), West newly unspools communist associations in the pasts of Judge Tanya Chutkan and Victoria Nuland. In the spirit of bi-partisan targeting, West also exposes the shocking conservative crack-up, circa 2016, over the candidacy of Donald Trump in the must-see-it-to-believe-it compendium, “The Right’s Anti-Trump Lexicon.” West also turns her sprightly pen to popular culture in a series of magazine essays she wrote on the way to The Death of the Grown-Up (2007). In all, an invaluable collection from one of our most provocative writers.

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

“I have seen the future, and it works” – words written by Lincoln Steffens following a visit to the newly formed Soviet Union in 1918. Last year, while in Shanghai for a store opening, Apple CEO Tim Cook was obsequious in his praise of China: “I think China is really opening up…it’s so vibrant and so dynamic.”

For more than a hundred years many, supposedly perceptive Western geopolitical analysts, journalists and business leaders, have chosen to ignore the evil that is Communism. In his 1919 book, Ten Days that Shook the World, American journalist John Reed, scion of a wealthy Oregon family, wrote sympathetically of the Russian Revolution that he had witnessed in Petrograd. Warren Beatty turned the book into a 1981 film, Reds, nominated for an Academy Award. In 1937, after spending months with Mao Tse Tung’s Red Army, American journalist Edgar Snow wrote Red Star Over China, a glowing portrait of life in Communist areas. He contrasted his experience with Mao and his Communist followers with his depiction of the gloom and corruption of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang’s government, which relocated to Taiwan in 1949.

For Americans, Communism has never approached the revulsion felt for Nazism, yet the similarities are far greater than their differences. In the February 5, 2018 issue of The New York Review of Books, Ian Johnson responded to an earlier article by Timothy Snyder, “Who Killed More, Hitler or Stalin?” Johnson wrote that the question was slightly off: “…it should have included a third tyrant of the 20th Century, Chairman Mao. And not just that, but that Mao should have been the hands-down winner, with his ledger easily trumping the European dictators’.” According to his research, Stalin killed somewhere between 6 and 9 million people, Hitler between 11 and 12 million, and Mao between 35 and 45 million, most during the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Nazism and Communism both practice(d) genocide, are (were) authoritarian, and have (had) no regard for individual rights or human life.