Exploiting the Final Solution

The other day Mr. Lavrov, the Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs, compared the ongoing Western campaign against Russia to Hitler’s idea of the final solution of the Jewish question:

“Like Napoleon mobilized Europe against Russia, like Hitler, the United States too has formed a coalition of EU and NATO members and with the help of Ukraine, by proxy, wages war against Russia,” the diplomat is convinced.

Lavrov accused the U.S. of waging war against Russia and of wanting to “solve the Russian question” the same way Hitler wanted to solve the Jewish question.

See here for direct quotation in Russian.

The European Jewish Congress then demanded apologies from Lavrov (emphasis below mine):

“We are shocked and appalled by this shameful comparison drawn by Minister Lavrov between the actions of a coalition of democratic countries and Hitler’s persecution and murder of six million Jews in the Shoah,” EJC President Ariel Muzicant said.

“This is Holocaust distortion at its most basic level and we call on Mr. Lavrov to unequivocably apologise and withdraw these comments,” he added.

Really? Not anti-semitic at all, I was outraged by this demand, to be honest. It triggered me in every possible way. Why would Lavrov apologize to anyone for saying the truth? Did he say that Hitler was right? Did he glorify genocides, nazism, imperialism, racism, double standards? Nope, quite the opposite. He made a very obvious comparison.

The Jewish congress on the other hand did what it and other Jewish organizations seem to have been doing for a long time now. It acted immediately to protect their position of the only possible victim-nation of the world. They did it contrary to the logic, contrary to moral and common sense, they did it, even though it helped those who now revive nazism. If you ask me, they actually spitted on the graves of their dead as much as on those of our.

My dear Jews, with all the due respect, you don’t own the Holocaust and you, as a nation, cannot privatize the position of the only innocent victim of genocide that ever happened. Especially, given your attitude to Palestinians lately.

My dear Jews, there were Armenians before you, there were Russians many times in history, there were Native Americans, there were African slaves transported in tens of thousands to the Caribbean sugar cane plantations (far worse than slavery in what was later the USA, they just died there without having children), there were Chinese during the war with Japan, there were gypsies, etc. And yes, the final solution of the Russian question has been on the agenda for centuries now. Russophobia in Europe is hardly younger than antisemitism.

During the war the Soviet Union lost 27m people saving the world (including Jews) from European nazism. Soviet losses are so big not because we were lousy at fighting, but because Germans and their satellites killed civilians. By the way, sometimes collaborators exceeded Germans in cruelty, and, although it is a bit of an off-topic, I must mention the Baltic states, Finland and Poland. All had camps for Soviet people. Poland had camps before the WWII and sometime after it. Just for the record. Again, I’m not speaking about German camps in those countries, I speak of camps they created quite voluntarily to exterminate everybody they considered “untermenschen” including Jews, but not limited to them.

Would there be any Jews left by now, but for the USSR? Would there be the state of Israel, but for the post-war UN-based system? I’m not so sure.

But my main point is that it is ugly to try to appropriate the status of the one and only victim-nation and argue that someone cannot be a bad person only because they are Jewish (yup, Zelensky). Jews became similar to He Who Cannot Be Named in their extreme pursuit of positive exclusiveness, there is something dialectical in it, isn’t it? Moreover, it looks like a lucrative business now or like a tool for blackmailing anyone who dares to say that a Jewish person can be anything less than an angel, not like an attempt to find truth and preserve the memory of the past.

PS: The Russian MFA refused to apologize.