ГУЛаг Палестины - Лев Гунин

reporting from rabid hatemongering and as a result has no place in mainstream journalism. He

has lost his credibility.

Mr. Safer, too, will be welcomed by the supermarket tabloids where he will find the heavy burden

of logic and consistency considerably lightened, and the constraints of having to make his words

correspond to the facts mercifully relaxed.

(12) 60 Minutes should do a story on Simon Wiesenthal and assign it to a reporter and to

researchers who have the courage to consider objectively such politically-incorrect but arguable

conclusions as that Mr. Wiesenthal's stories are self-contradictory and fantastic, that his

denunciations have sometimes proven to be irresponsible, and that he spent the war years as a

Gestapo agent.

CONTENTS:

Preface

The Galicia Division

Quality of Translation

Ukrainian Homogeneity

Were Ukrainians Nazis?

Simon Wiesenthal

What Happened in Lviv?

Nazi Propaganda Film

Collective Guilt

Paralysis of the Comparative

Function

60 Minutes' Cheap Shots

Ukrainian Anti-Semitism

Jewish Ukrainophobia

Mailbag

A Sense of Responsibility

What 60 Minutes Should Do

PostScript

PostScript

A discussion relevant to the above critique concerns third-party attempts to incite

Ukrainian-Jewish animosity and can be found within the Ukrainian Archive at Ukrainian

Anti-Semitism: Genuine and Spontaneous or Only Apparent and Engineered? The relevance lies in

the fact that The Ugly Face of 60 Minutes which you have just read above has been the target of

a crude attempt at anti-Semitization, and at the discreditation of the author, myself, as is

documented particularly at Lubomyr Prytulak: Enemies of Ukraine anti-Semitize The Ugly Face of

60 Minutes.

HOME DISINFORMATION 60 MINUTES

HOME DISINFORMATION PETLIURA 1441 hits since 23Mar99

Symon Petliura An Introduction

Long after Symon Petlura had gone into exile and was living in Paris, armed

resistance broke out again and again in his name in Ukraine. Indeed, even today his

name is still regarded by the Ukrainian masses as the symbol of the fight for freedom.

Symon Petliura: An Introduction

Is Symon Petliura the man who "slaughtered 60,000 Jews"? Symon Petliura is

relevant to the Ukrainian Archive primarily because he led the fight for Ukrainian

independence at the beginning of the twentieth century, and secondarily because

Morley Safer in his infamous 60 Minutes broadcast of 23Oct94, The Ugly Face of

Freedom, summed him up this way:

Street names have been changed. There is now a Petliura Street.

To Ukrainians, Symon Petliura was a great General, but to Jews,

he's the man who slaughtered 60,000 Jews in 1919.

Or is Symon Petliura a fighter for Ukrainian independence? But as the documents

in this PETLIURA section will begin to suggest, Safer's contemptuous dismissal is not

quite accurate and does not quite tell the whole story. We can begin with a few

short excerpts to provide background on Petliura from his entry in the Encyclopedia

of Ukraine:

Petliura, Symon [...] b 10 May 1879 in Poltava, d 25 May 1926 in

Paris. Statesman and publicist; supreme commander of the UNR Army

and president of the Directory of the Ukrainian National Republic.

(T. Hunczak in Danylo Husar Struk (ed.), Encyclopedia of Ukraine,

1993, Volume III, p. 856)

After the signing of the UNR-Polish Treaty of Warsaw in April 1920,

the UNR Army under Petliura's command and its Polish military ally

mounted an offensive against the Bolshevik occupation in Ukraine.

The joint forces took Kiev on 7 May 1920 but were forced to retreat

in June. Thereafter Petliura continued the war against the

Bolsheviks without Polish involvement. Poland and Soviet Russia

concluded an armistice in October 1920, and in November the major UNR

Army formations were forced to retreat across the Zbruch into

Polish-held territory and to submit to internment.

(T. Hunczak in Danylo Husar Struk (ed.), Encyclopedia of Ukraine,

1993, Volume III, p. 856)

In late 1923, faced with increased Soviet demands that Poland hand

him over, he was forced to leave for Budapest. From there he went to

Vienna and Geneva, and in late 1924 he settled in Paris. In Paris he

founded the weekly Tryzub, and from there he oversaw the activities

of the UNR government-in-exile until his assassination by a

Bessarabian Jew claiming vengeance for Petliura's purported

responsibility for the pogroms in Ukraine (see Schwartzbard Trial).

He was buried in Montparnasse Cemetery.

(T. Hunczak in Danylo Husar Struk (ed.), Encyclopedia of Ukraine,

1993, Volume III, p. 856)

The above reference to Petliura's assassin being motivated by Jewish vengeance can be

taken in two ways: literally or as part of Kremlin-manufactured plot.

Assassinated by a Jew? In the first case, if the assassination was indeed the

work of a lone Jew longing for vengeance, then it might not be amiss to wonder

whether there has ever been any great Jewish leader who has been assassinated by a

Ukrainian for wrongs committed by Jews against Ukrainians, or for any other reason

for that matter. If not, and I think not, then one might wonder also what the

respective statistics might be for all cross-ethnic assassinations of leaders and

officials of not only the highest rank, but of any rank as well, and to wonder

finally whether any differences in such statistics might be attributable to a

differential incitement to vengeance within Jewish and Ukrainian cultures.

Or assassinated by the Kremlin? However, crediting Bessarabian watchmaker,

Yiddish poet, and assassin Shalom Schwartzbard's claim that he murdered Petliura to

satisfy a Jewish longing for vengeance is possibly to be taken in by Kremlin

disinformation, as the following passage explains (where the spelling becomes

"Schwarzbart"):

According to Bolshevist misinformation, the Jews are to blame for the

murder of Petlura. [...]

The choice of the person who was to commit the murder has always

served as the basis for the invention of lies and legends about the

actual murder itself. They have always chosen persons to whom - in

the event of their arrest - credible tales about motives other than

the orders of the Kremlin, motives of a personal or political

character, could be imputed, so as to conceal the fact from the court

that the order to murder was issued by Moscow.

In the case of Petlura, a Jew, Schwarzbart, was instructed by Moscow

to carry out the murder. He received orders to give himself up of

his own accord to the police as a Communist agent, in order to start

a political trial in this way. Thus there was a two-fold purpose

behind this murder: to murder Petlura who was a danger to the

Bolsheviks, and to direct the political trial of this murder in such

a way that the person of Petlura and the Ukrainian government which

he represented, as well as the national liberation movement, which

was a danger to Moscow, could be defamed from the political point of

view. It was Schwarzbart's task during this trial to conceal the

part played by the Russian GPU in this murder and to pose as a

national avenger of the Jewish people for the brutal pogroms

committed against them by various anarchist groups, who operated in

Ukraine during the years of the revolution, that is from 1919 to

1921, and in the interests of Russia also fought against the

Ukrainian state. The blame for the pogroms carried out by these

groups was to be imputed to Petlura. By planning the trial in this

way the Russians managed to gain a two-fold success. In the first

place, they succeeded in winning over most of the Jews in the world

for the defence of the Communist agent Schwarzbart and in arousing

anti-Ukrainian feelings, which, incidentally, persisted a long time,

amongst the Jews, and, secondly, as a result of the unjust verdict of

the Paris court, the Russians and other enemies of an independent

Ukraine were able to obtain "the objective judgement of an impartial

court in an unprejudiced state," which could then be used in

anti-Ukrainian propaganda. For years the Russians made use of this

judgement in order to defame Petlura in the eyes of the world and to

misrepresent the Ukrainian state government which he represented and

the Ukrainian liberation movement as an anti-Semitic, destructive and

not a constructive state movement, which would be capable of ensuring

human democratic freedoms to the national minorities in Ukraine. The

jury of the Paris court, who consisted for the most part of

supporters of the popular front at that time and of socialist

liberals, refused to believe the testimony of the numerous witnesses

of various nationalities, which clearly proved that Petlura had

neither had any share in the pogroms against the Jews, nor could be

held in any way responsible for them. They ignored the actual facts

of the murder, and by their acquittal of the murderer rendered

Bolshevist Moscow an even greater service than it had expected. Thus

Moscow scored two successes. But it did not score a third, for the

Paris trial did not help Moscow to change the anti-Russian attitude

of the Ukrainians into an anti-Semitic one or to conceal its

responsibility for the murder of Petlura from the Ukrainians.

(Anonymous, Murdered by Moscow: Petlura - Konovalets - Bandera,

Ukrainian Publishers Limited, London, 1962, pp. 8-9)

Three reflections arise from the Schwartzbard assassination:

(1) Juror historians. One wonders whether the jurors in a criminal case are

competent to arrive at a fair determination of historical truth, or whether they are

more likely to bring with them personal convictions of historical truth which are

likely to be unshaken by the evidence.

(2) French justice. The acquittal of a self-confessed assassin might be an outcome

peculiar to French justice. Other Western states might more typically require the

conviction of a self-confessed assassin, and consult his motives only to assist in

determining the severity of sentence. A comment which in part reflects on the French

acquittal:

It is a strange paradox that the once so sacred right of asylum, even

for the spokesmen of hostile ideologies and political trends,

nowadays does not even include the protection of the fundamental

rights of life of the natural allies of the West in the fight against

the common Russian Bolshevist world danger.

(The Central Committee of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN),

Munich, December 1961, in Anonymous, Murdered by Moscow: Petlura

Konovalets - Bandera, Ukrainian Publishers Limited, London, 1962, p.

65)

(3) True-believer assassins. If an assassin is sent by the Kremlin, then is it

necessary for the Kremlin to find one who is personally committed to the

assassination? The answer is yes. This is because a Soviet assassin sent to Paris

has some opportunity to defect and to seek political asylum. He might choose to do

so to escape totalitarianism, to raise his standard of living, to avoid going through

with the assassination, and in the Petliura case to avoid the punishment that was

being anticipated from the French courts. On top of that, he must realize that once

he has carried out the assassination, he becomes a potential witness against the

Kremlin, and so might find the Kremlin rewarding him with a bullet to the back of his

head for the success of his mission.

Thus, it is essential for the Kremlin to ensure that the assassin be energized with a

zealous committment to his mission. One way to achieve such committment is to hold

his family hostage. Another way is to incite in him a thirst for revenge based on

wrongs done to his people. Thus, even if the Kremlin did order the assassination of

Petliura, and even if the Kremlin's selection of a Jew to perform the assassination

was for the political reasons outlined in the quotation above, it may nevertheless be

true that a Jewish thirst for revenge played a useful role, and that all the Kremlin

had to do to inspire the requisite motivation was to propose the disinformation that

Petliura was the appropriate target of that revenge.

Pogromist or fighter for independence? The Encyclopedia of Ukraine entry ends

with:

[S]ince the mid-1920s he has personified, perhaps more than any other

person, the struggle for Ukrainian independence. The personification

seemingly also extends to the issue of the pogroms that took place in

Ukraine during the revolutionary period of 1918-1920, and Petliura

has frequently been invested with the responsibility for those acts.

Petliura's own personal convictions render such responsibility highly

unlikely, and all the documentary evidence indicates that he

consistently made efforts to stem pogrom activity by UNR troops. The

Russian and Soviet authorities also made Petliura a symbol of

Ukrainian efforts at independence, although in their rendition he was

a traitor to the Ukrainian people, and his followers (Petliurites)

were unprincipled opportunists.

(T. Hunczak in Danylo Husar Struk (ed.), Encyclopedia of Ukraine,

1993, Volume III, p. 857)

A continuing threat to the Kremlin. Petliura's leadership of the fight for

Ukrainian independence did not end with his withdrawal from the field of battle:

Long after Symon Petlura had gone into exile and was living in Paris,

armed resistance broke out again and again in his name in Ukraine.

Indeed, even today his name is still regarded by the Ukrainian masses

as the symbol of the fight for freedom [...].

(Dr. Mykola Kovalevstky, in Anonymous, Murdered by Moscow: Petlura

Konovalets - Bandera, Ukrainian Publishers Limited, London, 1962, p.

28)

However real the continuing resistance that was carried on in Petliura's name, the