Kevin Myers: Martin Hohmann - a German Christian Democrat member of the Bundestag - recently spoke of the role of Jews in the Bolshevik Revolution, and the millions who died at the time.
"Jews were in large numbers at the leadership level as well as in the Cheka [secret police\] execution squads. That is why it is to a certain extent justified to characterise Jews as a guilty people. That might sound alarming, but it would follow the same logic by which one characterises the Germans as a guilty people."
Well, if this sentiment embodies one central axiom it is this: the truth may not be spoken with equal freedom by all mouths. For some - though they might well be thoroughly informed and free of all prejudice - cannot, because of their background, be expected to he heard with the same respect as others who are perhaps less informed and less free of prejudice. This is the conundrum of truth: unversed Irish Catholics are more acceptable critics of the IRA than knowledgeable English Tories.
Much of what Herr Hohmann was saying about the Jews in the Russian revolution reeked of tendentiousness, but I have read only parts of his speech, and in translation only. I suspect he was trying to make general points which, as a German Christian Democrat, he is both ill-advised and ill-placed to do, for anti-Semitism is still too rife in Germany, and the Holocaust too close. Perhaps I, as a defender of Israel's right to exist and, I hope, a firm friend of Jewry, might be allowed to murmur: Yes, some Jews were indeed responsible for the worst crimes of the 20th century - but not because they were Jews, but because they were humans.
And as it happened, they were humans who had access to power at one of the very worst moments that can occur in human history: revolution. Out of the woodwork crawl the troubled, the demented, the delusional, the obediently homicidal: in the case of the Nazis, the Heydrichs and the Eichmanns - Heydrich being the SS chieftain who actually ordered the implementation of the Final Solution, and Eichmann being the sedulous bureaucrat who organised it.
They were boundlessly evil men, but they were not the inventors of final solutions. Perhaps the first man in the 20th century to articulate the notion of killing people by the million in the course of seeking a political millennium was the Bolshevist Gregory Zinoviev. He said in September 1918, more than 32 years before the decision to eliminate Europe's Jews: "To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must win over to our side 90 million out of the hundred millions of the inhabitants of Russia under the Soviets. As for the rest of them, we have nothing to say to them: they must be annihilated."
He was deadly serious: just days before, the Petrograd Cheka under his command had taken out and murdered 512 helpless hostages - "bourgeois", "counter-revolutionaries", "reactionaries". "The bourgeoisie kill separate individuals," he boasted, "but we kill entire classes." He was known as Zinoviev; but his real name was Grigoriy Yerseyevich Radomysk, also going by the name Appelbaum, and he was Jewish; and more to the point, he was evil, through and through.
So was his secretive, conniving colleague Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich, the proto-Eichmann. A time-server of the most obsequiously murderous kind, he was Stalin's most central, most loyal servant within the Soviet Union from 1918 to the 1950s, and in the course of his squalid career he administratively presided over the deaths of some 20 million people. This unspeakable beast lived on, untroubled by allegations of war crimes, to his death in 1991. He was Jewish; and perhaps a million Soviet Jews died because of him.
The Soviet revolution could probably not have have occurred, and certainly could not have been maintained on its course after 1917, without the boundless energies of six men: Lenin, Stalin and Bukharin, and three Jews - Lev Davidovich Bronstein (Trotsky), Lev Borsovich Rosenfeld (Kamenev), and Zinoviev. Like Kaganovich, they were self-loathing Jews, who despised Jews who cherished their identity, the religion, their traditions.
Perhaps it was this very deracination which made them the savage brutes they were; and they were the prototypes for the Jewish communists who came to power across the Soviet Union as regional administrators. Within the Ukraine, for example, one third of all Communist functionaries were Jewish, though Jews were a tiny minority of the population overall. The same was true of the Baltic states after they were conquered by the Soviets.
Jews were especially powerful in the Cheka, under one the most evil men in Soviet history, the Georgian Jew, Laventin Beria; yet they were anti-Semitic Jews who hated and hounded Jewish Jews. Moreover, the Cheka was not founded by Jews, but by a Polish Catholic, Dzerzhinsky, and other Poles were eminent within it from the outset. And, of course, the man who was the moral and intellectual inspiration for Bolshevik terror, Lenin, was not a Jew: and nor was the greatest communist monster of the 20th century, Josef Stalin.
You probably haven't read such material before because writers have been terrified of being labelled as anti-Semitic for drawing attention to the fact that Jews can do wrong. But it is patronisingly anti-Semitic to paint Jews solely as a people of the arts, letters and humanities; and it is the very reverse of anti-Semitism to protest the simple human truth that Jews are just as prone to folly and evil as the rest of us.