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8Comparative and Competitive Victimization in the Post-­ Communist Sphere Zvi Gitelman The interpretation of the recent past occupies a prominent place on the agenda of post-­ communist states and societies. They seek to make sense of the five or seven decades of communist rule and place them in the larger narratives of their national histories, the latter being matters of contention within and between states. History serves as the legitimizer of present states and is therefore highly politicized. As the prominent Soviet historian M. N. Pokrovsky said in the 1930s, “history is politics projected into the past.”1 One of the most troublesome issues for several of the post-­communist states is that significant numbers of their citizens collaborated with the Nazis in the war against the Soviet Union and in the mass murder of Jews. Many assume that this raises questions not only about their behavior in the recent past but also about their po­liti­cal cultures and democratic commitments. If they do not at least address the “dark spots” and “blank spots” in their histories, this would mean, as the Talmud puts it, shtika ke-­hoda#ah damia, silence is acquiescence. One way to meet this challenge is to equate the evils of fascism and communism and to portray Jews as perpetrators of evil as much as they might have been victims of it. That would, in some people’s view, tie the moral score, absolve the present governments and populations of the region of guilt, and put the issue to rest. Of course, this is not the only way the issue is being treated, and there are nuances and complexities that both apologists for their national histories and vocal critics of them choose to ignore. Reinterpreting history is not an academic exercise but a deeply po­ liti­ cal one, with implications for how Jews are viewed and treated, among many other things. 216 | Zvi Gitelman Some post-­ communist states struggle to convince the world, and especially their neighbors, of their legitimacy as sovereign states—­Macedonia, Slovakia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova come to mind. All try to convince their own populations and the rest of the world of their virtue, high ethical standards, and great cultural achievements. Therefore, it is particularly difficult for insecure states, challenged by their neighbors and by internal forces, to confront “dark spots” in their recent histories. Countries which were allied with the Axis powers—Slovakia, Croatia , Hungary, Romania—or in which significant numbers of autochthonous people collaborated with the Nazis—Ukraine, the Baltic states—are at particular pains to explain how that came about. Some people simply deny it. Others, however, acknowledge that Jews who had lived among them were victims of genocide and that local people were responsible. Still others aver that Jews were just as much victimizers as victims. If one assumes that communism was as great an evil as fascism—and there is no objective way of measuring the extent or degree of evil—to the extent that one can blame communism on the Jews, as many attempt to do, the latter can be justly accused of being as much perpetrators as victims. The Holocaust need not be denied—it merely has to be equated with crimes perpetrated by “the Jews” against others in order to “cancel the debt” owed by others to the Jews. If Jews were equally murderers, robbers, and evil-­ doers as they were victims of such people, they deserve no special sympathy . Moreover, the only Jewish state in the world, Israel, once a haven for survivors of the Holocaust, in this accusatory view no longer deserves sympathy, for it has turned into a victimizer itself. It has allegedly perpetrated ethnically based crimes against the Palestinians and discriminated against Arabs and other non-­ Jews who are nominal citizens of Israel. Thus, neither the Jews nor the state that they created are said to deserve special consideration. In the competition for victimization, the Jews have had their day. Europe spent nearly half a century apologizing and making up to the Jews for the evils it had perpetrated against them. But with the Catholic church—though not the Orthodox one—having lifted the burden of guilt of deicide from the Jews, the near universal recognition of the State of Israel, and the enormous, though incomplete, reparation payments made for material destruction and, at least symbolically, for mass annihilation of human beings, the debt has been paid, scores have been Comparative and Competitive Victimization | 217 settled, and now the...

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