Текст книги "ГУЛаг Палестины"

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Two of the conclusions that Raul Hilberg draws concerning pogroms in Ukraine flatly contradict

the Wiesenthal-Safer story of a massive pre-German pogrom in Lviv:

First, truly spontaneous pogroms, free from Einsatzgruppen influence, did not

take place; all outbreaks were either organized or inspired by the

Einsatzgruppen. Second, all pogroms were implemented within a short time after

the arrival of the killing units. They were not self-perpetuating, nor could

new ones be started after things had settled down. (Raul Hilberg, The

Destruction of the European Jews, 1985, p. 312)

Raul Hilberg describes what may have been the chief – or the only Lviv pogrom quite

differently – it occurred after the arrival of the Germans, and it did not involve the killing

of 5,000-6,000 Jews:

The Galician capital of Lvov was the scene of a mass seizure by local

inhabitants. In "reprisal" for the deportation of Ukrainians by the Soviets,

1000 members of the Jewish intelligentsia were driven together and handed over

to the Security Police. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews,

1961, p. 204)

But even this milder version of an anti-Jewish eruption – now a post-German one – is not easy to

credit. The arrest of one thousand targeted individuals within a city is something that can

only be done by a large team of professionals backed by a research staff, weapons,

telecommunications equipment, vehicles. Before anyone would undertake such a daunting task,

furthermore, they would need to be assured that the thousand prisoners would be wanted and that

they could be processed – only an ambivalent gratitude might be expected for having herded a

thousand prisoners through the streets to the local police station which was not expecting them

– and so it is implausible that local inhabitants would act without at the very least

consultation and coordination with the occupying authorities. From what we have discussed

above, we would expect the local inhabitants to be devoid of initiative, able to follow orders

perfunctorily in order to save their lives, but quite unable to muster the resources to round up

one thousand individuals on their own. If any such round-up did occur, then, it would more

plausibly have been at the instigation of, and under the direction of, the German occupiers.

But to return to 60 Minutes, the reality is that the sort of pogrom described by Simon

Wiesenthal – massive in scale and initiated by Ukrainians independently of German instigation

never took place. The most that the Germans could incite a small number of Ukrainians to

contribute – and who knows exactly how large a contribution these few Ukrainians really made

alongside the Germans in such actions – was closer to the following:

In Kremenets 100-150 Ukrainians had been killed by the Soviets. When some of

the exhumed corpses were found without skin, rumors circulated that the

Ukrainians had been thrown into kettles full of boiling water. The Ukrainian

population retaliated by seizing 130 Jews and beating them to death with

clubs. ... The Ukrainian violence as a whole did not come up to

expectations. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1961, p.

204)

But on the principle that the person readiest to contradict Simon Wiesenthal is Simon Wiesenthal

himself, we turn to other statements that he has made:

The Ukrainian police ... had played a disastrous role in Galicia following the

entry of the German troops at the end of June and the beginning of July 1941.

(Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, p. 34, emphasis added)

In the same account, Wiesenthal does mention a Lviv pogrom of three day's duration, but

unambiguously places it after the German occupation:

Thousands of detainees were shot dead in their cells by the retreating

Soviets. This gave rise to one of the craziest accusations of that period:

among the strongly anti-Semitic population the rumour was spread by the

Ukrainian nationalists that all Jews were Bolsheviks and all Bolsheviks were

Jews. Hence it was the Jews who were really to blame for the atrocities

committed by the Soviets.

All the Germans needed to do was to exploit this climate of opinion. It is

said that after their arrival they gave the Ukrainians free rein, for three

days, to 'deal' with the Jews. (Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989,

p. 36, emphasis added)

In conclusion, Mr. Wiesenthal's story of a massive pre-German Lviv pogrom is contradicted by

other testimony, some of it his own. Mr. Safer had the good sense to subtract 3,000 fatalities

from Mr. Wiesenthal's upper estimate of 6,000, suggesting that he too is aware of Mr.

Wiesenthal's unreliability. Had Mr. Safer dared to subtract another 3,000, he would have hit

the nail right on the head. If one were to sum up within one short statement the picture that

emerges from a consideration of the evidence, and if in doing so one were to be uninhibited by

considerations of political correctness, then an apt summary might be that during the very

interval that Morley Safer claims that Ukrainians were killing Jews by the thousands, in fact it

was Jews that were killing Ukrainians by the thousands. George Orwell's 1984 has arrived and is

in place – now our media drum into us that black is white, love is hate, war is peace,

Ukrainians killed Jews.

Morely Safer Invents Corroborative Events

Furthermore, in connection with the possibility of a massive, pre-German Lviv pogrom, 60 Minutes

insinuated into the pre-German interval three events which gave the viewer the impression that

the pre-German pogrom in question was well-documented and incapable of being doubted: (1) the

arrest of Mr. Wiesenthal's mother, (2) the shooting of Mr. Wiesenthal's mother-in-law, and (3)

the scenes depicted in "remnants of a film":

SAFER: But even before the Germans entered Lvov, the Ukrainian militia, the

police, killed 3,000 people in 2 days here.

LUBACHIVSKY: It is not true!

SAFER: It's horribly true to Simon Wiesenthal – like thousands of Lvov Jews,

his mother was led to her death by the Ukrainian police.

These are remnants of a film the Germans made of Ukrainian brutality. The

German high command described the Ukrainian behavior as 'praiseworthy.'

WIESENTHAL: My wife's mother was shot to death because she could not go so

fast.

SAFER: She couldn't keep up with the rest of the prisoners.

WIESENTHAL. Yes. She was shot to death by a Ukrainian policeman because she

couldn't walk fast.

SAFER: It was the Lvov experience that compelled Wiesenthal to seek out the

guilty, to bring justice.

The above passage starts by mentioning Lviv prior to arrival of the Germans, and it ends with a

reference to "the Lvov experience," which invites the viewer to imagine that the events

mentioned in the same passage happened during the pre-German interval. However, examining Mr.

Wiesenthal's biographies for confirmation of the first two of these events – the arrest of his

mother and the shooting of his mother-in-law – turns up the following (it will help at this

point to recollect that Lviv was occupied by the Germans on June 30, 1941):

In August [1942] the SS was loading elderly Jewish women into a goods truck at

Lvov station. One of them was Simon Wiesenthal's mother, then sixty-three.

... His wife's mother was shortly afterwards shot dead by a Ukrainian police

auxiliary on the steps of her house. (Peter Michael Lingens, in Simon

Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, p. 8)

"My mother was in August 1942 taken by a Ukrainian policeman," Simon says,

lapsing swiftly into the present tense as immediacy takes hold. ... Around

the same time, Cyla Wiesenthal [Mr. Wiesenthal's wife] learned that, back in

Buczacz, her mother had been shot to death by a Ukrainian policeman as she was

being evicted from her home. (Alan Levy, The Wiesenthal File, 1993, p. 41)

We see, therefore, that 60 Minutes seems to have advanced the date of arrest of Simon

Wiesenthal's mother as well as the shooting of his mother-in-law by more than a year in order to

lend credibility to the claim of Ukrainian-initiated actions against Jews prior to the German

occupation of Lviv.

Also attributed to the pre-German interval by 60 Minutes were the events depicted in the

"remnants of a film" quoted above, but as we shall see below, these scenes are not scenes of a

pogrom and they did not antedate the arrival of the Germans either.

As a final piece of contradictory evidence, Andrew Gregorivich reports being told by a resident

of Lviv during those days that there was not a three-day gap between the departure of the

Soviets and the arrival of the Germans (Jews Ukrainians, Forum, No. 91, Fall-Winter 1994, p.

29)

And as a final comment on the possibility of a pre-German Lviv pogrom, one might note that the

pogrom claimed by Morley Safer is massive in scale, that Simon Wiesenthal claimed to be right in

the middle of it, and that it was this very pogrom which "compelled Wiesenthal to seek out the

guilty, to bring justice." One might expect, then, that this particular pogrom would have

occupied some of Mr. Wiesenthal's attention as a Nazi hunter, and yet we are faced with the

incongruity that he seems not to have brought any of its perpetrators to justice.

Impulsive Execution

We have just seen Mr. Wiesenthal reporting that his mother-in-law was "shot to death by a

Ukrainian policeman because she couldn't walk fast." Such a thing might well have happened, of

course, but in view of Mr. Wiesenthal's lack of credibility, it behooves us to notice that it is

somewhat implausible. In fact, impulsive killing of this sort was forbidden by the German

authorities for many reasons.

(1) Any optimistic illusions of those arrested concerning their fate were better preserved until

the last possible moment – this to decrease the possibility of emotional outbursts, protests, or

resistance.

(2) As arrests were continuous and unending, there would be the need to prevent forewarning

those slated for arrest at a later time of the reality that the arrests were malevolently

motivated. Optimally, all targeted victims should believe that the arrest was part of a

"relocation," an illusion that a gratuitous shooting in the course of the arrest would dispel.

(3) There was the desirability also of keeping all killings as secret as possible so as not to

arouse the fear or indignation of the general populace. Raul Hilberg describes how even the

roundups themselves were kept as much as possible from view – how much more self-conscious,

then, would the Germans feel about a public killing:

During the stages of concentration, deportations, and killings, the

perpetrators tried to isolate the victims from public view. The administrators

of destruction did not want untoward publicity about their work. They wanted

to avoid criticism of their methods by passers-by. Their psychic balance was

jeopardized enough, especially in the field, and any sympathy extended to the

victim was bound to result in additional psychological as well as operational

complications. ... Any rumors or stories carried from the scene were an

irritant and a threat to the perpetrator.

Precautions were consequently plentiful. In Germany, Jews were sometimes

moved out in the early morning hours before there was traffic in the streets.

Furniture vans without windows were used to take Jews to trains. Loading might

be planned for a siding where human waste was collected. In Poland, the local

German administrators would order the Polish population to stay indoors and

keep the windows closed with blinds drawn during roundups of Jews, even though

such a directive was notice of an impending action. Shooting sites, as in Babi

Yar in Kiev, were selected to be at least beyond hearing distance of local

residents. (Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, 1992, p. 215)

(4) Public executions would create witnesses able to later testify as to Nazi culpability, and

gunfire in a city would attract attention.

(5) In allowing impulsive killing, mistakes would be made, non-Jews or non-Communists killed.

(6) In an arrest, it would hardly be worthwhile to inform the police participants as to the

perhaps many purposes of the arrest or the final disposition of those arrested; in some cases,

therefore, those arrested, or some among those arrested, might be slated not for extermination

but for interrogation: they might have useful information, they might have monetary assets that

needed to be ascertained or confiscated, they might have rare skills which could be put into the

service of the Nazis – and so permitting the impulsive killing of any of the arrested would

interfere with these plans.

(7) Perhaps among those arrested might be informants who would be questioned and released, and

so again none of those being arrested should be impulsively killed.

(8) An impulsive execution would create the problem of what to do with the body of someone

impulsively executed in the street – to leave the body in the street would be unacceptable, and

yet to send a truck to pick it up would consume scarce resources.

(9) An impulsive execution might lead to blood being splattered over the participants, or might

lead to a bullet passing through the intended victim and hitting an unintended target.

(10) Anyone so trigger-happy as to shoot a woman for walking too slowly posed a danger to

everyone, even to his German superiors, and so would not be tolerated within the German forces.

(11) The Germans viewed the optimal executioner as one who found killing distasteful, but killed

dutifully upon command. Anyone who enjoyed killing, within which category must fall anyone who

killed on impulse, was a degenerate and had a corrupting influence on those around him, most

importantly on Germans who after the war would be expected to return to Germany and resume

civilian life. With respect to German personnel, at least, the attitude was as follows:

The Germans sought to avoid damage to "the soul" ... in the prohibition of

unauthorized killings. A sharp line was drawn between killings pursuant to

order and killings induced by desire. In the former case a man was thought to

have overcome the "weakness" of "Christian morality"; in the latter case he was

overcome by his own baseness. That was why in the occupied USSR both the army

and the civil administration sought to restrain their personnel from joining

the shooting parties at the killing sites. [In the case of the SS,] if

selfish, sadistic, or sexual motives [for an unauthorized killing] were found,

punishment was to be imposed for murder or for manslaughter, in accordance with

the facts. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1985, pp.

1009-1010)

The killing of the Jews was regarded as historical necessity. The soldier had

to "understand" this. If for any reason he was instructed to help the SS and

Police in their task, he was expected to obey orders. However, if he killed a

Jew spontaneously, voluntarily, or without instruction, merely because he

wanted to kill, then he committed an abnormal act, worthy perhaps of an

"Eastern European" (such as a Romanian) but dangerous to the discipline and

prestige of the German army. Herein lay the crucial difference between the man

who "overcame" himself to kill and one who wantonly committed atrocities. The

former was regarded as a good soldier and a true Nazi; the latter was a person

without self-control, who would be a danger to his community after his return

home. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1985, p. 326)

Every unauthorized shooting of local inhabitants, including Jews, by individual

soldiers ... is disobedience and therefore to be punished by disciplinary

means, or – if necessary – by court martial. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of

the European Jews, 1985, p. 327)

Although avoiding damage to the Slavic soul would not have had the same high priority to the

Nazis as avoiding damage to the German soul, nevertheless, it would have been more difficult to

keep Germans from wanton killing if that same wanton killing had been permitted to their Slavic

auxiliaries.

For these many reasons, then, and in view of Mr. Wiesenthal's overall lack of credibility, one

may well wonder whether his mother-in-law really met her end in the manner indicated.

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

Nazi Propaganda Film

Historical documentary footage was shown to 60 Minutes viewers and identified as Ukrainians

abusing Jews, and the impression was created that German cameramen happened to come across these

spontaneous outrages and filmed them as they were taking place. This too is a falsification.

The truth is that when the Germans entered Lviv, they made a propaganda film – they gathered up

a handful of street thugs and staged scenes in which mistresses of the recently-fled NKVD were

stripped and "wallowed in the gutter" and collaborators of the recently-fled Communist regime,

some of whom were probably Jewish, were humiliated and roughed up in the street. That several

of the victims are shown naked or half-naked suggests that this was just such a humiliation, and

not an arrest. Certainly, as German cameramen were present, the action must have taken place

after the arrival of the Germans, and as German soldiers are seen to be in attendance, the

action cannot be viewed as having been initiated by Ukrainians. And neither can the action be

interpreted as a pogrom, as the civilians are unarmed and no wounding or killing is recorded; in

fact, in footage 60 Minutes chose not to show, the women can be seen dressing themselves and

leaving the scene:

Several women suspected for collaborating with the NKVD were rounded up by

street gangs organized by the Nazis, stripped naked, then thrown into the

gutters in front of the prison. The event lasted for a few hours.

"While the public humiliation of any female is deplorable, the other photos

in the series show that these women left the scene intact" ... says Katelynksy.

"Moreover," he adds, "this staged outburst of revenge was mild compared

with the "bloody reprisals of the liberated French."

"In 1944 and 1945, countless women were publicly humiliated and over 15,000

of their compatriots were tortured, hanged, or shot for Nazi collaboration in

France. Yet the photographs of these bloody events are, for reasons of

sensitivity, not published by the Western press and the events are rarely

mentioned by historians." (Ukrainian News, Edmonton, March 1993, No. 3)

In short, some and possibly all of the historical footage broadcast by 60 Minutes was not the

Ukrainian populace spontaneously attacking Jews, but rather was street criminals directed by the

Germans to rough up Communist collaborators among whom were probably Jews. It is, therefore,

misleading to represent the scenes as either spontaneous in origin or initiated by Ukrainians or

motivated by Ukrainian anti-Semitism.

What must be kept in mind is that the Nazis had their reasons for making this film: (1) they

were trying to convince Germans back home that Nazi attitudes toward Bolsheviks and Jews were

not uniquely German, but rather were universal; (2) they were demonstrating to the intimidated

Ukrainian population that Bolsheviks and Jews need no longer be feared and that they could be

attacked with impunity; and (3) they were taking a first step toward dragging a handful of

Ukrainians into complicitous guilt.

Bodies on the Ground

One photograph inserted into the middle of these "remnants of a film" was of bodies lying in

rows on the ground. Of course Morley Safer does not identify the photograph – he does not

attribute it to a source, he mentions no date or place. As the photograph is being shown, Mr.

Safer is saying that Simon Wiesenthal "remembers that even before the Germans arrived, Ukrainian

police went on a three-day killing spree." The impression left in the viewer's mind, therefore,

is that these must be some of the 5,000 to 6,000 victims of that killing spree.

Three details of this photograph, however, suggest otherwise: (1) The bodies are shown lying in

snow, whereas the killing spree was supposed to have taken place in the three days before the

German occupation of Lviv on June 30, 1941. (2) The legs of one of the bodies are visible, and

these legs are skeletally thin, which suggests a famine victim and not the victim of a pogrom,

or else suggests that this is an exhumed corpse. If these are in reality famine victims, then

they are more likely to be Ukrainians than Jews. (3) Most of the shapes on the ground resemble

small heaps rather than bodies, which suggests that the photograph is one of exhumed remains

from some old mass grave – and we may reflect that in June 1941 (if that was when this

photograph was taken), the inhabitants of Ukraine's many mass graves were predominantly

Ukrainians and not Jews. Thus, there is a very real possibility that Morley Safer is using a

photograph of Ukrainians killed by Jews as evidence of Jews killed by Ukrainians.

The Wallowing Photograph

The last scene of this Nazi propaganda footage that was presented by Morley Safer has a

notorious history of being presented in various publications with wildly different

interpretations – of which Time Magazine's "Wallowing Photograph" fiasco of 22Feb93 is but one

instance. In fact, this photograph is taken from the wallowing-in-the-gutter German propaganda

film that we have been discussing above. Whereas Time magazine editors did not go so far as to

concede this, they were able to muster enough integrity to express ignorance and confusion, and

also to retract and to apologize:

Despite our best efforts, we have not been able to pin down exactly what

situation the photograph portrays. But there is enough confusion about it for

us to regret that our caption, in addition to misdating the picture, may well

have conveyed a false impression. (Time, April 19, 1993)

And yet this same notorious photograph has been recycled yet again by 60 Minutes and broadcast

as if it had unequivocal significance. Time admitted that it was wrong, Morley Safer cannot

escape having to do the same.

It is a curious incongruity that while professing to oppose Naziism, Morley Safer nevertheless

broadcasts a Nazi propaganda film and invites 60 Minutes' viewers to take it at face value. The

propaganda of one era is, half a century later, dredged up to become the propaganda of another

era, but with a switch from approval to disapproval – the Germans used the film to portray

Ukrainians as good anti-Semites, and so why shouldn't Mr. Safer use the same film to portray

Ukrainians as bad anti-Semites?

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

Collective Guilt

What was the rate of Ukrainian criminal collaboration with the Nazis during the Second World

War? I do not ask here for the rate of perfunctory and non-culpable collaboration – not, for

example, for a count which includes Ukrainian prisoners of war who, to save their lives, donned

German uniforms and then found themselves serving out the war as reluctant camp guards, which

have been more accurately referred to as "prisoner guards" because even while serving as guards,

such Ukrainians continued to be themselves prisoners. No, not that low level of culpability,

but rather an active collaboration palpably greater than would have been necessary for survival,

well beyond the minimum that would be offered by all but the few saints and martyrs among us

in short, collaboration of a magnitude that could plausibly lead to criminal prosecution. Let

us imagine several possibilities. As the population of Ukraine at the time was 36 million,

different collaboration rates give us a different number of collaborators:

Rate of Criminal Collaboration

Number of Criminal Collaborators

1/100,000

1/ 10,000

1/ 1,000

360

3,600

36,000

Were there 360 Ukrainians known to have criminally collaborated with the Nazis during World War

II? Perhaps there were, though I do not know of any such definitive list, and wonder if one

exists. However, 360 criminal collaborators only makes for one criminal collaborator out of

every 100,000 Ukrainians.

Could there have been 3,600 criminal collaborators? I doubt it, and I challenge anyone to come

up with a credible list this long. Note that I do not challenge someone to pull a number out of

the air equal to or exceeding 3,600 – likely there is more than one researcher at 60 Minutes who

would find such a task not difficult – but rather, I challenge someone to come up with a

documented list of names of Ukrainians who criminally participated in Nazi war crimes, where the

list includes a description of the crimes, their locations, their dates, and credible supportive

evidence. I repeat – this has not been done and cannot be done. And yet 3,600 certified

criminal collaborators would make for only one criminal collaborator out of every 10,000

Ukrainians.

And what about 36,000 criminal collaborators? The notion is preposterous. No documentation

exists to support such a fantastic claim. And yet 36,000 criminal collaborators would make for

only one criminal collaborator out of every 1,000 Ukrainians.

The middle figure – one criminal collaborator for every 10,000 Ukrainians – is possibly a wild

exaggeration, and would give us 3,600 criminal collaborators – more than enough to account for

all the stories of Ukrainian savagery, brutality, and sadism, even the ones that aren't true.

Such speculations as the above happen to coincide approximately with published estimates. For

example Professor Stefan Possony reports that "The records of Israel's War Crimes Investigations

Office indicate that throughout occupied Europe some 95,000 nazis and nazi collaborators were

directly connected with anti-Jewish measures, massacres, and deportations...." (The

Ukrainian-Jewish Problem, Plural Societies, Winter 1974). The middle column below contains the

rate of anti-Semitic war criminality 1939-1945 per 10,000 population, and the right-hand column

contains the estimated number of such war criminals. Possony points out that these figures fail

to cover Croats, Serbs, and Jews themselves who also "were forced to participate in the

extermination" (p. 92). It must be kept in mind that Possony did not himself conduct any

research, but is merely passing on Israeli estimates without any scrutiny of his own; neither is

it explained how the incidence per 10,000 is calculated – we may wonder when Russians together

with Byelorussians contribute 9,000 war criminals and Ukrainians contributed 11,000, and when we

know that the number of Russians together with Byelorussians is much greater than the number of

Ukrainians, how it can be that the Russian rate of 8/10,000 can be higher than the Ukrainian

rate of 3/10,000. Perhaps the calculation used as a denominator the number of Russian,

Byelorussians, and Ukrainians actually under German occupation, and so who had the opportunity

to offer their criminal collaboration so that even though the number of Russian collaborators is

low, the Russian collaboration rate is high because only a comparatively small number of

Russians found themselves under German occupation.

Balts

Austrians

Russians and Byelorussians

Germans

Poles

Ukrainians

Western Europeans

20

10

8

6

4

3

0.5

11,000

8,500

9,000

45,000

7,500

11,000

3,000

______

95,000

The figure of 11,000 for Ukrainians being some three times higher than my speculative figure of

3,600 can be explained by the Israeli researchers using a more inclusive definition of what

constituted collaboration (where I was specifying criminal collaboration) and might be explained

too by the Israeli researchers requiring weaker evidence than would be required to commence

criminal prosecution (where I was demanding evidence which would launch a criminal

prosecution). In any case, whether it's one criminal collaborator per 10,000 Ukrainians or

three makes no difference to the fundamental argument which I propose below.

And that argument is that Mr. Safer is condemning all Ukrainians for crimes committed by

something in the order of one Ukrainian out of every ten thousand – or at the very most, three

Ukrainians out of every ten thousand – and this leads to the most serious charge that can be

brought against the quality of his reasoning – which is the charge that he is engaging in this

primitive, retrogressive, atavistic, anti-intellectual notion of collective guilt. One

individual out of ten thousand in a group commits a crime, from which, according to Mr. Safer,

it follows that the entire group deserves to be condemned. How bracingly Medieval! How

refreshingly deviant from modern notions of culpability! How Nazi! And for how many

generations, we might ask Mr. Safer, must this collective guilt be carried? – The answer is, of

course, for all eternity. And why? – Why simply because the notion of collective guilt is no

more than a club by means of which one group bludgeons another, and as that club is eternally

useful, it is never shelved.

Mr. Safer does not stop to reflect that collective guilt – and more particularly eternal

collective guilt – is a two-edged sword, and that this sword has been used to cut the Jewish

people themselves. Eternal collective guilt permits the conclusion that an American Jew today

bears the guilt for Lazar Kaganovich administering the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933, or – why

stop there? – that a Jewish child who will be born in the next century will still be a

Christ-killer. This is the quality of discourse which Morley Safer sanctioned in "The Ugly Face