Douglas Reed, 1939, Disgrace Abounding, The Carpathian-Ukraine mini state

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Douglas Reed 1939 Disgrace Abounding The Carpathian-Ukraine mini state

"The peasant is entirely in the hands of the Jews. If he has any money and wishes to buy anything, he must buy it from a Jew. If he has no money, and needs to borrow some for his taxes or his mortgage, he must borrow it from a Jew. If he has something to sell, he can only sell it to the Jewish dealers. If he wishes to hire a plough, he must hire it, at a high rate, from a Jew. Most sinister of all, if he wants to drink � and spirits form his only solace � he must go to a Jew for it, for the great majority of the alcohol licences are in the hands of Jews. If he goes to law, he puts money into the pocket of the Jewish lawyer � for in Carpathian-Ukraine only 19 of the 160 lawyers are non-Jews. To litigate against a Jew, in these conditions, is for him an almost hopeless proceeding." � Douglas Reed

The passage featured below the present navy-blue comment area is an excerpt from Chapter 31, "Christmas Day in Chust," found in Douglas Reed's book, Disgrace Abounding, Jonathan Cape, London, 1939. One of Reed's books � Controversy of Zion � received the following reader review on the Amazon web site which I paste below as an introduction to Douglas Reed (my five asterisks below represent the five stars given the book by this one Amazon reviewer):

Customer Comments

Average Customer Review: ***** Number of Reviews: 1

[email protected] from Beachwood Ohio , May 17, 1998

A Blacklisted Classic!

It's not at all surprising that this urbane and encyclopedic decimation of Jewish power and pretense has been (for the most part successfully) marked for murder by the American publishing industry. Were Doug Reed's "Controversy" to find its way into the hands of too many thinking people, there would be at least a glimmer of hope for a restoration of Anglo-Saxon power both here and abroad. Let's be blunt: Amazon.com's "review guidelines" probably contain some empurpled fine print, courtesy of their friendly local ADL, to the effect: "Never praise Douglas Reed." So I don't expect this to see print. But in the odd event that one of their proofers was dozing over her "New Republic" and flavored Starbucks as this one flew by (is sarcasm permitted?), let's devote a few words of praise to a much-maligned and underappreciated book. Reed's main subject? The anthropological origins, political and economic goals, and real-life tactics of the Ashkenazi and Zionist "Jews" from the Old Testament era to the mid-1950s. His basic thesis: that this "certain people's" bloodline runs not to the Holy Land of OT times but to the 10th century Khazar empire, and that they've merely applied the redoubtable Khazar warrior acumen to the 20th century's marketplace and political arena to get what they want. Very touchy subjects, these, some of which are currently rising Phoenix-like in the Jewish establishment as "new" controversies, i.e., the (Jewish-produced) documentary on their possible Khazar origins that PBS plans to cautiously float this year. Not to mention the century-old internecine struggle for internal control between the Eastern and Western Jews, the Zionists and assimilationists, the secular and religious "Jews" (those darn quotation marks again). I think we will find, after much bloody debate and maybe more palpable events inside and out of the Jewish people and their state, that Reed was eerily prophetic and mostly right about Zionist motives, Jewish identity, and the consequences on the world stage as the true nature of both is slowly revealed. Reed's writing style is much like (his contemporary) Waugh's: elegant, acidic, detached. But as a foreign correspondent for the London Sunday "Times" during WWII and its spawning of the "Jewish" state, he was anything but a detached observer of these tectonic events. The truly open-minded will at least read and attempt to refute Reed rather than smear him. Few books this provocative are as thoroughly-documented or as intelligent as "Controversy", and the powers-that-be know it. This book remains in print, but will become progressively harder to find as the ADL and the New York publishers continue to tighten the censorship screws. This is not a book for the tame or weak-minded. Is it for you?

A more comprehensive introduction to Douglas Reed can be found in Ivor Benson's preface to The Controversy of Zion � the book reviewed by Goldman immediately above � of which I happen to have a copy:

The Author: In Europe during the years immediately before and after World War II the name of Douglas Reed was on everyone's lips; his books were being sold by scores of thousand, and he was known with intimate familiarity throughout the English-speaking world by a vast army of readers and admirers. Former London Times correspondent in Central Europe, he had won great fame with books like Insanity Fair, Disgrace Abounding, Lest We Regret, Somewhere South of Suez, Far and Wide and several others, each amplifying a hundredfold the scope available to him as one of the world's leading foreign correspondents.

The disappearance into almost total oblivion of Douglas Reed and all his works was a change that could not have been wrought by time alone; indeed, the correctness of his interpretation of the unfolding history of the times found some confirmation in what happened to him at the height of his powers.

After 1951, with the publication of Far and Wide, in which he set the history of the United States of America into the context of all he had learned in Europe of the politics of the world, Reed found himself banished from the bookstands, all publishers' doors closed to him, and those books already published liable to be withdrawn from library shelves and "lost", never to be replaced.

What do I think of Douglas Reed? I haven't read him � I've only skimmed a tiny fraction of his work, looking for sections of particular interest to me. My impression from such skimming is that Reed's writing is crammed with suggestive material, some of it politically incorrect, much of it plausible, but that would need to be verified with more scholarly discipline before being fully credited. Although Reed's professional downfall being attributed to his deviation from political correctness is plausible, my skimming also led me to wonder whether his failure to be totally convincing might have been a contributing factor. The reason that I have not read Reed with the same attention that I have read, say, Israel Shahak or Norman Finkelstein, and the reason that I do not quote Reed as I do some of these others (this is my first time), is that my skimming has left the impression of poor judgment and inadequate documentation. However, that is my impression of Reed when I hold him up to high academic standards. If instead I merely compare him to respected and widely-publicized individuals who speak on similar topics � I am thinking particularly of Morley Safer, Neal Sher, Elie Wiesel, and Simon Wiesenthal � then Reed stands out as a pillar of responsibility, integrity, and sound judgment. When compared to these others, one has to say that Reed is by and large right and they are by and large wrong. My defense for citing Reed below is that in refuting those who are mostly wrong, it is sometimes necessary to cite those who are not always right.

What is Reed's relevance to the Ukrainian Archive? At one point he visited the mini state of Carpathian-Ukraine (more conventionally referred to today as Carpatho-Ukraine, and whose existence is narrowly bounded by the years 1938-1939) set up by Nazi Germany, and it is an excerpt from his account of this visit that is reproduced below. This account provides a readable summary of the nature of that mini state, but is of particular interest for the light it throws on Ukrainian-Jewish relations on Ukrainian ethnic territory. More specifically, Reed's description is useful in demolishing the currently-popular image of Jews as powerlessly cowering in the ghettos to which they have been confined as Ukrainians inflict upon them repeated pogroms, and is useful as well in demolishing the image that any Ukrainian hostility that may have existed toward Jews was gratuitous and pathological in origin, and not based on rational considerations. Whatever may prove to be the ultimate verdict concerning Douglas Reed's overall credibility, he does provide a rare, eyewitness account of a curious historical anomaly, and perhaps his one description below of Carpathian-Ukraine is largely accurate.

Of course it must be remembered that tiny, isolated, peripheral Carpathian-Ukraine is not representative of the bulk of Ukraine, or of other Ukrainian communities beyond the borders of Ukraine � but still it helps to shatter stereotypes, to introduce the idea that Ukrainian-Jewish relations were sometimes quite different from what they are portrayed as being in popular culture. Although Carpathian-Ukraine cannot be held up to be precisely representative of what was happening in greater Ukraine, still it may provide a closer model than do the Fiddler-On-The-Roof images which are as biased as they are repetitive.

Finally, in reading Reed's account below, one may be struck by the similarity between the Ukrainian position with respect to Jews in Carpathian-Ukraine in the early decades of this century and the Palestinian position with respect to Jews in the second half of this same century. That position is one of being exploited to the point of beggary. This observation, in turn, calls to mind the similar position of Ukrainians with respect to Jews at the time of the Khmelnytsky rebellion of 1648. The observation of this repeating pattern invites the question � posed previously on the Ukrainian Archive � of whether Jews hand down from generation to generation an ideology which repeatedly tends to place them in the same relation to the people among whom they find themselves, irrespective of geographical location and irrespective of the passage of centuries.

And now � at long last � we turn to Reed's account of his visit to Carpathian-Ukraine.

The next day I began to study Carpathian-Russia, alias Carpathian-Ukraine. When Czechoslovakia was dismembered, as I wrote earlier, the best thing for this easternmost province, if the welfare of its inhabitants alone were considered, would have been to divide it between Hungary and Poland, since otherwise the few marooned mountaineers who were left could hope for little better than starvation. But this did not happen. Italy did succeed in getting for her protégé, Hungary, the fertile plains to the south and the only two towns of any size, Ungvar and Munkacs, together with the railway. But Germany insisted that a narrow strip, consisting mainly of mountains and intervening valleys running, rib-like, north and south, should remain independent; and this became the home-ruled statelet of Carpathian-Russia. This is the official name for it, but actually the members of the two-man Government are both Ukrainians, and the little state is currently spoken of as Carpathian-Ukraine.

Why? Why were these few hundred thousand half-starved mountaineers cut off from their only chance of making even a meagre living � the Hungarian plain � and given an unwelcome independence?

In order that the name 'Ukraine' should be printed on the European map. Poland, which has between 4,500,000 and 7,000,000 Ukrainians, Russia, which has from 20,000,000 to 25,000,000 Ukrainians, both deny that there is a great Ukrainian nation pining to be liberated. But the champion of the principle of self-determination, Germany, has put the word 'Ukraine' on the map. The sight of this little self-governed Ukrainian state is supposed to fill the Ukrainians in Poland, Russia and Rumania with longing.

When Germany, after Munich, enforced the creation of Carpathian-Ukraine it did look very much as if the 'Great Ukraine' would be the object of the next German coup, and that was why I made that dreary journey, over the one remaining road, to Chust. Germany had already liberated the Ukraine once, during the [First] World War, and put a Hetman there, and the idea of the German-controlled Ukraine, with its great mineral and agricultural wealth, was a pet one of many German expansionists.

For the last twenty years Berlin has been the home of emigrant Ukrainian leaders. The present claimant to the Hetman's throne lives in Germany, and is said to keep his crown there; he is even a colonel in the German army. Immediately after Munich masses of propaganda about the 'Great Ukraine', printed in Berlin, London and New York, began to be distributed. I have even seen a map showing that in the seventeenth century a Great Ukrainian state did exist, comprising the territory, now in Polish, Russian and Rumanian possession, that the Ukrainian patriots of to-day claim for it. But, for that matter, in the seventeenth century nobody questioned the historic frontiers of Bohemia. These were mutilated for the first time in history by the Men of Munich; it would be strange if an indirect result of their work were to be the restoration of the original frontiers of Ukrainia as they existed in that same century.

So everything, after Munich, seemed to point to the Great Ukraine as the direction of Germany's next great coup. But when I went to Carpathian-Ukraine I became rather doubtful about this, or at any rate about the possibility of using Carpathian-Ukraine as a suitable basis for the erection of the Great Ukraine, or as a springboard for the great Ukrainian swoop.

For one thing, there is only the one road, at present, leading to Carpathian-Ukraine. It goes up hill and down dale for some hundreds of miles, and would need a deal of improvement before it could be used for major military operations. For another, the population of this remote statelet only amounts to about half a million people. The evidence of the eye would suggest that about half of these are Jews; actually a sixth is probably nearer the truth. The remainder comprise some of the most miserably poor and racially mixed people in Europe; most of them do not themselves know what they are, but they know that they have nothing to eat. Many of them speak two, three, four or five languages or dialects, and have been successively told in the last twenty-five years that they are Hungarians, Ruthenians, and, now, Ukrainians. The proportion of them who have any knowledge of what a Ukrainian is is very small. This is not very important; the only thing that is important for these people is that they should be lifted out of the misery in which they live, and if anything happens to achieve that, whether it be called the Great Ukraine or what not, it will be welcome.

Never have I seen such poverty as reigns in Carpathian-Ukraine, although I believe rather similar conditions existed in Ireland, before the war, before the Irish took their affairs into their own hands, in the days when the land was at the mercy of the absentee landlord. Here, in these remote Carpathian hills and valleys, the peasant has a house without a chimney, without flooring. He builds his fire on the stamped-earth floor and the smoke just rises and filters through the roof. Geese, pigs and goats, if he is lucky enough to have any, share the one room with him and his family. For food, he has insufficient quantities of maize bread, which is only just edible. If he has half an acre of land he may pull a rudely-fashioned plough across it himself, or turn it over with a spade.

Money he never sees. He thinks with regret of the great days when he could at harvest time at least go down into Hungary and work on the big estates and bring back, as his wage, a side of bacon for the winter. That was wealth to him.

These peasants, their wives and children, live like animals. Even that is an under-statement. In many districts they are animals. I can see hardly any difference between their life and that of an animal. In one district, round the villages of Svalava and Verezky, where there are a few small factories, inter-marriage and the drinking of methylated spirits has produced a stunted race of deformed and mentally inferior people. Their life is so hard and their wages so small that their only solace is drinking spirits, and as they cannot afford Schnapps, at 36 kronen a litre, they buy methylated spirits from unscrupulous dealers at 5 kronen a litre. It brings intoxication and forgetfulness of hunger in half an hour.

Carpathian-Ukraine is a good place to study the persecution of a non-Jewish community by the Jewish one. Here, for the first time, I saw the Eastern Jews in their native habitat. By the time they reach Budapest, Vienna, Berlin or Prague they are already Westernized. Here, as in Poland, you have the raw material of your Hollywood film producers and screen stars, your international bankers, your slick Jewish journalists � for here, in Carpathian-Ukraine, they are learning English too.

Here you have a peasant population that has been plundered and bled white in centuries of exploitation, that has passed from one tyranny to another, Czars, kings, nobles, the Church, Russia, Poland, Hungary, and is now completely in the thrall of the Jewish community, which according to statistics only comprises about 15 per cent of the whole, but which controls all the money-power, the trade, commerce and banking. It is a grip far more subtle but as vice-like as that of any dictators. There is no escape for the peasant.

In Carpathian-Ukraine you are far more acutely aware of the Jews than in other countries, because they wear the uniform of black hat, caftan, ringlets and beard. In every town and village you enter they thus thrust themselves on your gaze, and your first impression is that they must be numerically predominant, that there must be more Jews than non-Jews in the place. This is not the fact. The reason is that they own all the shops and house-property in the main square and in the centre of the town generally. The non-Jews live in the meaner streets and remoter quarters.

The way to test this is to go through one of these towns on Friday evening, when the Jewish Sabbath begins. Nearly all the shops in the place are closed; it is difficult for the non-Jewish population to buy anything on Friday evening or Saturday morning. The squeeze-out of the non-Jews is complete. Only large and financially powerful concerns, like Bata, can hope to compete with the Jewish traders, and perhaps a non-Jewish shopkeeper here and there who keeps going chiefly on what he earns on Friday evening and Saturday morning. The non-Jewish small trader, with little capital, almost invariably goes bankrupt before very long. The Jews quarrel a good deal, and violently, among themselves, but at the approach of a non-Jew they close their ranks with a solidarity impossible to find among any other people in the world, unless it be some remote race in Tibet.

The wholesale trade is almost exclusively in the hands of the Jews, and the downfall of the non-Jewish interloper is achieved by supplying his Jewish competitors with goods at prices which enable them to undersell him. If any Jew fails to fall into line the services of the rabbi are enlisted and heavy punishments may be enforced against him; he may be refused access to the ritual bath, or the Jewish slaughterer may be ordered not to kill his chickens for him.

The peasant is entirely in the hands of the Jews. If he has any money and wishes to buy anything, he must buy it from a Jew. If he has no money, and needs to borrow some for his taxes or his mortgage, he must borrow it from a Jew. If he has something to sell, he can only sell it to the Jewish dealers. If he wishes to hire a plough, he must hire it, at a high rate, from a Jew. Most sinister of all, if he wants to drink � and spirits form his only solace � he must go to a Jew for it, for the great majority of the alcohol licences are in the hands of Jews. If he goes to law, he puts money into the pocket of the Jewish lawyer � for in Carpathian-Ukraine only 19 of the 160 lawyers are non-Jews. To litigate against a Jew, in these conditions, is for him an almost hopeless proceeding.

It is an iron ring, from which there is no escape. It is often said that there are many poor Jews in this region. The non-Jews are all poor. There are many Jews who look poor, very few who are poor in the sense that the peasant is poor.

All in all, I came to feel dubious, after looking at Carpathian-Ukraine, about the imminence of the Great Ukrainian coup, under German leadership. Carpathian-Ukraine did not seem to me a good basis either for major military or for major political operations.

Only a few score people, in the little Government and administration, feel Ukrainian and pine for the Great Ukrainian state. The real Ukrainians, the potential Ukrainian nation, live under Polish and Russian rule, and how are you to get at them, without war? After Munich, Poland and Russia seemed to be moving together, against this threat, but after that again came Franco's progress in Spain, and suddenly you found Colonel Beck, the Polish Foreign Minister, at Berchtesgaden, and Herr von Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Minister, in Warsaw, and it looked to me very much as if Germany found the prospects in the West and in the Mediterranean improving so much that she was turning her eyes in that direction and shelving the Ukrainian project for the present, as if she were telling Poland, 'Now, just behave well if anything explodes in Western Europe and nothing will happen to you'.

The only signs of the Great Ukrainian movement that I could find in Chust were the German-backed Government, headed by a cleric, Mgr. Voloshin, and his one Minister, M. Revay, who both count as Ukrainians, and the Ukrainian Storm Troops, the Karpatska Sitch, of whom I saw a few here and there in their grey-green uniforms. A German officer or two had passed that way, a German geologist or two, a German road-surveyor or two. But on the whole, the signs were that Germany was not signalling full-steam-ahead in the Ukraine, for the present.

The Great Ukrainian iron is a good one to have in the fire, and with the creation of this little state the iron is there, ready for use one day. But I fancy the fire will need a good deal of stoking, the iron a good deal of heating. In any case, one Great Power, Russia, and one almost Great Power, Poland, are involved, and I cannot see how Germany can for the present get over that.

For the moment, Hungary and Rumania seem to offer less certain prospects of resistance to German expansionism, I thought, after looking at Carpathian-Ukraine. So I burned the remains of my Christmas tree in the little iron stove, packed my bags, and boarded the ancient bus again. (Douglas Reed, Disgrace Abounding, Jonathan Cape, London, 1939.)

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