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Dear William [Zuzak],

Thanks for sending me your "Critique" [of "The Holocaust and the Historians", by Lucy Dawidowicz] and inviting me to express my comments on it. It is flattering to know that you are interested in my opinions; therefore, I decided to express them to the best of my ability. Hopefully, you might find them valid enough to discuss them with your colleagues. Of course, you will have to excuse my poor grammar and all the spelling and typing errors. I learned my English strictly on my own; for that reason, it has its own peculiarities.

I read the "Critique" with great interest and found the arguments expressed in it to be sober, honest and well founded. Unfortunately, this kind of approach is ineffective, just like using a mosquito net for protection against a baseball bat attack The book in question was published under the prestigious label of Harvard University. The Jews will see to it, that it is widely distributed to academic and public libraries, as "unbiased scientific information", which will help to shape opinions of an untold number of people across this continent and beyond. What do we offer in defense? A six page article, that hardly anybody will ever read.

The only way to make any headway against this preposterous racial hatred, vigorously promoted by the Jews against Ukrainians and Baltic people, is to publish equally prestigious, well written and well documented books, and to see to it, that they are just as widely distributed. As a first step in that direction, it would be expedient to get an article [published] in a well read paper, like the Globe and Mail, sharply accusing Jews of Promoting Racial Hatred [and] pointing out that they use exactly the same tactics against us, as Zundel, Keegstra and the like use against the Jews. If it is wrong for Zundel to do so, then it must be just as wrong for them. Besides, their actions undoubtedly will lead to reaction, eventually resulting in more antisemitism, more Zundels and Keegstras. We have to put them on the defensive. If individuals like Zundel could do it single-handed , why can't we do it as a community, with hundreds of thousands of voters behind us. The Ukrainian community, divided as it may be, is unprecidentedly united on this issue and any political party not realizing this fact, might experience a very rude awakening after the next election.

It is not enough to attempt putting up anemic defenses against each consecutive Jewish attack. We have to mount a vigorous and as vicious as possible counterattack. In order to achieve this goal, we do not have to resort to extreme tactics, such as denying that the holocaust ever happened, of trying to justify the draconian methods of Hitler. We should instead go to the Jewish sources, to their school books in Israel, to Israeli press, or to things like the recent letter from the deputy speaker of the Israeli Kneset , to prove that they are a source of racial hatred.

Jewish contempt of the Slavs, in general, and Ukrainians, in particular, has very deep historical roots. Abba Eban, in his luxuriously published 1984 book: "Heritage, Civilization and the Jews", mentions in passing that the English word slave is derived from Slav. The Slavic captives were sold by the Jews to the British, so that eventually the words Slav and slave acquired identical meaning. He covers his slight embarrassment with a fig leaf of explanation, that it occurred before the Slavs became Christians.

The only Jews, who could have access to Slavic captives in the IX and X centuries, were the Khazars, who according to another Jewish author, Arthur Koestler, (The Thirteenth Tribe), were the ancestors of the Ashkenazi Jews, who, by the way, have nothing in common with the Semitic race, or the biblical (Sephardim) Jews, except their religion. After the collapse of their empire in the XI century, they migrated West. Eventually, according to Mr. Eban, they "were invited by the Polish gentry to colonize Ukraine" after the Polish-Lithuanian union in 1569. From then on began a stormy history of Jewish-Ukrainian relations, full of mutual contempt and violence. Mr. Eban assures us that the Jews were always loyal and respectful of the authorities, which, in plain language, means that they were serving the strong to subjugate the weak, collecting considerable profits in the process. He describes in detail the horrors, to which the Jewish population was subjugated during the Khmelnytsky uprising, without mentioning a word about the brutal treatment of the Ukrainian serfs by the Jews, which preceded this explosion of wrath.

Mr. Eban, as almost every other Jewish author, complains bitterly about the restrictions and deprivations imposed on the Jews by tsarist Russia. He states, also, that in the middle of the last century, three quarters of the total Jewish population in the world resided in the Russian empire. If it really was so bad, how come this unprecedented Jewish population explosion occurred in this "Pale of settlement"? The reason for it was, that, in reality, they did enjoy comparatively the best economic, social and political environment there, than anywhere else in the world. The great majority of the native population of the region: Ukrainians, Bielorussians, Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians were serfs of the Russian and Polish landlords. They were bought and sold like cattle until 1861. The Jews, in comparison, were never subjected to serfdom. They lived in compact communities, controlled totally trade and light industry, and most of the professions. They enjoyed freedom of religion and were allowed to use Yiddish in their schools and in print. The serfs, on the other hand, had no rights of any kind, had no access to education, and their languages were outlawed. Consequently, they fell easy prey to Jewish speculators and manipulators. The Jews referred to them with the Yiddish word "goy", which is equivalent to the German word "untermensch", and treated them with a matching contempt. This attitude prevails among them up to the present, and this is one of the reasons why they direct their venom against the people from that region now.

The other reason is that the Soviet Union has considerable difficulty in suppressing the nationalistic aspirations in the same region, from which come most of the political prisoners and where the security forces conduct a similar hunt for war criminals. This is no coincidence. It is obvious, that by cooperating with Moscow in an effort to discredit our aspirations, they hope to obtain a more favorable treatment of Jewish interests in return.

Those are some of my thoughts on the subject. Unfortunately, my generation did not succeed in gaining adequate influence to combat effectively this plague. In your generation, there is a fair number of men and women with brains and education, grown up in a democratic environment, free of persecution and an adverse �[not legible].

It is your turn to stand up and tell the true story, loud and clear, for everyone to hear, because, if you neglect to do so, the slime of this Jewish slander will stick to you also. In a way, it is easier for us to do so, because we do not have to twist historical facts to prove our point, as they do. The truth is on our side!

Respectfully

Ivan Shumuk -- Jan. 25, 1987

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c:\zmail\shumuk\shumuk19870126.doc
- typed out by Will Zuzak with minor editing 1998-01-04
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