IBTG
IBTS
Ethnic Cleansing & Genocide is always supported by an underlying justification no matter the source...
“God Wills It”
Like Croats with the Ustasha in Croatia, many Ukrainians view Bandera's group with rose-colored glasses, believing the claims of Jewish and Polish persecution to be Soviet lies. Not surprising after decades of Soviet oppression.
The Ukrainian fury against the Jews was driven by two factors. First, for centuries, Ukrainians were serfs working for Polish landlords. These landlords preferred to live in cities far away from their Ukrainian landholdings. They would lease their estates to Jewish syndicates for a fixed rent. The syndicates were then free to extort as much as they could in addition from the peasantry as long as the rent was paid. It didn't take a lot of this to go around before the Jews in general were hated as much as the Poles by the Ukrainians. Second and probably more important was the Soviet invasion of Eastern Poland. In many places, the Jews welcomed the Soviets as an alternative to the German occupation. Needless to say, this wouldn't have endeared them to their gentile neighbors, either Poles or Ukrainians.
For example, as the Polish state collapsed before the German and Russian onslaught in 1939, I have not read of any Polish pogroms against Jews. Jews were noted in the Polish press for having gone "above and beyond" to help Polish defenses, especially around Warsaw. But as the Germans moved East in 1941, in the interregnum between Soviet and Nazi occupation, the locals in several Polish villages in the East and in Lwow vented their fury on the local Jewish population. Similar events (even more brutal) took place in Lithuania and Latvia as well.
It's a complicated history where Poles have oppressed Ukrainians, Ukrainians Poles, the Russians everyone else, and the Jews by everyone else. And at the moment the only group continuing to wage a war of Nazi-like rape, murder and looting are the Russians.
I love how the author fails to state that Bandera himself was under arrest by the Nazis at the time because he refused to cooperate with them. The idea that Bandera was leading a pogrom against non-Ukrainians is a myth invented by the Soviets. Some here, however, find that it is still useful.
The author backhandedly puts out as his first line that Israel committed genocide, and then goes on to talk of what other people did in the past without mentioning the Mideast or Israel again. In point of fact, Israel did NOT commit genocide, not by a long shot. Israel was (is?) fighting a war, and in all wars innocents die - and under international law, blame for that is assigned to the country that started the war. Unless, that is, the victim country engages in war crimes, which Israel did not. In fact, Israel went out of its way, and lost more of its own soldiers, because it was trying to AVOID civilian casualties.
But why should Armstrong bother to mention those facts? Instead, he leaves the genocide charge just hanging there, the PIS.