Fascists’ New Turn: From Bush ’88 Campaign to EU Elections
The European Union parliamentary elections of last June produced a slew of significant victories for far-right parties across the EU conglomerate. Notable breakthroughs were seen in parliament representation for racist demagogues and neo-fascist political groups in some Central/Eastern European nations, including Hungary, Romania and Slovakia.
In the United Kingdom, the neo-fascist, Holocaust-denying, racist
British National Party (BNP) breached the vote level where they earned their first seat in the Brussels/Strasbourg EU parliament. Controversy, anger and protest transpired in October when the BBC gave BNP leader and newly minted European Union representative for Britain, Nick Griffin, nationwide television airtime to speechify for the BNP on the show Question Time.
Since the 1989 end of communism in Slovakia, local admirers of the old Axis “Slovak Republic,” a German puppet-state that killed over 75,000 Jews in the Holocaust, have been internationally bolstered by a Slovak emigre network. This network originated from fascist, post-war exiles from the former Czechoslovakia, including fugitive Nazi war criminals and their supporters, and is based largely in Canada.
And (consequently, in part) anti-Semitic incidents have grown in number, including violence and vandalism against Jews and Jewish religious sites, and there have been violent attacks upon Slovakia’s Roma minority (Gypsies). Outside observers and Jewish organizations within Slovakia have directly attributed the emergence and rise of such acts and bigotry to the work of Slovak exile groups, whose revisionist historians and cultural propagandists swooped down upon Czechoslovakia in the post-1990 period, following a grant of general amnesty to the indicted Nazi war crminals and Nazi collaborators who had led these groups. Their rehabilitation and glorification of the Tiso regime and Axis Slovakia period, done at times from the platform of universities and state cultural institutions, has served to foster and encourage the growth of neo-nazism and current-day attacks against Jews and Roma people.
One alarming, institutional aspect of this sociopolitical tendency is the reemergence in Slovakia of the first documented forced, racial sterilizations of women in Europe since the Nazis made it common practice in the German-occupied countries of World War II (against handicapped, Gypsy and Jewish women and girls).
Although banned by law in Slovakia, it appears to be going on anyway, barely concealed. See this video documentary, for example: “Forced Sterilisation-Slovakia” :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SipcRkfnxtY
In 2003, the United States Congressional body investigated the matter, and published their findings in Coerced sterilization of Romani women in Slovakia: a report /, authored by the staff of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe. The commission was chaired by Representatives Benjamin Cardin and Alcee Hastings. The report concluded by noting that although the Slovak government had promised to set up a special investigating group on coerced sterilizations, the “threat [of criminal charges brought against people reporting "false information" on sterilizations"] has led some to suggest that the Slovak Government is more interested in silencing its critics than investigating their claims.” As of 2010, it appears that this terrible practice continues on in Slovakia.
The full report can be found online, here:
http://csce.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=UserGroups.Home&ContentRecord_id=312&
ContentType=G&ContentRecordType=G&
UserGroup_id=84&Subaction=ByDate&
CFID=95720&CFTOKEN=1
In tandem with the return of the Nazi-replicating, biomedical crime of mass, involuntary sterilization of women, there have been more visible acts of racial and anti-Semitic hatred and violence. In echoes of Slovakia’s Nazi-shadowed past, they include vandalism, beatings and murder. There should be a great outcry from human rights groups in the rest of the world, especially given Slovakia’s status as an EU and NATO member nation.
But that, surprisingly, has yet to occur. And in attributing blame for these trends and occurences one should look outside this small country’s borders to the institutions and persons of the West whose academic and sociopolitical power have spearheaded the damage; I shall focus here on one person in particular, Canada’s Dr. Stanislav Jozef Kirschbaum, and do so mainly because not only is he pushing a “scholarly” procession of books, articles and lectures that serve to rehabilitate the Nazi puppet regime and legacy of Slovakia’s World War II dictator Jozef Tiso, but his work to this end is conducted under the auspices of such prestigious and distinguished establishment bodies as York University, St. Martin’s Press, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Professor Stanislav Kirschbaum, an author and media commentator who has had close to 200 radio and television appearances, and is listed in Who’s Who in Canada, is creating a distorted, Axis-apologetic modern history and historical viewpoint for Slovakia that threatens to become the standard, mainstream and most influential version of Slovak history, in the absence of other English language general histories of this Slovakia, the lesser known and less developed portion of the former Czechoslovakia (split into Czech republic/Slovakia republic again in 1993). This landlocked, mountainous country of five million (with a 10% Roma population) rremains relatively obscure, yet for a West alignment against Russia, geopolitically quite strategic.
Stanislav Kirschbaum’s books also contain some glaring, basic factual errors. For example, in the entry “Jews” of his book Historical Dictionary of Slovakia, author Kirschbaum describes Bratislava, the Slovakian capital city, as the home of Rabbi Nachman, the legendary Jewish leader and founder of the Breslov Chasidic Dynasty. In fact, Rabbi Nachman was based in the town of Breslov, in the Ukraine, and was widely known as “Rabbi Nachman of Breslov.” Apparently Kirschbaum has confused Slovakia’s Bratislava with “Bratslav,” another name for Ukrainian Breslov. This mistake occurs in both the orginal 1999 and the 2007 second edition of Historical Dictionary of Slovakia.
The case of Slovakia also provides a revealing link to the behind-the-scenes role played by the post-1989 manipulations of Central-Eastern European politics and culture by North American
interests (including Canada as well as the United States), and their ties to the 1988 U.S. presidential election scandal in which it was revealed that the campaign staff of then-Vice President George Bush included a number of top advisors who had been Nazi collaborators and war criminals, and some still linked to current-day, anti-Semitic and fascist organizations.
Included in this GOP “Heritage Groups Council” were an electoral section for “ethnic outreach” were such figures as Florian Galdau, a retired priest and top member of Axis Romania’s pro-Hitler “Iron Guard”; Laszlo Pasztor, an embassy official in Berlin for the Nazi-
installed “Arrow Cross” regime of Axis Hungary, and Bulgarian Radi Slavoff, the executive director of the Heritage Groups Council and the Washington representative of the Bulgarian National Front, a fascist group that included neo-nazis in its ranks.
Following media exposure in September 1988, George Bush (senior) fired some of those named in the press, and went on to win the November election. However, as author Russ Bellant noted in a Nov. 19, 1988 New York Times, op-ed piece, four of those seven member discharged still maintained leadership positions within the Heritage Groups Council (including those named above), and many Nazi sympathizers and former figures in the collaborationist, Holocaust-perpetrating regimes of Eastern Europe continued to fill the council’s ethnic outreach positions.
Those ominous figures lingering on in the GOP’s council included
far-right Slovakians. They were U.S. resident members of the Slovak World Congress. Of them, Bellant observed: “The Slovak section of the council is run by sympathizers and at least one former official of the Slovak Nazi state created by Hitler in 1938. [This "Slovak Republic" entity was carved out of Czechoslovakia following the infamous Munich Agreement, "autonomous" under German pressure in late 1938, and nominally "independent" from Wehrmacht-invaded Czechoslovakia, as a Nazi satellite state from March 1939 through to its Allied-liberation in 1945].
“Although the Slovak state declared war on America one day after Hitler did, and deported many Slovak Jews to gas chambers, the leaders of the Heritage Council Slovak section still hold annual memorials of the 1938 founding of the puppet regime of Slovakia.”
The same Slovak World Congress that notoriously swelled the ranks of America’s Republican National Committee’s ethnic programs and and Bush campaign staff has also provided for the professional life and scandalously authoritative influence of Stanislav Kirschbaum, in Slovakia today, with the sadly predictable results of bolstering the far-right forces of both countries.
The Slovak World Congress has folded, but its power and influence extends to this day by the work of its offshoot groups and publications. Dr. Stanislav Kirschbaum, currently a professor of international studies at York University (Glendon College), in Toronto, contributed to Slovak World Congress publications and activities in the 1970s and 1980s. Since 2004, Kirschbaum has taught at the University of Trnava in Trnava, Slovakia during off-schedule periods at York University, and in 2008 he was awarded the “University of Trnava Medal” for his academic work. At present, there is scant literature that is solely devoted to Slovakian history and society available in libraries or bookstores, and little media attention to the small country. This situation gives Kirschbaum and his pro-Tiso, Nazi sympathizing cohorts the opportunity to fill a vacuum.
And, as the saying goes, words have consequences. Directly, or indirectly. One newly elected, far-right EU representative from Slovakia has run and won on a racist platform scapegoating the Roma minority. His party, the ultra-nationalist “Slovak National Party” won with 5.39% of the vote and espouses anti-Gypsy, anti-Hungarian and anti-Jewish propaganda in its campaigning, and is a junior coalition partner of the party of the current Slovakian prime minister, Robert Fico. The historical whitewashers and glorifiers of Slovakia’s Nazi-era regime prepare a fertile cultural ground for such outcomes.
The case of Jozef Mikus provides an example of how one of Kirschbaum’s Slovak World Congress affiliates has literally helped define the U.S. political landscape through deciding election outcomes, via his involvement in electoral power politics. Mikus had, according to columnist Jack Anderson, served as an advisor to a number of prominent Republican Party officials and elected figures (Jack Anderson,“Doleful Dole,” Washington Post, May 18, 1978, p. A25; Jack Anderson and Les Whitten, “Nazi Eulogy,” Washington Post, May 4, 1976, p.B15). As noted in a piece by Russ Bellant in the newsletter Press for Conversion!, Mikus, while in this capacity, would hold forth “that a German victory would have been preferable to an Allied one during WWII. Mikus was an unrepentant supporter of Monsignor Josef Tiso, the Catholic priest and leader of the Slovakian Hlinka Guard during WWII [also the Hitler-installed, nominal leader of Slovakia as a whole]. Lucy Dawidowicz, in her book The War Against the Jews, estimated that the Hlinka Guard participated in the murder of 75,000 Slovak Jews.” [[i]Press for Conversion![/i] Issue # 54 August 2004]
And still there is another level to this story, at which point the bottom drops out and we, in still greater surprise, meet the abyss. Professor Stanislav Jozef Kirschbaum is the son of a wanted Nazi war criminal, Jozef Marian Kirschbaum (1913-2001). This Jozef M. Kirschbaum had been a top official of Axis Slovakia’s Tiso regime 1939-45, and leader in the violent persecution of Slovakia’s Jewish population and the production of anti-Semitic propaganda. Jozef Kirschbaum managed to elude capture and extradition to stand trial in post-war Czechoslovakia, eventually moving to Canada in 1949, where he resided until his death in August of 2001. He had been listed as a wanted war criminal with Allied authorities since 1946, when Czechslovakia registered his name as such at the U.S. Army base in Wiesbaden, West Germany, near the city of Frankfurt am Main.
Of course, this in itself is not something that should be held against Professor Stanislav Kirschbaum; after all, one cannot choose one’s parents or family history. Stanislav was born in Bratislava in 1942, and he was still a toddler when the Nazi terror upon Europe came to an end in May of 1945.
But unfortunately, from the 1960s to the present, Prof. Stanislav Kirschbaum’s own published ouevre of articles and books have consistently promoted and echoed the historical stance of his father Jozef Kirschbaum, and Kirschbaum’s post-war network of fascist Slovak exile organizations. That is to say, the line (rooted in fascist ideology and falsified history) that the Nazi satellite state of Tiso’s Slovakia was a commendable and just entity. These works have also served, by various omissions and misleading characterizations, to distort and whitewash the history of fascist anti-Semitism and the genocide of Jews in Slovakia during the Holocaust, and immediate post-war period (over 70,000 men, women and children murdered; most sent to their extermination in Auschwitz by the end of 1944) And in which Jozef Kirschbaum himself played a major role, by instigating and enforcing brutal anti-Jewish violence and legal dictates.
These actions of Jozef Kirschbaum in the 1938-1940 period constituted landmark events in the history of the Holocaust. At this time Kirschbaum held the posts of Secretary-General (leader) of the Slovakian fascist party (the “Hlinka People’s Party”), and also served as a top propagandist, advisor, and chief administrator for dictator Jozef Tiso; and additionally served as a top commander of the Hlinka Guard, and head of the regime’s “Jewish Office” responsible for drafting anti-Jewish laws and assets confiscations.
In effect, then, Stanislav Kirschbaum is continuing his father’s work into the 21st century by erasing memory of its Axis period mass horrors (in part configured by Jozef Kirschbaum, his father and mentor), and hijacking history in the process. From the 1990s to the present, it has been scandalously the case that major publishers serve as his revisionist vessels, including St. Martin’s Press and Scarecrow Press (of Lanham, Maryland and London, publisher of the “Historical Dictionary of…” series used as standard reference works). Before this period, Stanislav Kirschbaum had done so in the media of books and articles published and distributed by Slovak World Congress-organ presses and affiliated small houses, e.g. “Slavica Publishers” of Columbus, Ohio, the self-referential “Slovak World Congress” publishing house based in Toronto, and the “Slovak Insititute” of Cleveland, Ohio. These were Stanislav Kirschbaum’s respective publishers for East European History (Kirschbaum, ed., 1988), Reflections on Slovak History (Kirschbaum and Anne C. Roman, eds., 1987) Slovak Politics: Essays on Slovak History in Honour of Joseph M. Kirschbaum (Kirschbaum, ed., 1983) This latter book is a “festschrift” celebration of Stanislav Kirschbaum’s father, still alive and well at age 70 at the book’s publication date, and still wanted in Czechoslovakia to stand trial for his 20-year prison sentence for Nazi collaborationist war/holocaust crimes. Stanislav Kirschbaum was assisted in the copy-editing and proofreading of this book by his then-wife, Dr. Agnes Whitfield, currently a professor of translation at York University. Prior to her work on this with the Slovak World Congress, Prof. Whitfield had served for four years as a professional French-English translator with the Canadian Secretary of State translation bureau (1976-1980). At the time of the release of em>Slovak Politics: Essays on Slovak History in Honour of Joseph M. Kirschbaum, in 1983, Jozef M. Kirschbaum was the highest-ranking Axis Tiso regime official left alive and unapprehended.
Within some five year’s time, Kirschbaum’s Nazi fugitive status and continuing pro-Axis propaganda works would become a major international scandal for the nation of Canada, with many asking how Kirschbaum had managed to elude justice for so long and with such an evidently large-scale and well-funded base of support. The outcry was led in part by Dr. Rudolf Vrba, a Slovakian Jew who, in a famous incident, managed to escape Auschwitz in 1944 and smuggle a detailed report of the camp’s atrocities and extermination mechanics, including diagrams of crematoria, to the outside world. In 1984, Rudolf Vrba, who had emigrated to Canada in the 1950s and become a professor of pharmacology at Vancouver Univeristy, watched on his TV screen the visit of Pope John Paul II to Canada, the first by any pope to Canada, and was amazed to recognize as the pope’s escort in Toronto none other than Jozef Marian Kirschbaum, the man who had drafted and enforced Slovakia’s first anti-Jewish laws for the Nazis, rallied Slovaks to murderous violence against Vrba and the rest of Slovakian Jewry, and set in motion the wheels of legalized persecution that would eventually send Vrba to Auschwitz. Quoted in the Jerusalem Post of November 25, 1988, Vrba said:
”Before the Jews could be deported from Slovakia and murdered, it had to be first established who is a Jew. Only some were visibly obvious, what with their beards and kaftans. Others – especially atheists, or those who had changed their religion, or had lived in mixed marriages – were less visible…
“The law defining who was a Jew was drafted for Slovakia by Dr. Kirschbaum. This law was praised – by his own newspaper – as being much more strict than the Nuremberg race laws of Nazi Germany . By-laws were introduced to accompany this basic law, again written by Dr. Kirschbaum.
”The Jews were to be removed from the civil service, their factories and businesses were to be confiscated,” Dr. Vrba continues. ”Jewish doctors were forbidden to treat non-Jewish patients. Jews were barred from the political, economic, cultural and social life of the country. They were forced to declare all their assets. They were forced to surrender cars and radios, musical instruments and skiing equipment. Their identity cards were marked with a ‘J’.
”From the age of seven, they were forced to wear a six-centimetre yellow Star of David. They were only allowed to live in certain streets; they were not allowed to leave their homes after 8 p.m.; marriage with a non-Jew was a crime, and so was sex with non-Jews”….
The police could not handle the job, says Dr. Vrba, but Kirschbaum had a special unit formed from the Hlinka Guards. But the project almost backfired. The Hlinka Guards thugs, equipped with revolvers and truncheons, managed only to create chaos. ”The deportation of 60,000 people,” says Dr.Vrba with bitter irony, ”requires a lot of law and order.”
Kirschbaum solved the problem. The Hlinka Guards were given a special officer corps, the so-called Academic (University) Hlinka Guards. Their founder and comander: Dr. Joseph Kirschbaum.
Comments Dr. Vrba: ”But if you ask Dr. Kirschbaum today what he’d been doing then, he’ll tell you he was academically active.”
(Jerusalem Post, November 25, 1988 “Past Returns to Haunt Slovak Fascist” by Peter Adler)
A pro-Axis bias is startlingly apparent in the two most recent history books of Jozef Kirschbaum’s son Dr. Stanislav Kirschbaum, both published by mainstream houses: A History of Slovakia: the Struggle for Survival (1995, latest edition: 2005) and Historical Dictionary of Slovakia (1997, latest edition: 2007).
In both texts, Stanislav Kirschbaum describes the Nazi satellite Slovakia under Tiso as a truly independent nation, waters down the nature and extent of fascist Slovakia’s atrocities against Jews and dissidents, and depicts in negative, even mocking terms the Slovak leaders and participants of the 1944 armed Slovak rebellion against Hitler and the puppet-Tiso regime.
Of course, to create such a distorted picture of fascist-era Slovakia and Czechoslovakia an author would have to bend facts, employ selective and misleading language, and use questionable sources, and even a quick leaf-through of these books reveals to any discerning reader that Stanislav Kirschbaum has in fact done all of the above. The official duties and posts of his father Jozef Kirschbaum in the 1938-45 period are simply altered from the historical reality or deleted from mention, as it suits his son in shaping an neutral or even positive image of Jozef Kirschbaum in the reader’s mind.
And in so doing attempting to tilt the culture and education of Slovakia, now an independent state for the first time in its history, in rightward and even neo-fascist directions suitable to the most anti-Russia elements in Slovakia’s recently acquired (in the 1990s) superiors in NATO (for whom Stanislav Kirschbaum has worked as an strategic advisor and editor) and the European Union.
Post-war protection for Kirschbaum was (scandalously) provided by British and French intelligence, when Kirschbaum was employed to participate in a British-led covert operation within Czecholoslvakia. The deal they apparently made is reminiscent of the immunity that the US Army Counter Intelligence Corps and CIA notoriously provided for Klaus Barbie, the fugitive SS officer “Butcher of Lyon,” who lived comfortably in Argentina and Bolivia for decades in exchange for becoming a U.S. agent and providing information and expertise garnered from his work in the gestapo and Sicherheitsdienst (SD) Nazi intelligence agency during the war.
Jozef Kirschbaum’s documented atrocities include his enforcing the first attempted external deportation of Jews (to Hungary) in Europe (in which two Jewish children froze to death), and organizing the first, Nazi-inspired pogrom in central Europe (which pre-dated Krystalnacht, Nov. 9, 1938, by a week), led by Kirschbaum’s SS-mimicking “Academic Hlinka Guard” black-uniformed brigades.
Kirschbaum was also responsible for overseeing the confiscation of Jewish businesses and property, and meeting with Adolf Eichmann to arrange early anti-Jewish laws for Slovakia. Jozef Kirschbaum fled to Canada in 1949, following the failure of the aforementioned neo-fascist coup attempt in Czechoslovakia (occurring in 1947), in which he had been employed by British and French intelligence to help crush leftist forces in Prague. Kirschbaum’s longtime mentor and cohort Ferdinand Durcansky, an ex-cabinet member of the Tiso regime, had with Kirschbaum helped direct the far-right, anti-Semitic underground in this abortive putsch from exile bases in Paris, Madrid and Rome, along with other remnant Slovakian fascists, including some Russian ex-Nazi SS and Ukrainian ex-Nazi SS members still residing within Czechoslovakia.
In 1970, the still-fugitive and unrepentant Jozef Kirschbaum and Ferdinand Durcansky co-founded the aforementioned “Slovak World Congress” an international organization of far-right, nationalist Slovak exiles, former Tiso henchmen and their fascist sympathizers. The Slovak World Congress was largely funded with money from Stephen B. Roman, a Slovak-Canadian uranium tycoon. Roman had amassed a fortune from his uranium mining and processing company, Denison Mines, valued at over two billion dollars in corporate assets at the time of Roman’s death in 1988. Roman had become a close friend and patron of Jozef Kirschbaum following Kirschbaum’s flight from Switzerland to Canada in 1949, in the wake of the Durcansky- Kirschbaum foiled coup attempt of 1947. Over the next four decades, Roman and Kirschbaum would take Caribbean vacations together and share office floor space in a Toronto skyscraper, where Kirschbaum worked in a low-profile job as an insurance executive.
(TO BE CONTINUED)
Tags: Anti-Roma, Anti-Semitism, Auschwitz, Canada, CSIS, Czech Republic, eugenics, fascism, George Bush, GOP, Hlinka Guard, Holocaust, Jozef Kirschbaum, NATO, Neo-Nazi, Slovakia, Stephen Roman, sterilization, Toronto, uranium, York University
