Tag: russia

Jedwabne: Genocide Often Occurs By Popular Action

We tend to think of violent genocide as occurring at the hands of jackbooted thugs from one extremist political movement or another. The reality is often more prosaic: goaded by the pains of diversity, locals take it upon themselves to remove the Other, as happened in the formerly Russian-occupied Polish village of Jedwabne:

After being controlled by Russia for two years, Jedwabne, a small town in northeastern Poland, was captured by Germany on June 22, 1941. One of the first questions the Poles asked the Nazis, their new rulers, was if it was permitted to kill the Jews.

According to Jan Gross’s book, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, the Nazis tried to persuade the Poles to keep at least one Jewish family from each profession, but the Poles responded, “We have enough of our own craftsmen, we have to destroy all the Jews, none should stay alive.”

Gross writes that Jedwabne’s mayor agreed to help facilitate a massacre and that Poles from local villages came in to watch and celebrate the event as a holiday. About half the men of Jedwabne’s 1,600 Catholic community participated in torturing Jedwabne’s 1,600 member Jewish community, corralling them into a barn, which was then set ablaze.

In future times, people may see genocide and democide as the complex monsters that they are: driven not so much by political reality but by day-to-day frustrations and the tendency of different groups to behave in different ways, causing resentment. In many Russian-occupied areas, the natives identified Jews with the Communist party, in part because so many Jews were Communists:

While in 1934 38.5% of the top officials in the NKVD were Jews, this number was decreased to 31.9% in July 1937, 3.9% in September 1938 and 3.5% in January 1940.

This may simply reflect cultural differences: for most of the world, Communism is a tempting ideology, although traditional European cultures have resisted it, and so members of foreign groups would be more prone to join those parties. In addition, as minority groups, they cannot identify with the majority and so are drawn to anti-majoritarian politics such as socialism and its parent, egalitarianism.

Northern European Genetic Biodiversity Revealed

Human biodiversity includes the study of populations through their differences with an eye for their overlapping similarities. While a new study about the ethnic origins of Northern Europeans does not exactly shock the existing model, it does give us further insight into how these populations formed and why they are different today.

The study tracked the migrations into Scandinavia and the Baltics that formed modern European populations:

Previous analysis of ancient human genomes has revealed that two genetically differentiated groups of hunter-gatherers lived in Europe during the Mesolithic: the so-called Western Hunter-Gatherers excavated in locations from Iberia to Hungary, and the so-called Eastern Hunter-Gatherers excavated in Karelia in north-western Russia. Surprisingly, the results of the current study show that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers from Lithuania appear very similar to their Western neighbors, despite their geographic proximity to Russia. The ancestry of contemporary Scandinavian hunter-gatherers, on the other hand, was comprised from both Western and Eastern Hunter-Gatherers.

“Eastern Hunter-Gatherers were not present on the eastern Baltic coast, but a genetic component from them is present in Scandinavia. This suggests that the people carrying this genetic component took a northern route through Fennoscandia into the southern part of the Scandinavian peninsula. There they genetically mixed with Western Hunter-Gatherers who came from the South, and together they formed the Scandinavian Hunter-Gatherers,” explains Johannes Krause, Director of the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, and senior author of the study.

…The earliest farmers in Sweden are not descended from Mesolithic Scandinavians, but show a genetic profile similar to that of Central European agriculturalists. Thus it appears that Central Europeans migrated to Scandinavia and brought farming technology with them. These early Scandinavian farmers, like the Central European agriculturalists, inherited a substantial portion of their genes from Anatolian farmers, who first spread into Europe around 8,200 years ago and set in motion the cultural transition to agriculture known as the Neolithic Revolution.

Similarly, a near-total genetic turnover is seen in the Eastern Baltic with the advent of large-scale agro-pastoralism. While they did not mix genetically with Central European or Scandinavian farmers, beginning around 2,900 BCE the individuals in the Eastern Baltic derive large parts of their ancestry from nomadic pastoralists of the Pontic-Caspian steppe.

Much as in Germany, Swedish populations are divided between Nordic northern groups and darker, more Central European styled southern groups. A southern Swede is closer to a Dane or a German than what we think of as typically “Nordic.” That element seems to come from the Western Hunter-Gatherers who form the basis of both Nordic and Baltic populations.

Most likely what we are seeing here is a gradual incursion of farming central Europeans into the northern states where they remained as lower castes, while the hunter-gatherer warrior elites remained on top culturally, genetically, and economically. This gives us a basis for European history as a prolonged caste war culminating in the French Revolution, with the farmers finally overthrowing their masters.

Interesting as well is the separation of Russia. People knew, traditionally, that Eastern Europeans/Eurasians were different somehow, but the presence of mostly Eastern Hunter-Gatherer genetics shows that these people are in fact fundamentally removed from the Western genetic legacy.