Edmund Connelly:  Five or six years ago, I saw some kind of film purportedly showing the mass execution of scores of Eastern Europeans by a cadre of cold-blooded murderers. I didn’t know about YouTube then, so I can’t say if that was the source.

In the film clip, lines of naked Whites, mostly blond haired, were brought into a cellar in pairs and threes, lined up against a wall, and given bullets to the back of the skull. The floor was, needless to say, awash in blood. It was a singularly chilling image, and I wish I had never seen it.

What was truly shocking was the fact that the victims behaved in such a sheep-like manner. It seemed obvious what their fate was, yet these young men and women meekly awaited their turn to die. Only one White, a young woman, even protested while being lined up against the wall in the cellar.

The way it was shown, the Whites were generally tall and lanky, while the dark-clad executioners were short, stocky, and looked stereotypically Jewish. One executioner seemed to find his job almost amusing.

The point of the film clip was to “prove” that Bolsheviks had without compunction systematically massacred untold numbers of Eastern Europeans. Again, I have no idea whatsoever of the veracity of the film, so I would never claim it proves anything.

Thus it was with the shock of recognition when I finally read Yuri Slezkine’s powerful 2004 book The Jewish Century. In it, Slezkine unabashedly paints a picture of Jewish killers nearly as vivid as in the above film.

We read that during the Red Terror in Russia, some expressed shock that seemingly pacifistic Jews changed almost overnight: “We were amazed by what we had least expected to encounter among the Jews: cruelty, sadism, and violence had seemed alien to a nation so far removed from physical, warlike activity; those who yesterday did not know how to use a gun are now found among the executioners and cutthroats.” 

Slezkine also describes a “formerly oppressed lover of liberty [who] had turned into a tyrant of ‘unheard-of despotic arbitrariness.’” He had been “transformed outwardly into a leather-clad person with a revolver and, in fact, lost all human likeness.” He could now be pictured as “standing in a Cheka basement doing ‘bloody but honorable revolutionary work.’”    

Most succinctly, Slezkine writes, “anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cheka stood a very good chance of finding himself confronted with and possibly shot by a Jewish investigator.” Estimates are that up to twenty million non-Jews died during that horrendous period.  

It is with this as a background that I read a recent comment by an acquaintance whom I respect. In the course of discussing how even the even American military is pushing “diversity” at the expense of getting the absolute best recruits, she wrote, “Since one of my nightmares is that the US Army will one day be ordered to gun down Americans, I am not too distressed to learn that incompetence is selected.” 

That took me by surprise because this person is not the excitable type and doesn’t relish hyperbole. Chillingly, it also resonated with a thread I found among last week’s VDARE columnists. 

For example, Pat Buchanan wrote that “In communist countries in the Cold War, all understood that the government did not represent the people. The state was at war with the nation. That idea is taking root in America — the idea that our government no longer seeks to represent us.” 

That’s probably putting it mildly. Paul Craig Roberts, back at the keyboard he had sworn to abandon, wrote more ominously about America’s likely future:

The Roman Empire lasted for centuries. The American one collapsed overnight. Rome’s corruption became the strength of her enemies, and the Western Empire was overrun. America’s collapse occurred when government ceased to represent the people and became the instrument of a private oligarchy. Decisions were made in behalf of short-term profits for the few at the expense of unmanageable liabilities for the many. Overwhelmed by liabilities, the government collapsed. 

Robertson added elsewhere, “On July 12, Niall Ferguson, an historian of empire, warned that the American empire could collapse suddenly from weakness brought on by its massive debts and that such a collapse could be closer than we think.”

Finally, Pastor Chuck Baldwin, Ph.D., quoted this comment on VDARE:

Skousen also chides the Post report for failing “to show how connected certain companies are to the mercenary contractor explosion that is growing into a force that will eventually be used to threaten individual liberties at home. The Powers That Be don’t need to hire foreign armies to clamp down on American dissidents. They are training hundreds of thousands of mercenary Americans to do it and using foreign wars to sort out who is ruthless enough or unprincipled enough to take orders without questions—similar to the way the Nazis sorted and selected those who would form the Brownshirt and SS brigades.”

I mostly certainly hope all these observers are wrong and that life may continue in America without state-sponsored terror. Unfortunately, evidence is appearing that makes more than a few of us nervous.