​Chris Hedges may be too radical. But what about The Washington Post? Ishaan Tharoor, a versatile observer, wrote on July 10, 2020) The pandemic and the dawn of an ‘Asian Century’/ The rolling disaster that is the U.S. coronavirus response has crystallized some hard truths about the country. Its political polarization has meant that Americans have not agreed on basic public health guidelines or collectively followed the social distancing practices enforced in other countries. Its deepening socioeconomic inequities saw the pandemic ravage some of its most vulnerable communities. And its commander in chief, rather than galvanizing a united front and leading a global effort, undermined international institutions, blamed foreign adversaries for his woes and blamed domestic rivals for the crisis. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/07/10/pandemic-dawn-an-asian-century/
​
Elsewhere, Riot declared, dozens arrested and officers injured in Portland, Seattle, Chicago protests/ AP. Aug. 17, 2020 

Dozens were arrested over the weekend in major cities including Portland, Seattle and Pittsburgh amid demonstrations over systemic racism and police brutality in the wake of the death of George Floyd in police custody. Video taken Sunday showed a confrontation blocks away from a peaceful protest in Portland after police declared a riot overnight Saturday. Protests, often violent, have happened nightly in Portland for more than two months after Floyd's death on Memorial Day in Minneapolis. 
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/08/17/riot-declared-dozens-arrested-portland-seattle-chicago-protests/5598568002/

Personally I feel especially disturbed by such news from the cities I have known since late 1960s – early 1970s where I spent my student years. That’s where the seeds of violence today were then planted. The year 1966, my first in the US, I spent at the U of Chicago. Even then the gang of “Blackstone Rangers” encroached on the university campus. The next five years--at the U of Washington, Seattle--were in the grip of anti-Vietnam war movement. Legitimate antiwar protests among students were infiltrated by radical left. My professor’s office was attacked and vandalized for he taught a course about Soviet influence via CPUSA. At one time Seattle claimed the largest number of home-made bomb explosions, including on campus, in the country. Eldridge Cleaver’s pro-gang and pro-rape book “Soul on Ice” was the rage of town. He was then the Black Panther Party leader. When a few years I met him at the Hoover Institution, he greatly mellowed in his views. He had travelled to a number of Communist countries and found out that the racial discrimination was not confined to the USA. I was delighted to hear that he and his wife became admirers of Solzhenitsyn. Read my article Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Relevance Today 
http://www.raga.org/news/aleksandr-solzhenitsyns-relevance-today/ 

You may want to glance at the book Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, the two New Left leaders who later changed their  mind. They may not have made amends about their destructive activities against their country but, like Cleaver, they had “second thoughts about them. For more details, read my recent article, Sighing-and more- at the Secrets of Jewish Genius: Vladislav Krasnov’s Rebuttal to Bret Stephens’s The New York Times’ article.

http://www.raga.org/news/sighing-and-more-at-the-secrets-of-jewish-genius-vladislav-krasnovs-rebuttal-to-bret-stephenss-the-new-york-times-article 

 This time I suspect there are again some influential moneyed people who want to inflame the racial issue by any means, including falsifying George Floyd’s cause of death. I hear it from various sources, including Destructive Generation, an American antiwar activist and RAGA’s long-time supporter. Ray unequivocally states “George Floyd was NOT ‘murdered’. He was not even ‘killed’. He ‘died’ of catastrophic heart failure while being arrested for criminal behavior. He had a heart attack, after he went violently berserk and violently resisted arrest.” His article is aptly titled “The Forest is Over Yonder, Right Behind Them Trees”. 

In his article “Seattle's Bolshevik Revolution” Mike Whitney is exactly right when he says “These aren’t protests, this is political warfare the likes of which we haven’t seen since the 1960s. Peaceful protesters” do not attack police stations with crowbars and firebombs, they don’t vandalize Starbucks and retail shops, and they don’t lay siege to public land and declare their own sovereign state. These are fanatical ideologues who believe the system must be obliterated and replaced. They are today’s Bolsheviks and they mean business.” See Mike’s full article “Seattle's Bolshevik Revolution”
https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/seattles-bolshevik-revolution/

However, the Russians can hardly gloat over America’s political disarray, domestic violence, civil strife, cultural chaos and MONUMENTAL confusion. 

ALASKA:  Sitka to remove monument to Alexander Baranov, first Russian governor of Alaska. 5 Jul, 2020/The city council in Sitka, Alaska has decided to remove a statue of Alexander Baranov, the explorer and first governor of Russian Alaska. The resolution lists a number of serious accusations against the man. Baranov worked for the Russian American Company, which was the vehicle for the Russian government’s effort to expand into the Americas. For almost three decades he was the de facto governor of Russian colonies on the continent. Sitka – called Novoarkhangelsk by its Russian founders – served as his capital.https://www.rt.com/usa/494777-sitka-baranov-statue-removal/

I have been to Alaska a couple of times. In 1987, I visited Sitka where met some members of the Tlingit Indian tribe and had a friendly conversation with its chief. I was impressed that they were Russian Orthodox Christian; many bore Russian names, even though their knowledge of Russian language was very limited. It’s true that they did not prosper, but I did not feel any hostility to Russians or white Americans for that matter.

Now take a look at Last year ‘Cultural diplomacy’: Russian America holiday proposed by Defense Ministry to promote ‘humanitarian cooperation’ 15 Oct, 2019    https://www.rt.com/russia/470962-russian-america-day-celebration/

There is a lot more to it! WHY Russia Saved the United States: The Forgotten History of a Brotherhood. By Matthew Ehret. August 23, 2020. Via The Duran https://theduran.com/why-russia-saved-the-united-states-the-forgotten-history-of-a-brotherhood/ ?

Why did Russia’s Czar Alexander II deploy the Russian navy to the coasts of the USA during the height of the Civil War in 1863? What dynamic shaped the rise of the great rail building traditions across Russia, the USA, Germany, Japan and France in the 19th century and how did this process shape the sale of Alaska and planned Bering Strait rail connection between old and new worlds?

As a matter of fact, even the anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist Marxist-Leninist ideology of the Soviet Union did not stop it from celebrating Russian exploration of Alaska. As Wikipedia says, Juno and Avos (Russian: Юнона и Авось), a popular Russian-language rock opera first staged in 1981, celebrates another Russian explorer, Nikolai Rezanov, and his love affair with  a daughter of the Spanish governor of California. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juno_and_Avos_(opera)

Moreover, having spent a major part of my life in California, I was always grateful to its government for preserving Fort Ross, a former Russian fortress turned into Fort Ross California State Park. This is a unique cultural monument that testifies to the openness of American people to other cultures. As a member of the Congress of Russian Americans (https://www.russian-americans.org/) feel the need to preserve Baranov’s monument in Sitka, Alaska, I sighed the petition below and hope you do the same
https://www.change.org/p/city-of-sitka-assembly-preserve-the-alexander-baranof-monument-in-sitka-alaska/psf/share?after_sign_exp=default&just_signed=true

As a Russian American, I am just as concerned with the preservation of  Fort Elizavety (Fort Elizabeth)), the last remaining Russian fort on the Hawaiian islands, built in the early 19th century by the Russian-American Company/

Today’s fashionable trend to reject the colonial heritage of America beginning with Christopher Columbus and George Washington, with its emphasis on the abuse of the non-Whites, is as ill-informed as it is childish. Hey, the Vikings had explored America even earlier, around the year 1000 AD. Had the Africans or American Indians the same level of ship-building skills, they would have done about the same if landed in Europe. In fact, Hannibal did invade the Roman republic from Africa and Shakespeare’s Othello was not exactly an angel.

2. Racial tensions flair up
​
Teaching Russian Studies at US universities I had a number of Black students who, on the average, performed, perhaps, slightly better than the Whites. They certainly took pride in the fact that Russia’s greatest poet Aleksandr Pushkin was partially Black as his maternal great-grandfather was African-born (Ethiopian) general Gannibal who was named after Hannibal! 
In fact, Thomas Sowell, an outstanding Black American economist and social thinker (he turned 90 on June 30, Happy Birthday, Tom!) was one of my favorite scholars at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He was one of the few avowed anti-Marxists and I wrote a salutary review of one of this many books, MARXISM: PHILOSOPHY AND ECONOMICS. (Review by: Vladislav Krasnov, International Journal on World Peace, Vol. 5, No. 3 (JUL-SEP 1988, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20751285?seq=1)

​Having read a number of books on this topic, I value SGOVIO’s very highly as one learns there many things one cannot find even in Solzhenitsyn’s The GULAG. My greatest surprise is that, in spite of excellent reviews by readers, this book is virtually UNKNOWN in the West where Cultural Marxism rules the roost.

4. But what’s New in Russia?

Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny was poisoned, German hospital says. Published: Aug. 24, 2020 By Associated Press, 39 Doctors said they do not believe his life is at risk.

Russia's most famous opposition leader, @navalny, has been rushed to the hospital, with reports that poison is suspected. If confirmed, it is a crime against the whole of Russia. There can be no democracy without dissent. Edward Snowden  @Snowden
As before, I let the Canadian Russia watcher Patrick Armstrong report:

CONSTITUTION passed comfortably. The ads varied between happy families and – the one projected on the US Embassy facade – in 1993 we were yours and now we’re ours. Sums up the main changes. As to the term reset many argue that it is designed to kill any succession in-fighting (or foreign fiddling): even if Putin quits after this term, he can still come back. I still see it as a cheap trick. https://patrickarmstrong.ca/2020/07/09/russian-federation-sitrep-9-july-2020/
 RUSSIA AND COVID. Latest numbers: total cases 870K; total deaths 14,606; tests per 1 million 203K. Russia has done 29.7 million tests (third after China and USA); among countries with populations over 10M it’s second in tests per million and of those over 100M first. The Health Minister says mass vaccinations will begin by October. https://patrickarmstrong.ca/2020/08/06/russian-federation-sitrep-6-august-2020/

Also Aug. 13, 2020. Moscow (CNN)Russian officials in Moscow tell CNN they have offered "unprecedented cooperation" with Operation Warp Speed (OWS), the US multi-agency body set up to accelerate access to effective Covid-19 vaccines and treatments. But the officials told CNN that the "US is not currently open" to the Russian medical advances." https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/13/europe/russia-us-coronavirus-vaccine/index.html

Aug. 17: Vietnam's health ministry is looking to buy a bulk order of Russia's coronavirus vaccine, state media said, despite global skepticism over its effectiveness and safety. President Vladimir Putin announced Russia is first in the world to approve a vaccine. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/08/17/coronavirus-in-russia-the-latest-news-aug-16-a69117

There are, however, other approaches to COVID-19. Ellen Brown, an Attorney and prominent alternative author, describes one, while warning against a potential abuse of COVID by “Police state”. Read:

From Lockdown to Police State: the “Great Reset” Rolls Out
ELLEN BROWN • AUGUST 22, 2020 •
Mayhem in Melbourne. On August 2, lockdown measures were implemented in Melbourne, Australia, that were so draconian that Australian news commentator Alan Jones said on Sky News: “People are entitled to think there is an ‘agenda to destroy western society.’”
https://www.unz.com/article/from-lockdown-to-police-state-the-great-reset-rolls-out/

Brown finds a plausible alternative in Sweden’s approach to COVID-19. According to her “Not restraining the populace has allowed Sweden’s curve to taper off naturally through “herd immunity,” with daily deaths down to single digits for the last month.” I am inclined to agree. I lived in Sweden, speak Swedish, and learned to respect this nation for the daring to go its own way, be it in social-democracy, political neutrality or just reliance on common sense.

In any case, Ellen Brown is right to warn: “Life as we know it will change. We need to ensure that it changes in ways that serve the people and the productive economy, while preserving our national sovereignty and hard-won personal freedoms.” I am proud to be her colleague in the Global Harmony Association. 

Ellen Brown is not alone. Listen to Atty. Thomas Willcutts on Science Propaganda Machine & COVID Censorship/August 18, 2020 Kevin Barrett at  https://kevinbarrett.heresycentral.is/
One way or another, these days Russia seems to be doing, at home and abroad, better than the USA.

5. No wonder that a large number of prominent Americans declare: It’s Time to Rethink Our Russia Policy

America’s current mix of sanctions and diplomacy isn’t working. An open letter on how to reconsider our approach to Putin—and whoever comes next was originally signed   By ROSE GOTTEMOELLER, THOMAS GRAHAM, FIONA HILL, JON HUNTSMAN JR., ROBERT LEGVOLD and THOMAS R. PICKERING. August 5, 2020 in POLITICO

…U.S.-Russia relations are at a dangerous dead end that threatens the U.S. national interest. The risk of a military confrontation that could go nuclear is again real. We are drifting toward a fraught nuclear arms race, with our foreign-policy arsenal reduced mainly to reactions, sanctions, public shaming and congressional resolutions. The global Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting serious worldwide economic decline, rather than fostering cooperation, has only reinforced the current downward trajectory…  

...Restoring normal diplomatic contacts should be a top priority for the White House and supported by the Congress.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/08/05/open-letter-russia-policy-391434

This is music to my ear. That’s what RAGA has been saying since 1992. Among a hundred plus prominent Americans who joined the call are people I like to quote in RAGA Newsletter, especially, in the RAGA Antiwar Antidotes series running since about 2014.

In addition to my former colleagues at the Monterey (now Middlebury) Institute of International Studies Anna Vassilieva and Bill Potters, I was glad to see the names of Tom Graham and Robert Legvold, as well as Matthew Rojansky, The Kennan Institute; Dimitry Simes, Center for the Nat. Interest; Stephen Walt, Harvard University; John Mearsheimer, U of Chicago. However, I did not see there—wonder why-- Stephen F Cohen, Nicolai Petro, Gilbert Doctorow nor Nikolas K. Gvosdev. Should not the drive to enroll the support of prominent Russia specialists be intensified before the Presidential elections? 

6. Belarus is close to my heart. As a student of ethnology at the U of Moscow in the late 1950-s I spent several summers there doing research on their ethnic self-awareness. We went to all major towns from Minsk and Mogilev, Gomel and Grodno, Lutsk and Brest. We did the field research in the countryside. We found no significant difference with the Russians of the RSFSR. Russian was spoken everywhere, even though some intellectuals in Minsk insisted on using Belorussian. At the Moscow U student dormitory I had Belorussian room-mates. During the 1990s I served as interpreter for Belorussian groups touring the USA and always sensed the feeling of mutual goodwill.

7. Dmitri Trenin, Director, Carnegie Moscow Center, reported via David Johnson’s Russia List on August 17, 2020

Game Over for Lukashenko: The Kremlin has had enough of Lukashenko, but it cannot allow Belarus to follow the path of Ukraine and become another anti-Russian, NATO-leaning bulwark on its borders. https://carnegie.ru/commentary/82493

Putin: Russia is ready to provide security help to Belarus
By: By YURAS KARMANAU and VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV
August 27, 2020 MINSK, Belarus — (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that he stands ready to send police to Belarus if protests there turn violent but sees no such need now…“We have agreed not to use it until the situation starts spinning out of control…,” he said. https://www.actionnewsjax.com/news/putin-russia-stands/7ODQZLQKXYUR2FZBF5VLARQS7M/
8. A View from outside of Europe. Belarus: Scramble for heart of Europe. AUGUST 4, 2020 BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR
By all indications, change is in the air in Belarus. For good or bad --
one cannot tell — the ground beneath the feet of the Belarus strongman
President Alexander Lukashenka is shifting…Belarus under Lukashenko
preserved the former Soviet system in the westernmost edge of the
extinct empire — no oligarchs, state-owned industry, stable employment
and social security but economic stagnation and repressive state
security apparatus. http://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article9775.html

Ajal Goyal, an Indian friend of Russia, writes from Moscow re Belarus:
There are such amazing pictures and videos... I would never support Maidan type foreign sponsored violent coup and protests. But these non-violent, peaceful, civilized and cultured protestors (compared with Maidan, Yellow Vests, and Black Lives Matter) are very Gandhian and they deserve love and sympathy of everyone. Hope neither Lukashenko nor Poles or Lithuanians will push violence because that will be end. Peaceful protests should continue and there should be no violence against them. There should be no manipulations or infiltration of these protests by Europeans or Americans either.
​
9. For several years RAGA has been affiliated with the Global Harmony Association founded in 2005 by Leo Semashko, a former professor of philosophy in Sankt-Petersburg. The GHA’s goal is to beat the emergency of COVID-19 in spite of growing nuclear arms race, the impotence of the UN and general chaos and unpredictability of global powers. Below is the Anti-Nuclear Gandhian Manifesto launched by the GHA.

The Permian Period began 298.9 million years ago and ended 252.2 million years ago, extending from the close of the Carboniferous Period to the outset of the Triassic Period.

May Perm enjoy the same permanence!
Finally, I am happy to announce the FORTHCOMING BOOK 
From The East to The West a message of Peace 
Published by Sanbun Publishers, New Delhi, INDIA

​Vladislav Krasnov (aka W George Krasnow), Ph.D., is the author of Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky: A Study in the Polyphonic Novel, and Russia Beyond Communism: A Chronicle of National Rebirth. Former professor and Head of Russian Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, since 1992 he has led Russia and America Goodwill Association www.RAGA.org, now affiliated with the Global Harmony Association, founded by Dr. Leo Semashko to advance Gandhi’s ideal of Non-Violence. 
https://peacefromharmony.org/?cat=en_c&key=938 

To those who preached violence and called nonviolent actionists cowards, he replied: "I do believe that, where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence....I would rather have India resort to arms in order to defend her honour than that she should, in a cowardly manner, become or remain a helpless witness to her own dishonour....But I believe that nonviolence is infinitely superior to violence, forgiveness is more manly than punishment."
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyagraha

HAPPY LABOR DAY

​​Sincerely,
W George Krasnow (http://wiki-org.ru/wiki/Краснов,_Владислав_Георгиевич)
President, RAGA
www.raga.org
Facebook

​All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

RAGA News
www.RAGA.org​

One certainly feels immense sadness at the millions of lives lost in the USSR (GULAG and more), Eastern Europe, China, Vietnam, Cambodia and wherever else Communists were allowed to take the reins. It all started in my country, Russia, in 1917, when Lenin proclaimed “Let’s turn the Imperialist War into a Civil War”.  After the coup d’etat Lenin’s slogans changed to “Death to Bourgeoisie and its servants!” and “Long Live Red Terror!” (see the photograph).  Both slogans were fulfilled and over-fulfilled during the long Soviet rule. And not just in Russia and the USSR. The appeal to hatred and “terror” proved contagious world-wide.

As to Stephens’ sighing at “relief and tiredness,” both apply to Marx’s misguided condemnation of free enterprise as taught by Adam Smith (1723 – 1790)[1] among others. Certainly, the neoliberal economists, now in charge of the economy of the US and its allies, feel “relief” not to have to look back to Marx. Even Russia’s economy, tormented by the oligarchs (mostly Jewish) as it is, seems to be doing much better than in the USSR.
 
And yet, isn’t Bret Stephens making a major mistake by reducing the ongoing Marxist influence in the world to merely a “sigh”?  When one reads that in 2018 China’s government donated $200 million to have a monument to Marx erected in his birth city of Trier,[2] one is forced to emit not just “sigh”, but “awe”. The PRC government still regards Marxism-Leninism as its official ideology.[3] The PRC rulers may no longer follow the precepts of Marxist economics, but they never renounced Marx’ justification and glorification of violence. Moreover, Stephens is hardly unaware of the ongoing influence of “Cultural Marxism” world-wide, especially, in the West.[4]

It’s no secret that the first Bolshevik government under Lenin was heavily Jewish. In his 1994 article “The Jewish Role in the Bolshevik Revolution and Russia's Early Soviet Regime. Assessing the Grim Legacy of Soviet Communism”, Mark Weber argued that “most of the leading Communists who took control of Russia in 1917-20 were Jews.”[5] Ron Unz, a Jewish Internet entrepreneur, who runs The Unz Review, an alternative interactive site, posted the above article, and added more “forgotten” information on the role of the Jews in the Bolshevik government. See his article American Pravda: the Bolshevik Revolution and Its Aftermath. [6]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Smith

[2] Karl Marx statue from China adds to German angst. 5 May 2018 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44009621

[3] CONSTITUTION OF THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA/ Under the leadership of the Communist Party of China and the guidance of Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, the important thought of Three Represents, the Scientific Outlook on Development, and the Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, the Chinese people of all ethnicities will continue to adhere to  democratic dictatorship. https://npcobserver.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/PRC-Constitution-2018.pdf

[4] About Cultural Marxism controversy read The Guardian 2015 report: <<It begins in the 1910s and 1920s. When the socialist revolution failed to materialise beyond the Soviet Union, Marxist thinkers like Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukacs tried to explain why. Their answer was that culture and religion blunted the proletariat’s desire to revolt, and the solution was that Marxists should carry out a “long march through the institutions” – universities and schools, government bureaucracies and the media – so that cultural values could be progressively changed from above. Then Nazism forced the (mostly Jewish) members of the Frankfurt School to move to America and got a chance to undermine the culture and values that had sustained the world’s most powerful capitalist nation.>>
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/19/cultural-marxism-a-uniting-theory-for-rightwingers-who-love-to-play-the-victim

[5] The Jewish Role in the Bolshevik Revolution and Russia's Early Soviet Regime. Assessing the Grim Legacy of Soviet Communism. MARK WEBER • JAN/FEB 1994 ISSUE •  
Most of the leading Communists who took control of Russia in 1917-20 were Jews. Leon Trotsky (Lev Bronstein) headed the Red Army and then, was chief of Soviet foreign affairs. Yakov Sverdlov (Solomon) was both the Bolshevik party’s executive secretary and — as chairman of the Central Executive Committee — head of the Soviet government. Grigori Zinoviev (Radomyslsky) headed the Communist International (Comintern), the central agency for spreading revolution in foreign countries. Other prominent Jews included press commissar Karl Radek (Sobelsohn), foreign affairs commissar Maxim Litvinov (Wallach), Lev Kamenev (Rosenfeld) and Moisei Uritsky. Lenin’s maternal grandfather, Israel Blank, was a Jew who was later baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church.
https://www.unz.com/pub/jhr__the-jewish-role-in-the-bolshevik-revolution-and-russias-early-soviet-regime/

[6] American Pravda: the Bolshevik Revolution and Its Aftermath. RON UNZ • JULY 23, 2018. 925 COMMENTS 
Although most of the books hardly emphasized the point, anyone with a careful eye for the occasional sentence or paragraph would surely know that Jews were enormously over-represented among the top revolutionaries, with three of Lenin’s five potential successors— Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev—all coming from that background, along with many, many others within the top Communist leadership. Obviously, this was wildly disproportionate in a country having a Jewish population of perhaps 4%, and surely helped explain the large spike in worldwide hostility towards Jews soon afterward…https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-the-bolshevik-revolution-and-its-aftermath/

The attraction of so many Jews world-wide to Marxism seems odd because Marx was no admirer of Jews as a people. He was, by all accounts a Jew-hating Jew. Read the latest discussion of the topic on the Internet:

<<Marx’s essay, On the Jewish Question, originally published in 1844, contains the following:
What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money… Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities…. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange…. The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.

Marx argues that, “In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.”[1]

Marx’s own words may sound as prejudicial toward Jews as anything that had been written about Jews from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Yet, I would not want to be unfair to the young Marx by calling him outright “anti-Semitic”, a term that should be avoid as a malicious misnomer designed to implicate all non-Jews in irrational hatred of racial or physical features common for the Jews and the Arabs. But Marx’s attitude toward the Jewish preoccupation with money-lending and other financial machinations, negative as it was, deserves attention. (At this point I would expect Stephens to fill the brackets with a word much stronger than “sigh”).

The young Marx’s aversion to a common Jewish preoccupation with money was an important factor of his hostility to Capitalism in general. Nay, it was more than hostility: it was an obsessive desire to get rid of it, once and for all, preferably by violent revolutionary means. Strange as it may seem, it was precisely this psychological need to free oneself from any association with “the Golden Calf” of Capitalism in a single stroke that attracted the young Karl Marx -- and then thousands of young, idealistic and impatient Jews-- to Communism, especially in Russia and Eastern Europe.

It seems like they badly wanted to get rid of their Jewishness, at least, of its “bad traits”, by joining The Communist International (Comintern)[2] whose members were not expected to notice, much less remark on, any physical or cultural traits of their comrades. Everybody was expected to concentrate instead on preparing for “the last and decisive battle” to free the world from Capitalism” and, by implication, from dependence on money.

There is more to Marx’s personality, and I suspect that Stephens will use the brackets again when he hears that. In my 1978 essay “Karl Marx as Dr. Frankenstein: Toward Genealogy of Communism,”[3] based on the novel of Mary Shelley, I tried to show how the young Karl was strongly drawn to Luceferian poetry[4] and dreamt of becoming a famous Devil-worshipping rebel-poet, rather than an economic scientist.

In a high-school the young Karl loved to write papers testifying to his Christian devotion (his parents, both of rabbinical families, had converted from Judaism to Lutheranism). However, as soon as he entered the University of Bonn as a student, he started carousing with his buddies and, when alone, wrote poetry full of the rebellious spirit. His favorite theme was a demonic rebellion against God. One of his poems was titled “Oulanem”, a sacrilegious distortion of Emanuel.[5]  In his letters, Marx’s father expressed concerns about his son’s obsession with “demons.”

His buddies, on the other hand, saw him as a modern Prometheus rebelling against all religions as “the opium of the people” to keep the proletariat dazed under Capitalism. However, when you analyze Karl’s poems, it becomes clear that his favorite Prometheus was not the one who just wanted to bestow on the people the gift of domesticated fire, the Prometheus Pyrphoros, but rather the Prometheus Plasticator who was the avenger of gods, filled with hatred of the world and ready to set it aflame with revolution.

Just like Shelley’s fictional Dr.Frankenstein, the young Karl is bright, knowledgeable, and full of a benevolent desire to free people from all the foibles of today by creating a New Mankind. But as Frankenstein was flabbergasted with the Monster produced in his Lab designed to produce a New Man, so Karl Marx would have been horrified seeing what his “offspring”, Marxism-Leninism, was in reality.

It was in Marx’s name that an attempt was made to create a new mankind. However, in reality the 73-years long heroic effort in Russia produced not only the horrors of Civil War,  destruction of churches, mosques and synagogues, forced collectivization, followed by Holodomor (not just in Ukraine!), the Show Trials, enormous losses in World War II, the GULAG, suppression of all dissent, but also -  new waves of Jewish emigration. Fatefully, just like Mary Shelley let Dr. Frankenstein drop his Monster in “the wilderness of Russia” where he had more space for mischiefs, so the adepts of Marx unleashed his monster on the landmass of the Russian Empire.
​
[1] MICHAEL EZRA.  23 MARCH 2015/ Karl Marx's Radical Antisemitism
Michael Ezra argues that Karl Marx's anti-Semitism is clear and unambiguous. 
https://www.philosophersmag.com/opinion/30-karl-marx-s-radical-antisemitism

[2] The Communist International (Comintern), known as the Third International (1919–1943), was an international organization that advocated world communism. The Comintern resolved at its Second Congress to "struggle by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and the creation of an international Soviet republic." 

[3] Karl Marx as Dr. Frankenstein: Toward Genealogy of Communism/ By Vladislav Krasnov (W Krasnow) https://www.academia.edu/28227073/Karl_Marx_as_Frankenstein_Toward_a_Genealogy_of_Communism_Modern_Age_WINTER_1978_-_VOL._22_NO._1._pp._72-82_Vladislav_Krasnov_-_https_home.isi.org_karl-marx-frankenstein-toward-genealogy-communism_sthash.MmTrb2DQ.dpuf
 
[4] Due to a condition referred to as a "weak chest", Marx was excused from military duty when he turned 18. While at the University at Bonn, Marx joined the Poets' Club, a group containing political radicals that were monitored by the police. He also joined the Trier Tavern Club drinking society, at one point serving as club co-president. He was also involved in serious  disputes: in August 1836 he took part in a duel with a member of the university's Borussian Korps. Although his grades in the first term were good, they soon deteriorated, leading his father to force a transfer to University of Berlin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx
 
[5] Emanuel (biblical) Immanuel whose birth is prophesied in the Book of Isaiah. A male given name from Hebrew, equivalent to English Immanuel. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Emanuel
See also https://www.amazon.com/Oulanem-Fictional-Conspiracy-Paul-Majkut/dp/0615959938 and "Was Marx a Satanist?" by  Richard Wurmbrand.

Would it not be natural in analyzing Marx’s personality to turn to the services of yet another great Jewish figure, Sigmund Freud (1856 -1939)[1] who somehow failed to make Stephens’ list? Freud’s absence from the list of famous Jews seems even more intriguing than Bret’s “sigh” in front of Marx. After all, Freud’s popularity outlived that of Marx.[2]  A younger contemporary of Marx, living in Austria and speaking the German language, Freud must have heard of Marx or read his works. What is known for sure, Freud did not invite Marx on his psycho-analytical couch.[3] He should have! After all, Marx was tormented by a number of psychological problems, and one of them was self-aggrandizement.

[1]  Sigmund Freud (1856 -1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst. Freud was born to Galician Jewish parents in the Moravian town of Freiberg. He qualified as a doctor of medicine in 1881 at the University of Vienna. Upon completing his habilitation in 1885, he was appointed a docent in neuropathology and became an affiliated professor in 1902. He set up his clinical practice in Vienna in 1886. In 1938, he left Austria to escape the Nazis and died in the UK in 1939.  Freud developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association and discovered transference. Freud's redefinition of sexuality led him to formulate the Oedipus complex as the central tenet of psychoanalytical theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud

[2]  If we want a different politics, we need another revolutionary: Freud. By Suzanne Moore
Marx is all very well, but to effect real change Sigmund Freud’s modern tools of self-examination hold the answers
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/26/politics-sigmund-freud-revolutionary-marx

 [3]   https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/5246/why-does-psychoanalysis-use-the-couch

The problem of self-aggrandizement was probably rooted in his problems with his father who much preferred a quiet bourgeois life to his son’s obsession with changing the world. It seems, his father bothered Karl mostly as a tangible projection of the Universal God figure that all exploitative (Karl’s language) societies like to extoll. Karl was determined to overthrow that God by reducing the amount of religion - “the opiate of the people” that the proletariat consumed, because it diverted them from joining his intellectual comrades in world revolution.
 
One might say that, as in his Oedipus complex poetic dreams, Marx wanted to slay not just his biological father, but also the Christian God Father of his youth, as well as Yahweh, the God of the Jews whom his ancestors had worshipped for centuries. In any case, his Bolshevik followers in Russia desecrated and destroyed untold numbers of houses of worship and religious relics, be they Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or whatever.
​
The persecution of the Russian Christians was especially vicious as Soviet leaders realized that the traditional Russian value system was a major obstacle to Marxist-Leninist ideology. One way or another, for all 73 years of Communist rule in Russia, the ideological trinity of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Lenin not just overshadowed but virtually displaced the Christian Trinity of God Father, God Son and the Holy Spirit that had spiritually sustained Russia for a thousand years.

​It is hardly accidental that in 1943, under the pressure of Hitler’s armies, Stalin nominally restored the Russian Orthodox Patriarchy in quest for national consolidation. To keep Soviet soldiers fighting, Stalin had to counter the rumors that in the occupied territories Germans were not as harsh on Russian Christians as the Bolsheviks were.

Soviet propagandist always presented Marxist ideas not as ideological speculations but as an immutable science. The laws of surplus value, of ever increasing exploitation of the proletariat, and the concept of the inevitability of revolution as formulated by Marx, were presented as “science” on par with Newton’s or Einstein’s laws in physics. A student was called “stupid” is he disagreed. Marxism was presented as the greatest achievement of Western civilization. It was superior to the “utopian socialist dreams” of such philosophers as Henri de Saint-Simon.[1] After a number of breakthroughs in science, with the ongoing industrial revolution in England, it was only a matter of time when science would displace religion.

As I have already shown, the young Mary Shelley (1797 – 1851)[2] has noticed early on that the abolition of God and replacement of religion with science was fraught with the risk of undermining the ethical foundation of society leading to its collapse.

Marx’s followers certainly over-reached when they proclaimed Marxism-Leninism in Russia, China and elsewhere as a SCIENCE. They claimed it was founded on the most advanced developments of the most advanced countries of the time: German philosophy, French socialist theories, and the experience of the British labor movement. They predicted that a victory of the world revolution was scientifically ordained and would end with the establishment of a world order that would guarantee everybody’s happiness.

While writing about Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1978, that is about fourteen years after my defection from the USSR in October 1962, I was constantly reminded of the fate of my fellow dissidents in the USSR, as well as of the ever-increasing flow of Jewish immigrants to the USA. Around 1973 an agreement was made with Soviet leaders that would allow a legal emigration of Soviet Jews[3]  for such humanitarian reasons as joining their families in Israel. (It later became adopted as Jackson-Vanik Amendment.) However, as soon as the applicants arrived to Vienna, Austria, for sorting out their next destination, the majority claimed they had no relatives in Israel and would rather go to the United States. I had already met a number of them who came to live in Dallas, Texas, where I taught at the Southern Methodist University.

Now I wondered what would have happened to Karl Marx had he indeed settled in the country of his “scientific” dream where “there was no difference in either income or treatment due to one’s nationality or origin”. Would he have joined clandestine courses where Soviet Jews learned Hebrew before going to Israel? Or would he have joined my Russian friends Lev Krasnopevtsev, Anatoly Ivanov, Vladimir Osipov or Andrei Amalrik[4]—to name just my fellow history students from Moscow State University—all of whom landed in the GULAG or the lunatic asylum? Or would Karl Marx have preferred to immigrate to the USA and join me on the faculty of SMU where he could teach not pol sci or economics—God Forbid, IMO—but “Life in the USSR” that I was teaching?

[1] Henri de Saint-Simon (1760 - 1825), was a French social theorist and the founder of French socialism. In the wake of the French Revolution, Saint-Simon proposed a new and positive reorganization of society, controlled by the chiefs of industry, with scientists in the role of priests. Saint-Simon’s call for a “science of society” influenced the development of sociology and economics. Saint-Simon’s vision influenced French and European society throughout the nineteenth century. https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Henri_de_Saint-Simon

[2] Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797 –1851) was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin and her mother was the philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley
 

[3] Signed into law by U.S. President Gerald Ford in 1975, the Jackson-Vanik Amendment to the Trade Act of 1974 eliminated barriers to the emigration of Soviet Jewry. Officially known as the Vanik Bill in the House and the Jackson Amendment in the Senate, this amendment required that nonmarket economy countries comply with specific free emigration criteria as a prerequisite for receiving economic benefits in trade relations with the USA. These benefits included Most Favored Nation (MFN) status—now known as Normal Trade Relations—and access to U.S. government financial facilities. https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Jackson-Vanik_Amendment
​
[4] Andrei Amalrik (1938, Moscow –1980, Guadalajara, Castile-La Mancha, Spain), was a Russian writer and dissident best known in the Western world for his essay, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Amalrik Information about other people on my list is available in the Russian version of Wikipedia.

Given the young Karl’s rebellious character, he would have tried to get out of the USSR where not all his works were allowed to be read, especially, not his article “On the Jewish Question”. I am sure he would have tried to escape from the trap he had set up for the future mankind by inspiring Lenin and his Bolshevik comrades to capture my native Russia.

Well, the world proletarian revolution did not start in the most advanced industrial countries of Europe, as Marx predicted, but in a relatively backward Russia. It would be a mistake to think that the Bolsheviks had any substantial support from either Russians or Jews in the Russian Empire when they seized power. The widely democratic general election to the Constituent Assembly which Michael II, a tsar de-jure after Nicholas II’s abdication on March 12, 1917,[1] empowered to choose the form of government, took place within weeks after the Bolshevik coup on November 7, 1917. Getting no more than 25% of the vote, the Bolsheviks dissolved the Assembly by force. The rest is history.

[1] Emperor Michael II in the Solzhenitsyn House - Author: Vladislav Krasnov
http://www.raga.org/news/emperor-michael-ii-in-the-solzhenitsyn-house-author-vladislav-krasnov
In brief, read The Last Tsar Was Michael, Not Nicholas. 18 July 2008 | Issue 3947/By W. George Krasnow
The 90th anniversary of the massacre of the Romanovs in Yekaterinburg has been raised to a new level thanks to the city of Perm. Since 1991, a growing number of Russians have argued that the last legitimate ruler of Russia was not Nicholas II, but his younger brother Michael. Their cause got a mighty boost -- from Britain: Donald Crawford, The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II. http://www.themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/the-last-tsar-was-michael-not-nicholas/369032.html#ixzz2TuIdx5nE

Not many Jews were voting for the Bolsheviks as they were happy with the abolition of the Pale of Settlement and other liberal reforms of the Provisional government. Besides, the Bolshevik “triumph” in shoving away the popularly elected Constituent Assembly was almost at once marred-- at first symbolically and eventually fatefully--by the Balfour Declaration that was made virtually at the same time.[1] Thus, now for more than 100 years the Jews of Russia—and of the world--have been drawn in opposite directions and forced to make a fateful decision: Communism or Zionism. I believe the majority of Jews would prefer never to have to make such decision between these two diametrically opposed extremist and violent positions.

Even though Jews became dominant in Lenin’s government, it does not mean they were pacified. As a matter of fact, the two most audacious terrorist acts against the Bolsheviks were carried out by Jews. Fanny Kaplan,[2] a Jewish revolutionary, attempted to kill Lenin, and Leonid Kannegisser[3] succeeded in assassinating the most hated killer Moisei Uritsky, a Jew and the head of the feared CHEKA in Petrograd.[4]

Maxim Gorky, the most famous Russian writer who was friends with Lenin and a judeophile, condemned the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and suppression of popular protest on the streets of Petrograd with gun-fire in January 1918. One might say that this was the end of whatever popular appeal Lenin’s Marxist revolution may have had for the Russian masses, Jews and Gentiles alike. The Civil War ensued (1918-1922) in which Russia lost more people than in World War I.
​
It became apparent that the Communist revolution in Russia was made not for the benefit of the working masses but to serve as an ego trip for a cohort of intellectuals aspiring to lead the whole world into the Utopia of world communism. Nobody expressed the disillusionment with Communism better than the Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884 – 1937)[5] who as early as 1921 published the first anti-Utopian novel, symbolically titled “WE”, in which he foretold the emergence of a totalitarian state as a consequence of Bolshevik rule.  The book had to be published abroad.

[1] Please read The Balfour Declaration at 100: Remembering Its Prophetic Jewish Critics. By ALLAN C. BROWNFELD. Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November/December 2017, pp. 42-43
Israel and Judaism. 2017 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER. https://www.wrmea.org/017-november-december/the-balfour-declaration-at-100-remembering-its-prophetic-jewish-critics.html I found this article so important, that I translated it into Russian. 100-летие Декларации Бальфура: Пора вспомнить еврейских пророков http://perevodika.ru/articles/1196711.html
 
[2] Fanny Kaplan (real name Feiga Haimovna Roytblat, 1890 – 1918) was a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party who allegedly tried to assassinate Vladimir Lenin. As a member of the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), Kaplan viewed Lenin as a "traitor to the revolution" when the Bolsheviks banned her party. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanny_Kaplan
 
[3] Leonid Kannegisser (1896 –1918) was a Russian poet and military cadet, known for assassinating Moisei Uritsky, chief of the Cheka in Petrograd, on 17 August 1918.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Kannegisser
 
[4] Moisei Uritsky (1873–August 17, 1918) was a Bolshevik revolutionary leader in Russia. After the October Revolution, he was Chief of Cheka of Petrograd City. Uritsky was assassinated by Leonid Kannegisser, a military cadet, who was executed shortly afterwards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moisei_Uritsky
 
[5] Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884 – 10 March 1937), was a Russian author of science fiction and political satire. He is most famous for his 1921 novel We, a story set in a dystopian future police state. Despite having been a prominent Old Bolshevik, Zamyatin was deeply disturbed by the policies pursued by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union following the October Revolution. In 1921, WE became the first work banned by the Soviet censorship. Ultimately, Zamyatin arranged for WE to be smuggled to the West for publication. The subsequent outrage this sparked within the Party and the Union of Soviet Writers led to Zamyatin's successful bid  for exile from his homeland. Due to his use of literature to criticize Soviet society, Zamyatin has been referred to as one of the first Soviet dissidents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevgeny_Zamyatin

It took quite a while before the West woke up to the threat if Communism. In 1945 George Orwell published “Animal farm” and in 1949 “Nineteen-Eighty-four.” He wrote these dystopian classics in the wake of Zamyatin, but he did not have to go to the USSR: as a British Communist he joined the civil war in Spain and witnessed bloody infighting among his comrades, an experience which gave him perspective into what Communist future would likely look like. Even before Orwell, Arthur Koestler, a former Jewish Communist, described his ultimate rejection of Communism in his anti-totalitarian novel “Darkness at Noon”.

Of course, the essence of Communist rule was in plain sight since 1917. And yet, after initial assistance to the so-called “White Russian Armies” of insurgents against Bolshevik rule during the Russian Civil War (1918-1922), the United States and the rest of the Free World did little to resist the virus of Communism until the USSR fell under its own weight at the end of 1991. This was in spite of some early warnings from British journalists and even Winston Churchill himself who in as early as 1920 warned of a "worldwide (Bolshevik) conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization.” Churchill pointed out that even in the UK “In every city there are small bands of eager men and women, watching with hungry eyes any chance to make a general overturn in the hopes of profiting themselves in the confusion, and these miscreants are fed by Bolshevist money. [Cheers.] They are ceaselessly endeavoring by propagating the doctrines of communism, by preaching violent revolution, by inflaming discontent, to infect us with their disease.[1] 

To begin with, Imperial Germany helped smuggle Lenin and dozens of his comrades across German territory and Sweden to the rebellious Petrograd in April 1917, and supplied them with money. America was not far behind. In his comprehensive article “American Pravda: the Bolshevik Revolution and Its Aftermath” Ron Unz quotes Henry Wickham Steed, editor of The Times of London that “(Jacob) Schiff, Warburg and the other top Jewish international bankers were among the leading backers of the Jewish Bolsheviks, through whom they hoped to gain an opportunity for the Jewish exploitation of Russia, and he describes their lobbying efforts on behalf of their Bolshevik allies at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference following the end of the First World War”.[2]

According to Unz, “Even the very recent and highly skeptical 2016 analysis in Kenneth D. Ackerman’s 2016 book Trotsky in New York, 1917 notes that U.S. Military Intelligence reports (were) pointing to Trotsky as the conduit for the heavy financial backing of Schiff and numerous other Jewish financiers” and that Schiff “gave a refuge to Trotsky and other revolutionaries and gave them funds to foment revolution in Russia”.

Armand Hammer (1898 – 1990), also a US Jewish businessman, had provided funds for the Soviets longer than anybody else. But he did not do it just for an idea. Read about him in “The Bolshevik Billionaire” by Steve Sailer.[3]

Both the Communist Party and the Trotsky adherents operated freely in the States when I arrived here in 1966. I witnessed how the country was being torn apart by the Vietnam antiwar movement. Still, I enjoyed the year at the University of Chicago where I was free to go where I wanted, to meet people I liked, and read books unavailable in the USSR. One day I bought Hitler’s book “Main Kampf” (in English translation) at the university bookstore; then went to a lecture by Hanna Arendt (1906 – 1975), who pointed out the similarity of both the Nazi and Soviet regimes in their totalitarian essence; then approached a stand that peddled Trotsky’s books and engaged his young adherents who were glad I defected from the USSR; then visited a former White Army officer who still wore the Tsarist military cap in his tiny apartment, and we had a drink to Communism’s  defeat in Russia and elsewhere; then I spoke before a Lithuanian club whose members listened to me eagerly as they not had a Lithuanian defector for a while. Finally, I celebrated Christmas at a Ukrainian church and saw no difference with Russian churches in the USSR, except that it was full. It was a year of liberty to discover. I felt like a Columbus.

Sometime during the 1980s when I moved to California to teach Russian language and Soviet studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies I came across the book Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties by Peter Collier  and David Horowitz. As in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I witnessed insurgent activities, including bombing attacks, on the campus of the University of Washington in Seattle, and I was curious how the two would describe those events.

One chapter attracted my attention. It was about David’s family life in a provincial American town. Both his father and mother, Jewish to be sure, were members of the CPUSA. And so were virtually all of their friends. All their endless meetings were about how to defeat “American imperialism” and to advance the cause of the Communist Party. Even though for the public they projected themselves as “The New Left,” writes Horowitz, in reality they were the same “old Stalinists”. He describes his upbringing as a self-imposed ideological ghetto because his parents shunned the newspapers and did not talk to non-Communist neighbors.

As to “Second Thoughts” in the title, I remember David’s decisive rejection of the subversive Communist ideology that indeed produced the “destructive generation” in the USA. I cannot help noticing, however, that after abandoning one extreme, Communism, David has joined the other, Zionism.[4]

It took a while for the best minds of the West to recognize that Zamyatin was right in describing the Soviet regime as totalitarian and issuing a warning as early as 1921. The West simply ignored several attempt to advance the Bolshevik Revolution in Hungary (the leader was Bela Kun) and Germany (Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg), and the emergence of fascism in Italy and National-Socialism in Germany, both trying to build a right-wing totalitarian regimes as a wall against the spread of left-wing Communist totalitarianism.

Apparently, nobody paid much attention to the book The Origin of Totalitarian Democracy by Jacob Leib Talmon (1916 –1980), Professor of Modern History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Reviewing genealogy of totalitarianism, Talmon argued that Communist political Messianism stemmed from the French Revolution, and stressed the similarities between Jacobinism and Stalinism.

Even though Germany’s and Italy’s economies were more free-market oriented that that of the USSR, Western governments chose to side with the Left-Totalitarian Soviet Communism. The common denominator of the two kinds of totalitarianism was reliance on violence in domestic and foreign affairs. Not for nothing the Soviet writer Vasily Grossman (1905 – 1964) [5] summed up his World War II experience in his novel “Life and Fate,” including description of German extermination camps, by wondering about “Why is the class warfare we unleashed morally superior to the race war of the Nazis?”

Not only were Western democracy in alliance with Stalin during WWII, but they were eager to please him even when the war ended. As Julius Epstein (1901-1975) showed in his ground-breaking book “Operation Keelhaul”, they systematically violated international rules on prisoners of war and even the Yalta Accords by surrendering to Stalin thousands of former White Army soldiers and Cossacks who never were Soviet citizens as the Yalta Accords required.

One may call it a Western “democratic” contribution to keeping the GULAG filled! Few years later, Nikolai Tolstoy, a British descendant of the famed Russian writer, elaborated on Epstein’s topic in his book, Victims of Yalta, originally published in London, 1977. I suppose, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, also learned few things about the West’s cooperation with the Soviet totalitarian regime, even beyond the call of duty.

Here I must interject the name of Benjamin H Freedman, who has shed a lot of new light on the most obscure dealings between the Communists and Capitalists, who are usually thought to be mortal enemies. According to Wikipedia, <<”Benjamin Harrison Freedman (1890 –1984) was an American businessman, Holocaust denier, and vocal anti-Zionist. Born in a Jewish family, he converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism. Outside of political activism, Freedman was a partner in a dermatological institute and investor for small businesses.”>>[6]

I first heard about Freedman some years ago, but then there were no accusations of him being a Holocaust denier. What attracted my attention was his introduction as “a Jewish Defector (who) Warns America.” Being a defector myself, and actually the author of Soviet Defectors: The KGB Wanted List[7] (though I defected in 1962 not from Judaism, but Soviet Communism), I could not help admiring that a few months before my defection, in October 1961 Freedman gave a speech before a patriotic audience at the Willard Hotel, Washington, D.C.,[8] on behalf of Conde McGinley's patriotic newspaper, “Common Sense”.

Here’s what Freedman said: “Here in the United States, the Zionists and their co-religionists have complete control of our government. For many reasons, too many and too complex to go into here at this time, the Zionists and their co-religionists rule these United States as though they were the absolute monarchs of this country. Now you may say that is a very broad statement, but let me show you what happened while we were all asleep.”

Is it not surprising, even baffling, to realize that the Jews as a people whom we, the Gentiles, often associate with the jewelry business, - that is, dealing with gold, silver, pearls and diamonds,- nonetheless seem not to strive for the Golden Mean as the goal of their own individual or national existence?

In any case, Lenin (partly Jewish) and his Jewish Bolsheviks abhorred the very word of “compromise” (компромис in Russian) as a “bourgeois trick” designed to emasculate revolutionary fervor. Methinks, this kind of ideological rigidness prevented Mikhail Gorbachev and his perestroika comrades from even seeking in the late 1980s a compromise between the then exiting socialist planned economy and collective farming, on the one hand, and the remnants of individual free enterprise which were not yet fully eradicated in the USSR, on the other. As I had lived in Sweden, I imagined that the Swedish national experience of merging free enterprise with a welfare state could serve as a model for post-Communist Russia.

Instead, after the dissolution of the USSR, Russia under Boris Yeltsin plunged, on the advice of a Harvard team of Jewish economists, into “privatization, that is whole-sale dissolution of state enterprises and transferring them into the hands of oligarchs, almost all Jewish, whose main “skill” was having accounts overseas.[9]

Just before the dissolution, I finished my book Russia Beyond Communism: A Chronicle of National Rebirth.[10] In it I took the issue with Western sovietologists who were so enthused with Gorbachev’s perestroika that saw no other but a Communist future.
​
Certainly they abhorred the idea that a new Russia would identify with its Christian roots. In fact, my book was dedicated to the thousand year anniversary of Russia’s baptism in tand he year 988. The book came out just in time for me to visit Moscow during the turbulent August 1991 give a copy to Boris Yeltsin following his victory speech after dispersing an abortive coup by Communist hardliners on August 22. It was a symbolic gift because during the speech Yeltsin announced that the Russian Federation would replace the Red flag of Communism with Russia’s national tricolor.

[1] Bolshevism and Imperial Sedition, November 4, 1920/A speech at United Wards Club Luncheon, Cannon Street Hotel in London. https://www.nationalchurchillmuseum.org/bolshevism-and-imperial-sedition.html
 
[2] “American Pravda: the Bolshevik Revolution and Its Aftermath”. By Ron Unz.. JULY 23, 2018
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-the-bolshevik-revolution-and-its-aftermath/
 
[3] The Bolshevik Billionaire. By Steve Sailer. July 15, 2015
https://www.takimag.com/article/the_bolshevik_billionaire_steve_sailer/#axzz3g1E4AlBS
 
[4] Right-wing bomb thrower David Horowitz behind anti-SJP posters
Alex Kane on February 26, 2015 https://mondoweiss.net/2015/02/thrower-horowitz-posters/
 
[5]  Vasily Grossman (1905 –1964) was a Soviet writer of Jewish origin. He trained as a chemical engineer at Moscow State University. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was engaged as a war correspondent by the Red Army newspaper and wrote first-hand accounts of the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk and Berlin. Grossman's eyewitness reports of a Nazi extermination camp near Treblinka were among the first accounts of a Nazi death camp. While Grossman was never arrested, his two major literary works (Life and Fate and Forever Flowing) were deemed anti-Soviet, and Grossman became a nonperson. The KGB raided Grossman's flat after he had completed Life and Fate, seizing manuscripts. He was told by the Communist Party's chief ideologist Mikhail Suslov that the book could not be published for two or three hundred years. At the time of Grossman's death in 1964 these books remained unreleased. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Grossman
 
[6] Benjamin Harrison Freedman (1890 – 1984) was an American businessman, Holocaust denier, and vocal anti-Zionist. Born in a Jewish family, he converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism. Outside of political activism, Freedman was a partner in a dermatological institute and investor for small businesses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_H._Freedman

[7] Soviet Defectors: The KGB Wanted List (Hoover Institution Press Publication) by Vladislav Krasnov https://www.amazon.com/Soviet-Defectors-Wanted-Institution-Publication/dp/0817982329
 
[8] https://www.biblebelievers.org.au/benjamin.htm
 
[9] Would Harvard Ever Help Russia? By W. George Krasnow http://www.russialist.org/archives/2006-62-24.php
Read also  Did Shock Therapy Help Russia? About Anders Aslund’s Capitalist Revolution
http://www.russialist.org/archives/2008-88-39.php
 
[10] Russia Beyond Communism: A Chronicle Of National Rebirth (C C R S SERIES ON CHANGE IN CONTEMPORARY SOVIET SOCIETY) by Vladislav Krasnov, Bolder, CO. 1991 https://www.amazon.com/Russia-Beyond-Communism-Chronicle-CONTEMPORARY/dp/0813383617

​The book was a review of the “polyphonic choir” consisting of the voices of glasnost, that is, Soviet authors of different political persuasions searching for possible sources of national renewal.  The main focus was on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “Letter to the Soviet Leaders”(1973) and “Rebuilding Russia”(1990). 

In both works Solzhenitsyn proposed a peaceful, gradual, and Non-Violent evolution of the country away from its Marxist-Leninist fetters. In Chapter Four I included a discussion of the role of Jews in the revolution and Jewish –Russian relations in general.

As it turned out, near the end of his career, Solzhenitsyn turned to the same topic in his two-volume book “Two Hundred Years Together” in which he put the role of Jews in the Communist revolution into a deeper historical context. Strangely, the English translation is not readily available for American readers. For the lack of it, I recommend an essay by Vladimir Moss titled “Russia and the Jews: 1856-1917.” It’s available for downloading on Academia.edu. Dr. Moss is actually a British scholar and converted Russian Orthodox Christian. He frankly admits that his book is “based largely on (Solzhenitsyn’s) research – which is derived to a great extent from Jewish sources. For it is only on the basis of such balanced and truthful historiography that real peace can be established between the nations”. I agree with Dr. Moss that the truth about the greatest tragedy of the 20th century should be sought via a dialogue between, first and foremost, Jews and Russians, for the sake of peace on earth.

Yet there are some Jews who have welcomed Solzhenitsyn’s challenge for a dialogue. One of them is Avigdor Eskin. A former Soviet Jew who now lives in Israel but often appears in talk shows on Russian TV channels. He is the author of “The Jewish View on the Russian Question” (in«Еврейский взгляд на русский вопрос»). A former Soviet dissident who fought for the right of Jews to learn Hebrew and was once arrested for distributing Solzhenitsyn's works, Eskin asks a bold, albeit paradoxical question: “What are the causes of the joint Russian-Jewish fall from Grace into the Sin of communism and liberalism?” I am prepared to agree with him about the “joint fall”, but disagree that communism and liberalism should be lumped together.

Eskin is not alone in admitting a Jewish guilt in creating and running Communism. The Israeli Rabbi Yosef Tzvi ben Porat went as far as accepting the main blame and apologizing to the Russian people: "We are to blame for everything and we must know why we are being driven away. We created Marxism and Leninism. We captured Russia. We killed 30 million educated Russians. We are wise men and sat down to rule over them." Moreover, he believes that revolutionary atheist Jews provoked Hitler's rise to power in Germany. Ben Porat is not alone. Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi,[2] the American rabbi of the Orthodox denomination has been making similar statements. (Read more in Emperor Michael II in the Solzhenitsyn House - Author: Vladislav Krasnov. http://www.raga.org/news/emperor-michael-ii-in-the-solzhenitsyn-house-author-vladislav-krasnov)

Now back to “The Secrets of Jewish Genius”. I may not have written this rebuttal to Bret Stephens had I not checked my email on January 3, 2020. There was a letter from Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) of which I have been an eager (non-Jewish) member for a number of years. The letter said:

<<Tallie Ben Daniel <info@jewishvoiceforpeace.org>
TO:  W George Krasnow <president92@gmail.com>
DATE:      January 3, 2020
Dear W George (my common American appellation),
I was appalled when I saw the latest column from New York Times writer Bret Stephens. He claims that white Ashkenazi Jews have genetically superior intellects, and backs up this claim with a bogus study from a white supremacist eugenics “expert.”

This is race science – the same ideology that has inspired violence and genocide against Jewish people – and we can’t let it stand. Sign our petition to demand The New York Times fire Bret Stephens for this gross abuse of his platform>>.

Frankly, I was a bit baffled, for I did not see in the article any reference to <<a white supremacist eugenics “expert.”>>

Then I re-read Editors’ Note which indeed says (here abbreviated)    that Stephens quoted “a 2005 paper that advanced a genetic hypothesis for the basis of intelligence among Ashkenazi Jews. Mr. Stephens was not endorsing the study or its authors’ views, but it was a mistake to cite it uncritically. The effect was…an impression with many readers that Mr. Stephens was arguing that Jews are genetically superior. That was not his intent. He went on instead to argue that culture and history are crucial factors in Jewish achievements…“What makes Jews special is that they aren’t. They are representational.”[1]

After reading the above I decided not to honor JVP’s request, even though, as a JVP member, I have signed many of its appeals, including those on behalf of Palestinians. In fact, I would recommend JVP to anyone as an organization that is both high-minded and effective. But in this case, I felt it was a mistake to punish Stephens for his free speech and for being proud of his people. I also felt he was already punished by the Editors who nearly emasculated his article.

I say so in spite of strongly objecting to Stephens’ contention that any disagreement with or critique of either Zionism or the state of Israel amounts to Jew-hatred or, as he says, “anti-Semitism”.  In this respect, I am in full agreement with Jewish Voice for Peace created to promote peace between Israel and Palestine. In effect, it also promotes peace between the USA and Russia. As president of the Russia & America Goodwill Association (www.raga.org) which I have run since 1992, I have primarily focused on the improvement of US-Russia relations after the collapse of the USSR. However, it soon became clear that the US foreign policy was high-jacked by the Neocons (several of whom were former Trotskyists)[2] whose goal is world domination for which Israel’s supremacy in the Middle East is the main linchpin.

In RAGA’s quest for peace we do not discriminate between Right or Left, Conservative or Liberal, Protestant, Catholic or Muslim, Gentile or Jew. We welcome thinking people of all persuasions as long as they are truthful, honest, and non-violent.

I have been fortunate in finding many like-minded Jewish peace activists such as Noam Chomsky; Allan Brownfeld (American Council for Judaism); Naomi Klein; Law Professor Marjorie Cohn (a former president of the National Lawyers Guild); Professor Stephen Cohan, a Russia scholar; Norman Finkelstein, the author of THE HOLOCAUST INDUSTRY: Reflections on the exploitation of Jewish Suffering and, most recently, GAZA: An inquest into its martyrdom;  Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept who assisted Ed Snowden’s escape, and denounces US religious fanaticism[3]; Dan Lieberman, my Washington DC tennis buddy who runs the indomitable Alternative Insight;  Gilad Atzmon, a jazz saxophonist who freed himself from the Zionist straitjacket; the Mondoweiss News Site; the emphatically Non-Violent branch of Judaism Neturei Karta;[4] the two of my colleagues at the conservative Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation Professor Paul Gottfried and Jon Utley, publisher of The American Conservative ; Ed Lozansky, a former Soviet nuclear scientist and dissident who immigrated to the US and now runs US-Russia.org think-tank and American University in Moscow; Gilbert Doctorow, a Russia scholar and RAGA contributor; Israel Shamir,[5] Ron Unz, who proposed a strategy to defeat mainstream media;[6] Nomi Prins, former Wall Street insider, now a geopolitical financial expert and critic of financial manipulators; and, finally,  Brother Nathanael,[7] a former New York Jew and now a hermit Christian monk who rallies on his YouTube somewhere in Iowa against corrupt Jewish media moguls and politicians with such precision, passion and Chutzpah that any Gentile “anti-Semite” could envy.

Sadly, after this article was posted on https://www.unz.com/, Jon Utley passed away. He was my dear friend and peace-loving RAGA supporter. The COVID-19 contingency does not allow me write a eulogy. But I want to share with you my recollection of how Jon and I worked together in trying to find out what happened to his Russian Jewish father after he was arrested in Moscow in 1936.

Jon Basil Utley at 80 “He is One of Us” (Memoirs of Two Trips to Russia) Tribute by W. George Krasnow at Jon’s birthday party in Washington on March 12, 2014 John Basil Utley at 80 “He is One of Us”. You may also like to see a DVD about our search for   his father’s remains Return to the Gulag: Jon Utley's Search for His Father

To come back to the list of RAGA associated and my friends of Jewish origin, I am proud to say that some of their articles I have posted or quoted in RAGA newsletter and even translated into Russian. Not all of the above are concerned with Israel or Zionism. But those who are concerned are not working in a vacuum. As early as 2001 the research of two great scholars, John Mearshimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard resulted in the book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy in which the linkage of the two was made uncontestable.

We are very fortunate to have on our side the authority of Jimmy Carter, the US president and the Nobel Peace Prize winner, the first to pay attention to human rights in the USSR and the one who brought Israel and Palestine closest to a peaceful agreement. To his great credit, after the deal failed, Carter did not fall silent but wrote a book to leave Israel with the choice, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.[8] Alas, the greatest electoral support for a short-sightred pro-Israel US foreign policy under Donald Trump comes not from US Jews but from the evangelical wing of Protestantism, the so called Christian Zionists.[9]

I believe that the strongest defense against prejudice toward Jews around the world, as well as for Israel’s statehood, comes not from Israel’s armed forces (IDF), nor from its nuclear weapons,[10] and certainly not from the US Department of Defense, but from the righteous Jews like those listed above. Because when the non-Jews meet, read or hear the people like those listed above, they know that in the search for truth and justice what counts most is not the difference in IQs between Jews and Gentiles but their commitment to decency.

While I do not wish to dispute the importance of high IQ scores for Jewish provenance in business, arts and science, I doubt that higher IQs lead automatically to higher ethical standards or wisdom. Quite to the contrary: a person of higher intelligence is more likely to succumb to excessive pride and egotism leading to the foibles of hubris and self-destruction as has been known since antiquity. On a mundane level Bernie Madoff [11] was probably a lot cleverer than the average American, but this did not prevent him from robbing his investors, Jews and Gentiles alike, including even charitable associations in Israel. Nor did his cleverness prevent him from causing a tragedy for himself and his family. And Kosher Mafia, alas, is not an “anti-Semitic” trope. I heard about it way back, from my Jewish friends in 1966 when I lived in Chicago. Now I learn more about Jewish mafia in America not from “The New York Times” but from the Israeli newspaper “Haaretz”.

However, I am amenable to Stephens’s correction, suggested by NYT editors, that “The Secrets of Jewish Genius” must be sought not so much in racial characteristics, but rather in the idea that “culture and history are crucial factors in Jewish achievements”.  But I would add “religion” as well and recommend he reads The Jewish Century [12] by Yuri Slezkine, my former Soviet countryman and now American professor. Below is the publisher’s teaser: “<<This masterwork of interpretative history begins with a bold declaration: The Modern Age is the Jewish Age -- and we are all, to varying degrees, Jews. The assertion is, of course, metaphorical. But it underscores Yuri Slezkine’s provocative thesis. Not only have Jews adapted better than many other groups to living in the modern world, they have become the premiere symbol and standard of modern life everywhere.>>”

Also to be recommended is Max Weber’s (1864-1920)[13] classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.[14] Weber was a German economist who wrote a number of essays in the early 1900s in which he linked levels of economic development to the prevailing religious beliefs and ethical standards of various nations. His observation was that the countries of Northern Europe (Germany, Scandinavia, and the UK) and North America – were doing much better in economic development because people there were guided by Protestant values such as individualism, entrepreneurship, and thrift to a greater extent than the countries of Southern Europe, where Catholicism did not emphasize such values.

Of course, Weber’s was a challenge to Marx’s class struggle theory that discounted the connection. For the sake of argument I would also add the book “Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism And The Rise Of The Jews”[15] by Albert Lindemann, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

If Stephens assumes that the interaction of Jews and non-Jews has involved just one guilty party, Lindemann, reviewing outbreaks of modern “Anti-Semitism”, allows that sometimes it was a reaction to certain patterns of Jewish behavior about which even Karl Marx complained. Metaphorically, Lindemann links it with the cultural habits derived from the Jewish Bible, such as the story of Jacob cheating his tween brother Esau of his first-born right by conspiring with his mother Rebecca to deceive her husband Isaac in order “to get her way.[16]
​
Where I do agree with Bret Stephens is his statement quoting Einstein: “There is a moral belief, “incarnate in the Jewish people” according to Einstein, that “the life of the individual only has value [insofar] as it aids in making the life of every living thing nobler and more beautiful.” Einstein is indeed so important for modern thinking that when I was recently writing the essay Mahatma Gandhi and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Two Giants Who Blessed the 20th Century, suggesting the need to replace Professor Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” with a Saving the Planet paradigm, I was tempted to add Albert Einstein to the duo.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/27/opinion/jewish-culture-genius-iq.html
 
[2] Neoconservatism - where Trotsky meets Stalin and Hitler. By:Srdja Trifkovic | April 02, 2015
https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/neoconservatism-where-trotsky-meets-stalin-and-hitler/
 
[3] Religious Fanaticism is a Huge Factor in Americans’ Support for Israel. By Glenn Greenwald April 15, 2015 "ICH" - "The Intercept"http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article41566.htm

[4] Neturei Karta is not - as is often alleged - a small sect or an extremist group of "ultra-orthodox" Jews. The Neturei Karta has added nothing to nor has taken anything away from the written and oral law of the Torah. (We) are fighting the changes and inroads made by political Zionism during the past one-hundred odd years. https://www.nkusa.org/AboutUs/index.cfm

[5] Israel Shamir is a spiritual and political thinker. His comments are published on his site www.israelshamir.net and elsewhere. He is the author of three books, Galilee Flowers, Cabbala of Power and Masters of Discourse. Born in Novosibirsk, the USSR, he moved to Israel in 1969, served as paratrooper in the IDF and fought in the 1973 war. After the war, he turned to journalism and writing. In 1975, Shamir joined the BBC and moved to London. In 1977-79 he lived in Japan. http://www.israelshamir.com/biography/

[6] Ron Unz's Strategy for the Alt-Media to Defeat the Mainstream Media Is Brilliant. Vladislav Krasnov , Jul 25, 2019 https://russia-insider.com/en/ron-unzs-strategy-alt-media-defeat-mainstream-media-brilliant/ri27507

[7] Brother Nathanael is a New York Jew named Kappner who converted to Russian Orthodox Christianity and now runs Real Jew News in which he tears off the mask of anonymity from those Jewish Money Bags who manipulate US mass media, U.S. foreign policy or Hollywood sex–for-success industry. See his latest YouTube  January 28, 2020
The Enemies Of Free Speech http://www.realjewnews.com/?p=1421

[8]  https://www.amazon.com/Palestine-Peace-Apartheid-Jimmy-Carter/dp/0743285034

[9] Christian Zionist philo-Semitism is driving Trump’s Israel policy. By Mairav Zonszein. .Jan. 28, 2020
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/01/28/trump-thinks-supporting-israel-means-letting-it-do-whatever-it-wants/ See also Why Do Evangelical Christians Support Israel? Because they have a favorable opinion of Jews. DAVID BERNSTEIN |THE VOLOKH CONSPIRACY | 1.20.2020 6:35 PM
https://reason.com/2020/01/20/why-do-evangelical-christians-support-israel/

[10] Did Israel Blow Up the Vanunu Nuclear Whistleblower Affair to Boost Its Deterrence? Thirty years after the espionage case exposed Israel’s nuclear secrets, the questions remain. By Adam Raz/ March 30, 2018. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-did-israel-rig-the-nuclear-whistleblower-affair-to-boost-deterrence-1.5961997

[11] 10 years after Madoff ripped off the Jewish world, many groups have managed to find their feet again. By BEN SALES, 21 December 2018. https://www.timesofisrael.com/10-years-after-madoff-ripped-off-the-jewish-world-a-sort-of-happy-ending/

[12] The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkine. https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691127606/the-jewish-century

[13] Maximilian Weber (1864 –1920)-  German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist, one of the most important theorists on the development of modern Western society. His ideas profoundly influenced social theory. Weber is often cited, with Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx, as among the three founders of sociology.

[14] The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, a book by Max Weber. The original German text was composed in 1904 and 1905, and was translated into English for the first time by American sociologist Talcott Parsons in 1930. It is considered a founding text in economic sociology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism

[15] Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-semitism And The Rise Of The Jews. By Albert Lindeman. https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=980241516&searchurl=vcatn%3DJEWISH%2BHISTORY.%26sortby%3D17%26vcat%3DJEWISH___HISTORY___%26vci%3D229481&cm_sp=msrp-_-msrpdesc-_-bdp

[16] When Esau learns of his brother's thievery, he begs his father to undo the blessing. Isaac responds to his eldest son's plea by saying that he could not reverse the sacred blessing. Esau vows to kill Jacob (Genesis 27:41). Rebecca intervenes to save her younger son from being murdered by his elder twin brother, Esau. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esau

​Einstein cherished his friendship with Gandhi. Indeed, all three—Gandhi, Solzhenitsyn and Einstein—lifted themselves above one’s ethnicity, country and religion to show the ways for Saving the Planet. I also added Martin Luther King Jr., who reproached America for ignoring the Christian commandment “to turn the other cheek,” but instead rushing into unprovoked wars.

It was not accidental that Einstein befriended Gandhi: both were ardent critics of the violent roots of the Israeli state. Einstein was among those outstanding Jewish American thinkers who on December 4, 1948 signed a letter to The New York Times condemning Menahem Begin’s visit to the USA, “Lest America be fooled by post-Independence rhetoric, the Herut party Begin led was ‘closely akin to the Nazi and Fascist parties,” they wrote.[1]

Alas, the 20th century showed that, very tragically, the most dynamic young Jews of the world were attracted to two opposite extremes: either exclusive race-based Zionist nationalism or all-embracing abstract Communist internationalism. Both extremes rely on violence. Both pretend to have a strong popular mandate. It does not help that lately Zionism got a tremendous boost from the American Neocons trying to turn it into Zionist globalism.

If Israel is to continue to exist, it is only on the terms of Martin Buber, perhaps the greatest Jewish philosopher: "The task of Israel as a distinct nation (is) inexorably linked to the task of humanity in general". For starters, we all should follow the Golden Rule: “Do not do onto the other what you don’t want to be done to you”. It is expected from the Jews no less. As Hillel the Elder (c. 110 BC – 10 AD) advised someone who wanted to convert to Judaism, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn".

[1]  This Day in Jewish History. 1948: N.Y. Times Publishes Letter by Einstein, Other Jews Accusing Menachem Begin of Fascism. https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/.premium-1948-n-y-times-letter-by-einstein-slams-begin-1.5340057

Vladislav Krasnov (aka W George Krasnow), Ph.D., is the author of Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky: A Study in the Polyphonic Novel, Soviet Defectors: The KGB Wanted List, and Russia Beyond Communism: A Chronicle of National Rebirth.

Since 1992 he has led Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA.org).

We are now affiliated with the Global Harmony Association (GHA), founded by Dr. Leo Semashko of Sankt Peterburg, to advance Mahatma Gandhi’s ideal of Non-Violence.
https://peacefromharmony.org/?cat=en_c&key=938
 
Peace and Justice to the World. 
миру мир и благоволение в сердцах

RAGA: "We are an association of Americans who believe it is in the U.S. national interests to foster friendship with Russia on the basis of mutual Good Will and non-interference in each other's affairs. RAGA is a gathering of people who share common interests in Russia's history, culture, religion, economy, politics and the way of life. We feel that Russian people have made outstanding contributions to humankind and are capable of greater achievements. We envision Russia as a strong, independent, proud and free nation and as a partner in achieving peace in the world."

​All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

RAGA News
www.RAGA.org​

Dear friends of the Russia & America Good Will Association (www.raga.org) and antiwar colleagues!

Let me congratulate Russian readers with the Russian Easter on April 19. Sorry that COVID-19 contingency prevented me from doing the same for the earlier Hanukkah and the Gregorian calendar Easter for the benefit of the majority of our readers!

From TOR Browser to OPERA
For some time I have heard the reports that RAGA became inaccessible for readers located in Russia and some other countries. No worry:  TOR Browser is easy to install, and it is FREE https://www.torproject.org/download/ the same goes for OPERA VPN: https://www.opera.com/features/free-vpn

COVID facts, lessons, awareness of Life on Earth vulnerability

ON APRIL 16, 2020 BY PATRICK ARMSTRONG IN RF SITREP

COVID AND RUSSIA. Overall totals to today are 28K infected, 232 dead. This raises the question of why the death rate in Russia appears to be lower. One theory is that the widespread Soviet-era tuberculosis vaccinations (BCG vaccine) may have had an effect – just how or why is unclear, but there seems to be a statistical relationship. A test of its effectiveness is beginning in Australia. Over half the cases are in Moscow but every region except one reports cases: most of Sunday’s infections in Shanghai came from a flight from Russia the day before. A pass system was introduced in Moscow yesterday but not very successfully (and many standing in line waiting to be checked). The new hospital in Moscow Region is up and running. A vaccine prototype is undergoing human testing (including by the developer). The Victory Parade is postponed. Meanwhile Russian military specialists are working away in Italy...
https://patrickarmstrong.ca/2020/04/16/russian-federation-sitrep-16-april-2020/
​
SITREP 2 APRIL 2020/ ON APRIL 2, 2020 BY PATRICK ARMSTRONGIN RF SITREP
COVID AND RUSSIA. As of today there are about 3600 cases and 30 deaths, most in Moscow City. Why so much lower than other places? Some reasons: Moscow ordered travel and flight closures earlier than Western countries; it does not appear to have run down its stockpiles of PPE (as the USA and, apparently, most Western countries did); the war-time/emergency preparedness of a country that knows the cost of not being prepared and the fact that anti-Russia sanctions have made the country very self-sufficient. (As even the NYT admits. A few weeks ago, though, in NYT-land, Russia’s economy was faltering. Hard to keep up with the Party Line it is.)……. NEW NWO. Post COVID, things are going to be a lot different. I offer Stephen Walt’s “The Death of American Competence” for your reflection. Pompeo’s boast only six weeks ago that “The West is winning” looks hollow. This 2019 rating of countries best prepared to deal with a pandemic hasn’t worn well (USA and UK first, Russia and China in the middle). 2020 – the year the West lost its mojo.
​
https://patrickarmstrong.ca/2020/04/02/russian-federation-sitrep-2-april-2020/

U.S. Sanctions Must Stop/ Simone Weil Center, By Paul Grenier, April 1, 2020
 Sharon Tennison, director of the Center for Citizen Initiatives, has called for an end to the U.S. policy of sanctions against dozens of nations during a deadly global pandemic. We urge everyone to read her appeal, sign on to it, and distribute it further. *

By Mikhail S. Gorbachev MARCH 16, 2020 If war is the consequence of a policy, then get rid of the policy.

It is only two months into 2020, and the world has already been on the brink of a clash between two great powers. These were real military actions—in Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Then the participants seemed to rethink and stepped back from the brink…What is this? It’s the old policy of “balancing on the edge of war.” A dangerous, adventurist policy.

https://www.thenation.com/article/world/mikhail-gorbachev-coronavirus-nuclear/

Coronavirus: What could the West learn from Asia? By Helier Cheung BBC News
RAGA COMMENT: Yes, it’s need to be done

The outbreak hit many countries in Asia several weeks earlier - and some have been praised for containing the number of infections. For example, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan all kept case numbers relatively low - despite their proximity to mainland China.

What did they do differently - and are there any lessons for other countries?

Lesson one: Take it seriously - and act quickly
Health experts agree on the same measures for containing the outbreak - test widely, isolate those infected, and encourage social distancing. Such measures are being adopted to varying degrees in the West now - but a key difference is that many countries didn't act as quickly.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-51970379

CORONA in INDIA.  As RAGA has a global outreach, I am happy to post a report from our colleague in India.

Daily Pioneer, Tuesday, 14 April 2020 /The Corona apocalypse, Tuesday, 14 April 2020 | Sandhya Jain

……What makes India’s response unique is the Union Cabinet’s decision to reduce salary, allowances and pensions of all Members of Parliament (MPs) by a whopping 30 per cent for one year, with effect from April 1, 2020. The President, Vice President and Governors voluntarily took a similar pay cut as social responsibility. The MP Local Area Development Scheme (MPLADS) has been suspended for two years (2020-21 and 2021-22); all money saved will go to the Consolidated Fund of India. This scale of personal sacrifice is unmatched in the world so far; even children have been inspired to give their savings (for bicycle, birthday) to feed the needy...

Comparisons are undesirable at this apocalyptic moment in human history but given the uncalled for attacks on India from some responsible quarters, some points are in order. India saw its first case of Coronavirus in the last week of January, around the same time as Europe and the US. After initially claiming the disease would go away on its own, US President Donald Trump said on March 30 that administration estimates show that COVID-19 could kill 100,000 to 200,000 people in America and such a toll would indicate that his administration has “done a very good job.” Imagine an Indian leader saying such a death toll is acceptable and surviving. At the time of writing, the world had 1,853,327 cases and 114,250 deaths; India had 9,152 cases and 308 mortalities.

https://www.dailypioneer.com/2020/columnists/the-corona-apocalypse.html

RAGA comment:  As you can see above, India’s top leadership set the standards for leaders everywhere by making personal income sacrifice before expecting the same of their plain citizens!

​PATRICK LAWRENCE: The US National Emergency  RAGA likes Patrick’s geopolitical philosophy

https://consortiumnews.com/2020/03/16/patrick-lawrence-the-us-national-emergency/ 

COVID-19 calls on us to consider our plundered commons and unite around four truths made conspicuous by the pandemic.  Now that the Trump administration has declared the COVID–19 virus a national emergency, it is plain that this once-a-century catastrophe has some things to tell us about ourselves. A thousand New Age apostles call for unity in 1960s “get together” style. In the Hallmark card category, Marianne Williamson advised us on Twitter Saturday, “We can grow from this.”

We may or may not grow from this. This will depend on whether we identify the lessons the COVID–19 pandemic has for humanity — and then go on to learn from them such that we can effect change in the way we live and organize ourselves. Certain nations — agile, imaginative, confident — prove capable of change in the face of new circumstances. The U.S. is not one of these, to put the point politely. ..Neoliberalism in the extreme version we live with — another Reagan-era legacy — is the wrong technology for moments such as this one. It cannot respond to 21stcentury exigencies such as COVID­­–19. We know this now. It is prominent among the culprits behind this crisis. It has devastated our public space, not least our public health institutions.  

This century demands sturdy supra-national institutions—truth No. 3. But they are nowhere in evidence now because we have so far failed to build them effectively. These, too, have to be properly democratized if they are to work as conduits for ground-up solutions to on-the-ground problems. The UN so often fails because so much of it is manipulated by the U.S. and its Atlantic allies.

https://consortiumnews.com/2020/03/16/patrick-lawrence-the-us-national-emergency/  

The Fed, the Virus, and Inequality
A Global Dr. Frankenstein at Work/ By Nomi Prins

https://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176674/tomgram%3A_nomi_prins%2C_the_global_economy_catches_the_coronavirus

Dr. Frankenstein, the experiment (in neoliberal economics) became the monster. The byproduct of making lots of money available to a sliver of society was, of course, that it flowed to the top, only exacerbating the already significant inequality on this planet. That’s why there’s something the same and yet so different about today’s inequality… If recent years have taught us anything, it’s that the official responses to crises will ultimately help Wall Street and the markets, while leaving real people behind again. It’s a vicious cycle that will only stoke inequality further until, of course, whether thanks to the coronavirus or some unknown future development, it all comes tumbling down.

Vladislav Krasnov
April 6 at 6:09 PM · 

RAGA.org sends KUDOS to NOMI again for we too seek a more peaceful, fair and harmonious world for all/RAGA.org recommends to listen to a former Wall Street insider who is now with us, the outsiders Vladislav Krasnov
​
APRIL 6, 2020
Wall Street Wins, Again: Bailouts in the Time of Coronavirus/ By NOMI PRINS
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/04/06/wall-street-wins-again-bailouts-in-the-time-of-coronavirus/
​
To say that these are unprecedented times would be the understatement of the century.

David Horowitz of The Times of Israel summed up our common humility before the challenge of CORONA in these words: "the deeply dismaying truth that months into this pandemic, and weeks into radically curtailed life as we know it on much of planet Earth, the people to whom we look for guidance — the experts, and the political leaders who hopefully at least try to make: decisions on the basis of the experts’ wisdom — still cannot entirely pin down COVID-19.  

As to myself, since January 3, 2020 I have been busy with this
Sighing at the Secrets of Jewish Genius
Rebuttal to Bret Stephens’s The New York Times Column
VLADISLAV KRASNOV • FEBRUARY 3, 2020
 • 10,000 WORDS •   251 COMMENTS • 3 NEW • REPLY
https://www.unz.com/article/sighing-at-the-secrets-of-jewish-genius/?highlight=Krasnov

It is a huge, complicated and usually controversial topic on which I continued to work on by producing a version of the above article and its Russian rendition for the benefit of RAGA readers. (See attachments to this email)

Finally, I am happy to congratulate the Global Harmony Association, with which RAGA is now affiliated, on publication of a new collection “Gandhica: Intellectual Triumph of Varnas/Spherons Equality.”Approved by the GHA o­n April 7, 2020
  
Publication:
In English: https://peacefromharmony.org/?cat=en_c&key=938
In Russian: https://peacefromharmony.org/?cat=ru_c&key=835
 
After the publication of the GHA eighth book “Global Peace Science” in 2016 (https://peacefromharmony.org/docs/global-peace-science-2016.pdf), we started preparing for a new book, which eventually got the name Gandhica. We found in philosophy, science and practice of non-violence of the greatest peacemaker in human history, Mahatma Gandhi, a new fundamental thinking/consciousness for a new, peacemaking era that eliminates inequality and war, ensures the humanity survival and the prosperity of all nations o­n the basis of Gandhian equal varnas/spherons, covering the entire population. Hundreds of the GHA members and its peacemaking friends participated in the creation of this book, of which 82 people from 25 countries became its co-authors, including the President of India, four Nobel Peace Laureates and many peace leaders.

Sincerely,
W George Krasnow (http://wiki-org.ru/wiki/Краснов,_Владислав_Георгиевич)
President, RAGA
www.raga.org
Facebook

Peace and Justice to the World. 
миру мир и благоволение в сердцах

From RAGA site:
"We are an association of Americans who believe it is in the U.S. national interests to foster friendship with Russia on the basis of mutual Good Will and non-interference in each other's affairs. RAGA is a gathering of people who share common interests in Russia's history, culture, religion, economy, politics and the way of life. We feel that Russian people have made outstanding contributions to humankind and are capable of greater achievements. We envision Russia as a strong, independent, proud and free nation and as a partner in achieving peace in the world."

​All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

RAGA News
www.RAGA.org​

Dear friends of the Russia & America Good Will Association (www.raga.org) and antiwar colleagues!

We may be a bit off the precise timing, but our seasonal greetings to people of different faiths are just as cordial: Merry Christmas, Delightful Diwali, Ecstatic Eid, Happy Chanukah, and a prosperous New Year to you all! 

The more we have tried to improve the US & Russia relation, the more we realize that it can hardly be done without replacing the now prevailing paradigm of "clash of civilizations" by a realization of common destiny of humankind.

So, let me save your time for holidays celebration, by placing just two items inside RAGA Antidote 55 greeting.

First, I am delighted to forward the holidays greeting from Rich Siegel, an American musician and singer, who does his best to overcome the pernicious divide between Israel and Palestine, Jews, Muslims and Christians in the Holy Land. I got Siegel's greeting via Israel Shamir's readers list. (Shamir is my old friend who first emigrated from the USSR to Israel and then, upset about Israel's racist attitude toward Palestinians, moved back to Russia and now resides in Sankt-Peterburg). 

Rich is an American peace-loving singer and musician. As a Jew, he is nonetheless happy to say "Merry Christmas" to Christians and "Happy Hanukkah" to Jews regardless whether they are in the USA or Israel or Russia or anywhere.  But he feels especially distressed by the injustices and even terrorist attacks committed by Israeli extremists against Palestinian Muslims and Christians and even against  Archbishop Atallah Hanna of Christian Palestinian Church in Jerusalem.

Rich quotes Archbishop:
​
“I would like to remind all Christians all around the world there is no point in celebrating Christmas if you do not pay attention to what is happening in Palestine as it is the birthplace of Christ and where Christianity originated and spread its message throughout the world.” ~Archbishop Atallah Hanna~

December 2019  

Unfortunately, the Archbishop believes that in his opinion“ISRAEL” IS RESPONSIBLE FOR POISONING ME". Quds News Network. Amman, Dec. 23, 2019. http://orthochristian.com/126648.html In Russian see  https://russian.palinfo.com/news/2019/12/25/A

The second item is devoted to Professor William Brumfield of Tulane University who has done more for the restoration of the glory of Russian Christian architecture after the ravages of Soviet anti-religious campaigns than just about anybody. As RAGA friends may have noticed, just about every newsletter for the past several years ends with Professor Brumfield's photographic record of Russian Christian architectural monuments with brief and lucid commentary. Please read about Brumfield's recent trip to Moscow and his talk at The Andrei Rublev Museum ( https://www.moscovery.com/andrei-rublev-museum-of-ancient-russian-culture-and-art/  ) on December 23, 2019 in conjunction with his recent award by the Russian government.

I like to think that Siegel and Brumfield are just two American examples of cross-religious, cross-ethnic, and simply global solidarity that is so essential for the survival of the Planet. That is why lately, RAGA has become affiliated with the Global  Harmony Association, founded by Dr. Leo Semashko of Sankt-Petersburg twelve years ago and now attracting global membership. A former Marxist-Leninist, Leo is determined to turn around Marxist class-struggle into class-cooperation, solidarity and HARMONY. Please take a look at Leo's personal page https://www.peacefromharmony.org/?cat=en_c&key=253

My own writings, both in English and Russian, can be also found there
https://www.peacefromharmony.org/?cat=en_c&key=752  

Finally, as a non-Jewish member of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), I am just as concerned with the recent stabbing attack on five people at the home of Hasidim Rabbi in Monsey, N.Y., but I remain hopeful it was an act of a mentally unstable man rather than expression of Jew hatred in general.The governor called the violence an “act of domestic terrorism” after a suspect was arrested in Harlem. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/28/nyregion/monsey-synagogue-stabbing-anti-semitic.html  

WASHINGTON, December 6 (2019). /TASS/. Russian Ambassador to the USA Anatoly Antonov has awarded the Order of Friendship to a renowned American historian specializing in Russian architecture, professor of Slavic studies of the Tulane University William Craft Brumfield, the Embassy said on its Facebook page. https://tass.com/society/1096371 The award ceremony was held during the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Russian Cultural Center in Washington, D.C.

"Today it’s a great honor for us to present professor Brumfield with a high state award of the Russian Federation - the Order of Friendship in accordance with the Russian presidential decree signed on October 26, 2019, for achievements in strengthening friendship and cooperation between the nations, fruitful activity in conciliating and mutually enriching the cultures of our nations and peoples. Please accept our most cordial congratulations!" Antonov said. https://tass.com/society/1096371

As RAGA readers know, just about every RAGA newsletters for several years has ended with Professor Brumfield’s brief and precise photographic record of Russian religious heritage, often Orthodox Christian churches and chapels that fell apart from age, abuse and vicious desecration during anti-religious campaigns of Soviet government.  

In a sense, William Brumfield has been playing a role similar to that of Savva Yamshchikov and dozens other selfless Russian restorers of Russian religious art after decades of Soviet abuse. As Wikipedia says, Savva Yamshchikov (1938 –2009) was a leading expert on Russian provincial art, particularly medieval icon painting and of the 18th and 19th centuries. Graduated from the Moscow University, Yamshchikov worked at the All-Russian Art Restoration Center in Moscow. He went from one province to another in order to find medieval icons that required cleansing. Yamshchikov …advised Andrei Tarkovsky on the film production of “Andrei Rublev” and Sergey Bondarchuk on the film Boris Godunov.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savva_Yamshchikov

December 23, 2019, William Brumfield gave a great talk to Muscovites in the Museum of Andrei Rublev. It was the best place for him to speak. “The idea to create a museum of religious art emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War. During the years of Stalin’s fight with religion and the devastating war, a great many Orthodox churches in the Soviet Union had been looted or badly damaged. The museum staff restored the remaining works of art and searched for other artifacts. The museum’s opening took place in 1960.” https://www.moscovery.com/andrei-rublev-museum-of-ancient-russian-culture-and-art/

So here William presented his latest book “Puti k Belomu Moriu” (‘Ways to the White Sea’) which is actually a Russian translation of his book “Architecture at the End of the Earth: Photographing the Russian North” published by Duke University Press in in Durham, London, 2015. As I currently reside in Moscow, it fell upon me to say a few words about William after his introduction by the Museum rep.
 
I told the audience how I founded the Russia & America Good Will association (RAGA.org) in early 1990s. After the collapse of the USSR, all former Soviet associations of friendship also disintegrated, including the one in Washington DC.  That’s why I decided to fill the vacuum with an organization that was essentially non-political and non-partisan.  We favor neither Democrats nor Republicans, neither Capitalism nor Socialism, neither neoliberal economics nor Neo-Conservative politics.  After over 70 years of isolation from the outside world, former Soviet citizens, as well as Americans, needed People-to-People contacts. To make those contacts more rewarding we should abandon all prejudices and act always in the spirit of Good Will.

As former professor of Russian Studies and-- after moving to Washington DC in 1991-- as a free-lance interpreter and translator I knew full well that in addition to whatever cultural and language barriers, all former Soviet citizens – and I worked not just with Russian and Ukrainians, but also Georgians, Azerbaijanis and all Central Asian republics –badly needed to overcome the political prejudices and restrictions imposed on them by Soviet propagandists.  On a much smaller scale and with meager resources, RAGA had been doing the work similar to that the Open World Leadership program (https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9908/rlp.html ) founded Dr. James Billington (1929 – 2015) of the Library of Congress and Russian Academician Dmitry Likhachev (1906 – 1999), a former GULAG prisoner on the Solovky Islands , photographed by Brumfield.

Sharon Tennison’s Center for Citizen Initiatives (https://ccisf.org/) in San Francisco has also served as RAGA’s role model, as well as Eduard Lozansky’s  American University in Moscow (http://us-russia.org/)

Among RAGA’s favorite sources is The American Committee for East-West Accord, Ltd. (https://eastwestaccord.com/). RAGA relies on such perceptive authors as Dr. Gilbert Doctorow who watches the world from Brussels and Patrick Armstrong, a former Canadian diplomat, who always presents an excellent overview of US-Russia events.

In addition to RAGA, I have published my own articles on the site of Fitzgerald Friffin Foundation (as W George Krasnow), Johnson Russia List (https://russialist.org/), Veterans Today, and Antiwar.com. I have been interviewed by Dr. Kevin Barrett’s Truthjihad Radio.  Lately, The Unz Review and Russia-Insider posted a number of my articles.

Whenever I can I try to acquaint Russian people with how Americans view Russia. I have also translated into Russian a number of such outstanding American authors as Patrick Buchanan, Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky, Allan Brownfeld, Chas Freeman, Charles Bausman, and Marjory Cohn.

In Russia, where I currently reside, my articles appeared in Predstavitelnaya vlast’ (http://www.pvlast.ru/archive/index.565.php), an independent State Duma magazine, and in a number of local newspapers. I was also often interviewed by RADIO RADONEZH, an independent Christian radio station that broadcasts worldwide. In Russia, RAGA closely works with the Global Harmony Association founded by Dr. Leo Semashko of Sankt Peterburg (https://www.peacefromharmony.org/?cat=en_c&key=253) some twelve years ago. I have published my articles there too: https://www.peacefromharmony.org/?cat=en_c&key=884

Overall, I must conclude that Professor Brumfield’s pictographic presentation of the uniqueness of Russian civilization to the outside world, especially to the Americans, constitute an important ingredient to RAGA’s peace-promoting endeavors, and I personally congratulate him on receiving a high award from the Russian government.
To see Brumfield’s pictographic art, any RAGA reader can review previous issues of RAGA Antidotes. 

​Sincerely,
W George Krasnow (http://wiki-org.ru/wiki/Краснов,_Владислав_Георгиевич)
President, RAGA
www.raga.org
Facebook

Peace and Justice to the World. 
миру мир и благоволение в сердцах

From RAGA site:
"We are an association of Americans who believe it is in the U.S. national interests to foster friendship with Russia on the basis of mutual Good Will and non-interference in each other's affairs. RAGA is a gathering of people who share common interests in Russia's history, culture, religion, economy, politics and the way of life. We feel that Russian people have made outstanding contributions to humankind and are capable of greater achievements. We envision Russia as a strong, independent, proud and free nation and as a partner in achieving peace in the world."

​All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

RAGA News
www.RAGA.org​

​Greetings!
Dear friends of the Russia & America Good Will Association (www.raga.org) and antiwar colleagues!

Congrats!
Let me congratulate everyone with the Thanksgiving Holidays! And never forget about our predecessors in America, the native Indians!

ATTENTION - About using TOR or Opera VPN Browser to visit RAGA from other countries! For some time I have heard the reports that RAGA became inaccessible for readers located in Russia and, perhaps, some other countries. No worry:  try - out TOR Browser. It is easy to install, and it is FREE: https://www.torproject.org/download/ See more options at the end!

Right away, read two outstanding reviews of two outstanding books by two outstanding peace champions.

​Professor Michael Brenner reviews Edward Snowden's book "Permanent Record" 

There was a time in America when a Snowden would be celebrated as the model of an idealistic young man whose devotion to principle placed justice before self-interest. Nowadays, the baying pack of scoundrels,  careerists and bumblers who run the country howl for his traitorous hide.  Obviously, there are exceptions. Yet, one is hard-pressed to identify voices raised on his behalf. 

http://www.raga.org/news/edward-snowdens-permanent-record-book-review-by-prof-michael-brenner-must-read

​How to Save the Planet and Ourselves

Now Chris Hedges reviews Roger Hallam's New Book
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a New York Times best-selling author  

If you read only one book this year, it should be Roger Hallam’s “Common Sense for the 21st Century: Only Nonviolent Rebellion Can Now Stop Climate Breakdown and Social Collapse.”
Hallam’s lucid and concise book, which echoes Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,” says what many of us now know to be true but do not say: If we do not replace the ruling elites soon we are finished as a species. It is a cogent, well-argued case for global rebellion—the only form of resistance that can save us from ecosystem collapse and human-induced genocide. It correctly analyzes the failure of environmentalist activists in groups such as 350.org to understand and confront global corporate power and thus make a meaningful impact as we barrel toward ecocide. “Common Sense for the 21st Century” is a survival manual for the human species. “The corrupt system is going to kill us all unless we rise up,” Hallam, a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, bluntly warns.  https://www.truthdig.com/articles/how-to-save-the-planet-and-ourselves/  

PeopleNow.org Newsletter #1  

Ron Fisher www.dfpa.org,
doing business as PeopleNow.org
Fisher@PeopleNow.org
703-725-7849
Arlington, Virginia
Ron Fisher Bio  

​More opinions

Gordon M. Hahn: Fables of Ignatius
Nov 24, 2019 08:47 pm
It is now important for every American to realize that he or she can get little to no reliable news from the US mainstream media on Ukraine, Russia, or even the United States itself.With it becoming ever more clear that the US government and media have been covering up especially the Democratic Party’s collusion with Ukraine’s government in order to facilitate the self-enrichment of DP leaders’ family members, undermine the presidential candidacy and presidency of Donald Trump (however unpresidential he may be) and foment liberal-socialist revolutions globally, the participants are moving into high gear propaganda mode. A recent piece from David Ignatius is a good place to begin to highlight the intensification.... 
https://gordonhahn.com/2019/11/22/fables-of-ignatius/

25 Times Trump Has Been Dangerously Hawkish On Russia
November 19, 2019 • Caitlin Johnstone discredits a CNN listicle on Trump’s “softness” towards Moscow. In fact, she writes, the U.S. president has  actually been consistently reckless towards Moscow, with zero resistance from either party. 
By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com
​
CNN has published a fascinatingly manipulative and falsehood-laden article titled “25 times Trump was soft on Russia,” in which a lot of strained effort is poured into building the case that the U.S. president is suspiciously loyal to the nation against which he has spent his administration escalating dangerous new cold war aggressions.

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/11/19/25-times-trump-has-been-dangerously-hawkish-on-russia/  
​
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2019/11/18/for-wall-street-russia-has-become-bullet-proof/#75f5c706ffd4  ​

Covert Operative In Ukraine Controversy Revealed To Be Associated Press – OpEd

November 15, 2019 By William Dunkerley
CONCLUSION:At this point it is necessary to reflect upon what AP is up to. What kind of role is it playing in bringing vital political news to American voters? A quote from Walter Cronkite can help put this into perspective: “We all have our likes and our dislikes. But… when we’re doing news — when we’re doing the front-page news, not the back page, not the op-ed pages, but when we’re doing the daily news, covering politics — it is our duty to be sure that we do not permit our prejudices to show. That is simply basic journalism.”  I can’t think of a rational argument that would support a notion that AP is practicing even basic journalism. It has exploited the presumptive trust enjoyed by its Stylebook — a bible in the journalism field — to covertly propagate one-sided “background” to its unsuspecting readers. If one accepts Cronkite’s concept of journalism, there no longer seems to be reason to trust AP’s Stylebook. It’s wrong on the political issues. It’s even wrong on the simple matter of how to spell the Ukrainian president’s name. The Stylebook might more honestly be termed a political document that manifests an insidious propensity to propagate false and misleading information. What a sad and troubling conclusion that is. 
https://www.eurasiareview.com/15112019-covert-operative-in-ukraine-controversy-revealed-to-be-associated-press-oped/  ​

Inconvenient Truths.  Alarming things we have learned under Trump, but not always about him.
By Stephen F. Cohen  NOVEMBER 6, 2019
The current state of US-Russian relations is unprecedentedly dangerous, not only due to reasons cited here—a new Cold War fraught with the possibility of hot war. Whether President Trump serves one or two terms, he must be fully empowered to cope with the multiple possibilities of a US-Russian military confrontation. That requires ridding him and our nation of Russiagate allegations—and that in turn requires learning how such allegations originated.  
https://www.thenation.com/article/inconvenient-truths-2/  

PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Impeachment Pantomime
The political theatrics that begin Wednesday raise several questions. For starters, will Joe Biden be investigated for mounting evidence of corruption? And why is the  corporate media turning the CIA “whistleblower” into a phantom in plain sight?
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/11/12/patrick-lawrence-the-impeachment-pantomime/

John Brennan's CIA Trump Task Force - Could it become Obamagate?
By Philip Giraldi
November 12, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - There is considerable evidence that the American system of government may have been victimized by an illegal covert operation organized and executed by the U.S. intelligence and national security community. Former Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director Jim Comey appear to have played critical leadership roles in carrying out this conspiracy and they may not have operated on their own. Almost certainly what they may have done would have been explicitly authorized by the former President of the United States, Barack Obama, and his national security team.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52532.htm

RAGA.org thinks the "Neo-Con" title says it ALL. Cheers to David Stockman for saying it. Vladislav Krasnov
Up In Smoke: The Neocon Assault on Syria Is Finally Over
By David Stockman
October 24, 2019 "Information Clearing House"  

...Indeed, the evidence is overwhelming that the Arab Spring and the conflict in Syria were the result of external intervention and subversion....   

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52440.htm  

​Is Ukraine vital to U.S. security?
By Edward Lozansky - - Wednesday, November 27, 2019
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
The ongoing impeachment inquiry of President Trump can certainly compete with Hollywood’s most successful drama or comedy shows. However, when we deal with national security issues one expects the actors, in this case members of Congress and witnesses, to tell the truth. In this case, some do, but some regrettably do not. The whole picture, said House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, Louisiana Republican, looks like a “Soviet-style” event.  ...In this political atmosphere, anyone who calls for resumption of U.S.-Russian dialogue is labeled as Mr. Putin’s bootlicker or useful idiot at best. It was French President Macron who pronounced NATO’s brain to be dead and has come up with some ideas on how to avoid, in the words of former Sen. Sam Nunn and many other serious analysts, the process of “sleepwalking into nuclear catastrophe.”   Will Washington listen? Chances are not good, but what is the alternative?
⦁ Edward Lozansky is president of the American University in Moscow.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/nov/27/crosstalk-is-ukraine-vital-to-us-security/

Everyone Is a Russian Asset
America laughed at Hillary Clinton’s remarks about Tulsi Gabbard, but her ideas fit perfectly in the intellectual mainstream
By MATT TAIBBI

Hillary Clinton, not long ago the nominee of the Democratic Party, had some choice words about the state of American politics Friday.
  “I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate,” Clinton said on a podcast with former Barack Obama aide David Plouffe. “She’s the favorite of the Russians.”
  Clinton appeared to be talking about Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, a combat veteran. She wasn’t done, teeing off on former Green Party candidate Jill Stein:
  “[Jill Stein’s] also a Russian asset… Yeah, she’s a Russian asset — I mean, totally. They know they can’t win without a third-party candidate.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/clinton-gabbard-russian-asset-jill-stein-901593/

​Hillary Clinton Is A Psychopath And A War Criminal: Prof. Francis Boyle
Dialogos Radio Interviews Prof. Francis Boyle
   The transcript of Dialogos Radio’s interview with international lawyer and professor Francis Boyle of the University of Illinois. This interview aired on their broadcasts for the week of February 18-24, 2016. Find the podcast of this interview here.
    MN: Joining us today on Dialogos Radio and the Dialogos Interview Series is international lawyer and professor of international law at The University of Illinois Dr. Francis Boyle. Boyle has served as legal counsel to the Palestinian Authority, to Hawaiian independence groups, and served on the legal team which led to the conviction of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for war crimes. Professor Boyle, welcome to our program today.
https://www.countercurrents.org/boyle020316.htm

Pepe Escobar: The Road to Damascus: How the Syria War was Won
​Oct 23, 2019 10:58 am
What is happening in Syria, following yet another Russia-brokered deal, is a massive geopolitical game-changer.  

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/10/18/pepe-escobar-the-road-to-damascus-how-the-syria-war-was-won/  ​
​

Everybody Betraying Everybody in Syria
After some eight years of civil conflict, the situation in Syria is basically reverting to the pre-conflict norm, writes Graham E. Fuller.
By Graham E. Fuller
grahamefuller.com
Just what have we witnessed in the recent events in Syria? It’s hard to know, given the avalanche of superficial and over-the-top headlines in most U.S. media: betrayal of the Kurds, handing Syria over to Russia, caving to Turkey’s President Recep Erdogan, bestowing a gift upon Iran, allowing ISIS to once again run wild, end of U.S. leadership.
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/10/16/everybody-betraying-everybody-in-syria/

Restoration of the Monastery of St. Dimitry of Rostov
https://www.rbth.com/travel/331320-rostov-iakov-monastery

Comparison of early 20th-century photographs in the Prokudin-Gorsky Collection (Library of Congress) with photographs from William C. Brumfield Collection  (National Gallery of Art) . 

232nd article in "Discovering Russia" series. 
General link:  https://www.rbth.com/special-discovering-russia

Monumental art in Yaroslavl: Church of the Prophet Elijah
https://www.rbth.com/travel/331251-yaroslavls-church-prophet-elijah
​
Comparison of early 20th-century photographs in the Prokudin-Gorsky Collection (Library of Congress) with photographs from William C. Brumfield Collection  (National Gallery of Art). 

231st article in "Discovering Russia" series. 
https://www.rbth.com/special-discovering-russia

Rebuilding a masterpiece of wooden architecture. the Intercession Church from Ankhimovo:
https://www.rbth.com/travel/331188-intercession-church-petersburg

Comparison of early 20th-century photographs in the Prokudin-Gorsky Collection (Library of Congress) with photographs from William C. Brumfield Collection  (National Gallery of Art) . 

230th article in "Discovering Russia" series. 
General link:   https://www.rbth.com/special-discovering-russia

ATTENTION - About using TOR or Opera VPN Browser to visit RAGA from other countries! For some time I have heard the reports that RAGA became inaccessible for readers located in Russia and, perhaps, some other countries. No worry:  try - out TOR Browser. It is easy to install, and it is FREE: 
https://www.torproject.org/download/

Opera is also free and offers similar VPN function: 
https://www.opera.com/computer/features/free-vpn

*TOR and other VPN browsers are restricted in some countries so know your local laws before using these programs. Act at your won risk. 

BBC News: The former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev full interview
The former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has warned that current tension between Russia and the West is putting the world in “colossal danger” due to the threat from nuclear weapons.
In an interview with the BBC's Steve Rosenberg, former President Gorbachev called for all countries to declare that nuclear weapons should be destroyed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYVsKoQXATY

Sincerely,
W George Krasnow (http://wiki-org.ru/wiki/Краснов,_Владислав_Георгиевич)
President, RAGA
www.raga.org
Facebook

​All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

RAGA News
www.RAGA.org​

Edward Snowden’s book is not a ‘coming-of-age’ saga. It is necessary to say that at the outset. One of the peculiarities of our times is the penchant for rendering everything in terms of so-called ‘human interest.’  The most profound events, the most penetrating analysis, the most stirring ideas – all are reduced to personality. Whether it is the personality of the author, a representation of the subject, or some background character, we wonder: Who can write about Hillary without immediately bringing up Bill?

So, it is no surprise that the reviews of Snowden’s revelatory and instructive account of his experience place undue stress on background, his relationship with his now wife Lindsay Mills (an admirable person), his workplace colleagues. They come up dry in terms of the man. They are totally irrelevant to the crucial issues of America’s Intelligence obsession/abuse.

Admittedly, Snowden does offer us a descriptive account of his life’s progression – but it is all quite prosaic. You don’t find either ‘Snowden’ or the meaning of what his has exposed (in the book as well as in the ‘papers’) by looking at the outer contours of his life. That does not deter reviewers, of course. They are driven by three things: our culture’s pervasive voyeurism, the bottom line of whatever media company they’re writing for, and – most powerfully – an escape from the responsibility to address the grave and shameful matters that he discusses. The last is at once an intellectual challenge and a career risk.

Snowden’s awakening to the distressing illegal activities of the NSA/CIA nexus was gradual. Omens were there early on – as was his discomfort with the Intelligence world’s ethics. He joined the CIA in 2007 just a few years after the 9/11 trauma. Let us recall that period. The country was panicked; a quiet hysteria was everywhere. So was a thirst for vengeance. Official Washington lived with the dread of more attacks to come. Few understood the dimensions of the threat or its mainsprings. The brooding atmosphere was like a lingering winter ground-fog. It has yet to fully disperse. The Intelligence agencies felt the imperative to act, i.e. to do something without delay. Thinking it all through was neither any office’s clear responsibility nor seen as a logical prelude to taking action.

In typical fashion the impulsive response was to mobilize resources – money and technology, the two prized assets in the United States’ Intelligence arsenal. The money was duly appropriated. How to spend it was the challenge. Disposing of $75 billion a year is not easy when you already possess an apparatus larger than that of all the world’s other Intelligence services combined. Technology came to the rescue as the quickest way to absorb all those dollars. That is to say, technology and its human consorts numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

Recruiters combed the universities to lay their hands on pretty much any live body that came within reach. Many bodies responded to their blandishments.  Patriotism was a big sell. So was the prospect of a well-paid, secure job. Credentials were secondary – with somef exceptions. Language skills were one, especially Arabic, Farsi and other neglected ‘exotic’ tongues. IT capabilities were in even greater demand. For nerds, it was like Paradise – the promised land of 77 jobs open to the bearded, the tattooed, the loners, the addicted tinkers. Diversity left room for the conventional, too.

Snowden was pretty conventional on most counts. Consumed by IT to the point of neglecting his formal studies, he had an independent cast of mind, unawed by authority, but not a born rebel. After kicking around in a number of schools and jobs interspersed with a stint in the Army, he wound up applying to a position advertised at a consulting firm called COMSO. He was 23. (Snowden never bothered to find out what the acronym stood for; apparently it’s owned by BAEA Systems). A few exchanges of electronic correspondence led to an interview in a non-descript office in a non-descript building in Greenbelt, Maryland with an everyman non-descript recruiter.

A cursory conversation concluded with the man telling Snowden “the job is yours, Edward. What sort of salary are you looking for?” Snowden’s $50k request rose to $62k at the man’s prodding – he was bent on getting the amount as high as reasonably possible. Why? His outfit wasn’t going to pay it; rather, the U.S. government via the CIA would with the recruiting company getting a fixed percentage. ‘Cost-plus” is what they call it. These were (are) the terms on which roughly 80% of the ‘contractors’ who make up the NSA (and technical CIA workforce) got their jobs. Some switch to the more secure status of a straight government employee, some jump back and forth -as did Snowden.

In effect, the famed Intelligence community turned over recruiting responsibilities for staffing the great “War On Terror” to private, for-profit firms. Some were big defense contractors like Lockheed Martin – others small-time operations that acted as little more than a dating service. A strong preference was given to candidates who had advanced skills and some experience. The NSA and CIA didn’t want to be bothered training them. It did, though, take 6 months to indoctrinate and to socialize them.

As Snowden writes, “restructuring your intelligence agencies so that your most sensitive systems were being run by somebody who really didn’t work for you was what passed for innovation.” It did line the pockets of both the dating services and the top administrators who would eventually parachute into lavishly paid positions at those same outfits.

Security clearances? A formality. Given that 835,000 people have wound up with TOP SECRET clearances, it was derisory. A Mickey Mouse polygraph exam: “have you ever been a member or supporter of al-Qaeda?..” A cheap sedative would get you through even if you did have something awkward to hide. Background checks were of the kind done by shop-worn FBI agents in regional offices who show up in a professor’s office with a checklist of banal questions. “Has Jane Doe, to the best of your knowledge, ever belonged to an organization that seeks the overthrow of the United States government? To the best of your knowledge, is Jane Doe addicted to any illegal substance or engaged in alcohol abuse?”

An honest answer would be: “How the hell do I know?” Never having had the pleasure of being invited to a pre-dawn gathering of her and her confederates where they practiced suicide bombings while under the influence of the drug of the month, all I could say was ‘NO.’ The likelihood of having provided cover for a sleeper agent of a terrorist organization was virtually non-existent. The sober truth is that the number of such who have surfaced since 9/11 numbers is in the low single digits. Those few slipped through the fingers of an FBI whose considerable resources were spent entrapping and directing poor sods who, left to their own devices, never would have gotten up from their bar stools or dragged themselves away from their PCs.

Such security measures, existing at the time of Snowden’s recruitment, were ill-suited to identify a dedicated young American whose intelligence, courage and integrity prompted him to take the risk of revealing that the Intelligence agencies he worked for were violating the law and the Constitution on the orders of 3 successive Presidents and their appointees.

In theory, agents of hostile governments (a bestiary now composed of Russia, Iran, China, Hezbollah, Syria and the ever-menacing Mr. Maduro in Caracas) could have taken advantage of the Intelligence agencies slapdash recruiting methods and flawed IT security to penetrate into those ever-expanding data banks. None have managed what Snowden did – at least not from the inside. They could have – if the intent existed. Just respond to a job announcement inserted by the non-descript man in the non-descript office (and take that sedative when they hook you up to the polygraph).

Ironically, one of Snowden’s frustrations before government criminality wracked his conscience was the lackadaisical response of his superiors to his pointing out the seriousness of those flaws – and more serious technical flaws in their systems -and to his recommendations for remedying them.  His initiative produced nothing in the way of remediation.

The system – organization, modes, persons – Snowden describes exhibits some singular features. Most striking is the disproportionate effort and resources devoted to its maintenance. His arrival came at the moment when the CIA and NSA were charging ahead full-bore to build and deploy a vast, high tech apparatus for accumulating, storing and sifting vast amounts of Intelligence data. That involved hardware, software, real estate, dense networks of personnel scattered around the globe and – not least – an intricate, multi-layered organizational complex. Communication was the common denominator.

Communications among unwitting sources picked up by a mind-boggling array of surveillance devices; communications within the Intelligence administration – horizontally, vertically, matrixed into storage sites, out of storage sites; communication among technicians, analysts, directors, and policy-makers. The last, of course, was least developed or standardized. Witness Mr. Tenet, Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Cheney.

Maintaining the systems consumed the lion’s share of the resources.  Actual deployment/activation was relatively cheap. Transmission/storage was another ‘gas-guzzler.’ Add in the enormous waste and redundancy involved in relying on a galaxy of predatory contracting firms, and you have the answer as how to spend $80 annually while accomplishing very little of value.

Further evidence of how pervasive is the technology driven operations of the IC is the disparagement of human Intelligence. We do know that this shift began several years before 9/11. Still, when Snowden arrived in Geneva on his first overseas assignment, the CIA still was hunting and signing up real live sources. Even Snowden the nerd was mobilized to try his hand – despite an aversion to gala parties and alcohol. An expatriate Saudi supposedly involved in oil and money had been identified as someone to look into.

Snowden was told to make the first contact before passing him on to a ‘pro.’ This episode quickly turns comedic – not because of Snowden’s naïveté but due to the bumbling of his senior operator. The latter wound up being recalled to Maclean. The humiliated Saudi wound up back in the Kingdom nursing a life-long grudge against the Yanks who had pulled the rug out from under his posh Geneva sedan chair.

This occurred just about the time that the CIA honchos made the fateful decision to drop those old-fashioned methods of seducing/ buying/blackmailing/running agents. The substitute method was simplicity itself. Predictably, it was technology grounded, antiseptic and did away with the need for most human faculties. Step 1: identify somebody who might know something worth having. Step 2: ‘tap’ as many of his/her electronic communications as possible. Collect and store the data for future ‘algorithm-fication.’  Installation, the only sensitive part of the process, became progressively easier as surveillance technology developed ever greater sophistication. Clean & easy.

HUMINT was being marginalized just as old-fashioned SIGNET was being recast as “cyberintelligence.” That foreshadow the morphing of “mass surveillance’ into “bulk collection” and “metadata” – the former connotation suggesting the bi-annual municipal trash service and the latter impressive but unfrightening.

By 2011, Snowden – now promoted to a bigger job with expanded access – was fully aware that the United States was committed to a massive, global strategy of electronic surveillance. The ultimate aim was to assemble a vast horde of data about everyone who conceivably was worth tracking, and hundreds of millions about whom you knew nothing. BUT about whom you might to know something at some future time – whether on the basis of specific reference or the algorithm printouts. That realization left him deeply disturbed.

Moreover, a harsh truth was emerging. The developing system paid scant attention to legal constraints or privacy rights of any kind. Indeed, a powerful logic was at work that was driving the process toward a total disregard for the 4th amendment. Its strictures could not be accommodated by the technology – hardware & software. The organizational drive within the Intelligence agencies steamrolled all other considerations. Regard for the sensibilities of foreign governments didn’t figure in the equation. Precedent setting and possible retaliation similarly were given no thought (“this is America – isn’t it!”) The emotions that fueled the War On Terror were still eclipsing reason – and they were being inflamed by politicos around the country.

 Finally, there was unanimity among higher-ups – in the Intelligence agencies, in Congress, in the courts, in the Justice Department and in the White House under 3 successive Presidents - in holding to the view that the law had to bend before the exigencies of the threatening times. The Privacy vs Security trade-off as it mistakenly was called by all and sundry – including renowned law professors writing in the New York Review of Books and other esteemed places. In truth it was a conflict between the Law and Lawlessness.

The difference between the two formulations is elementary – but fundamental. The concept of “security vs privacy” has no standing whatsoever in the law – regardless of the standing it might have in the policy realm or philosophical discourse. (‘Mitigating circumstances’ may be acknowledged; however, they come into play only at the sentencing stage. A crime is a crime is a crime). The readiness to obscure that difference, therefore, had nothing to do with intellect. Rather, it demonstrated that we were not ready to go down a road to where Constitution met political expediency.  That attitude has contributed to the persecution of Snowden.

There is a straightforward way to reconcile the two. If one feels that the privacy vs security balance is weighed too heavily in the privacy direction, then there is a method for shifting it, i.e. pass new legislation &/or constitutional amendment. Of course, if you are in panic mode and believe that the exigencies are so acute as to put the Republic at risk, then you are tempted to circumvent the law - especially easy to do when the President is directing you under prodding by the Vice-President.

People like Snowden were not privy to the details. But the implications of the technical tasks they were doing pointed to the conclusion that such a compact was in place. Lawlessness was destined to win.

In particular regard to elite political consensus, let us recall the bipartisan cabal formed by President Bush in 2002 to launch a radical surveillance program that they acknowledged was illegal and nullified the 4th amendment. There was the Deistic push to all that followed. That story was recounted by James Risen in his 2006 book STATE OF WAR – a story that his New York Times editors had in October 2004 but withheld under direct pressure from the Bush White House.

The cabal’s members included all the Congressional leaders from both parties (Pelosi, Daschle, Feinstein on the Democratic side), the Attorney General John Ashcroft, Chief Justice Rehnquist, Robert Mueller – Director of the FBI, as well as the heads of the principal Intelligence agencies and their chief subordinates: General Michael Hayden at the CIA, George Tenet at CIA, and Admirals Thomas Wilson and Lowell Jacoby at DIA. They were sworn to secrecy – an oath they’ve observed to this day. The big IT companies provided helpful services while denying that awkward fact. After all, they were doing something similar for their own deceitful commercial purposes.

Thereby, the equivalent of a “Line of Blood’ was drawn that placed the leaders of America on the side of clandestine criminality. That truth foreclosed any chance of the country’s coming to terms with what constitutes a revision of the Constitution without due process. Overcoming it was certainly not something that an Obama had either the conviction or courage to try doing. Snowden did. The vehemence of his denunciation and persecution by Obama and other self-styled liberal humanists can be explained by the juxtaposition. *

They, and America’s political class generally, cannot understand a man like Snowden. Just what makes him tick is beyond their comprehension. That dread of the unknowable stokes their passionate enmity toward him. Moreover, he might inspire others of similar character. The prospect of an upwelling of such persons exposing the deceit, lawlessness and incompetence - that had become endemic in the most sensitive corners of the American government was nightmarish. Even worse, it undercut their cultivated self-image as public servants of rectitude. Therefore, the instinct of Obama, Holder, Hillary, the NYT editors’ et al was to crucify Snowden.

Snowden rose rapidly into more and more responsible positions – propelled by his talents, his innovative mind and technical curiosity. With promotion came even greater access to the sweep of the IC’s surveillance activities. From Tokyo to Maryland to Hawaii, he encountered PRISM in all its troubling dimensions.

“PRISM is a code name for a program under which the United States National Security Agency (NSA) collects internet communications from various U.S. internet companies. The program is also known by the SIGAD US-984XN. PRISM collects stored internet communications based on demands made to internet companies such as Google LLC under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to turn over any data that match court-approved search terms. The NSA can use these PRISM requests to target communications that were encrypted when they traveled across the internet backbone, to focus on stored data that telecommunication filtering systems discarded earlier, and to get data that is easier to handle, among other things.”

It was his involvement with PRISM that convinced Snowden of the imperative to expose it. For he was now an active contributor to a criminal operation – an aggressive multi-dimensional program that was routinely violating Americans’ basis constitutional rights while promising even deeper encroachments. Nobody was inclined to do anything about it.

Under the pressure of being Dell’s chief technologist for the CIA account and recoiling from the programs he was directing, Snowden began to suffer nervous seizures. It was finally diagnosed as a form of epilepsy.

Back in Hawaii, his plans began to crystallize. They were encouraged by a talk given there by the CIA’s chief technology officer ‘Gus’ Hunt. He informed the audience that “At the CIA, we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang onto it forever.” There were journalists there from the ‘high tech’ press and journals. Hunt mentioned to them, in a private discussion, that the agency could subject to surveillance every one of their communications – much of it through their smart phones, activated or not. None of them reported on what was said. Mysteriously, a video of the talk appeared on You Tube – site visited by a total of 302 people in 6 years. Some of those journalists might very well be commenting on Snowden’s book in reviews heavy on the Lindsay element.

The date was March 20, 2013. Exactly 7 days earlier, General James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee. In response to a direct question from Senator Wyden as to whether the NSA conducted mass surveillance of Americans, Clapper replied: ‘NO.” His lie represented criminal perjury, a perjury ignored by all parties.

Have we gotten our money’s worth? If not – why? You decide.

• In the Spring of 2008, legislation to extend the broad powers of the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act (FSIA) was before the Congress. Senator Barack Obama made strongly worded comments committing himself to opposing it – indeed, to filibuster against it. When the bill came up in June, he voted in favor. Responding to criticism of his volte-face, he wrote an open letter disparaging his critics as ‘my left-wing friends.’  Three months earlier, he too had been one of those distained left-wingers. That was an augury of things to come.  

In the wake of the Snowden revelations, President Obama assured the country that “no one is listening to your phone calls.” It was a bald-faced lie. Right then it should have been obvious what manner of man was on the threshold of the White House. Such is our capacity for self-delusion that even today, 11 years later, I know of no public figure of the Democratic persuasion who is prepared to hold Obama to account. Yet they are free and easy with their denunciation of Edward Snowden – the villain, the traitor.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/10106919/Obama-on-NSA-surveillance-scandal-nobody-is-listening-to-your-phone-calls.html

Michael Brenner mbren@pitt.edu
You may also like to see Glen Grweenwald’s twit to me about the book
Glenn Greenwald@ggreenwald

 • Sep 12
Just got our copy of Edward @Snowden's book/memoir, Permanent Record! So much has been said about this great & courageous hero; now he finally tells his own story in his own words. It's out on Constitution Day - Sept 17 - but you can pre-order now https://amazon.com/Permanent-Record-Edward-Snowden/dp/1250237238

And my response to Greenwald
w george krasnow@vlad62slav

Edward Snowden is a hero for the global peace, and Glenn Greenwald be praised for his loyal support to Snowden and other peace champions. Snowden's book is a must for the citizens of the world.
 
P.S. For self-disclosure I must admit I have not read Snowden’s book but I wrote an article about him shortly after his defection. It was published by RAGA 

To Defect or to Integrate? The USA vs Edward Snowden 4/29/2014 

http://www.raga.org/news/to-defect-or-to-integrate-the-usa-vs-edward-snowden
​
I am also a former Soviet defector and the author of Soviet Defectors: The KGB Wanted List.
https://www.amazon.com/Soviet-Defectors-Wanted-Institution-Publication-ebook/dp/B07CQPFH5S
​
All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

RAGA News
www.RAGA.org​

​It is important we do not confuse Gandhi's Non-Violent philosophy with cowardice. As Gandhi himself put it: "Let no one say when I am gone that I taught the people to be cowards. I would far rather that you died bravely dealing a blow and receiving a blow than died in abject terror. Fleeing from battle is cowardice and unworthy of a warrior. Cowardice is worse than violence because cowards can never be non-violent." See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyagraha  

When an 800-kiloton nuclear warhead, some 53 times more powerful that the one dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, is detonated over Manhattan in the apocalyptic nuclear exchange with Russia, the center of the blast will reach four to five times the temperature of the sun and the resulting fire storm will cover 90 to 150 square miles and will rage for several hours, based on an assessment by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.  People and animals in the direct light of the fireball will be mutilated with third degree burns as far away as Corona, Queens, and Crown Heights, Brooklyn.  There will be no survivors within five to seven miles of Midtown Manhattan.

When command centers in and around the Russian capital are attacked with Trident nuclear warheads from a single submarine, “The total number of people who would die within 12 weeks in Moscow and the surrounding areas would be around 3 million, including around 750,000 children,” according to a study by John Ainslie. “Several million people would be injured.”  With all major hospitals in the area destroyed or rendered inoperable by radiation and fire, there will be no burn beds to alleviate the horrific wounds sustained by millions of people who are not completely incinerated.

Elaine Scarry, a Professor at Harvard University, in her recent interview in Boston Review invokes these and many other horrors that miraculously have not yet happened and warns: “I’m almost at the point of believing that there is a wanton refusal to see the imminent peril, a refusal to understand not just that we have a responsibility to reverse it, to dismantle it, but that we have the ability to do so, and that if we don’t, it is going to happen. I don’t know if it’s going to happen this year, or whether it’s going to happen this century, but it’s almost inconceivable that nuclear war isn’t going to happen.”

With hundreds of nuclear-tipped ICBMs in Russia and America on hair-trigger alert and a complete break-down in nuclear arms control agreements and communication between the world’s two largest nuclear superpowers, no words ring truer or more urgent today. 

Ernest Moniz and Sam Nunn, bemoaning this erosion of “strategic stability” in the U.S.-Russia relations, write in the Foreign Affairs magazine on this year’s somber 74th anniversary of Hiroshima Day: “Not since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis has the risk of a U.S.-Russian confrontation involving the use of nuclear weapons been as high as it is today. Yet unlike during the Cold War, both sides seem willfully blind to the peril.”

As the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the last remaining vestige of nuclear arms control architecture between the U.S. and Russia, is set to expire in 2021, and “all nine nuclear powers are…modernizing their nuclear weapons production facilities and adding new, improved types of nuclear weapons to their arsenals,” it is really hard to miss the gravity of what we are witnessing in the world today.  We have to start working on easing that omnicidal tension now, before it is too late.  In order to do this, we have to finish what we weren’t able to resolve in the 1990’s.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the world had a real chance of pursuing the path of peaceful co-existence.  The horrible nightmare that we all lived in during the second half of the twentieth century, in constant fear of mutually assured nuclear destruction, seemed to be over.  There were bright, peaceful years ahead.  But something went awfully wrong…

What we are experiencing today causes even more fear, and you can’t really call it a “nightmare” any longer.  It’s been a long time since everybody awoke, but most are still pretending to be asleep.  Good luck trying to wake them up, as Gandhi was well aware.  In the meantime, the Doomsday Clock is ticking, and the nuclear odds are not in our favor.

To stop the clock, before the minute hand irreversibly hits the eternal midnight, we are going to have to give up our misplaced faith in our own exceptional uniqueness and insularity.  It is that faith that allows us to see ourselves as superior to the rest of the world and, simultaneously, allows others to manipulate us.  What politician would be able to convince his constituents that the continuation of endless war is good for them, if they didn’t already believe that it would be necessary to preserve and impose forcefully on the rest of the world the freedom-loving fire of their benevolent exceptionalism?

That was precisely how, in the aftermath of the 9/11 tragedy, which, in the words of the late Lynn Margulis, was “the most successful and most perverse publicity stunt in the history of public relations,” the neoconservatives were able to con America into adopting the concepts of unilateralism and pre-emptive military action.  After all, we know better what’s best for the rest of the planet, truth and justice be damned; we are the victims, we are different, and we’ll to dictate to others by our God-given privilege the rules and conditions of their dependent, inferior, and completely isolated existence.

Once we’ve let this faith in our uniquely-blessed exceptionalism and our vengeful self-righteousness, whether American, or Jewish, or Evangelical Christian, nurtured carefully by the state and mass media, blind us into such an illusion, we lost our chances for peaceful development in the world.  Russia, which was infected by the Bolsheviks with a similar belief system in the twentieth century, paid for it dearly after the collapse of the Soviet Union.  The United States is about to experience the same tragedy that it was forewarned about by the Russian ordeal.

The only thing that can help us now is the realization that we are all brothers and sisters.  We are all in this together; we are all the same and all so different.  We all share the same fundamental interests.  The other person’s happiness is no less valuable and important than ours.  And her pain no less terrible and unbearable than our own.  All those who say otherwise are our only enemies.  We have no others.  We have to overcome them with our self-enquiry and ensuing action.  There are many organizations and international efforts trying to bring peace and security to us all, but they need our collective and individual help.

First of all, there is the Appeal of the Hibakusha, the A-bomb survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons.  The Appeal, signed by over 9 million people around the world, states:

We, the Hibakusha, call on all State Governments to conclude a treaty to ban and eliminate nuclear weapons. The average age of the Hibakusha now exceeds 80. It is our strong desire to achieve a nuclear-weapon-free world in our lifetime so that succeeding generations of people will not see hell on earth ever again.

You, your families and relatives, or any other people should not be made Hibakusha again. We believe that your signatures appended to this appeal will add up to the voices of hundreds of millions of people around the world and move international politics. They will finally save the future of our blue planet and all life on it. We earnestly appeal to you to append your signature to this petition.

Let’s get these signatures to 100,000,000 and make the Hibakusha and our voices heard!

Second, there is the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) itself, which was adopted at the UN on July 7, 2017.  On Hiroshima Day 2019, Bolivia became the 25th country to deposit its ratification instrument of the TPNW.  The Treaty will enter into force once it’s been ratified by 50 States, so we are now halfway to making nuclear weapons illegal under international law.  Organizations, such as ICAN (International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons) and Nihon Hidankyo (Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations), need all the help we can provide them to make full ratification of the TPNW a reality.

Third, we need to follow the lead of the United States Conference of Mayors (USCM) and bring the nuclear disarmament issue into the 2020 U.S. Presidential Campaign.  On July 1, 2019, the USCM, a nonpartisan association of 1,408 American cities with populations over 30,000, unanimously adopted a Mayors for Peace resolution “Calling on All Presidential Candidates to Make Known Their Positions on Nuclear Weapons and to Pledge U.S. Global Leadership in Preventing Nuclear War, Returning to Diplomacy, and Negotiating the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons”.  The USCM “calls on all Presidential candidates to pledge, if elected, to reverse U.S. opposition to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and to embrace its humanitarian values and goals”.  We have to bring this resolution to the attention of our mayors, public officials, and Presidential candidates.  And we need to help United for Peace & Justice, CodePink, World BEYOND War, and other peace organizations make this resolution, along with others adopted by the USCM in the past, front and center in a number of critical campaigns, including Back from the Brink and Divest from the War Machine.

Fourth, there was the Basel Appeal on Disarmament and Sustainable Security addressed in January  2019 to Presidents Trump and Putin, Secretary-General of NATO, and to the chairs of U.S. congressional and Russian parliamentary committees on defense and foreign relations, by mayors, parliamentarians and representatives of civil society organizations from some 40 countries, including the mayors of 18 U.S. cities.  Their joint appeal calls on the U.S., Russian and European leaders to preserve the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty (from which the United States formally withdrew on August 2), extend the New START Treaty until 2026, adopt ‘no-first-use’ and rescind ‘launch-on-warning’ policies, and work towards a nuclear-weapon-free world through “enhanced dialogue and engagement with other nuclear-armed States.” 

The endorsing mayors and parliamentarians also call on the Russian Duma and U.S. Congress to refuse to authorize or allocate funding for the nuclear weapons banned by the INF Treaty, reaffirm their commitment “to acting resolutely for a nuclear-weapons-free and less militarized world,” and “call on cities, parliaments, governments and civil society around the world to join us in this endeavor.”  You can already see these calls at work in several Congressional resolutions in the U.S., such as the No First-Use Act introduced by Senator Elizabeth Warren and Congressman Adam Smith.

As  Christine Muttonen, Jacqueline Cabasso, and Alyn Ware write on IPS, “it may not be all up to Trump and Putin.”  They quote U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, who observed: “People want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.”

This power-from-below approach – taking concerted action on nuclear risk-reduction and disarmament in federal, state and city legislatures – is just beginning…There are powerful levers parliaments, cities and civil society can use to stop the unraveling of the arms control regime and prevent an arms race…

It is our responsibility as an informed public in what is supposed to be a participatory democracy to help them engage these levers.

Finally and perhaps most importantly, there are the indispensable nonviolent acts of civil disobedience that must become our reality for the foreseeable future.  We have plenty of examples of this in our past, from Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement in the U.S., to Mahatma Gandhi’s Satyagraha and the Indian independence movement, which was influenced heavily by Leo Tolstoy’s philosophy of “non-resistance to evil by force.”  Tolstoy was, in turn, moved by the Doukhobors (Духоборы, “Spirit Wrestlers”), whose pacifism and anti-war preaching led to government persecution in 19th-century Russia and whose immigration to Canada, following their 1895 mass burning of guns in Transcaucasia, Tolstoy helped finance, along with the British Quakers.  The Doukhobors tradition is alive in Canada to this day.

The Plowshares movement is a courageous example of anti-nuclear protests and nonviolent resistance to war in the present-day world.  The movement was started by the Reverend Daniel Berrigan, his brother Phillip and six other activists, known as the “Plowshares Eight”, when they trespassed onto the General Electric nuclear missile facility in King of Prussia, PA, on September 9, 1980.  They hammered on nuclear warhead nose cones, poured blood on documents, and prayed for peace, before being arrested. A prolonged court battle followed, with over 10 felony and misdemeanor charges piled on by the federal government.  The eight were convicted and served from five days to over 14 months in prison for their protest.

There have been 100 similar actions throughout the world since then, with the latest event organized on April 4, 2018.  On that day, marking the 50th anniversary of the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination, seven Catholic plowshares activists entered Kings Bay Naval base in St. Mary’s, GA, the largest nuclear submarine base in the world.

The Kings Bay Plowshares 7 (KBP7) said in their pre-action statement, “Weapons of mass destruction, especially nuclear weapons, create nothing but a false sense of security.  They cannot constitute the basis for peaceful co-existence between members of the human family, which must rather be inspired by an ethics of solidarity.  Nuclear weapons eviscerate the rule of law and force white supremacy, perpetuate endless war and environmental destruction, and ensure immunity for all manner of crimes against humanity…A just and peaceful world is possible when we join prayers with action, [beat] swords into plowshares.”

The KBP7 proceeded to symbolically and nonviolently convert the nuclear weapons of mass destruction stored at the base by hammering on a statue of a Trident II D5 missile and pouring their own blood on it.  They were arrested, and several of them, including the 79-year-old Liz McAlister, have spent the next 17 months (as of this writing) in jail, awaiting trial (now set for October 21) and facing 25 years in prison, if convicted of the multiple charges brought by the federal government.  Compare this with the 13 months served by the multimillionaire pedophile, sex trafficker, and alleged Mossad agent Jeffrey Epstein out of an 18-month sentence in 2008 for molesting 36 underage girls, some as young as 14 years old, and you’ll get the idea of whose interests the government and the justice system truly represent and why our nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience are so important.

It takes exceptional courage and dedication to do what the Plowshares Eight, KBP7, and the rest of the Plowshares movement have done, and very few of us will ever be able to rise to their level.  But we all have to stand in solidarity with these heroes, when they need our help the most.  Please join Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and other Nobel Peace Laureates and distinguished supporters from around the world and sign a global petition to U.S. Attorney General William Barr to dismiss all charges against the Kings Bay Plowshares 7.

We can also look to the British-based group Extinction Rebellion (XR, for short) for inspiration in using “acts of peaceful civil disobedience to disrupt the business-as-usual which is sending our species on a one-way track to extinction.”  The movement was founded in May of 2018 (one month after the KBP7 action) by 94 academics who co-signed a letter declaring that “When a government willfully abrogates its responsibility to protect its citizens from harm and to secure the future for generations to come, it has failed in its most essential duty of stewardship. The “social contract” has been broken, and it is therefore not only our right, but our moral duty to bypass the government’s inaction and flagrant dereliction of duty, and to rebel to defend life itself.”

Extinction Rebellion has since brought together thousands of people around the world in nonviolent direct actions against the governments’ criminal inability to address the “direct existential threat” to humanity of climate change and ecological collapse.  Major roads and bridges were blocked and hundreds of demonstrators arrested.  XR organizers have called for a general strike around the world this October.  As Chris Hedges writes in Fear vs. Fear,

The 10-day protest in April in London led by Extinction Rebellion—which saw 1,130 people arrested as crowds repeatedly shut down major parts of the city in demonstrating against the failure of the ruling elites to confront the climate catastrophe—is what we must emulate…

Switch off the electronic images. Ignore the media burlesque. The endless political shows, which turn presidential campaigns into mind-numbing, two-year-long marathons, are entertainment. Do not trust anyone in power. We will save ourselves by building mass movements to overthrow corporate power. I am not certain we will succeed. But I am certain that if we fail, we are doomed.

Elaine Scarry observes in her interview for Boston Review that “It might be embarrassing to have to stand on a street corner with a sign or attend a public meeting.  Imagine, though, if we forgave the complicity with past acts of enslavement or genocide by saying, ‘People saw that it was wrong, but they considered it too intellectually obvious, too compromising of their dignity, to have to stand up and protest.’”

Discussing the meaning of the Second Amendment as the repudiation of a “standing army” that serves at the discretion of a single individual, without the consent of the citizens who are instead to be armed for their mutual self-defense, she notes that “A nuclear weapon is everything that was detested (and regarded as illegal) in the ‘standing army…’”  We have surrendered our right to self-defense, which underlies every other human right, to a “thermonuclear monarch,” who is “so thrilling, so important, so vulnerable that he alone deserves a fallout shelter.”

As for America’s political landscape,
Right now it seems there are only two options: keep the right to bear arms and continue to witness shootings in schools, streets, and workplaces, or repeal the right to bear arms altogether. But there is a third alternative: the left has to listen to the right, and the right has to listen to the left…Ours is a citizenry that needs to relearn what courage is; it’s not shooting schoolchildren, and it’s not firing nuclear missiles at the innocent citizenry of a foreign nation.

The Chinese writer and poet Lu Xun wrote, “Hope is like a path in the countryside. Originally, there is nothing–but as people walk this way again and again, a path appears.”  May we all walk this path to peace.
 
Author: Anna Tolstoyevskaya grew up in the Soviet Union and came to the U.S. as a student of Philology and Foreign Service in the mid-1990s. She is an analyst by trade and an Austinite at heart, having spent a third of her life in that beautiful city. She can be reached at atx3017@gmail.com.

​All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

RAGA News
www.RAGA.org​

Dear Dr. Leo Semashko and all GHA peace-lovers!

 I congratulate you all on Mahatma Gandhi's 150th anniversary.  We have an additional reason to celebrate  because we were able to  publish - on time! - Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolence Starting Point. Spherons' Genetics and Statistics, a collection of outstanding articles by GHA activists including my friends, such as Rudolf Siebert, John Avery, Ela Gandhi, Rene Wadlow, Mairead Maguire, Andre Sheldon and more.

 Special thanks to you, Leo, for including my article "Mahatma Gandhi and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn" and also providing the readers with its Russian translation in the parallel Russian collection. The latter is perhaps especially timely as Russia has been lately playing the role of  the katechon (from Greek: τὸ κατέχον, "the one who withholds"), that is keeping the balance in view of the dangerously erratic policies in the USA and UK. Let us hope that since the time of Leo Tolstoy the Russians have been learning more of nonviolent philosophy and strategies of Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and other nonviolent heroes.

As to the GHA's failure to unite and consolidate its membership in search for an equitable  solution for the Kashmir problem just remember that it takes a lot more courage and perseverance to find a peaceful solution than to start a war. Gandhi's violent death, his martyrdom remind us that the cause of peace is safeguarded by the heroes.

As you wish, in November, I will take a copy of the Gandhi Book to the USA to be deposited at the Library of Congress, the largest book and digital documents depository in the world. I promise to keep celebrating Gandhi's Non-Violence the whole year!

In Peace and Harmony, 
I remain truly yours,
Vladislav Krasnov (see my GHA personal page)
https://peacefromharmony.org/?cat=en_c&key=752  

Sincerely,
W George Krasnow (http://wiki-org.ru/wiki/Краснов,_Владислав_Георгиевич)
President, RAGA

Greetings!
Dear friends of the Russia & America Good Will Association (www.raga.org) and antiwar colleagues!

Congrats!
​Let me congratulate Russian readers with the beginning of school year across the whole country, and the American readers I wish a Happy Labor Day!

ATTENTION - About using TOR or Opera VPN Browser to visit RAGA from other countries! For some time I have heard the reports that RAGA became inaccessible for readers located in Russia and, perhaps, some other countries. No worr:  try - out TOR Browser. It is easy to install, and it is FREE: 
https://www.torproject.org/download/

Opera is also free and offers similar VPN fiction: 
https://www.opera.com/computer/features/free-vpn

*TOR and other VPN browsers are restricted in some countries so know your local laws before using these programs. Act at your won risk. 

Now, some news!

Ron Unz's Strategy for the Alt-Media to Defeat the Mainstream Media Is Brilliant
Vladislav Krasnov Jul 25 2019, 9373 views 213 comments
 
Ron Unz’s article “The Alternative Media Can Defeat the Mainstream Media” makes a lot of sense, especially, as viewed against the background of his own articles in which he does not shy away from criticizing Jewish religion, Zionism, or ingrained habits. Above all, he welcomes others to do the same. In fact, he does more to undermine the moneyed Jewish MSM establishment than many alleged or real anti-Semite. Charles Bausman deserves the credit for rerunning Unz’s important strategy-minded article in Russia-Insider. 

I think that Ron Unz is right in focusing on the media. “Groups advocating policies opposed by the American establishment should recognize that the greatest obstacle they face is usually the mainstream media”, he says. And adds, “In Clauswitzian terms, the media often constitutes the strategic “center of gravity” of the opposing forces”.

READ MORE and feel free to participate in the debate it generated.
https://russia-insider.com/en/ron-unzs-strategy-alt-media-defeat-mainstream-media-brilliant/ri27507

The above article is also posted on RAGA site. However, since a few months ago, RAGA has been inaccessible from Russia. Indirectly one can access RAGA by using TOR Browser. 
Please try to use TOR Browser! Easy to install and FREE.
https://www.torproject.org/download/

Alternatively try Opera VPN: https://www.opera.com/computer/features/free-vpn
 
Then please try the link below.
http://www.raga.org/news/ron-unzs-strategy-for-the-alt-media-to-defeat-the-mainstream-media-is-brilliant-vladislav-krasnov-phd

That is how it happened when I invited Kevin Barrett and his readers/listeners to join the debate about my article about Ron Unz’s “strategy” to Beat the Big Media

AUDIO PODCAST VERSION

"Dear Kevin,
"This is to invite you and your readers/listeners to a debate on Jewish-Gentile relations that my article 'Ron Unz's Strategy for the Alt-Media to Defeat the Mainstream Media Is Brilliant' generated on the pages of Russia-Insider. 

"So far there are over 213 comments, and it is good as far as hits are concerned. However, I've noticed a negative dynamics because emotional negativism toward Jews seems to predominate. I can understand that the anger toward Jews in general is, at least, partially understandable and perhaps justifiable. However, I am convinced that all Jews are not alike. Moreover, the number of Jews who challenge Zionism, especially its current pro-Netanyahu trend, is growing. Some Jews are even more forthright about secretive Jewish shenanigans than the alleged 'anti-Semitic' authors of The Protocols of the Wizards of Zion were.

"Therefore I feel that it is incumbent upon us-- the 'Whites', Gentiles, Christian, Muslim, and secular non-Jews--to respond in kind and welcome such dissident Jews as Norman Finkelstein, Gilad Atzmon, Israel Shamir (whom I know personally and admire his work), Ron Unz, Brother Nathanael Kapner and several more into the community of truth-seekers.

"And you, Kevin,  are the person who is best qualified and positioned to do so. You're a converted Muslim familiar with Christianity. And you are a secular scholar. You work well with Veterans Today and now a regular author of Ron Unz's site. What is personally very important to me, you know who Mikhail Bakhtin, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn are. You know that Russians were able to overcome Marxist-Leninist ideological and political monopoly ('monologue') via a dialogue and actually polyphony of many dissident authors as soon as glasnost was established. In the US we should be able to stave off the monologic tendency of Big Media by letting Christian, Muslim, Jewish and other genuine dissidents to speak up. And that's what you are doing at TruthJihad Radio."

http://www.raga.org/news/video-vladislav-krasnov-and-kevin-barrett-on-russia-and-jewish-gentile-relations-interview  (again this link may not open in Russia)

Other ways to access my interview with Kevin Barrett:

От: Kevin Barrett <truthjihad@gmail.com>
Date: Aug. 13, 2019
To: Vladislav Krasnov <president92@gmail.com>

Hello George,
Our discussion is now uploaded:
https://kevinbarrett.heresycentral.is/2019/08/krasnov-unz/ 
​and  at YouTube:  https://youtu.be/1xNzsxBLaZI 
It will be broadcast Thursday 1 to 2 pm Eastern on https://NoLiesRadio.org
Thank you for the great discussion, and for your patience.
Best, Kevin

Manifesto of Survival - by Anna Tolstoyevskaya
8/27/2019
http://www.raga.org/news/manifesto-of-survival
switch to Russian
http://www.raga.org/novosti/manifest-vizhivaniya
 
However, unless you use TOR Browser, you can read it only in English
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51635.htm
 
Our civilization has reached amazing heights of scientific and technical development, but we still have not learnt to see a human being in each other. And a friend. We are still throwing sticks and stones at one another, except they have become so much bigger and heavier. Too heavy even for our planet.

And now we are facing the question of whether anyone will be around tomorrow to greet the sunrise.

Yet, we still have a chance to save our mother planet from and for ourselves, and continue meeting sunsets and sunrises with her. And with our friend, in humanity and in spirit.
 ….
And we’ll finally find Christ in each and every one of us. A true son and daughter of our true god, infinitely beautiful universal consciousness in all its manifestations on earth and in heaven.
Let there always be the Sun!
 
Author: Anna Tolstoyevskaya grew up in the Soviet Union and came to the U.S. as a student of Philology and then Foreign Service in the mid-1990s. She is an analyst by trade and an Austinite at heart, having spent a third of her life in that beautiful city. She can be reached at atx3017@gmail.com

Mr. President: Send Sam Nunn to Moscow
U.S.-Russia ties 'in a state of strategic instability'
By Edward Lozansky - - Wednesday, August 14, 2019
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
  Nowadays it is hard for anyone much under the age of 50 to imagine, but once upon a time the threat of nuclear war and the prospect of planetary extinction were things people actually worried about. Backyard bomb shelters, duck and cover in the classroom, LBJ’s 1964 “Daisy” ad, apocalyptic books and films like On the Beach, The Day After and Dr. Strangelove both reflected and fed genuine fears that a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union, whether deliberate or accidental, would mean at least “the end of civilization as we know it” and maybe the end of all life on Earth.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/aug/14/crosstalk-trump-should-send-sam-nunn-to-moscow

RAGA.org agrees with both Nixon and Simes. Vladislav Krasnov
Delusions About Russia
Russia is a dangerous adversary. But treating it as an outright enemy could result in a self-fulfilling prophecy, triggering mortal threats to its neighbors which otherwise may not be in the cards.
By Dimitri K. Simes
TWENTY-SIX years ago at a national policy conference in Los Angeles co-hosted by his foundation, Richard M. Nixon observed that one of America’s most fundamental foreign policy objectives was to build a new international order after the collapse of the Soviet Union which included the newly-democratic Russia as a partner. He stated, 
    "In discussing Russia, it is first necessary to dispel a myth. The Russians did not lose the Cold War. The Communists did. The United States and our allies played a crucial role in containing communism and in rolling it back, but it was democratic Russia that gave the knockout blow to communism on December 14th in 1991. So therefore, we should treat Russia today not as a defeated enemy but as an ally and a friend who joined with us in defeating communism in Russia."
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/delusions-about-russia-7232

​Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects Paperback – May 31, 2011
by Dmitry Orlov  (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0865716854/ref=asc_df_08657168545963217?tag=shopz0d-20&ascsubtag=shopzilla_mp_1475-20;15652473671832126344610080302008005&creative=395261&creativeASIN=0865716854&linkCode=asn
The United States is in steep decline. Plagued by runaway debt, a shrinking economy, and environmental catastrophes to rival Chernobyl, the United States has been retracing the trajectory of the Soviet Union in the early 1980s toward national bankruptcy and political dissolution. By comparing a collapse that has run its course to one that is now unfolding, Dmitry Orlov holds a unique lens up to America's present and future.

RAGA.org agrees with Martin Gilman that Russia can survive any sanctions and get out stronger. Vladislav Krasnov
Martin Gilman
Professor of Economics, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow; Former Senior Resident Representative, Moscow Office, International Monetary Fund (1996-2002)
Event Documents
How Russia Is Surviving Western Sanctions Event Slides (3.51 MB)...
See More  
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/how-russia-surviving-western-sanctions

LIBERALISM. Putin’s interview has stimulated some (more) silliness among people who probably haven’t read it. “What is happening in the West? What is the reason for the Trump phenomenon, as you said, in the United States? What is happening in Europe as well? The ruling elites have broken away from the people. The obvious problem is the gap between the interests of the elites and the overwhelming majority of the people… Our Western partners have admitted that some elements of the liberal idea, such as multiculturalism, are no longer tenable… [the liberal idea] has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population.” Well, what’s incorrect? Putin has a better understanding than all the op-eds about populism. Western elites respond with a barrage of clichés.  
https://patrickarmstrong.ca/2019/07/11/russian-federation-sitrep-11-july-2019

​"Volodymyr Zelensky’s Landslide Victory in Ukraine May Become a Slippery Slope," Nicolai Petro, The Nation, July 25, 2019.  
Well-organized, partly government funded, and armed to the teeth, nationalist groups currently exert a much greater influence in Ukrainian politics than their paltry electoral results would suggest. Even as their leaders vie among themselves for dominance, whenever their common agenda of a “Ukraine Above All” is challenged, such groups have resorted to violence and intimidation, to which state authorities have often turned a blind eye.  

From the US government’s perspective, therefore, Ukraine will continue to be a disappointment, but American policy-makers have only themselves to blame for this. By blatantly siding with Poroshenko on the country’s most divisive political, religious, and cultural debates, US policy became totally identified with him, and widely resented as a form of “external administration.” We are now seeing the backlash in the rising support for neutrality rather than membership in NATO, in growing pro-Russian sympathies and popularity of the opposition parties willing to make peace with Russia, and in the doubts that Zelensky himself has recently expressed about whether Western politicians really have Ukraine’s best interests at heart, when they urge him not to negotiate directly with Putin.
https://www.thenation.com/article/vladimir-zelensky-ukraine-election/  
​
Petro’s announcement
My previous piece on Zelensky, which appeared in The National Interest, is now also available in Russian: "Неужели национализм станет ядом для нового президента Украины?" 

MOSCOW, July 24. /TASS/. On Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin visited the Solzhenitsyn House of Russia Abroad and toured the exhibition dedicated to the life of Russian emigrants who fled the country after the Bolshevik revolution. The president was accompanied by Moscow’s Mayor Sergei Sobyanin. After the museum tour, the president left a note in the Honorary Guests Book. He thanked the museum organizers for creating "a remarkable, interesting and informative exposition about the life of Russian emigrants."
He also spoke with Solzhenitsyn’s widow, Natalia Solzhenitsyna, thanking her for her work on the exposition. He stressed that people must not forget the tragedy of Russian emigrants and must not repeat the mistakes that had caused it.    https://tass.com/society/1070246  
You may like to know that I am an early admirer of the Russian writer and the author of
Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky: A Study in the Polyphonic Novel Hardcover – 1980
by Vladislav Krasnov  (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Solzhenitsyn-Dostoevsky-Study-Polyphonic-Novel/dp/0820304727
See also my articles
Emperor Michael II in the Solzhenitsyn House - Author: Vladislav Krasnov
http://www.raga.org/news/emperor-michael-ii-in-the-solzhenitsyn-house-author-vladislav-krasnov
Mahatma Gandhi and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Two Giants Who Blessed the 20th Century. Will Vladimir Putin, Other World Leaders Listen?
VLADISLAV KRASNOV • JANUARY 25, 2019.  • 8,100 WORDS •
http://www.unz.com/article/mahatma-gandhi-and-aleksandr-solzhenitsyn-the-two-giants-who-blessed-the-20th-century

Wooden church from the time of Peter the Great
Church of St. John the Divine on the Ishnya (near Rostov)
https://www.rbth.com/travel/330722-wooden-church-bogoslov
Early 20th-century photographs from the Prokudin-Gorsky Collection (Library of Congress) and photographs from William C. Brumfield Collection (National Gallery of Art)  
224th article in "Discovering Russia" series. 
General link:   https://www.rbth.com/special-discovering-russia
 
Commemorating a battle between Moscow and Tver
St. Theodore Convent in Pereslavl-Zalessky
https://www.rbth.com/travel/330797-convent-theodore-pereslavl-zalessky
Early 20th-century photographs from the Prokudin-Gorsky Collection (Library of Congress) and photographs from William C. Brumfield Collection (National Gallery of Art)  
Sent from St. Theodore Convent as part of a project documenting the convent's architecture and art.
 
Also in Pereslavl-Zalessky:
https://www.rbth.com/travel/328978-goritsky-monastery-pereslavl-zalessky
​

​Sincerely,
W George Krasnow (http://wiki-org.ru/wiki/Краснов,_Владислав_Георгиевич)
President, RAGA
www.raga.org
Facebook

Peace and Justice to the World. 
миру мир и благоволение в сердцах

 From RAGA site:
"We are an association of Americans who believe it is in the U.S. national interests to foster friendship with Russia on the basis of mutual Good Will and non-interference in each other's affairs. RAGA is a gathering of people who share common interests in Russia's history, culture, religion, economy, politics and the way of life. We feel that Russian people have made outstanding contributions to humankind and are capable of greater achievements. We envision Russia as a strong, independent, proud and free nation and as a partner in achieving peace in the world."

​All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

RAGA News
www.RAGA.org​

Vladislav Krasnov writes:

"Dear Kevin,
"This is to invite you and your readers/listeners to a debate on Jewish-Gentile relations that my article 'Ron Unz's Strategy for the Alt-Media to Defeat the Mainstream Media Is Brilliant' generated on the pages of Russia-Insider. 

"So far there are over 150 comments, and it is good as far as hits are concerned. However, I've noticed a negative dynamics because emotional negativism toward Jews seems to predominate. I can understand that the anger toward Jews in general is, at least, partially understandable and perhaps justifiable. However, I am convinced that all Jews are not alike. Moreover, the number of Jews who challenge Zionism, especially its current pro-Netanyahu trend, is growing. Some Jews are even more forthright about secretive Jewish shenanigans than the alleged 'anti-Semitic' authors of The Protocols of the Wizards of Zion were.

"Therefore I feel that it is incumbent upon us-- the 'Whites', Gentiles, Christian, Muslim, and secular non-Jews--to respond in kind and welcome such dissident Jews as Norman Finkelstein, Gilad Atzmon, Israel Shamir (whom I know more), Ron Unz, Brother Nathanael Kapner and several more into the community of truth-seekers.

"And you are the person who is best qualified and positioned to do so. You're converted Muslim familiar with Christianity. And you are a secular scholar. You work well with Veterans today and a regular author of Ron Unz's site. What is personally very important to me, you know who Bakhtin, Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn are. You know that Russians were able to overcome Marxist-Leninist ideological and political monopoly ('monologue') via a dialogue and actually polyphony of many dissident authors as soon as glasnost was established. In the US we should be able to stave off the monologic tendency of Big Media by letting Christian, Muslim, Jewish and other genuine dissidents to speak up. And that's what you are doing at TruthJihad Radio."

Dr. Vladslav Krasnov (also known as Wladislaw “George” Krasnow) of RAGA.org was a dissident in the former Soviet Union, where deviating from the official Communist Party line was a serious thoughtcrime. He defected to Sweden and then the United States in the 1960s, earned a doctorate in Russian Literature at the University of Washington, and has written three books and worked for many leading think tanks and government agencies.

​All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

RAGA News
www.RAGA.org​