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By Vladislav Krasnov ![]() The most revealing part of Bret Stephens’s article The Secrets of Jewish Genius carried by The New York Times on December 27, 2019 is a list of outstanding Jews who have “contributed (to the world) so seminally to so many of its most path breaking ideas and innovations”. Here they are: “Sarah Bernhardt and Franz Kafka; Albert Einstein and Rosalind Franklin; Benjamin Disraeli and (sigh) Karl Marx”. I am not about to dispute any of them, nor Stephens’ right of choice. Granted, this rather short list of Jewish over-achievers in different fields for a hundred years can be easily augmented. Such world-famous Jews as Sigmund Freud and Leo Trotsky (1879-1940)[1] are very conspicuous by their absence. And then that parenthetical “(sigh)” which Stephens emitted before placing it in front of Karl Marx! Does it not cancel the major part of Stephens’ argument about the great beneficial influence of Jews on world affairs? According to a standard dictionary to sigh is to “emit a long, deep audible breath expressing sadness, relief, tiredness, or similar”. In relation to Karl Marx (1818 – 1883),[2] one may not just sigh but weep for the millions of victims of the bloody violence his teaching of the necessity of class struggle and world revolution had unleashed world-wide. [1] Leon Trotsky (Lev Bronstein, 1879 –1940) was a Soviet revolutionary, whose strain of Marxism is known as Trotskyism. Initially supporting the Mensheviks within the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, he joined the Bolsheviks just before the 1917 October Revolution, immediately becoming a member of the Politburo to manage the Bolshevik Revolution. During the early days of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and the Soviet Union, he was People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later commander of the Red Army, with the title of People's Commissar of Military and Naval Affairs. He was a major figure in the Bolshevik victory in the Civil War (1918–1922). Defeated in a struggle against Stalin in the 1920s, he was removed as Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs (January 1925), from the Politburo (October 1926), the Central Committee (October 1927), and expelled from the Communist Party (November 1927). Exiled to Alma–Ata (January 1928) and then from the USSR (February 1929). As the head of the Fourth International, Trotsky continued to oppose the Stalinist rule in the USSR from exile. Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico City by Ramón Mercader, a Spanish-born NKVD agent. On 20 August 1940, Mercader attacked Trotsky with an ice axe and Trotsky died the next day in a hospital. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Trotsky [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx 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 THE HIGHLIGHTS As I set my foot on the American soil, I was delighted to read Professor Gary Saul Morson’s outstanding review of Solzhenitsyn’s “March 1917”, the third and last part of Solzhenitsyn’s majestic “The Red Wheel” trilogy about Russia’s downfall, finally published in the US.[i] “In Russia, history is too important to leave to the historians,” writes Morson. “As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn explained in his 1970 Nobel Prize lecture, literature transmits “condensed and irrefutable human experience” in a form that “defies distortion and falsehood. Thus literature . . . preserves and protects a nation’s soul.” In truth, the Horrorcost of the Bolshevik totalitarian rule for the Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, Muslims, Christians and all Non-Bolsheviks by far exceeds anything what the accolades of the Jewish Holocaust during WWII could master. Above all, it was not the Germans exterminating Jews and other “racial inferiors” during a fierce war, but Jews and Russians killing Jews and Russians—and all other—deviant from the Party Line. The bosses of the GULAG, often Jewish, were killing the “Trotskists,” “Zionists” and other former comrades because the “party line” kept on changing. This made Vasily Grossman ( 1905 –1964), a Soviet (Jewish) writer, wander in his proscribed novel Life and Fate (1960): Was Marxist “class struggle” morally superior to the Nazi race war? Grossman’s novel waited twenty years before being published in 1980 abroad.[iii] Most recently, Dmitry Bykov, the famed Russian poet and literary critic, speculated that “Hitler would have won over more in the USSR if he'd dropped the Antisemitism.” Remarkably, after a huge “patriotic” uproar, the lawyers decided that Bykov’s remarks do not constitute “disrespect for society” or “profanity against Russia’s military glory.” It was a huge victory for the freedom of speech in Putin’s Russia. Bykov was also off the hook for “rehabilitating Nazism,” disappointing those who were convinced that Bykov had crossed the line. (Meduza, 5 March 2019).[iv] An admirer of Solzhenitsyn, Bykov wrote a brilliant article about the failure of modern Russian nationalists to understand either Solzhenitsyn or Dostoevsky.[v] On March 29 I had a breakfast with Jon Utley in Washington Harbor. The publisher of The American Conservative, Jon has been a peace-maker and my personal friend since the 1990s. In 2005, I helped him find out what happened to his Russian father Arkady Berdichevsky, a Soviet trade mission official, who was arrested alleged for “Trotskitst” sympathies in Moscow in 1936 when Jon was 2 year old. He got a “light” 3-year sentence. But then all correspondence with Freda Utley, Jon’s mother, stopped. As it turned out, Arkady was sent to a GULAG camp in Vorkuta, re-tried there for organizing a hunger strike and sentenced to die. We found a general location of mass executions site where he was executed along with hundreds of others in March of 1938. You may want to read my article about Jon[vi] or see Documentary: Return to the Gulag: Jon Utley’s Search for His Father.[vii] Learning of my forthcoming trip to California, Jon Utley asked me to give his warmest to Ron Unz, who preceded him as the publisher of The American Conservative and now publishes The Unz Review, one of the best alternative web-zine in the country. On March 29, I visited the Library of Congress to hand a number of books to Grant Harris, a former graduate student of mine at the Monterey (now Middlebury) Institute of International Studies and now the head of the LOC’s European Division. Several books were from a Russian professor and Solzhenitsyn scholar from Krasnoyarsk University whom I had met during Solzhenitsyn’s Centennial Conference at Northern Vermont University in September 2018. [i] https://www.amazon.com/March-1917-Center-Culture-Solzhenitsyn/dp/0268102651 [ii] (“Solzhenitsyn’s cathedrals” by Gary Saul Morson | The New Criterion. Vol. 37, No. 8 / April 2019). [iii] About Grossman’s novel read https://www.thenation.com/article/maximalist-vasily-grossman/ [iv] https://meduza.io/en/news/2019/03/05/russian-poet-is-off-the-hook-for-saying-hitler-would-have-won-over-more-in-the-ussr-if-he-d-dropped-the-antisemitism) [v] http://www.solzhenitsyn.ru/o_tvorchestve/articles/general/index.php?ELEMENT_ID=1965 [vi] http://www.raga.org/news/john-basil-utley-at-80-he-is-one-of-us-memoirs-of-two-trips-to-russia [vii] http://www.hacer.org/hacers-exclusive-video-channel-in-youtube/ As president of RAGA, I feel my duty to help cultural exchange between Russia and the US, the little that remains of it due to the ongoing russophobia of leading US media. In that I am guided by this utterance of James Billington (1929-2018), the former Library of Congress director: “If Americans cannot penetrate into the interior spiritual dialogue of other peoples, they will never be able to understand, let alone anticipate or affect, the discontinuous major changes which are the driving forces in history and which will probably continue to spring unexpected traps in the years ahead. To put it another way, if we cannot learn to listen to others as they whisper their prayers, we may well confront them later on when they howl their war cries.” The above is from the article “Russia’s Mission” by Professor NICOLAI N. PETRO, my former colleague at the Monterey (now Middlebury) Institute of International Studies. He has been one of the most perceptive and honest observer of Russia-US relations. He sees “Russia’s Mission” in President Putin’s efforts to engage his NATO opponents in “civilizational realism” in the hope to “forge a new and more ‘congenial’ world order”. (NOV 14, 2018).[i] Arriving at San Francisco on March 30, I called Ron Unz. Upon receiving Utley’s greetings from Washington, he kindly invited me and my daughter Vera for a lunch at Jing-Jing Chinese restaurant in Palo Alto. Based on a number of his articles, including the one stressing the support of Jewish American bankers for the Bolshevik revolution, I had already welcomed him as one of RAGA authors.[ii] (). Now in front of me sat an introspective, polite, almost shy man eager to listen and understand rather than talk and blame anyone. We agreed the surest way for the United States to survive as a viable democracy and a beacon of hope for the downtrodden is not to force “democracy” on others but start by respecting their sovereignty. Domestically, let people of different persuasions engage in a friendly dialog. Be they Conservative or Liberal, Right or Left, Capitalist or Socialist—as long as they eschew violent, vile and offensive means of propagating their ideas—all are welcome. [i] Petro’s article https://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/online-articles/russias-mission [ii] http://www.raga.org/news/welcome-ron-unz-and-american-pravda Ron and I agreed that we should promote polyphony and the art of mutually beneficial dialog, as Socrates practiced it. And be mindful that sometimes democracies TOO get out of hand, turn demagogic and brutal, just as the Athenian populace condemned Socrates to death. Ron and I agreed that generally conservatives have upheld best the banner of liberty. The nearby Hoover Institution was just about the only anti-Communist US think-tank where Solzhenitsyn found a plenty of materials on the brutality of Communism in Russia. I am glad to acknowledge my indebtedness to the Hoover Institution for publishing my book “Soviet Defectors: The KGB Wanted List”.[i] It just crossed my mind that one of Jon Utley’s close associates, the Austrian philosopher Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909 – 1999) suspected, as the ancient Greeks did, that DEMOCRACIES have the tendency to degenerate into a mob rule and tyranny. His self-description as a "conservative arch-liberal" may sound self-contradictory, but actually is not. The best ways to preserve the foundations of civil order in the world is not forcing “democracy” on the “benighted” nations but rather, while respecting their sovereignty, show them the advantages of liberal attitude toward censorship and human rights. A polyglot who mastered several languages, Kuehnelt-Leddihn exerted considerable influence on the conservatives in the USA. See Lee Congdon’s article “Kuehnelt-Leddihn and American Conservatism”.[ii] The conservatives, like Utley, Kuehnelt-Leddihn or Unz should not be confused with their opposites, the aggressive and dogmatically pro-Zionist Neo-Cons. According to Wikipedia, the ascendance of the Neo-Cons in US foreign policy has to do with The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a think tank founded in 1997 in Washington by William Kristol and Robert Kagan under the motto: "American leadership is good both for America and for the world."[iii] However, in a bold 2006 article “The Israeli Lobby” (later a book, The Israeli Lobby and US Foreign Policy) Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt traced the origin of anthe Neo-Cons to an earlier event. In 1996 a group led by Richard Perle submitted to Benjamin Netanyahu, the then Prime Minister of Israel, a report titled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. The insisted on a new approach to solving Israel's security problems in the Middle East via a propaganda campaign to emphasize Israel’s affinity with "Western values." The report pushed an aggressive policy, including the removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and dismantling of Syria by proxy warfare. Thus, at least since 1996, the US global strategy has been in alliance with and—some would say—subordinated to Israel’s security needs as perceived by the right wing Zionists. My next appointment was an April 5, 2019 radio interview with Dr. Kevin Barrett about Solzhenitsyn, Gandhi, and Peace in the World https://kevinbarrett.heresycentral.is/tag/vladislav-krasnov/ Kevin is an American dissident and former university professor who lost his job for sticking to the “irreverent” view that 9/11 was an inside job for mobilizing public opinion in favor of US military offensive in the Middle East, North Africa, and vis-à-vis Russia. My interview followed that with Richie Allen, a popular Irish radio show host opposing censorship in UK. [iv] The key note for my own 2nd hour interview- Listen HERE - with Kevin was Solzhenitsyn’s prophetic utterance: [i] https://www.hoover.org/research/soviet-defectors-kgb-wanted-list [ii] https://www.crisismagazine.com/author/lee-congdon [iii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century [iv] https://sarahwestall.com/richie-allen-speaks-censorship-insignificant/. In placing this quotation in front, Kevin was just on cue. His mission is the pursuit of truth. That’s how he presented me: Vladislav Krasnov, a.k.a. George Krasnow, discusses his recent articles “Solzhenitsyn’s relevance today” and “Gandhi and Solzhenitsyn, the Two Giants Who Blessed the XXth Century.” The latter article serves as a spring board for advocating a new Paradigm for Global Relations, including an alliance of Civilizations to save the Planet from Nuclear destruction.” Listen HERE (remember I am in the 2nd half of the scale) There is no need to text the radio voice. But a brief overview might save your time. Kevin and I started with my book Russia Beyond Communism: A Chronicle of National Rebirth written when I was still professor of The Monterey Institute. Appearing just before the end of the USSR in 1991, the book was not only predictive of--but also aimed at preparing both American and Russian public opinion for-- the emergence of a New Russia. In fact, I presented a copy to Boris Yeltsin right after he had squashed the August 19, 1991 Communist coup attempt and replaced the Red Flag of Communism with Russia’s national tricolor. Starting with Solzhenitsyn’s vision of post-Soviet future, I presented a number of Soviet and some Russian émigré authors who took advantage of a relative freedom of expression under Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost’ to argue that the country should abandon the straitjacket of Marxism-Leninism and go “beyond” Communism. Solzhenitsyn was of primary importance. I discussed a number of his essays that pointed toward Russia’s post-Communist future, such as “Letter to the Soviet Leaders” (1973), REPENTANCE AND SELF-LIMITATION IN THE LIFE OF NATIONS (1973), Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals. The last one was widely published in the USSR in August 1990. Solzhenitsyn was also important as I employed his polyphonic method in selecting authors of different persuasions. In the subtitle I used “National”, not “nationalist”, rebirth. This is because “nationalist” smacks of possible xenophobic and chauvinistic tendency which Solzhenitsyn and the majority of my authors deplored. If they were “nationalist”, it was only in a positive sense of adhering to the best of national traditions. The majority of my authors favored a national, now I would say identitarian alternative to Communism--that is restoring Russia’s traditional pre-1917 national identity, her historical roots, religious beliefs and customs--to replace the official Marxism-Leninist ideology which by 1991 seemed to have fallen into a coma. Having returned to Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn refused to support Boris Yeltsin and the “shock therapy” reforms that brought the country on the brink of anarchy and civil war. Only with the 1998 ascent of Yevgeny Primakov as Prime-Minister and then Vladimir Putin as President did Solzhenitsyn feel reassured that Russia has regained its national sovereignty. During these post-Soviet years I found myself in agreement with Solzhenitsyn’s dissatisfaction with Yeltsin’s government. Having moved from California to Washington DC, I founded the Russia & America Good Will Association (RAGA.org) to help overcome an enormous cultural gap between the USA and post-Soviet Russia still plagued by the vestiges of Soviet mentality. My chief advantage was the familiarity with both, plus my ability to travel back and forth, as well as across the States, often as a contract interpreter for the USDS. As RAGA president, I tried to help A New Russia get on her feet. * In March 1998, published in The Washington Post a paid ad with the greeting to Russia’s Prime-Minister Yevgeni Primakov when he turned his plane back when the US had started bombing Yugoslavia; * In March 1999, wrote an Open Letter to Bill Clinton protesting US interference in Russian reforms; it was signed by over a hundred American experts http://www.raga.org/news/raga-open-letter-to-clinton; * In 2001, warned “Don’t Count Russia Out,” in a polemical article welcoming Vladimir Putin’s assertion of Russia’s sovereignty; http://www.raga.org/dont_count.html * In 2008, I wrote a comprehensive article Did Shock Therapy Help Russia?, describing the collusion between of the Gaidar-Chubais group in Russia and the Harvard clique of Andrei Shleifer and Jonathan Hay, who got the contract on doing reforms in Russia without competitive bidding. As the two got involved in illegal investments, Harvard University was forced to pay the largest penalty in its history. In my research I was greatly helped by Janine Wedel’s book Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe, 1989-1998.[i] * Then came “Obama’s Perestroika Challenge: US & Russia”, by W.George Krasnow, 7 January 2009, insisting on “Abandoning the fantasy of U.S. unipolar world domination and recognizing Russia's legitimate national security concerns” among other recommendations;[ii] * When President Obama failed to reset US-Russia relations and continued George Bush’s policy of confrontation, I engage him in a letter exchange suggesting that, instead of vain demagogic efforts to spread “democracy” throughout the world, the USA should, first of all, honor the right of each nation for “sovereignty”.[iii] In 2014 my book was published in translation, Новая Россия. От коммунизма к национальному возрождению. [iv] In its Preface Professor Aleksei Lyubimov, the editor of a Duma magazine[v] and member of the Diplomatic Academy, recommended the book as “balanced and dispassionate”. He also praised it for offering a number of different, even opposing viewpoints, “for calling for societal consolidation, and a civilized dialog and polyphonic interaction between the Westernizers and Slavophiles, the advocates of free market and socialists, Orthodox Christians, Muslims and Jews. In his opinion, the whole world needs to cooperate with independent, free, prosperous and peace-loving Russia”. My book was the last of a series of four publications undertaken by the Center of Contemporary Russian Studies which Dr. Nicolai Petro and I founded around 1988 at the Monterey Institute. We deliberately used “Russian” to challenge numerous Soviet Studies think-tanks across the States. As soon as Mikhail Gorbachev proclaimed glasnost’, that is a degree of freedom long suppressed in the USSR, we felt that the Communist Utopia will not last long. We felt that US academic establishment needed to prepare for a New Russia for which the recovery of its historical, cultural, and spiritual identity was essential. That’s why the book was dedicated to the Millennium of Russia’s baptism in the year 1988. I did not expect that the millions of Soviet atheists would overnight confess Jesus Christ. Nor did I expect that the New Russia would abandon secular freedom of conscience. But I expected that all its citizens, whether Christian, Muslim or Jewish, would feel free to confess their convictions. The main thrust of the book was antithetical to that of Professor Richard Pipes (1923-2018) who once headed Russian Center at Harvard. The difference was that while we in Monterey looked upon Russia’s re-emergence with a hope, Pipes felt that the USSR must be feared precisely because it retained too much “Russianness” from its past. In a sense, my book was the extension of my 1979 debate with Pipes in The Russian Review in the USA and Encounter magazine in UK. See “Richard Pipes’s Foreign Policy Strategy: Anti-Soviet or Anti-Russian?”[vi] In his writings Pipes entirely dismissed the influence of Marxist-Leninist ideology on the behavior of Soviet leaders. Moreover, he failed to see how powerful pro-Communist and pro-Marxist forces outside the USSR, including “Cultural Marxism” and “Catholic Marxism,” were facilitated Soviet strategy throughout the world. In fact, one of the reasons for the West’s current hostility toward Russia today is the failure to recognize during the Old Cold War that Communism was not just a Russian, Chinese or Cambodian event, but a common, West-centered, affliction of humankind with the virus of violence. It was advertised as the most effective, quick, scientifically “required” cure of all injustices of the world. I call it “West-centered” because Lenin and his Bolsheviks always prided themselves that their Marxist ideology was based on the ideas of French Revolution, German philosophy, and British labor movement. But the “Russian proletariat” was called upon to spread these Western ideas for the sake of world revolution. As to the terror of French Revolution, its degeneration into Napoleon’s wars of conquest, Lenin dismissed as non-consequential. Thus the October Revolution of 1917 was driven by the desire of the Bolsheviks to re-play the French Revolution and be more “Western” than the West. The prominence of Jews in the Bolshevik leadership, a taboo topic for many years, has been lately elucidated by a number of authors, especially by MARK WEBER.[vii] Ron Unz himself shed light on the assistance to the Bolsheviks from Jewish donors from overseas.[viii] What remains overlooked is that the Bolsheviks, whether Jewish, Russian or Latvian, were largely deracinated individuals who were hardly representative of their ethnic or religious group. Karl Marx himself, though from rabbinical families on both sides, was baptized and acted as an ardent Christian in his youth. But then, denouncing “everyday Jews” as misers and blood-suckers, he turned into fanatical atheist and God-fighter. His denunciation of all religions as the opiate of the people is well-known. Anti-religious fanaticism of the Russian Bolsheviks was just as stark. Lenin was as much an anti-Christ as Trotsky anti-Moses if not anti-Yahweh. One might say that the totalitarian tendencies of early Bolsheviks were inspired less by Lenin’s mixed Jewish and “Mongolian” or Stalin’s “Asiatic” Georgian background, but rather by the complex of inferiority they felt vis-à-vis the West. The brutality of their early Soviet regimes largely stems from the desire to surpass the West in the most “progressive” Western idea of a violent world revolution as a short-cut to a socialist paradise on Earth. The Bolsheviks succeeded in surpassing the anti-clerical and anti-Christian ardor madness of the French Revolution. Professor Talmon was right in tracing “The Origines of Totalitarian Democracy” to the French Revolution. According to the book-selling site, Jacob Leib Talmon[ix] (1916 –1980) was Professor of Modern History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He studied the genealogy of totalitarianism, arguing that political Messianism stemmed from the French Revolution, and stressed the similarities between Jacobinism and Stalinism. He coined the terms Totalitarian Democracy and Political Messianism. “The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy” was first published in 1952, re-published in 1986. I read it some thirty years ago while working on “Russia Beyond Communism”. But the book did not become dated. If anything, it is even more relevant now. As the book-sellers say, This study is an attempt to show that concurrently with the liberal type of democracy there emerged from the same premises in the eighteenth century a trend towards what we propose to call the totalitarian type of democracy. These two currents have existed side by side ever since the eighteenth century. The tension between them has constituted an important chapter in modern history, and has now become the most vital issue of our time. In my dialog with Kevin Barrett I argued that the issue is especially inflamed now when the USA and its allies declare themselves so much in love with democracy that they eagerly impose it on any country, allegedly, for its own benefit. Unfortunately, in our propensity to denounce all “the reactionary,” “arch-conservative” and “rightists” defenders of status quo while bathing in the self-satisfying glory of all-atoning “progressivism” we forget that the defining watershed of modern age was the Bolshevik coup-d’état in October 1917 which lead to the longest totalitarian rule in history. If the Oliver Cromwell revolution and civil war turmoil in England lasted two decades (1642- 1662), the French Revolution just ten (1788-1999) and then degenerated into Napoleon’s dictatorship and wars of conquest, the October1917 Revolution in Russia drugged on for nearly 73 years (1917-1991). Alas, it distinguished itself not just by unusual longevity but also by its counter-productive result as it ended with re-introduction of capitalism it vowed to destroy. It was counter-productive in achieving the goals it set: the liberation of working people, first in Russia and then the rest of the world, from exploitation and abuse by capitalists, money bags and the latter day imperialists. It did expropriate the capitalists and other money bags in Russia in 1917-1919. But when the Communist party rule evaporated at the end of 1991, socialist economy was quickly replaced, often by former Party functionaries, by crony-capitalism just like in the US, except the taxation in Russia is not progressive and anti-monopoly laws against the oligarchs are largely ineffective. The Bolsheviks were right in never calling their revolution “Russian” because they conceived it as the beginning of world revolution and knew that its essence was rather anti-Russian. Toward the end of the hour Kevin and I discussed my translation into Russian of John Andre Morrow’s book: Six Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad with the Christians of His Time: The Primary Documents[x] Dr. John Andrew Morrow (Imam Ilyas ‘Abd al-‘Alim Islam) is a Métis Canadian Muslim scholar who embraced Islam over thirty years ago at the age of sixteen. He has studied the Islamic sciences for over three decades at the hands of both traditional Muslim scholars as well as Western academics. He completed post-doctoral studies in Arabic in Fez and Rabat and considers Morocco to be his second home. He worked as a university professor for two decades, retiring from teaching after reaching the rank of Full Professor. He has authored a vast body of work, including over one hundred academic articles and thirty scholarly books.[xi] Intrigued by early Muslim-Christian cooperation, John discovered it was based on a number of the Prophet Mohammad’s early agreements with Christian communities. One such Covenant, with the Christians of St. Catherine’s Monastery on Sinai, had been known in Tsarist Russia. But in the atheist USSR, historical record of Muslim-Christian cooperation became a non-issue. Agreeing with John that anti-Christian attitudes of Islamist extremists, such as the ISIL (Daesh), do not reflect the mainstream Muslim tradition, I translated John’s booklet to Russian and had it posted on a Russian site.[xii] Later my friend from Azerbaijan had it translated into Azeri. Diverse authors and publications: *--On Thursday March 28, Dan Lieberman, a good friend of mine for many years, a journalist, playwright, and, sometimes, a tennis partner, treated me with lunch downtown Washington. Dan is a tireless publisher of Alternative Insight. And “Alternative” it really is! Dan never fails to challenge US policy toward Russia, as well as its subservience to Israel’s interests in the Middle East. This time he was especially upset with The New York Times publishing an Oct. 19, 2018 article by Adam Goldman, "Justice Dept. Accuses Russians of Interfering in Midterm Elections," which Dan finds erroneous. His attitude to the Mainstream media is articulated in his article The Media is the Mischief *--My Californian son-in-law Sammy presented to me Thomas Cowan’s book, Human Heart, Cosmic Heart: A Doctor’s Quest to Understand, Treat, and Prevent Cardiovascular Disease. [xiii]I read the book on the Aeroflot flight back to Moscow. I find Dr. Cowan’s argument compelling, especially since it is buttressed not just with careful medical research, but also with the anthroposophist philosophy of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) with its holistic approach to all sources of knowledge: heart, blain, and soul. *--John, my lawyer, whom I have known since mid-1990s when he registered RAGA.org, has always delighted me with his broad interest in Russian arts, ballet, music, and architecture. During a coffee break with him I was pleasantly surprised that it was he who emailed to me Gary Saul Morson’s profound review article about Solzhenitsyn that made me so happy on the first day in America. It seems, the academic establishment here begins to recognized that by writing The Red Wheel, (including March 1917), Solzhenitsyn created a credible non-Communist version of Russian history distinct from both Russophobic and pro-Marxist mainstreams. *--Another associate from Solzhenitsyn’s Vermont Conference suggested I read a book on russophobia by a Swiss journalist. I am happy to recommend it to all RAGA readers: Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria by Guy Mettan.[xiv] “Why do the USA, UK and Europe so hate Russia?” wonders the book seller rephrasing Mr. Mettan. “How it is that Western antipathy, once thought due to anti-Communism, could be so easily revived over a crisis in distant Ukraine, against a Russia no longer communist? Why does the West accuse Russia of empire-building, when 15 states once part of the defunct Warsaw Pact are now part of NATO, and NATO troops now flank Russian borders ...” It is one thing when a Russian like me or Putin complains about russophobia, but to hear it from outstanding journalist in Switzerland, the oldest republic in Europe, known for its neutrality and tri-lingual peaceful co-existence is a lesson to all who aspire to a membership in a civilized world, and that includes Ukraine! *--An exceptional book from Eastern Europe is GRAND DECEPTION: The Killing of William Browder” by Alex Krainer. Alas, it is NOT carried by the foremost book-seller in the world, Amazon.com. As Krainer explains, “My book, published only last month (August 2017), was starting to get some traction and in its first four weeks gained very positive reviews from readers (seven 5-star reviews and one 4-star review). That’s when Browder’s legal counsel Jonathan M. Winer stepped in. He contacted CreateSpace and demanded that my book be delisted alleging that it contained defamatory content. CreateSpace promptly obliged, suppressing the book and instructing me that I needed to, “work with the disputing party until a resolution is reached.” [xv] Now Krainer’s book Grand Deception: The Browder Hoax may be purchased here.[xvi] The book seller explains: “Suppressed and banned by the CIA's supplier, Amazon, “The Grand Deception: The Browder Hoax” is a highly intelligent, frank and entertaining take-down of one of the biggest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the US public and the world – The Magnitsky Act. Krainer’s study of Bill Browder’s book and actions is a riveting, unflinching expose of one of this decade’s big hoaxes.” If Mettan is a neutral Swiss, Krainer hails from Monte Carlo, Monaco. Moreover, born in Rijeka, Croatia, he is supposed to be hostile to Russia. But he is not because he is belongs to The Truth Alliance and proudly proclaims: “We aim to inspire public debate and open minds for a dialogue. We reject false “truths” telling that we need to be afraid and “protected” and that the “other” needs to be demonized and, ultimately, killed or otherwise destroyed. We reject lies and propaganda for those who deny us our own dignity and our own humanity.” It is easy to see in this a challenge to the New World Order, more specifically, to “The New American Century” proclaimed by the Neo-Cons in 1996. I hope this challenge will be sustained by, first and foremost, the peoples of Eastern Europe who, like the peoples of Russia, have carried the main brunt of Communist totalitarianism. Most appropriately, Krainer quotes Václav Havel, the dissident Czech writer who went to the office of president virtually straight from his prison cell. “Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed — be it ecological, social, demographic, or a general breakdown of civilization — will be unavoidable.” Not for nothing, Havel was called a “Czech Solzhenitsyn”. “The catastrophe” Havel feared is now even more imminent than in his time and it can hardly be avoided without Alex Krainer’s The Truth Alliance as long as the US and its European allies vilify Russia. There was a disappointment on my trip too. Next day after my arrival at Washington on March 25, Benjamin Netanyahu was to speak at the AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) meeting at the Walter E Washington Convention Center. The JVP (Jewish Voice for Peace), of which I am a non-Jewish member, called for a rally to protest against Netanyahu’s belligerent and uncompromising attitude toward Palestinians. At least, since Mearsheimer’s and Walt’s 2007 book The Israeli Lobby and the US Foreign Policy, I have been acutely aware of the problem. That’s why some years ago I joined the JVP as a genuine pro-peace human rights organization favoring a compromise between the Jews and Palestinians in Israel and elsewhere. I have admired JVP’s Non-Violent tactics, including participation in BDS actions against Israel across the USA. This time I responded to JVP’s call to protest against Netanyahu’s appearance in Washington as I hoped to meet JVP Washington area members. However, I saw none: either I was a bit late or they called off the protest as Netanyahu failed to appear sending instead a youTube pep talk. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank called Netanyahu's pep talk “a knife in the heart of the U.S.-Israel relations”.[xvii] Well, my disappointment was soon compensated by JVP appeal to Madonna to cancel her appearance at Eurovision contest to be held next month in Israel. As the JVP newsletter says, “...Israel shouldn’t even be hosting Eurovision in the first place. The core values of the contest – inclusion, diversity and unity – are the polar opposite of Israel’s unequal laws, apartheid roads and numerous human rights violations.” Choose Freedom: Boycott Eurovision, Madonna! [i] http://janinewedel.info/collisionreview_ForgnServ.html [ii] https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/obama-s-perestroika-challenge-us-russia/ [iii] http://www.raga.org/news/to-mr-barack-obama-potus [iv] https://www.labirint.ru/books/438669/) [v] Lyubimov http://www.pvlast.ru/glavred/ [vi] Krasnow vs Pipes Debate https://www.jstor.org/stable/128605?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents. Also The Russian Review vol.38, no.2, 1979; also the Encounter (April 1980). [vii] See Weber’s article “The Jewish Role in the Bolshevik Revolution and Russia's Early Soviet Regime. Assessing the Grim Legacy of Soviet Communism.” http://www.unz.com/pub/jhr__the-jewish-role-in-the-bolshevik-revolution-and-russias-early-soviet-regime/ [viii] See his “The Bolshevik Revolution and Its Aftermath,” 8/27/2018. [ix] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3400147-the-origins-of-totalitarian-democracy [x] Morrow’s book https://www.amazon.com/Covenants-Prophet-Muhammad-Christians-Time-ebook/dp/B00VTWYERS [xi] https://www.islamicity.org/by/john-andrew-morrow/ [xii] https://books.google.ru/books?isbn=1527509672 [xiii] Thomas Cowan https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30006169-human-heart-cosmic-heart [xiv] Guy Mettan https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34237648-creating-russophobia [xv] https://thirdalliance.ch/krainers-take-amazon-ban/ [xvi] Alex Krainer https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/JabbaQ Price: $14.99 USD. Words: 79,970. Language: English. Published: September 2018. [xvii] Dana Milbank https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-republicans-chutzpah-at-aipac/2019/03/26/21c12356-4fff-11e9-a3f7-78b7525a8d5f_story.html The JVP is not alone in defending Palestinian rights in Israel, and – the right of free speech guaranteed to Americans by the First Amendment. “Why So Much Fuss About A Conference In North Carolina?” APRIL 24, 2019 By LARA FRIEDMAN The attacks on the UNC-Duke conference—alongside continuing efforts to pass laws defining criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism—demonstrate that, although the president clearly has something else in mind when he talks about protecting free speech on campus, the truth is that campus free speech, when it comes to Israel, is very much under attack today—by those who want to shut down all criticism of Israel.[i] About Julian Assange’s predicament The best comment on Julian Assange’s dangerous predicament was by Caitlin Johnstone, “The Prosecution of Julian Assange Is Infinitely Bigger Than Assange” Caitlin Johnstone Tue, Apr 23, 2019 'They’re trying to win this fight against Assange in brutal fashion to ensure that they win all future fights as well' Caitlin adds… “The other day I published a massive mega-article attacking the major smears about Assange I’ve encountered. There are 27 of them in total so far, and I’ll be adding more soon. This mountain of smears exists because instead of paying attention to the world-shaping dangers I just outlined which threaten to make it impossible to oppose the leaders of the US-centralized empire who are marching us towards either extinction or dystopia, people are babbling about Assange’s personality, or whether or not he cleaned up after his cat while at the embassy.” [ii] Personally, I cannot add much about the Assange case to what I have already said about Ed Snowden. To Defect or to Integrate? The USA vs Edward Snowden.[iii] Unless the US learns to integrate peaceful dissent and welcome dissidents to open public dialogue, it will disintegrate and go the way of the USSR. The Notre Dame Cathedral and Russia Then there was the Notre Dame Chathedral fire. It may need some time before we could put it in a proper perspective. The best comment I have seen so far was by Charles Mills who writes for the same conservative, but not dogmatic site Fitsgeral Griffin Foundation, where I also write. “The blood of martyrs is still there to water Paris, but it will not do so as long as official and Paris-run France persists in glorifying Bastille Day, the Tricolor, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" and the Marseilles as national symbols, not as symbols of the Terror”, writes my FGF colleague. Read Notre Dame de Paris by Charles G. Mills.[iv] Although I am not as “Catholic” as Charles is, and am not as familiar with French history, I see his point as I do know that the French Revolution inspired the October Revolution in Russia where the Bolsheviks tried hard to surpass the French Revolutionary in their anti-clerical and anti-Christian fervor. In 1931, led by Lazar Kaganovich (1893-1991), one of Stalin’s Jewish henchmen, the Bolsheviks blew up the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the largest church building in Moscow. In a tragic irony of history, this Cathedral had been erected as a sacred memorial to the defeat of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812. Napoleon’s aggressions against the established order of Europe were born out of the God-fighting spirit of the French Revolution whose ideals of Equality, Brotherhood, and Liberty Napoleon also betrayed. Remarkably, one of the first major construction projects in Moscow after the fall of the atheist USSR was rebuilding the destroyed and desecrated Cathedral of Christ the Savior. This was not an easy task because the previous building was not just destroyed, but its foundation was dug out to make a huge public swimming pool under open sky. One way or another, currently the Cathedral serves as the spiritual center for all of Russia where the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church presides over the liturgy during major events of Russian religious history. It appears then that, after having suffered the greatest persecution of Christians since Nero, Russia rebounded and restored its spiritual health while retaining a secular state with freedom of conscience for denominations. The question is whether France and other countries of Europe can successfully guard and preserve the spiritual heritage of Western civilization without taking into account Russia’s newly gained spiritual experience? [i] Lara Friedman https://lobelog.com/why-so-much-fuss-about-a-conference-in-north-carolina/#more-48412 [ii] Caitlin Johnstone https://russia-insider.com/en/prosecution-julian-assange-infinitely-bigger-assange/ri26841 [iii] Krasnow http://www.raga.org/news/to-defect-or-to-integrate-the-usa-vs-edward-snowden [iv] Charles Mills http://fgfbooks.com/Mills-Charles/2019/Mills190419.html Presidential election in Ukraine
Can Zelensky Make Ukraine Great Again? April 22, 2019 Is the ouster of Petro Poroshenko a turning point in Ukraine's crisis or just another disappointment? By Nikolas K. Gvosdev.[i] Outgoing Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko is to be commended for presiding over an election that was generally free and fair and, more importantly, in accepting the outcome. Privately, however, he may be breathing a sigh of relief that he will not have to take responsibility for some of the major decisions Ukraine is facing—decisions which will prove to be difficult and unpopular. His successor, comedian Volodomyr Zelensky, fits squarely in the mold of anti-establishment populist candidates who have been winning elections all throughout Europe—and his attractiveness as a presidential candidate for having played one on television carries echoes of how Donald Trump’s public persona in The Apprentice likewise helped to boost his presidential prospects. ...Zelensky is going to find he won’t have much of a honeymoon—either within Ukraine or with Ukraine’s main foreign partners and its key rival. How much leeway he will get remains to be seen—and it is way too premature to determine whether his election marks a turning point in Ukraine's crisis or another disappointment. Nikolas Gvosdev is professor of national security studies at the U.S. Naval War College and the former Editor of the bi-monthly foreign policy journal, The National Interest. Wikipedia US decision on Golan Heights violates UN Security Council resolutions – Putin. Published 8-04-2019 The US’ decision to recognize Tel Aviv's sovereignty over the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights region violates UN Security Council resolutions – a position that Moscow has already made clear, Russia's president said. The US’ decision to recognize Tel Aviv's sovereignty over the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights region violates UN Security Council resolutions – a position that Moscow has already made clear, Russia's president said.[ii] The Orchestration of Russiaphobia Is The Prelude To War. April 22, 2019 | By Paul Craig Roberts …The Russian government’s naive and gullible response to Washington played into Washington’s hands. By responding to Washington’s orchestrated Russiaphobia as if it were some kind of mistake based on bad information, the Russian government allowed Washington to keep the process of demonization alive and thereby contributed to the ongoing demonization of Russia. If, instead, the Russian government had denounced the demonization of Russia as Washington’s act of preparing Americans for war with Russia and had taken a belligerent rather than a complaining stance, the realization that Washington’s policy had serious cost would have spread throughout the US and Europe and voices would have arisen against Washington’s dangerous and reckless policy. Today in place of the uniformity of voice against Russia, there would be dissent opposing Washington’s irresponsible provocations.[iii] RUSSIA’s KULTURA TV channel The most significant event in Russia right now is on a state supported KULTURA TV channel. It is a multiple one-hour series program called Propovedniki (Evangelists).[iv] It is about the suppression of dissent in the USSR and Soviet bloc countries within the officially allowed but unofficially controlled and abused Christian Orthodox Church. So far I have seen four documentary programs: about Archpriest Alexander Men, Professor Sergey Averintsev, Archpriest Paul Adelheim, and Metropolitan (of the Orthodox Church in Montenegro) Amphilohie (Radovich). The three Russians were not political dissidents, but they held the light of spirituality alive in a country where Marxist-Leninist materialism was the ruling ideology. Archpriest Men helped hundreds of Soviet intellectuals return to Christianity by preaching and writing books distributed by samizdat in overseas editions. He also helped Alexander Solzhenitsyn hide a GULAG manuscript. However, in 1990 he was assassinated, and his assassin was never found. Archpriest Pavel Adelheim himself spent three years in the GULAG camp where one of his legs had to be amputated due to abuse by the guards. He was assassinated in 2013 by a lunatic who came to him for a “cure”. Sergei Averintsev was university professor and a world authority on Byzantine, but secretly he served as a reader in a parish that attracted many Soviet intellectuals. Metropolitan Amphilohije started his spiritual assent in Communist (and officially atheist) Yugoslavia. He studied in several seminaries abroad. Once when he was in Greece he met Solzhenitsyn whom he awarded a special personal cross for his devotion to truth. Metropolitan Amphilohije still devotes his mission to the unity of Slavic and non-Western peoples against the encroachments of the materialistic West. See his extensive interview THE ORTHODOX CHURCH IS STANDING IN THE WAY OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER. [v] There are more documentaries about modern evangelists to be shown on Russian TV channels for there were many martyrs in the USSR who held the hope for Russia’s rebirth alive. However, Russian TV channel is secular and does not engage in religious proselytizing. It has been running a number of programs devoted to the remembrance of the events of Russian history that were distorted or silenced during the Soviet period. A number of programs are devoted to cultural achievements and events—in arts, music, movies, and theater--in all countries in the world, from Japan and China to ancient Egypt and modern Europe. In view of Western sanctions against Russia, the current emphasis on strengthening cultural ties with Asian countries, especially India, is understandable. TV Channel Kultura, for instance, has run for several months an Indian production of the ancient Indian epic “Sita and Rama”. Russia’s Outreach to India—and the World Not all efforts to strengthen cultural ties with foreign counries, especially non-allied countries of the East, are sponsored by the government. Dr. Leo Semashko of St. Petersburg, a peace activist, has created Global Harmony Association (GHA) 15 years ago entirely on his own. Now he is an Honorary President because he entrusted the leadership to its current President Dr. Subhash Chandra of India. But Leo remains active, always trying to build a global outreach. On the GHA’s masthead there are the winners of Nobel Peace Prize Dr. John Avery of Denmark and Mairead Maguire of Northern Ireland, GHA Vice-Presidents Susana Roberts of Argentine, Surendra Pathak of India, Delasnieve Daspet of Brazil ; and Ayo Amale, GHA Africa President.[vi] A couple of years ago Leo, upon reading some of RAGA Antidote newsletters, Leo invited me to join the Global Association which I gladly did. No doubt, similarity of our backgrounds helped. I graduated from Moscow State University in history; he went to graduate school in philosophy of the same university. Both of us got fed up with Marxism-Leninism and became dissidents. Both of us have felt a great attraction to Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of Non-Violence. When the GHA president declared the year of 2019 “Gandhi World Year”, Leo invited me to submit something to honor Gandhi’s 150th anniversary. Which I did, by writing Mahatma Gandhi and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Two Giants Who Blessed the 20th Century.[vii] Learning of my participation in the Vermont conference on Solzhenitsyn’s Centenary in Spetember 2018, the GHA site posted also my article “Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Relevance Today”.[viii] Yesterday, April 26, 2019 I went to the English Language Club of Moscow to hear the lecture by Dr. Leena Sareen of India about Economic Development of India. She teaches Theory of Intercultural Communication at the Department of Psychology of Moscow Region State University and has 10 years of experience in multinational companies as a coordinator between Russia and India. It was interesting to learn that out of India’s 1,364 million people 666 million use the internet, and 126 million of them use English. Now I am even more proud that some of my articles found their way on the site of my email pal and friend Sandhya Jain.[ix] HAPPY EASTER GREETING--from Bethlehem, Palestine In conclusion I am glad to transmit a HAPPY EASTER GREETING from Bethlehem, Palestine. It is authored by Dr. who describes himself as follows A bedouin in cyberspace, a villager at home Professor, Founder, and (volunteer) Director Palestine Museum of Natural History Palestine Institute of Biodiversity and Sustainability Bethlehem University Occupied Palestine http://qumsiyeh.org http://palestinenature.org I have been receiving Mazin’s elucidating newsletter for quite some time and pasted them on my FB page. A Christian Palestinian of mixed origin, he celebrates Easter twice, according to both Gregorian (as in the USA) and Julian (as in Russia) calendar. In 2014 I was fortunate to visited Israel/Palestine on a Russian Orthodox pilgrimage tour, and seeing Bethlehem was one of the highlights. There is no need to relate Dr. Qumsiyeh’s whole letter. You could read it by clicking the links. But the few lines describing the Easter Hope of the Palestinian people are in order: We aspire to a certain future when refugees are allowed to return and all people of all religions live in equality and justice. Jerusalem/Bethlehem will then become a true light unto the world. We are grateful that there has been tremendous growth of actions by civil society around the world to push for human rights and justice in this “Holy Land”. This has included some really significant actions for boycotts, divestments, and sanctions (BDS) from Israel in the same way we did with Apartheid South Africa. Palestine will rise from the ashes like a Phoenix. We believe indeed in a resurrection! Reading these lines, remember how in 1974, after being thrown out of the USSR, Solzhenitsyn predicted that he and his books will return to a free Russia. My American colleagues did not take him seriously and some thought he was mad. Was it because they did not believe in a Resurrection? END [i] Nicholas Gvosdev https://nationalinterest.org/feature/can-zelensky-make-ukraine-great-again-53677 [ii] http://us-russia.org/6130-us-decision-on-golan-heights-violates-un-security-council-resolutions-putin.html [iii] https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/04/22/the-orchestration-of-russiaphobia-is-the-prelude-to-war/ [iv] Evangelists https://tvkultura.ru/brand/show/brand_id/62714/ [v] https://pravoslavie.ru/81604.html [vi] Global Harmony Association https://www.peacefromharmony.org/ [vii] Gandhi and Solzhenitsyn https://peacefromharmony.org/?cat=en_c&key=884 [viii] Krasnov, “Solzhenitsyn’s Relevance Today” https://peacefromharmony.org/?cat=en_c&key=864 [ix] http://www.vijayvaani.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?aid=4040 Sincerely, W George Krasnow (http://wiki-org.ru/wiki/Краснов,_Владислав_Георгиевич) President, RAGA www.raga.org 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 The Two Giants Who Blessed the 20th Century. |
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