​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​

"She’s representing Iceland in Miss Universe 2018, but it turns out the stunning Katrin Lea Elenudottir comes from Russia’s Siberia. The fair-skinned, blue-eyed beauty emigrated at young age but retains a fondness for her roots.

The titleholder of ‘Miss Universe 2018 – Iceland’ is due to compete against 94 of the world’s most striking beauties on December 17. But while she’ll be representing Reykjavik in contest for the international crown, she was in fact born in the Siberian city of Omsk.

Katrin lived in Siberia until the age of nine when her mother met a man of Icelandic origin and moved to the Nordic country. Both Katrin and her mother gained Icelandic citizenship, but Russia remains near and dear to their hearts as they often return to visit family and friends."

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

RAGA News
www.RAGA.org​

​Vladislav Krasnov graduated from Moscow State University with a degree in history and anthropology. He has a Master’s degree in Slavic languages and a Ph.D. in Russian literature from the University of Washington. He taught at numerous institutions, including the University of Texas (Austin), Monterey Institute of International Studies, the Hoover Institution (Standard University), etc. He was formerly a visiting scholar at Sapporo University, Japan.

Krasnov is the author of Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky: A Study in the Polyphonic Novel (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1980),  Soviet Defectors: The KGB Wanted List (Stanford: Hoover Institution, 1985), and Russia Beyond Communism: A Chronicle of National Rebirth (New York: Westview Press, 1991). He is the president of RAGA, Russia & America Goodwill Association. This is our first in a series of interviews. The second interview will be on Solzhenitsyn and his relation with Vladimir Putin.

Alexis: You are a Solzhenitsyn scholar, and Solzhenitsyn is arguably one of the rarest minds and perceptive writers the twentieth century ever produced. Solzhenitsyn praised Putin for his tremendous work, and no one ever really challenged him on this.
​
Krasnov: First of all, thanks for focusing on a Russian writer who belongs as much to Russia as to the USA, Jonas. He wrote in Russian. However, it was the United States that gave him a refuge when he was forcibly deported from the USSR. He lived here from 1976 to 1994. Enjoying the freedom of research and expression unavailable then in his beloved Russia, he produced a very substantial body of work at his home in Cavendish, Vermont. Even though he had gotten a Nobel Prize in literature in 1970 before he was exiled from the USSR, his major works were published here. Scholarship on Solzhenitsyn was first produced in the West too. So I am pleased but not surprised you regard him as a towering figure of the 20th century.

Alexis: Peter Eltsov of National Defense University disparagingly linked Solzhenitsyn with Putin in an article. He said: “Indeed, it is one of history’s ironies that the No. 1 internal enemy of the Soviet Union has now become a spiritual guru to a former KGB officer who repeatedly voices nostalgia for Soviet times.”[1]

Krasnov: The linkage per se does not surprise me. However, Eltsov does it in a negative context. Apparently he excludes even as a possibility of a genuine spiritual regeneration. I regard this linkage as a good omen for the future of Russia. In the late 1980s, when the Gorby mania was on a rampage in the West and Reformed Communism was the ultimate dream of the US intellectual establishment, I wrote Russia Beyond Communism: A Chronicle of National Rebirth,[2] in which I foresaw Russia’s return to its Christian roots.

In fact, my book was dedicated to the Millennium of Russian Baptism in 1988. At that time in the USSR it was strictly verboten for Soviet soldiers even to wear a crucifix or any other religious symbol. Now, if you watch the military parade on the 9th of May, Victory over Germany Day, you will see on Russian national TV how the commanding General Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s Defense Minister, crosses himself publicly before he enters the Red Square through the Kremlin Gate. If you did not see it, I am not surprised. The Big Media indulges in Putin-phobia to divert attention to the greatest event of the past 25 years, Russia’s spiritual rebirth, of which Putin and Shoigu are just two examples.[3]

I would love VT followers to see this video on the meeting of Putin and Solzhenitsyn in 2008.

​Alexis: Thank you for the information. The masses in America are being buried beneath the avalanche of disinformation, colossal hoaxes, fabrications, and just bold lies. I am still stunned that the Zionist Media would even suggest that Putin wanted to rebuild the Soviet Union. One has to sink very low to propagate such nonsense. Anyway, anything on US Ambassador William Joseph Burns?

Krasnov: We know that US Ambassador William Joseph Burns did meet with Solzhenitsyn in 2008, just a few months before the writer passed away. Here is what was reported:

“According to Burns, Solzhenitsyn positively contrasted the eight-year reign of Putin with those of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, which he said had ‘added to the damage done to the Russian state by 70 years of communist rule’. Under Putin, the nation was rediscovering what it was to be Russian, Solzhenitsyn thought.”[4]

​Alexis: Do you agree with Solzhenitsyn’s assessment of Putin?

Krasnov:  Yes, I do. Moreover, I think Solzhenitsyn would have been pleased with Putin’s performance SINCE 2008, even though Burns was right to point out that “the writer’s praise for Putin wasn’t unqualified.” Solzhenitsyn was a man who could not be subservient to anyone.

Alexis: Did you meet either Solzhenitsyn or Putin?

Krasnov:  I never met Putin. As to Solzhenitsyn, although I met him only once, I corresponded with him for many years and during late 1990s, when he moved back to Russia in 1994. I talked to him on the phone every time I came to visit Russia.

Alexis: What did you talk about?

Krasnov: I won’t go into details, but generally he asked me about what was going on in the US and I asked him of his readjustment to Russia, especially, to the tragic years of the oligarchic rule in the 1990s.

Alexis: Since you are a Solzhenitsyn scholar, and since you wrote Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky: A Study in the Polyphonic Novel way back in 1979,[5] does the book have any relevance almost forty years later?

Krasnov: Well, as you said, it’s a work of scholarship, and my primary purpose was to help American readers understand Soviet realities via Solzhenitsyn. I wanted to put Solzhenitsyn’s novels within the Russian literary tradition, tracing it back to Dostoevsky who, while letting his heroes argue for their diverse world views, also gave freedom to the reader to choose his favorite.

As to its relevance, I once had an interview with Kevin Barrett [6] who asked the same question. I told him that the polyphony of literary heroes needs to travel from novels to the polyphony of ideological views in real life. I think Solzhenitsyn sensed this need during the totalitarian rule of the Marxist-Leninist ideology in the USSR, and his literary work did much to undermine it. Many American intellectuals, Dr. Barrett is just one of them, feel the same need in the USA where Big Media and the Zionist-controlled intellectual establishment want their MONOLOG monopolizing the world.

Alexis: I remember that one of the battle cries of Soviet dissidents was the demand for glasnost, meaning giving “voice” (glas) to any subject on which Soviet leaders put a taboo.

Krasnov: Exactly so. That’s why while writing my book, Russia Beyond Communism: A Chronicle of National Rebirth, I tried to give a voice, an opportunity to speak to every brave and cogent Soviet intellectual or expat dissident who, not being satisfied with Gorbachev’s schemes to save Communism, called for a Russian future BEYOND Communism, a future which could not be gained unless Russia recovered its thousand years deep national roots, including its Christianity.

In fact, I was not so much an author but rather a conductor of a polyphonic choir against the endless monotonous Communist tune. Solzhenitsyn was one of those voices, but his main influence was that I consciously translated his literary strategy into Russia’s spiritual quest for a future BEYOND Communism.

I noticed that you have a whole string of questions, all of which focus on the ethical imperative to tell the truth. Am I right to assume that your educational background influenced you, first, to question the secular predominance in the US educational system and, second, made your views more compatible with Solzhenitsyn’s and Russia’s renewed Christianity?

Alexis: Very good question, but there is no way to delve into all the details here. Let me be brief. I have always been interested in metaphysical issues. That’s how I got to study mathematics and philosophy. My first major was psychology, but I switched it very quickly because I disagreed with some of the fundamental principles I was learning about Freud, Jung, Adler, Maslow, Fromm, Rogers and others. I came to realize that modern psychology wasn’t as rigorous as I once believed in high school and some of it is just common knowledge.

I remember I went to one of my professors to talk about some of my issues because they were really important to me, and I could not get a satisfying answer at all. So, I dropped out of psychology within one semester. That was back in 1999, and I knew next to nothing of revolutionary movements during that time.

I was OK in math and science in high school, so I quickly changed major. I got interested in history right after I realized that practical reason cannot really be understood without a historical context and background.

To make a long story short, I quickly discovered that no philosophical, political or intellectual project can make sense without what Immanuel Kant called practical reason (categorical imperative), and practical reason cannot really exist without metaphysical Logos.

As a corollary, any individual who dismisses practical reason in his project will inexorably end up propounding internal contradictions and incoherency. That’s what happened to Darwin, and his intellectual children have never recovered from that. I have written numerous articles on this, among them “Vladimir Putin: The New World Order Worships Satan,” “Soros, Practical Reason, and the World-Wide Criminal Organization,” “Dark Lord Soros Meets Charles Darwin,” “Metaphysics of the New World Order: Contempt for Morality and Practical Reason,” “Social Darwinism, Einstein and Determinism,” “Fashionable Nonsense, Fads, and Fallacies in the Name of Logic and Science,” “Scientific Frauds, Academic Gangsters, and the Khazarian Theory Revisited,” etc.

I also realized that Solzhenitsyn was basing his critique of the former Soviet Union on both practical reason and metaphysical Logos. That’s how I got to appreciate his non-fiction work.

Krasnov: You obviously base your premise upon what you say is Logos. If that is the case, then why it is usually said that Christian Zionists are no less responsible for Israel’s obstinacy in occupation of Palestine than Jewish and Israeli right-wingers?

Alexis: This is a very complicated issue which requires a long and complicated answer. If people would like to study this in much detail, numerous scholarly studies have already been written on it. [7]

Let’s just briefly say that Christian Zionism is part of the revolutionary project which got its inception in the 16th century but which blossomed in the 19th century, when a con man by the name of John Nelson Darby came on the scene.

Darby had a pernicious influence on another con man named C. I. Scofield. But the seed of the Zionist movement really flourished in 1800s. As one scholar puts it, “By the 1830s philo-Semitism and anti-Catholicism were becoming the flipsides of the same coin. Hugh McNeile [an Irish-born Calvinist]…became one of the most outspoken anti-Catholic orators of the 1830s and a leading voice of those advocating the new philosemitic message.”[8]

Similarly, in his book Jewish Influence on Christian Reform Movements, rabbi Louis Israel Newman argues that Jewish revolutionaries have supported virtually every subversive movement in the West, and Christian Zionism is no exception.[9]

Heinrich Graetz, the father of modern Jewish historiography, agreed: “Whenever a party in Christendom opposes itself to the ruling church, it assumes a tinge of the Old Testament, not to say Jewish spirit.”[10]

The overarching theme of the Christian Zionist movement is the elevation of the Jewish people and Israel above the law, above practical reason, and sometimes even above metaphysical Logos (as in the case of people like John Hagee).

So, whenever people start to defend Christian Zionism, despite numerous evidence to the contrary, it is an obvious sign that you are in the presence of either useful idiots, political or religious whores, or cowards.

“Even if all is covered by lies, even if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way: Let their rule hold not through me!”

Krasnov: What do you like most about Solzhenitsyn?

Alexis: What I specifically like about Solzhenitsyn is that he was committed to the truth, regardless of where it took him. In fact, he wrote arguably the most controversial book in the twentieth century, 200 Years Together, which has yet to be translated in the English language.[11] Solzhenitsyn said that the first step of a courageous man is to not take part in a lie. Shouldn’t that be an encouragement for us today?

Krasnov: Sure, the truth shall set us free! And the failure to acknowledge the truth and indulgence in lies will put us back to moral and intellectual bondage. This is applicable to Russia, the USA, and everywhere.

Alexis: Why are the Zionist-controlled media reluctant to praise Solzhenitsyn? And why do they persist in calling Putin the “new Hitler”?

Krasnov: Certainly the Jewish intellectual establishment is very reluctant to praise Solzhenitsyn now. They know he did as much as ANYONE to end the Communist experiment in Russia. Moreover, having been deported from the USSR, he strengthened the Western world by resisting the Soviet expansion. He helped turn around pervasive pro-Soviet sentiments of the left-liberal intellectual establishment, where Jews predominated, into criticism of the USSR and Soviet bloc. This was evident in the USA during the 1970s when I wrote my first book. My students felt the impact of Solzhenitsyn’s writings, taking a more critical view of the USSR and becoming more patriotic US citizens.

Solzhenitsyn’s impact was just as strong in Western Europe as anywhere else. In France a whole generation of left-leaning intellectuals, the New Philosophers[12], abandoned pro-Soviet sympathies in favor of the US. I once had a long conversation with Eldridge Cleaver, and he told me Solzhenitsyn helped him turn to God and away from radicalism.

Now the Jewish establishment is reluctant to give credit for the denouement of Communism to Solzhenitsyn or any Russian for that matter. They prefer to credit Russian Jewish dissidents who came to the US during the 1980s or those who immigrated, en masse, to Israel during the 1990s. Of course, the Neo-Cons claim lots of credit too.

That’s why they ignore Solzhenitsyn’s last major work, Двести лет вместе, 1795-1995[13](“Two Hundred Years Together”[14]) dealing with the origin of the Bolshevik Revolution, even though it led to the great woes for both Russians and Jews, especially for those aspiring to live in Zionist Israel.

Alexis: Eldridge Cleaver got caught up with a movement he didn’t fully understand. That movement was known as the Black/Jewish alliance.[15] I don’t think Cleaver understood that he was being manipulated at the time. David Horowitz himself admitted that Robert Scheer became “the key person to launch the career of Eldridge Cleaver.”[16]

Krasnov: Thank you for clarifying on Eldridge. My conversation with him was not wide-ranging so I am unaware of many things. However, I did read David Horowitz’ book The Destructive Generation that was very revealing about Jewish Communist infiltration of the USA. Alas, I hear that he now turned into a Zionist zealot.

Alexis: What career was Horowitz talking about? The Black Panther Party, which, like Black Lives Matter, was an essentially messianic project. The Black Panther Party would have been buried long ago were it not for people like Scheer, David Horowitz and Sol Stern, who promoted violent groups and individuals in the defunct magazine Ramparts.

Horowitz’s brethren were and still are using “racism” as the linchpin to promote violence in major cities in America. The Black Lives Matter movement is a classic example. Interestingly enough, Dostoevsky talked about how revolutionaries were manipulated the large section of the black population.[17]

Dostoevsky’s indictment was written back in 1877, and the Black Panthers proved Dostoevsky right. By 1967, Harold Cruse messed everything up when he declared that Jewish revolutionaries were using blacks like remote control. Virtually every serious historian of that era says the same thing, including David Levering Lewis and Jewish writer Gelya.[18] The late academic Israel Shahak noted,

“The apparent enthusiasm displayed by American rabbis or by the Jewish organizations in the U.S.A. during the 1950s and the 1960s in support of the Blacks in the South, was motivated only by considerations of Jewish self-interest, just as was the communist support for the same Blacks…

“Stalin and his supporters never tired of condemning the discrimination against the American or the South African Blacks, especially in the midst of the worst crimes committed within the USSR…Its purpose in both cases was to try to capture the Black community politically, in the Jewish case to an unthinking support of Israeli policies in the Middle East.”[19]

Jewish scholar Benjamin Ginsberg of Johns Hopkins University goes so far as to say that through the Black/Jewish alliance, “Jews were able to weaken their conservative Southern adversaries as well as their Northern white working-class rivals within the Democratic Party, and to virtually destroy the traditional party machines upon which these forces depended for their power.”[20]

There you have it. People were being used as pawns in the service of a larger messianic ideology, which was and still is essentially against practical reason, against Logos, and against all mankind.

What’s the solution to all this madness? More subversive movements? More insurrections in places like Ferguson and Dallas? The answer to that is no. The solution is simple: people need to submit their will to practical reason and Logos.

What unites decent people is practical reason in the moral and political firmament, and anyone who is docile to it is our friend and ally. I think it is what Alexander Solzhenitsyn would have recommended. Subversive movements are obviously lies, and Solzhenitsyn has some damning things to say about lies:

“Our way must be: never knowingly support lies! Having understood where the lies begin—step back from that gangrenous edge! Let us not glue back the flaking scale of the Ideology, not gather back its crumbling bones, nor patch together its decomposing garb, and we will be amazed how swiftly and helplessly the lies will fall away, and that which is destined to be naked will be exposed as such to the world.”[21]

[1] Peter Eltsov, “What Putin’s Favorite Guru Tells Us About His Next Target,” Politico, February 10, 2015.
[2] Vladislav Krasnov, Russia Beyond Communism: A Chronicle of National Rebirth (New York: Westview Press, 1991).
[3] I reported this episode in RAGA Antidote Newsletters. It was also reported by http://thesaker.is/something-truly-amazing-happened-today/
[4] Luke Harding, “WikiLeaks cables: Solzhenitsyn praise for Vladimir Putin,” Guardian, December 2, 2010.
[5] Vladislav Krasnov, Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky: A Study in the Polyphonic Novel(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979).
[6] http://noliesradio.org/archives/74314
[7] See for example Donald M. Lewis, The Origins of Christian Zionism: Lord Shaftesbury and Evangelical Support for a Jewish Homeland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Timothy P. Weber, On the Road to Armageddon: How Evangelicals Became Israel’s Best Friend (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004); E. Michael Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2008).
[8] Donald M. Lewis, The Origins of Christian Zionism: Lord Shaftesbury and Evangelical Support for a Jewish Homeland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 102.
[9] Jones goes into great details of this in his book.
[10] Quoted in Jones, Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, 149.
[11] E. Michael Jones has discussed the content of that book at length in his study The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2008), 731-758. Parts of 200 Years Together can be found online.
[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Philosophers.
[13] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Двести_лет_вместДвести лет вместе — М.: Русский путь, 2001/2002.
[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Hundred_Years_Together.
[15] See Jones, Jewish Revolutionary Movement, 950-951, 96-966.
[16] Quoted in ibid., 957.
[17] Quoted in ibid., 691.
[18] Murray Friedman, What Went Wrong?: The Creation & Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance (New York: The Free Press, 1995), 59.
[19] Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion (New York: Pluto Press, 1994), 103.
[20] Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 225.
[21] Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Solzhenitsyn Reader (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), 558.

​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​

​I confess I do admire Solzhenitsyn, especially as far as US-Russia relations are concerned, RAGA stands with him. But occasionally I disagree with him, as you can see in my recent article 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

Владислав Краснов.  Император Михаил II в Доме Солженицына -  
http://www.raga.org/novosti/imperator-mikhail-ii-v-dome-solzhenitsyna   


Below are other highlights:

Who Putin Is Not. Falsely demonizing Russia’s leader has made the new Cold War even more dangerous.

By Stephen F. Cohen SEPTEMBER 20, 2018

The specter of an evil-doing Vladimir Putin has loomed over and undermined US thinking about Russia for at least a decade. Henry Kissinger deserves credit for having warned, perhaps alone among prominent American political figures, against this badly distorted image of Russia’s leader since 2000: “The demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy. It is an alibi for not having one.”

https://www.thenation.com/article/who-putin-is-not/

By Paul Grenier  ·  Friday, September 7, 2018
Are the divisions that fragment the United States primarily driven by some deep flaw in its political life, or was the United States doing just fine, thank you very much—until Russia came along during the 2016 presidential race and started sowing division and dissension? Framed that way, the question answers itself. Whatever some state-sanctioned Russian actors may have done to pester the American political process, it is obvious that America’s deep divisions exist for reasons having essentially nothing to do with Russia. They long precede the last election.

http://www.telospress.com/russia-gate-as-symptom-the-crisis-of-american-community/

As the US is meddling in the Middle East in an alliance with Israel, please read this remarkable article by a Washington Post famed columnist Dana Milbank, September 21, 2018

<<My rabbi, Danny Zemel, comes from Zionist royalty: His grandfather, Rabbi Solomon Goldman, led the Zionist Organization of America in the late 1930s, and presided over the World Zionist Convention in Zurich in 1939. So Zemel’s words carried weight when he told his flock this week on Kol Nidre, the holiest night of the Jewish year, that “the current government of Israel has turned its back on Zionism.”...…A poll for the American Jewish Committee in June found that while 77 percent of Israeli Jews approve of Trump’s handling of the U.S.-Israeli relationship, only 34 percent of American Jews approve. Although Trump is popular in Israel, only 26 percent of American Jews approve of him. Most Jews feel less secure in the United States than they did a year ago…

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/israel-is-driving-jewish-america-farther-and-farther-away/2018/09/21/de2716f8-bdbb-11e8-8792-78719177250f_story.html?utm_term=.efc054250abb&wpisrc=nl_opinions&wpmm=1
 
By Edward Lozansky - - Wednesday, September 26, 2018

ANALYSIS/OPINION:
 During the past six months, the U.S. and Russia came close at least three times to a direct military clash in Syria with unpredictable consequences, including possible use of nuclear weapons. Each time unthinkable disaster was avoided at the last minute, but no one knows if we will be lucky again the next time.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/sep/26/crosstalk-us-russia-play-chicken-syria/

As usually, we have Patrick Armstrong's sound recommendation:

STRATEGIC CULTURE FOUNDATION. Let me put in a plug for this site. It has now acquired quite a stable of writers (myself included) and is a good place to get alternative views to those repeated by the drearily monotonic Western outlets.

https://patrickarmstrong.ca/2018/10/25/russian-federation-sitrep-25-october-2018/

By Daniel J. Mahoney, the author of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology, on Putin's and Solzhenitsyn's Russia, August 07, 2018

The time has arrived for some moderation and clarity in thinking about contemporary Russia and its relationship to the Western world. Ronald Reagan was not wrong in the 1980s to call the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” Its death in 1991 was a welcome victory for liberty, peace, and political civilization. But post-communist Russia is not the Soviet Union and it cannot reasonably be called an “evil empire.” The continuity between the two political orders is woefully exaggerated in the West, with some on the left hating contemporary Russia, a half-authoritarian autocracy, more than they ever opposed communist totalitarianism.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/08/07/post-communist_russia_is_not_the_soviet_union_137730.html

The Trajan Manifesto By Martin Sieff, Edward Lozansky, James Jatras and Gilbert Doctorow - Tuesday, September 4, 2018

First, the United States should follow the strategic principles executed by the Roman emperor Trajan at the end of the first century AD.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/sep/4/trajan-manifesto/


Finally, a very independent observer,  Ajay Goyal, My life of Zen, on Oct 8, 2018, findsTen reasons Moscow is the best capital city in Europe

Moscow of 2018 is a new city with a rich heritage and history. The city has gone through a massive facelift with new and modern infrastructure and institutions. Here is how it compares with London, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin and other great European cities.

https://medium.com/@ajay.zen/ten-reasons-moscow-is-the-best-capital-city-in-europe-d1a904af9c39
 
Sincerely,
W George Krasnow (http://wiki-org.ru/wiki/Краснов,_Владислав_Георгиевич)
President, RAGA
www.raga.org

Peace and Justice to 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​

​On the foggy cliffs of the Sonoma Coast on Saturday, Gov. Jerry Brown was glad to stand on dirt with a high-powered delegation of Russian officials to commemorate the restoration of a historic cemetery at Fort Ross.

While tensions between the two countries are taut after U.S. officials have accused Russia of interfering in elections and launching a global hacking campaign, the governor of California and the Russian ambassador to the United States joined church leaders, Alaska Natives, Kashia Pomo Indians and preservationists to celebrate a project of mutual interest.

“This site at Fort Ross is a good time to remember that Russia and America, together, won World War II. And we didn’t like the guy who was in charge of Russia then, but we worked with him and we defeated the Nazis,” Brown said to the crowd. “So let’s learn from the horrors of the past to create the beauty of the future.”

The cemetery restoration included a new 14-foot-tall, eight-point Russian cross structure made from redwood trees, new boulders inscribed with a description of the cemetery in multiple languages, interpretive panels, a bench and maintenance of a wooded half-mile trail between the cemetery and Fort Ross, a former Russian settlement. It’s a project that brought together a diverse range of groups with a shared history, and for many who attended the ceremony, a hope for a shared future of peace.

Russian Ambassador Anatoly Antonov acknowledged the area’s history — the first Russian Orthodox church in the U.S. was built at Fort Ross — and the strained relationship between his country and the United States.

“Preserving the memory of our common past has played an important role in strengthening trust and mutual understanding between Russia and the United States. We hope that this work will be continued, regardless of the current political turbulence,” Antonov said.

Antonov also mentioned he spoke with U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis about the initiative to restore the cemetery, and Mattis sent him a letter of support.

“I hope that General Mattis will not be fired tomorrow,” Antonov joked to the chuckling crowd, which included Vassily Nebenzia, Russian representative to the United Nations.

The project to restore the cemetery began in February and recently finished, according to Leslie Hartzell, chief of the cultural resources division at the state parks department.

“There are so many people who share a history to this place and their cultural traditions are still anchored to Fort Ross, and it’s very important to be a place where people can continue to come and celebrate their cultural history and carry on their cultural traditions,” said Hartzell, who facilitated cultural dialogue between the groups and got their input for appropriate improvements in the interpretive area.

About 130 people were buried from 1812 to 1840 at the Ross settlement, which included Russians, the Kashia Pomo, Miwok, Spaniards and Mexicans. The majority buried are women and children, and the different groups intermarried.

Sabrena Rosenberg, Unangax for Unalaska and Fort Ross Conservation Center board member, is from Sonoma County and has Native Alaskan ancestry, including a relative buried in the cemetery.
​
“So it’s very sacred land to me and it matters very much,” said Rosenberg, who spoke at the ceremony Saturday about her appreciation for the renovation efforts.

​Brown spoke about learning from the past. The Kashia Pomos lived in the area for more than 12,000 years. He recalled the first governor of California wanted to “exterminate” Native Americans, a dark time in the state’s history.

“In California, we believe in diversity. We believe in hospitality, and we believe in respecting our ancestors and those who got us here and we want to build on that diverse spirit for even a better future. A future of inclusion and diversity and creativity, that’s what it’s all about. And it all starts with standing on this dirt and making it all work for us,” Brown said.

Dino Franklin Jr., tribal chairmen of the Kashia Pomo Band of Indians of the Stewarts Point Rancheria, said the Russian cross at the cemetery was known to his tribe’s dreamers long before, and they saw it as an important symbol.

“I’m grateful that we, the Kashia people, have dreamed about this symbol and the power it has even before contact. It’s a symbol of hope, peace and love,” Franklin said.

Fr. Alexander Krassovsky of Saints Peter and Paul Russian Orthodox Church in Santa Rosa took part in the religious blessing of the new cross. As a Russian American raised in the Bay Area, the cemetery has special meaning to him.

“I think that Fort Ross, altogether, is an example of what Mahatma Gandhi once said, that it is possible to live in peace,” Krassovsky said. “We’ve come to this point today where it is very, very possible that we all have a great deal in common, maybe more than some of our politicians like to think.”

You can reach Staff Writer Susan Minichiello at 707-521-5216
or susan.minichiello@pressdemocrat.com.
​On Twitter @susanmini.

Source: https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/8833090-181/restored-cemetery-at-fort-ross


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

RAGA News
www.RAGA.org​

​Dear friends of the Russia & America Good Will Association (www.raga.org) and antiwar colleagues!  
 
Hope everyone in the USA had a Happy Labor Day, and in Russia it was the countrywide New School Year Day!

Below are some important events and articles posted throughout the Summer 2018.
 
As I am heading to Northern Vermont University for a scholarly conference dedicated to the memory of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, I am in a hurry to survey what has happened last Summer.
 
A major development for RAGA team was that we have started to cooperate with Ron Unz, the publisher of The Unz Review and the author of American Pravda series. In view of RAGA's mixed Russian and American readership, I translated some of his articles important as they are for both countries.
 
Welcome Ron Unz and American Pravda
http://www.raga.org/news/welcome-ron-unz-and-american-pravda
The Unz Review is a flagship of heterodox opinion that seeks to help create an educated alternative to the failed foreign and domestic policies of the US... 
 
"American Pravda: The Bolshevik Revolution and Its Aftermath" - by Ron Unz
http://www.raga.org/news/american-pravda-the-bolshevik-revolution-and-its-aftermath-by-ron-unz
I was not so totally naive that I did not recognize some of the powerful taboos surrounding discussion of the Bolsheviks, particularly regarding their ethnic composition. 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...
 
"Американская правда: большевистская революция и её последствия" 8/27/2018.
http://www.raga.org/novosti/amerikanskaya-pravda-bolshevitskaya-revolutsiya-ron-unz
 
Indeed, last Summer marked the 100th anniversary of the brutal extermination of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and his whole family in Yekaterinburg. I hail from the city of Perm, on the Western slopes of the Ural Mountains, and I was more concerned with the 100th anniversary of the massacre there on June 12-13, 1918 that eliminated the tsar's younger brother Mikhail whom some historians call Emperor Michael II de jure. Below are the links to my new article on the subject both in English and Russian (a bit shorter) version.
 
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
 
Император Михаил II в Доме Солженицына -  Автор: Владислав Краснов.
http://www.raga.org/novosti/imperator-mikhail-ii-v-dome-solzhenitsyna

 My RAGA colleagues were not idle either. One of them, Dmitry Tamoikin, produced a number of youTubes

Dmitry Tamoikin. Published on Aug 9, 2018
WHY I CARE ABOUT AMERICA? Message from a Russian || Dmitry Tamoikin ||
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSMsb4vR3vo 

Also watch:
✦ UNITED STATES & RUSSIA MUST BE FRIENDS & ALLIES https://youtu.be/05_jE0RzvKU​
✦ There will be no winners in WWIII https://youtu.be/8lcuC8xuJ64
✦ STRATEGIC MIGRATION https://youtu.be/-u9uzWoEqYE

Below are links to other important article you may have missed in the Summer heat. Patrick Armstrong is always on top:
 
WORLD CUP. A triumph. Russia has gained enormously I think. Money well spent. One Brit: “The British media should be ashamed of themselves for their clear propaganda against the Russian people. Absolutely class country.” > https://raga.us18.list-manage.com/track/click?u=31e221c6cacce790681510404&id=9f279406c3&e=cb1b7817d4

Millions of people who were there or who had friends who were and told them what they saw will form a mighty bulwark against more anti-Russia lies. This video by an English father-son team has 90K views so far. > https://raga.us18.list-manage.com/track/click?u=31e221c6cacce790681510404&id=9209b43177&e=cb1b7817d4

Casual Russophobia will be harder to sell and the credibility of Western media has taken another hit. > https://patrickarmstrong.ca/2018/07/05/russian-federation-sitrep-5-july-2018/  
 
I was watching WORLD soccer CUP on Russian TV and I concur with Patrick's observations.

SITREP 30 AUGUST 2018. BY PATRICK ARMSTRONG 
PENSIONS. Responding to protests, Putin addressed the nation. He explained the necessity of reforming the pension system so as to keep it funded, explained other alternatives the government considered and explained why it rejected them, and made some softening modifications. As I expected, a little exercise to show that Batyushka listens. In essence, he has said “trust me”. And, because they do, I would expect the protests to die down. And, changing the system is both necessary and appropriate.

RUSSIA INC. Industrial production January to July 2018 is up 3.1%. A bit better than the USA or EU. > https://patrickarmstrong.ca/2018/08/30/russian-federation-sitrep-30-august-2018/

TURKEY. As everyone knows, Ankara-Washington relations are bad and getting worse. There are many factors involved in Turkey’s economic problems but Washington’s pressure is exacerbating them and it is using the opportunity/excuse to force Erdoğan back into line. The situation creates, to put it mildly, a tremendous opportunity for Russia and China to offer a better deal, thereby weakening NATO and strengthening their own “Eurasian bloc”.  https://patrickarmstrong.ca/2018/08/16/russian-federation-sitrep-16-august-2018/  

​Sharon Tennison of Center for Citizen Initiatives reports Observations of Moscow. September 3, 2018

The following letter was written by Sylvia Demarest, a trial lawyer from Dallas, Texas.  Sylvia is one of the travelers on CCI’s current AMMR (Americans Meet Mainstream Russians) delegation.

Dear Friends:
I wanted to take some time to report a few of my  impressions of Moscow and today’s Russia over the last few days.  I was in Russia in 1988 as part of a legal group before the collapse of the Soviet Union.  I have been looking forward to seeing what has changed in the country over the last 30 years.

https://ccisf.org/observations-of-moscow/
 
More Sharon Tennison in her own words:
It’s disturbing to see these eight Republican Senators criticized for merely visiting Russia. Isn’t this what they should do as decision makers of whether we go to war or not? Are Democrats now the “war party”? Will every effort to decrease international tension now be criticized and politicized? This cycle started when Trump expressed the desire to improve relations with Russia. It became a political football when the Clinton campaign decided to use Russia as an election issue to cover up its loss against Trump. 
 
Another long-time peace champion Noam Chomsky made a very-very revealing statement:
<<Speaking to Democracy Now, Mr Chomsky said “Israeli intervention in US elections vastly overwhelms anything the Russians may have done, I mean, even to the point where the prime minister of Israel, Netanyahu, goes directly to Congress, without even informing the president, and speaks to Congress, with overwhelming applause, to try to undermine the president’s policies - what happened with Obama and Netanyahu in 2015.”>>

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/israel-us-elections-intervention-russia-noam-chomsky-donald-trump-a8470481.html 

Ambassador Jack Matlock: Amid ‘Russiagate’ Hysteria, What Are the Facts?
THE NATIONJune 4, 2018

“Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.”
..It is a fact that many senior Russian officials (though not all, by any means) expressed a preference for Trump’s candidacy. After all, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had compared President Putin to Hitler and had urged more active US military intervention abroad, while Trump had said it would be better to cooperate with Russia than to treat it as an enemy.
https://www.thenation.com/article/amid-russiagate-hysteria-what-are-the-facts/

Gordon Hahn: "Through the Looking Glass Falsely: A World Without Facts"
GORDONHAHN.COM  August 31, 2018As the West has turned more and more to Soviet/Russian methods of the ‘big lie’ in order to advance democracy and its interests, the Russia-West propaganda war had produced a post-fact world in which disinformation comes to be believed by its purveyors. https://eastwestaccord.com/gordon-hahn-through-the-looking-glass-falsely-a-world-without-facts/

Ed Lozansky: 'Sanctions bill from hell' Anti-Russia legislation and Capitol Hill
By Edward Lozansky - - Wednesday, August 22, 2018
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
I’d leave it to the Vatican to figure out if someone can send a message from hell without having personally been on location. But there is no doubt that if the deterioration in relations between the two major nuclear powers continues with the same intensity then hell indeed may break loose on this planet in the not-too-distant future.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/aug/22/crosstalk-sanctions-are-coming-what-next/

In Gorky Park, with nuclear worries

BY MATTHEW BUNN, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 08/13/18 THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
...First, at their next summit, President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin should restate the fundamental point that Reagan and Gorbachev once made: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Second, they should direct their governments to make the compromises necessary to resolve the charges of violations of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty that each side is making against the other. Third, they should extend the New START Treaty for five years, keeping its cap on nuclear forces and the inspections and data exchanges that enhance transparency and predictability. 

ark-with-nuclear-worries > https://raga.us18.list-manage.com/track/click?u=31e221c6cacce790681510404&id=6b40b00f15&e=cb1b7817d4

INTERNATIONAL DAY OF PEACE (Sept. 21),  Dear Promoters of Peace.  To mark the occasion of INTERNATIONAL DAY OF PEACE (Sept. 21), the UNITED NATIONS theme for 2018 is “THE RIGHT TO PEACE - THE UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS AT 70”... which reads “It is time all nations and all people live up to the words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which recognizes the inherent dignity and equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human race. This year marks the 70th anniversary of that landmark document.” In commemoration of INTERNATIONAL DAY OF PEACE (Sept. 21) on the said theme, please find here under the link to my exclusive poetic message   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXLw2jRQkX8&t=4s, with a request to promote and project PEACE to all like-minded people and groups in your circles.

Regards and Best Wishes
Dr. T. Ashok Chakravarthy
Poet – Review Writer – INDIA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXLw2jRQkX8&t=4s

Diverse opinions:

Andrei Kortunov: http://russiancouncil.ru/en/analytics-and-comments/analytics/a-letter-to-john-where-are-u-s-russia-relations-headed/. 

<<We have role models to whom we can look up. Our generation still remembers brilliant intellectuals of the bygone years—among them, George Kennan and Yevgeny Primakov, William Fulbright and Georgy Arbatov, Marshall Shulman and Anatoly Dobrynin. They taught us ethics of responsibility. These people were thinking in terms of eras and generations rather than election cycles and bureaucratic squabbles. Now these people are no longer with us; some left us sooner, others later.>>  

http://russiancouncil.ru/en/analytics-and-comments/analytics/a-letter-to-john-where-are-u-s-russia-relations-headed/ 

Video. Propaganda and the Globalization of War
By Prof Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research, August 23, 2018

Professor Michel Chossudovsky has been tracking and analyzing the trajectory of U.S. military planning for the last two decades and has been at the forefront of dissecting the propaganda describing these projects as ‘self defense’ or a ‘humanitarian intervention.’


“We’re dealing with a diabolical agenda where the United States is intervening under the banner of ‘Responsibility to Protect’ or ‘Global War on Terrorism.’ In other words it is providing a legitimacy to a war of aggression, or a sequence of wars of aggression. And the public is led to believe somehow that these are humanitarian undertakings.”

https://www.globalresearch.ca/video-propaganda-and-the-globalization-of-war/5651439

Patrick Buchanan

Can America Ever Come Together Again?
The people who cheer Trump believe the country they inherited from their fathers was a great, good and glorious country, and that the media who detest Trump also despise them.
  Published  on August 18, 2018 By Patrick J. Buchanan

http://theduran.com/can-america-ever-come-together-again/?mc_cid=ab2f2ae02f&mc_eid=50350f8d0f

The U.S. Must Engage With Russia
Real dialogue is necessary for nuclear-arms reduction.
RAND PAUL,AUG 15, 2018
Gorbachev’s youthful concern about nuclear disaster became apparent when he assumed leadership of the Soviet Union. In a speech he gave to senior personnel of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in May 1986, Gorbachev said, “Peace is the value above anything. In the nuclear-cum-space era, a world war is the absolute evil. It cannot be won.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/08/the-us-must-engage-with-russia/567646/

By Daniel J. Mahoney

August 07, 2018 The time has arrived for some moderation and clarity in thinking about contemporary Russia and its relationship to the Western world. Ronald Reagan was not wrong in the 1980s to call the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” Its death in 1991 was a welcome victory for liberty, peace, and political civilization. But post-communist Russia is not the Soviet Union and it cannot reasonably be called an “evil empire.” The continuity between the two political orders is woefully exaggerated in the West, with some on the left hating contemporary Russia, a half-authoritarian autocracy, more than they ever opposed communist totalitarianism.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/08/07/post-communist_russia_is_not_the_soviet_union_137730.html

CHRISTIANS, IT’S TIME FOR A FRANK, LOVING DIALOGUE WITH OUR JEWISH FRIENDS. Vince Dhimos. 5/13/2018

http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/news--analysis/christians-its-time-for-a-frank-loving-dialogue-with-our-jewish-friends 

Recently, Charles Bausman, editor-in-chief of Russia Insider, wrote a landmark commentary titled “It's time to drop the Jew taboo.” It was to many a shockingly frank commentary on the so-called “Jewish question,” focusing on the grievous misdeeds of a people that, at least since the Holocaust, no one had dared to criticize publicly for fear of being called anti-Semitic, being banned from social media, being ostracized, not being elected to public office, even losing one’s job.Trump-Bibi ‘win-win’ alliance may bring the one-state solution to its political dissolution

Côme Carpentier De Gourdon
May 19, 2018,  

One has to give credit to the Israeli cunning and doggedness which have enabled it to maintain a vice-like grip on the US government, but more far-sighted Jews are worried about the writing on the wall. 

https://www.sundayguardianlive.com/world/trump-bibi-win-win-alliance-may-bring-one-state-solution-political-dissolution 

NEWS

MOSCOW — Republican members of Congress sounded a newly conciliatory tone in meetings with Russian lawmakers and officials here on Tuesday in a rare visit to Moscow and a preview of the looming summit between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

  Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) told Russia’s foreign minister that while Russia and the United States were competitors, “we don’t necessarily need to be adversaries.” Later on at the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, members attending a plenary session greeted the Americans with applause.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/republican-lawmakers-come-to-moscow-raising-hopes-there-of-us-russia-thaw/2018/07/03/1213130c-7e94-11e8-b0ef-fffcabeff946_story.html?utm_term=.793c856f205d&wpisrc=nl_evening&wpmm=1

Just do IT: Why Russians dominate cyberland

SCIENCE & TECH JULY 06 2018 SVETLANA ARKHANGELSKAYA ICPC prizewinners from Russia include students from ITMO University, St. Petersburg State University, Moscow State University, and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT). For many years, they have got the better of teams from Oxford, Berkeley, MIT, Harvard, Caltech, and others. The secret of Russia’s success is the effective training system developed by Moscow Workshops ICPC under the auspices of MIPT. https://www.rbth.com/science-and-tech/328694-why-russians-win-it-cyber

Rumors of Edward Snowden being considered a bargaining chip in upcoming Trump-Putin summit

After five years, the fate of the NSA contractor turned epic whistleblower appears to remain secure with him safely in Russia

by  Seraphim HanischSERAPHIM HANISCH. June 30, 2018, 
http://theduran.com/edward-snowden-fate-not-considered-a-bargaining-chip-in-upcoming-trump-putin-summit/?mc_cid=ac381fb7de&mc_eid=50350f8d0f

A video introducing Russian Faith for all seasons
David Curry

Published on Oct 21, 2017
Bringing Christian issues into the secular media cycle
www.russian-faith.com/support

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​

Although I always had a great interest in history, I naively believed what I read in my textbooks [1], and therefore regarded American history as just too bland and boring to study.

By contrast, one land I found especially fascinating was China, the world’s most populous country and its oldest continuous civilization, with a tangled modern history of revolutionary upheaval, then suddenly reopened to the West during the Nixon Administration and under Deng’s economic reforms starting to reverse decades of Maoist economic failure.
​
In 1978 I took a UCLA graduate seminar on the rural Chinese political economy, and probably read thirty or forty books during that semester. E.O. Wilson’s ​seminal Sociobiology: The New Synthesis [2] had just been published a couple of years earlier, reviving that field after decades of harsh ideological suppression, and with his ideas in the back of my mind, I couldn’t help noticing the obvious implications of the material I was reading. The Chinese had always seemed a very smart people, and the structure of China’s traditional rural peasant economy produced Social Darwinist selective pressure so thick that you could cut it with a knife, thus providing a very elegant explanation of how the Chinese got that way. A couple of years later in college, I wrote up my theory while studying under Wilson, and then decades afterward dug it out again, finally publishing my analysis as How Social Darwinism Made Modern China [3].

1 http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-our-deadly-world-of-post-war-politics/
2 https://www.amazon.com/Sociobiology-New-Synthesis-Twenty-Fifth-Anniversary/dp/0674002350/?tag=unco037-20
3 http://www.unz.com/runz/how-social-darwinism-made-modern-china-248/

With the Chinese people clearly having such tremendous inherent talent and their potential already demonstrated on a much smaller scale in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, I believed there was an excellent chance that Deng’s reforms would unleash enormous economic growth, and sure enough, that was exactly what happened [4]. In the late 1970s, China was poorer than Haiti, but I always told my friends that it might come to dominate the world economically within a couple of generations, and although most of them were initially quite skeptical of such an outrageous claim, every few years they became a little less so. The Economist had long been my favorite magazine [5], and in 1986 they published an especially long letter of mine [6] emphasizing the tremendous rising potential of China and urging them to expand their coverage with a new Asia Section; the following year, they did exactly that.

These days I feel tremendous humiliation for having spent most of my life being so totally wrong about so many things for so long, and I cling to China as a very welcome exception. I can’t think of a single development during the last forty years that I wouldn’t have generally expected back in the late 1970s, with the only surprise having been the total lack of surprises. About the only “revision” I’ve had to make in my historical framework is that I’d always casually accepted the ubiquitous claim that Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward of 1959-61 had caused 35 million or more deaths, but I’ve recently encountered some serious doubts [7], suggesting that such a total could be considerably exaggerated, and today I might admit the possibility that only 15 million or fewer had died.

4 http://www.unz.com/runz/chinas-rise-americas-fall/
​5 http://www.unz.com/runz/the-long-decline-of-the-london-economist/
6 http://www.unz.com/runz/far-east-2/
7 http://www.unz.com/article/mao-reconsidered-part-two-whose-famine/

But although I always had a great interest in China, European history was even more fascinating to me, with the political interplay of so many conflicting states and the huge ideological and military upheavals of the twentieth century.

In my unjustified arrogance, I also sometimes relished a sense of seeing obvious things that magazine or newspaper journalists got so completely wrong, mistakes which often slipped into historical narratives as well. For example, discussions of the titanic 20th century military struggles between Germany and Russia quite often made casual references to the traditional hostility between those two great peoples, who for centuries had stood as bitter rivals, representing the eternal struggle of Slav against Teuton for dominion over Eastern Europe.

Although the bloodstained history of the two world wars made that notion seem obvious, it was factually mistaken. Prior to 1914, those two great peoples had not fought against each other for the previous 150 years, and even the Seven Years’ War of the mid-18th century had involved a Russian alliance with Germanic Austria against Germanic Prussia, hardly amounting to a conflict along civilizational lines. Russians and Germans had been staunch allies during the endless Napoleonic wars, closely cooperated during the Metterich and Bismarck Eras that followed, while even as late as 1904, Germany had supported Russia in its unsuccessful war against Japan. Later, Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia had a period of close military cooperation during the 1920s, the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 marked the beginning of the Second World War, and during the long Cold War, the USSR had no more loyal a satellite than East Germany. Perhaps two dozen years of hostility over the last three centuries, with good relations or even outright alliance during most of the remainder, hardly suggested that Russians and Germans were hereditary enemies.

Moreover, throughout much of that period, Russia’s ruling elite had had a considerable Germanic tinge. Russia’s legendary Catherine the Great had been a German princess by birth, and over the centuries so many Russian rulers had taken German wives that the later Czars of the Romanov dynasty were usually more German than Russian. Russia itself had a substantial but heavily assimilated German population, which was very well represented in elite political circles, with German names being quite common among government ministers and sometimes found among important military commanders. Even a top leader of the Decembrist revolt of the early 19th century had had German ancestry but was a zealous Russian-nationalist in his ideology.

Under the governance of this mixed Russian and German ruling class, the Russian Empire had steadily risen to become one of the world’s foremost powers. Indeed, given its vast size, manpower, and resources, combined with one of the world’s fastest economic growth rates and a natural increase in total population that was not far behind, a 1914 observer might have easily pegged it to soon dominate the European continent and perhaps even much of the world, just as Tocqueville had famously prophesized in the early decades of the 19th century. A crucial underlying cause of the First World War was Britain’s belief that only a preventative war could forestall a rising Germany, but I suspect that an important secondary cause was the parallel German notion that similar measures were necessary against a rising Russia.

Obviously, this entire landscape was totally transformed by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which swept the old order from power, massacring much of its leadership and forcing the remainder to flee, thereby ushering in the modern world era of ideological and revolutionary regimes. I grew up during the final decades of the long Cold War, when the Soviet Union stood as America’s great international adversary, so the history of that revolution and its aftermath always fascinated me. During college and graduate school I probably read at least one hundred books in that general topic, devouring the brilliant works of Solzhenistyn and Sholokhov, the thick historical volumes of mainstream academic scholars such as Adam Ulam and Richard Pipes, as well as the writings of leading Soviet dissidents such as Roy Medvedev, Andrei Sakharov, and Andrei Amalrik. I was fascinated by the tragic story of how Stalin outmaneuvered Trotsky and his other rivals, leading to the massive purges of the 1930s as Stalin’s growing paranoia produced such gigantic loss of life.

I was not so totally naive that I did not recognize some of the powerful taboos surrounding discussion of the Bolsheviks, particularly regarding their ethnic composition. 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, which sometimes took the most deranged and irrational forms, such as the popularity of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion and Henry Ford’s notorious publication of The International Jew. But with Russian Jews so much more likely to be educated and urbanized, and suffering from fierce anti-Semitic oppression under the Czars, everything seemed to make reasonable sense.

Then perhaps fourteen or fifteen years ago, I encountered a rip in my personal space-time continuum, among the first of many to come.
In this particular instance, an especially rightwing friend of evolutionary theorist Gregory Cochran had been spending long days browsing the pages of Stormfront, a leading Internet forum for the Far Right, and having come across a remarkable factual claim, asked me for my opinion. Allegedly Jacob Schiff, America’s leading Jewish banker, had been the crucial financial supporter of the Bolshevik Revolution, providing the Communist revolutionaries with $20 million in funding.
My first reaction was that such a notion was utterly ridiculous since a fact so enormously explosive could not have been ignored by the many dozens of books I had read on the origins of that revolution. But the source seemed extremely precise. The Knickerbocker columnist in the February 3, 1949 edition of The New York Journal-American, then one of the leading local newspapers, wrote that “Today it is estimated by Jacob’s grandson, John Schiff, that the old man sank about 20,000,000 dollars for the final triumph of Bolshevism in Russia.”

Once I checked around a little, I discovered that numerous mainstream accounts described the enormous hostility of Schiff towards the Czarist regime for its ill-treatment of Jews, and these days even so establishmentarian a source as Wikipedia’s entry on Jacob Schiff notes that he played a major role financing the Russian Revolution of 1905, as was revealed in the later memoirs of one of his key operatives. And if you run a search on “jacob schiff bolshevik revolution” numerous other references come up, representing a wide variety of different positions and degrees of credibility. One very interesting statement appears in the memoirs of Henry Wickham Steed [8], editor of The Times of London and one of the foremost international journalists of his era. He very matter-of-factly mentions that 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.

8 https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.79764

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 of the period directly made that astonishing claim, pointing to Trotsky as the conduit for the heavy financial backing of Schiff and numerous other Jewish financiers. In 1925 this information was published in the British Guardian and was widely discussed and accepted throughout the 1920s and 1930s by numerous major media publications, long before Schiff’s own grandson provided a direct confirmation of those facts in 1949. Ackerman rather cavalierly dismisses all of this considerable contemporaneous evidence as “anti-Semitic” and a “conspiracy story,” arguing that since Schiff was a notorious conservative who had never shown any sympathy for socialism in his own American milieu, he surely would not have funded the Bolsheviks.

Now admittedly, a few details might easily have gotten somewhat garbled over time. For example, although Trotsky quickly became second only to Lenin in the Bolshevik hierarchy, in early 1917 the two were still bitterly hostile over various ideological disputes, so he certainly was not then considered a member of that party. And since everyone today acknowledges that Schiff had heavily financed the failed 1905 Revolution in Russia, it seems perfectly possible that the $20 million figure mentioned by his grandson refers to the total invested over the years supporting all the different Russian revolutionary movements and leaders, which together finally culminated in the establishment of Bolshevik Russia. But with so many seemingly credible and independent sources all making such similar claims, the basic facts appear almost indisputable.

Consider the implications of this remarkable conclusion. I would assume that most of Schiff’s funding of revolutionary activities was spent on items such as activist stipends and bribes, and adjusted for the average family incomes of that era, $20 million would be as much as $2 billion in present-day money. Surely without such enormous financial support, the likelihood of any Bolshevik victory would have been far lower, perhaps almost impossible.

When people casually used to joke about the total insanity of “anti-Semitic conspiracy theories” no better example was ever tossed around than the self-evidently absurd notion that the international Jewish bankers had created the worldwide Communist movement. And yet by any reasonable standard, this statement appears to be more or less true, and apparently was widely known at least in rough form for decades after the Russian Revolution, but had never been mentioned in any of the numerous more recent histories that shaped my own knowledge of those events. Indeed, none of these very comprehensive sources ever even mentioned Schiff’s name, although it was universally acknowledged that he had funded the 1905 Revolution, which was often discussed in enormous detail in many of those very weighty books. What other astonishing facts might they similarly be concealing?

When someone encounters remarkable new revelations in an area of history in which his knowledge was rudimentary, being little more than introductory textbooks or History 101 courses, the result is a shock and an embarrassment. But when the same situation occurs in an area in which he had read tens of thousands of pages in the leading authoritative texts, which seemingly explored every minor detail, surely his sense of reality begins to crumble.

In 1999, Harvard University published the English edition of The Black Book of Communism, whose six co-authors devoted 850 pages to documenting the horrors inflicted upon the world by that defunct system, which had produced a total death toll they reckoned at 100 million. I have never read that book and I have often heard that the alleged body-count has been widely disputed. But for me the most remarkable detail is that when I examine the 35 page index, I see a vast profusion of entries for totally obscure individuals whose names are surely unknown to all but the most erudite specialist. But there is no entry for Jacob Schiff, the world-famous Jewish banker who apparently financed the creation of the whole system in the first place. Nor one for Olaf Aschberg, the powerful Jewish banker in Sweden, who played such an important role [9] in providing the Bolsheviks a financial life-line during the early years of their threatened regime, and even founded the first Soviet international bank [10].

9 http://www.unz.com/isteve/swedens-volunteer-auxiliary-thought-police/
10 ​https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olof_Aschberg

When one discovers a tear in the fabric of reality, there is a natural tendency to nervously peer within, wondering what mysterious objects might dwell there. The Ackerman book denounced the notion of Schiff having funded the Bolsheviks as “a favorite trope of Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda” and just prior to those words he issued a similar denunciation of Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent, a publication which would have meant almost nothing to me. Although Ackerman’s particular book had not yet been published when I began exploring the Schiff story a dozen years ago, many other writers had similarly conjoined those two topics, so I decided to explore the matter.

Ford himself was a very interesting individual, and his world-historical role certainly received very scanty coverage in my basic history textbooks. Although the exact reasons for his decision to raise his minimum wage to $5 per day in 1914 [11] — double the existing average pay for industrial workers in America—can be disputed, it certainly seems to have played a huge role in the creation of our middle class. He also adopted a highly paternalistic policy of providing good company housing and other amenities to his workers, a total departure from the “Robber Baron” capitalism so widely practiced at that time, thereby establishing himself as a world-wide hero to industrial workers and their advocates. Indeed, Lenin himself had regarded Ford as a towering figure in the world’s revolutionary firmament, glossing over his conservative views and commitment to capitalism and instead focusing on his remarkable achievements in worker productivity and economic well-being. It is a forgotten detail of history that even after Ford’s considerable hostility to the Russian Revolution became widely known, the Bolsheviks still described their own industrial development policy as “Fordism.” Indeed, it was not unusual to see portraits of Lenin and Ford hanging side-by-side in Soviet factories, representing the two greatest secular saints of the Bolshevik pantheon.
​
11 http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/01/03/history/post-perspective/ford-doubles-minimum-wage.html
12 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0375407359

As for The Dearborn Independent, Ford had apparently launched his newspaper on a national basis not long after the end of the war, intending to focus on controversial topics, especially those related to Jewish misbehavior, whose discussion he believed was being ignored or suppressed by nearly all mainstream media outlets. I had been aware that he had long been one of the wealthiest and most highly-regarded individuals in America, but I was still astonished to discover that his weekly newspaper, previously almost unknown to me, had reached a total national circulation of 900,000 by 1925, ranking it as the second largest in the country and by far the biggest with a national distribution. I found no easy means of examining the contents of a typical issue, but apparently the anti-Jewish articles of the first couple of years had been collected and published as short books, together constituting the four volumes of The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, a notoriously anti-Semitic work occasionally mentioned in my history textbooks. Eventually my curiosity got the best of me, so clicked a few buttons on Amazon.com, bought the set, and wondered what I would discover.

Based on all my pre-suppositions, I expected to read some foaming-at-the-mouth screed, and doubted I would be able to get past the first dozen pages before losing interest and consigning the volumes to gather dust on my shelves. But what I actually encountered was something entirely different.

Over the last couple of decades, the enormous growth in the power and influence of Jewish and pro-Israel groups in America has occasionally led writers to cautiously raise certain facts regarding the untoward influence of those organizations and activists, while always carefully emphasizing that the vast majority of ordinary Jews do not benefit from these policies and actually might be harmed by them, even leaving aside the possible risk of eventually provoking an anti-Jewish backlash. To my considerable surprise, I found that the vast majority of the material in Ford’s 300,000 word series seemed to follow this same pattern and tone.

The individual 80 chapter-columns of Ford’s volumes generally discuss particular issues and events, some of which were well-known to me, but with the vast majority totally obscured by the passage of almost a hundred years. But as far as I could tell, almost all the discussions seemed quite plausible and factually-oriented, even sometimes overly cautious in their presentation, and with one possible exception I can’t recall anything that seemed fanciful or unreasonable. As an example, there was no claim that Schiff or his fellow Jewish bankers had funded the Bolshevik Revolution since those particular facts had not yet come out, only that he had seemed to be strongly supportive of the overthrow of Czarism, and had worked toward that end for many years, motivated by what he regarded as the hostility of the Russian Empire towards its Jewish subjects. This sort of discussion is not all that different from what one might find in a modern Schiff biography or in his Wikipedia entry, though many of the important details presented in the Ford books have disappeared from the historical record.

Although I somehow managed to plow through all four volumes of The International Jew, the unrelenting drum-beat of Jewish intrigue and misbehavior became somewhat soporific after a while, especially since so many of the examples provided may have loomed quite large in 1920 or 1921 but are almost totally forgotten today. Most of the content was a collection of rather monotonous complaints regarding Jewish malfeasance, scandals, or clannishness, the sort of mundane matters which might have normally appeared in the pages of an ordinary newspaper or magazine, let alone one of the muckraking type.

However, I cannot fault the publication for such a narrow focus. A consistent theme was that because of the intimidating fear of Jewish activists and influence, virtually all of America’s regular media outlets avoided discussion of any of these important matters, and since this new publication was intended to remedy that void, it necessarily required coverage overwhelmingly skewed toward that particular subject. The articles were also aimed at gradually expanding the window of public debate and eventually shame other periodicals into discussing Jewish misbehavior. When leading magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly and Century Magazine began running such articles, this result was cited as a major success.

Another important goal was to make ordinary Jews more aware of the very problematical behavior of many of their community leaders. Occasionally, the publication received a letter of praise from a self-proclaimed “proud American Jew” commending the series and sometimes including a check to purchase subscriptions for other members of his community, and this achievement might become the subject of an extended discussion.

And although the details of these individual stories differed considerably from those of today, the pattern of behavior being criticized seemed remarkably similar. Change a few facts, adjust the society for a century of change, and many of the stories might be exactly the same ones that well-meaning people concerned about the future of our country are quietly discussing today. Most remarkably, there were even a couple of columns about the troubled relationship between the earliest Zionist settlers in Palestine and the surrounding native Palestinians, and deep complaints that under Jewish pressure the media often totally misreported or hid some of the outrages suffered by the latter group.

I certainly cannot vouch for the overall accuracy of the contents of these volumes, but at the very least they would constitute an extremely valuable source of “raw material” for further historical investigation. So many of the events and incidents they recount seem to have been entirely omitted from the major media publications of that day, and surely were never included in later historical narratives, given that even such widely known stories as Schiff’s major financial backing for the Bolsheviks were completely tossed down George Orwell’s “memory hole.”
​
With the volumes long out of copyright, I have added the set to my collection of HTML Books, and those so interested may read the text and decide for themselves.

The International Jew
The World’s Foremost Problem
http://www.unz.com/book/henry_ford__the-international-jew

As mentioned, the overwhelming majority of The International Jew seems a rather bland recitation of complaints about Jewish misbehavior. But there is one major exception, which has a very different impact upon our modern mind, namely that the writer took very seriously The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Probably no “conspiracy theory” in modern times has been subjected to such immense vilification and ridicule as the Protocols, but a voyage of discovery often acquires a momentum of its own, and I became curious about the nature of that infamous document.

Apparently, the Protocols first came to light during the last decade of the 19th century, and the British Museum stored a copy in 1906, but it attracted relatively little attention at the time. However, all this changed after the Bolshevik Revolution and toppling of many other long-standing governments at the end of the First World War led many people to seek a common cause behind so many enormous political upheavals. From my distance of many decades, the text of the Protocols struck me as rather bland and even dull, describing in rather long-winded fashion a plan of secret subversion aimed at weakening the bonds of the social fabric, setting groups against each other, gaining control over political leaders by bribery and blackmail, and eventually restoring society along rigidly hierarchical lines with an entirely new group in control. Admittedly, there were many shrewd insights into politics or psychology, notably the enormous power of the media and the benefits of advancing political front-men who were deeply compromised or incompetent and hence easily controllable. But nothing else really jumped out at me.

Perhaps one reason I found the text of the Protocols so uninspiring is that over the century since its publication, these notions of diabolical plots by hidden groups have become such a common theme in our entertainment media, with countless thousands of spy novels and science fiction stories presenting something similar, though these usually involve far more exciting means, such as a super-weapon or a powerful drug. If some Bond villain proclaimed his intent to conquer the world merely through simple political subversion, I suspect that such a film would immediately die at the box office.

But back one hundred years ago, these were apparently exciting and novel notions, and I actually found the discussion of the Protocols in many of the chapters of The International Jew far more interesting and informative than reading the text itself. The author of the Ford books seems to appropriately treat it as any other historical document, dissecting its content, speculating on its provenance, and wondering whether or not it was what it purported to be, namely an approximate record of the statements of a group of conspirators pursuing mastery over the world, with those conspirators widely believed to be an elite fraternity of international Jews.

Other contemporaries seem to have taken the Protocols very seriously as well. The august Times of London fully endorsed it, before later retracting that position under heavy pressure, and I’ve read that more copies were published and sold in the Europe of that era than any other book save the Bible. The Bolshevik government of Russia paid the volume its own sort of deep respect, with mere possession of the Protocolswarranting immediate execution.

Although The International Jew concludes that the Protocols was probably genuine, I doubt that likelihood based upon the style and presentation. Browsing around on the Internet a dozen years ago, I discovered quite a variety of different opinions even within the precincts of the Far Right, where such matters were freely discussed. I remember some forum writer somewhere characterizing the Protocols as “based upon a true story,” suggesting that someone who was generally familiar with the secretive machinations of elite international Jews against the existing governments of Czarist Russia and other countries had drafted the document to outline his view of their strategic plans, and such an interpretation seems perfectly plausible.

Another reader somewhere claimed that the Protocols were pure fiction but very significant nonetheless. He argued that the very keen insights into the methods by which a small conspiratorial group can quietly corrupt and overthrow powerful existing regimes arguably ranked it alongside Plato’s The Republic and Machiavelli’s The Prince as one of the three great classics of Western political philosophy, and earned it a place on the required reading list of every Political Science 101 course. Indeed, the author of Ford’s books emphasizes that there are very few mentions of Jews anywhere in the Protocols, and all the implied connections to Jewish conspirators could be completely struck from the text without affecting their content whatsoever.
​
In any event, this short work is now available as one of my HTML Books, making it quite convenient for reading and text-searching.

The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion
http://www.unz.com/book/anonymous__the-protocols-of-the-learned-elders-of-zion

​Some ideas have consequences and others do not. Although my introductory history textbooks had often mentioned Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic activities, his publication of The International Jew, and the concurrent popularity of the Protocols, they never emphasized any lasting political legacy, or at least I don’t recall any. However, once I actually read the contents and also discovered the enormous contemporary popularity of those writings and the huge national circulation of The Dearborn Independent, I quickly came to a very different conclusion.

For decades pro-immigration liberals, many of them Jewish, have suggested that anti-Semitism was a major factor behind the 1924 Immigration Act that drastically reduced European immigration for the next forty years, while anti-immigration activists have always heatedly denied this. The documentary evidence from that era certainly favors the position of the latter, but I really do wonder what important private discussions may not have been set down in print and entered into the Congressional Record. The overwhelming popular support for immigration restriction had been successfully blocked for decades by powerful business interests, which greatly benefited from the reduced wages of the resulting labor-competition, but now matters had suddenly changed, and surely the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia must have had been a powerful influence.

Russia, overwhelmingly populated by Russians, had been governed for centuries by a Russian ruling elite. Then, heavily Jewish revolutionaries, drawn from a group amounting to just 4% of the population had taken advantage of military defeat and unsettled political conditions to seize control of the country, butchering those previous elites or forcing them to desperately flee abroad as penniless refugees.

Trotsky and a large fraction of the leading Jewish revolutionaries had been living as exiles in New York City, and now many of their Jewish cousins still resident in America began loudly proclaiming that a similar revolution would soon follow here as well. Huge waves of recent immigration, mostly from Russia, had increased the Jewish fraction of the national population to 3%, not far below the figure for Russia itself on the eve of its revolution. If the Russian elites who ruled Russia had been suddenly overthrown by Jewish revolutionaries, is it not obvious that the Anglo-Saxon elites who ruled Anglo-Saxon America feared suffering the same fate?

The “Red Scare” of the 1919 was one response, with numerous immigrant radicals such as Emma Goldman rounded up and summarily deported, while the Sacco-Vanzetti murder trial in 1921 Boston captured the attention of the nation, suggesting that other immigrant groups were violent radicals as well, and might ally themselves with the Jews in a revolutionary movement, just like the Letts and other disgruntled Russian minorities had done during the Bolshevik Revolution. But drastically reducing the inflow of these dangerous foreigners was absolutely essential since otherwise their numbers might easily grow by hundreds of thousands each year, increasing their already huge presence in our largest cities of the East Coast.

Sharply reducing immigration would certainly cause a rise in worker wages and hurt business profits. But considerations of profits are secondary if you fear that you and your family might eventually end up facing a Bolshevik firing squad or fleeing to Buenos Aires with just the clothes on your backs and a few hurriedly-packed suitcases.

A noteworthy bit of evidence in support of this analysis was the subsequent failure of Congress to enact similar restrictive legislation curtailing immigration from Mexico or the rest of Latin America. The local business interests of Texas and the Southwest argued that continuation of unrestricted Mexican immigration was important for their economic success, with Mexicans being good people, politically docile workers, and no threat to stability of the country. This was a clear contrast with the Jews and some other European immigrant groups.

The much less familiar early 1920s battle over restricting Jewish enrollment in the Ivy League may have been another consequence. In his magisterial 2005 volume The Chosen, Jerome Karabel documents how the very rapid growth in Jewish numbers at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and other Ivy League colleges had by the early 1920s become an enormous concern to the Anglo-Saxon elites which had established those institutions and always dominated their student bodies.

As a result, a quiet war over admissions broke out, involving both political and media influence, with the reigning WASPs seeking to reduce and restrict Jewish numbers and the Jews struggling to maintain or expand them. Although there seems no paper-trail of any direct references to the enormously popular national newspaper and books published by Henry Ford or any similar material, it is difficult to believe that the academic combatants were not at least somewhat aware of the theories of a Jewish assault on Gentile society then being so widely promoted. It is easy to imagine that a respectable Boston Brahmin such as Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell regarded his own moderate “anti-Semitism” as a very reasonable middle-ground between the lurid claims promoted by Ford and others and the demands for unlimited Jewish enrollment made by his opponents. Indeed, Karabel himself points to the social impact of Ford’s publications as a significant background factor to this academic conflict.

At this point in time, the Anglo-Saxon elites still held the upper hand in the media. The very heavily Jewish film industry was only in its infancy and the same was true for radio, while the vast majority of major print outlets were still in Gentile hands, so the descendants of America’s original settlers won this round of the admissions war. But when the battle was rejoined a couple of decades later, the strategic political and media landscape had completely shifted, with Jews having achieved near-parity in print influence and overwhelming dominance in the more powerful electronic media formats such as film, radio, and nascent television, and this time they were victorious, easily breaking the hold of their longtime ethnic rivals, and eventually achieving almost complete dominance over those elite institutions [1].

1 http://www.unz.com/runz/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/

And ironically enough, the most lasting cultural legacy of the widespread anti-Jewish agitation of the 1920s may be the least recognized. As mentioned above, modern readers might find the text of the Protocols rather boring and bland, almost like they had been cribbed from the extremely long-winded monologue of one of the diabolical villains of a James Bond story. But it wouldn’t surprise me if there were actually an arrow of causality in the opposite direction. Ian Fleming created this genre in the early 1950s with his string of international best-sellers, and it is interesting to speculate about the source of his ideas.

Fleming had spent his youth during the 1920s and 1930s when the Protocols were among the most widely read books in much of Europe and leading British newspapers of the highest credibility were recounting the successful plots of Schiff and other international Jewish bankers to overthrow the government of Britain’s Czarist ally and replace it with Jewish Bolshevik rule. Moreover, his later service in an arm of British Intelligence would surely have made him privy to details of that history that went far beyond those public headlines. I think it is more than pure coincidence that two of his most memorable Bond villains, Goldfinger and Blofeld, had distinctly Jewish-sounding names, and that so many of the plots involve schemes of world-conquest by Spectre, a secretive and mysterious international organization hostile to all existing governments. The Protocols themselves may be half-forgotten today, but their cultural influence probably survives in the Bond films, whose $7 billion of aggregate box-office gross ranks them as the most successful movie series in history when adjusted for inflation.
 
The extent to which established historical facts can appear or disappear from the world should certainly force all of us to become very cautious in believing anything we read in our standard textbooks, let alone what we absorb from our more transient electronic media.

In the early years of the Bolshevik Revolution, almost no one questioned the overwhelming role of Jews in that event, nor their similar preponderance in the ultimately unsuccessful Bolshevik takeovers in Hungary and parts of Germany. For example, former British Minister Winston Churchill in 1920 [2] denounced the “terrorist Jews” who had seized control of Russia and other parts of Europe, noting that “the majority of the leading figures are Jews” and stating that “In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing,” while lamenting the horrors these Jews had inflicted upon the suffering Germans and Hungarians.

2 http://www.fpp.co.uk/bookchapters/WSC/WSCwrote1920.html

Similarly, journalist Robert Wilton, former Russia correspondent of the Times of London, provided a very detailed summary of the enormous Jewish role in his 1918 book Russia’s Agony and 1920 book The Last Days of the Romanovs, although one of the most explicit chapters of the latter was apparently excluded from the English language edition [3]. Not long afterward, the facts regarding the enormous financial support provided to the Bolsheviks by international Jewish bankers such as Schiff and Aschberg were widely reported in the mainstream media.

3 http://mailstar.net/wilton.html

Jews and Communism were just as strongly tied together in America, and for years the largest circulation Communist newspaper in our country was published in Yiddish [4]. When they were finally released, the Venona Decrypts demonstrated that even as late as the 1930s and 1940s, a remarkable fraction of America’s Communist spies came from that ethnic background.

A personal anecdote tends to confirm these dry historical records. During the early 2000s I once had lunch with an elderly and very eminent computer scientist, with whom I’d become a little friendly. While talking about this and that, he happened to mention that both his parents had been zealous Communists, and given his obvious Irish name, I expressed my surprise, saying that I’d thought almost all the Communists of that era were Jewish. He said that was indeed the case, but although his mother had such an ethnic background, his father did not, which made him a very rare exception in their political circles. As a consequence, the Party had always sought to place him in as prominent a public role as possible just to prove that not all Communists were Jews, and although he obeyed Party discipline, he was always irritated at being used as such a “token.”

4 https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1zxsj1m.6?seq=2#page_scan_tab_contents

However, once Communism sharply fell out of favor in 1950s America, nearly all of the leading “Red Baiters” such as Sen. Joseph McCarthy went to enormous lengths to obscure the ethnic dimension of the movement they were combatting. Indeed, many years later Richard Nixon casually spoke in private [5] of the difficulty he and other anti-Communist investigators had faced in trying to focus on Gentile targets since nearly all of the suspected Soviet spies were Jewish, and when this tape became public, his alleged anti-Semitism provoked a media firestorm even though his remarks were obviously implying the exact opposite.

5 https://www.nytimes.com/1999/10/07/us/in-1971-tapes-nixon-is-heard-blaming-jews-for-communist-plots.html

This last point is an important one, since once the historical record has been sufficiently whitewashed or rewritten, any lingering strands of the original reality that survive are often perceived as bizarre delusions or denounced as “conspiracy theories.” Indeed, even today the ever-amusing pages of Wikipedia provides an entire 3,500 word article attacking the notion of “Jewish Bolshevism [6]” as an “antisemitic canard.”

6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Bolshevism

I remember in the 1970s the enormous gusts of American praise for Solzhenitysn’s three volume Gulag Archipelago suddenly encountered a temporary headwind when someone noticed that his 2,000 pages had included a single photograph depicting many of the leading Gulag administrators, along with a caption revealing their unmistakably Jewish names. This detail was treated as serious evidence of the great author’s possible anti-Semitism since the actual reality of the enormously large role of Jews in the NKVD and the Gulag system had long since disappeared from all the standard history books.

As another example, the Rev. Pat Robertson, a leading Christian televangelist, published The New World Order in 1991, his fiery attack on the “godless globalists” whom he considered his greatest enemy, and it quickly became a massive national best-seller. He happened to include a couple of brief, somewhat garbled mentions of the $20 million which Wall Street banker Jacob Schiff had provided to the Communists, carefully avoiding any suggestion of a Jewish angle and providing no reference for that claim. His book quickly provoked a vast outpouring of denunciation and ridicule across the elite media, with the Schiff story seen as conclusion proof of his delusional anti-Semitism [7]. I cannot really fault these critics since in pre-Internet days they could only consult the indexes of a few standard histories of the Bolshevik Revolution, and finding no mention of Schiff or his money, naturally assumed that Robertson or his source had simply invented the bizarre story. I myself had had exactly the same reaction at the time.

7 https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1994/10/16/calling-all-crackpots/68f3742a-3b1e-46b5-aedf-b8c0f21a5cf4/

Only after Soviet Communism had died in 1991 and no longer was perceived as a hostile force were academic scholars in America once again able to publish mainstream books that gradually restored the true picture of that past era. In many respects, a widely praised work such as The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkine, published in 2004 by Princeton University Press, provides a narrative quite consistent with long-forgotten works by Robert Wilton but marks a very sharp departure from the largely obfuscatory histories of the intervening eighty-odd years.
Until about a dozen years ago, I had always vaguely assumed that Henry Ford’s The International Jew was a work of political lunacy and the Protocols was a notorious hoax. Yet today, I would probably consider the former as a potentially useful source of possible historical events otherwise excluded from most standard accounts, while at least understanding the argument of why the latter might deserve a place alongside Plato and Machiavelli as a classic of Western political thought.

Related Reading:
·   The International Jew by Henry Ford
http://www.unz.com/book/henry_ford__the-international-jew/

·   The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion by Anonymous
http://www.unz.com/book/anonymous__the-protocols-of-the-learned-elders-of-zion/

·   American Pravda: Oddities of the Jewish Religion
http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-oddities-of-the-jewish-religion/

·   Hating Russia is a Full-Time Job by Philip Giraldi
http://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/hating-russia-is-a-full-time-job/

·   The Elders of Zion and the Masters Discourse by Israel Shamir
​http://www.unz.com/ishamir/the-elders-of-zion-and-the-masters-discourse/

​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​

In the footsteps of the great Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who did more for the liberation of Russia--and the United States--from the false image of the October (Bolshevik, Communist) Revolution created by the lies of 73 years of global Soviet propaganda, I have done as much as I could to expose it as a vane and violent attempt to impose an utopia on Russia and the world.

In my 1991 book Russia Beyond Communism: A Chronicle of National Rebirth, I argued that the most promising exit from the impasse of the USSR was for Russia to return to its ancient spiritual roots, including Christianity and much of the pre-1917 cultural, economic and political inheritance. Instead of pursuing unworkable Soviet utopia, Russia should have returned to its traditional national identity and let other Soviet republics do the same.

I am happy to say that, to a large extent, this happened.[i] And it is still happening, even though there are many huge obstacles that New Russia has encountered on the path to its own identity. The greatest obstacle is the refusal of the USA to recognize Russia's quest for national self-identity, her sovereignty. This refusal has led to a New Cold War that is even more dangerous than the Old Cold War. The expansion of NATO to Russia’s border is one such worrisome and uncalled-for development. The US numerous unprovoked aggressions in the Middle East and elsewhere is another.

Domestically, the recent transfer of US mega media to a very few hands has effectively curtailed the freedom of expression. However, Donald Trump’s presidential victory signaled that the mega media, overwhelmingly geared against Trump, are not all-powerful. The Internet technology assured the freedom of heterodoxy the mega media has unsuccessfully tried to suppress.

The Unz Review is a flagship of heterodox opinion that seeks to help create an educated alternative to the failed foreign and domestic policies of the US. I have been reading its publications for a number of years and am convinced that it upholds best the standards of responsible free speech so fundamental for the US and the West.

I am especially delighted that the blog-magazine’s founder and primary writer Ron Unz has challenged its writers and readers to a dialogue on most controversial topics, including the role of Jews in the October (Bolshevik) Revolution in Russia. On RAGA’s behalf I already welcomed the recent call by Charles Bausman of the Russia Insider to “drop the Jew taboo” by translating his article into Russian and posting it on our site. Now am delighted to welcome Ron Unz’s American Pravda series of articles on similar issues.

[i] Post-Communist Russia Is Not the Soviet Union. By Daniel J. Mahoney. August 07, 2018
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/08/07/post-communist_russia_is_not_the_soviet_union_137730.html

Ron is not the first Jew to point out that the Bolshevik leadership was heavily Jewish and thus challenge Soviet propaganda’s image of the October Revolution as a popular uprising. In the free election to Constituent Assembly to decide on the form of government in January 1918, the Bolsheviks garnered less than 25% of the vote. Then, Bolshevik troops forcibly dissolved the Assembly to dispersed workers’ demonstrations by gun fire to let Lenin and Trotsky stay in power.

It is doubtful that the majority of Russian Jews supported the violent revolution. In any case, many more Jews voted for the Zionists and Social Revolutionary party rather than the Bolsheviks. Not for nothing, Fanny Kaplan,[i] a Jewish Socialist Revolutionary, made a failed attempt to assassinate Lenin, and Leonid Kannegisser, [ii]a Jewish Tsar army cadet, assassinated Moisei Uritsky,[iii] the notorious brutal Jewish boss of the Petrograd Cheka.

Still, many more Jews of the Russian Empire did not want to do anything with the revolution as they believed their ongoing gradual emancipation assured their equality in Russia. Some of them sided with the White Army and, after the defeat by the Reds, joined the ranks of patriotic Russian emigrees forced to flee the USSR. In my book, Russia Beyond Communism (op.cit), in Chapter 4, I discussed Joseph Bickermann’s Russian collection of articles by a number of prominent Russian Jews opposed to Communism. In 1928 Joseph Bickermann published another anti-Soviet collection, this time in English:  “Ten Years of the Bolshevic Domination”[iv]
Thus, Ron Unz joins the ranks of those Jews who are so independent in their thinking that they defy any stereotypes. After all, the phenomenon of prophets as wise men standing alone against threatening crowds and against all shibboleths of the time is as Jewish as Jeremiah. I am especially delighted that Ron is an admirer of Solzhenitsyn as a writer and Russian prophet who helped Americans get rid of their pro-Soviet illusions. As the author of Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky: A Study in the Polyphonic Novel, I share Ron’s indignation over US media later vicious insinuations that Solzhenitsyn was an “anti-Semite”.

Most recently I have dealt with the issue of Jews vs. non-Jews in the Russian revolution in a longer article Emperor Michael II in the Solzhenitsyn House.[v] The article was dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the brutal murder of Mikhail (Michael), the last legal ruler of Russia, on June 13, 1918, in my native city of Perm. In fact, some historians in Russia, as well as the late Donald Crawford of UK, call Mikhail “The last Tsar”. In this instance I agree with them rather that my hero Solzhenitsyn who unfortunately, being unfamiliar with post-Soviet research, appraised Mikhail as a weakling and political non-entity of no consequence.

There are also serious US domestic considerations for taking Ron Unz and his alternative blog-magazine seriously. With great regret I must say that I have not seen the American people so deeply torn apart along political, racial, and economic and gender lines since I came to the States in 1966. Some people even talk about the threat of Civil War II Coming?[vi] It is painful to see as US left-liberal cum Neo-Con establishment is trying to divert attention of American people from pressing domestic problems to the imagined threat from Russia.

The RAGA was founded on the idea that world peace is best advanced by US-Russia dialogue whereas domestic tranquility is best assured by a polyphony of various ideological, political, economic or religious beliefs as long as their protagonists—be they Russian or American, Jewish or non-Jewish, Israeli or Palestinian, Christian or Muslim—hold their opinion honestly and engage their opponents as friends in a common search for truth, harmony and peace.

END

[i] Fanya Yefimovna Kaplan (Russian: Фа́нни Ефи́мовна Капла́н; real name Feiga Haimovna Roytblat, Фейга Хаимовна Ройтблат; February 10, 1890 – September 3, 1918) was a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party who allegedly tried to assassinate Vladimir Leninanny Kaplan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanny_Kaplan

[ii]Leonid Akimovic Kannegisser (Russian: Леони́д Иоаки́мович Каннегисер, March 1896 – October 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

[iii] Moisei Solomonovich Uritsky (Russian: Моисей Соломонович Урицкий; January 14, 1873–August 30, 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 then fled into the British embassy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moisei_Uritsky

[iv] Joseph Bickerman et al. on Bolshevik domination https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/ten-years-of-bolshevic-domination/author/bickermann-joseph-ed-patriotic-union-of-russian-jews-abroad/

His biography is only in Russian Иосиф Менассиевич Бикерман (нем. Josef Bickermann; 15 января 1867, село Окны, Ананьевский уезд, Херсонская губерния — 1942, Париж) — российский историк, писатель и публицист. Отец американского историка-антиковеда Ильи Иосифовича Бикермана и химика Якова Осиповича Бикермана. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Бикерман,_Иосиф_Менассиевич

[v] http://www.raga.org/news/emperor-michael-ii-in-the-solzhenitsyn-house-author-vladislav-krasnov

[vi] Kevin Barrett  http://www.unz.com/article/civil-war-ii-coming/

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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.

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Imagine for a moment that there was a freak cyclone that came in to your nearest city, and caused enormous wind and rain damage to property. That would be newsworthy, yes? If it wasn’t reported, despite all the wreckage and disruption, then you would be curious as to why it was not being mentioned, correct?

Now consider what would happen if some A-list celebrity entertainers — let’s pick Jay-Z and Beyoncé as archetypes of the genre — held an impromptu concert on a popular beach. Hundreds of people would be present, all uploading their pictures and videos to Instagram and YouTube. That would be in the news, don’t you think? And its omission from the tabloids and TV talk shows would say something rather interesting, wouldn’t you agree?

What if, for a moment, a high-profile public figure — the First Lady of the US — wore some fashion clothing with a provocative message. After all, everything has a meaning, whether intentional or not. Her choice could be seen as highly significant, I would consider. Should it be in the news? I would expect so! And would an omertà on FLOTUS overcoats strike you as odd? I do hope so!

These kinds of natural, cultural and political events are deemed worthy of column inches and TV schedule time. So wouldn’t you find it just a little bit off-kilter if matters of far, far greater significance were being ignored by the corporate media?

The United States — the world’s only military and economic superpower — has been in a formal state of emergency since 21st December 2017. The stated reasons for the invocation of these formidable executive powers are human rights abuses and corruption. You can check it for yourself — along with the huge asset seizure list on the DOJ website.
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I just want to pick on an aspect of this situation, one that is conspicuous by its complete absence from the mainstream news narrative: there is an absolute blackout. Sealed filings (presumed to be indictments — each potentially naming tens of people) have been piling up in America’s Federal courts since last autumn. The rate of filing is around 50x (and more!) what it was previously: 5000-6000 a month, whereas there are usually just over 1000 each year. So we’re approaching two orders of magnitude increase in throughput.

​Reasonable people might vehemently disagree on how to interpret this data — as being sinister or reassuring — but its veracity is not in dispute (to the best of my knowledge). Any lawyer with a PACER account can go and check the numbers, as it is semi-public information.

So given that: (A) there is a formal state of emergency with powers to match, and (B) convictions for human trafficking and child pornography have already rocketed ten-fold, plus (C) a hundred-fold increase in indictments is filling the judicial pipeline… is it not reasonable to conclude that (D) there is a prospect of mass arrests ahead in 2018, as the corruption clean-up hits full-on?

The silence of the news media on this subject is absolutely deafening.

We culturally treat the “official” corporate media as having a monopoly on truth: it defines what is acceptable to say in polite company, and what is too outrageous. If it’s on the CNN or BBC websites, then Wikipedia thinks that’s good enough as a proxy for factual accuracy and citation legitimacy. It is also respectable to repeat what the TV news says, no matter how mendacious. The opinions of the media class are treated (by themselves) as being those of all people of good conscience. The impression is given that they are also views held by the majority — even when those views are manifestly rejected in plebiscites.

The problem is that the interests of corporate media by necessity represent those of its investors (and spookier stakeholders) — not ordinary citizens, nor even the most valiant journalist. Telling people extremely difficult truths about the nature of the society we live in doesn’t help sell advertising inventory. Our society’s hidden horrors — like slavery, paedophilia, and blackmail — are mostly kept out of sight and out of mind, replaced by fear porn and empty gossip.

It strikes me that we are in an extremely dangerous situation. There is only one possible conclusion that I can come to that explains this blackout, given the facts: the mass media itself is a key target of the corruption purge to come. They are collectively compromised, and have been for decades. It’s a bit hard to write about VoIP or SD-WAN as being defining trends in the communications industry, given what is happening in the socio-political!

Whilst this media industry fall from grace is bad enough, it is not the thing that is most concerning to me. There is also a scary silence of the masses, who so far refuse to pay attention to even a national state of emergency. Their reality is completely defined by the nightly news anchor regurgitating the day’s official talking points. Since the media fails to highlight these important national events, making them figural in the audience member’s mind, they simply disappear into a memory hole and cease to officially exist!

Whirlwinds, lip-sync and fashionista jackets may fill the screen, but they aren’t what is important right now. Every responsible citizen should be insisting on a truly free press, one that offers the public the full story. Yet relatively few people are demanding media accountability for this particular manifest and massive lapse. Ask yourself: Was I aware of this? Is it true? Does it really matter? How do I feel about it? What should I do?
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The media wolves have been guarding the public sheep, whilst telling them they are harmless sheep dogs. Meanwhile, the legislative shepherd — whose dedication to ovine longevity is dubious at best — appears to be overly interested in lamb recipes. We’ve all been fleeced, and there’s a storm approaching. Time to bleat loudly for attention, and hope for rapid rescue by some judicial animal lovers.
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​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​