IMPORTANT - Kevin MacDonald: The Wilders Syndrome

The Wilders Syndrome
Jews, Israel, and the European Right
By Kevin MacDonald

German Chancellor Angela Merkel caused a sensation recently when she stated bluntly that Muslim integration has “failed.” Despite the media controversy, Merkel was merely acknowledging a broad consensus in Europe, and one that crosses national and party boundaries. In Merkel’s Germany, for example, a recent survey found that 55 per cent of respondents think Muslims are a burden on the economy, and around a third believe that Muslims will “overrun the country.” Throughout Europe, Muslims live in parallel societies, and the dream of a harmonious multicultural future has little basis in reality. Thilo Sarrazin’s well-publicized book, Germany Does Away With Itself, pointed to the many shortcomings of immigrants (including low intelligence and educational achievement) and placed the blame for the failure to assimilate squarely on the Muslims.
Popular sentiment is increasingly on the side of those who would sharply curb immigration, particularly Muslims immigration. And the rise of European nationalist parties is certainly one of the more encouraging developments for White advocates. Times are changing.
Nevertheless, parties addressing these concerns still have a serious problem establishing their legitimacy. Opposition to immigration is the lightning rod of contemporary politics throughout the West and has been met with vicious opposition by the Powers That Be.
Indeed, it might be said without exaggeration that opposition to immigration and multiculturalism have defined a “no-go zone” for decades—beyond the pale of legitimate political discourse. “Far right” parties that challenge the consensus on these issues are typically seen by the elite media and the political establishment through the lens of conventional post-World War II moralism—as hearkening back to National Socialist attitudes of racial exclusion and superiority. Within this worldview, opposition to immigration and multiculturalism is immediately shrouded in the rhetoric of the Holocaust that has become the cultural touchstone of European civilization at least since the 1970s.

Given the centrality of the Holocaust and Jewish sensibilities to the current zeitgeist favoring immigration and multiculturalism, it is interesting that some of these parties have openly courted Jewish support. They have not only proclaimed support for Israel but for the most right-wing elements within Israel—the settler movement that is championed by an increasingly large and politically influential contingent of religious and ethno-nationalist Jews.
Recently, a delegation of 35 European anti-Muslim politicians from Austria, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Britain, and Sweden toured the West Bank in a series of meetings hosted by leaders of the Israeli settler movement. The delegation included prominent Austrians: Heinz-Christian Strache, head of the German Freedom Party—quite possibly the next chancellor of Austria, and Claus Pandi, editor-in-chief of Krone Zeitung, the largest newspaper in Austria. The delegation also included Filip Dewinter, spokesman for Belgium's Vlaams Belang party and a member of the Flemish Parliament, and René Stadtkewitz, a former member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union who recently established the Freedom Party in Germany with an explicitly anti-Muslim, pro-Israel line.
Not present was Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch Freedom Party. However, Wilders was in Israel at the time, espousing similar sentiments: strong commitment to the Jewish state and expressing his belief that Palestinians should relocate to Jordan. Wilders is doubtless the most famous exemplar of this anti-Muslim, philo-Semitic, pro-Israel phenomenon. He began his speech in Tel Aviv by noting, “Israel is an immense source of inspiration for me. … I am grateful to Israel. I will always defend Israel. Your country is the cradle of Western civilization. We call it the Judeo-Christian civilization with good reason.” Indeed, Israel is a bulwark against Muslim destruction of the West:

Without Judea and Samaria [i.e., the West Bank], Israel cannot protect Jerusalem. The future of the world depends on Jerusalem. If Jerusalem falls, Athens and Rome—and Paris, London and Washington — will be next.

Wilders wants to end Muslim immigration and have the Qur’an banned for inciting violence. His 2008 video Fitna (see here and here) depicts Islam as out to conquer the world, committed to violent jihad against the West. It portrays Islam as anti-Jewish and intolerant of contemporary Western attitudes on sexuality, democracy, and personal freedom.
Wilders therefore presents himself as a classical liberal, a “libertarian” (in American parlance) for whom Margaret Thatcher is his political role model. He is a staunch defender of free speech who sees concerns about offending Muslim sensibilities as casting a pall over conventional liberal views in a wide variety of areas:

Speech now deemed suspect includes subjects that are commonly and openly aired when not involving Islam: women's subordination, violence, child marriages, criminalization of homosexuality and animal cruelty. … We believe our country is based on Christianity, on Judaism, on humanism, and we believe the more Islam we get, the more it will not only threaten our culture and our own identity but also our values and our freedom.

Note that Wilders is here ascribing a foundational role for Judaism in Western culture.
Wilders rejects any explicit appeal to race and has rejected being associated with politicians associated with racialist or anti-Jewish views. In an interview with Der Spiegel, he noted,

[W]e have no problems with other skin colors, nor with Muslims—our problem is with Islam.  I do not believe in genetic causes; I am miles away from there. I believe rather that all people who embrace our values, our laws and our constitution are full members of our society. I would even go so far as to say that the majority of the Muslims in Europe are people like you and I; they lead a normal life, have a normal occupation and want the best for their children. My problem is with the growing influence of an ideology that will cost us our freedom.

It is not surprising therefore that he completely rejects the “wrong” types of politicians: “My allies are not Le Pen or Haider. ... We'll never join up with the fascists and Mussolinis of Italy. I'm very afraid of being linked with the wrong rightist fascist groups.”
Consistent with the above, he has been careful to depict Muslims entirely as imprisoned by their culture, not as racial aliens. The West is a “proposition culture” dedicated to individual freedom, whereas the Muslim religion shackles its adherents into a fatalistic worldview that leaves women in fearful subservience to their husbands. In his view, Islam promotes a political culture of fear and despotism and an economic culture of stagnation. Wilders therefore believes that non-White immigration is fine as long as the immigrants assimilate to liberal European culture. That means that Muslims are fine but they must shed their religion:

Islam deprives Muslims of their freedom. That is a shame, because free people are capable of great things, as history has shown. The Arab, Turkish, Iranian, Indian, Indonesian peoples have tremendous potential. If they were not captives of Islam, if they could liberate themselves from the yoke of Islam, if they would cease to take Muhammad as a role model and if they got rid of the evil Koran, they would be able to achieve great things which would benefit not only them but the entire world.

Wilder’s thinking is therefore on a par with those who believe that sub-Saharan Africa would quickly become an economic powerhouse if only it adopted liberal democracy and capitalism or some other nostrum. He is definitely not an IQ realist. And his principled opposition to Islam would not be sufficient to exclude the hundreds of millions of non-Muslims who desire to relocate to Europe.
Wilders’ pro-Israel, philo-Semitic sentiments may be a cynical tactic to obtain support from Jews. However, they seem sincere and heartfelt. Quite simply, he loves Israel and repeatedly portrays Judaism as a part of the West. He has visited Israel more than 40 times beginning as a young man working on a Kibbutz. His second wife is the Jewish-Hungarian diplomat Krisztina Marfaimarried. There is some indication of Jewish ancestry. His grandfather on his father’s side was a colonial officer in Java who married Johanna Meyer, from “a famous Jewish-Indian family."
Nevertheless, it would be simplistic to ascribe Wilders’ views to either opportunism or ancestry. He is certainly far from the only Western politician who ardently believes that all peoples could become good Westerners simply by adopting conventional liberal attitudes and that Europe would be the better for it. These attitudes on race are, of course, a prominent intellectual failing of American conservatives.
The fact is that Wilders and other movements with similar attitudes have not been able to make headway with the leaders of the mainstream Jewish community, which has been the main force promoting immigration and multiculturalism as imperatives throughout the West. A recent JTA article (“Not wild about Wilders? Populists’ anti-Islam message has European Jewish leaders worried”) illustrates once again that the organized Jewish community wants a multicultural future for Europeans (whether in Europe or elsewhere), and that Islam is an entirely acceptable component of the multicultural mix.
From the standpoint of the Jewish leadership, the basic problem is that populists like Wilders “want a Sweden for the Swedes, France for the French and Jews to Israel,” in the words of Serge Cwajgenbaum, secretary general of the European Jewish Congress. This is a slippery slope argument because shipping the Jews off to Israel is certainly not Wilders’s position given that he sees Judaism as central to European culture. Indeed, the slippery slope argument was explicitly stated by Lena Posner, president of the Official Council of Swedish Jewish Communities: “We are quite upset about having a party [in the Parliament] that says they are only addressing Muslims and immigration. History has taught us about where this can lead, and this is not necessarily good for the Jews.”
The slippery slope argument dovetails with traditional Jewish fear and loathing of homogeneous White, Christian cultures. Jewish leaders want to have their cake and eat it too:  a Diaspora strategy that dilutes the power of the native peoples while promoting their own ethnic nationalism in Israel.  In fact, while the idea of Sweden for the Swedes is abhorrent to Jewish leaders, Israel is now insisting that the Palestinians acquiesce in the idea that Israel is a Jewish state with scarcely a peep from the Diaspora. Israel continues to enact laws promoting apartheid and ethnic cleansing that are a far cry from anything proposed by European nationalist parties. Just recently 300 Israeli rabbis endorsed “a written religious ban on selling or renting homes, apartments, and lots to non-Jews, particularly Arabs.” Indeed, Carroll Bogert, deputy executive director of Human Rights Watch recently noted,

Palestinians face systematic discrimination merely because of their race, ethnicity, and national origin, depriving them of electricity, water, schools, and access to roads, while nearby Jewish settlers enjoy all of these state-provided benefits. While Israeli settlements flourish, Palestinians under Israeli control live in a time warp—not just separate, not just unequal, but sometimes even pushed off their lands and out of their homes.

The knee-jerk attitude among liberal Jews who are dominant in the Diaspora in the West is that attempts to restrict immigration conjure up images of National Socialism. Adar Primor, editor of the English edition of the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz, may be seen as representative of this strand of Jewish thinking. She agonizes about the “very unholy alliance between figures on Israel's right and extreme nationalists and even anti-Semites in Europe that is gaining momentum in the Holy Land.”

The organizers of these visits believe they have tamed this bunch of extremists they brought over from Europe, who after trading in their Jewish demon-enemy for the Muslim criminal-immigrant model are now singing in unison that Samaria is Jewish ground. Soon they'll be sprouting beards and wearing kippot. But they have not genuinely cast off their spiritual DNA, and in any event, they aren't looking for anything except for Jewish absolution that will bring them closer to political power.

Primor’s statement that the Europeans are looking for “Jewish absolution” is a telling comment on the perceived power of Jewish sensibilities to the current multicultural zeitgeist in the West. From my standpoint, this view of Jewish influence has a strong basis in reality.
As a Left-liberal, Primor rejects Wilders’s solution of transplanting the Palestinians in Jordan. But her choicest words are for Dewinter and Strache, both of whom she sees as having connections to the Nazi past. Dewinter is excoriated because he “moved about in anti-Semitic circles and has ties to European extremist and neo-Nazi parties.” Strache belonged to an “extremist organization from which Jews were banned, hung out with neo-Nazis and participated in paramilitary exercises with them.”
The past history of these figures will doubtless continue to follow them even as they eschew anti-Jewish comments and voice strong support for Israel. Similarly, Martin Webster has suggested that Jews have not supported the British National Party despite its pro-Israel stance at least partly because of Nick Griffin’s past anti-Jewish statements and associations. In France, Jean-Marie Le Pen has a history of statements that have angered Jews. However, Marine Le Pen, who will succeed Jean-Marie as head of the National Front, has “notably refused to echo the anti-Semitic views expressed by her father.”
Reflecting these sensibilities, the organized Jewish community in the Diaspora has consistently supported Muslim immigration and has actively forged ties with the Muslim community. For example, the ADL strongly supports the political and cultural aims of Muslims in America. Predictably, Abe Foxman is incensed at Wilders’ failure to agree with both prongs of the Jewish strategy, loving multiculturalism at home and an ethno-nationalist, apartheid Israel abroad, even though the former is obviously against Wilders’s interest as a European: “It’s akin to the evangelical Christians. …  On one hand they loved and embraced Israel. But on the other hand, we were not comfortable with their social or religious agenda.”
Overall, there is no evidence that European Jews are rushing to support the nationalist parties. An article on a Dutch Jewish site pointed out that only two percent of Dutch Jews voted for Wilders, including young Jews (compared to the 25 percent of the native Dutch who voted or Wilders’s party in the general elections of 2010). The majority of Jewish votes go to the liberals and socialists (58 percent). Only three percent voted for the major Christian party, the center-right Christian Democratic Appeal, the fourth most popular party in the 2010 election, with 13.7 percent of the popular vote. Jews obviously like Wilders’s message even less than a party devoted to Christian morality. Wilders can depend on support from radical Jewish colonists on the West bank or some renegade Israeli generals, but if Wilders campaign against the Muslims succeeds, it will be without the help of Dutch Jews.
The other way to see this is from the perspective of ultra-nationalists within Israel. Nationalist European parties are not alone in their search for legitimacy. Some Israeli ultra-nationalists see a world in which Israel is becoming increasingly rejected by European elites who see it, correctly, as an ethno-nationalist state bent on apartheid and ethnic cleansing. The EU has been quite critical of the Netanyahu government, the settlements, and the Gaza embargo. (See also here and here.) It provides substantial funding for the Palestinian Authority. The Israeli ultra-nationalists are also worried about the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement which is making real progress in isolating Israel. And even the vaunted Israel Lobby in the United States may be on the wane, if Josh Reubner, writing in Mondoweiss, is correct:

Growing unease on Capitol Hill over these “one-sided resolutions” is attributable to several factors: Israel’s deliberate humiliation of President Obama on settlements; recognition that Israeli and U.S. interests are not one and the same; and a hard-to-define yet palpable Israel fatigue.

The settlers are reaching out because they see their cause as needing support. And in order to get the support of the nationalists, they are willing to accept their expressed philo-Semitism and love for Isarel. David Ha'ivri, a prominent spokesman for the settler movement, has noted, “If these European leaders—with their ties to anti-Semitic groups and their past—come around and declare that Israel has a right to exist securely in all of the areas under our control, and that Europe has a moral responsibility because of the crimes of their past, then I believe that we should accept their friendship.”

Their statements are the strongest possible tool in the war against anti-semitism. No skinhead cares what [Anti-Defamation League Chairman] Abe Foxman has to say, but if Filip Dewinter and Heinz-Christian Strache make these statements they will have real impact. For that reason I am considering appearing with them in their countries for pro-Israel rallies. I think that it is worth the risk of being defamed by Ha'aretz and the like if we can cause a shift in the European nationalist movements, moving them away from their traditional Jew-hatred and bringing them closer to appreciation of Zionism. I don't think that I am naive to feel that this is a revolutionary opportunity.

Nevertheless, Ha’ivri’s views are not universal on the Israeli right. No member of the Knesset met with the European delegation, including even those allied with Ha’ivri’s nationalist views.
On the other hand, Wilders was hosted by Aryeh Eldad, a secular rightist member of the Knesset representing the Hatikvah faction of the National Union Party. Eldad  is a strong backer of the settler movement (the Arabs on the West Bank are occupying Israeli land) and is committed to preventing a Palestinian state. This may signal a bit more support for Wilders on the Israeli right, but certainly far from even a glimmering of a consensus.

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So what can we make of all this? Diaspora Jews in the West react primarily as a Diaspora group, and that means identifying with the multicultural, pro-immigration, anti-White Left. The Jewish identification with the Left is a strategy designed to increase Jewish power as an elite with a long history of fear and loathing of the White European majority of America. Indeed, the organized Jewish community has not only been the most important force in ending the European bias of American immigration laws, it has assiduously courted alliances with non-White ethnic groups, including Blacks, Latinos, and various Asian groups.
Within this worldview, Jews want Muslim immigration but they want a housebroken Islam in Western societies, free of anti-Semitism and not prone to terrorism, particularly terrorism motivated by anti-Israel sentiment. It is noteworthy that even neocon Daniel Pipes, who is known as an “Islamophobe,” is far less radical than Wilders in his opposition to Islam. He states, “Our goal has to be to build and help with the development of a moderate Islam that [Wilders] says doesn’t exist and can’t exist. So we are allies, but there is a significant difference.” In other words, Pipes, like other Jewish leaders, wants a manageable Islam in the West while strongly supporting an ethno-nationalist Israel.
The desire for a housebroken Islam is also consistent with the history of portraying Arabs negatively in the U.S. media. Jack Shaheen’s Guilty: Hollywood's Verdict on Arabs After 9/11 shows that Hollywood, well-known to be a Jewish fiefdom, portrays Arabs as terrorists, corrupt sheiks, or exotic, camel-riding primitives. As Edmund Connelly notes, such media presentations are also likely to influence audiences throughout the West to be more favorable to wars against Muslim countries. In this regard, it is noteworthy that images of Blacks and Latinos are air brushed to make them attractive to audiences. Arabs are the only non-White group that is not given a free pass in the Western media.
Similarly, in the U.K., the Board of Deputies, the official organization for British Jewry, has consistently reached out to Muslims (see, e.g., here). The organized Jewish community has condemned the English Defense League, which has a strong anti-Muslim, pro-Israel line along with a tiny Jewish section. Again reflecting the power of the slippery slope argument among Jews, the President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews stated,

The EDL's supposed “support” for Israel is empty and duplicitous. It is built on a foundation of Islamophobia and hatred which we reject entirely. Sadly, we know only too well what hatred for hatred's sake can cause. The overwhelming majority will not be drawn in by this transparent attempt to manipulate a tense political conflict.

Nevertheless, Martin Webster notes, “in the Jewish-owned sections of the UK media, there is a flood of anti-Muslim, anti-Islam stories. This barrage is so relentless that for the average Briton the words ‘Muslim’ and ‘Islam’ have become hardwired to the word ‘terrorist’.”
In other words, Jews across the political spectrum—even Jews closely connected to anti-Muslim rhetoric—retain the dream of a utopian multicultural West in which Judaism finds safety as one of many cultures within a fractionated political culture. All of the mainstream Jewish organizations are on board with making connections and alliances with Muslims, as they have with other non-White groups. All are opposed to Wilders and the other pro-Israel, philo-Semitic parties. Muslim organizations are also doing their part by joining the pro-immigration advocacy movement and its desire to make Whites a minority as soon as possible.
A paper recently put out by the Muslim Public Affairs Council in the U.S. advocates the entire wish list of the anti-White coalition: Support for the DREAM act, providing illegals with an easy path to citizenship, and raising the numbers of legal immigrants.
I would suggest therefore that the pro-Israel, philo-Semitic rhetoric of the main European nationalist parties is not effective and will not be effective in recruiting Jewish support. Very few Jews vote for these parties and even the great majority of ethno-nationalist Jews in Israel seem wary or at least ambivalent about making a public alliance with these groups.
I suggest that the main function of this rhetoric on the right may well be in convincing non-Jews that voting for these parties is not an affirmation of National Socialism, anti-Semitism, or racialist sentiments. And because of the abject terror that most Whites have of being associated with those ideas, it may well be an effective strategy that could, in the long run, lessen the inhibitions that Europeans now have about preserving Europeans and their culture. The progress of these parties is certainly very heartening.
Assuming as obvious that Muslims will not give up their religion and suddenly become good liberal Europeans, success by Wilders and similar political movements would certainly be a huge step in the right direction. Success would mean that eventually Muslims would be strongly encouraged or even forced to leave, and Europe would have a renewed sense of cultural identity.
It would then be a short step to the realization that some cultures are simply unable or unwilling to adopt contemporary liberal European values. Europeans would be much closer to the realization that their individualist, libertarian tradition is fundamentally at odds with pretty much the entire rest of the world.
Moreover, success of these parties would embolden anti-immigration sentiment throughout the West, including countries like the United States whose main immigration problem stems from the failed states of Latin America rather than Islam. There is much to be said for the slippery slope argument that once Muslims are successfully targeted as unassimilable, Europeans and other Westerners will realize that other groups, such as African-derived peoples, Latinos, and Asians, have not been successfully integrated either. One can easily see the anti-immigration movement snowballing as Europe develops a renewed sense of cultural identity and confidence.
Such developments would be anathema to the great majority of the organized Jewish community, and the great majority of Jews throughout the West. Not only would this shatter their dream of the demise of a dominant European Christian culture, it would also feed into their worldview that targeting any immigrant group is a slippery slope that ends with another Holocaust.
So don’t count on any help from the Jews. But as tensions with Muslims continue to mount and as Europeans see that they really must choose between expelling Muslims and preserving a livable society, Jews may be powerless to stop the ultimate success of these parties.
More generally, the self-portrait of Jews as an enlightened, progressive group with a long history of victimization at the hands of Europeans is coming unraveled by the rise of a strident ethno-nationalism in Israel. As I wrote in Separation and Its Discontents, beginning with the Enlightenment, Jews have sought  to refashion themselves as adhering to “the most ethical of religions, with a unique moral, altruistic, and civilizing role to play vis-à-vis the rest of humanity—modern versions of the ancient 'light unto the nations' theme of Jewish religious writing." When most Americans think of Jews, they think of the friendly doctor who lives in the neighborhood, the brilliant scientist at the university, or the liberal social activist on behalf of the downtrodden. They think of Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East" and a "staunch ally" of America.
However, the ethno-nationalist right is in the driver’s seat in Israel, and they will continue to increase their power because of their relatively high fertility compared to liberal secular Jews. The image of Jews as enlightened liberals is increasingly being replaced by images of Jews as religious fanatics and racists bent on ethnic cleansing and apartheid.
In the long run, these images cannot coexist. Thoughtful people in the West will understand that the pose of enlightened liberalism, tolerance, and pro-multiculturalism is simply a Diaspora strategy designed to diminish the power of the traditional peoples in those societies. It reflects the same brand of ethnic hardball that is being played out in Israel, but in a different context where Jews, as a minority, must make alliances with other groups.
When Westerners come to grips with this reality, it will have a transformative effect on our political culture. The opposition of the organized Jewish community to the rise of an anti-Muslim, philo-Semitic right in Europe will be seen as increasingly threadbare intellectually given the reality of what is going on in Israel. And that too will contribute to the ultimate resurgence of European ethnonationalism.
http://www.alternativeright.com/main/the-magazine/the-wilders-syndrome/

Kevin MacDonald: Why Are Professors Liberal?

Kevin MacDonald: Why Are Professors Liberal?

Richard Redding’s LA Times op-ed,  ”It’s Diverse If You Are Liberal” comes to the shocking conclusion that conservative viewpoints are excluded from college campuses. Who’d have thought? Indeed, “most [students] did not think it entirely safe to hold unpopular opinions on campus.”

Intellectual diversity is what schools value least. Instead, it is only diversity of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation — all of which are very desirable, to be sure — that rules the day in higher education. This agenda dominates higher education in faculty hiring, student admissions, curricula, student life programs and virtually every other aspect of college life.

Redding must establish his bona fides by genuflecting before the gods of the “very desirable” forms of diversity. What if the conservative faculty he thinks would be a great addition turn out to really hate all this other diversity—as a real (at this point, revolutionary) conservative would?

I have a recent article on this, in The Occidental Quarterly—soon to be available online to subscribers. (Hint.) Redding notes that conservative students are at a disadvantage because “conservative students lack academic role models, have more distant relationships with their professors and have fewer opportunities to do research with professors (particularly on sociopolitical issues).”

In a word, they feel alienated from their professors, which in turn explains why conservatives don’t think of the academy as a place where they want to spend their lives.

My paper is based on a well-publicized academic article by Ethan Fosse and Neil Gross, “Why are Professors Liberal?” Their paper fits well with Redding’s article because it emphasizes self-selection. The academy is liberal not because smart people are liberal but because smart non-liberals quickly realize that the academy would be a terrible place to spend your life. As I note in the article:

With my current beliefs, it would be suicide to embark on an academic career—doomed to be a secret agent all through graduate school and at least up until the granting of tenure, never able to express my real attitudes. (Yet, that is exactly the position of a number of graduate students and young faculty who have contacted me over the years.)
Even after tenure, one doesn’t want to remain an associate professor for the rest of one’s career. Promotion would be impossible for anyone who came out as a conservative, much less someone like me who believes in the importance of ethnic genetic interests, ending legal and illegal immigration, the role of Jewish influence in shaping elite political and cultural attitudes, etc.
Even full professors at many institutions would think twice about espousing conservative views. They would stop being invited to parties and they would find they have many fewer friends. They could forget about obtaining federal grants or receiving financial or other types of support from the university, and they could even see their salary drop, since at many institutions the department chair or a committee has power over their salary.
And, as Foss and Gross relate, “when it occasionally happens that conservative students do form the aspiration to become professors, they are likely to run up against barriers involving both self-concept incongruence and negative judgments from peers and occupation members.”
I remember before I became an academic scofflaw—when I became a Reagan-type mainstream conservative, somewhere in the early 80s. Going to an academic party became an experience in dissembling—forced smiles at anti-Reagan jokes uttered with absolute confidence that everyone would join in the fun. There is an absolute certainty that all conservatives have two-digit IQs and are infinitely inferior to them intellectually. They also believe that conservatives suffer from severe psychiatric disorders—just like in the movies. Conservatives speak with a Southern accent, drive pickup trucks, are fond of guns, and are filled with irrational hatreds. Or they are snooty capitalists who exploit minorities, attend exclusive country clubs, and have retrograde attitudes on race and homosexuality.
Typical academics have internalized the attitudes that have come to dominate the Western intellectual scene. There’s no question that it’s a herd mentality. The assumption of ideological homogeneity is stifling—some kinds of diversity are simply out of bounds in an academic environment—even mainstream conservatism. And yes, based on my experience, coming out as a non-liberal is guaranteed to result in “negative judgments from peers and occupation members.”A conservative professor is not exactly an oxymoron, but a mainstream conservative—and certainly an evolutionary psychologist who believes that White people have ethnic genetic interests—is certain to be regarded with moral revulsion by pretty much all the people he works with.

http://theoccidentalobserver.net/tooblog/?p=3647

Michael Colhaze - Lords of the Ring

Lords of the Ring

Michael Colhaze 

October 31, 2010

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

                                                           JRR Tolkien

 Many moons ago and for a few years only, I wore my locks long and sported colourful garb and roamed the psychedelic haunts of Paris, London or Amsterdam, usually holding a joint in one hand while employing the other to underline with languid gestures my latest concept of how to bring instant peace and love to the world. As for my fellow freaks and hippies, most subsisted on very little, at least money-wise, but nearly all had pets, the latter named frequently after a brand of heroes much en vogue during those innocent times. For cats, Galadriel stood high on the agenda, also Arwen and Legolas. In Amsterdam my next-door neighbour, a middle-aged lady with henna-dyed hair, flowing dresses and tinkling bells around one fat ankle, owned a huge tomcat called Gollum. When he was one day run over by a lorry, she came and cried bitterly into my lap. I did my best to comfort her, though secretly rejoiced because the cunning bastard, nomen est omen, used to be a veritable bane for the local sparrows and blackbirds, and long since had I weighed means of abandoning him in a far-away place without coming under suspicion. As for dogs, I remember a Frodo, Bilbo and Pippin, also one Boromir, him a mighty Leonberger and the gentlest fellow I’ve ever met.  

Which gives you an idea of how much Tolkien’s arrant epos was on our mind during those happy years. Wherever you came, you found in the bookshelves from cardboard boxes or orange crates at least one copy, usually a weighty paperback falling apart from much use. Walls were hung with coloured maps of Middle Earth, and Gandalf was a household name for anything from an Underground publication to a short-lived artistic society. Depending on fantasy and imagination, and perhaps also on the daily cannabis consume, an inordinate number of people identified with a member of the Fellowship, or wished fervently for the return of the King, or would have retired into the Shire without looking back even once. 

On the other hand there were some, myself included, who had enjoyed the book but found it somewhat lacking in psychological depth. It was, after all, a monumental canvas painted largely in black and white, with protagonists either amazingly valiant, handsome and noble or the absolute opposite, namely unspeakably ugly and wicked. Which made the tale rather predictable and deprived it of the complex emotional touch that otherwise would have found a way into the heart. Still, Tolkien’s power of imagination cannot and will not be denied, and for his excuse it must be said that he relied much on the High Germanic saga like Edda or the Nibelungen, and that those were on the whole magnificent exemplifications of the eternal battle between Good and Evil. A battle where tads of intellectual embroidery might have seemed misplaced.    

Yet under the heroic plainness hid an aspect that intrigued me and many of my  friends considerably, namely the deeper meaning behind the fantasy. Because, as we all agreed, there had to be one since the tale was simply too carefully thought out to be without one. Never mind that the ghastly Sauron, title figure and main protagonist aiming to enslave the world and mankind particularly, didn’t turn up personally during the proceedings. But his presence is overwhelmingly felt, and he had to have an equivalent within the recent history of man, and as such a name that made sense.  

First in line was of course Adolf Hitler, temporal saviour of a betrayed, ruined and starving Germany robbed naked by the Versailles victors, but for the rest and according to the New York Times the biggest blackguard ever to set foot on our sacred earth. Next came good old Joe Stalin, mass murderer par excellence supported by a closely knit clan of henchmen as described and defined by the great  Solzhenitsyn in his Gulag and Two Hundred Years Together. Then the fabulous Chairman Mao, who most likely holds the Guinness record for accumulated corpses worldwide. And finally the inventors of the nuke, embodied by one Robert Oppenheimer who paid, just like that abominable fraud Freud, with lung cancer and a slow and painful death for his sins. 

But try as you might, none of the above really made sense. One reason was of course that Tolkien had begun The Lord of the Rings already in the mid-thirties, long before those villains blossomed medially into full bloom. 

As to the ring itself, what kind of power did it exactly wield? It was, this we know, potent enough to enslave the lesser ones, but not all-powerful. Because long ago Isildur King of Gondor, in a desperate attempt to stem the advance of the Orcs, had offered battle to Sauron their chieftain. And in a one-to-one succeeded with God’s help to cut off the latter’s hand which bore the ring. A feat that routed the Dark One and his hosts, at least for a while and until he tried another grab at the hideous thing.   

My understanding of Tolkien’s political leanings is scant. He himself has, as far as I know, refused to give any clues. But there are hints. It is rumoured that he considered General Franco rather emphatically as the saviour of Catholic Spain, a view much at odds with contemporaries like that heartless hunter, boozer and scribbler Hemingway and his liberal chums. One of Tolkien’s close friends, the writer and poet Roy Campbell, had witnessed the atrocities committed by Marxist death squads against priests and nuns in Cordoba and described them in vivid detail. What makes him interesting in this context is that he also contributed articles to The European, a fascist gazette run by Lady Diana Mosley, wife of Sir Oswald and, as James Lees-Milne described her, the nearest thing to Botticelli’s Venus as I have ever seen.  

Ezra Pound, among others, was a fellow contributor to The European. 

The latter should have rung a bell, but didn’t. Nearly twenty years had to pass before bits and pieces fell into place, at least within my much limited perception. One was an exhibition, the other a production of Wagner’s Ring. 

The exhibition was staged in Frankfurt by one of the more affluent art establishments, meaning that decent Fizz, snacks with French pâté and a few interesting people could be expected on the eve of its grand opening. Which was the reason, some curiosity apart, why an old friend took me there. Both of us have no truck with Modern art and knew the artist only vaguely by name. Lucien Freud it was, grandson of you-know-who, and his hams about as uplifting as a dead rat under the sink. As we stood in front of one, an uncouth male nude reclining on a smutty bedstead with legs spread wide open while scratching reddish genitals dangling above a cavernous anus, my friend cast a look around and said: Grand Orc of the Crap Arts! Never had any sense of beauty, and never will! 

[ΒΓΑΛΑΜΕ ΤΗΝ ΦΩΤΟΓΡΑΦΙΑ ΑΥΤΟΥ ΤΟΥ ΕΡΓΟΥ ΔΙΟΤΙ ΗΤΟ ΑΚΡΩΣ ΑΗΔΙΑΣΤΙΚΗ]

A remark that transported me immediately into a more sunny and innocent past, but also made me decline any comment. Because this was after all Germany, a country ruled by politically correct criminals that long since have booted the freedom of expression as laid down in the constitution, and who slap you for years on end into the cooler if you dare to insist on it.

Damned be the Ring I forged with a Curse!

Though the Gold gave me unlimited Might

Now its Sorcery has brought me Ruin!

                                         The Rhinegold, 3^rd Scene 

 

About a week later I saw, and heard, Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung. I have no intention, and lack the intellectual acumen, to give this masterwork its proper due. George Bernhard Shaw, in his essay The Perfect Wagnerite, has summed it up like this:  Only those of a wider consciousness can follow it breathlessly, seeing in it the tragedy of human history and the whole horror of the dilemma from which the world is shrinking today. 

Dilemma?! Horror?! 

Shaw did not enter into detail as to the above, but the composer himself was more forthcoming.  

You ask me about Jewry. I felt a long-repressed hatred for them, and this hatred is as necessary to my nature as gall is to blood. An opportunity arose when their damnable scribbling annoyed me most, and so I broke forth at last. It seems to have made a tremendous impression, and that pleases me for I really wanted only to frighten them in this manner. Because it is certain that not our princes, but the bankers and Philistines are nowadays our masters... (Correspondence between Wagner and Liszt, Vol. I, p.145, 18/4/1851) 

He did however not intend, as stated very clearly elsewhere, to blame the whole tribe, just as you and I wouldn’t consider every Italian automatically a member of the Cosa Nostra.  

As to the tremendous impression, this is how it commences. Namely at the very bottom of Germany’s mighty river Rhine. There a trove of gold lays embedded in a reef, glinting and gleaming mysteriously in the sunlight that filters through the timeless waves. Beautiful mermaids guard it on orders of their father, enjoying its dazzling radiance, cajoling and wriggling their lovely bodies in the bright reflection. Until one Alberich crawls out of the deep, a stunted Nibelung and Son of the Night who beholds the maids with greedy eyes. When he tries to seduce them, they only laugh, pull his beard and taunt him. Enraged, he asks about the significance of the gold. Carelessly they tell him that unlimited Power to rule the World is in store for the one who will forge a Ring out of the precious metal. But, they also warn him, this feat is only possible if he renounces forever the Power of Love. 

It takes Alberich only a moment to make up his mind.  

The World as heirloom would I gain!

And if I cannot have Love

Might I not cunningly extort Lust? 

The Light will I extinguish for you

The Gold will I tear from the reef

And forge the avenging Ring!

Let the Waves be my witness:

FOREVER HAVE I CURSED LOVE! 

He rips the gold from the rocks and forges the Ring to rule the World with cunning and brute force — and of course without Love. 

My Ring and Wagner’s were round, but there the resemblance ceases!  scoffed Tolkien rather maliciously after his book had been published in the mid-fifties. Which is so transparent a denial that it seems almost laughable. Shaw’s aforementioned essay The Perfect Wagnerite, nearly of book-length, much acclaimed and widely read, must have been known in detail to Tolkien as well. Because his Ring and Wagner’s are identical in theme and essence, twins in fact if only in a different quality of clothing. Meaning that the former, compared to Wagner’s peerless magnum opus, is over-large and very entertaining, but not really a masterpiece of literature in the classical sense. Interesting might be that Tolkien uses words like Mordor or Sauron, clearly derived from the German Mord, or murder, and Sau, or sow. Though his claim that his own name derived from the German tollkuehn, meaning extremely foolhardy, seems unlikely since it doesn’t exist as a family name. 

As to the deeper meaning in both cases, it is important to know that the one Ring of Power has no magical potentials as we understand them. It cannot destroy enemy armies simply by an order of its bearer. It cannot make you fly. It cannot stop the flow of time. It can’t even prevent you from getting wet if it rains. It can make you invisible, true, but that is just an illusion. And you’d still get wet in any case. So what is it really?  

It really is only GOLD! 

And isn’t that enough to rule the world?!  

For many of those who had witnessed the last decades of the great European Empires, a reign of peace and general improvement that ended abruptly and horribly with World War One, the era afterwards must have seemed like the proverbial devaluation of all values. Because the bankers and Philistines, already so powerful in Wagner’s times, had by now metastasized out of all proportion. Germany, down on its knees, was hardest hit. During the ill-fated and debt-ridden Weimar Republic the country’s capital, Berlin, boasted 115 banking institutions of which 112 were Jewish-owned. The same ratio was true for innumerable cabarets and brothels where girls and boys as young as ten years old sold their famished bodies to the new caste of money acrobats. As to the banks, they used the country’s catastrophic finances to their advantage and tricked and forced the starving population out of their assets, be it shares, shops, houses, farmland, factories or newspapers, until half of Germany was in the hands of a very few. The same happened, though much less drastically, in much of the Western World and resulted finally in the cataclysmic Black Friday. An exercise, as the Orc-faced Robert Fuld of formerly Lehman Bros. has informed us so brazenly, where we ruin a national economy and pick up the bits and pieces for a song.  

Now it must be remembered that in those years public opinion was on the whole far less brainwashed than today. No Holocaust had yet been invented to slap down undesirable critics, no worldwide Media Mafia could tell you convincingly that a crock of shit is a pot of gold. Thus in many of the national and international gazettes, accounts of thefts, crimes and injustices abounded, backed up with caricatures of the cruel and greedy Jew.  

Accounts that surely have been observed and considered by Tolkien as well. Therefore it seems highly plausible that the Ring he began to forge in his mind during the early Thirties wasn’t so very different from the one Wagner had invented a hundred years earlier. Particularly if we remember a rather interesting detail, namely that indeed one Aragorn strode out of the wild and re-forged the sword that was broken. A man not of royal descent, it is true, but some kind of Mahdi or Sent-One, as Carl Gustav Jung has called him. Very powerful, a great orator, fearless too, and immediately setting to work and succeeding, almost overnight, to break the Ring’s terrible stranglehold. A feat he brought about by throwing worthless paper money out of the window and replacing it with barter based on real goods and honest work.  

Well, we know what became of him and his folks, and how dearly they paid for an attempt that endangered the supremacy of Sauron’s banking institutions worldwide. The latter regrouped, giving his Ring full play, and Germany’s ancient cities and their innocent inhabitants, millions of them, perished in a Firestorm of unimaginable magnitude and barbarity. A sad moment in our great Christian European history, you will agree, and its final curtain fittingly drawn by one of its greatest conductors, Herbert von Karajan, who performed on the eve of Berlin’s destruction the Ring’s last episode, Twilight of the Gods. 

As for the Sent-One, there comes a day when he will be assessed more objectively and not just demonised out of all proportion. When some of the most hideous accusations levelled against him might crumble like a house of cards in a cloud of dust about as big as the one at 9/11 and its official explanations. Which could result in two schools of thought, namely one where he remains indeed a villain, and another that pronounces him the most tragic character that ever walked the earth.  

Him and his people. 

As for myself, I still have to make up my mind.  

As for Tolkien, nearly twenty years went by between the Ring’s first written page and its publication. A time span that radically changed the face of the world, including the book market. Which ended up, to a large part and small wonder, in Sauron’s hands as well. Thus it doesn’t come as a surprise if Sauron’s chronicler got somewhat mum and choose to refute any familiarity, let alone indebtedness, with and to his German forbear. And so removed any ideological obstacles and cleared the way for a tremendous literary success.

A success most certainly deserved, with the one little setback that we will never know what kind of Secret Fire the old wizard Gandalf the Grey has been serving, and which he so mightily evoked when he  smote the Bridge of Khazad-Dùm from under the Balrog’s fiery feet. The latter an intriguing name, particularly if you keep in mind that Baal is the Canaanite god of fertility who demanded human sacrifices, and Rog the Hindi word for malady.   

As for the rest of the world, the question is of course of how far the Lords of the Ring have succeeded to enslave us. Logically speaking, and seeing their immeasurable wealth and nearly unlimited influence, they should have long since consolidated the realm. Which seems indeed the case in most Western countries where presidents, prime ministers and chancellors are their obedient marionettes. Ring Wraiths, Tolkien has called them fittingly. Men and women like you and me, but empty-eyed. Outer shells of their former selves who command us to abandon our morals and artistic heritance, fight proxy wars for their masters, pay any amount of money into their purse, and generally order us to be at their service whenever it pleases them.  

Yet something went badly wrong.  

To begin with, the Shadows have been torn from the Land of Mordor, a mysterious region shrouded in deep secrecy for hundreds of years, but now glaringly illuminated. So much so that its schemes and crimes are every day more clearly observed and understood, be it the corruption of politicians, the doling out of jobs to foreign countries, the true intent behind globalism, the giant thefts, the resulting economical upheavals, the unspeakable atrocities in the occupied territories, the bungled assassinations, the real culprits behind 9/11, to name but a few. 

Next come the Ring Wraiths, perhaps Tolkien’s finest invention. Enablers, Paul Gottfried has called them, and deems them worse than their criminal masters. Men and women who once possessed Christian souls and knew about the Power of Love, but sold both for thirty pieces of gold to forge their own insignificant rings. Trinkets that serve for a few brief years to ride the crest of power until a new contender wins the upper hand and sends them packing. Which is usually sweetened with honours and compliments to ease the approaching twilight years, a time when the ghosts and corpses of the past begin to whisper in the dark and the hour of reckoning draws close, slowly but inevitably.  

Today this kind of sugar-coating can have a sour aftertaste, due to an unforeseen invention called the Internet which markedly diminished the control of the Media Mafia and its sniffing, lying, cajoling, mudslinging lackeys. That is why the Bushes and Blairs of this world have become lepers instead of paragons, with motions underway to hold them responsible for their crimes, including the death of countless women and children and that of many fine soldiers whose intentionally poor equipment has prolonged the conflict to this day. 

Finally the Dark Lords themselves. 

Those who have already entered the twilight years, like the one on top of this little essay, watch with silent horror how the mountains of gold are seeping like water through their fingers, leaving them empty-handed and with nothing to bargain on Judgement Day. As for the others, still springy and enterprising, it is said they are preparing for the ultimate Armageddon with their nukes, viruses, bacteria, cheque books, connections and what not. And perhaps they do, because they see that the world has tired of them, of their lies and extortions. But if they do, they’ll have to fight themselves for a change and not let others do the dirty work. Which will result, as a kind of divine retaliation and since they are so few, in the final destruction of the Ring and the utter defeat of its forgers.   

Because once, long ago, when tempted by a hoard of gold deep in the River Rhine, they made the wrong choice and… 

…forever cursed the Power of Love.  

Wolfgang Strauss : Solzhenitsyn’s “200 Years Together”

The End of the Legends

By Wolfgang Strauss

Alexander Solschenitsyn, "200 Jahre zusammen." Die russisch-jüdische Geschichte 1795-1916 (200 Years Together. The Russian-Jewish History 1795-1916), Herbig, Munich 2002, 560 pp., €34.90; "Zweihundert Jahre zusammen," Die Juden in der Sowjetunion (200 Years Together. The Jews in the Soviet Union), ibidem, 2003, 608 pp., €39.90.

It may be said without hesitation that Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together. The Jews in the Soviet Union is one of the most important books on the Russian Revolution and the early Bolshevik period ever to appear. After publication of this work with its many revelations about the role of the Jews during the Leninist period, the history of the Bolshevik October putsch will have to be rewritten, if not completely, then with substantial additions.

The book title might have been even more appropriately called "The End of the Legends." For example, the legend that there ever existed an independent "Russian" Social Democracy Party is questioned. Founded in Minsk in 1898, the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (RSDWP) derived, with respect to personnel and organization, from the Allgemeine jüdische Arbeiterbund in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia. It might be said that the Jewish Arbeiterbund midwife service officiated at the birth of the Russian Social Democracy Party. Legends without number are examined.

Solzhenitsyn emphasizes, "Many more Jewish voices than Russian are heard in this book". Jewish voices, not Russian, speak of Jewish dominance in the anti-monarchial movements in the period before the war. In an article entitled "The Jewish Revolution" in the 10 December 1919 issue of the Neue Jüdischen Monatsheften, published in Berlin, was the sentence:

"Regardless of how extremely the anti-Semites exaggerate it, and how so nervously the Jewish bourgeoisie deny it, the large Jewish contingent in today’s revolutionary movement stands fast."

The writer, whom the publicist Sonia Margolina calls a "patriarch" in the tradition of Dostoyevsky, the last Russian prophet, rejects decisively, almost passionately, all theses of collective guilt. The chronicler of the Gulag holds that neither the Russians nor the Jews can be held separately responsible for the emergence of the reign of terror. He characterizes the relationship between Russian and Jews as a "burning wedge." In his book he tries to see the wedge from both sides. In so doing, the legends dissolve.

Perhaps the most persistent legend, now dissolved, used to go like this: Long before the last Tsar left the throne, the old Russian Empire was in decline, the revolution was coming, the apocalypses of February and October 1917 could not have been prevented. They were determined as if by a world court. Only a legend, Solzhenitsyn says, and this chapter in his book, a noir-thriller, illuminates 18 September 1911 – a day that heralded the approach of the Great Terror in that it dimmed the last opportunity to prevent it.

They had tried to assassinate Petr Stolypin eight times. Various terrorist groups had attempted to murder Stolypin and his family, but they had never succeeded in killing the man who had set governmental direction in the decade before the war nor in tarnishing his reputation and charisma. The "Russian Bismarck," as he was called, had, as an unassuming Christian and self-confident first servant of the Russian Empire, led his country into the modern age by introducing agrarian reforms and representative self-government that made individual enterprising farmers out of the backward villagers. The eighth attempt, however, on 18 September 1911 in the Kiev Opera, succeeded in ending the life of the great reformer who had served his country as minister president and minister of the internal affairs. Ninety years later Solzhenitsyn was to write:

"The first Russian premier minister, who had honorably set the task of establishing equal rights for Jews and had even opposed the Tsar in attempting to realize it, was killed at the hands of a Jew. Was it an irony of history?" (p. 431)

The assassin was Mordko Hershovich Bogrov, a university student, grandson of a liquor concessionaire and son of a millionaire. When he fired his Browning at Stolypin, Bogrov was 23 years old. Those shots brought the process of Russian reformation, including Stolypin’s measures to lift anti-Jewish restrictions, to a fateful end by their own hands. Among the grave consequences of 18 September was a radical change in world politics. Stolypin had opposed Russian foreign policy that had been hostile to Germany and friendly with France and Britain. Solzhenitsyn asserts that under Stolypin Russia would have never entered World War I. The ultimate beneficial consequence for the Russian people would have been that they would have been spared the February revolution, which was triggered by the defeats in the First World War.

Whether Bogrov acted alone or as a member of the Bolshevik, Menshevik, or anarchist underground remains unknown. Solzhenitsyn provides no answer. But the Nobel Laureate does not doubt that Mordo Hershevich was an agent of the Okhrana, a spy in the pay of the Tsarist secret police. In August Nineteen-Fourteen, the first volume of The Red Wheel cycle, 233 pages are given over to the ‘Jewish Question’ by a partially documentary and partially literary presentation of Stolypin’s person and his reforms. There, too, is a characterization of the assassin and a psychogram of Bogrov’s motive:

"Stolypin had done nothing directly against the Jews, he had even made their lives easier in some ways, but it did not come from the heart. To decide whether or not a man is an enemy of the Jews, you must look beneath the surface. Stolypin boosted Russian national interests too blatantly and too insistently, even provocatively about Russian international interests. […] the Russianness of the Duma as a representative body, the Russianness of the State. He was trying to build, not a country in which all were free, but a nationalist monarchy. So that the future of the Jews was not affected by his goodwill toward them. The development of the country along Stolypin’s lines promised no golden age for the Jews. Bogrov might or might not take part in revolutionary activity, might associate with the Maximalists, Anarcho-Communists, or with no one, might change his Party allegiance and change his character a hundred time over, but one thing was beyond all doubt: his exceptionally talented people must gain the fullest opportunity to develop unimpeded in Russia." (p. 592 in August-Fourteen)

Because of this passage, fifteen printed lines in all, Solzhenitsyn has been accused of anti-Semitism – not by the Russians but in the American press. The unusually gifted people referred to in the passage are the Jewish people.

After the deadly shots of Kiev, the shots fired in Sarajevo three years later destroyed the peace of Europe. Kiev and Sarajevo belong together as turning points in the history of mankind. The depiction of Stolypin’s assassin belongs among the highpoints in Solzhenitsyn’s career, who to this point had evoked no positive echo in the (West) German media – which regrettably was to be expected. In any case, the Frankfurt, Munich, Hamburg, and Berlin reviews have become like a hotbed of hedonism that is the most inappropriate reception imaginable for ethical and aesthetic ascetics like Solzhenitsyn.

Gerd Koenen of the Welt newspaper (12 October 2002), who calls this great Russian a "moral overlord," believes it would be "an unreasonable intellectual demand" to be forced to read his work. Nonetheless, Koenen attributes a "patriarchal sternness" to the Russian in a tone that is not accusatory or virulent, but rather "deliberately conciliatory." That Sonia Margolina of all people, the daughter of a Jewish Trotskyite, of whom she remains proud today, that of all people, this nostalgic Red can accuse Solzhenitsyn’s enlightened spirit of "always looking backwards" should be laughed at as a joke in a feuilleton world. Every truth lives within a time nucleus. The truth about the October Revolution in which the Bogrovs, Bronsteins, Mandelstams, Auerbachs, Rosenfelds, Brilliants, and Apfelbaums played an essential role, is being vomited up ten years after the end of the failed experiment of Communism.

The Dirty Revolution I

If it is true that it was neither the planned economy nor the absence of democracy that landed bolshevism in the dustbin of history, then the question of just when the downfall set in and what caused it must be answered. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, deemed the greatest conservative writer of our times by many, cites 1918 as the date Red Terror was born.

A terrorist named Apfelbaum proclaimed the mass death sentence:

"The bourgeoisie can kill some individuals, but we can murder whole classes of people."

In that year the non-communist intelligentsia saw Medusa’s head. Apfelbaum, who entered the history books as Zinovev, wanted to send ten million Russians (ten out of each one hundred) to the smoldering ovens of the class war. German historyian Prof. Dr. Ernst Nolte states that this pronouncement of 17 September 1918 sounds almost unbelievable in its monstrosity; Apfelbaum formulated this holocaust sentence:

"From the population of a hundred million in Soviet Russia, we must win over ninety million to our side. We have nothing to say to the others. They have to be exterminated."

In this, his latest book, Solzhenitsyn writes of the "dushiteli Rossii" (stranglers of Russia,) the "palachi grasnoy revolyutsii" (hangmen of the dirty revolution.) Who does he mean exactly? On page 89 he writes, "Bol’sheviki yevrey" the "Jew Bolsheviks." In another place he uses the term "Bol’shevististkiye Juden" (Bolshevistic Jews). Superordinate to these is the key expression – "Yevreyskiy vopros" (the Jewish Question). After 1918 the Communist censors in no way forbade this expression, even with regard to Jew Bolsheviks the Jewish question was not a taboo. On the contrary, the Jewish question became the central theme of the Party ideology, which had become a secular religion. Lenin himself set the example in 1924 with his famous instructive paper "On the Jewish Question in Russia," published in the Moscow Proletariat Publishing House (cited by Solzhenitsyn on page 79).

Given the factual revelations in this book, the history of the 20^th Century ought to be revised, especially that of the Soviet Union with particular reference to the collapse of the great ideological fronts in the pre-revisionist period. What is new in this work is Solzhenitsyn’s graphic depiction of a phenomenon about which the (West) German historians’ establishment has kept absolutely mute about, namely, that the historically unprecedented cruelty exercised in the seizure of power, the Russian Civil War, and wartime (WWII) had a clearly defined ideological and anthropological source. As mentioned above, the codeword Solzhenitsyn uses is "Jew Bolsheviks."

"Before the October Revolution, Bolshevism was not the numerically strongest movement among the Jews." (p. 73)

Solzhenitsyn recalls that immediately before the Revolution, the Bolshevistic Jews Trotsky and Kamenev concluded a military alliance with three Jewish social revolutionaries – Natanson, Steinberg, and Kamkov. What Solzhenitsyn is saying is that Lenin’s military putsch, from the purely military point of view, relied on a Jewish network. The collaboration between Trotsky and his coreligionists in the Left Social Revolutionary parties assured Lenin’s success in the Palace revolt of October 1917. As crown witness, Solzhenitsyn cites the Israeli historian Aron Abramovitch who in 1982 in Tel Aviv wrote:

"In October 1917 the Jewish contingent of soldiers played a decisive role in the preparation and execution of the armed Bolshevik uprising in Petrograd and other cities as well as in the following battles in the course of suppressing rebellions against the new Soviet power."

The famed Latvian Rifle Regiment of the 12^th Army, Lenin’s praetorian guard, had a Jewish commissar, Nachimson, in charge.

There are crimes that the descendents of the victims cannot bear. Those are crimes that break through the last protective wall, crimes like the psychocide of a civilized people. Most educated Russians sensed in October the emergence of a destructive reordering principle. ‘October’ became synonymous with a deadly threat to their existence. In 1924 the Jewish historian, Pasmanik, wrote:

"The emergence of Bolshevism was the result of special aspects of Russian history. However, Soviet Russia can thank the work of the Jewish commissars for the organization of Bolshevism."

Solzhenitsyn cites this key passage on page 80 in which the word "organization" is in quotes in the book text.

The large number of eyewitness reports from the early period of Soviet rule is astounding. In the Council of People’s Commissars, the writer Nashivin simply notes: "Jews, Jews, Jews." Nashivin avers that he was never an anti-Semite, but "the mass of Jews in the Kremlin literally knocks your eyes out." In 1919 the famous writer Vladimir Korolenko, who was close to the Social Democrats and who had protested against the pogroms in Tsarist Russia, made the following entry in his diary:

"There are many Jews and Jewesses among the Bolsheviks. Their main characteristics – self-righteousness, aggressive tactlessness and presumptive arrogance – are painfully evident. Bolshevism is found contemptible in the Ukraine. The preponderance of Jewish physiognomies, especially in the Cheka, evokes an extremely virulent hatred of Jews among the people."

Chapter 15 of Solzhenitsyn’s book opens with the words:

"Jews among the Bolsheviks is nothing new. Much has already been written about it."

This for Solzhenitsyn is further support for his cardinal thesis, namely, that Bolshevik Jews were the indispensable power brokers in the victory of Bolshevism, in the Russian Civil War, and in the early Soviet Regime.

Alexander Solzhenitzyn

"Whoever holds the opinion that the revolution was not a Russian, but an alien-led revolution points to the Yiddish family names or pseudonyms to exonerate the Russian people for the revolution. On the other hand, those who try to minimize the over-proportional representation of Jews in the Bolshevik seizure of power may sometimes claim that they were not religious Jews, but rather, apostates, renegades, and atheists."

According to rabbinical law, whoever was born of a Jewish mother is a Jew. Orthodox Judaism requires more, i.e., recognition of the Hebraic Halacha scriptural laws and the observance of the religious laws of the Mishna, which form the basis of the Talmud. Solzhenitsyn then asks:

"How strong were the influence, power, fascination, and adherence of secular Jews among the religious Jews and how many atheists were active among the Bolsheviks? Can a people really just renounce its renegades? Does such a renunciation make any sense?"

Solzhenitsyns’s attempt to answer these questions on the basis of historical facts concentrates on several factors, namely, the behavior of Orthodox Jews after October, the relative numbers of Bolshevik Jews before and after October, the ascendance of Bolshevistic Jews in the cadres of the Red Army and the Cheka, Lenin’s Jewish strategy, and finally, Lenin’s own heritage.

"The Bolsheviks appealed to the Jews immediately after the seizure of power. And they came; they came in masses. Some served in the executive branch, others in the various governmental organs. They came primarily from among secular young Jews who in no way could be classified as atheists or even as enemies of God. This phenomenon bore a mass character." (p. 79)

By the end of 1917 Lenin had not yet left Smolny, when a Jewish Commissariat for Nationality Questions was already at work in Petrograd. In March 1919 the VIII Party Congress of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) undertook to establish a "Jewish Soviet Russian Communist Bund."

In this matter Solzhenitsyn again relies on Jewish historians. Leonard Schapiro, living in London in 1961, wrote:

"Thousands of Jews streamed to the Bolsheviks whom they saw as the protectors of the international revolution."

M. Chaifetz also commented on the Jewish support of Bolshevism:

"For a Jew, who came neither from among the aristocrats nor the clergy, Bolshevism represented a successful and promising new prospect to belong to a new clan."

The Chaifetz article appeared in 1980 in an Israeli journal for the Jewish intelligentsia arriving from the USSR.

The influx of Jewish youths into the Bolshevik Party at first was a consequence of the pogroms in the territory held by the White Army in 1919, argues a certain Schub. Solzhenitsyn rejects Schub’s argument as a myth:

"Schub’s argument is not valid because the massive entry of Jews into the Soviet apparatus occurred as early as 1917 and throughout all of 1918. Unquestionably, the Civil War situation in 1919 did hasten the amalgamation of Jewish cadres with the Bolsheviks." (p. 80)

Solzhenitsyn traces the rise in Judeophobia, among other things, back to the brutal Bolshevistic suppression of peasant and citizen uprisings, the slaughter of priests and bishops, especially the village clergy, and finally, the extermination of the nobility, culminating in the murder of the Tsar and his family.

During the decisive years of the Civil War (1918-1920) the secret police (Cheka) was controlled by Bolshevistic Jews. The commandants of the various prisons were usually from Poland or Latvia.

Exclusively Jews occupied the Party, Army, and Cheka command positions in Odessa. Jews constituted the majority in the Presidium of the Petrograd City Soviet. Lazar Kaganovich directed the Civil War terror in Nizhny Novgorod, while Rosalia Salkind-Semlyachka commanded the mass executions by firing squads in the Kremlin. In 1920 the farming areas of West Siberia were turned into a Vendée when grain-commissar Indenbaum through his confiscation campaigns caused mass starvation. During the winter in the steppes, rebellious farmers were forced to dig their own graves. The Chekists doused the naked bodies with water; those that tried to flee were machine-gunned. The peasant uprising in Tyumen entered the history books as the "Iskhimski Rebellion".

By virtue of the sheer numbers liquidated and the radicalism and motivation of the perpetrators, the mass executions of Russian Orthodox priests assumed a genocidal character. The intellectual elite of Eastern Christendom in Russia was literally slaughtered. Lenin provided the impetus. On 27 July 1918, shortly after the murder of the Tsar and his family, the Soviet government ordered the liquidation of all pogromists; every priest was by law considered to be a pogromist. As Lunacharsky recalls, Lenin composed the text of the law by his own hand, and Lenin ordered that the clergy could be executed (vne zakona) outside the law and the courts. That meant, Solzhenitsyn comments, they could simply be shot out of hand.

It was Lenin, not Stalin, who on 17 July 1918 let loose the demons (p. 15). It was the Party, Army, and Cheka apparatus under Lenin’s command during the early Bolshevik period that characterized the ideology of crimes against humanity. (Ernst Nolte writes about ‘an ideological extermination postulate.’) "The key to the decision was in Lenin’s hands," Solzhenitsyn asserts in his chapter on Bartholomew’s Night in Yekaterinburg. Lenin exhibited neither doubt nor compromise in this matter. "He had no reservations about exterminations." To destory and exterminate was his intend.

For this destruction and extermination, Sverdlov, Dzerzhinski, and Trotsky were his most powerful allies. None of them was Russian. Lenin’s executioners in Yekaterinburg and the Ural governments were not Russians. The bloody careers of Goloshekin and Beloborodov, the Party terrorists and Ural mafia killers, are described on pp. 90-91. Yankel Yurovsky, who boasted "it was my revolver that knocked off Nicholas on the spot," certainly was not a Russian. In 1936 Stalin’s Chekists executed Beloborodov in Lubyanka, whether as a Jew, a cosmopolitan, or as an enemy of Stalin’s Russification policies. Goloshekin met death in the Fall of 1941 as German tanks approached Moscow.

Is Russia a land of criminal perpetrators? Solzhenitsyn denies it as strongly as he rejects the concept of collective guilt in general, and the rejection pertains to both the Large People (the Russians) as well as the Small People (the Jews). And who were the victims? The overwhelming majority were Russians. Those shot in cellars, those burnt to death in the cloisters, those drowned in river boats, those hanged in the forest; officers, peasants, aristocrats, proletariats, the anti-anti-Semitic bourgeois intellectuals – Russians mostly, but others as well. The "hangmen of the Revolution," the crimes they try to justify with internationalism, transformed their "dirty revolution" into what Solzhenitsyn calls an "antislav" revolution. No, the Nobel Laureate Solzhenitsyn emphasizes, the Cheka-Lubyanka-Gulag holocaustic perpetrators could not possibly be a Slavic people (p. 93)

On page 233 of Nolte’s Der Kausale Nexus is an early confirmation of Solzhenitsyn’s theses. The German historian is convinced that the term "Jewish Bolshevism" is not simply an invention made for crude political purposes, but that it is historically well-founded and not to be expunged from history "regardless of how terrible the National Socialist consequences were". Nolte draws a parallel to the other contrary, ideological postulate:

"Only when it has not been excluded and made a taboo beforehand can ‘Auschwitz’ escape the danger that now threatens it, namely, that by being isolated from ‘Gulag’ and the conflict between the two ideologically driven States (Germany and the Soviet Union) it becomes not a lie, but a myth that contradicts history."

Is Solzhenitsyn the first historian to examine the dark year of 1918 scientifically? About a decade ago, the Russian Jewess Sonya Margolina, daughter of a Bolshevik of the Lenin-Stalin era, wrote about the crimes committed by the Bolsheviks and the part the Jews played in them. The horrors of the Revolution and the Civil War are "closely bound to the image of the Jewish commissar," she writes in Das Ende der Lügen (The End of the Lies), published in 1992 by Siedler Publishers in Berlin. Her book bore the shocking subtitle The Russian Jews – Perpetrators and Victims at the Same Time. Sentences appear in the chapter "Jews and Soviet Power" whose validity Solzhenitsyn now confirms. "In the first years after the revolution the Bolsheviks and the Jews at their side ruled Russia with the cold sweat of fear on their brows," Margolina writes. One thing remained very clear in the minds of the actors: if the red hangman’s rope around the neck of the people were ever to be loosened, "the Jewish Bolsheviks would be the first candidates for the scaffold."

Where was God in Lubyanka? In Kolyma? On the White Sea Canal project? Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in the sense of one of Dostoyevsky’s God-seekers a homo religious, does not even ask that question. He wants to know, as does Margolina, why Russia’s Jews were both the perpetrators and victims alike during the Bolshevik century? At the onset of the third millennium this 84-year old – the public conscience of Russian culture – understands the first precept of historical revisionism in a Russia unsullied with political correctness, namely, he who breaks through the fire wall surrounding the ‘Jewish question" is sovereign.

The Dirty Revolution II

"Everyone was listening intently to determine if the Germans were already on the way."

In June and July of 1941 those living in the regions of eastern Poland occupied by the Red Army – Polish farmers, the bourgeoisie, the clergy, ex-soldiers, and intellectuals – all awaited the invasion of German troops. This quote is from the Polish Jewish historian J. Gross, author of the book Neighbors: The Murder of the Jews of Jedwabne. Solzhenitsyn explains why Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians, Estonians, Belorussians, Bukowina-, and Moldava-Romanians could hardly wait for the Germans to invade.

Pursuant to his central thesis, Solzhenitsyn writes that without the high Jewish presence among the leaders and executioners of the Bolshevik dictatorship, Lenin’s newly born Soviet state would have been at an end, at the latest, by the time of the Kronstadt Sailors Rebellion in 1921. Solzhenitsyn examines specific decisive questions, as for example: Why, in the period 1939-41, did such a large percentage of Jewry in eastern Poland, Galicia, and in the Baltic States collaborate with the Red Army, Stalin’s secret police, and Bolshevism in general? And why did the pogroms in these regions take place under the slogan "Revenge for the Soviet Occupation"? Solzhenitsyn:

"In eastern Poland, which had been incorporated in the Soviet Union in September 1939, the Jews, especially the younger generation, welcomed the invading Red Army with frenetic jubilation. Whether in Poland, Bessarabia, Lithuania, or Bukowina, the Jews were the main support of Soviet power. The newspapers report that the Jews are enthusiastically supporting the establishment of Communist rule." (p. 329)

In that fateful year a Polish Jew who had emigrated to France prophesized that the non-Jews who had been subjugated to Bolshevism would one day exact a fearful war of vengeance. In 1939 Stanislav Ivanowich, a left socialist sympathetic to the Soviet Union, warned:

"Should the dictatorship of the Bolsheviks end one day, the collapse will be accompanied by the atavistic, barbaric passions of Jew hate and violence. The collapse of Soviet power would be a terrible catastrophe for Jewry; today Soviet rule equates to Judeophilia." (p. 310)

Shoot Anti-Semites on the Spot

And as for the next aspect examined, why was it that in 1918 the victorious Russian worker class supported, not just an underground, but also an openly aggressive – even Party-based – broad anti-Semitism taking the form of Jew-hatred?

Although on 27 July 1918 Lenin had issued an ukase ordering that any active anti-Semite could be shot without going through any court procedures, a new, extremely militant form of anti-Semitism, which had even gained influence in governmental layers of the monopoly Party, was rife in the mid-twenties.

"This wave of the ‘new anti-Semitism’ included the cultural cadres and educational inspectors of the Russian worker class and reached into the Komsomol and the Party". (p. 200f.)

To explain the reasons for this, Solzhenitsyn cites extensively and without commentary from the newspapers of the day. According to the newspapers, the ‘Jew Bolsheviks’ had captured and occupied the Soviet State; they were in the top ranks of the Red Army. Soviet power had been converted into Jewish power, and the Jews pursued Jewish, not Russian goals. (p. 201)

In 1922 exiled Social Revolutionaries E. Kuskova and S. Maslov, both Jews, reported:

"Judeophobia has spread throughout present-day Russia. It has even spread to areas in which previously no Jews had even lived and where there was never a Jewish Question. […] Bolshevism today is – without any doubt – identified with Jewish rule."

Or colloquially expressed:

"Aron Moiseyevich Tankelwich today walks in the place of Ivan Ivanov."

Kuskova and Maslov reported further:

"New slogans have appeared on the walls of the high schools – ‘Smash the Jews, Save the Soviets’; ‘Beat the Jews Up, Save the Councils’".

In other words, the revolutionary jargon of that day wanted to keep the Soviets and the Soviet rule, but without Jews.

"‘Smash the Jews’ was not the slogan of the Black Hundreds from the pogroms of Tsarist times, but the battle cry of young Russian communards five years after the Great October." (p. 229)

On the eve of the XII Party Day 1923, the Politburo consisted of three Jews and three non-Jews. The ratio in the Komsomol Presidium was three to four. In the XI Party Day, ‘Jew Bolsheviks’ constituted 26% of the Central Committee membership. Because of this foreign invasion and anti-Slavic trends, prominent Russian Leninists decided upon an "anti-Jewish rebellion."

May 1924

Shortly before the opening of the XIII Party Day, veteran Russian revolutionaries Frunze, Nogin, and Troyanovsky called for the expulsion of the ‘Jewish leaders’ from the Politburo. The opponents of the purge reacted quickly. In no time, Nogin died after an operation on his esophagus, after which Frunze went under the knife. (p. 207)

In Solzhenitsyn’s opinion, the main reason for this outbreak of new anti-Semitism is to be found in the hostility towards Russians inherent in the extreme Jewish internationalism. Unlike the Jewish intelligentsia who greeted the revolution of 1918 with great passion, the Russian proletariat was not fascinated by the idea of a Russian-led internationalism. After 1918 the Jews spoke consistently of "their country." (p. 218)

To support his thesis Solzhenitsyn cites Party ideologue Nikolai Bukharin, who was executed after the last Moscow show trial. At the Leningrad Party Conference in early 1927 Bukharin had criticized the ‘capitalistic’ nature of the Jewish mid-level bourgeoisie who had come to power and had taken the place of the Russian bourgeoisie in the main cities of the USSR (p. 209), and "whom we, comrades, must sharply condemn." Former chief Bolshevik theorist Bukharin concluded by saying that the Jews themselves were responsible for the new anti-Semitism.

It was part of Stalin’s tactical game not just to tolerate Jews in his own entourage, but also deliberately to place them in leading positions so that later he would have plausible grounds for turning them over to the executioner on grievous charges. Such was the case in the murderous collectivization program in 1928-1933 to which the names of prominent ‘Jew Bolsheviks’ were attached. Stalin was well aware of the hate city Jews had for everything related to the Russian and Ukrainian peasantry. They spread terror, killing the peasants and destroying the villages, eventually causing the famine that took the lives of at least six million Ukrainians. The Jewish commissars in charge of the anti-kulak program, which was tantamount to genocide, were literally the masters over life and death.

In 1936, after the slaughter of the peasantry "at the hands of the Bolshevik Jews," the death bell began to toll for those who had been responsible for the carnage. For the first time in a Russian historical work, their names are listed: Ya. Yakovlev-Epstein, M. Kolmanovich, G. Roschal, V. Feygin. (p. 285) The books covering the crimes in the first twenty years after Lenin seized power fill many meters of shelf space. With this one Solzhenitsyn volume, the subsequent reckoning with the Slavic peasant holocaust has only begun.

Bread and Knowledge, Stomach and Brain

There were also reasons for the outburst of proletariat anti-Semitism in two other sensitive areas. The Russian working class young people were getting nowhere in their quest for advancement on the educational front. In 1926, 26% of university students were Jews who had enjoyed a bourgeois background. (p. 202). Mostly Jews, between 30 and 50%, occupied the main positions in the domestic and foreign trade commissariats. Their empire included rural and urban store chains, restaurants, business canteens, prison and barracks galleys, cooperatives, and consumer goods production. Management of the Gosplan (State Plan) and the five-year plans was exercised by Rosenholz, Rukhimovich, Epstein, Frumkin, and Selemki; they controlled the nation’s food supply. In 1936 they themselves became fodder for the execution chambers in Lubyanka.

Despite the enormous bloodletting in 1936-37, millions of Jews still served the Stalinist regime with cadaver-like loyalty; they remained enthusiastic, unshakable, almost blind defenders of the cause of Socialism. Solzhenitsyn writes:

"Cadaver-like obedience in the GPU, the Red Army, the diplomatic service, and on the ideological front. The passionate participation of young Jews in these branches was in no way dampened by the bloody events of 1936-38." (p. 281)

The world spirit, Hegel says, assists the lowest creatures to realize its impenetrable intentions. In the realization of the socialist experiment the world spirit did not just serve the lower creatures. Nikolai Ostrovsky, crippled and blind, wrote his autobiographical novel How the Steel Was Hardened as an idealist. Others belonged among the lowest creatures, and Solzhenitsyn enumerates them in the chapters concerning the secret police. (In the book reviews published in the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel and the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, these bloody chapters were ignored.)

Gassing Trucks and Poison Chairs

From the very beginning the secret police was under the control of the ‘Bolshevik Jews.’ Solzhenitsyn revealed their names in the most interesting chapter of his book called The Nineteen Twenties. They are the biographies of the mass murderers at their desks in the Cheka, the OGPU, and the GPU. But they were not just sitting at their desks. Uritzki, Unschlicht, Katznelson, Bermann, Agranov, Spiegelglas, Schwarz, Asbel, Chaifetz, Pauker, Maier, Yagoda, personally participated in the tortures, hangings, crucifixions, and incinerations. Dzerzhinski, the founder of the Cheka, had three deputies from this guard of iron Bolsheviks – Gerson, Luszki, and Yagoda. An elite of Bolshevik Jews! Years later, when the Gulag Archipelago was being expanded, they were again to be found in the front line of executioners. Israel Pliner was the slave master of the Moscow-Volga-Canal; Lazar Kogan, Zinovey Katznelson, and Boris Bermann directed the forced labor genocide at the White Sea Canal project. The Great Purge became their graveyard.

Solzhenitsyn comments: (p. 293)

"One cannot deny that history elected very many Jews to be the executors of Russia’s fate."

Commissioned by the NKVD, the Jewish designer of execution systems, Grigori Mayranovsky, invented the gas chair. When, in 1951, Mayranovsky, as the former head of the NKVD Laboratory Institute, was himself incarcerated, he wrote to Beria:

"Please do not forget that by my hand hundreds enemy-pigs of the Soviet State found their deserved end."

The mobile gassing truck was invented and tested by Isay Davidovich Berg, head of the NKVD Economics Division in the Moscow region. In 1937, a second highpoint in the Great Purge, prisoners were sentenced to death in conveyor-belt fashion, packed into trucks, taken to the places of execution, shot in the back of the neck, and buried. In the economic sense, Isay Berg found this method of liquidation inefficient, time-consuming and cost-intensive. He, therefore, in 1937 designed the mobile asphyxiation chamber, the gassing truck (Russian: dushegubka, p. 297). The doomed were loaded into a tightly sealed, completely airtight Russian Ford; during the drive the deadly exhaust from a gasoline engine was directed into the section containing those sentenced to death. Upon reaching the mass gravesite, the truck dumped the corpses into the burial ditch.

The Dirty Revolution III

History sheds blood. The history of Bolshevism shed the blood of at least sixty-six million, according to the calculations of statistician Prof. I. A. Kurganov, cited by Solzhenitsyn in his Novy Mir essay "The Russian Question at the End of the Century," Moscow 1994. The crimes against humanity of the Bolshevik genocide up to 1937, i.e., in the first twenty years of the permanent terror, amounted to twenty million victims. In his scientific probing, Solzhenitsyn does not ignore the moral imperfect; he does not fail to connect the uniqueness of the Bolshevik holocaust with the exorcistic destructive hate of a particular ethnic-religious group in old Russia. This may well be the reason why this second volume of Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Together has been given the silent treatment or has been distorted, not in Putin’s Russia, but rather in Germany’s establishment media. (An honest translation of this work by Solzhenitsyn would constitute a major contribution to historiography.)

Schirrmacher and Holm: Refuted

The motives and obsessions of the left-oriented intellectual class recall the Cambridge Spy case (Philby, Maclean, Blunt, Burgess). Specifically, in the BBC sentimentalized story, in which one of the decadents proclaims:

"To fight Fascism, you have to be a Communist."

German reviews concerning the crimes of the Soviet secret police state sympathetically that in the final analysis at least the Jews in the GPU, NKVD, and KGB were fighting against Hitler. "Russians and Jews fought together against Hitler," Ms. Holm writes in the Schirrmacher review. (Many reviews read like news reports from the Soviet Union!) In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 29 January 2003, she writes:

"After the October Revolution, the author explains, the high Jewish presence in the young Soviet state was found acting with great innovative agitation and drive in fields of State service, among the people’s commissars, and in the top ranks of the Army."

That, however, is not Solzhenitsyn’s interpretation! On the basis of document analysis, Solzhenitsyn states that Lenin had three reasons for elevating young secular, revolutionary-minded Jews to the State’s elite, in effect replacing the Tsarist bureaucracy. First, because of the deadly hate the young Jews had for Russian traditions, religious rites, historical models, hate for everything Russian and Russia itself. Second, their willingness to cross the last taboo borders in morality. And third, their readiness to physically liquidate the enemy.

"Mixed Blood Mestizo"

Lenin, the internationalist, was no friend of Jews who were Zionists. In 1903 he expressed the opinion that there was no such thing as a Jewish nationality; the concept was a monstrous invention of a moribund capitalism. Stalin, along the same lines, considered Jewry a "paper nation" that would over time "disappear in an inevitable assimilation."

For Solzhenitsyn, Lenin himself was "a mixed blood mestizo." (p. 76) A grandfather on his father’s side was an Asian Kalmuck; the other grandfather, Israel Blank, was a Jew from Volhynia, who after converting to the Russian Orthodox Church took the first name of Alexander. His grandmother on his father’s side, Anna Johanna, had German and Swedish blood; her maiden name was Grossschopf. Solzhenitsyn:

"Initially Russians did not consider Lenin to be an enemy of the Russian people, although at certain times his behavior became anti-Russian. Many Russians considered him a product of another race. Despite that, we as Russians cannot completely renounce Lenin." (p. 76)

A Bestseller in Russia

In a Russia free of literature-policing Solzhenitsyn’s book of historical revelations has achieved the status of bestseller. The first hundred thousand edition of the second volume was sold out shortly after it appeared. Solzhenitsyn’s expression "a century of crimes" has become widely used among writers. Crimes with consequences to the 22^nd century, because "never before had Russia stood so close to the historical abyss, separating her from the void," the poetess Natalia Ayrapetrova writes in Literaturnaya gazeta (22 January 2002). Solzhenitsyn has set an avalanche loose. A new book, The Enemy Within. Genealogy of Evil (576 pp., Feri Publishers, Moscow), by the historian Nikolai Ostrovski has just appeared. Ostrovski became famous for his Holy Slaves and Temple of the Chimeras, discourses critical of Judaism that do not permit the author to be banished to the dead end of conspiracy theories.

In contrast to the general Russian acceptance of Solzhenitsyn’s second volume, the German-language edition has been met with silence and misrepresentation, and in most cases with a touch of Russophobia. Der Spiegel (7/2003) provided an interpretation that contradicted the facts. For example, Der Spiegel’s reviewer wrote that under Stalin many Jews were alienated from Soviet power and that there was a reduction in the number of Jewish ‘collaborators’ in the Party and the secret police.

An interpretation of a critical chapter in Solzhenitsyn’s book vacillates between trivialization and obfuscation. Spiegel uses the word ‘collaborators’ instead of accomplices in the various phases of Stalin’s rise. In the mid nineteen twenties until the mid thirties the Jewish component in the leadership functions of the Party and State apparatus in the Ukraine amounted to 22.6% (in the capital Kharkov it was 30%), in Belorussia it was 30.6% (in the capital Minsk it was almost 40%) and in Moscow city it was about 12%. Six and a half times more Jews occupied cadre positions in the Soviet ruling class than existed in the total Jewish population, which was 1.82% in 1926.

"The greatest influx of Jews to Soviet government offices took place in the cities and metropolitan areas of the Soviet Republics,"

Solzhenitsyn observes (p. 199), and it is characteristic of Der Spiegel’s and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s lack of objectivity and philosemitism that they deny their German readers the most important data and numerical comparisons given in Chapter 18.

Even in the purge year of 1936 one still sees a disproportionately high representation in the "People’s Commissariat of Jews:" Litvinov-Finkelstein, Yagoda, Rosenholz, Weizer, Kalmanovich, Kaganovich. In the same government Sozhenitsyn observes whole groups of people’s commissars (ministers) with the names Solz, Gamarnik, Gurevich, and Ginzburg. These are only a few of the hundreds. A predominance of ‘Jew Bolsheviks’ is noted in the cultural fields, the brainwashing section, and the new-speak department. In the nineteen twenties the Jewish internationalists purged the history books. Radical ideological reeducation by race haters like Goykhbarg, Larin, Radek, and Rotstein began by deleting and forbidding such concepts as ‘Russian history’ and ‘Great Russian,’ putting them on the black list of counter-revolutionary terminology. In the Moscow Party press Jewish writers advocated blowing-up the Minin-Posharsky Monument on Red Square (p. 275).

But to come back to the left-oriented German media: The spirited derussification program conducted by the ‘Jew Bolsheviks’ during the nineteen twenties is not mentioned at all, neither by Uwe Klussmann nor by Kerstin Holm. Nor do the terms Cheka and GPU appear in the German reviews.

The Cheka – the bulldozer locomotive of State terror, the bulldozer for sixty-six million corpses, and the gas turbine for the Bolshevik holocaust – does not exist in Schirrmacher’s daily newspaper and Augstein’s successor Holm, chief editor of Der Spiegel, as a shorthand symbol for death. Is it simply the rejection of the truth, or shame, or fear of exposure because many liberal humanists have so long stood beside Stalinist humanism? In any case, ethical and physical degenerates do use the word when it is buried in history as a unique chapter on the Cheka/GPU under the laurels of the anti-Hitler war.

Name Lists Betray Everything

Solzhenitsyn lists the names of about fifty mass murderers, desk criminals, and murderers of prisoners. (p. 300f.) Their first names betray the ethnic origin of these monsters. Moise Framing, Mordichai Chorus, Josef Khodorovsky, Isaak Solz, Naum Zorkin, Moise Kalmanovich, Samuel Agurski, Lazar Aronstam, Israel Weizer, Aron Weinstein, Isaak Grindberg, Sholom Dvoylazki, Max Daitsh, Yesif Dreiser, Samuel Saks, Jona Jakir, Moise Kharitonov, Frid Markus, Solomon Kruglikov, Israel Razgon, Benjamin Sverdlov, Leo Kritzman…

"Here and now we are making an end to synagogues forever,"

the new foreign minister Molotov is reported to have said in the Spring of 1939 as he undertook to purge his own ministry. (Litvinov-Finkelstein took revenge in 1943 when he gave Roosevelt a personal secret list of Stalin’s pogroms.) In comparison with the foreign ministry, the official pogrom in the ministry of internal affairs was much more dramatic. Between 1 January 1935 and 1 January 1938, Jewish dominance in the ministry of internal affairs fell from about 50% of ministry members to about 6%. Solzhenitsyn writes:

"The rulers over the fate of the Russian people believed that they were irreplaceable and invulnerable. All the more terrible for them when the blow fell. They had to face the collapse of their world and their view of the world."

Also in this section Solzhenitsyn reveals the names of the butchers who once bossed the secret police. They once headed the Lubyanka, now they themselves ended in the corridors of Lubyanka: pistol-flaunting Matvey Berman, Josef Blatt, Abraham Belenki, Isaak Shapiro, Serge Shpigelglas, Israel Leblevski, Pinkus Simanovski, Abraham Slutski, Benjamin Gerson, Zinovi Katsnelson, Natan Margolin – an almost endless list of ‘Jew Bolsheviks.’ These names are not mentioned in Germany, the "land of the perpetrators." Salpeter, Seligmann, Kagan, Rappoport, Fridland, Rayski-Lakhman, Yoselevich, Faylovich… prominent names in Stalin’s list for execution after 1936. The Jewish Menshevik, S. Shvarts, who emigrated to the United States, noted in 1966 in a documentation of the American Jewish Worker Committee:

"The purges resulted in the physical disappearance of almost all Jewish Communists who had played an important role in the USSR.". (p. 327)

Hebrew or Yiddish

The early Stalin believed in the eventual assimilation of the Jews under the dogmas of the "proletarian revolution." Innately opposed to this, most of the Jewish Bolsheviks fiercely rejected assimilation, i.e., their disappearance as a special ethnic group in Socialism (by assimilation they understood a mortally feared Russification). From the beginning these Jews fought in the Jewish Commissariat (Yevkom) and the Jewish Section within the Russian Communist Party (Yevsek) for the "preservation of the Jewish people" in the Socialist state, and even for the creation of a "Jewish Soviet Nation in the USSR." The historical recreation of these events is a service of Solzhenitsyn. Naturally it found no mention in the German book reviews.

The promotion of Yiddish as a State language was a way of establishing the Jewish Soviet Nation; it was recognized by law for the first time in Belorus in 1920.That recognition meant not only a ‘no’ to Zionism, but also to the expansion of New Hebrew (Ivrit). In the early 1920s Ivrit was officially forbidden, while Yiddish was recognized as a "Language of Soviet Proletariat Culture." (p. 255). Marc Chagall and Ed Lisizki were considered in the vanguard of a Yiddish-Communist culture – the New Man from Vitebsk.

A political setback came at the end of the twenties when Yevkom and Yevsek were abolished. The younger generation of Soviet Jews accepted this without protest, Solzhenitsyn reports. Without protest, without rebellion, and without a "Kronstadt." The abandonment of Yiddish occurred with the triumph of an international atheism, and internationalism without nationalities, without national identities, but with one single exception: "The Soviet People!" An artificial construct, sacrificed to the hecatombs of proletariat blood, the blood of Slavs, Balts, Moslems, and Caucasians; the Soviet people, a drawing-board product, a Frankenstein monster, was created in Gulagism, whose existence without the enforcers from the ranks of the ‘Jew Bolsheviks’ would not be conceivable. Alexander Solzhenitsyn documents this on almost 600 pages of text. When near the end of the war Stalin ordered the liquidation of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and proceeded to murder their intellectual leaders, as well as programming the end of Yiddish as a separate culture, the Bolshevik solution of the old Russian ‘Jewish Question’ came to a bizarre conclusion, i.e., on the ramps to the Gulag.

Final Comments

"Our history is one of tragedies and catastrophes," writes Svetlana Alekseyevicha thirteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago appeared in the West thirty years ago. The Main Directorate of Camps (Glawnoje Uprawlenije Lagerei = GULag), which lasted for half a century, was one of the saddest catastrophes in the two thousand year history of Russia. Looking back today, one can say with good reason that Solzhenitsyn’s reportage on the bloodiest crimes against humanity in modern times belongs among the spiritual turning points that represented the beginning of the end of the Red Imperium.

Solzhenitsyn’s chronicle from hell prompts the question of why today the historical reality of the Gulag is much less widely and passionately remembered than is the persecution of the Jews under National Socialism. There can be no rational answer to this. The reproach is that a work like the Gulag Archipelago exceeds the powers of imagination and that – based on the laws of classical aesthetics – it ought not be produced at all because it inundates the reader with unrelieved pictures of disgust and revulsion. But then, by the same logic, a play like Macbeth might also be considered too off-putting. In his third volume Solzhenitsyn depicts the slaughter of five thousand women and children in the Kingir slave labor camp in June 1954 (only thirteen years after Babi Yar).

The opinion that the Gulag, unlike the killing of the Jews, has yet to find a Hollywood director of the caliber of Steven Spielberg to film it, is negated by the fact that Russia, herself, has highly talented, even brilliant film producers, dramaturges, and screenplay writers whose work can easily stand comparison with that in the West. The showing of the play I Will Repay by Serge Kuznetsov in the Maly Theater in Moscow, for example, always plays to a full house – standing room only for months on end! The play recreates the last tragic moments of the Tsar’s family. For Russia’s Orthodox, but also for Russian revisionist historians, 16 July 1918 was the ultimate ejaculation of Gulag thinking. The role of the Bolshevik Jews is handled directly in this stage play as when Botkin, the Tsar’s physician, says to one of his guards:

"The time will come when everyone will believe that the Jews were responsible for this and you will be the victims of the revenge."

For the lyricist Stanislav Kunyayev, chief editor of the literary magazine Nash Sovremennik, the murder of the Romanovs was the product of "depraved intellects and a satanic will." Kunyayev is one of a group of seventy leading Russian intellectuals who have signed their names to a letter, in which they hold Communist Jews responsible for the murder of the Tsar, the Bolshevik putsch, and the mass murders that followed it. In the case of Kunyayev it is clear why the filming of the Gulag era would be unthinkable in a Western country for the time being. Or, to put it differently: Why the Jew Steven Spielberg shies away like Belshazzar from the handwriting on the wall. It is not just the sheer magnitude of the crimes that block Spielberg’s undertaking a film of the Gulag, it is much more the taboo question of the unspoken complicity of secularized Jews in a unique breach of civilized behavior that resulted in the execution chambers in Lefortovo, the stone quarries of the White Sea Canal project, and the gold mines of Kolyma.

In Germany, the land of the Adornos and Friedmans, the dreadful accusation of anti-Semitism is held in the ready for anyone who wants to use it at anytime; it is omnipresent and inexpensive, and packs a deadly explosive force socially and professionally. The left-liberal review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 26 June 2003 published an allegedly lost story of the Bolshevik writer, Isaak Babel, who was shot In January 1941 in a Bolshevik forced labor camp. The previously unknown story, Esfir’s Ring, aesthetically and morally without any reference to Russian literature, eulogizes the death of the Jewish secret policeman, Esfir Rubenblum, "Commissar of the Special Department of the Kiev Cheka," who died "a hero’s death in the struggle against enemies of the revolution." Original quotations of Isaak Babel were written a few years before the "hero’s death" of the Civil War Chekist Babel.

This world-famous Bolshevik (the evaluation of Frank Schirrmacher, chief editor of the Frankfurter) confirms in one of his last contributions the Jewish leadership in the execution squads of the secret police in the Lenin period. Dr. Schirrmacher found no reason to go into Babel’s Chekist past. In Germany the deadly threat of the anti-Semitism shibboleth prevents an objective discussion of the anthropological roots of the theme Solzhenitsyn has illuminated.

On the occasion of his receiving the left-wing German Ludwig-Börne-Prize for outstanding performances in literature, the American-Jewish scholar George Steiner said in his thank-you speech:

"In my opinion there can be no higher honor, no higher nobility, than to belong to a people who has never engaged in persecution. Since my childhood I have been proud not to have that arrogance. I belong to the highest race because it does not persecute others. We are the only ones; we never had the power to do so. Alleluia!" (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 31 May 2003)

Never persecuted others? Never held power?

"The Jewish commissar with the leather jacket and Mauser pistol, often speaking broken Russian, is the typical image of revolutionary power."

This statement comes from Sonya Margolina, who is proud to be "the daughter of a Jewish Bolshevik." Margolina today lives in Berlin. Her book Das Ende der Lügen: Rußland und die Juden im 20. Jahrhundert (Siedler, Berlin 1992), from which the above passage is cited, follows it with these words:

"The tragedy of Jewry is that there was no political option to escape the vengeance for the historical sin of the Jews, namely, their enthusiastic cooperation with the Communist regime. The victory of the Soviet regime saved them for a while, but vengeance still lurked ahead."

http://www.vho.org/tr/2004/3/Strauss342-351.html