From my new Taki's Magazine column:
There’s inevitable bad blood between Russians, for whom pro-czarism is the natural political inclination (for reasons of geography and history, Russia is a backward place, so its political traditions are backward), and American Jews, whose ancestral traditions are fervently anti-czarist.
Thus, Putin’s reconstruction of a functioning Russian state after the disasters of the 1990s was inevitably going to turn out to be more or less neo-czarist. In turn, a strong Russia predictably triggered anti-pogrom alarms among American Jews. Since there aren’t actual pogroms, much of Jewish animus and angst got displaced into its 21st century proxies: neoconservatism (as in the case of the State Department’s Victoria Nuland) and gay activism (Radio Liberty’s Masha Gessen).
Both Russians and American Jews have perfectly understandable reasons for feeling the way they do. Fortunately, this psychological disjunction needn’t lead to war or even to simple jingoism. After all, we live on different continents. Both sides ought to be able to recognize and laugh off their inevitable bigotry and malice.
The central cognitive problem for America, however, is that gentile Americans aren't allowed to notice, much less laugh at, Jewish predilections, nor even mention the level of Jewish influence in the American media and government (consider the careers of Gregg Easterbrook and Rick Sanchez).
Read the whole thing there.
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44 comments:
A lot of Russian Jews, including ones in America, like Putin and his policies. I know such people personally.
The assassination of Czar Alexander by Jewish radicals was one of the great tragedies of Russian history. Alexander was easily the most benevolent of the Romanov rulers, and had he lived was going to convert Russia over to a Parliamentary system based on the UK model. It's easy to see why his murder would have triggered pogroms.
It's a good column, although Mongols didn't massacre the urban middle class in Poland (they made one fleeting appearance in a small part of what was nominally Polish territory). Also, the word Czarism really pisses me off (both the vague concept and the ridiculous spelling).
ATBOTL said: I know such people personally.
Hunsdon said: Could you encourage them to make their voices heard? We seem to be presented with a "UAF", a Unified Ashkenazi Front, beating the war drums with Russia, and Russian Jews who are at least cautiously supportive of Putin would make a wonderful counterbalance.
1/ 'As a nation, we began by declaring 'that all men are created equal'. We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except the negroes'. When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'All men are created equal, except the Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.'. When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some other country where they make no pretense of loving liberty-to Russia for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, without the base alloy of hypocrisy.'
-Abraham Lincoln
But that quote can't be true because its only because of Jews that Americans can have negative opinions of Tsarism.
2/ From the wikipedia article about the Monroe doctorine:
'However the immediate provocation was the Russian ukase of 1821 asserting rights to the Northwest and forbidding non-Russian ships from approaching the coast'
But that can't be right because Americans have really never had any problem with Russia except for Jews.
3/ Right here on iSteve there there was a positive article about George Kennan the architect of 'Containment' of Russia.
But that can't be right because why would non-Jewish Americans want to contain Russia?
This article reminded of a comment made by one of the key people involved in the campaign to bring gay marriage to Canada:
"From a Jewish perspective, being the grandchildren of penniless [Eastern European] immigrants, I think Michael and I were immigrants at a time when being gay was symbolically crossing an ocean," Leshner observed. "My grandparents taught me never to run with Cossacks, and this was a modern day Cossack story."
Calling homophobia a "post-modern anti-Semitism," Leshner noted Jews weren't innocent from this irrational pathology. "But to their credit they weren't the obstacle that the Catholic Church and fundamentalist Protestant churches proved to be. By and large, Jews didn't have the stomach for a cultural war against gays and lesbians."
Leshner termed his union with Stark just another form of intermarriage. His own mother, today 90, was present at the nuptials and sang Canada's national anthem at the ceremony, he added. By contrast, four decades ago she had bitterly fought her eldest son from marrying a non-Jewish woman.
"She learned that love trumps religion in almost every case," Leshner smiled.
Gay gesunderheit, Canadian gay crusaders win the right for same sex marriages, by Gil Zohar, Aug. 11, 2003
Have I got this straight?
A backward place was the second country to build nuclear weapons, the first country to put people in space and maintains a fleet of nuclear submarines with SLBMS, but the thoroughly modern Jewish state, yeah.
Czarism is good for Russia, at least better than the alternatives. They don't have the political culture to support a representative democracy (and we are losing it!). So they're better off with a strong central leader than chaos.
Putin has threaded the needle of dealing with Jewish oligarchs without starting the sort of pogroms that would really get my odious distant relatives in the Western media after him.
Overall, though I think we must oppose him as an enemy of America, we can admire his strength and skill (sort of the way Crusaders saw Saladin). Let's face it--a strong Russian leader is, to some degree, bad for the Americans, because of the zero-sum nature of geopolitics.
The Jewish-gay thing is interesting. Here is a theory I have not heard, that I think bears examining, particularly by someone as sagacious as Steve: Jews have good verbal skills. Gays have good verbal skills. Wouldn't we then expect Jewish gays to have very good verbal skills, and to have a strong ability to dominate media for that reason? This is of course *combined* with the nepotistic networks of the two groups (and all humans form networks) to establish a media dominance. Also, both groups benefit from a weak Christianity (though I'm not sure it would be as bad for the Jews as my odious relatives seem to think), so they will work together and see themselves as allies.
I know a few right-wing (anti-socialist, pro-Israel, but not anti-white) Russian Jews, but they don't go anywhere near the media--they don't have the connections and, being recent immigrants, want to make money right away. Media's something you do when your family's been here for a while and you don't need to worry about money.
I really miss Richard Grenier. From the obit on the Arlington Cemetery Page:
"A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Richard Grenier was a Bostonian. He served in the Atlantic and Pacific fleets, did graduate work at Harvard, studied at the Institut des Sciences Politiques in Paris and had careers as a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times, as a movie screenwriter, as a novelist and as cultural correspondent for The New York Times.
He spent much of his life in London, Madrid and Paris and lived and wrote from his home in Washington during the last decade and a half of his life. His columns appeared regularly for years in the Washington Times and, more recently, in WorldNetDaily."
I never knew that Grenier was a Naval academy grad. Perhaps more of our critics and reviewers would benefit from that kind of background.
I've said mentioned this before, but reading your article just seems to confirm it. A lot of people are really disappointed that Putin is not anti-Semitic.....
One thing that anti-Semites and philo-Semites have in common is the curious conviction that Putin went after the Jewish oligarchs because they were Jewish. This is not true. Putin went after the Jewish oligarchs because they were threats to his consolidation of power. Their Jewishness was incidental.
ATBOTL has it right.
Most Russian Jews, especially the Orthodox, have no issue with Putin and don't mind at all if he takes back the former USSR.
We shouldn't put them in the same category as the revolting Jaime Kirchick.
"Thus, Putin’s reconstruction of a functioning Russian state after the disasters of the 1990s was inevitably going to turn out to be more or less neo-czarist. In turn, a strong Russia predictably triggered anti-pogrom alarms among American Jews."
A strong America - strong in the real sense of being relatively monolithic - has triggered anti-pogrom alarms in some American Jews.
I don't really feel the need to sympathise with those Jews who see the black hundreds or the gestapo around every corner. That's their problem, not mine, and I resent them attempting to turn my country upside down to avert a wholly imaginary threat that is of no concern to anybody but them.
The old saying that "paranoids have enemies" can be true. However, sometimes paranoids make enemies for themselves by being paranoid. Sometimes paranoids have enemies because they have behaved like jerks. In any event, those enemies are the paranoids' enemies - not mine.
Steve, why do you think pro-czarism is backwards? Some types need a king, not a parliament.
"A lot of Russian Jews, including ones in America, like Putin and his policies."
I wish this was true but it isn't. I'm a Jew born in Russia and residing in America and I like Putin and his policies. But I'm a weirdo, and not just in politics. An attitude like this is highly unusual for someone of my background. In Russia opposition to Putin is led by the Jews who stayed behind. Most Russian Jews in America are really, really anti-Putin. I'm talking about family, friends, the community in general. The Hasidim whom Putin cultivates in Moscow are an extreme exception.
All of the Russian Jews I know reflexively cheer on anybody who opposes Russia - Georgia, Ukrainian nationalists, the Baltic states, the US government. Basically, their attitude to Russia is the same as the American Jewish attitude to America, the French Jewish attitude to France, etc.
This is how I understand the mechanics of it:
Throughout history diasporic minority groups tended to be assimilated by majorities, i.e. they tended to disappear. The Varangians in Russia and Byzantium, the Lomards and Osthrogoths in Italy, the ancient Greeks in southern Italy and southern France, the Franks in France, the Dutch (and so many other groups) in America, etc. It's a very common story.
The only diasporic groups that did not disappear were the ones that developed or originally possessed some resistance to the forces of assimilation. Instinctive, subconsciously determined hostility to outsiders is a form of such resistance. Jews, Gypsies and Armenians definitely have it. I don't know enough about overseas Chinese to judge.
Out of all the thousands of groups that became minorities somewhere throughout the course of history, some were bound to be more resistant to assimilation than others. Not all of that resistance need have been developed in response to diasporic conditions. Some of it might have been preexisting, a side effect of unrelated developments.
"Russia is a backward place, so its political traditions are backward"
Russia lagged behind the West on the way up the ladder of civilization. Since WWII it has lagged behind the West on the way down the same ladder, on the way back to barbarity. Backwardness isn't always a bad thing. The more backward parts of the Roman Empire, Sardinia for example, retained some elements of civilization longer than the more central parts. Ireland, so backward that it wasn't even a part of the Empire, retained more literacy during the Dark Ages than Britain, which was a province.
As for democracy, it's turning out to have been a fluke. It's too exploitable to be lasting. And in fact it hasn't lasted. How can something that only survives as a badly-made knockoff, something that disappeared as real thing long ago, be called "forward"?
When Soros says that he promotes "open societies", he isn't lying. Truly open societies are very exploitable, and he likes to exploit. Any society that wants to survive long-term has to be a little more closed than that.
Keep up the good work Steve. You give us hope sanity will prevail. I laugh at Jewish predilections all the time and my few Jewish friends are cool with it- because they understand their neuroses.
Dan in DC
"Both sides ought to be able to recognize and laugh off their inevitable bigotry and malice."
lol good one, Steve...the Jews are known for their light hearted tolerance of opposing views
"The Roman Republic rose to dominance through a complex, evolving system of power sharing until Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul seemed to make
imperial dictatorship advisable through sheer scale."
The original Romans were physically and culturally European. Tribal European societies tended to be democratic. The Romans, like ancient Greeks and many later European peoples, tried to maintain some democratic institutions past the tribal stage. They ultimately failed at it. They imported a lot of Middle Eastern slaves as cheap labor. As populations mixed, Middle Eastern political traditions prevailed over European ones. However, even in historical cases that didn't feature such population movements attempts to scale tribal democracy to large states often led to failure.
I forgot which Greek author wrote that the maximum size of an ideal state is around 10,000 citizens. The idea was that citizens had to be able to know a large percentage of their fellow citizens for the thing be able to function in the old, democratic Greek way.
"Czarism, which is Russian for Caesarism, is not the default political system of humanity."
Well, yes and no. Caeserism, Czarist Absolutism, Monarchy, Dictatorship, etc., they are all different flavors of autocracy, absolute rule by one person. In fact, if you total all the years that human civilizations/polities have existed, one of these forms of autocracy would constitute the vast majority of years that civilization has existed under. Republican or democratic rule is the exception, having only come along in modern Western societies for about 250 years or so, not counting the autocratic interregnums (i.e. Bonapartist France, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy). Rome itself was an imperial autocratic empire for most of its 1200-year history (only talking about the Western Empire here; including the Eastern Empire would extend the autocracy even further); the Republic only lasted roughly 500-30 B.C. And the Greek city-state democracies lasted an even shorter period. Our modern republics are beginning to resemble emerging oligarchies, where a smaller group of powerful people actually lead the state, while political power for the greater common citizenry is waning. The oligarchies will inevitably start devolving because of intragroup competition until some form of autocracy emerges again.
Jewish Hostility against Putin seemed to start around the time he cracked down on certain oligarchs, particularly Khodorkovsky.
Tom Lantos was very vocal when Khodorkovsky was convicted in 2005.
Hire Tom McMaster.
Nonetheless, Jews widely blame the czar for Kishinev
The Kishinev Pogram doesn't seem to be the great of a massacre.
The Kishinev pogrom started on April 19 (April 6 O.S.) after the Christian population of the town got out of church on Easter Sunday. It spanned three days of rioting against the Jews. Forty-seven (some put the figure at 49) Jews were killed, 92 severely wounded, 500 slightly wounded...
Though any deaths are tragic, and I am not making light of it, this pogrom seems like a soccer riot, not some sort of ethnic cleansing event to be cataloged in the annals of history.
Great stuff. A couple days ago it occurred to me that the same a$$wipes pushing WWG (and I can't imagine Kushner not getting on that bandwagon) were telling us how bad we should feel about our mistreatment of the the willing agents of Soviet espionage. A big part of Angels in America was Roy Cohn and his role in getting the chair for both Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. By the time Angels in America came out no serious person could doubt their guilt. By the time Angels in America was made into an HBO series the Venona files had come out, slamming the case shut.
Yet Kushner and ilk fought a tooth-n-nail rearguard action to deny the obvious. Rosenbergs? Innocent victims! OK, maybe they were spies, but Ethel was railroaded. OK, maybe not, but at least they were inspiring idealists.
I guess it does really come down to who-whom. Putin the wannabe neo-czar? Evil incarnate. Putin the institutional heir to the people who murdered the czar? Meh, not so bad.
" In turn, a strong Russia predictably triggered anti-pogrom alarms among American Jews."
Really? Give us quotes, please.
I don't know one American Jew who is in favor of WWG, or who wants a new rearmament, or gives a rat's tuchus about any of this.
Take your J-meds, Steve.
"The Russians have since felt that while they may not have all that much going for them in terms of access to the ocean or other geographical and economic advantages, they at least stick together and follow orders. As long as they don’t fragment, another Genghis Khan can’t conquer them."
Steve, this is an excellent concise explanation of Russian motivations and why they produce such horror in individualist Westerners.
Meanwhile, SOCIAL relations between Putin's Russia and Netanyahu's Israel grow stronger and stronger. For example, any given middle-class winter-snowbird-tourist at an Eilat beach-resort hotel is ten times more likely to be a gentile Russky than an American Jew. There are more Russian Orthodox kids entering IDF conscript service each year (as the sequelae of the family having taken up residency in Israel) than American Jews. Go look at any public-information-oriented *.co.il website; they are invariably trilingual Hebrew/English/Russian. Not Arabic, because the ethnic-Arabic customers really aren't economically important enough to justify the cost of translation. But Russkies are. The English is not to cater to American Jews; it is to cater to the Euros and the Asians. Many thousands of Thais and Filipinos present in the Israel labor force. Lots of jokes about them on the TV sitcoms, but they are never the target of mistrust like Arabic-ethnics are. Caveat: the supermarkets and department stores in Samaria have a lot of Arabic labeling and signage, because of the noticeable single-day-shopping-visa traffic of Gulf Arab customers. The Israel Border Police (legally set up as a gendarmerie) has a policy of stamping their passports on a separate piece of paper, so that when they go back to Bahrain or Qatar, they can pass for only having ever entered Jordan.
Two things:
First, Caesarism was not simply the result of Caesar’s conquest of Gaul and the sudden realization that the republic was just too big. It was the result of two centuries (at least) of corruption and rot that made republican government impossible. Remember that before Caesar there was Sulla, and before Sulla there were the Gracchi. Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Gibbon (and others) say that Caesarism became final after the victory in the Second Punic War. (Which not incidentally added Spain and all of Sicily and Sardinia to Rome’s territory.) When republics go, they tend to go one of two ways: conquest by an outsider, or seizure by a Caesar. We shouldn't be too dismissive of Caesarism as it's quite likely America will end up with it.
Second, don’t make too much of Washington’s “czars”. They are all failures, both at what they are supposed to do (solve problems and “get things done”) and at what the name implies (centralizing power). The actual idea is more benign than the name makes it sound. It is merely to cut through and coordinate the various intra-agency clutter when different departments have responsibility (and resources) for part, but not all, of a given problem. The reason czars are always failures should be a (rare) source of hope, in that it shows the resiliency of the system to resist centralization and unilateral domination. All the established “equity” players zealously defend their turf. The czar always has infinitesimally smaller budgets and staffs and so always loses. Sadly, they tend never to go away, either, but at least they are not expensive and don’t do much harm.
3/ Right here on iSteve there there was a positive article about George Kennan the architect of 'Containment' of Russia.
But that can't be right because why would non-Jewish Americans want to contain Russia?
You're an intellectually dishonest ethnic activist, so there's no point arguing with you. But the non-Jewish American George Kennan was the architect of containment against the Soviet Union, not Russia. Kennan did not have the ethnic hostility against Russians that people like you do.
George F. Kennan was the second George Kennan to be an expert on Russia. His grandfather's cousin George Kennan had been an explorer of Siberia and frequently lectured in America about the evils of czarism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Kennan_(explorer)
George F. Kennan was the second George Kennan to be an expert on Russia. His grandfather's cousin George Kennan had been an explorer of Siberia and frequently lectured in America about the evils of czarism:
George F. Kennan did not have a particular ethnic animus against Russians, unlike commenters like anony-mouse. This is clear in his books and memoirs. I doubt George Kennan did either.
Actually, Kennan's argument was that Soviet behavior derived from its Russian antecedents. The famous "X" article was entitled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" and while one source he identified as Marxism, he said that the more fundamental source was the Russian historical experience (as outlined by Steve).
Kennan later renounced all that, of course.
Anonydroid at 1:00 PM said: I don't know one American Jew who is in favor of WWG, or who wants a new rearmament, or gives a rat's tuchus about any of this.
Take your J-meds, Steve.
Hunsdon said: Know personally, or know of?
I don't know one American Jew who is in favor of WWG, or who wants a new rearmament, or gives a rat's tuchus about any of this.
Take your J-meds, Steve.
Again, you're conflating "Jews" with "The Jews", i.e., the Jewish community. The distinction is crucial, as the policy positions of the community are not based on polls of its members. Organizations like the JCPA decide what is a "Jewish issue". Recently, for instance, the JCPA tweeted that immigration is a Jewish issue.
https://twitter.com/theJCPA/status/436901801175293952
A real read of history will reveal gays have always gravitated toward the halls of power, if allowed to do so.
Basically, the problem is counterbalancing big government and big business. Neither big government (Putin) nor big business (Khodorkovsky, Soros, Adelson)is absolutely bad, it's a matter of getting one to contain the other.
As for the gays, a lot of them have seen the light about Israel and shun the attempts of "pinkwashing" Israel. Perhaps These people may some time understand that they are now used to pinkwash Jewish resentment against Russia.
>A lot of people are really disappointed that Putin is not anti-Semitic<
Hitler once reportedly bellowed, "I decide who is Aryan."
Similarly, it isn't non-Jews who decide who is antisemitic.
"The Russians have since felt that while they may not have all that much going for them in terms of access to the ocean or other geographical and economic advantages, they at least stick together and follow orders."
No, you got it backwards. Russians are terrible at following orders (except in rare cases of national emergency.) You know who is great at following orders? The Anglos, including Americans. Despite all the flapping about individualism, the Anglos make excellent little cogs in a machine. That's why the governments they set up always function so well.
The Russians, on the other hand, tend to ignore the authorities. As in, not doing what the authorities happen to demand today. This is the problem that bedeviled the czars and the Soviets. As someone said, "In Russia, the harshness of laws is mitigated by their optionality." Some rulers tried to deal with it by being double-plus harsh (Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Stalin). They may have been successful for a while but then it was always back to the traditional pohuism.
"Rainer said...
Neither big government (Putin) nor big business (Khodorkovsky, Soros, Adelson)is absolutely bad,..."
Actually, big business like those of Khodorkovsky, Soros, and Adelson is - absolutely - bad. Khodorkovsky effectively a stole a massive state enterprise for himself, Soros is a money-shuffler, Adelson is a casino magnate. They have made fortunes in wholly unproductive and exploitative ways. They are not Carnegie, Rockefeller, or Ford - captains of industry - ruthless, no doubt - but who built productive enterprises.
< I don't know one American Jew who is in favor of WWG, or who wants a new rearmament, or gives a rat's tuchus about any of this.>
Pauline Kael, are you still hanging around here?
@Hundson
Know personally. Of course I "know of" Jews who feel this way, I "know of" Christians, atheists and Dominicans who feel this way.
In my random sampling of Silent Majority Jews, no one wants this war. They all watched Sochi. Doesn't anyone remember the failed boycott?
This is not true. Putin went after the Jewish oligarchs because they were threats to his consolidation of power. Their Jewishness was incidental.
What's not incidental is why all of the oligarch's who happened to arise out of the ruins of the oppressive USSR are Jewish. The world needs to have a serious discussion about that.
Jews have good verbal skills. Gays have good verbal skills. Wouldn't we then expect Jewish gays to have very good verbal skills, and to have a strong ability to dominate media for that reason?
You're either joking or cynical, and either way your statement lacks intelligence.
They don't have the political culture to support a representative democracy (and we are losing it!)
Actually, their relative (to the USA) demographic homogeneity would lead to a better functioning democracy than we have. However, since democracy has been largely outed as a sham, especially in a diverse nation, the Russians would have to be deemed insane or foreign occupied to institute that form of government.
The only diasporic groups that did not disappear were the ones that developed or originally possessed some resistance to the forces of assimilation
ie: de-facto anti-miscagenation/anti-intermarriage edicts and extremely effective conversion deterrents. It also greatly helps if at the same time they promote miscegenation and intermarriage between the other co-nationalist ethnic groups. It's a simple formula, really.
As for democracy, it's turning out to have been a fluke. It's too exploitable to be lasting.
Yes.
Czarism, which is Russian for Caesarism, is not the default political system of humanity.
There is no default political system of humanity. There are only differing political systems that ultimately best benefit different groups of people. The trick is to suss out which system is ultimately truly in the best long term benefit of the majority. The cult of the individual leads to minority rule and ultimately despotic communism, unless such a system skips the pretense of social change and institutes the communist government militarily. Either way works, it just depends on what you can get away with. However, as we saw with the USSR failure, the military method is ultimately undermined by the living culture and values of the people. Czarism is the opposite end of the spectrum, which is why it still works for nationalist/majority benefit.
Well, yes and no. Caeserism, Czarist Absolutism, Monarchy, Dictatorship, etc., they are all different flavors of autocracy
A vast and fatal oversimplification. The differing social structures underlying each respective form of government informs the rule and the interests of the leader. Dictatorship societies tend to be communist/left-wing in nature, societies that underlie czarist or monarchical governments tend to be conservative or nationalist. Whether you lump these governments together and miscategorize them on purpose or because you are not informed is irrelevant; the point is that it's inaccurate to do so on any meaningful level.
Our modern republics are beginning to resemble emerging oligarchies, where a smaller group of powerful people actually lead the state, while political power for the greater common citizenry is waning.
This is precisely indicative of a drift toward a communist social structure and the government that results. It is not indicative of a drift toward a monarchical or czarist autocracy that is enforced by the strong political cohesion of the people. This is why conflating all of these forms of government under the broad term "autocracy" is not useful in practical analysis.
I do not have an 'ethnic animus' against Russians
People can hold an ethnic animus against another population while believing that they don't and that they're motivated purely by morally good reasons.
@Steve Sailer. I recommend you read this very interesting analysis of Putin's Russia. The blogger makes the point Putin is defying the Anglo-Zionist empire. http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.ie/2014/04/a-new-cold-war-has-begun-let-us-embrace.html
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