There’s an old saying that the winners write history. One of the
most important consequences of Jews being a dominant intellectual and media
elite is that they write their own history. Events like the devastation of the USS Liberty
[
http://www.amconmag.com/blog/the-uss-libertys-final-chapter/ ] by Israel during the Six-Day War, the role of Jewish neocons in
promoting the Iraq war, and the history of anti-Semitism generally (a
major topic of Separation and Its Discontents) become arenas where
unpleasant realities are simply expunged or are given apologetic treatments. On
the other hand, Jewish victimization during World War II [ See The Holocaust® Industry
or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Finkelstein - Ed.
]
has achieved the status
of a moral touchstone and is massively promoted in the media and in the
educational system to the point that it has become a prime weapon in the push
for massive non-European immigration, multiculturalism, and advancing other
Jewish causes (see
here,
p. 95). Naysayers are categorized as anti-Semites or self-hating Jews.
A prime example of the ability of Jews to manipulate the
historical record is expunging the critical Jewish role in Communism during the
Bolshevik Revolution and in the ensuing decades — the main topic of
Solzhenitsyn’s Chapter 24 (“Breaking
Away from Bolshevism -
http://200yearstogether.wordpress.com/2010/10/15/chapter-24-breaking-away-from-the-bolshevism/”).
Solzhenitsyn ascribes the fervor of the early Soviet government to the intensity
of Jewish support. But, as noted in previous chapters, the very large imbalances
in elite positions favoring Jews characteristic of the early decades diminished,
especially after World War II, when Jews began to be specifically targeted, as
during the anti-cosmopolite campaign of the early 1950s. Israel also exerted its
primeval pull on Jews, especially after the Six-Day War when the USSR supported
the Arabs. The result was an upsurge in overt Jewish nationalism, with
synagogues filled and societies devoted to studying Jewish history, Jewish
culture, and the Hebrew language.
Jews turned against Communism but in doing so “almost none” of
them ever acknowledged “their formerly active and cruel role in the triumph of
communism in Russia.” “The whole educated society, the
cultured circle, had genuinely failed to notice any Russian
grievances in the 1920s and 1930s; they didn’t even assume that such
could exist — yet they instantly recognized the Jewish grievances as soon as
those emerged.”
The level of self-deception is truly breathtaking. Acutely
sensitive to any injustice toward Jews, they were completely tone deaf in
comprehending the suffering of others or their role in causing it. A
Jewish author writes of the attraction of Jewish intellectuals to Marxism as
motivated by idealistic visions of liberalism and humanism. Solzhenitsyn scoffs:
“Liberalism and humanism? True, but only after Stalin’s death, while coming to
their senses.” Even the concession that Jews were attracted to Marxism is lost
on the great majority of Jewish writers who “find that under communism there was
nothing but Jewish suffering! … Is it really possible to forget everything so
completely?”
One can only read in amazement the Jewish writer who claims "If
... one takes a bird's-eye view of the entire history of the Soviet period, then
the latter appears as one gradual process of destruction of the Jews."
Solzhenitsyn comments: “Note — the entire history! We investigated
this in the previous chapters and saw that even without taking into account
Jewish over-representation in the top Soviet circles, there had been a period of
well-being for many Jews with mass migration to cities, open access to higher
education and a blossoming of culture.” Solzhenitsyn is incredulous at the claim
by a Jewish writer that “it is not possible to cultivate a loyal Soviet elite
among them [the Jews]”:
Oh my God! Was not this method working flawlessly for 30 years
and only recently went awry? So where did all those glorious and famous names —
whom we’ve seen in such numbers — came from? And why were their eyes kept so
tightly shut that they couldn’t see the essence of Soviet rule for thirty to
forty years? How is it that their eyes were opened only now? And what opened
them? Well, it was mostly because of the fact that now that power had suddenly
turned around and began pushing the Jews not only out of its ruling and
administrative circles, but out of cultural and scientific establishments also.
Solzhenitsyn quotes several Jewish writers who acknowledge the
role of Jews in the most murderous regime in history, but they are few and far
between. One such writer is particularly trenchant in his criticism of these
Jews with no historical memory, writing of "our young Zionists who demonstrate
so much contempt toward Russia, her rudeness and savagery, contrasting all this
with [the worthiness of] the ancient Jewish nation. I saw it pretty clearly,
that those who today sing hosanna to Jewry, glorifying it in its entirety
(without the slightest sense of guilt or the slightest potential to look
inside), [not long ago] beat their breasts in ecstasy: ‘Long live the great
brotherhood of nations! Eternal Glory to the Father and Friend, the genius
Comrade Stalin!’”
Tellingly, Solzhenitsyn compares the ever-guilty and remorseful
Germany with the behavior of Soviet Jews. Germany has made unending payments to
Israel and to Holocaust victims, and the slightest advocacy of German
sovereignty in regulating its borders and ensuring a future for ethnic Germans
is met with outpourings of guilt about their past. On the other hand, there is a
complete lack of guilt and remorse among Jews for their role in the destruction
of Russia, and the vast majority of Jews are intensely committed an overtly
ethnonationalist Israel. A Jew who did repent for the evil perpetrated by Jews
against Russia “was bitterly ridiculed”—certainly not the fate of guilt-prone
Germans.
The result was that Jews, after they “zealously helped to
exterminate [the Russian intelligentsia] during the first decade after the
revolution” now became the vanguard of the new revolution against the USSR. Jews
were responsible for publicizing Soviet injustices in the West, but the great
majority of these Soviet dissidents never apologized for the behavior of their
Jewish ancestors in the early decades of Soviet rule. Quite a few cared nothing
about the fate of non-Jews. Their protests were solely about the treatment of
Jews and the ability of Jews to emigrate from the USSR.
As an exemplar of these tendencies, Solzhenitsyn devotes
considerable space to,
a poet who was labeled by the arbiters of culture as "the most popular people's
poet," the "bard of modern Russia." [ The
Wikipedia -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Galich gives absolutely no hint of his hypocrisy - Editor
]. Solzhenitsyn’s account drips with disgust
and scorn. Galich is representative of the Jews Solzhenitsyn discusses in his
chapter on World War II [
http://200yearstogether.wordpress.com/2010/10/15/ ]:
He avoided military service by claiming “poor health” but then
"unexpectedly easily became the head of the literature section of the local
Drama Theatre" — obviously suggesting that Galich benefited from his Jewish
connections. He spent the war safely entertaining troops well behind the front
lines.
After the war, he smoothly morphed into a widely acclaimed
screenwriter, comfortably spouting the “stupefying official Soviet lies” that
were required for success in the media. (The parallels to the current recipe for
media success in the West are painfully obvious.) But as Jews generally soured
on the regime, Galich became an influential critic of the regime. His songs
criticized current Soviet leadership, narrowly focusing on “their privileged way
of life,” while generally ignoring the bloody early decades. As someone who
suffered through his experience in the Gulag, Solzhenitsyn is particularly
outraged that Galich represented himself as having been a camp inmate; and "from
the camp we were sent right to the front!," implying also that he served as a
soldier at the front during the war.
But even worse is Galich’s failure to apologize for his own past
as a purveyor of Soviet lies: “He had never expressed a single word of
his personal remorse, not a word of personal repentance, anywhere!”
(emphasis in text). Galich’s Jewish identity and sense of Jewish victimization
assumed center stage: "Our train leaves for Auschwitz today and daily." Galich
the “folk poet” had nothing but hatred and contempt for the Russian people. In
his songs, all the evildoers are Russians, often referred to with ethnic slurs.
There is not a single heroic Russian soldier, worker, or intellectual, “not even
a single decent [Russian] camp inmate (he assigned the role of the main camp
inmate to himself).” On the other hand, all of his Jewish characters are “either
humiliated, or suffering, or imprisoned and dying in a camp” (while guarded by
Russians), despite the fact that Jews remained overrepresented in elite
positions even after the post-WWII campaign for greater non-Jewish participation
among the elite.
What a short memory they have — not only Galich, but his whole
audience who were sincerely, heartily taking in these sentimental lines! … They
have sincerely and completely forgotten [the past]. Indeed, it is so difficult
to remember bad things about yourself.
Notice that Solzhenitsyn is saying that the Jews had “sincerely
and completely forgotten” about the past. This is yet another example of Jewish
self-deception in accord with their ethnic self-image. It goes without saying
that behind this avalanche of self-deception is a towering ethnocentrism that
biases Jewish self-perceptions—the point of
Chapter 8
of Separation and Its Discontents [
http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/SAIDchap8.pdf ] Jews steadfastly believe
their own myths while delighting in skewering the myths of the peoples they live
among. This is what makes Jewish issues fundamentally insoluble: With very few
exceptions as noted by Solzhenitsyn (inevitably labeled “self-hating Jews”),
there can never be common ground because Jewish self-perceptions are inevitably
skewed by their ethnocentrism. They simply fail to see how their behavior as an
elite, whether in the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s or in the contemporary
United States and throughout the West, could conflict with the legitimate
interests of others.
A recent example is neocon warrior
Joshua Muravchik
reviewing [
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Muravchik ] a book on the Jewish refuseniks and therefore covering the same ground as
Solzhenitsyn’s Chapter 24:
[It is ironic} that Communism, a monstrosity in whose
birth a number of deracinated Jews played a shamefully large part, was
eventually brought down by acts undertaken in disproportionate measure by re-racinated
Jews: Israelis, Americans, and, above all, Soviet citizens.
The proposal that the Jews responsible for the birth of Communism
were “deracinated” stands as needing no defense or explanation. No need to
explain Jewish ethnic networking at all the elite levels of Soviet society
during the most horrific days of the Soviet regime—a point emphasized repeatedly
by Solzhenitsyn in several chapters. No need to discuss the
great mass of evidence [ http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/CofC-chap3.pdf"
class="style444 ]
that Jewish radicals comprised a very significant, mainstream Jewish subculture
that retained a strong ethnic identity throughout the early decades of the 20th
century. (Solzhenitsyn has some excellent examples in Chapter 27, soon to be
posted.) Muravchik is confident that his audience is quite prepared to believe
that Jews were not really Jews when they served as Stalin’s willing
executioners, but then became heroic Jews as they acted to bring down the Evil
Empire. Meanwhile, as a proudly racinated Jew, Muravchik puts the interests of
Israel first, for example, by writing propaganda pieces for Commentary aimed at denying that
neoconservative foreign policy prescriptions are tailored to benefit Israel and
that imputations to that effect amount to “anti-Semitism” (see my review
of Muravchik’s role in neoconservatism
here -
http://www.toqonline.com/archives/v4n2/TOQv4n2MacDonald.pdf ).
So it goes.
In conclusion, I can only agree wholeheartedly with Solzhenitsyn
for the need to dispassionately think about Jewish issues, but without fear:
We have to get used to talk about Jewish question not in a hush
and fearfully, but clearly, articulately and firmly. We should do so not
overflowing with passion, but sympathetically aware of both the unusual and
difficult Jewish world history and centuries of our Russian history that are
also full of significant suffering. Then the mutual prejudices, sometimes very
wild, would disappear and calm reason would reign.
The only problem with this is that Solzhenitsyn shows that the
vast majority of Jews are simply incapable of dispassionate analysis that would
in any way imply criticism of Jews. And that in turn implies that a real
discussion is impossible.