In the 1930s: Chapter 19 of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s “200 Years Together”

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The project of translating Alexandr Solzhenitisyn’s 200 Years Together into English continues apace. The 18,000-word Chapter 19, “In the 1930s” is now available (see here). The decade of the 1930s was tragic almost beyond description. The main idea advanced by Solzhenitsyn is that all segments of Soviet society suffered, including Jews who had been members of the elite. However, the suffering of Jews pales in comparison to the suffering of the Ukrainian and Russian farmers undergoing forced collectivization. Moreover, Jews were never targeted as Jews, and in general Jews remained vastly overrepresented in elite positions throughout the period, even after the purges.

Solzhenitsyn emphasizes the culpability of the West. The brutal process of industrialization was carried out with the cooperation of Western merchants and bankers eager to do business with the Soviet Union. Such commercial cooperation had been prohibited under the Czars because Jewish activist organizations had pressured governments not to do business with Russia because of its treatment of Jews — much as there are now sanctions against trading with Iran because of the concerns of the Israel Lobby. As we also see today, financial and commercial interests were not concerned with ideological commitment to capitalism or with human rights but simply sought to expand their profits.  Trade was allowed because there was the perception in the West that “Soviet power would not oppress the Jews, but on the contrary, that many of them would remain at the levers of power.” Read more

“Russia for the Russians”

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Nationalist Demonstrators Clash with Police in Moscow

From a Russian Correspondent: In Moscow on December 5 there was a murder of a Russian young male (a soccer team fan) by a gang of “guests” from North Caucasus, who are ethnically distinct Turkish-like peoples (Chechnya, Dagestan, etc.) This was the second murder over the course of last week. (Here is a Russian-language account which is fairly readable in English provided by Google Translator.) As usual, politically-correct or/and corrupt police released all suspects but one.

On the next day around 7:00PM over a thousand people assembled at local prosecutor’s office demanding a real investigation. As no one spoke to them, they marched, halting traffic on a major street for 40 minutes (see video on this page. This article notes that the demonstrators were shouting “Russia for the Russian” and “Moscow for Muscovites.” Read more

Bernard Lewis as an Academic Ethnic Activist

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In doing some research on Geert Wilders, I came across a recent article by Andrew G. Bostrom favorably describing Bernard Lewis’s views of Islam (“Geert Wilders and the Rise of Islamic Political Correctness,” Dec. 8, 2010). Bernard Lewis is the best known academic expert on the Muslim world, so his views carry quite a bit of weight. Bostrom quotes a 1954 essay of Lewis as follows:

I turn now from the accidental to the essential factors, to those deriving from the very nature of Islamic society, tradition, and thought. The first of these is the authoritarianism, perhaps we may even say the totalitarianism, of the Islamic political tradition… There are no parliaments or representative assemblies of any kind, no councils or communes, no chambers of nobility or estates, no municipalities in the history of Islam; nothing but the sovereign power, to which the subject owed complete and unwavering obedience as a religious duty imposed by the Holy Law…For the last thousand years, the political thinking of Islam has been dominated by such maxims as “tyranny is better than anarchy,” and “whose power is established, obedience to him is incumbent.” Read more

White Victims Ignored by DOJ

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From the News We Already Knew Dept.:  The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has found that the U.S. Dept. of Justice ignores White victims of voter intimidation and other civil rights infractions.  Notable:  One DOJ attorney, Christopher Coates, chief of the Voting Rights Act section, bravely defied DOJ orders not to testify about the anti-White bias.  Coates relayed that some attorneys would simply refuse to work on cases where Whites were the victims.  He has since been stripped of his position and now works as an Assistant US Attorney in South Carolina.

Another  attorney, J. Christian Adams, the lead prosecutor in the Black Panther voter intimidation case that was scuttled by DOJ, resigned over the incident. Read more

The “Debate” between Alan Dershowitz and Dennis Prager

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For decades, “The 92nd St. Y”—as in Young Men’s Hebrew Association—has been a bastion of progressive thought in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The community center describes itself as “a proudly Jewish institution that reaches out to people of every race, ethnicity, religion, age and economic class.”

Last fall, the Y featured a revealing discussion on “the Left, the Right, and Judaism” between the conservative moralist Dennis Prager and superlawyer, liberal activist, and Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz. David Frum joined them as moderator. It was a discussion between Jews, for Jews, and about Jewish interests, which is something Jews do quite a bit of. Highlights can be viewed here and here. Read more

Smells Like White Guilt: Christian Lander’s Whiter Shades of Pale

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Christian Lander: Whiter Shades of Pale: The Stuff White People Like, Coast to Coast, from Seattle’s Sweaters to Maine’s Microbrews; New York: Random House, 2010

I saw Christian Lander in San Francisco on Tuesday, December 2nd, speaking to a tiny sweater-clad audience at a small independent bookstore in the Marina District. Lander told the story of the amazing success of his blog Stuff White People Like which in about six months grew from a private joke to a New York Times bestselling book (with a reported $300,000 advance). (See Christopher Donovan’s review of the Stuff White People Like book.)

In his talk, Lander made it very clear that he is not talking about all White people, but just “the right kind of White people,” as opposed to “the wrong kind of White people.”

The right kind of White people are urban, college-educated, and from upper-middle and upper-class backgrounds. And, most importantly, they are liberal. Read more

Letter from Sweden

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Editor’s note: This was submitted as a comment but I thought it was of general interest and would get more visibility as a blog post. It is slightly edited from the original.

In Sweden the arguments from the elites are very similar.  Our elites claim that “structural racism” in the Swedish culture is a deep problem in our society.  At the same time our elite argue that Swedish culture and the Swedish people are social construction.

A very common argument is that “Swedish culture is the sum of all cultures”.  Often, our elite begin a debate with the rhetorical question: “Who is a Swede” when they argue for multiculturalism.   What they want to do is to tell us that we as Swedes do not exist. We, as Swedes can only exist when we discriminate against immigrants. This kind of argument was easy for the nationalist Swedish Democrats (SD) to reject. They just say, we exist as a people and as a people we have the right to decide who and how many people can come here to Sweden moreover, they should adopt our values.   In one debate, Congressman (SD) Matthias Karlsson just said “If we as a people do not exist, how can the Kurdish people exist, and how can you claim identity politics for them”. The journalist and his political opponent just gasp. Read more