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The Limerick “pogrom”: Creating Jewish victimhood

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A very curious article has appeared in the March 14th edition of the UK Daily Mail (“Goldman Sachs’ touch of darkness“), a comment on Greg Smith’s recent indictment of the Goldman Sachs’ culture of greed and client exploitation. The article in question was written by one Alex Brummer, a journalist who writes for both the Daily Mail and the London-based Jewish Chronicle. Brummer’s specialty, it seems, is economic matters and he has a number of strange points to make in relation to the recent revelations that Goldman Sachs has been referring to its clients as “muppets” for some time.  The article begins by stating that the bank has been “sapped of its confidence” following a series of scandals “during and after the great financial panic,” under the chairmanship of Lloyd Blankfein.

If that doesn’t pull at your heartstrings, Brummer goes on to state that “the most enduring image of Blankfein era is that of the great, vampire squid drawn in an excoriating article in Rolling Stone magazine in 2010. What Rolling Stone does not seem to have realised is that this was a rerun of a notoriously anti-Semitic campaign by the late 19th-century polemicist ‘Coin’ Harvey against the Rothschild family. Whatever mistakes Blankfein and Goldman may have made, it does not deserve that.” (Matt Taibbi’s actual words, from his article “The Great American Bubble Machine: From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression“:  “The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Read more

Falling down the memory hole: Reflections on the 1980s Soviet counterculture, Part 5

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During my pre-hospital days, when I still hung out with a lot of ‘the system people’, I had been if not an ‘honorary Jew’ then certainly a sympathizer. Therefore it often happened that my Jewish friends and acquaintances did not mind my presence when they felt like saying an honest thing or two about the ‘damned natives.’ I never argued with them but listened with interest. Here are a few examples.

‘The system’ Jews seldom used the word ‘Russians’ but preferred euphemisms such as ‘common oafs’, ‘proles,’ ‘peasants,’ ‘ignoramuses,’ ‘dull wits,’ or ‘straights.’ Once, a guy was telling me about the book Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut that he had just read. I remembered how he described in his own words an episode where US POWs arrive at a German concentration camp. The main character of the novel mentions Soviet POWs standing against a barbed wire that divided the British and the Russian areas, begging for food. His offhand comment ran something like: ‘If you can imagine! All these oafs could think of only one thing — the grub! Imagine what a dull bunch of bastards! Especially compared to the Brits — always clean and orderly Brits!’

He failed to notice what Vonnegut was driving at — that the Soviet POWs, unlike the British ones, were barred from the Red Cross food, so they were slowly dying from starvation. Yet, for him it was a proof of their ‘oafishness.’ Read more

Falling down the memory hole: Reflections on the 1980s Soviet counterculture, Part 4

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It was a cold and sickly gray February morning of 1983 when I walked into a shrink’s office and said that I had a severe mental and drug problem. The office belonged to Kirov’s District Psychiatric clinic of the city of Leningrad. The shrink I was to see was Dr. Dvorkin.  My ‘system’ friends especially recommended him to me as a man who could be trusted, who knew ‘what’s up’ and who ‘understood’ and ‘approved.’ It was a popular but totally fictitious belief: that some Jewish shrinks were such anti-Soviet dissenters that they knowingly granted the ‘system people’ fake diagnoses that released the latter from the draft. Of course, Jewish shrinks were more lenient to young Jewish patients, but still they followed the official regulations. I learned about this only later.

So here he was — a jolly Jewish fellow of staggering proportions with spectacular jowls hanging on a collar of his white medical coat (obese people were extremely rare in the Soviet Union — he was the third truly obese man I had met in my life).   Read more

Falling down the memory hole: Reflections on the 1980s Soviet counterculture, Part 3

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The ‘system’ members always proclaimed that the drugs were necessary for artistic creativity. Using drugs was also a form of political protest and an activity that distinguished the self-ordained elite from the vodka-soaked proletarian crowd.

The most common drug — cannabis — was easily obtainable through friends and acquaintances, but it was also freely shared among the ‘people.’ Drug pushing in its pure commercial sense was uncommon, at least within the ‘system’ crowd. In fact, it was easy to obtain ‘weed’ for free.

Speaking of drug dealers, the first one I encountered was a 24-year-old Jewish guy nicknamed ‘Michael the Kind’. He was a truly mysterious figure, and incidentally, he was the person who gave me my first taste of pot. I met him through a personal introduction. Supposedly, he was an excellent guitar player who enjoyed being a local celebrity while leading the life of a carefree vagrant. What traditional Jews call a ‘luftmensch’.

According to rumors, his father defected to the West a long time ago while Michael continued to live with his mother who doted on him incessantly. He neither held a job nor did he study. This despite the Soviet law that people convicted of a ‘parasitical lifestyle’ could go to prison for three years. (You were a parasite if you were unemployed more than three months.) Read more

Falling down the memory hole: Reflections on the 1980s Soviet counterculture, Part 2

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My personal involvement with ‘the system’ had seemingly innocent origins. All through my adolescent years, I had been dreaming of becoming a rock musician. Of course, harboring such dreams, especially by one born in the Soviet Union, smacked of a childish naiveté. For one thing, the Soviet authorities viewed rock music as a political and cultural deviation—and a sad result of the influence of ‘the rotten West.’ Theoretically, it was possible to join a low-profile commercial band and play in restaurants and at weddings, but I aspired to higher (or at least different) things.

But in pursuing my dreams, I did not appreciate another type of obstacle to my dreams.  Spheres of influence in the USSR were clearly divided along many lines, including nationality. The Russian majority firmly controlled the government and military (you needed personal connections or better still, you had to be born into the right family to be able to get on the fast track to success). The Jews dominated culture and entertainment—clearly a demotion from their former positions as leading communists. In fact, this demotion was one of the reasons the Jews felt wronged by the Soviet system and why many of them were in silent or no-so-silent opposition to it. But in all artistic spheres and in a great many other liberal spheres, the Jews reigned supreme. For instance, in the early 1980s, the vast majority of movie actors, musicians, writers and journalists were Jews. They were  slightly less represented in the medical and legal professions, but still Jews promoted Jews, so if you weren’t one, it was useless to try to squeeze into certain professions. Read more

Falling down the memory hole: Reflections on the 1980s Soviet counterculture, Part 1

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This essay is a reflection on certain aspects of my past in connection with a counterculture of the former Soviet Union and its main architects, participants and driving force — the Jews.  I had been a disillusioned young man at the time I joined the so-called ‘system’ movement, and although my personal involvement with it was rather brief, the very association with ‘the system’ and its people — in itself quite a bizarre experience — has drastically altered the consequent course of my life.  It is still difficult for me to write about ‘the system’ (the original slang name for the Soviet counterculture was ‘the system’, or ‘sistema’; its participants or members often termed themselves ‘hippies’, ‘pacifists’ or ‘punks’, but those names were completely arbitrary. The general nickname they preferred to use was ‘a man of the system’ or, ‘sistemny’ or plural — ‘the people’/ ‘peoply’).

Although ‘the system’ was an important and visible feature of Soviet urban life, one hardly hears of it nowadays, as if this particular phenomenon had disappeared down the Orwellian memory hole without a trace. Allegedly, it had united hundreds if not thousands of young men, Jews and non-Jews alike, who shared a rebellious attitude towards the Soviet System. It promised to break stagnation by the united strength of the younger and disillusioned generation of Soviet youth who had nothing to lose, as they had not got even chains. Yet, all these silent protests and supposedly rebellious activities came to naught; they disappeared into the past, or they were deliberately erased. Read more

A Closer Look at What Happened to Pat Buchanan: Part II

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Rachel Maddow: Trying not to cry during interview with Pat Buchanan

Criticism of Zionist Projects Not a Problem at MSNBC

Having found defenders on the left, Buchanan started working for MSNBC in July 2002, the ADL’s disapproval notwithstanding. Criticism of Israel-First foreign policy never seemed to be a problem for him there. James Kirchick, a harsh critic, complains in the Columbia Journalism Review:

The very same “left” which Buchanan decries today as unwilling to hear his voice was more than happy to lap up his commentary in one crucial realm: foreign policy. [James Kirchick, “Pat Buchanan and His Enablers,” Columbia Journalism Review, 23 February 2011]

On Buchanan and Press, MSNBC’s imitation of CNN’s Crossfire, both the rightwing Buchanan and the leftwing Bill Press agreed that the United States should not attack Iraq. Opposition to Zionist or pro-Zionist aggression seems to have been more or less the established view at MSNBC when Buchanan started there.

In addition to Pat Buchanan and Press, MSNBC’s Phil Donahue and Chris Matthews were dishing out skepticism of the justifications for war on a regular basis. Since the current president of MSNBC, Phil Griffin, was the producer of Hardball with Chris Matthews during its strongest anti-war period, and since Griffin was also a longtime personal friend of Keith Olbermann’s from the 1980s when they both worked at CNN, it would appear that Griffin does not have any objection to airing anti-war commentary. Read more