Jews and the Left

Another Attempt to Control Historical Writing on the Role of Jews in the USSR

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Apropos the recent series on chapters from Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together (especially Chapter 18), a new textbook for university students in Russia emphasizes the elite status of Jews in the early decades of the USSR. (JTA, August 8, 2010:  “Russian Textbook Seen as Anti-Semitic“) The Foreword states, “For the greater part of its 70-year history, the USSR was ruled by people of non-Russian nationality.” The book also states that, “By the 1930s, the Jewish nation was the leader among those represented in the Communist party and the state machinery, in Science and Art.”

At this point, the elite status of Soviet Jews during this period is common knowledge among scholars (e.g., Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century), but that doesn’t mean that scholars are free to draw attention to ethnicity in textbooks intended for university students. Predictably, any such effort is regarded as “anti-Semitic”: “some are calling [the book] anti-Semitic because it counts the number of Jews in Soviet governments.” As in the US, Jews are the elite that “cannot tell its name.”

Jewish activist organizations go ballistic over any mention that Jews are a disproportionate portion of American elites–truth is irrelevant. Those who stray into this forbidden territory soon learn that their lives have just gotten a lot more complicated. The result is that people behave like well-conditioned rats in a psychology experiment and keep their mouths shut no matter how obvious Jewish overrepresentation is. (“The New Elite Doesn’t Officially Exist“

The theme of the textbook is that the Russians were ruled by non-Russians. Rule by outsiders had predictably disastrous results for those without power: it was during this period that the most horrific mass murders of Russians occurred. The common sense of it is that Russians would not have murdered huge numbers of their own people in the name of international socialism.  (It takes Puritans to do that.) This leads to an often-repeated theme on this website: It is the ultimate folly to allow non-Whites — especially non-Whites with powerful historic grudges — to become a majority and develop the power to rule over Whites.

Also predictably, the article uses guilt-by-association arguments. An author of the textbook was the advisor to a student who is now on trial for murdering two anti-fascists, and the university where the text is used is “tainted by anti-Semitism” because it invited a Holocaust dissident to speak.

Okay. But does that show that the USSR was not ruled by non-Russians during this period or that Jews  were not an elite during the worst excesses of the  Soviet regime? The same can be said about the comment from the Jewish apologist attacking the idea that deportation of the Crimean Tatars was caused by the necessity of clearing the territory for the proposed Jewish republic. Even if true, it doesn’t go to the heart of the matter. Here’s what Solzhenitsyn says in Chapter 18:

The settlement of the Jews in the Crimea provoked the hostility of the Tatars (“Are they giving Crimea to the Jews?”) and dissatisfaction of local landless peasants. Larin writes “evil and false rumors are circulating throughout the country about removal of land from non-Jews, the expulsion of non-Jews and the particularly strong support the authorities have given to the Jewish settlers”. It went so far that the chairman of the CIK of the Crimean ASSR, Veli Ibraimov published an interview in the Simferopol paper Red Crimea (Sept 26, 1926) which Larin does not quote from, but which he claims was a manifestation of “evil bourgeois chauvinism” and a call for a pogrom.

Solzhenitsyn seems to agree that the Jews were treated very well by the government (with the help of foreign Jewish organizations), and he amply documents the resentments this caused among non-Jews. But he does not state that the Tatars were expelled because of Jewish settlement.

Of course, for all I know, the textbook doesn’t say that either. The Tatars weren’t deported until 1944, long after the project for Jewish settlement had fizzled.

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Edmund Connelly: American Government versus the People

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Edmund Connelly:  Five or six years ago, I saw some kind of film purportedly showing the mass execution of scores of Eastern Europeans by a cadre of cold-blooded murderers. I didn’t know about YouTube then, so I can’t say if that was the source.

In the film clip, lines of naked Whites, mostly blond haired, were brought into a cellar in pairs and threes, lined up against a wall, and given bullets to the back of the skull. The floor was, needless to say, awash in blood. It was a singularly chilling image, and I wish I had never seen it.

What was truly shocking was the fact that the victims behaved in such a sheep-like manner. It seemed obvious what their fate was, yet these young men and women meekly awaited their turn to die. Only one White, a young woman, even protested while being lined up against the wall in the cellar.

The way it was shown, the Whites were generally tall and lanky, while the dark-clad executioners were short, stocky, and looked stereotypically Jewish. One executioner seemed to find his job almost amusing.

The point of the film clip was to “prove” that Bolsheviks had without compunction systematically massacred untold numbers of Eastern Europeans. Again, I have no idea whatsoever of the veracity of the film, so I would never claim it proves anything.

Thus it was with the shock of recognition when I finally read Yuri Slezkine’s powerful 2004 book The Jewish Century. In it, Slezkine unabashedly paints a picture of Jewish killers nearly as vivid as in the above film.

We read that during the Red Terror in Russia, some expressed shock that seemingly pacifistic Jews changed almost overnight: “We were amazed by what we had least expected to encounter among the Jews: cruelty, sadism, and violence had seemed alien to a nation so far removed from physical, warlike activity; those who yesterday did not know how to use a gun are now found among the executioners and cutthroats.” 

Slezkine also describes a “formerly oppressed lover of liberty [who] had turned into a tyrant of ‘unheard-of despotic arbitrariness.’” He had been “transformed outwardly into a leather-clad person with a revolver and, in fact, lost all human likeness.” He could now be pictured as “standing in a Cheka basement doing ‘bloody but honorable revolutionary work.’”    

Most succinctly, Slezkine writes, “anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cheka stood a very good chance of finding himself confronted with and possibly shot by a Jewish investigator.” Estimates are that up to twenty million non-Jews died during that horrendous period.  

It is with this as a background that I read a recent comment by an acquaintance whom I respect. In the course of discussing how even the even American military is pushing “diversity” at the expense of getting the absolute best recruits, she wrote, “Since one of my nightmares is that the US Army will one day be ordered to gun down Americans, I am not too distressed to learn that incompetence is selected.” 

That took me by surprise because this person is not the excitable type and doesn’t relish hyperbole. Chillingly, it also resonated with a thread I found among last week’s VDARE columnists. 

For example, Pat Buchanan wrote that “In communist countries in the Cold War, all understood that the government did not represent the people. The state was at war with the nation. That idea is taking root in America — the idea that our government no longer seeks to represent us.” 

That’s probably putting it mildly. Paul Craig Roberts, back at the keyboard he had sworn to abandon, wrote more ominously about America’s likely future:

The Roman Empire lasted for centuries. The American one collapsed overnight. Rome’s corruption became the strength of her enemies, and the Western Empire was overrun. America’s collapse occurred when government ceased to represent the people and became the instrument of a private oligarchy. Decisions were made in behalf of short-term profits for the few at the expense of unmanageable liabilities for the many. Overwhelmed by liabilities, the government collapsed. 

Robertson added elsewhere, “On July 12, Niall Ferguson, an historian of empire, warned that the American empire could collapse suddenly from weakness brought on by its massive debts and that such a collapse could be closer than we think.”

Finally, Pastor Chuck Baldwin, Ph.D., quoted this comment on VDARE:

Skousen also chides the Post report for failing “to show how connected certain companies are to the mercenary contractor explosion that is growing into a force that will eventually be used to threaten individual liberties at home. The Powers That Be don’t need to hire foreign armies to clamp down on American dissidents. They are training hundreds of thousands of mercenary Americans to do it and using foreign wars to sort out who is ruthless enough or unprincipled enough to take orders without questions—similar to the way the Nazis sorted and selected those who would form the Brownshirt and SS brigades.”

I mostly certainly hope all these observers are wrong and that life may continue in America without state-sponsored terror. Unfortunately, evidence is appearing that makes more than a few of us nervous.

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Kevin MacDonald: Chapter 5 of 200 Years Together: “After the Murder of Alexander II”

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Chapter 5 of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together: “After the Murder of Alexander II” has now been translated and is the topic of the current TOO article. Again, the project is worthy of financial support for the translators. (I am not involved except as publicizing and commenting on the chapters.) This is an important background chapter for thinking about the Jewish role leading up to and after the Bolshevik Revolution. I encourage comments here. Kevin M

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Chapter 22 of 200 Years Together: “From the End of the War to Stalin’s Death”

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The English translation of Chapter 22 of 200 Years Together (“From the End of the War to Stalin’s Death”) is now available. (See here; donations are needed to complete the project.)

The main theme is the post-WWII purging of Jews from many of the powerful positions they held as an elite in Soviet society. Solzhenitsyn’s account is similar to other mainstream accounts, such as Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century. When Jewish intellectual activists write about the role of the Jews in the USSR, they generally focus on this period—Jews as the victims of anti-Jewish actions—rather than the status and role of Jews in previous decades. The following quote from a historian sums up the situation:

“‘Pushing’ Jews out of prestigious occupations that were crucial for the ruling elite in the spheres of manufacturing, administration, cultural and ideological activities, as well as limiting or completely barring the entrance of Jews into certain institutions of higher education gained enormous momentum in 1948-1953. … Positions of any importance in KGB, party apparatus, and military were closed to the Jews, and quotas were in place for admission into certain educational institutions and cultural and scientific establishments.”

Solzhenitsyn pointedly notes that Jews who had benefited from their nationality because they were officially classified as an oppressed minority under the Czar were now targeted on the basis of nationality:

Through its “fifth item” [i.e., the question about nationality] Soviet Jews were oppressed by the very same method used in the Proletarian Questionnaire, other items of which were so instrumental in crushing the Russian nobility, clergy, intellectuals and all the rest of the “former people” since the 1920’s.

Nevertheless, Jews were by no means eliminated from prestigious occupations. A historian comments that “Although the highest echelon of Jewish political elite suffered from administrative perturbations; but surprisingly it was not as bad as it seemed. … The main blow fell on the middle and the most numerous stratum of the Jewish elite — officials… and also journalists, professors and other members of creative intelligentsia.”

Anti-Jewish attitudes remained strong, fueled in large part because of the role of Jews as agents of oppression during the pre-war decades. For example, Solzhenitsyn notes that there were negative attitudes toward Jews returning to areas that the Germans had evacuated, particularly Ukraine.  Anti-Jewish attitudes combined both traditional ideas (Jews as wealthy: demanding restoration of prime residential property they owned before the war) as well as the role of Jews as government officials during the pre-war Soviet oppression.  A Jewish observer who claimed that Nikita Khrushchev had said, “In the past, the Jews committed many sins against the Ukrainian people. People hate them for that. We don’t need Jews in our Ukraine. It would be better if they didn’t return here.”

Jews complained about these attitudes as well as the fact that other groups were indifferent to Jewish suffering, but Solzhenitsyn notes the irony, quoting another Jewish observer who stated “that in the years of our terrible disasters, the Jewish intellectuals did not raise their voices in defense of the deported nations of Crimea and the Caucasus.” The example is a testimony to Jewish ethnocentrism–focused on their own suffering but never seeing, much less acknowledging, their indifference to the suffering of others or their role in causing it during the height  of their power.

There was a similar scene throughout Eastern Europe as Jews returned from exile after the war.

A great overrepresentation of Jews occurred in the post-war puppet Polish government, among managerial elites and in the Polish KGB, which would again result in miserable consequences for the Jews of Poland. After the war, other countries of Eastern Europe saw similar conflicts: “the Jews had played a huge role in economic life of all these countries,” and though they lost their possessions under Hitler, after the war, when “the restitution laws were introduced…  (they) affected very large numbers of new owners.” Upon their return Jews demanded the restoration of their property and enterprises that were not nationalized by Communists and this created a new wave of hostility towards them (22).)

Toward the end of Stalin’s life, he intensified the campaign against Jews, possibly resulting in his death in 1953. The main source of his hostility toward Jews was the age-old concern about loyalty: Jewish ties with Jews in other countries — in this case, Israel and the United States. During the Cold War there was a fear that Jewish sympathies would lie with Israel and the US as Israel’s main source of support. One result was that Stalin crushed the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (EAK), a Jewish organization that had been created to court support for the USSR among American Jews during WWII. During the Cold War, the ties between Soviet Jews and American Jews became a liability in the eyes of Soviet regime.

An indication of Jewish power is that the campaign against the EAK in 1952 was carried out “slowly and with great caution” because Stalin was “very well aware what kind of international storm would be triggered by using force.” It’s striking that the mass murders and deportations of the 1920s and 1930s were carried out without any international outcry, but the campaign against a rather small Jewish group was done very cautiously.  Thirteen Jews were executed.

This is similar to what happened when Stalin ordered the murder of two Jewish leaders of the international socialist movement, Henryk Ehrlich and Victor Alter in 1942. These murders of two Jewish leftist activists created an international incident, and there were protests by leftists around the world — the same people who had previously ignored or rationalized mass murder during the 1920s and 1930s. Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt made appeals to Stalin, and American Jewish leaders, such as Nahum Goldmann of the World Jewish Congress and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise of the American Jewish Congress (AJCongress), helped quell the uproar over the incident and shore up positive views of the Soviet Union among American Jews.

Another manifestation of Stalin’s anti-Jewish campaign was the trial of Rudolf Slansky, the Jewish First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. The trial was “openly anti-Jewish with naming ‘world leading’ Jews such as Ben Gurion and Morgenthau, and putting them into the same harness with American leaders Truman and Acheson.”

Stalin also arrested a large number of Jewish doctors —the  “Doctors’ plot” — and “prominent Soviet Jews were forced to sign a letter to Pravda with the most severe condemnation of the wiles of the Jewish ‘bourgeois nationalists’ and their approval of Stalin’s government.” (The letter was preceded by an article in Pravda published on January 13, 1953 claiming “”The majority of the participants of the terrorist group… were bought by American intelligence. They were recruited by a branch-office of American intelligence — the international Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organization called ” Joint” [i.e., the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee]. The filthy face of this Zionist spy organization, covering up their vicious actions under the mask of charity, is now completely revealed.”)

In February, the Soviet Embassy in Tel Aviv was bombed. Solzhenitsyn accepts the idea that the “international anger” resulting from the Doctors’ plot  “could possibly” have motivated “internal forces” to murder Stalin:

And then Stalin went wrong, and not for the first time, right? He did not understand how the thickening of the plot could threaten him personally, even within the secure quarters of his inaccessible political Olympus. The explosion of international anger coincided with the rapid action of internal forces, which could possibly have done away with Stalin. It could have happened through Beria (for example, according to [Abdurakhman] Avtorhanov’s version (66).)

The trimming of Jewish power in the USSR is important not just as a facet of Jewish history in the USSR but also because it had a major role in influencing some components of the American Jewish community to become less enamored with the left—notably Leo Strauss and the neoconservatives. Strauss believed that liberal, individualistic Western societies were best for Judaism. National Socialism was obviously bad for Jews, and Communism had become so. Despite their elite status, the events of 1948-1953 showed that Jews were vulnerable when the attitudes of an autocrat like Stalin turned against them.  Liberal societies were best, but they had to be controlled against populist tendencies. After all, the working class had eventually opted to join the  National Socialists.

Stephen Holmes describes Strauss’s solution to the Jewish dilemma as follows:  “The good society … consists of the sedated masses, the gentlemen rulers, the promising puppies, and the philosophers who pursue knowledge, manipulate the gentlemen, anesthetize the people, and housebreak the most talented young” — a comment that sounds to me like an alarmingly accurate description of the present situation in the United States and elsewhere in the Western world. Given Strauss’s central concern that an acceptable political order be compatible with Jewish survival in the Diaspora and with the tendency for Jews to become an elite, it is reasonable to assume that Strauss believed that Jews would be a prominent part of the aristocracy and that the arrangement would serve Jewish interests–as indeed the current regime does.

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Kevin MacDonald: Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's “The 1920s.” Chapter 18 of 200 Years Together

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The English translation of Chapter 18 of 200 Years Together, “The 1920s,” is now available. (See here, and notice the link requesting donations.) It has a very different feel from Chapter 20, on the Gulag. Whereas Solzhenitsyn’s account of the Gulag stresses his own experiences, this chapter relies on a wide range of academic historical writing to paint his picture of the USSR during the critical decade of the 1920s. His account is therefore based on mainstream scholarship and overall is similar to other accounts, such as Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century. However, it goes beyond other accounts in several important ways and provides a great deal of new information for Western audiences. It is a very long chapter (>26000 words). In the current TOO article, I summarize some of the main points and draw analogies to the current situation in the West. I encourage comments on Solzhenitsyn’s chapter and my article here.

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More on Peter Beinart

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The Peter Beinart event continues to reverberate within the Jewish community. (See here.) The whole thing is rather surreal. Critics focus a great deal on why American Jews might be excused for carving out a special place for ethnic nationalism while holding on to their liberal attitudes in the US. James Kirchick writing in Foreign Policy is among many who say it’s all the Palestinians’ fault.

There’s never any mention of the possibility that the liberalism of American Jews is a strategy that is well suited to Jewish ethnic aims in the Diaspora but is quite unsuited for Israel. Jewish liberalism in the Diaspora is a sign that Jews are morally superior people who have been forced by circumstances to accept a certain amount of illiberalism in order to have a Jewish state at all. As I noted previously, the reality is that the most prestigious and powerful Jewish communal organizations, such as the ADL, see no problem at all in supporting the most extreme forms of ethnonationalism in Israel while at the same time framing their advocacy of liberal policies in America as stemming from the very nature of Judaism as an ethically superior group — despite the fact that these liberal policies conform to Jewish group interests in the US and effectively undermine White identity and interests. Beinart is a bit more honest in at least feeling a tad of cognitive dissonance in this state of affairs.

In general, there is very little mention of one of Beinart’s main points–that the entire Jewish community in Israel and in the Diaspora is likely to become more religious and more nationalistic over time because of demographic trends. Simply put, the orthodox and nationalist elements are the ones having the babies. In his critique of Beinart, Steven M. Cohen writes that the main factor influencing the lack of involvement of young Jews is intermarriage — the “departure from all manner of Jewish ethnic ‘groupiness,’ of which Israel attachment is part.” Beyond that, secular Jews have fewer children than their religious/nationalist brethren, with the result that the Jewish community in general is moving in their direction.

As an evolutionist, I see this as natural selection for ethnocentrism within the Jewish community. In traditional societies, even the less ethnocentric Jews were more or less forced to marry within the community. Marrying a non-Jew effectively removed one from the community. It also carried huge penalties to the entire family that remained behind–a blot on their name for as long as communal memory remained. But since the Enlightenment, Jews have been able to marry outside the community, and many have done so. In the same way, traditional pressure to marry kept genes for homosexuality in the gene pool because people with homosexual tendencies got married and had children. There is doubtless strong selection pressure against homosexuality now — ironically, because gay activists have succeeded in making homosexuality an acceptable lifestyle  in the West. Intermarriage was seen as a serious problem by the early Zionists who viewed the creation of a Jewish state as preventing intermarriage and allowing Jewish ethnic continuity. As Cohen implies, liberal, secular Jews cannot maintain Jewish group ties over the long haul. The demographic engines both in Israel and the US are the more Orthodox and conservative elements–precisely the people who have aggressive, nationalistic attitudes toward the Palestinians.

So Cohen agrees with Beinart that American Jewish activist organizations will be run by nationalist Jews and the entire American Jewish community will be increasingly nationalist. And I predict that American Jewish nationalists will continue to advocate liberal policies in America. Psychologically, greater ethnocentrism would be expected to be linked to seeing issues more in terms of what’s good for the Jews–and rationalizing whatever  is good for the Jews in terms of whatever principles place them in a positive light. As Beinart notes, the Conference of Presidents continues to insist that  “Israel and the United States share political, moral and intellectual values including democracy, freedom, security and peace” — despite the obvious reality that Israel is an apartheid ethnonationalist state. The more ethnocentric one is, the less cognitive dissonance one will feel for holding such attitudes.

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Elena Kagan on the Jewish radical tradition in American politics

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JudicialWatch.org has some important material on Elena Kagan. Judicial Watch President Thomas Fitton notes the “most disturbing”  parts of her senior thesis at Princeton are the following:

Through its own internal feuding, then, the SP [Socialist Party] exhausted itself forever and further reduced labor radicalism…to the position of marginality and insignificance from which it has never recovered. The story is a sad but also a chastening one for those who, more than half a century after socialism’s decline, still wish to change America.

…if the history of Local New York shows anything, it is that American radicals cannot afford to become their own worst enemies. In unity lies their only hope.

As Fitton says, “Do we really need a Supreme Court Justice who once lamented the lack of unity on the part of the Socialist Party?”

Judicial Watch had a link to Kagan’s thesis but it doesn’t work as of today. Her senior thesis is consistent with other historical studies in showing that the Socialist Party in New York in the early 20th century was a Jewish phenomenon. She notes that Jews were the backbone of the Socialist Party and that other ethnic groups, such as the Irish and Italians, could not be motivated to join even though they were in a similar economic situation.

Not only were Jews the backbone of the Socialist Party, socialism was very mainstream within the Jewish community.  Her account parallels those of other historians who describe the Jewish community from 1890 to 1920 as “one big radical debating society” (see here, p. 71ff).

From [1886] on Jewish districts in New York and elsewhere were famous for their radical voting habits. The Lower East Side repeatedly picked as its congressman Meyer London, the only New York Socialist ever to be elected to Congress. And many Socialists went to the State Assembly in Albany from Jewish districts. In the 1917 mayoralty campaign in New York City, the Socialist and anti-war candidacy of Morris Hillquit was supported by the most authoritative voices of the Jewish Lower East Side: The United Hebrew Trades, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, and most importantly, the very popular Yiddish Daily Forward. This was the period in which extreme radicals—like Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman—were giants in the Jewish community, and when almost all the Jewish giants—among them Abraham Cahan, Morris Hillquit, and the young Morris R. Cohen—were radicals. Even Samuel Gompers, when speaking before Jewish audiences, felt it necessary to use radical phrases.

The result was a radical mainstream Jewish culture that persisted in New York and elsewhere into the 1960s and beyond. With the success of the Bolshevik Revolution, many Jews opted out of the Socialist Party, resulting in a Jewish Communist subculture that was also entirely mainstream within the Jewish community.

Kagan’s comments in her thesis suggest a sympathy with this radical Jewish culture — even a desire to carry it to fruition. Everything we know about her indicates that she continues to be immersed in a Jewish culture whose attitudes are well to the left of the American mainstream–a subculture that was hostile to the  traditional people and culture of the US and has now become a hostile elite.

This fits well with Kagan’s childhood in New York’s Upper West Side — described by Dan Freedman as “as conservative’s worst nightmare.” During her college years she wrote, “Where I grew up _ on Manhattan’s Upper West Side _ nobody ever admitted to voting for Republicans.”

Elena Kagan and many of this culture’s children emerged from the Upper West Side political cauldron as committed to making the world a better place for all, mindful that everyday people can affect change as teachers, doctors, lawyers _ and, yes, even journalists _ and make government work for the common good.

There is no indication that Kagan has changed her views, and there’s not much doubt that indeed she will be a judicial activist on the left. Fitton quotes from her Oxford thesis:

As men and as participants in American life, judges will have opinions, prejudices, values. Perhaps most important, judges will have goals. And because this is so, judges will often try to mold and steer the law in order to promote certain ethical values and achieve certain social ends. Such activity is not necessarily wrong or invalid.

Well, at least we know what we can expect when Kagan gets on the court.

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