Note: Repost from the old blog.
A review of Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Together, a history of Russia and its Jews from 1795-1916. It’s the best thing I have ever read on the subject, and I’ve read a lot of crap about this area from all sides. The author is Richard Pipes and it’s published by Benador Associates.
Benador Associates is Neocon Central, home of all manner of rightwing, Zionist, pro-Terror War and pro-Iraq War nasties. From the About US page:
Among the experts are James Woolsey, A.M. Rosenthal, Richard Perle, Amir Taheri, Kanan Makiya and Saad Eddin Ibrahim.
It’s supposedly run by some reactionary Peruvian ruling-class woman named Eleana Benador who I’ve never heard of before. Her photos are here. I hate to make fun of people’s appearances, but I will make an exception in here case and call her a hunchbacked dwarf. Why? Because I don’t like her, that’s why.
Her biography shows you what kind of nasties make up the horrible Peruvian ruling class. Such a malignant bunch of gangsters could only have produced equally malign revolutionaries like the Shining Path. Like creates like; politics is a mirror.
Ms. Benador is also apparently in deep with International Jewry of the nastiest sort, but that’s not unusual, because I understand that some members of the Peruvian ruling class are in with them. These folks are fabulously rich, care nothing at all about their country, and don’t even spend much time there, they are so busy jet-setting around.
They spend most of their time in foreign cities or on jetliners and they put most of their money in the US, often in the New York Stock Exchange. They’re afraid to invest in their own country because it’s so “unstable”. The reason it’s unstable is due to their existence.
I figure she’s fronting for some big money lurking somewhere in the background?
I always thought Richard Pipes was a complete prick. He spent most of his life working for the CIA, more or less, as a Sovietologist. Most prominent Sovietologists like Condoleeza Rice were always pretty much just glorified CIA employees. He’s another Robert Conquest. Plus, he produced, from the spawn of his loins, an abhorrent ultra-Zionist maniac son named Daniel, he of the fascist Campus Watch .
Pipes was one of the original neocons, along with Frank Gaffney, James Woolsey and Richard Perle. He even worked for Henry Jackson in the 1970’s, and you can’t much more seminal neocon than that (the neocons were birthed by a largely-Jewish group operating out of Henry Jackson’s office in the 1970’s). Of course he wrote for Commentary – that’s another classic neocon steppingstone.
He opposed detente, served on Reagan’s National Security Council in 1981-1982 and teamed up with Paul Nitze and Paul Wolfowitz and the rest of the Team B “Beware the Bear!” liars.
He dedicated his whole life to US imperialism’s war with the USSR. He lied all day, went to bed, dreamed a bunch of dishonest dreams, got up the next morning, poured some liar crystals into his brewing coffee and started off another day of lying. That was his life; every time he opened up his mouth, it was just the voice of the CIA.
Pipes’ work as a Sovietologist, while quality scholarship, was also a politically motivated pack of lies, propaganda and bullshit from the very start, though he did have his moments. Check out his thesis on the cause of the Russian revolution, which I agree with:
Pipes is famous for arguing that the origins of the Soviet Union can be traced to the separate path taken by 15th century Muscovy in a Russian version of the Sonderweg thesis.In Pipes’ opinion, Muscovy differed from every state in Europe in that there was no concept of private property in Muscovy, and that everything was regarded as the property of the Grand Duke/Tsar. In Pipes’ view, this separate path undertaken by Russia ensured that Russia would always be an autocratic state with values fundamentally dissimilar to the values of Western civilization.
Nice, huh? It’s true in part, but avoids the crucial role of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Anyway, like many of these one-sided characters, once you get them away from the subject of their feverish obsession (in his case, the USSR), they can be surprisingly level-headed, because they’re extremely smart and they are finally thinking clearly for once.
Since he is Jewish, I expected the usual Jewish bullshit pile of invective towards the Czar, the Russian people and Russia in general, but this nice review is fair to all sides and sums up the role of the Czar, the Church, Russian nationalists, Jews both traditional and assimilating, revolutionaries, etc superbly.
Check it out and learn something.
I assume his evil spawn Daniel will just go on being an asshole for the rest of his life.
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I’m not an expert, but wasn’t the Russian Orthodox church essentially another property of the Czar?
Thanks for that. I had trouble with all the Benador links. Here’s a working link to Pipes’ review.
http://tinyurl.com/nk4th8
But sorry, I don’t see anything remarkable or out of character in that review. It amounts to ” Solzhenitsyn has recanted his antisemitism and exonerated the jews”. But it appears that the powers that be want us to take his word for it, rather than read ‘ 200 Years Together’. Me personally, having tried unsuccesfully to get through some of his other mindblowingly turgid works ( ok, it might be the translation), and knowing now his prejudices and scant regard for evidence, I doubt if I could be bothered reading it anyway. When you get down to it, why should we care what Solzhenitsyn has to say about it, especially since, as Pipes notes, his book is based on very flimsy sources?
I’ve always found Pipes a very urbane and civilised writer, seemingly eminently sensible. ‘Seemingly’ is the problem, because of course he is a very urbane and civilised propagandist – a skilful professional liar. Just a couple of examples, from the review, of questionable assertions:
” To his credit, he disposes of the canard, widespread in late czarist Russia, that the Jews exploited the peasants. He cites the historian I. Orshanskii to the effect that Jewish traders opened markets for peasants by transforming articles of consumption into commodities, in this manner enriching the peasantry. The historical evidence indeed indicates that Russian peasants fared better in the regions populated by Jews–that is, the so-called Pale of Settlement–than in other parts of the empire where legal residence was forbidden to Jews. ”
From someone who would no doubt tell us that the peasants ( or ‘the people’) prosper everywhere the American writ runs that’s laughable. That means that some peasants (kulaks) got rich, by enabling the exploitation of the others, like the standard US imperial model.
” …the ranks of the revolutionaries were certainly dominated by Russians. ”
And the ranks of zionists are certainly dominated by Christian fundamentalists – as cattle and ballot fodder; that tells us nothing.
Wolfgang Strauss wrote a different kind of review of Solzenhitzyn’s book about the Jews in the Soviet Union. It’s entitled “The End of the Legends.” I first found it at a defunct Christian website. Now it’s archived at Germar Rudolph’s VHO site: http://www.vho.org/tr/2004/3/Strauss342-351.html
Who cares what the Pipes’ thinks about anything? Someone should march into a Benador Associates Passover Seder and dump a bucket of bacon bits over all those tweedy machers!
“…Just finished reading the French translation of Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Together (2003) on Russian-Jewish relations since 1772 in two volumes (still no English translation available…”are we powerful or what?”). It’s both a quick and fascinating read; among other things, we learn that not only the October 1917 Revolution (really a just a well-organized, well-carried out Jewish coup) was dominated by Jewish agitators (a documented fact) but so was the 1905 Revolution (something I didn’t know). We also learn from the grand old man the awe-inspiring extent of the Jewish domination of the Soviet Union during its first two decades of existence, including its ruthless and murderous internal security system: Tcheka, OGPU, NKGB, and NKVD. A Russian in the hands of the Tcheka, etc. was almost certain to be in the hands of Jewish torturers and executioners. The litany of Jewish crimes committed against the long-suffering Russians (and other Slavic peoples: Ukrainians and Belarussians) and coldly listed by the author is simply nauseating and one should approach both volumes on an empty stomach. To this day there has been no acknowledgment on the part of international Jewry of Jews’ overwhelming support of the Bolshevik dictatorship during its first two decades. No asking for forgiveness. No reparations paid out to Russians. No chest-beating. No calls for repentance. No nothing…how un-Jewish that would be! Those few, rare Jewish voices who dared to speak out about the Jewish role in the establishment of the communist terror machine in Russia were inevitably greeted with hostility and enmity by other Jews and told to shut their “self-hating” mouths. It must also be remembered that it was Russian Jewry that saved the Bolshevik “experiment” in the early days when the old order civil servants went on a general strike to protest Bolshevik methods and measures. When that happened, educated and sympathetic Russian Jews were able to step in and literally save the nascent Bolshevik administration.
Another interesting aspect brought up by the author concerns the so-called era of “National Bolshevism” (a real misnomer) allegedly inaugurated by Stalin. Solzhenitsyn points out that Stalin was as much hostile to Russian interests as Lenin and Trotsky. How many millions of Russian peasants and Russian Orthodox clergy perished under Stalin? To speak of a Russian nationalism on the part of Stalin is simply laughable when one considers the slaughter accompanying Stalin’s and Kaganovich’s collectivisation and religious persecutions. Additionally, Jews continued to be overrepresented at all levels of the Soviet bureaucracy (including their overwhelming participation in the administration of the Gulag system) during Stalin’s years at the helm.
Furthermore, Solzhenitsyn speaks of his personal contacts with Soviet Jews and their typical detached relativism on all issues, including communist crimes with their tens of millions of victims. However, all that cool, intellectual relativism and reluctance to see the world in black and white terms would disappear in the blink of an eye as soon as Hitlerism was mentioned. Another example of Jewish hypocrisy highlighted by the author concerns Jews admonishing Russians (namely Solzhenitsyn) to reject generalisations regarding Jews and aspects of the Jewish character at the same time that they would form and propagate the most negative opinions on the Russian character and how it was the Russians’ fault that the fundamentally noble communist experiment failed, etc., etc., etc.. Expressing generalisations about Russians while demandind from them that they abstain from seeing in Jews some distinct personality traits is very Jewish and pure chuzpah. Nothing is ever the Jews’ fault. It’s always someone else’s fault. One standard for the Jews, another standard for the goyim. ” – Fredrich Braun August 8, 2008
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Hey Lindsay: do you know anything about National Bolshevism? – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Bolshevism
I’ve been learning about it in the last day or two and it seems to fit your worldview better than the generic communism which you espouse. What do you think about NB? Do you believe in any aspects of it?
I don’t like it one bit.
Hey, WS, please don’t join in on those pile-on attacks on me over at Occidental Dissent, ok? The comments section is open to allies, friends and neutrals only. Once you start joining in those pile-on sessions like that, you sort of go into the enemy category.
Also, you should probably apologize to me for that.
Other than that, I really don’t mind you, and I’d be happy to have you keep posting here.
About National Bolshevism, I don’t like it one bit. But really, nationalistic socialism as opposed to internationalism is a good thing. Socialism on a single country level is the only thing with a chance these days. Many European countries, along with Canada and Australia, have had socialist type regimes that also favored that nation and were not explicitly internationalist.