Today we get down to brass tacks. Our conversation with California attorney and businessman Michael Shaw, the creative force behind Freedom Advocates and Liberty Garden.
Freedom Advocates
Liberty Garden
"A zeal for
different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other
points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different
leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of
other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions,
have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual
animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other
than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of
mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion
presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been
sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent
conflicts."
--James Madison,
Federalist No. 10, Nov. 22, 1787
"They that can
give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither
liberty nor safety."
--Benjamin Franklin
From the loftiest point
of its roof, during precisely three and a half hours of each forenoon, floats
or droops, in breeze or calm, the banner of the republic; but with the thirteen
stripes turned vertically, instead of horizontally, and thus indicating that a
civil, and not a military, post of Uncle Sam's government is here established.
--Nathaniel Hawthorne,
The Scarlett Letter
Freedom Advocates
Exposing Agenda 21 and Sustainable
Development
Created by Michael
Shaw, a California businessman and an American freedom advocate
Freedom Advocates
Misprision of Treason
Primer
Responding to your City's Association
with ICLEI
Liberty Garden Preview
Misprision in Alameda County - Facing Down Agenda 21
Detax Canada
Treason
Thomas
Jefferson wrote in the USA Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to
be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and
the pursuit of Happiness.
It is obvious that Jefferson gained his
inspiration from:
Virginia Declaration of Rights (June 12,
1776) Drafted by: George Mason
Article I: That all men are by
nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of
which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact,
deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty,
with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining
happiness and safety.
It should be noted here
that the primary unalienable (meaning: a value cannot be ascertained) right is 'life'. The secondary unalienable rights are 'property' and 'liberty'. 'Property' is
absolutely necessary for the maintenance of life - the maintenance of one's
body. One's
primary property is one's labour -
mental and/or physical. 'Liberty' is absolutely necessary to take one's produce to
market - to travel to one's place of work where labour, the primary property,
may be exchanged for the necessary property to maintain life - food, shelter
and clothing.
The 'Pursuit of
Happiness' (Hope for Happiness - as an attainable objective) is vital for one's
mental and physical health.
Notice that Jefferson
'conveniently' left the property right out of the Declaration of Independence.
Modern charters of rights use the term 'security of person'.
Since 'person' is a
legal status (corporate slave status) attached to one's body, the statement is meaningless
relative to rights.
That to secure these
rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from
the consent of the governed, [yet, you will find that 'MAN, MEN - regardless of
sex, are NEVER mentioned in any Government legislation, Acts statutes or laws,
at any level of Government.]
Article II: That all power is
vested in, and consequently derived from, the people; ['persons' is not the
plural of 'people', nor are 'persons' people] that magistrates are their
trustees and servants, and at all times amenable to them.
Article
III:
That government is, or ought to be, instituted for the common benefit,
protection, and security of the people, nation or community; of all the various
modes and forms of government that is best, which is capable of producing the
greatest degree of happiness and safety and is most effectually secured against
the danger of maladministration; and that, whenever any government shall be
found inadequate or contrary to these purposes, a majority of the community
hath an indubitable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to reform, alter or
abolish it, in such manner as shall be judged most conducive to the public
weal.
That whenever any Form
of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People
to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its
foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to
them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Prudence, indeed, will
dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and
transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are
more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves
by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
But when a long train
of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design
to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty,
to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future
security.
{Read more at above link…}
<|>---<|>---<|>
From the 1893
Dictionary of Law:
Treason. Betrayal,
treachery, breach of faith or allegiance.
Treason may exist only as between
allies: it is a general appellation to denote not only offenses against the
king and government, but also accumulation of guilt which arises whenever a
superior reposes a confidence in a subject or inferior, between whom and
himself there subsists a natural, a civil, or even a spiritual relation, and
the inferior so abuses that confidence, so forgets the obligations of duty,
subjugation, and allegiance, as to destroy the life of the superior.
When disloyalty attacks
majesty itself it is called, by way of distinction, high
treason,
equivalent to the 'crimen loesoe
majestatis' of the Romans.
High treason is the
most heinous civil crime a man can commit. If indeterminate, this alone is
sufficient to make a government degenerate into arbitrary power.
{Read more at above link…}
Wikipedia
brass
tacks
In colloquial
English, brass tacks (often "get down to brass tacks")
refers to the fundamental or essential elements of a topic. As in the pieces of
brass inserted into the edges of the paper creating the binding of a document.
The points which hold an idea together.
Phrases (UK)
“Get down to brass tacks”
Meaning
Engage with the basic
facts or realities.
Origin
The figurative
expression 'getting down to brass tacks' isn't particularly old as phrases go.
Its first appearance in print that I can find, from the USA in January 1863,
was in the Texas newspaper The Tri-Weekly Telegraph:
"When you come down to 'brass tacks' -
if we may be allowed the expression - everybody is governed by
selfishness."
All of the other
known early citations either originate in, or refer to, Texas. It is reasonable
to assume that the phrase was coined there, in or about the 1860s.
Brass tacks are, of
course, real as well as figurative items and two of the most commonly repeated
supposed derivations refer to actual tacks. Firstly, there's the use of
brass-headed nails as fabric fixings in the furniture trade, chosen on account
of their decorative appearance and imperviousness to rust. Such brass tacks
were commonly used in Tudor furniture and long predate the use of the phrase,
which would tend to argue against that usage as the origin - why wait hundreds
of years and then coin the phrase from that source? The supporters of that idea
say that, in order to re-upholster a chair, the upholsterer would need first to
remove all the tacks and fabric coverings, thus getting down to the basic frame
of the chair. While that is true, it hardly seems to match the meaning of the
expression, as the tacks would be the first thing to be removed rather than the
last.
The second explanation
that relies on actual tacks comes from the haberdashery trade. Here
the notion is that, in order to be more accurate than the rough-and-ready
measuring of a yard of material by holding it out along an arm's length, cloth
was measured between brass tacks which were set into a shop's counter. Such
simple measuring devices were in use in the late 19th century, as is shown by
this piece from Ernest Ingersoll's story The
Metropolis of the Rocky Mountains, 1880:
"I hurried over to Seabright’s. There
was a little square counter, heaped with calicoes and other gear, except a
small space clear for measuring, with the yards tacked off with brass
tacks."
Various other
explanations relate to the tacks in boots, those that were put on chairs as a
prank, the rivets on boats etc, etc. None of these come equipped with any real
evidence and are best left alone.
Of the supposed
explanations that don't have literal allusions, we can rule out links with any
form of 'brass tax'. There have been taxes on brass at various times, but no
one can find any connection with this phrase. 'Getting down to brass tax'
appears to be just a misspelling. The expression is also often said to be an
example of Cockney rhyming slang, meaning 'facts'. In the strange world of
Cockney argot, 'tacks' does indeed rhyme with 'facts' (facks), but that's as
far as it goes. Rhyming slang coinages from the 19th century are limited to the
UK and Australia. The apparent US origin of the phrase discounts the rhyming
slang origin.
For my money, the
'fabric measuring' derivation is the strongest candidate but, given no smoking
gun, we await further evidence.
Answers
misprision of treason
United States
In the United States,
misprision of treason is a federal offense, committed where someone who has
knowledge of the commission of any treason against the United States, conceals
such knowledge and does not inform the President, a federal judge or State
Governor or State judge (18 U.S.C. § 2382). It is punishable by a fine and up
to seven years in federal prison. It is also a crime punishable under the
criminal laws of many states.
See also
Misprision
Misprision of felony
Treason
Compounding treason
Britannica
physiognomy
physiognomy,
the study of the systematic correspondence of psychological characteristics to
facial features or body structure. Because most efforts to specify such
relationships have been discredited, physiognomy sometimes connotes
pseudoscience or charlatanry. Physiognomy was regarded by those who cultivated
it both as a mode of discriminating character by the outward appearance and as
a method of divination from form and feature.
Physiognomy is of
great antiquity, and in ancient and medieval times it had an extensive
literature. Inasmuch as genetic flaws are sometimes revealed by physical
characteristics (e.g., the characteristic appearance of Down syndrome, with
up-slanted eyes and broad, flat face), some elements of physiognomy evolved in
physiology and biochemistry.
In its second
aspect—i.e., divination from form and feature—it was related to astrology and other
forms of divination, and this aspect of the subject bulked large in the
fanciful literature of the Middle Ages. There is evidence in the earliest
classical literature, including Homer and Hippocrates, that physiognomy formed
part of the most ancient practical philosophy.
The earliest-known
systematic treatise on physiognomy is attributed to Aristotle. In it he devoted
six chapters to the consideration of the method of study, the general signs of
character, the particular appearances characteristic of the dispositions, of
strength and weakness, of genius and stupidity, and so on. Then he examined the
characters derived from the different features, and from colour, hair, body,
limbs, gait, and voice. While discussing noses, for example, he says that those
with thick, bulbous ends belong to persons who are insensitive, swinish;
sharp-tipped noses belong to the irascible, those easily provoked, like dogs;
rounded, large, obtuse noses to the magnanimous, the lionlike; slender, hooked
noses to the eaglelike; and so on.
Among the Latin
classical authors Juvenal, Suetonius, and Pliny the Elder refer to the practice
of physiognomy, and numerous allusions occur in the works of the Christian
scholars, especially Clement of Alexandria and Origen. While the earlier classical
physiognomy was chiefly descriptive, the later medieval studies particularly
developed the predictive and astrological side, their treatises often
digressing into prophetic folklore and magic.
Along with the
medical science of the period, Arabian writers such as the alchemist ar-Rāzī
and Averroës also contributed to the literature of physiognomy. The medicine of
systematic correspondence that evolved in China after the period of the Warring
States is still associated with traditional Chinese science and has some
bearing on the doctrine of yin-yang.
Physiognomy also is
treated (in some cases extensively) by such scholars as Avicenna, Albertus
Magnus, John Duns Scotus, and Thomas Aquinas. The development of a more
accurate anatomy in the 17th century seems to have dampened the scientific
interest in physiognomy. In the 18th and 19th centuries physiognomy was
proposed as a means of detecting criminal tendencies, but each system was
examined and discarded as fallacious, and by the 20th century physiognomy—as it
was known in earlier times—was largely regarded as a historical subject.
Dictionary of
Education
communitarianism
A grouping of views
which can be said to have the common thread of viewing the individual as
beholden to the community. One example is in the view that an individual's
moral beliefs will be largely a matter of cultural inheritance. One political
version is that the individual is subordinate to the collective authority of
the community. Another theoretical version holds to a system of social
organization based on small self-governing communities.
terrorism
Government by intimidation
and the initiation of coercion and/or force… through the inducement of fear…
and the organized, systematic promotion… of [often false] perceptions of
scarcity
Niki Friedrich Raapana
From her Facebook page:
The entire Marxist theory for social change is based on the dialectical process of continual synthesizing of opposites. That's basic Marxism 101. So why is it so hard for people to grasp that in 1989, the conflicting ideologies known to the world as capitalism and communism were synthesized, along with the Vatican, to create a more "perfect" ideology called Communitarianism? The new ideology combines the very worst of each system… crony, corporate capitalism, genocidal Marxism, and the Inquisition... all rolled into ONE harmonious supra-national world order.
PBS NEWSHOUR
American
Ideology: We Don't Practice What We Preach
By Paul Solman
{Pro-Communitarian stance ~Lark}
PBS NEWSHOUR
American Ideology?
There Is No Such Thing
By Paul Solman
{Pro-Libertarian stance ~Lark}
Tulanelink
When Attorneys Fight
Judicial Corruption
Roger Weidner
is a former attorney and public prosecutor who battled pervasive corruption in
the Oregon court system for 12 years as he struggled to return the now-valued
$100 million Kettleberg estate to its rightful beneficiary after it had been
wrongly seized by an unscrupulous but well-connected attorney. For his efforts, Weidner was repeatedly
arrested, imprisoned, confined to an insane asylum, and finally disbarred. His story, as told to H. Hammond, testifies
to how the judiciary has usurped the law for its own purposes and replaced
constitutional guarantees with a system in which judges rule by decree. It exemplifies the failure of meaningful
accountability within the judicial branch.
Roger Weidner I
USA Observer coverage of judicial corruption
{Note: Mr. Weidner was a recent guest host on Officer Jack McLamb's program on RBN}
Children of Men
Futuristic tale in
which society is without hope since humankind lost its ability to procreate.
The year is 2027, and women can no longer give birth. The youngest inhabitant
of the planet has just died at the age of 18, and all hope for humanity has
been lost. As civilization descends into chaos, a dying world finds one last
chance for survival in the form of a woman who has become inexplicably
pregnant. Now, as warring nationalistic sects clash and British leaders try to
maintain their totalitarian stronghold on the country, a disillusioned
bureaucrat (Clive Owen) is brought back into the fold of activism by his
guerrilla ex-wife (Julianne Moore). Reluctantly, he takes on the daunting task
of escorting Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), the refugee who represents humankind's
last hope for survival, out of harm's way and into the care of a mysterious
organization known as The Human Project. Chiwetel Ejiofor, Charlie Hunnam, and
Michael Caine co-star in this adaptation of author P.D. James's gripping 1992
novel.
Zen Gardner
Phoenix
Rising: Vision of a New America
Zen Gardner
Resisting Mind Control
with Conscious Awareness
ANCIENT ALIENS DEBUNKED
The Political System in
the US Has Collapsed - Paul Craig Roberts
The Obama Timeline
The Obama
Timeline has more than 35,000
online references, and parts I and II combined exceed 5,000 pages. Nowhere will
you find a more complete history of Obama's activities, from his birth to the
present. The Timeline is updated on a daily basis - if it's in the news and it
is related to Obama, it is in the Timeline.
I scour the Internet,
newspapers, magazines, and television reports every day, and then distill all
the important stories to a few pages that you can read in just a few minutes. I
do the research so that you do not have to. Just click on the current month in
Part II of the Timeline and look for the text that is highlighted in yellow -
that is the new text that was added at the end of the previous day.
Please tell your
friends about the Timeline. Removing Obama from the White House cannot be
accomplished unless the voters know about his radical past and his
anti-American policies... and the Timeline is the best place to learn about
both.
Newest articles and
items of note
“[W]hen you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission
from men who produce nothing; when you see that money is flowing to those who
deal not in goods, but in favors; when you see that men get rich more easily by
graft than by work, and your laws no longer protect you against them, but protect
them against you. . . you may know that your society is doomed.”
--Ayn Rand
"The problems we face today are because the people who work for a
living are outnumbered by those who vote for a living."
--Anonymous
Amazon
Jesus and Buddha: The Parallel Sayings
By Marcus Borg
(1997)
Uncovers the strange
and unexplained parallels Jesus's sermons, Buddha's sayings, and the koans of
Zen Buddhist masters.
Through his
teachings, Jesus not only created the Christian heritage, he also transcended
traditional Western thought to reveal many of the universal truths of Buddhism.
As a result, the sayings of Jesus and Buddha are often nearly identical. In
Jesus and Buddha, these sayings, as well as equivalences between Jesus and
later masters of Zen Buddhism, are presented in parallel fashion on facing
pages.
"It is easy to
see the fault of others but hard to see one's own", Buddha remarked.
"Why do you see the splinter in someone else's eye", Jesus asked,
"and never notice the log in your own?"
At the heart of these
amazing parallels lie two mysteries How could Jesus, living 500 years after
Buddha in a land 3,000 miles from India, teach the same ideals? Some historians
believe that Buddhist principles were known throughout the Roman Empire.
Certain fringe theorists claim that Jesus was trained in Buddhism and some even
insist that he visited India!
Since there's little
evidence to support these claims, most scholars dismiss them, leading to the
larger mystery, if Jesus was not subject to Buddhist influences, why do so many
of his sayings parallel these teachings? Is it possible that the wisdom of
Jesus led him not only to lay the foundation for the West's predominant
religion but also to communicate many of the truths upon which Eastern beliefs
are based?
Jesus and Buddha
delves into the mysteries surrounding Christ and the Buddha, traces the life
story and beliefs of both, and then presents their dual teachings in a
beautifully formatted fashion.
{30 customer reviews}
Beliefnet
Jesus and Buddha: The
Parallel Sayings
Are there universal
truths? If we compare the sayings of Jesus and Buddha the answer is a heartfelt
yes.
Buddhism and
Christianity would appear to have little in common. One is non-theistic for
instance, the other, theistic. But the sayings of Jesus and the Buddha, whose
teachings gave rise to the two religions are another matter. They have much in
common in the realms of ethical behavior, discipleship, compassion, materialism
and the inner life. The following are some examples.
Reprinted from Jesus and Buddha: The Parallel Sayings edited
by Marcus Borg, published by Ulysses Press
Jesus:
"Do to others as you would have them do to you." Luke 6:31
Buddha:
"Consider others as yourself." Dhammapada 10:1
Jesus:
"If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also." Luke 6:29
Buddha:
"If anyone should give you a blow with his hand, with a stick, or with a
knife, you should abandon any desires and utter no evil words." Majjhima
Nikaya 21:6
Jesus:
"Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these,
you did not do it to me." Matthew 25:45
Buddha:
"If you do not tend to one another, then who is there to tend you? Whoever
would tend me, he should tend the sick." Vinaya, Mahavagga 8:26.3
Jesus:
"Put your sword back into its place; for all those who take the sword will
perish by the sword." Matthew 26:52
Buddha:
"Abandoning the taking of life, the ascetic Gautama dwells refraining from
taking life, without stick or sword." Digha Nikaya 1:1.8
Jesus:
"Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their
life for my sake will save it." Mark 8:35
Buddha:
"With the relinquishing of all thought and egotism, the enlightened one is
liberated through not clinging." Majjhima Nikaya 72:15
Jesus:
"Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the
name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to
obey everything that I have commanded you." Matthew 28:19-20
Buddha:
"Teach the dharma which is lovely at the beginning, lovely in the middle,
lovely at the end. Explain with the spirit and the letter in the fashion of
Brahma. In this way you will be completely fulfilled and wholly pure."
Vinaya Mahavagga 1:11.1
Amazon
The Original Jesus:
The Buddhist Sources of Christianity
By Elmar R. Gruber
and Holger Kersten
(1996)
{8 customer reviews}
Daemonologie
By King James I
(1597)
King James' early
obsession with witchcraft began after a perceived supernatural attempt on his
life. Almost single handed, he rewrote English law and ordered all witches put
to death. Ultimately his action would lead to the Salem Witch Trials long after
his reign. This book written in his hand is a great insight into his paranoia.
---
Written in 1597 in
old English, King James I, the author of the King James Bible, wrote Demonology. This work includes his
beliefs in Satan and witches. A historical work and important read for scholars
of religion, this title allows readers to study the beliefs and ideas and King
James. Demonology is known as one of
the most interesting and controversial writings in the history of Christianity.
King James I: Demonologist
By Mary Sharratt
(2010)
Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion
By Jane Ellen
Harrison
Second Edition
(1908)
Celtic cross measuring angle of stars
Reality 101 Blog
EZEKIAL’S
WHEELS
Avro car in flight
Reality 101 Blog
EVOLUTION OF THE UFO -
we don't need no steenking aliens
By Harry Mobley
Conspiracy-Café
The Mormon Conspiracy
Freemasonry-Watch
Barack Obama &
Prince Hall Freemasonry
{128 comments}
Creepy…
Vigilant Citizen
Sinister Sites – Temple
Square Utah
Revisionist History
Romney’s Masonic
Mormonism: Lesser of Two Evils?
An Expose'
THE UNITED STATES
IS STILL A BRITISH
COLONY
EXTORTING TAXES FOR THE
CROWN!
A DOCUMENTARY REVIEW
OF CHARTERS AND
TREATIES
August 17, 1996
PART ONE of SEVEN
PARTS
Henry Makow
Iraq War - Was it Worth
it?
The Iraq war cost $3 Trillion. 4,800
US soldiers were killed and 32,000 seriously wounded. Iraqi civilian casualties
range around 600,000.
Was It Worth It?
"This war will be
long seen as boon for the few, and a bane for the many."
By RA
(Baghdad
correspondent)
In the build-up to
the Iraq war, the United States used Iraq's alleged "weapons of mass
destruction" to justify the decision to invade the country.
What were the real
reasons for the war? What were the costs and benefits from the US point of
view?
REAL REASONS OF THE WAR
1. Control of Iraq's
oil: Second only to Saudi Arabia, Iraq possesses more than 60% of
the world's known oil reserves, amounting to 115 billion barrels. Thanks to the
war, American oil companies returned to Iraq, 36 years after Saddam
nationalized them. Remarkably, when the war started, oil was just at $26.00 a
barrel. After the invasion, prices kept rising to new heights and reached a
record of $145.75 in 2008.
2. Preservation of the
U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency: In late 2000, Iraq
converted to the Euro in exchange for oil. Had an increasing number of
countries followed suit and shifted away from the dollar, the U.S. would have
been dealt a huge blow inflicted by a plummeting dollar.
3. Elimination of a
threat to Israel: The centrality of Israel in any U.S. Mideast
strategy is a foregone conclusion. Iraq possessed Scud long-range ballistic
missiles which directly threatened Israel. In 1991, Iraq attacked two Israeli
cities with Scud missiles. It was the first time Tel Aviv had been hit in the
history of the Israel-Arab conflict. Saddam also doled out thousands of dollars
to families of Palestinians killed in fighting
with Israel. Toppling him
stemmed a source of support to Palestinians and eliminated the direct missile
threat.
4. Weapons
field-testing: In real-battle mode, the Pentagon could use a long
list of high-tech and newly developed weapons, such as the highly destructive
nano-wave weapons, e-bombs, sensor fuzed weapons, laser weapons and agent
defeat bombs.
5. War profiteering:
The U.S. targeted the privatization of the Iraqi infrastructure by granting
lucrative (no-bid) contracts to the likes of Halliburton, Blackwater, Chevron,
Shell, Lockheed, DynCorp, and KBR, all of whom were unwavering supporters of the
Bush administration.
COSTS OF THE WAR
In 2011, the
Congressional Research Service estimated that the U.S. will have spent almost
$802bn on funding the war by the end of fiscal year 2011. The actual cost,
however, may exceed 3 trillion dollars when replacement and maintenance costs
for equipment and the care for wounded troops are factored in.
On the other hand,
4,487 U.S. troops were killed in addition to 32,223 wounded (one-fifth of whom
have suffered serious brain or spinal injuries and one-third have developed
serious mental health problems - chief among them, post-traumatic stress
disorder - soon after end of deployment).
The war did also
exact a toll on Iraqi civilians and government forces. UN reports state that
Iraqi civilian casualties, commonly reported to have ranged between 50,000 and
100,000, have been significantly under-reported. Some informed estimates put
Iraqi civilian casualties at over 600,000 (including 55,000 Iraqi insurgents),
whereas about 5 million Iraqis were permanently or temporarily displaced.
Besides, more than 10,000 policemen and soldiers were reported killed as of
July 31, 2011.
UNINTENDED
CONSEQUENCES: A STRONGER IRAN
During his rule,
Saddam marginalized the Shi'a and stood as a bulwark rival against Tehran on
behalf of neighbors like (Sunni) Saudi Arabia, which funded Iraq's eight-year
war against Iran.
The power vacuum in
Iraq has been largely filled by Tehran. The invasion had shuffled the cards of
the Iraqi domestic power equation: Shi'a have risen to power in Baghdad, Kurds
have achieved autonomy, and Sunnis have been pushed to the sidelines. This has
played into Iran's hands, enabling it to increase its political and religious influence
in a friendlier Iraq.
The post-war Iraq has
eased the pressure on Iran. It has created breathing room for Tehran to pay
more attention to the U.S. army presence in Afghanistan and to Saudi Arabia,
the longtime U.S. ally.
The fall of a
longtime foe and the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq have significantly strengthened
Iran - hardly something the United States originally intended.
AMERICAN COMPANIES
PROFIT
Several American or
U.S.-based oil services companies such as ExxonMobil, Halliburton,
Schlumberger, Baker Hughes, and Weatherford International have won huge
drilling and well refurbishment contracts and subcontracts.
Some analysts
estimate that nearly half of the expected $150 billion that international oil
giants are expected to spend at Iraqi oil fields over the next few years will
be awarded to American drilling subcontractors.
While other
international companies have established a footprint for building facilities
and processing pipelines, U.S. oil services companies are set to take over most
of the drilling contracts in the six major Iraqi oil fields.
WAS THE WAR WORTH IT?
Looking at it from an
American prism, the Iraq war turned out to be a bloody, prolonged and high-cost
commitment in terms of lives and treasure.
The U.S. credibility
has been tarnished by the groundless pre-war claims set forth by the Bush
Administration. The removal of Saddam Hussein was eclipsed by the rise of a
more belligerent Iran.
The U.S. dollar has
maintained its supremacy but the trillions spent in Iraq will burden the U.S.
economy for years to come. Israel was relieved from a historical threat only to
be replaced by that of the Mullahs in Tehran. The war gained the U.S. unlimited
access to Iraqi oil. But while American companies have emerged biggest winners,
the U.S. taxpayers have borne the brunt of its gigantic cost.
This war will be long
seen as boon for the few, and a bane for the many.
Arutz Sheva
ADL Pulls
Out of Interfaith Dialogue Due to 'Outrageous Bias'
ADL has withdrawn from a national interfaith dialogue in response to “a
serious breach of trust” by Christian leaders attending meeting.
The Anti-Defamation
League (ADL) has withdrawn from participating in a national Jewish-Christian
interfaith dialogue, scheduled to take place October 22, in response to “a
serious breach of trust” by mainline Protestant Church leaders attending the
meeting.
A number of the
Protestant leaders participating in the dialogue sent, what the ADL termed, “an
outrageous and biased letter” to members of Congress on October 5, accusing
Israel of human rights violations and calling for a re-evaluation of U.S.
foreign aid to Israel.
By failing to alert
Jewish dialogue participants beforehand, the ADL said that mainline Protestant
leaders, who signed on to the letter, had shown a "blatant lack of
sensitivity" and "seriously damaged the foundation for mutual
respect."
The letter was signed
by the current head of the National Council of Churches, as well as leaders of
the Presbyterian, Methodist and Lutheran churches, among others, and was issued
without notifying any of the churches' longtime Jewish dialogue partners,
including ADL.
"In light of the
failure of any of the church leaders to reach out to us, we have decided not to
attend this interfaith meeting," said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National
Director. "The blatant lack of
sensitivity by the Protestant dialogue partners we had been planning to meet
with has seriously damaged the foundation for mutual respect, which is
essential for meaningful interfaith dialogue."
The letter called for
an investigation into possible violations by Israel of the U.S. Foreign
Assistance Act and the U.S. Arms Export Control Act, which would make Israel ineligible
for U.S. military aid.
"As Christian
leaders in the United States, it is our moral responsibility to question the
continuation of unconditional U.S. financial assistance to the government of
Israel," the letter said.
"Realizing a just and lasting peace will require this
accountability, as continued U.S. military assistance to Israel -- offered
without conditions or accountability -- will only serve to sustain the status
quo and Israel's military occupation of the Palestinian territories.
"We request,
therefore, that Congress hold Israel accountable to these standards by making
the disbursement of U.S. military assistance to Israel contingent on the
Israeli government's compliance with applicable U.S. laws and policies."
Foxman responded by
saying, "It is outrageous that mere days after the Iranian president
repeated his call for Israel's elimination, these American Protestant leaders
would launch a biased attack against the Jewish state by calling on Congress to
investigate Israel's use of foreign aid.”
“In its clear bias
against Israel, it is striking that their letter fails to also call for an
investigation of Palestinian use of U.S. foreign aid, thus once again placing
the blame entirely on Israel,” he said.
"We hope that
other Jewish organizations will understand the level of disrespect the American
Jewish community is being shown here and join us in withdrawing from the
interfaith gathering," Foxman added.
Arutz Sheva
Op-Ed:
Can We Fight the Biased Anti-Israel Media?
Arutz Sheva
Op-Ed:
Jews, Leave Eurauschwitz Now!
Never before has
knowledge of the Holocaust been disseminated all over the West as it is today.
Yet never before has the anti-Jewish venom and the Nazi style monsterization of
Israelis spread like a virus as it is today.
Roi Tov
IDF
Photographs its own Defeat
A particularly poor
performance of the IAF
MarketWatch
Your right to resell
your own stuff is in peril
It could become
illegal to resell your iPhone 4, car or family antiques
The-Tap
Who Exactly Are The
Rothschilds? Amazing...
The Daily Bell
Government in America!
Thursday, October 11,
2012 – by Tibor Machan
The central achievement of the
American Revolution was to demote government to a role of cop on the beat. The
monarch stopped being the sovereign; the citizen became sovereign instead.
Self-government became an aspiration for all people not just rulers.
The idea became prominent, at least
for a while, that government's proper role is to secure the natural rights of
the citizenry. There was nothing there about a nanny or a regulatory state.
John Locke, who identified the most principled version of the classical liberal
conception of government, argued that since in "the state of nature"
– i.e., prior to civilized society – some people may pose a serious threat to
others, a system of laws is needed so as to mark everyone's sphere of
authority, a region within which one is in full charge and which others must respect
instead of trespass upon.
One's life is the beginning of this
sphere; one's liberty follows as does one's private property. What a government
is needed for is to keep these safe, to secure the rights to life, liberty,
property and whatever derives from these. That is the point of government,
nothing else. It is a vital function since without it criminal conduct would
very likely go unchecked. But like referees at a sports event, government isn't
meant to get involved in the game, only to make sure it goes on peacefully,
with everyone's sovereignty secured.
This view of government was, of
course, radical to the core. Instead of the century's old top-down rule, by
some king or tsar or gang, everyone is supposed to rule oneself and his or her
dominion. All interactions among people would in time be voluntary and
peaceful. And from this arrangement would emerge a productive, creative, free
community and not a hive or colony as with bees or termites.
That is what is individualist about
the American system, namely, that a country is to serve the objectives of a
great variety of unique citizens and that one particular way of living was not
to be imposed on all by a ruler. Government is to serve the citizenry, not the
other way around. And contrary to some thinking on the topic, we are not all in
it together as in North Korea and other collectivist political communities.
Instead of being a sphere for just one kind of life dictated to by a ruler,
America was to be a sphere for an immense variety of different lives coexisting
peacefully, competing and cooperating, not marching to the same tune.
The details of the American idea
course would, of course, be complicated and diverse but one idea was at the
center of it all: None may violate the basic principles on which such a system
rests, the basic rights of every individual. The only role for force was to be
defensive and retaliatory. No one may initiate it with impunity, not even for
noble goals a leader might wish to force upon the rest.
That is the American political
alternative, the American political tradition, not the collectivist ideal
pursued by some political thinkers and "leaders."
---
Posted by Libertarian Jerry
on 10/11/12 09:32 AM
Excellent synopsis of what America
was and what it became. Why was the collectivist genie allowed to escape from
the bottle? Probably 2 reasons. 1. The endless drive for control and power by
the Elites. 2. The basic dishonesty, jealousy and coveting of a voting majority
of Americans. I would also add into the mix the drive for power by the
Leftists, who over the last 90 years or so, have used Cultural Marxist methods
to impose their worldview on the rest of us. Staying with the Elitist theme, the
American Revolution was mainly about the American colonists trying to break
away from the yoke of the Bank of England and its use of the state to collect
taxes for its interest payments. Today the money men hide behind a creature
called the Federal Reserve. It seems that in 225 plus years America has traded
one money master for another.
Posted by DarbyJie on 10/11/12 06:38 AM
But then came the Kantian school of
philosophy, dead set on destroying such a ridiculous notion as men having
unalienable rights. Why this morbid philosophy, which postulated a *second*
hidden reality, a denial of man's ability to be sure of anything and man's
"duty" to seek 'the greatest good for the greatest number' acquired
such a death grip on our national psyche is hard to understand -- but it was
(and still is) embraced with great devotion, while man's rights to freedom has
become -- in philosophical circles-- a discredited, 'immoral' concept.
We have not returned yet to the
simple goodness of our founders' philosophy of "natural rights", and
thus still suffer the loss the absence of this world view creates in our lives
and spirits. A true, unheralded tragedy for America. But yes, this was indeed a
most unique country originally. When we are chided for our American
'Excepionalism' - well, we WERE exceptional, for a far too brief period of
time~
Thanks to Dr. Machan for this
excellent article.
Posted by Hapa on 10/11/12 03:46 AM
well said... long live individual
liberty...
NATIONAL
ASSOCIATION OF REGULATORY COMMISSIONERS
NARUC is the national
association representing the State Public Service Commissioners who regulate
essential utility services in your State. NARUC members are responsible for
assuring reliable utility service at fair, just, and reasonable rates.
Founded in 1889, the
Association is an invaluable resource for its members and the regulatory
community, providing a venue to set and influence public policy, share best
practices, and foster innovative solutions to improve regulation.
Hon. David A. Wright,
President NARUC
Before Its News
Nanny-stater
columnist for the Charleston City Paper says “communitarianism” overrides
personal liberty on smoking bans
Detax Canada
INTRODUCTION To:
THE BRITISH LEGAL
SYSTEM OF
MIXED COMMON AND ROMAN
LAW
HAS BEEN USED TO
ENSLAVE US(A)
PRESENTED IN THIRTEEN PARTS
PRESENTED AND EDITED BY ELDON G.
WARMAN
Any guesses as to which
flag
is the true flag of
the People of the
united states of America?
A 1913 picture of a
U.S. Customs House flying the flag of the Republic
John Hoefle On The
Black Tower Show
Mr. Hoefle, economics editor of
Executive Intelligence Review and affiliated with the Lyndon LaRouche
organization, offers an important historical perspective on the house of cards
which is the current US and world financial system
Mont Pelerin Society
The Conquest of Poverty
By Henry Hazlitt
(1972; 1996)
Remembering Henry
Hazlitt
Hazlitt Both Reported
on and Contributed to the Field of Economics
Pro-Business Policies
as Ideology
. . . when I was a young man, only the very old men still believed in
the
free-market system. When I was in my middle ages I myself and nobody
else believed in it. And now I have the pleasure of having lived long
enough to see that the young people again believe in it. And that is a
very important change.
--FRIEDRICH VON
HAYEK, 1978
Ideologies perform essential political functions of informing the
public,
mobilising supporters and energising leaders and other activists . . .
An
effective ideology will mobilise political supporters to share the
general
beliefs and goals of a party, interest group or politician.
--PETER SELF
OBSERVATIONS ON
PROFESSOR HAYEK’S PLAN
By LUDWIG VON MISES
The Road from Mont Pèlerin
The Making of the
Neoliberal Thought
Collective
(2009)
Threats to Freedom Then
and Now
The Mont Pelerin
Society after 50 Years
Mont Pelerin Society
Inventory of the
General Meeting Files (1947-1998)
Etceteras…
Fifty Years of the
Mont Pelerin Society
Second Annual
Conference on the History of Recent Economics
Technical University
of Lisbon
5-7 June 2008
Means and Ends in
Post-War Liberalism
Prof. J. Daniel
Hammond
Prof. Claire H.
Hammond
Department of
Economics
Wake Forest
University
Winston-Salem, NC
27109 USA
16 May 2008 draft♣
“To deny that the end justifies the means is indirectly to assert that
the end in question is
not the ultimate end, that the ultimate end is itself the use of proper
means”
--Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom
“When we say economism, we mean one of the forms of social rationalism
…. We mean
the incorrigible mania of making the means the end, of thinking only of
bread and never
of those other things of which the Gospel speaks”
--Wilhelm Röpke, A Humane Economy
Introduction
The Mont Pelerin
Society, the brainchild of F.A. Hayek, was an attempt to reclaim and
reenergize liberalism
in light of the intellectual onslaughts of socialism, communism and
Nazism in the first
part of the twentieth century. But in April 1947 as Hayek and his
fellow conferees
departed the inaugural meeting of the Society for their homes in Europe
and America, they
were united more in their sense of impending crisis from growing
worldwide nationalism
and state control than in a shared understanding of the moral and
philosophical
foundations of liberalism. The program of the Mont Pelerin meeting
included five
sessions on economic issues such as monetary reform, trade unions, and
agricultural policy;
two sessions on post-war Europe; and two on historiography and
politics. There was
one session on liberalism and Christianity, and four on the purpose
and organization of
the nascent Mont Pelerin Society. The latter five sessions proved to
be contentious. In
retrospect this is not surprising, as these discussions went to the very
nature and purpose of
a liberal association such as the Mont Pelerin Society and of a
liberal politics. The
question of the nature and purpose of liberalism was not settled at the
first Mont Pelerin
Society meeting and we suspect that it remains unsettled today.
After Hayek made
opening remarks, a committee composed of himself, Walter
Eucken, H.D.
Gideonse, Henry Hazlitt, Carl Iverson, and John Jewkes1 prepared a
document stating
organizational aims for the permanent body. The document failed to
gain sufficient
support for adoption and Lionel Robbins was asked to write a second
draft. Robbin’s
version was adopted, and remained the Society’s only official statement
of aims for the
organization. There has never been an official Mont Pelerin Society
statement of a
liberal creed. The Mont Pelerin Society began as and remains an
organization
committed to inquiry and discussion “among minds inspired by certain
ideals and broad
conceptions held in common, to contribute to the preservation and
improvement of the
free society” (Hartwell 1995) (p. 42).
What were the ideals
and broad conceptions held in common? Our thesis is that
the original Mont
Pelerin Society members held less in common on what they were in
favor of and why than
on what they were opposed to. While there was agreement that
liberalism was
important, there was not agreement on the foundations of a liberal order,
or on the fundamental
reasons for its importance. In terms of means and ends, their lack
of consensus on these
foundational issues meant that their focus shifted from discussions
of the ends which
liberalism furthered to the means of furthering liberalism. Those
assembled at Mont
Pelerin were united in opposition to communism and socialism. They
were united in favor
of personal liberty and the prosperity that would result from
competitive
capitalism. But they were not of one mind about the purpose that liberalism
served; the end to
which a liberal order is directed. For that matter, they were not united
on the purpose of
prosperity. To illustrate their failure to come to terms with the ultimate
goal of a liberal
order we will examine the two versions of the statement of aims that
were considered at
Mont Pelerin, along with contemporaneous writings of Hayek and
three other charter
members of the Mont Pelerin Society. Our selection of the three --
Wilhelm Röpke, Frank
H. Knight, and Milton Friedman -- is based on their views of the
roles of religion
(ends) and of science (means) in the task of rebuilding liberalism. This
survey will reveal
the boundaries of the “ideals and broad conceptions held in common”
at Mont Pelerin.
Hayek’s Vision and the
Mont Pelerin Conference
In his History of the
Mont Pelerin Society Max Hartwell suggests that the reason
the statement of aims
drafted by the committee fell short of adoption may have been
either that it was
too uncompromising and overly specific or that it was too long and
diffuse (Hartwell
1995) (p.40). The committee’s version, however, is not longer by much
than the Robbins’s
second draft, and at first glance is not substantially different in
content.
We begin with a look
at Robbins’s statement of aims, the one that was adopted. It
opens by identifying
“the crisis of our times.”
Central values of
civilization are in danger. Over large stretches of the
earth’s surface the
essential conditions of human dignity and freedom have
already disappeared.
In others they are under constant menace from the
development of
current tendencies of policy. The position of the
individual and the
voluntary group are progressively undermined by
extensions of arbitrary
power. Even the most precious possession of
Western Man, freedom
of thought and expression, is threatened by the
spread of creeds
which, claiming the privilege of tolerance when in the
position of a
minority, seek only to establish a position of power in which
they can suppress and
obliterate all views but their own” (Hartwell 1995).
(p. 41).
About time: 21 Hours
The Harder We Work The
More We ... Lose, Waste, and Pollute
The British economist
John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay in 1913 in which he predicted that by this
time, we'd work an average of about 15 hours a week and we'd be 4 to 5 times
richer.
That famously did not
happen. Several factors, like monetary policy and resulting inflation just to
name two, contribute to the fact that the exact opposite happened. We are
working more, earning less, and the whole culture is greedier, more exhausted,
more damaging to the environment - just spinning our wheels more than ever.
The harder we work
the more we...lose. We are losing quality time, and quality of life. The hidden
costs are undermining us from within.
What we are focused
on here is looking at what can be gained from working less. The NEF, New
Economic Foundation is an independent "Think and Do Tank" in the UK
that inspires and demonstrates real economic well being. They put together a
report spotlighted in this video that claims the ideal work week would be 21
hours.
Juliet Schor is a
Professor of sociology at Boston College. She studies trends in working time
and leisure, consumerism, the relationship between work and family, women's
issues and economic justice. In this video we hear her explain: "Reduced
working hours are a powerful lever for making transformational change.
Improving working hours provides us with what we call in economics a triple
dividend possibility: 1. Improving the employment picture, improving ecological
outcomes, and improving quality of life."
She also makes the
point that countries who are on a path of reduced working hours have lower
ecological footprints.
Those who have a
little more time can be better parents, better community members, can take care
of their health, drive less, grow food, make more things instead of buy them,
in short: consume less and have more.
--Bibi Farber
For more info on the
NEF see www.neweconomics.org
List of
Obama Czars (Updated)
Latest Subtraction: Richard Holbrooke, as Af-Pak Czar.
We now have 35 Presidential Czars and Czarinas.
On my list, I do not include people who were appointed by the President but needed the Senate confirmation and/or are under Senate oversight. (Or I try to...)
Latest Subtraction (12/13/2010)
Richard Holbrooke, Af-Pak Czar (aka U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan) died from torn aorta.
Latest Addition (9/17/2010)
Elizabeth Warren, assistant to the President and special advisor to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner regarding the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.Latest Addition (7/21/2010)
David Blumenthal as Electronic Health Record Czar, aka National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.
(Did you know that a huge chunk of health care "reform" was passed already when the Congress passed $800 billion stimulus back in February 2009? You would have known if you had read my post way back when. I would link it if only I could find that post...)
Latest addition (7/16/2010)
Health Food Czar Sam Kass, who continues to be the White House chef. Mr. Kass, who was Obama's personal chef back in Chicago (a mere Senator could afford a personal chef??), has been quietly appointed as "Senior Policy Adviser for Healthy Food Initiatives".Other Czars and senior staff are paid $172,200, but there is no information about Mr. Kass's salary.
Latest addition (6/15/2010)
Oil Drilling Czar Michael Bromwich, in the wake of continuing disaster in the Gulf.
Latest addition (10/19/09)
Food Safety Czar Michael Taylor, ex-Monsanto executive and lobbyist
Manufacturing Czar Ron Bloom (double duty as Car Czar)
Latest subtraction (10/19/09)
Green Czar Van Jones resigned on September 5, 2009
Latest additions (8/31/09):
AIDS Czar Jefferey Crowley
Counterterrorism Czar (or Homeland Security Czar) John Brennan
Religion Czar Joshua DuBois (a 26-year old pastor who worked in Obama campaigns)
Trade Czar Ron Kirk
Safe School Czar Kevin Jennings (He is a founder of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN).)
Latest addition (8/25/09):
Green Czar Van Jones has been added. He was a co-founder of Color of Change, an African American political advocacy group which is now actively campaigning for the boycott of advertisers to Glenn Beck's program on Fox News. Green Czar's formal title is "special advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality".
Latest addition (8/21/09):
Science Czar John P. Holdren has been added. He advises President Obama on climate change and other science matters. According to the Senate Commerce Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV, Dr. Holdren is so miraculous that he can walk on water. Dr. Holdren has other rather unique ideas and philosophies on wide-ranging subjects (wealth, health, life), which will warrant a separate post.
Update - correction (8/17/09):
Vivek Kundra, previously listed as Technology Czar, turns out to be Information Czar. Technology Czar is actually his buddy, Aneesh Chopra, who got the job despite the fact that he doesn't appear to have any technology training (BA from Johns Hopkins University, Masters in Public Policy from Harvard University).
Already appointed: 35
- AIDS Czar (Jefferey Crowley)
- Automotive Communities and Workers Czar (Ed Montgomery)
- Bailout Czar (Herb Allison)
- Car Czar (Ron Bloom)
- Climate Czar (Todd Stern)
- Consumer Protection Czar (Elizabeth Warren)
- Counterterrorism Czar (or Homeland Security Czar John Brennan)
- Drug Czar (Gil Kerlikowske )
- Economic Czar (Lawrence Summers. Or is it Paul Volcker?)
- Education Czar (Arne Duncan)
- Electronic Health Records Czar (David Blumenthal)
- Energy Czar (Carol Browner)
- Food Safety Czar (Michael Taylor)
- Great Lakes Czar (Cameron Davis)
- Guantanamo Closure Czar (Daniel Fried)
- Healthcare Czar (Nancy-Ann DeParle)
- Health Food Czar (Sam Kass)
- Information Czar (Vivek Kundra)
- Iran/Middle East Czar (Dennis Ross)
- Manufacturing Czar (Ron Bloom)
- Middle East Czar (George Mitchell)
- Oil Drilling Czar (Michael Bromwich)
- Pay Czar (Kenneth Feinberg)
- Performance Czar (Jeffrey Zients. She had to withdraw because of some tax problem...)
- Regulatory Czar (Cas Sunstein)
- Religion Czar (Joshua DuBois)
- Safe School Czar (Kevin Jennings)
- Science Czar (John P. Holdren)
- Stimulus Accountability Czar (Earl Devaney)
- Technology Czar (Aneesh Chopra)
- Trade Czar (Ron Kirk)
- U.S. Border Czar (Alan Bersin)
- Urban & Housing Czar (Adolfo Carrion Jr.)
- Violence Against Women Czar (Lynn Rosenthal)
- WMD Czar (Gary Samore)
Financial Regulation Czar (With the passage of so-called financial "regulation" bill, this is all but inevitable; or it may just mean the double duty for Chairman Bernanke.)
Cyberspace Czar
Copyright Czar (I have no idea if anyone got appointed. Here's petitioning for one.)
High-Value Detainee Interrogation Czar (See the post.)
Green Czar, to be re-filled after Van Jones resigned;
Af-Pak Czar to be re-filled, as Richard Holbrook died.
Speculative, for now:
Urban Demolition Czar (Dan Kildee)
Fat Czar (Richard Simmons) - I guess Sam Kass's appointment killed this one.
Art Czar (see the post, 3rd topic on the post)
Global Corporate Fascism - Citizens are now customers
Occupy Corporatism
Swiss
Study Shows 147 Technocratic “Super Entities” Rule the World
By Suzanne Posel
The Swiss Federal Institute (SFI) in Zurich released a study entitled “The Network of Global Corporate Control” that proves a small consortiums of corporations – mainly banks – run the world. A mere 147 corporations which form a “super entity” have control 40% of the world’s wealth; which is the real economy.
These mega-corporations are at the center of the global economy. The banks found to be most influential include:
• Barclays
• Goldman Sachs
• JPMorgan Chase & Co
• Vanguard Group
• UBS
• Deutsche Bank
• Bank of New York Melon Corp
• Morgan Stanley
• Bank of America Corp
• Société Générale
However as the connections to the controlling groups are networked throughout the world, they become the catalyst for global financial collapse.
James Glattfelder, complex systems theorist at the SFI explains: “In effect, less than one per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network.”
Using mathematic models normally applied to natural systems, the researchers analyzed the world’s economy. Their data was taken from Orbis 2007, a database which lists 37 million corporations and investors. The evidence showed that the world’s largest corporations are interconnected to all other companies and their professional decisions affect all markets across the globe.
George Sudihara, complex systems expert for SFI claims that this phenomenon is a common structure that could be found in nature. Comparing the manufactured reality of the financial markets to the ecosystems of the planet, Sudihara says that although the 147 corporations that rule the world through influence and interconnectedness are no more harmful than the natural cycles of our weather or animal kingdoms.
Yet because of the facts presented in the study, the financial crash of 2008 can be traced back to these tightly-knit networks. Future disasters can also be projected based on this analysis because of the “connectedness” of these influential entities which are only 147 corporations.
It is suggested the global capitalism could be a useful tool to make the markets more stable by simply acquiescing to control by the technocrats. The world’s transitional corporations (TNCs) guide the flow of all economies through influence and manipulation which created a structure of economic power. Most corporations are guided by the shareholders who use the companies to wield incredible power over the shift of economic consciousness. And the behavior of the system reflects the direction taken by those who fund the super entities.
Assumed by many that there was a complex architecture to the global economic power that caused financial systems to ebb and flow or crash and burn is not a scientific fact as evidenced in this study.
As the banking cartels force countries in the EuroZone into sovereign debt, there is a weakening of the many multi-national corporations around the world. Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase have financially gained while stocks are being unloaded in other markets.
This sovereign land-grab by the central banking cartels across Europe is mirrored in a recent Goldman Sachs report: “The more the Spanish administration indulges domestic political interests … the more explicit conditionality is likely to be demanded.” In other words the technocrats working for the Zionists are acquiring each country in the EuroZone.
The European Central Bankers agreed to give any nation in the Euro-Zone a bailout if they agreed to hand over the country to them under the guise of “new rules and conditions when applying for assistance.”
As America drifts downstream toward economic implosion, the Federal Reserve headed by Ben Bernanke has chosen a different approach. They unveiled QE3 last week as a pump and dump scheme to prop up the US dollar by printing cash that is backed by nothing, while purchasing the mortgage-backed securities from the same banks that created the scandal and acquiring land in a massive land-grab; the likes of which have never been seen in the US.
Simultaneously, the BRICs nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China) are buying gold to back their fiat currencies to avoid being caught up in the destruction of the technocrats as they march toward one world currency. BRICs have become the anti-thesis to the banking cartels of the Zionist regime.
As these nations pair with Middle Eastern countries like Iran to trade gold for petrol instead of the US dollar as the global reserve currency, the Obama administration has begun a propaganda campaign against China involving a manufactured cyber-threat.
In Iran, the terrorist factions that do the bidding of the Zionists to topple governments by inciting fake revolutions have been deployed to Iran to stir-up trouble and blame the failing Ra-il which is being strategically destroyed by sanctions placed on the nation by the US. The American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) coerced the US Congress to pass HR 1905 which further tighten the economic noose around Iran for the benefit of the Zionist-controlled Israeli government.
In April of this year, the BRICs nations met to agree upon a strategy that would liberate the countries of the world from the grip of the technocrats. The BRICs countries are pushing for peace, but not through force and occupation of other countries to obtain this goal.
Vladimir Putin, President of Russia had this to say about the United Nations and their obvious attempts at global governance through usurpation of powers over countries. “One of the priorities of BRICs for the years to come should be the strengthening and key role of the UN’s Security Council in maintaining international peace and security. And also ensuring that the UN is not used as a cover for regime change and unilateral actions to resolve conflict situations.”
A joint BRICs bank was discussed with vigor. It would serve as an alternative to central banks that abuse their power at the expense of nations worldwide. They hope to replace the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The IMF and World Bank are alarmed by this move and highly disapprove of it.
This is not shocking, considering that the central banks play a game of printing fiat that has no precious metals backing the paper.
Over 180 countries have signed onto the BRICs agreement as evidenced in their declaration. While the global Elite still hold power over the G5 countries, the rest of the world is standing up, severing their ties and making plans for a new world without them.
State-Citizen
Index of /files
- Parent Directory
- allfiles.txt
- bulletins/
- cites-cases/
- fedcommunic/
- federalinfo/
- generalinfo/
- generalresecisson/
- map.doc
- mercier/
- misc/
- moneyandbanking/
- new/
- stateinfobriefs/
- thepatriot/
SHTF Plan
Russian General: “The
USSR Collapsed and the Same Fate Has Been Prepared for the USA”
Rense
The 'Holocaust' For
Dummies
Internet Sources
6-11-9
JR Books Online
The Thinking Man's
Hitler
A Michael Walsh
Compilation
---
THE TRIUMPH
OF REASON
"I believe that there can be nothing of value which is not in the
last resort based on reason. I refuse to believe that in statesmanship one
should regard as right any views which are not anchored in reason."
- Adolf Hitler.
Karlsruhe, 13th March 1936
A Michael Walsh
Compilation of Adolf Hitler's Statements with editorial added.
{Heavily footnoted - see at above link...}
Who Killed
JFK?
August 16, 2011 —
Dean Henderson
(Excerpted from
Chapter 9: The Texas Oil Mafia: Big Oil & Their Bankers…)
Texaco insider Clint
Murchison had meat packing interests in Haiti which were looked after by CIA
agent George de Mohrenschildt, a wealthy Russian oilman and, according to the
FBI, a Nazi spy during WWII. It was de
Mohrenschildt who drove Lee Harvey Oswald from New Orleans to Dallas days
before the November 22, 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Gaeton Fonzi, a
special investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, was on
his way to interview de Mohrenschildt in Florida regarding his role in the JFK
hit when the CIA agent was found with a shotgun blast through his head. De Mohrenschildt’s diaries were later
uncovered. One entry read, “Bush, George
H. W. (Poppy), 1412 W Ohio also Zapata Petroleum Midland”. [374]
Kennedy had done
plenty to piss off the US military establishment. In October 1963 he pulled 1,000 advisers out
of Southeast Asia and issued NSAM 363 – a blueprint for a total Vietnam
withdrawal. He sent US Ambassador to
Guinea William Atwood to Cuba to begin talks with Fidel Castro, after publicly
blasting the CIA’s bungling of the Bay of Pigs operation. Kennedy said he wanted to “splinter the CIA
into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds” and that he understood
Castro‘s revolutionary struggle against dictator and Meyer Lansky crony
Fulgencio Batista, who Kennedy called, “an incarnation of a number of sins on
the part of the US”. [375]
Ted Shackley, Santos
Trafficante and the CIA boys running Operation Mongoose – which aimed to
assassinate Castro – were especially outraged at Kennedy. Major General Edward Lansdale had
commandeered Operation Mongoose and escalated it into a small war against
Cuba. In 1955 Lansdale helped Lucien
Conein set up the South Vietnamese Opium Monopoly under President Nguyen Cao
Ky. The CIA continued to train
anti-Castro rebels in south Florida and around Lake Ponchartrain outside New
Orleans, even after JFK had the FBI raid the camps.
Kennedy fired CIA
Director and Rockefeller cousin Allen Dulles, CIA Deputy Director Charles
Cabell (whose brother was the mayor of Dallas) and CIA Deputy Director of Plans
Richard Bissell. Richard Helms was
Bissell’s successor at the Company’s dirty tricks bureau, as the Plans section
was known. Helms was tight with James
“Jesus” Angleton, who ran the CIA’s MK-ULTRA mind control program for years,
utilizing techniques Dulles obtained in Switzerland from the House of Saud
Muslim Brotherhood.
All the Watergate
plumbers came from an Operation Mongoose offshoot known as Operation 40. Plumber Howard Hunt was paymaster for
Operation 40, which also included plumbers Bernard Barker and Enterprise
liaison Rafael Quintero. Plumber Frank
Sturgis ran the Miami-based International Anti-Communist Brigade, which was
funded by Santos Trafficante through his Teamsters Local 320 front. The other Watergate burglars were Felipe
Diego and Rolando Martinez. They were buddies with OSS China hand William
Pawley, who had owned sugar refineries in Cuba as well as the country’s bus
line. [376]
Hunt ran the Miami
based Double-Chek, a CIA channel during the Bay of Pigs. Sturgis physically attacked Vietnam War opponent
Daniel Ellsberg on the steps of the Capitol and recruited agent provocateurs to
disrupt peaceful protests at the 1972 Democratic Convention. [377]
As part of Operation
40 Frank Sturgis recruited Marita Lorenz to seduce Castro, then kill him. Miss Lorenz says she rode to Dallas in a
vehicle loaded with weapons with Frank Sturgis, Jerry Patrick Hemming, two
Cuban exile brothers named Novis and a pilot named Pedro Diaz Lanz. Lorenz says they arrived in Dallas the day
before Kennedy was shot, where they met Howard Hunt at a local hotel.
Fletcher Prouty was
an Air Force intelligence officer who had been part of Kennedy’s fact-finding
mission which resulted in the NSAM 263 directive calling for a US pullout of
Vietnam. On November 10, 1963 Prouty’s boss
Edward Lansdale reassigned him to a South Pole desk job. Twelve days later Kennedy was
assassinated. Prouty swears that a
photograph of Dealey Plaza on the day of the assassination shows Edward
Lansdale walking away from the scene of the crime. [378]
Others have
identified Howard Hunt as one of the tramps who lurked on the railroad tracks
behind the grassy knoll from where the fatal shot was fired.
George Bush Sr.
headed Houston-based Zapata Offshore Petroleum from 1956-1964. According to authors William Cooper and David
Icke, in 1961 Zapata got the CIA into the Columbian cocaine business. Zapata’s offshore oil platforms were used to
transship cocaine, while the Four Horsemen shipped chemicals to Columbia
necessary in the production of coke. [379]
One CIA operation to
invade Cuba was code-named Operation Zapata.
Two Navy ships used in the attempt were named Barbara and Houston.
An FBI memo from J.
Edgar Hoover dated 11-23-63 discusses briefing “George Bush of CIA” on the
Kennedy assassination, which had occurred one day earlier. Bush was in Dallas on November 22nd. One intelligence source stated, “I know he
(Bush) was involved in the Caribbean. I
know he was involved in the suppression of things after the Kennedy
assassination”. [380]
In a 1973 interview
published in the Atlantic Monthly, Kennedy Vice-President and successor Lyndon
Johnson – himself a Texas oilman – hinted at a conspiracy on that gloomy day in
Dallas and talked of a “Murder Incorporated” being run by the CIA out of the
Caribbean. Johnson was referring to
Permindex (Permanent Industrial Exhibitions) – an assassination bureau run by
the Special Operations Executive (SOE) of Britain’s MI6.
According to a book
published by Executive Intelligence Review called Dope Inc.: The Book That
Drove Kissinger Crazy, Permindex was funded by the Canadian Bronfman family and
the wealthy Polish Solidarist Radziwill family.
Permindex leader, MI6 SOE Colonel Sir William “Intrepid” Stephenson, had
earlier deployed the Meyer Lansky syndicate and helped rehabilitate Lucky
Luciano. SOE Colonel Louis Mortimer
Bloomfield was an OSS veteran and Bronfman liaison who chaired Permindex since
its 1958 founding in Montreal and Geneva.
SOE and Permindex insider General Julius Klein ran guns to the murderous
Haganah when the Zionists seized Israel from the Palestinians. He “handles” Buffalo mob boss Max Fischer and
Carl Lindner at United Brands – whose banana boats, according to DEA, regularly
ship cocaine to the US. [381]
Other SOE members
included David Sarnoff, whose RCA conglomerate at that time formed the core of
the US National Security Agency; and Walter Sheridan, who provided intelligence
to Resorts International and fugitive financier Robert Vesco. The most familiar member of SOE was Colonel
Clay Shaw- whose son of same name is a Florida Congressman serving on a House
Narcotics Task force.
Shaw was an OSS
veteran who later became Director of the New Orleans International Trade Mart –
the US subsidiary of Permindex. Shaw was
indicted in 1969 for his role in the Kennedy assassination by New Orleans
attorney Jim Garrison. During the trial,
17 key prosecution witnesses died and Garrison became the target of a smear
campaign.
Shaw served under
Stephenson for twenty years starting in WWII, where he had been OSS liaison to
Winston Churchill. SOE operatives
infiltrated the FBI and formed Division Five, a British intelligence Fifth
Column which was headed by Bloomfield.
Both Bloomfield and Shaw were present at a series of meetings in Montego
Bay, Jamaica in 1963. The meetings were
held at the Tyndall Compound, built by Sir William Stephenson to serve British
intelligence interests in the Caribbean after WWII.
Stephenson had
launched BRINCO, an energy exploration firm financed by the Oppenheimer
family’s Rio Tinto. He moved to Jamaica
in 1949 and set up the British-American-Canadian Corporation with financing
from UK merchant banking giant Hambros.
It was Stephenson who helped Allen Dulles stash the Hitler and Goebell
trusts in Swiss bank accounts after WWII.
Now he presided over the Montego Bay meetings where, according to many
Kennedy assassination researchers, the JFK hit was planned.
Those present at the
meetings included Ferenc Nagy, a WWII cabinet minister in the pro-Hitler Horthy
government of Hungary, who later became Hungarian Prime Minister; Georgio
Mantello, a Romanian emigre who served as Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s
Trade Minister; Paul Raigoradsky, a Russian Solidarity leader; and Jean de
Menil, an old money European aristocrat and Russian president of Schlumberger,
the giant oil industry service provider and frequent CIA arms conduit based in
Houma, LA. [382]
All present at
Tyndall were executives of Permindex, whose board members included Roy Cohn,
former general counsel to Sen. Joe McCarthy; Montreal crime boss Joe Bonnano;
Mussolini Agriculture Minister Count Guitierez de Spadafora of the Italian
House of Savoy; Hapsburg and Wittelsbach family banker Hans Seligman of Basel;
Carlo d’Amelio, Rome attorney for the Houses of Savoy and Pallavicini; King
Farouk of Egypt’s uncle Munir Chourbagi; and Guiseppe Zigiotti, head of the
Italian Fascist Association for Militia Arms.
Permindex was a front for Nazi International.
Colonel Louis
Bloomfield was a partner at Philips, Vineberg, Bloomfield & Goodman – attorneys
for the Canadian Bronfman family. In
1968 the firm was forced to delete Bloomfield’s name from its letterhead when
French President Charles de Gaulle publicly exposed Bloomfield for his role in
the assassination attempt on de Gaulle.
De Gaulle named
Credit Suisse of Geneva as financier of Bloomfield’s attempted putsch and
traced its origin to NATO Headquarters in Brussels. Permindex was forced to move out of Europe to
fascist-friendly South Africa.
Simultaneously, de Gaulle kicked the Israeli Mossad out of France due to
its cozy relations with Permindex.
Credit Suisse Canada has been identified by some researchers as SOE
paymaster for the Permindex assassination of JFK, which was accomplished after
Stephenson set up an operations command center in David Sarnoff’s RCA Building
at New York’s Rockefeller Center.
Bloomfield worked
under the cover of Israeli Continental Corporation and the Canadian subsidiary
of Heineken Breweries. He controlled the
Ran Histadrut “charity”, which constitutes 33% of Israel’s GNP; and Bank
Hapoalim, Israel’s second largest bank and a favorite Mossad conduit. Bloomfield was director of the
Israeli-Canadian Maritime League and served as Canadian Consul-General in
Liberia. There he worked with the only
other foreign diplomat in Monrovia – Banque du Credit Internacionale’s (BCI)
Tibor Rosenbaum – in establishing Liberia’s status as an off-shore banking
center and in making Liberia’s flag available to international shippers who
wished to disguise their true country of origin. The Liberian flag has been well utilized by
drugs and arms smugglers.
Bloomfield was also
chairman of the Red Cross Ambulance Service, a post traditionally held by the
top Knight in Queen Elizabeth II’s modern-day roundtable – Most Venerable
Military & Hospitalier Order of St. John of Jerusalem. Though known for its more “charitable” side –
which includes selling donated blood for around $100/pint – the Red Cross is
officially an intelligence arm of the British monarchy. [383]
According to Dope
Inc., Tibor Rosenbaum’s BCI was a key bank in the Permindex assassination of
Kennedy, transferring funds from Bank Hapoalim to New Orleans FBI Division Five
Station Chief Guy Bannister. Bannister’s
agent Jerry Brooks Gaitlin doled out the cash to Hunt and his Cuban team of
assassins. Both Bannister and Gaitlin
died under mysterious circumstances.
Howard Hunt’s Double
Chek was a subsidiary of Centro Mondiale Commerciale, the Permindex Rome
branch. William Seymour, the Oswald
double who played Cuban sympathizer for months before the Kennedy hit, met with
Clay Shaw and David Ferrie to form a triangulation of fire plan. The actual Oswald was on SOE Division Five
payroll.
According to many
researchers, the weapons for the Kennedy coup came through Schlumberger and the
seven-shooter hit team consisted of an elite group put together by J. Edgar
Hoover and Sir William Stephenson in 1943.
The team was formed through the American Council of Christian Churches
(ACCC), which Bloomfield, Stephenson and Hoover founded as cover for US and
British intelligence via ACCC Latin American missions.
ACCC is a network of
aristocratic far-right religions. Its west coast director E. E. Bradley was
indicted by New Orleans prosecutor Jim Garrison for his role in the JFK
hit. David Ferrie worked under ACCC
cover. An ACCC orphan school near
Puebla, Mexico was used to train 25-30 of the world’s premier marksmen. ACCC Minister Albert Osborne ran the school
after he fled the US due to his support of Hitler during WWII. These “students” carried out the Kennedy
assassination. Assassins from this same
team may have deployed to kill both Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
[384]
Kennedy was scheduled
to speak at the Dallas Trademart – a Permindex affiliate – the day he was
gunned down. After the Kennedy
assassination Permindex morphed into Intertel, while BCI was replaced by Robert
Vesco’s Bahamas-based Resorts International – whose lawyers included Paul
Helliwell and Kennedy Justice Department hack Robert Peloquin, who served in
Naval Intelligence and with NSA before joining Justice.
Resorts International
has its headquarters on Paradise Island, which is owned by Huntington Hartford,
scion of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company. Intertel is officially a subsidiary of
Resorts and its board included Howard Hunt buddy Edward Mullin of FBI Division
Five and president of the Bronfman family-controlled Royal Bank of Canada,
David Belisle of NSA and Sir Randolph Bacon – former head of Scotland
Yard. Intertel provides security for
Caribbean and Las Vegas casinos and moved gambling and horse racing into
Atlantic City, New Jersey.
The Warren Commission
which “investigated” the Kennedy assassination was stacked with the very
cronies Kennedy had denounced. Allen
Dulles, the CIA Director whom Kennedy had fired, loomed large over the
proceedings, steering the inquiry away from any hint of CIA involvement. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was a right-wing
fanatic who despised Kennedy. President
Gerald Ford, then a Michigan Senator, leaked information on the hearings to FBI
Assistant Director Cartha De Loach. [385]
Senators Arlen Spector (D-PA) and Richard Shelby (R-AL) are prominent
members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which oversees CIA activity.
But the most
influential member of the Warren Commission was Chase Manhattan Bank chairman
John McCloy, who later directed the World Bank.
McCloy was attorney for the Saudi-based ARAMCO and helped David
Rockefeller spirit the Shah out of Iran.
Kennedy had angered
the US military establishment but his death sentence was signed by the
international bankers.
Kennedy had announced
a crackdown on off-shore tax havens and proposed increases in tax rates on
large oil and mining companies. He
supported eliminating tax loopholes which benefit the super-rich. His economic policies were publicly attacked
by Fortune magazine, the Wall Street Journal and both David and Nelson
Rockefeller. Kennedy’s own Treasury
Secretary Douglas Dillon, who came from the Bechtel-controlled Dillon Read
investment bank, voiced opposition to the JFK proposals. [386]
Kennedy’s fate was
sealed in June 1963 when he authorized the issuance of more than $4 billion in
United States Notes by his Treasury Department in an attempt to circumvent the
high interest rate usury of the Eight Families Federal Reserve international
banker crowd. President Lincoln had made
a similar move 100 years earlier and suffered the same consequences.
The wife of accused
assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, who was conveniently gunned down by Jack Ruby
before Ruby quickly died in prison, told author A. J. Weberman in 1994, “The
answer to the Kennedy assassination is with the Federal Reserve Bank. Don’t underestimate that. It’s wrong to blame it on Angleton and the
CIA per se only. This is only one finger
on the same hand. The people who supply
the money are above the CIA”. [387]
New Orleans Trade
Mart Director and SOE operative Clay Shaw’s address book contained the names of
many powerful people who may have “supplied the money”. They included international oligarchs
Maquesse Guiseppe Rey of Italy, Baron Rafaelo de Banfield of Italy, Princess
Jaqueline Chimay of France, Lady Margaret D’Arcy of England, Lady Hulce of
England and Sir Michael Duff of England. [388]
But perhaps the most
interesting phone number in Shaw’s address book belonged to Sir Steven
Runciman, an elite historian with insider knowledge of the Knights Templar and
their Priory of Sion inner sanctum.
Warren Commission Chairman Earl Warren, John McCloy, Allen Dulles, J.
Edgar Hoover and Gerald Ford were all 33rd Degree Illuminized Freemasons.
Visitors to the
Dealey Plaza assassination site report seeing an obelisk dedicated to
Freemasonry. Dallas – headquarters for
illumination merchant Exxon Mobil and much of corporate America – sits on the
33rd parallel.
The Hollow Men
A poem by T.S.
Elliott
The Third Millennium BC
(3100-2100 BC)
The Period of the
First Great Civilizations. Where there great asteroid/comet impacts. Do the
flood stories base on what really happened. What caused the drop of temperature
and drying around the Mediterranean?
The sudden beginning,
did something happen in 3114 BC? Why did the first great civilisations collapse
suddenly and at the same time around 2200 BC?
<|>---<|>---<|>
The problem with
intellectually insecure whites
By Kevin MacDonald
January 19, 2009
Real Jew News
Unmasking
The Structures
Of Jewish
Thought
By Brother Nathanael
Kapner, Copyright 2012
Real Jew News
The New
Jewish Hostile Elite
Interview of Nathanael Kapner with
Kevin MacDonald PhD
Interview transcript
The Occidental
Observer
Kevin
MacDonald: Jews as a hostile elite–again
Kevin MacDonald:
Peter Brimelow ends his recent article (”Redneckophobia”? Why Obama Is
Attacking Arizona“) by noting : “Our political class may live in a fantasy
world, but the motive for its immigration enthusiasm is all too real: a
relentless hatred of the historic American nation.”The immediate object of his
ire is one Klejda Gjermani, described by Brimelow as “an Albanian expatriate of
Jewish descent” who stepped off the boat and pretty much immediately realized
she suffered from redneckophobia. She
works for Commentary, so I am sure she feels quite at home there.
Writing in Takimag,
Paul Gottfried (The Death of the WASP) also raises the issue of Jews as a
hostile elite, claiming that although I am generally an “over-the-top critic of
Jewish power” (specifics would be nice),
on this particular issue I have “hardly scratched the surface”:
Even that over-the-top critic of Jewish
power, Kevin MacDonald, has hardly scratched the surface in delineating the
nastiness with which the children and grandchildren of Eastern European Jewish
immigrants clawed their way to the top of the academic-media industry, on the
backs of those they often despised. And all the while they appealed with
brilliant success to a guilty WASP conscience.
I’ll really try to
work on this problem, maybe check my Thesaurus for some good synonyms for
“despised.” Memo to self: Must stop being polite.
It really wouldn’t
matter much that Jews have become an elite except for this relentless hatred
and loathing. After all, all societies
have elites. What is toxic is that such a substantial portion of our
elite–especially that part of the elite that is ensconced in the media, the
financial, and the academic world– hates (loathes, despises) the traditional
people and culture they rule over.
We should never
forget what happened when Jews were a hostile elite in the USSR. The loathing
and contempt for the traditional people and culture of Russia was a major
factor in the avid Jewish participation in the greatest crimes of the 20th century:
A very traditional part of Jewish culture
was to despise the Russians and their culture. (Even the Jewish literati
despised all of traditional Russian culture, apart from Pushkin and a few
literary icons.) Indeed, one wonders what would motivate the Jewish commissars
to revenge apart from motives related to their Jewish identity. Traditional
hostility toward non-Jews and their culture forms a central theme in the
writings of Israel Shahak and many mainstream Jewish historians, including
Slezkine, andI have presented summaries of this material elsewhere…. hatred
toward the peoples and cultures of non-Jews and the image of enslaved ancestors
as victims of anti-Semitism have been the Jewish norm throughout history—much
commented on, from Tacitus to the present.
(review of Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century)
In other words, this
is a problem that is endemic to Diaspora Judaism. Hostility and loathing toward
the people and culture they live among is a very long and tragic theme of
Jewish history and a potent source of historical anti-Semitism.
And speaking of
“redneckophobia,” the above passage continues:
It is easy to imagine which sectors of
American society would have been deemed overly backward and religious and
therefore worthy of mass murder by the American counterparts of the Jewish
elite in the Soviet Union—the ones who journeyed to Ellis Island instead of
Moscow. The descendants of these overly backward and religious people now loom
large among the “red state” voters who have been so important in recent
national elections. Jewish animosity toward the Christian culture that is so
deeply ingrained in much of America is legendary.
Gottfried notes that
the Jews who deposed the WASP elite “appealed with brilliant success to a
guilty WASP conscience.” Why the WASPs are so guilt-prone is an important
question, but it’s ironic that Shelby Steele recently appealed to White guilt
to explain why the West can’t muster the moral courage to condemn Israel’s
enemies (WSJ, “Israel and the surrender of the West“). Leaving aside the
monstrosity of what he says about Israel, this is the gist of the argument:
One reason for [Israel being seen as the
bad guy] is that the entire Western world has suffered from a deficit of moral
authority for decades now. Today we in the West are reluctant to use our full
military might in war lest we seem imperialistic; we hesitate to enforce our
borders lest we seem racist; we are reluctant to ask for assimilation from new
immigrants lest we seem xenophobic; and we are pained to give Western
Civilization primacy in our educational curricula lest we seem supremacist.
Today the West lives on the defensive, the very legitimacy of our modern
societies requiring constant dissociation from the sins of the Western
past—racism, economic exploitation, imperialism and so on.
When the Israeli commandos boarded that
last boat in the flotilla and, after being attacked with metal rods, killed
nine of their attackers, they were acting in a world without the moral
authority to give them the benefit of the doubt.
So the conclusion is
that the Jews who deposed the WASP elite by appealing to their guilt proneness
to the point that the new Jewish hostile elite has carte blanche to displace
them by importing a new people (opposition would be “racist”) now find
themselves with a West unable to defend the moral legitimacy of whatever Israel
does. I suppose there is a certain justice in this, but the loss for the
traditional people of America is incalculable. And given what happened in the
USSR, White people should be very afraid of what the future may hold.
{130 responses…}
Jennifer Lake’s Blog
The Moscow
Signal
The Moscow
Signal was the name given by
intelligence insiders to the low-power microwave beams claimed to have been
broadcast into the US embassy for more than two decades, from 1953 until 1976.
No members of the public were to hear of it until 1976, not even the staff of
the US embassy in Moscow. Journalist Paul
Brodeur, longtime writer for The New Yorker, recounted the events in his
1977 book The Zapping of America: “According
to the first report of the affair, which appeared in the Los Angeles Times on
February 7 [1976], Ambassador Walter J. Stoessel Jr had told some of the 125
members of his staff that the Russians were using microwave beams to listen in
on conversations inside the embassy, and that such radiation could be harmful to
their health…” [p95]
As it happens, the
signal went undiscovered until 1962 when a security sweep for listening devices
revealed the presence of an unusual pulsed series of microwaves. The Department
of Defense had only recently terminated its Tri-Service Program, a microwave
studies “health and safety” evaluation operated from 1957 to 1961, for reasons
that Brodeur makes clear. What followed in the wake of the Moscow Signal
discovery was a rapid withdrawal of related, defense-funded radio/radar research
among independent non-military contractors. In 1966, the government classified
its continuing effort as Project Pandora,
a three year investigation that maintained complete official silence until the
story of the Moscow Signal broke in the papers –most of Pandora’s experiments,
it seems, have never been declassified.
The focus of Brodeur’s whistleblowing in Zapping was the power density exposure, arbitrarily set and voluntarily adopted at
the limit of ten-milliwatts per
centimeter squared (10mW/cm2). The Russians, he states, set their upper
limit 1,000 times lower, measured in microwatts. Even one milliwatt was a
figure much too high for Russian workplace safety. During the mid-60s period of
contentious debate among knowing Americans, a one-milliwatt (1mW/cm2) limit had
been suggested by the deputy director of the Bureau of Radiological Health
(Robert L. Elder) who then reversed himself to defend a five-milliwatt limit
for industry. Not without irony, the Moscow Signal was said to be at
four-milliwatts per square centimeter.
{Read more at the
above link…}
“… good for Israel…”
Exposing,
Challenging and Stopping AIPAC
Occupy AIPAC 2012 Workshop
Semitic Controversies
In Brief: The
Trotsky Quote
Recently there has been an upsurge in
the use of a particular quote that has been attributed to the leading jewish
Bolshevik Leon Trotsky. (1) This quote is as follows:
‘We must turn Russia
into a desert populated by white negroes upon whom we shall impose a tyranny
such as the most terrible Eastern despots never dreamt of. The only difference
is that this will be a left-wing tyranny, not a right-wing tyranny. It will be
a red tyranny and not a white one.
We mean the word 'red'
literally, because we shall shed such floods of blood as will make all the
human losses suffered in the capitalist wars quake and pale by comparison. The
biggest bankers across the ocean will work in the closest possible contact with
us. If we win the revolution, we shall establish the power of Zionism upon the
wreckage of the revolution's funeral, and we shall became a power before which
the whole world will sink to its knees. We shall show what real power is. By
means of terror and bloodbaths, we shall reduce the Russian intelligentsia to a
state of complete stupefaction and idiocy and to an animal existence... At the
moment, our young men in their leather jackets, who are the sons of watchmakers
from Odessa, Orsha, Gomel and Vinnitsa, know how to hate everything Russian!
What pleasure they take in physically destroying the Russian intelligentsia -
officers, academics and writers!’ (2)
We should first remark that this
quote is obviously very similar to what I have termed the Selenkov quotation;
which I have previously discussed, that runs as follows:
‘We must create a climate of anti-nationalism
and anti-racialism amongst Whites. We must reduce patriotism and pride of race
to meaningless abstractions and make racialism a dirty word.’ (3)
In my discussion of the Selenkov
quotation I pointed out that there was no reason to regard it as genuine as the
wording makes no sense from an avowedly Marxist-Leninist perspective and to
claim a Bolshevik leader would talk in a fashion more akin to the radical right
than their own radical left language was nonsensical unless the quotation could
be substantiated evidentially. We can see that this supposed Trotsky quotation
suffers from the same basic problem in that it uses the language of the radical
right rather than the radical left, which stems from the apparent inability of
the originator(s) to use Marxist-Leninist phraseology and replacing this way of
thinking and arguing with how their own ideology (in this case something to do
with the Russian far right) interprets what Marxism-Leninism is really saying.
For example the Trotsky quotation
makes the considerable mistake of claiming; in effect, that Trotsky was a
Zionist when Marxism-Leninism and Zionism were (often violently) competing
ideologies among the jews in Russia and the early Soviet Union; in which
Trotsky played a not inconsiderable role, went so far as to provide a counter
to the Zionist tendency by assigning jews their own oblast or autonomous
region. Indeed Trotsky spent a considerable portion of his early career
fighting and speaking against Zionism as a competing self-solution to the
jewish question!
The Trotsky quotation also makes the
mistake of asserting that Trotsky knew that the Bolshevik revolution would fail
and that in its wake he would somehow create a new; and largely undefined,
Zionist state, which by implication rule the Russian people as cattle. This is
utterly undermined by Trotsky’s own behaviour after his removal from power and
exile from the Soviet Union under Stalin’s auspices. After all if Trotsky had
been planning something along these lines then he should have immediately
repudiated some of his professed beliefs and then go on to join the flourishing
Zionist movement rather than founding his own breakaway Bolshevik faction: the
Fourth International. Indeed Trotsky spent the remainder of his life until his
assassination writing and arguing for another Bolshevik revolution in what he
perceived to be the spirit of Lenin rather than that of Stalin (i.e. the
doctrine of ‘permanent revolution’ as opposed to ‘socialism in one country’). (4)
We should also note that the Trotsky
quotation gives us a quite obvious clue to the fact that it is probably
entirely made-up in so far as it asserts that its young acolytes should ‘know
how to hate everything Russian’. This is not something that a Marxist-Leninist
would say: given that although national identity is technically irrelevant in
Marxism-Leninism it is however of importance to the infant revolution not to
preach such doctrines as they would work directly against the feelings of the
Russian people as maybe simply demonstrated by pointing out that in 1941:
Stalin was able and had to call; after 24 years of Bolshevism, on nationalist
and religious sentiment in order to get the recruits he needed for the Red
Army.
Now if Trotsky was so absurdly silly
as to argue that such sentiment was irrelevant at some undefined, but likely
very early, point during the Soviet Union then he would not have succeeded in
convincing those around him to fight as they did. After all the single most important
component of Marxist-Leninist cadre is to ‘do anything to further the interests
of the revolution’ and causing massive opposition is hardly furthering the
interests of the revolution!
However to a Russian nationalist then
it would be a point of ideology that both Bolsheviks and jews hated everything
Russian; a-la the Protocols of Zion, (5) and sought to destroy it as a matter
of priority with the implication that everything Russian is the be all and end
all of importance.
We can confirm this probable
authorship by pointing out that according to Stepin the quotation came from the
first edition of ‘Russkoye Slovo’ (a copy of which I have been unable to
locate) although a similar publication; ‘Novoye Russkoye Slovo’, was an
American anti-Bolshevik Russian émigré periodical that began life in 1910. (6)
We can deduce from this that
‘Russkoye Slovo’ was either an émigré or indigenous Russian periodical with
strong anti-revolutionary and anti-jewish tendencies; as to whether it was
anti-Judaism or anti-Semitic we have no clue but the former is the more likely,
that was probably in operation before 1910. However that presents us with a
considerable problem in that Trotsky was not of any particular prominence in
the revolutionary movement in Russia before 1917 and if we are to believe the
quotation’s accuracy and the necessary deductions we have made about the
originating publication then the publication itself was either very lucky or
had considerable knowledge of how things would turn out. When we consider how
secure the Tsarist regime seemed before the strain of war told on its
population from 1916 to 1917 facilitating the February and October revolutions
then we can only suggest that either the periodical had prophetical ability or
the periodical did not exist.
Perhaps the best reason we can argue
that the periodical did not exist is the more likely of the two situations is
that with Trotsky being an obscure figure in the revolutionary movement and the
Tsarist government seeming very secure: the periodical; which remember was
likely published before 1910, would not have known that Trotsky was to become a
major figure and that therefore any utterances he would have made would have
been those of an obscure and rather marginal jewish revolutionary who had been
effectively neutralised by the Tsarist secret police. So why on earth would the
‘Russkoye Slovo’ given such space to utterances from a marginal jewish
revolutionary that are not even confirmable and would be surpassed by the
claims and arguments of the readily available revolutionary émigré publications
such as the ‘Iskra’.
So why give a revolutionary nobody
such prominence in the first issue?
The answer is obvious: because it did not exist in the first place
and the quote was manufactured after Trotsky had risen to prominence by his
opponents.
Interestingly; by way of an addendum,
a 1937 American anti-Semitic publication; ‘Trotsky
and the Jews behind the Russian Revolution’, allegedly cryptically authored
by ‘a former Russian Commissar’ tries to do something similar when it asserts;
contrary to the biographers of Trotsky and Lenin, that Lenin ‘fronted’ from Trotsky who was the
éminence grise of the Bolshevik movement. (7) The author of this occasionally
clever diatribe against the overrepresentation of jews in the Russian Socialist
movement in general makes a similar mistake to the author of Trotsky quotation
when he talks about his supposed ‘insider
knowledge’ of Trotsky in that he never once makes anything like a statement
that one would attribute to someone who had had strong Marxist beliefs; which
to be a Commissar one would have to have been, and often speaks with a strongly
Orthodox Christian tone (8) more common to the Russian radical right (9) than
to a repentant ex-Marxist. (10) This informs that this kind of writing; i.e.
ascribing things to Trotsky which were patently not anything to do with, were
common among the radical right at this time and the reason they ascribed them
for Trotksy was that he was the most prominent of the jewish Bolsheviki; although
later Lenin’s jewish origins were discovered he was generally considered a
Russian at the time, much as German anti-Communists and anti-Semites focused on
the activities of Karl Radek in connection with the jewish-dominated nascent
KPD. (11)
References
(1) There are numerous biographies of Trotsky
but perhaps the best of the pack are Isaac Deutscher, Ronald Segal and Robert
Service’s offerings as each offers a different and somewhat credible
perspective on him.
(2) As cited in Vladimir Stepin, 1993, ‘The Nature of Zionism’, which has been
made available in English translation at the following address: http://radioislam.org/zionism
(4) The ideological differences between
Trotsky and Stalin have been rather overplayed in the literature on
Marxism-Leninism as it has been conclusively shown that Stalin did believe in
the doctrine of permanent revolution, but rather was more realistic about it
than Trotsky was in that he wanted to build up the ‘forces of revolution’ rather than simply expect the ‘proletariat’ to join the masses of the
Red Army when the latter invaded as both Lenin and Trotsky did. On this point
please see Ernst Topitsch, A. Taylor (Trans.), 1987, ‘Stalin’s War: A Radical New Theory of the Origins of the Second World
War’, 1st Edition, St. Martin’s Press: New York, pp. 11-62 and John Mosier,
2010, ‘Deathride: Hitler vs. Stalin: The
Eastern Front, 1941-1945’, 1st Edition, Simon & Schuster: New York, pp.
57-115.
(5) To quote part of Protocol 15 with a
similar message: ‘The principle guarantee
of stability of rule is to confirm the aureole of power, and this aureole is
attained only by such a majestic inflexibility of might as shall carry on its
face the emblems of inviolability from mystical causes from the choice of God.
Such was, until recent times, the Russian aristocracy, the one and only serious
foe we had in the world, without counting the Papacy.’ (p. 193 in the 1934 ‘Defender’ expanded edition of the
Marsden translation). This obviously also assigns a similar role to Russia as
the ‘main bulwark’ and ‘intellectual
centre’ of the world against Bolshevism and the jews in much the same way as
the Trotsky quotation does.
(6) http://rbth.ru/articles/2010/05/13/novoye_russkoye_slovo_100_years.html
[Last Accessed: 09/01/2011]
(7) Anon., 1997, [1937], ‘Trotsky and the Jews behind the Russian Revolution’, 1st Edition,
CPA Book Publisher: Boring, pp. 8-9
(8) Ibid, p. 13
(9) See for example Michael Kellogg, 2005, ‘The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Emigres
and the Making of National Socialism 1917-1945’, 1st Edition, Cambridge
University Press: New York, pp. 30-46
(10) For example compare to Freda Utley, 1940, ‘The Dream We Lost: Soviet Russia Then and
Now’, 1st Edition, John Day: New York.
(11) For example see Nigel Jones, 2004, ‘A Brief History of the Birth of the Nazis’,
2nd Edition, Robinson: London, p. 61
Posted 30th April 2011
by Karl Radl
Institute for
Historical Review
The Jewish Role
in the Bolshevik Revolution and Russia's Early Soviet Regime
Assessing the Grim Legacy of Soviet
Communism
By Mark Weber
In the night of July
16-17, 1918, a squad of Bolshevik secret police murdered Russia's last emperor,
Tsar Nicholas II, along with his wife, Tsaritsa Alexandra, their 14-year-old
son, Tsarevich Alexis, and their four daughters. They were cut down in a hail
of gunfire in a half-cellar room of the house in Ekaterinburg, a city in the
Ural mountain region, where they were being held prisoner. The daughters were
finished off with bayonets. To prevent a cult for the dead Tsar, the bodies
were carted away to the countryside and hastily buried in a secret grave.
Bolshevik authorities
at first reported that the Romanov emperor had been shot after the discovery of
a plot to liberate him. For some time the deaths of the Empress and the
children were kept secret. Soviet historians claimed for many years that local
Bolsheviks had acted on their own in carrying out the killings, and that Lenin,
founder of the Soviet state, had nothing to do with the crime.
In 1990, Moscow
playwright and historian Edvard Radzinsky announced the result of his detailed
investigation into the murders. He unearthed the reminiscences of Lenin's
bodyguard, Alexei Akimov, who recounted how he personally delivered Lenin's
execution order to the telegraph office. The telegram was also signed by Soviet
government chief Yakov Sverdlov. Akimov had saved the original telegraph tape
as a record of the secret order.1
Radzinsky's research
confirmed what earlier evidence had already indicated. Leon Trotsky -- one of
Lenin's closest colleagues -- had revealed years earlier that Lenin and Sverdlov
had together made the decision to put the Tsar and his family to death.
Recalling a conversation in 1918, Trotsky wrote:2
My next visit to Moscow took place after
the [temporary] fall of Ekaterinburg [to anti-Communist forces]. Speaking with
Sverdlov, I asked in passing: "Oh yes, and where is the Tsar?"
"Finished," he replied. "He
has been shot."
"And where is the family?"
"The family along with him."
"All of them?" I asked, apparently
with a trace of surprise.
"All of them," replied Sverdlov.
"What about it?" He was waiting to see my reaction. I made no reply.
"And who made the decision?" I
asked.
"We decided it here. Ilyich [Lenin]
believed that we shouldn't leave the Whites a live banner to rally around,
especially under the present difficult circumstances."
I asked no further questions and considered
the matter closed.
Recent research and
investigation by Radzinsky and others also corroborates the account provided
years earlier by Robert Wilton, correspondent of the London Times in Russia for
17 years. His account, The Last Days of the Romanovs - originally published in
1920, and reissued in 1993 by the Institute for Historical Review -- is based
in large part on the findings of a detailed investigation carried out in 1919
by Nikolai Sokolov under the authority of "White" (anti-Communist)
leader Alexander Kolchak. Wilton's book remains one of the most accurate and
complete accounts of the murder of Russia's imperial family.3
A solid understanding
of history has long been the best guide to comprehending the present and
anticipating the future. Accordingly, people are most interested in historical
questions during times of crisis, when the future seems most uncertain. With
the collapse of Communist rule in the Soviet Union, 1989-1991, and as Russians
struggle to build a new order on the ruins of the old, historical issues have
become very topical. For example, many ask: How did the Bolsheviks, a small
movement guided by the teachings of German-Jewish social philosopher Karl Marx,
succeed in taking control of Russia and imposing a cruel and despotic regime on
its people?
In recent years, Jews
around the world have been voicing anxious concern over the specter of
anti-Semitism in the lands of the former Soviet Union. In this new and
uncertain era, we are told, suppressed feelings of hatred and rage against Jews
are once again being expressed. According to one public opinion survey
conducted in 1991, for example, most Russians wanted all Jews to leave the
country.4 But precisely why is anti-Jewish sentiment so widespread among the
peoples of the former Soviet Union? Why do so many Russians, Ukrainians,
Lithuanians and others blame "the Jews" for so much misfortune?
A Taboo Subject
Although officially
Jews have never made up more than five percent of the country's total
population,5 they played a highly disproportionate and probably decisive role
in the infant Bolshevik regime, effectively dominating the Soviet government
during its early years. Soviet historians, along with most of their colleagues
in the West, for decades preferred to ignore this subject. The facts, though,
cannot be denied.
With the notable
exception of Lenin (Vladimir Ulyanov), most of the leading Communists who took
control of Russia in 1917-20 were Jews. Leon Trotsky (Lev Bronstein) headed the
Red Army and, for a time, was chief of Soviet foreign affairs. Yakov Sverdlov
(Solomon) was both the Bolshevik party's executive secretary and -- as chairman
of the Central Executive Committee -- head of the Soviet government. Grigori
Zinoviev (Radomyslsky) headed the Communist International (Comintern), the
central agency for spreading revolution in foreign countries. Other prominent
Jews included press commissar Karl Radek (Sobelsohn), foreign affairs commissar
Maxim Litvinov (Wallach), Lev Kamenev (Rosenfeld) and Moisei Uritsky.6
Lenin himself was of
mostly Russian and Kalmuck ancestry, but he was also one-quarter Jewish. His
maternal grandfather, Israel (Alexander) Blank, was a Ukrainian Jew who was
later baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church.7
A thorough-going
internationalist, Lenin viewed ethnic or cultural loyalties with contempt. He
had little regard for his own countrymen. "An intelligent Russian,"
he once remarked, "is almost always a Jew or someone with Jewish blood in
his veins."8
Critical Meetings
In the Communist
seizure of power in Russia, the Jewish role was probably critical.
Two weeks prior to
the Bolshevik "October Revolution" of 1917, Lenin convened a top
secret meeting in St. Petersburg (Petrograd) at which the key leaders of the
Bolshevik party's Central Committee made the fateful decision to seize power in
a violent takeover. Of the twelve persons who took part in this decisive
gathering, there were four Russians (including Lenin), one Georgian (Stalin),
one Pole (Dzerzhinsky), and six Jews.9
To direct the
takeover, a seven-man "Political Bureau" was chosen. It consisted of
two Russians (Lenin and Bubnov), one Georgian (Stalin), and four Jews (Trotsky,
Sokolnikov, Zinoviev, and Kamenev).10
Meanwhile, the Petersburg (Petrograd)
Soviet -- whose chairman was Trotsky -- established an 18-member "Military
Revolutionary Committee" to actually carry out the seizure of power. It
included eight (or nine) Russians, one Ukrainian, one Pole, one Caucasian, and six
Jews.11 Finally, to supervise the organization of the uprising, the Bolshevik
Central Committee established a five-man "Revolutionary Military
Center" as the Party's operations command. It consisted of one Russian
(Bubnov), one Georgian (Stalin), one Pole (Dzerzhinsky), and two Jews (Sverdlov
and Uritsky).12
Contemporary Voices
of Warning
Well-informed
observers, both inside and outside of Russia, took note at the time of the
crucial Jewish role in Bolshevism. Winston Churchill, for one, warned in an article
published in the February 8, 1920, issue of the London Illustrated Sunday
Herald that Bolshevism is a "worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of
civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested
development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality." The eminent
British political leader and historian went on to write:13
There is no need to exaggerate the part
played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the
Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical
Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With
the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews.
Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish
leaders. Thus Tchitcherin, a pure Russian, is eclipsed by his nominal
subordinate, Litvinoff, and the influence of Russians like Bukharin or
Lunacharski cannot be compared with the power of Trotsky, or of Zinovieff, the
Dictator of the Red Citadel (Petrograd), or of Krassin or Radek -- all Jews. In
the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing. And
the prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism
applied by the Extraordinary Commissions for Combatting Counter-Revolution [the
Cheka] has been taken by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses.
Needless to say, the most intense passions
of revenge have been excited in the breasts of the Russian people.
David R. Francis,
United States ambassador in Russia, warned in a January 1918 dispatch to
Washington: "The Bolshevik leaders here, most of whom are Jews and 90
percent of whom are returned exiles, care little for Russia or any other
country but are internationalists and they are trying to start a worldwide
social revolution."14
The Netherlands'
ambassador in Russia, Oudendyke, made much the same point a few months later:
"Unless Bolshevism is nipped in the bud immediately, it is bound to spread
in one form or another over Europe and the whole world as it is organized and
worked by Jews who have no nationality, and whose one object is to destroy for
their own ends the existing order of things."15
"The Bolshevik
Revolution," declared a leading American Jewish community paper in 1920, "was
largely the product of Jewish thinking, Jewish discontent, Jewish effort to
reconstruct."16
As an expression of
its radically anti-nationalist character, the fledgling Soviet government
issued a decree a few months after taking power that made anti-Semitism a crime
in Russia. The new Communist regime thus became the first in the world to
severely punish all expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment.17 Soviet officials
apparently regarded such measures as indispensable. Based on careful
observation during a lengthy stay in Russia, American-Jewish scholar Frank
Golder reported in 1925 that "because so many of the Soviet leaders are
Jews anti-Semitism is gaining [in Russia], particularly in the army [and] among
the old and new intelligentsia who are being crowded for positions by the sons
of Israel."18
Historians' Views
Summing up the
situation at that time, Israeli historian Louis Rapoport writes:19
Immediately after the [Bolshevik]
Revolution, many Jews were euphoric over their high representation in the new
government. Lenin's first Politburo was dominated by men of Jewish origins
Under Lenin, Jews became involved in all
aspects of the Revolution, including its dirtiest work. Despite the Communists'
vows to eradicate anti-Semitism, it spread rapidly after the Revolution --
partly because of the prominence of so many Jews in the Soviet administration,
as well as in the traumatic, inhuman Sovietization drives that followed.
Historian Salo Baron has noted that an immensely disproportionate number of
Jews joined the new Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka And many of those who
fell afoul of the Cheka would be shot by Jewish investigators.
The collective leadership that emerged in
Lenin's dying days was headed by the Jew Zinoviev, a loquacious, mean-spirited,
curly-haired Adonis whose vanity knew no bounds.
"Anyone who had
the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cheka," wrote Jewish
historian Leonard Schapiro, "stood a very good chance of finding himself
confronted with, and possibly shot by, a Jewish investigator."20 In
Ukraine, "Jews made up nearly 80 percent of the rank-and-file Cheka
agents," reports W. Bruce Lincoln, an American professor of Russian
history.21 (Beginning as the Cheka, or Vecheka) the Soviet secret police was
later known as the GPU, OGPU, NKVD, MVD and KGB.)
In light of all this,
it should not be surprising that Yakov M. Yurovksy, the leader of the Bolshevik
squad that carried out the murder of the Tsar and his family, was Jewish, as
was Sverdlov, the Soviet chief who co-signed Lenin's execution order.22
Igor Shafarevich, a
Russian mathematician of world stature, has sharply criticized the Jewish role
in bringing down the Romanov monarchy and establishing Communist rule in his
country. Shafarevich was a leading dissident during the final decades of Soviet
rule. A prominent human rights activist, he was a founding member of the
Committee on the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR.
In Russophobia, a
book written ten years before the collapse of Communist rule, he noted that
Jews were "amazingly" numerous among the personnel of the Bolshevik
secret police. The characteristic Jewishness of the Bolshevik executioners,
Shafarevich went on, is most conspicuous in the execution of Nicholas II:23
This ritual action symbolized the end of
centuries of Russian history, so that it can be compared only to the execution
of Charles I in England or Louis XVI in France. It would seem that
representatives of an insignificant ethnic minority should keep as far as
possible from this painful action, which would reverberate in all history. Yet
what names do we meet? The execution was personally overseen by Yakov Yurovsky
who shot the Tsar; the president of the local Soviet was Beloborodov
(Vaisbart); the person responsible for the general administration in Ekaterinburg
was Shaya Goloshchekin. To round out the picture, on the wall of the room where
the execution took place was a distich from a poem by Heine (written in German)
about King Balthazar, who offended Jehovah and was killed for the offense.
In his 1920 book,
British veteran journalist Robert Wilton offered a similarly harsh
assessment:24
The whole record of Bolshevism in Russia is
indelibly impressed with the stamp of alien invasion. The murder of the Tsar,
deliberately planned by the Jew Sverdlov (who came to Russia as a paid agent of
Germany) and carried out by the Jews Goloshchekin, Syromolotov, Safarov, Voikov
and Yurovsky, is the act not of the Russian people, but of this hostile
invader.
In the struggle for
power that followed Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin emerged victorious over his
rivals, eventually succeeding in putting to death nearly every one of the most
prominent early Bolsheviks leaders - including Trotsky, Zinoviev, Radek, and
Kamenev. With the passage of time, and particularly after 1928, the Jewish role
in the top leadership of the Soviet state and its Communist party diminished
markedly.
Put To Death Without Trial
For a few months
after taking power, Bolshevik leaders considered bringing "Nicholas
Romanov" before a "Revolutionary Tribunal" that would publicize
his "crimes against the people" before sentencing him to death.
Historical precedent existed for this. Two European monarchs had lost their
lives as a consequence of revolutionary upheaval: England's Charles I was
beheaded in 1649, and France's Louis XVI was guillotined in 1793.
In these cases, the
king was put to death after a lengthy public trial, during which he was allowed
to present arguments in his defense. Nicholas II, though, was neither charged
nor tried. He was secretly put to death - along with his family and staff -- in
the dead of night, in an act that resembled more a gangster-style massacre than
a formal execution.
Why did Lenin and
Sverdlov abandon plans for a show trial of the former Tsar? In Wilton's view,
Nicholas and his family were murdered because the Bolshevik rulers knew quite
well that they lacked genuine popular support, and rightly feared that the
Russian people would never approve killing the Tsar, regardless of pretexts and
legalistic formalities.
For his part, Trotsky
defended the massacre as a useful and even necessary measure. He wrote:25
The decision [to kill the imperial family]
was not only expedient but necessary. The severity of this punishment showed
everyone that we would continue to fight on mercilessly, stopping at nothing.
The execution of the Tsar's family was needed not only in order to frighten,
horrify, and instill a sense of hopelessness in the enemy but also to shake up
our own ranks, to show that there was no turning back, that ahead lay either
total victory or total doom This Lenin sensed well.
Historical Context
In the years leading
up to the 1917 revolution, Jews were disproportionately represented in all of
Russia's subversive leftist parties.26 Jewish hatred of the Tsarist regime had
a basis in objective conditions. Of the leading European powers of the day,
imperial Russia was the most institutionally conservative and anti-Jewish. For
example, Jews were normally not permitted to reside outside a large area in the
west of the Empire known as the "Pale of Settlement."27
However
understandable, and perhaps even defensible, Jewish hostility toward the
imperial regime may have been, the remarkable Jewish role in the vastly more
despotic Soviet regime is less easy to justify. In a recently published book
about the Jews in Russia during the 20th century, Russian-born Jewish writer
Sonya Margolina goes so far as to call the Jewish role in supporting the
Bolshevik regime the "historic sin of the Jews."28 She points, for
example, to the prominent role of Jews as commandants of Soviet Gulag
concentration and labor camps, and the role of Jewish Communists in the
systematic destruction of Russian churches. Moreover, she goes on, "The
Jews of the entire world supported Soviet power, and remained silent in the
face of any criticism from the opposition." In light of this record, Margolina
offers a grim prediction:
The exaggeratedly enthusiastic
participation of the Jewish Bolsheviks in the subjugation and destruction of
Russia is a sin that will be avenged Soviet power will be equated with Jewish
power, and the furious hatred against the Bolsheviks will become hatred against
Jews.
If the past is any
indication, it is unlikely that many Russians will seek the revenge that
Margolina prophecies. Anyway, to blame "the Jews" for the horrors of
Communism seems no more justifiable than to blame "white people" for
Negro slavery, or "the Germans" for the Second World War or "the
Holocaust."
Words of Grim Portent
Nicholas and his
family are only the best known of countless victims of a regime that openly
proclaimed its ruthless purpose. A few weeks after the Ekaterinburg massacre,
the newspaper of the fledgling Red Army declared:29
Without mercy, without sparing, we will
kill our enemies by the scores of hundreds, let them be thousands, let them
drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin and Uritskii let
there be floods of blood of the bourgeoisie -- more blood, as much as possible.
Grigori Zinoviev,
speaking at a meeting of Communists in September 1918, effectively pronounced a
death sentence on ten million human beings: "We must carry along with us
90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia's inhabitants. As for the
rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated."30
'The Twenty Million'
As it turned out, the
Soviet toll in human lives and suffering proved to be much higher than
Zinoviev's murderous rhetoric suggested. Rarely, if ever, has a regime taken
the lives of so many of its own people.31
Citing newly-available
Soviet KGB documents, historian Dmitri Volkogonov, head of a special Russian
parliamentary commission, recently concluded that "from 1929 to 1952 21.5
million [Soviet] people were repressed. Of these a third were shot, the rest
sentenced to imprisonment, where many also died."32
Olga Shatunovskaya, a
member of the Soviet Commission of Party Control, and head of a special
commission during the 1960s appointed by Premier Khrushchev, has similarly
concluded: "From January 1, 1935 to June 22, 1941, 19,840,000 enemies of
the people were arrested. Of these, seven million were shot in prison, and a
majority of the others died in camp." These figures were also found in the
papers of Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan.
Robert Conquest, the
distinguished specialist of Soviet history, recently summed up the grim record
of Soviet "repression" of its own people:34
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the
post-1934 death toll was well over ten million. To this should be added the
victims of the 1930-1933 famine, the kulak deportations, and other anti-peasant
campaigns, amounting to another ten million plus. The total is thus in the
range of what the Russians now refer to as 'The Twenty Million'."
A few other scholars
have given significantly higher estimates.35
The Tsarist Era in
Retrospect
With the dramatic
collapse of Soviet rule, many Russians are taking a new and more respectful
look at their country's pre-Communist history, including the era of the last
Romanov emperor. While the Soviets -- along with many in the West -- have
stereotypically portrayed this era as little more than an age of arbitrary
despotism, cruel suppression and mass poverty, the reality is rather different.
While it is true that the power of the Tsar was absolute, that only a small minority
had any significant political voice, and that the mass of the empire's citizens
were peasants, it is worth noting that Russians during the reign of Nicholas II
had freedom of press, religion, assembly and association, protection of private
property, and free labor unions. Sworn enemies of the regime, such as Lenin,
were treated with remarkable leniency.36
During the decades
prior to the outbreak of the First World War, the Russian economy was booming.
In fact, between 1890 and 1913, it was the fastest growing in the world. New
rail lines were opened at an annual rate double that of the Soviet years.
Between 1900 and 1913, iron production increased by 58
percent, while coal
production more than doubled.37 Exported Russian grain fed all of Europe.
Finally, the last decades of Tsarist Russia witnessed a magnificent flowering
of cultural life.
Everything changed
with the First World War, a catastrophe not only for Russia, but for the entire
West.
Monarchist Sentiment
In spite of (or
perhaps because of) the relentless official campaign during the entire Soviet
era to stamp out every uncritical memory of the Romanovs and imperial Russia, a
virtual cult of popular veneration for Nicholas II has been sweeping Russia in
recent years.
People have been
eagerly paying the equivalent of several hours' wages to purchase portraits of
Nicholas from street vendors in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other Russian
cities. His portrait now hangs in countless Russian homes and apartments. In
late 1990, all 200,000 copies of a first printing of a 30-page pamphlet on the
Romanovs quickly sold out. Said one street vendor: "I personally sold four
thousand copies in no time at all. It's like a nuclear explosion. People really
want to know about their Tsar and his family." Grass roots pro-Tsarist and
monarchist organizations have sprung up in many cities.
A public opinion poll
conducted in 1990 found that three out of four Soviet citizens surveyed regard
the killing of the Tsar and his family as a despicable crime.38 Many Russian
Orthodox believers regard Nicholas as a martyr. The independent "Orthodox
Church Abroad" canonized the imperial family in 1981, and the Moscow-based
Russian Orthodox Church has been under popular pressure to take the same step,
in spite of its long-standing reluctance to touch this official taboo. The
Russian Orthodox Archbishop of Ekaterinburg announced plans in 1990 to build a
grand church at the site of the killings. "The people loved Emperor
Nicholas," he said. "His memory lives with the people, not as a saint
but as someone executed without court verdict, unjustly, as a sufferer for his
faith and for orthodoxy."39
On the 75th
anniversary of the massacre (in July 1993), Russians recalled the life, death
and legacy of their last Emperor. In Ekaterinburg, where a large white cross
festooned with flowers now marks the spot where the family was killed, mourners
wept as hymns were sung and prayers were said for the victims.40
Reflecting both
popular sentiment and new social-political realities, the white, blue and red horizontal
tricolor flag of Tsarist Russia was officially adopted in 1991, replacing the
red Soviet banner. And in 1993, the imperial two-headed eagle was restored as
the nation's official emblem, replacing the Soviet hammer and sickle. Cities
that had been re-named to honor Communist figures -- such as Leningrad,
Kuibyshev, Frunze, Kalinin, and Gorky -- have re-acquired their Tsarist-era
names. Ekaterinburg, which had been named Sverdlovsk by the Soviets in 1924 in
honor of the Soviet-Jewish chief, in September 1991 restored its pre-Communist
name, which honors Empress Catherine I.
Symbolic Meaning
In view of the
millions that would be put to death by the Soviet rulers in the years to
follow, the murder of the Romanov family might not seem of extraordinary importance.
And yet, the event has deep symbolic meaning. In the apt words of Harvard
University historian Richard Pipes:41
The manner in which the massacre was
prepared and carried out, at first denied and then justified, has something
uniquely odious about it, something that radically distinguishes it from
previous acts of regicide and brands it as a prelude to twentieth-century mass
murder.
Another historian,
Ivor Benson, characterized the killing of the Romanov family as symbolic of the
tragic fate of Russia and, indeed, of the entire West, in this century of unprecedented
agony and conflict.
The murder of the
Tsar and his family is all the more deplorable because, whatever his failings
as a monarch, Nicholas II was, by all accounts, a personally decent, generous,
humane and honorable man.
The Massacre's Place in
History
The mass slaughter
and chaos of the First World War, and the revolutionary upheavals that swept
Europe in 1917-1918, brought an end not only to the ancient Romanov dynasty in
Russia, but to an entire continental social order. Swept away as well was the
Hohenzollern dynasty in Germany, with its stable constitutional monarchy, and
the ancient Habsburg dynasty of Austria-Hungary with its multinational central
European empire. Europe's leading states shared not only the same Christian and
Western cultural foundations, but most of the continent's reigning monarchs
were related by blood. England's King George was, through his mother, a first
cousin of Tsar Nicholas, and, through his father, a first cousin of Empress
Alexandra. Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm was a first cousin of the German-born
Alexandra, and a distant cousin of Nicholas.
More than was the
case with the monarchies of western Europe, Russia's Tsar personally symbolized
his land and nation. Thus, the murder of the last emperor of a dynasty that had
ruled Russia for three centuries not only symbolically presaged the Communist
mass slaughter that would claim so many Russian lives in the decades that
followed, but was symbolic of the Communist effort to kill the soul and spirit
of Russia itself.
From The Journal of
Historical Review, Jan.-Feb. 1994 (Vol. 14, No. 1), pages 4-22
About the Author
Mark Weber was born
and raised in Portland, Oregon. He studied history at the University of
Illinois (Chicago), the University of Munich, Portland State University and
Indiana University (M.A., 1977).
{Heavily footnoted - see at above link...}
Chapter 3
(Revised Sept. 2010)
Russia under
Lenin and Stalin 1921-1939
I The NEP
Period.
(1) The New Economic Policy (NEP).
This policy was
implemented in March 1921, primarily because massive peasant revolts all over
Russia threatened Bolshevik power. The peasants were revolting against war
communism, the forcible requisitioning of their produce to feed the army and
the cities. War communism was carried out with particular ruthlessness in
Tambov province. Lenin had begun this practice in the spring of 1918 (see ch.
2).
At the same time,
there was growing unrest in the towns as well as protest against undemocratic
Bolshevik rule. In March 1921, the same "Red sailors" of the naval
base on the island of Kronstadt (pron: Kronshtatt, island just outside
Leningrad), who had fought for the Bolsheviks in November 1917, now revolted
against them. The sailors demanded free and secret elections to the Soviets;
freedom of speech and press; the peasants' right to work their own land as they
wished; and the legalization of small scale private industry.
The Kronstadt revolt was brutally put down by Trotsky (then War Commissar) and Tukhachevsky, who led troops over the frozen sea to the island base. The government condemned the revolt as a "White Guardist Plot." This was propaganda, since no "White Guard" officers were involved. In reality, the Kronstadt revolt expressed general unrest and convinced Lenin that he had not only peasant revolts to deal with. Thus, the threat to Bolshevik power convinced him of the need to relax controls and rebuild the economy. Therefore, he persuaded his colleagues in the leadership to implement the New Economic Policy, NEP.
NEP was a mixture of
socialism and capitalism. The state kept control of "the heights,"
i.e., of heavy industry, banking, and transport, but allowed a free internal
market Therefore, it allowed some scope to private enterprise, i.e. private
shops, restaurants, and small scale manufacture, as well as the leasing of some
larger enterprises to private entrepreneurs. It also allowed the peasants to
work their farms. However, they were to do so within the old communal system,
and use only family labor. Forced deliveries were abolished and peasants paid
graduated taxes instead. The state remained the owner of the land.
A new class of
entrepreneurs appeared, called Nepmen. They were really middlemen, who made a
very good living by finding and selling what was most needed. They also
supplied state owned industry with parts and raw material. They could be seen
everywhere in large cities spending their money in first class restaurants and
shops.
The Soviet economy
revived quickly. There was more food from the farmers; there were goods in the
shops and outdoor markets. But was this communism or even socialism? Many party
members did not think so; they considered NEP to be a betrayal of communist
principles.
Lenin himself saw NEP
not as a departure from socialism, but as a temporary expedient. He called it
"state capitalism," and claimed it was "the ante-chamber of
socialism." He had, in fact, tried briefly to implement a similar system
in spring 1918, calling it the "New Course," but abandoned it after a
short while (see ch. 2).
(Note. We should bear in mind that NEP, whose best known exponent and defender was Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin, 1888-1938, murdered by Stalin in 1938, inspired plans for economic reform in Poland and Hungary in the late 1950s and and early 1960s; in the USSR under Nikita S. Khruschev in the early 1960s, and under Mikhail S. Gorbachev in the late 1980s . It also inspired some of the reforms carried out in Red China by Deng Xsiao Ping in the 1980s and after).
(2) Education, the
Arts. and Religion in the NEP Period.
The Soviet government
launched a campaign to eradicate illiteracy and reorganized the school system.
Education at all levels was free, but it taught communist ideology; it also
combined book learning with physical work. The old high schools, called
"gimnazia," were abolished and replaced by new secondary schools
which combined general education with vocational training; both inculcated
communist ideology. Finally, during the 1920s, most schools abolished textbooks
and examinations. While this was partly due to new educational theory, it also
stemmed from a lack of appropriate textbooks written in a communist framework.
There was censorship
of all printed matter and writers were organized in a "Proletarian
Cultural and Educational Organization" (Proletcult). Thus, as
Chernyshevsky had preached in the late 19th century, culture and education had
a didactic mission: they were to educate the people in the "right
way" of thinking. Nevertheless, in comparison with the later Stalinist
period, NEP was a time of relative cultural freedom. The arts flourished:
literature, literary criticism, art, and theater, registered considerable
achievements. Great emphasis was placed on the popularization of culture,
specially in the key cities, where the theater and art exhibitions were
accessible to the people. Likewise, state-owned publishing houses printed large
editions of both classical and contemporary Russian literature.
At this time, most of
the poets and writers supported the Soviet system, e.g. the poets Vladimir V.
Mayakovskv (1893-1930), Sergei A.Yesenin (1895-1925), and Nicholas S. Gumilev
(1886-1921), also writers such as Boris A. Pilnyak (1894-1942). However, while
Yesenin's suicide apparently was brought on by debauchery, Mayakovsky's stemmed
at least in part from disillusionment with Stalin's brand of communism.
Pilnyak, who opposed organized terror, wrote a novel titled: Tale of the
Unextinguished Moon.
The Murder of an Army Commander, in which he clearly hinted that the Red Army leader and Deputy Commissar for War in 1924-25, Mikhail V. Frunze (1885-1925), had been murdered while undergoing an operation.
The Murder of an Army Commander, in which he clearly hinted that the Red Army leader and Deputy Commissar for War in 1924-25, Mikhail V. Frunze (1885-1925), had been murdered while undergoing an operation.
True or not, such a
rumor made the rounds in Moscow and the issueof Novy Mir in which it appeared
was confiscated by the authorities. Pilnyak was arrested in late October 1937
and accused of being a Japanese spy. This seemed a plausible charge for he had
visited Japan, but it was used to remove him as an inconvenient critic of the
regime. He was shot in April 1938, one of many Soviet writers and poets who
perished in Stalin's Great Terror of 1938-39.
Thus, though the
government tolerated non-party artists and writers, there were certain limits.
A less drastic example is that of Evgeny I. Zamyatin (1884-1937) whose novel We
was a biting futuristic satire of the fully developed totalitarian state and
could not be published in the Soviet Union. The novel described how a ruthless
group of people established a state that controlled all aspects of human
activity. It was published in England in 1924, and provided the inspiration for
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), as well as for George Orwell's satire
of the USSR: 1984 (1949). Zamyatin was allowed to emigrate and died in Paris in
1937. His novel was finally published in the USSR when Gorbachev launched his
policy of "glasnost" (openness) in the late 1980s.
There was also a
great flourishing of art, music, theater, and artists were allowed extensive
experimentation. But the greatest achievements were in the area of film. In
1925, Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) produced The Battleship Potemkin,on the
revolution of 1905 in Odessa. However, he soon encountered problems. His film
about collectivization, The General Line, was suspended and the film about the
Bolshevik revolution, October, was banned, because it showed Trotsky.
Eisenstein went abroad, returning in 1932, only to be virtually banned. He was to
be reinstated after making the patriotic film Alexander Nevsky (1938), which
was produced according to party directives and fitted Stalin's new line of
using Russian history to teach patriotism. (It showed Nevsky's victory over the
Teutonic Knights at Lake Peipus in 1242). The film won a Stalin prize, but
since it was anti-German (the Teutonic Knights were Germans), it was banned
again during the period of German-Soviet friendship in 1939-41.
(Note. Eisenstein
also won the Stalin prize in 1945 for Part I of Ivan the Terrible (1530-84).
Here the young Tsar was shown as an idealist working for the good of the
Russian people. In fact, Stalin told the actors how he saw the Tsar, and the
film was generally seen as an allegory for Stalin. However, Part II, which
showed the Tsar as the cruel despot that he became later, was condemned and not
released in the USSR until 1958. Today, Eisenstein's films are recognized as
cinema classics).
Since communism was
atheistic, it is not surprising that religion came under attack. This was all
the more so, since the Orthodox Church had been a pillar of Tsarism and
supported the "Whites" (anti-communists) in the civil war. Thus,
thousands of churches were destroyed, while priests and nuns were arrested and
sent to labor camps. At the same time, strident propaganda campaigns condemned
religion as a fraud and as "an opiate for the people" (Marx). The
government briefly supported the establishment of a counter church, called the
"Living Church," made up of renegade priests. However, in 1927,
Metropolitan Sergei, officially recognized the Soviet regime and ordered the
clergy and the faithful to accept it. This policy is sometimes justified by the
argument that it allowed the church to survive - but we should note that it was
infiltrated by government agents. Indeed, some NKVD - later KGB - officers even
became priests for this purpose.
Finally, the church was under complete government control, which led to the creation of an "underground church" which did not recognize Sergei and his successors.
Finally, the church was under complete government control, which led to the creation of an "underground church" which did not recognize Sergei and his successors.
(3) The Nationalities.
Under Soviet rule,
the non-Russian nationalities were allowed their own schools, but teaching had
to conform to communist doctrine. In 1925, when Soviet control was considered
secure, there was a very brief period of free cultural development.
This policy aimed at
fusing national cultures with communism, but it actually produced a vigorous
development of these cultures, especially in Soviet Ukraine. In Moscow, this
raised fears of Ukrainian nationalism and separatism; therefore, extensive
purges of literary organizations took place in Ukraine in 1927. These purges
were replicated in Belorussia (now Belarus) and other non-Russian republics.
For a few years, Soviet Jews were allowed to use Yiddish in Jewish schools and to publish Yiddish and Hebrew newspapers. However, synagogues were closed down. In fact, while Yiddish and Hebrew were tolerated, or at least encouraged, the official policy was to use these languages as instruments to effect the total assimilation of the Jews. Thus, while the Soviet government officially condemned anti-semitism, it aimed at eradicating the Jewish faith. Furthermore, Jewish self-help organizations were abolished and pre-revolutionary Jewish political parties were banned, as were all parties except the communists.
Most of the Jews in
the Soviet Union lived in towns. At one time, Soviet policy aimed at persuading
as many as possible to take up farming in compact Jewish settlements, which
were hardly conducive to assimilation. The most ambitious such project was
launched in 1928; in 1934, it led to the creation of the Jewish Autonomous
district of Birobiian, located 78 miles west of Khabarovsk, near China (Soviet
Far East). This was a failure, for most Jews preferred city work and in any
case collectivization meant the Jews could not farm their own land.We should
note that Birobijan was used by Soviet propaganda as proof that the Jews had
their own territorial unit in the USSR. This was to counter Zionism, which
called for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
Soviet policy toward
the Jews was a success. The official condemnation of anti-semitism and the
policy of equal rights for all quickly led to the assimilation of the vast
majority of Soviet Jews, while also attracting sympathy and support for Soviet
communism and the USSR from Jews outside the Soviet Union. However, although
Russian anti-semitism was muted, it remained strong, manifesting itself in
anti-Jewish discrimination in higher education and employment. Jews had their
race listed in their identity papers ("Yevrei"), but then all Soviet
passports listed the owners' nationality.
The Moslem peoples of
the Caucasus and Soviet Central Asia also benefitted briefly from early Soviet
toleration for they were allowed to use the Arabic script. However, the Soviet
government aimed at their total integration in the Soviet state and therefore
cut them off from their brethren in neighboring states.
Furthermore, Arabic script was soon replaced first by Latin, then by Cyrillic.*. Moslem mosques were either destroyed, or allowed to fall into disrepair . However, from the 1970s onward, the government permitted the restoration of some key mosques as historic monuments.. This sparked a cultural and national revival among the Moslems shortly before the demise of the USSR (August 1991).
Furthermore, Arabic script was soon replaced first by Latin, then by Cyrillic.*. Moslem mosques were either destroyed, or allowed to fall into disrepair . However, from the 1970s onward, the government permitted the restoration of some key mosques as historic monuments.. This sparked a cultural and national revival among the Moslems shortly before the demise of the USSR (August 1991).
*(Note. The Cyrillic
alphabet is named after St. Cyril, a Macedonian missionary of the 9th century,
who, together with St. Methodius, was sent out of Constantinople to convert the
Balkan peoples to the Greek Orthodox faith of Byzantium. They created a Slavic
language written in a new alphabet based on Greek. From that time on, old
Slavonic, or "Church Slavonic," has been used in the Russian and
Balkan Orthodox Churches, whose missionaries travelled to Russia. When the
ruler of Kiev Rus, Vladimir accepted Christianity from Constantinople in 988-
A.D., he accepted Church Slavonic, with its Cyrillic alphabet, along with the
faith. Therefore, all Russian as well as Serbian and Bulgarian writing uses the
Cyrillic alphabet.).
In 1988, the millenium of Russian conversion to Christianity was celebrated in the USSR. Gorbachev allowed the return of hundreds of churches to the faithful. He also visited Pope John Paul II, the head of the Roman Catholic Church, in Rome in December 1989. However, although the Ukrainian Greek Catholic or Uniate Church was legalized in December 1990, there seems no end in sight for the bitter war over church property in western Ukraine between the Ukrainian Uniate Church (union with Rome 1569), the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, and the Russian Orthodox Church. Underlying and envenoming this conflict is the fact that the Uniate Church lies at the core of Ukrainian national identity in western Ukraine, and that the Orthodox Churc h was used by the Tsars as an instrument of Russification, just as it was by the communists. Orthodox resentment of the Uniate and Roman Catholic churches is so strong that Pope John Paul II coould not visit Russia. He did, however, a visit independent Ukraine, where he was given an enthusiastic reception in June 2001.
II. The Rise
of Stalin.
Joseph Vissarionovich
Dzugashvili -- his revolutionary name was Stalin, meaning "man of
steel"l --, was born in 1879 in the village of Gori, near Tiflis, Georgia.
His father was allegedly a cobbler, who is said to have been a drunkard who
beat his wife and son. However, Stalin once hinted that his father was a
priest, and there were also rumors of a noble father Whatever the case may be,
Stalin's mother was a pious washerwoman who wanted Joseph to have an education.
Since she was poor, she sent him to the Orthodox Seminary in Tiflis, to be
educated as a priest.
Joseph soon became a
rebel. At first, he dreamed of leading a revolution to free Georgia from
Russian rule; in this he resembled Napoleon Bonaparte who first dreamed of
freeing his native Corsica from French rule. Both the Corsican and the Georgian
became absolute rulers -- although Napoleon was an enlightened one --,
conquerors, and founders of empires. Napoleon lost his empire in 1814-15, but
the Soviet empire was greatly expanded by Stalin. It became a world power,
second in military might only to the United States, and survived until it was dissolved
in late December 1991.
Stalin soon became
interested in Marxism and joined the Bolshevik faction in the Russian Social
Democratic Labor Party. He organized strikes and bank robberies. This was a
common way of obtaining funds for revolutionary activities, though strongly
condemned by most socialists. He was arrested and sent to Siberia five times,
but escaped every time. These easy escapes made some of his political enemies
suspect that he was then in the pay of the Tsarist Security Police, the
Okhrana, but no evidence has been found so far to confirm this. (If there were
any such documents, Stalin had plenty of opportunity to destroy them).
He met Lenin, when
the latter was living near Krakow, in Austrian Poland. Lenin was impressed by
the rough hewn revolutionary from the working class. In 1912, Stalin became a
member of the Bolshevik Central Committee. In the following year, after he had
spent some time doing research in Vienna (one of the two capitals of the
multinational Austro-Hungarian empire the other being Budapest), Lenin helped
him write Marxism and the National Question. This pamphlet set out Bolshevik
views on the nationalities' problem in Russia, i.e. self-determination. We
should note that this was also the view of the Mensheviks (moderate communists)
and the Socialist Revolutionaries (S.Rs, Peasant Party).
When the revolution
broke out in March 1917, Stalin was again in Siberian exile. He was released,
returned to the capital (renamed (Petrograd in WW I, later Leningrad, and now
against St. Petersburg) and became the editor of the Bolshevik paper, Pravda
(Truth). However, though Lenin clearly respected his abilities, he did not play
a leading role in the period March-November 1917, except for a brief period in
July-August, when Lenin was hiding in Finland and the other major leaders were
in prison (see ch. 2).
In fact, a diarist of
the revolution, Nikolai N. Sukhanov (real name: Gimmer) who was first an S.R.
then a Menshevik, also a member of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd
Soviet in 1917, remembered Stalin as "a grey blur." At this time,
Trotskv was the no. 2 leader after Lenin. (Sukhanov, born in 1882, was killed
in the Stalin purges of the 1930s).
Key Factors in Stalin's
Rise to Power.
These can be
summarized as follows:
(a) control and use
of party bureaucracy to accumulate power;
(b) the ability to
divide his opponents and/or rivals, and play them off against each other;
(c) skillful use of
the cult of party unity, sacred to Bolsheviks.
(d) an unshakeable
determination to wield absolute power and absolute ruthlessness in using it;
(e) the ability to
wait patiently for the right moment to
act; and
(f) the ability to
retreat when necessary, in order to advance later.
We know that one of
Stalin's favorite books was Machiavelli's The Prince. He certainly knew how to
apply the counsels given to leaders in that famous, little book.
While accumulating
power, Stalin maintained a "centrist" position, throwing his support
to those he needed, and then "dialectically" switching policies. That
is, he would support a policy in order to defeat one set of leaders, and then
adopt the policy of those he defeated to crush those whom he had supported, as
was the case in the Debate on Industrialization. (See below).
Some scholars believe
that in Bolshevik practice, policy issues were always secondary, i.e. they were
manipulated for the purpose of gaining power. (1) While this was certainly true
of Stalin and some of his rivals, and was partly true later, it is going too
far to apply it to all Soviet leaders all the time. Thus, it is clear that,
like Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders, Stalin's ultimate aim was
collectivization of the land and industrialization. Of course, we cannot tell
how Lenin, or Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev or Bukharin, would have ruled the USSR
if they had won the struggle for power . However, it seems unlikely, from what
we know about them, that any of these leaders could have equalled Stalin's
monstrous tyranny which cost the lives of millions.
Stalin began his
struggle for power with several handicaps. He was not an orator; he spoke
slowly and with a heavy Georgian accent. He was not an intellectual, as were
the top Bolshevik leaders. He wrote little. Therefore, his colleagues at first
saw him as a slightly backward comrade who was a good administrator and could
be entrusted with the paperwork. This was a great mistake on their part. He was
also an avid reader, as evidenced by his library.
Stalin soon realized
that he could use the party bureaucracy as the tool to gain power. By 1922, he
held the following positions:
(1) member of the
Politburo (top executive organ of the party, created in January 1919 [later
renamed the Presidium];
(2) member of the
Central Committee, where policy was debated and decisions made;
(3) member of the
Organization Bureau (acronym: Orgburo), which supervised party organizations;
(4) head of the Party
Secretariat, which set the agenda for Central Committee and Politburo meetings;
(5) Commissar
(Minister) of the Workers and Peasants' Inspectorate (acronym: Rabkrin), which
was to control the administrative apparatus and, ironically, to guard against
bureaucratization (!);
(6) Commissar of
Nationalities; and
(7) in 1922, General
Secretary of the party, taking the post on Lenin's recommendation, after the
latter had suffered his first stroke in May of that year.
Thus, on top of all
the other posts, Stalin now held the highest position in the party.
The combination of
these posts and memberships allowed Stalin to monitor grassroots party
appointments all over the Soviet Union and thus build up an army of henchmen.
This, in turn, meant that he was soon able to control the election of deputies
to the Supreme Soviet, the top legislative body, and to the Partv Congress, so
he could "pack" them.
Stalin also drew
strength from the fact that in the last two years of Lenin's life (he died in
January 1924), and shortly thereafter, Trotsky was seen as his obvious
successor- and was feared by other leaders.. However, in the last year of his
life, Lenin came to have doubts about both of them. In his
"Testament" (really a letter to party leaders), Lenin wrote that
Stalin should be removed from the post of General Secretary. Provoked by
Stalin's rudeness to his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaia (1869-1939) - whom Stalin
berated for not following doctors' orders to keep party matters from Lenin,
after his stroke - he called Stalin "ruthless and rude." At the same
time, he criticized Trotsky for being too arrogant. Finally, he warned of the
danger of rivalry between the two which, he said, could split the party. When
the "Testament" was delivered by Nadezhda to the top party leaders
and read by them at a meeting held during the 13th Party Congress, Stalin
offered to resign. His colleagues decided, however, not to publish it as Lenin
had asked. In fact, they ignored it. They did so because they believed that
such public criticism of Stalin would ensure Trotsky's election as General
Secretary, and, with France's Napoleon I in mind, they feared that the
"father" of the Red Army would become a military dictator and get rid
of them.
(Note: Lenin's
"Testament" was first published in the New York Times in 1932. It was
obtained from Max Eastman, an American communist who had turned against Stalin.
The Soviet government denied its validity for years, calling it a forgery,
until Nikita S. Khruschev finally acknowledged it as genuine in his secret
speech to the 20th Party Congress in February 1956. For the history of this
document, see: Yuri Buranov, Lenin's Will. Falsified and Forbidden. From the
Secret Archives of the Former Soviet Union, Amherst, N.Y., 1994. For Trotsky's
involvement, see: Lars T. Lih et al., eds., Stalin's Letters to Molotov,
1925-1936, New Haven, Ct., and London, 1995, Appendix, The Eastman Affair, pp.
241-249).
Thus, Stalin had
allies in the top leadership because they feared Trotsky. Indeed, already in
1921, he had formed an alliance with Kamenev and Zinoviev against Trotsky. This
alliance was known as the "Troika," or threesome. They feared Trotsky
would use the Red Army to become a red Napoleon and did not suspect Stalin of
plans to make himself absolute ruler of the Soviet Union. In 1924, the year of
Lenin's death, Stalin published the pamphlet: Socialism in One Country. This
was seen later as an attack on Trotsky, who was known for his belief in the
need to spread world revolution. However, according to a recent study, Trotsky
did not oppose the concept of building Socialism in one country, at least not
at the time. (2) Whatever the case may be, Stalin went against the former
Bolshevik doctrine that world revolution was necessary for the Russian
revolution to survive. He tried to squate the circle by stating that Socialism
could be built in one country, but could not be completed until revolution
broke out all over the world. This point of view was accepted by most party
members because they saw the Soviet political-economic system as a socialist
one.
By 1925, Kamenev and
Zinoviev finally realized that Stalin was out to get absolute power, so they
teamed up with Trotsky -- but it was too late. They were helpless in the face
of the Stalin - packed Party Congress and Supreme Soviet, also his control of
the radio and the press. They decided to admit they were in the wrong so as to
stay in the party.
Stalin played his
cards expertly. His tactic of playing his opponents off against one another can
best seen in the Debate on Industrialization, which took place in 1924-27. As
it turned out, this was the last open, public policy debate in the party until
Gorbachev's party conference in 1988.
All party leaders
agreed on the need to industrialize Soviet Russia (in 1924, it was renamed the
Soviet Union, or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, acronym: USSR), so
the debate was on how fast and bv what means to proceed. There were two
opposing sides:
(a) The
"Right," led by Bukharin and supported by Stalin, argued for the
continued development of agriculture within the framework of NEP, that is,
private, family farms within traditional communes (mirs). They argued that
surplus production should be exported to obtain capital for investment in
industry.
(b) The
"Left," led by Trotsky and supported by the economist Yevgeny A.
Preobrazhensky ( 1886-1937, liquidated in the purges), wanted to
"bleed" the peasants by collectivizing the farms, and thus control
production and prices. The difference between state prices for food produce
paid to the collective farms and the higher prices at which they would be sold
in state shops in the towns was to provide investment capital for
industrialization. Trotsky also proposed a 10% annual growth rate in industrial
production. Stalin supported the "Right, " so it won. He even said
that Trotsky's proposed 10% industrial growth rate was "unrealistic."
(3) Trotsky was banished to Alma Ata, Kazakhstan, in 1927. He was expelled from
the Soviet Union in 1928. He continued to oppose Stalin from abroad until he
was murdered by a Stalin agent in Mexico in 1940.
Although the
"Right" had won the industrialization debate, 1927-28 witnessed the
so-called "scissors crisis, " in which the prices of agricultural
products were much lower than industrial products. Since the peasants could not
buy what they needed, they produced less food, especially grain, so there was
not enough for export and even shortages in the cities. This situation spurred
an internal debate on The First Five Year Plan (FYP) in 1927-28. In December
1927, the 15th Party Congress confirmed t Central Committee Resolutions to
reduce the influence of kulaks (rich peasants) in the villages. The resolution
also spoke of collectivization, but said it should be carried out by
persuasion, not by force. However, Stalin imposed very heavy taxes on the
peasants, and had them collected by force.
The argument for
collectivization sounded plausible: large, mechanized farms would produce more
food. The problem was, however, that the Soviet Union was not an industrialized
state, so there were very few tractors and other farm machinery. There were
also very few experienced farm managers in the Party. Finally, it was a
well-known fact that peasant farmers did not want to give up their land.
However, these considerations carried no weight with Stalin. In his eyes, the
private peasant farmers who tilled the land and raised the livestock, were
opposing the demands of the party leadership; in fact. they refused to produce
more food as long as they could not buy the goods they needed. Therefore, they
were capable of influencing the state's economic policy, and even of becoming a
political opposition. Finally, Stalin's letters to Molotov show he saw grain
exports as the key to industrialization, for they were to pay for it. He
believed these exports could not be assured without collectivization, even if
it had to be carried out by force (3a). We should also bear in mind that in
1928 he had defeated all his key rivals for power, so they could not oppose his
policies.
Collectivization.
In April 1928, there
was some opposition in the party to the first draft plan on collectivization.
However, in May, the Supreme Economic Council proposed an industrial expansion
of 130% over 5 years, i.e. 26% per year! (Trotsky had proposed 10% per year,
which Stalin criticized as unrealistic). This plan was intimately connected
with collectivization, which was to provide much of the capital investment for
industrialization.
When collectivization
began, there were protests and peasant riots in the North Caucasus. When Bukharin
criticized the policy, Stalin answered that a "temporary peasant tribute
was needed." Bukharin now teamed up with Kamenev and Zinoviev against
Stalin. Bukharin came out openly against Stalin in January 1929. He sent a
statement to the Central Committee that Stalin's policies were synonymous with
a military-feudal exploitation of the peasantry, the disintegration of the
Comintern, and the bureaucratization of the party, which turned out to be a
correct diagnosis. Though Stalin pretended to forgive him, he never did and
made up his mind to destroy him. However, since Bukharin was very popular in the
party, Stalin bided his time.
In March 1929, two
versions of the Five Year Plan were presented: a maximum and a minimum version.
The 16th Party Congress, packed by Stalin, approved the maximum version. There
were also attacks on Bukharin by Stalin's supporters, made on his orders. The
plan called for the collectivization of only 13% of the total farm population
by 1933. But in the summer of 1929, after Stalin had broken all internal party
opposition, collectivization went forward at breakneck speed and was
implemented by force. The peasants resisted fiercely, so Stalin decided on all-out
collectivization.
OGPU ( Security
Administration, later called NKVD) troops were sent in. They burned the
villages and shot the people. The peasants then killed off their livestock and
burned the grain. (4) Resistance was so strong that Stalin backtracked. In late
March 1930, he made a speech saying the party was "dizzy with success,"
and blamed local party members for excesses. In this way he headed off a mass
revolt, but after a few months the pace quickened again. (5) By July 1930, 23%
of the farms were collectivized, and by late 1931, 52.7%.
Still, the issue was
not yet settled. In 1932-33, Stalin's use of force against peasant resistance
to collectivization led to a man-made famine in some regions s of the Soviet
Union. It was worst in the Kuban and in Ukraine, which had the best soil in the
USSR. Indeed, Ukraine was the traditional breadbasket of Russia..To break
resistance in these regions, Stalin did not allow any food to be brought in,
while he exported grain abroad. Also, every bit of grain was taken from the
peasants, who were left to starve. People were shot for "stealing"
grain. Aside from those who starved to death, some 4 million Ukrainians were
deported to labor camps in Siberia or to other forced labor, e.g. the building
of the White Sea Canal. Historians estimate that 4- 7 million Ukrainians died as
a result of Stalin's policy.
In August 1942,
Stalin told British Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill, at a dinner in his
"dacha" (country house) near Moscow, that collectivization had been
imposed because agriculture had to be mechanized to avoid famine. The peasants,
said Stalin, had in a few months "spoiled all the tractors" they were
given, so they had to be collectivized. He claimed there was no alternative to
collectivization, but admitted it had been "a terrible struggle,"
involving 10 million "kulaks." Still, he said, "many of them
agreed to come in with us." Some of these were given land of their own to
cultivate in the provinces of Tomsk or Irkutsk (Siberia). "But the great
bulk were very unpopular and were wiped out by their labourers." (6)
In this outrageous
lie, Stalin nevertheless admitted that millions of peasants were deported to
Siberia. In fact, most ended up in labor camps or in huge industrial projects
like Magnitogorsk. The bulk of those who resisted were killed, not by their
"labourers" -- for most had none -- but by the military forces of the
security police. It was only in 1987, under Gorbachev, that the Soviet press
admitted Stalin's collectivization was a very costly "mistake." A
year later, in 1988, the Soviet press began writing about the horrors of the
man-made famine, especially in Ukraine. (7).although this has been denied after
Vladimir Putin came to power in late December 1991. We should also note that
many Bolsheviks were horrified by Stalin's methods at the time.It is certain
that Stalin deliberately ordered the starvation of millions of peasants,
particularly Ukrainians, and that this was done with the involvement of local
Ukrainian party members.. At the same time, he liquidated those Ukrainian
communists who wanted a real measure of autonomy for their people. Since
peasants also starved in other parts of the Soviet Union, the question is
whether Stalin specifically targeted the Ukrainians for physical and cultural
extermination, which is the claim made by Ukrainians and by some Western
historians.
Whatever the case may
be, collectivization did not increase Soviet agricultural output, but reduced
it catastrophically. First of all, the losses in livestock were not made up
until the early 1950s, although without the war this might have occurred sooner.
Furthermore, there were few agricultural machines to go around, so in 1932
"Motor Tractor Stations" (MTS) were established, each of which had to
serve several collective farms. This meant in turn, that collective farms had
to compete with each other in bribing the local MTS and some always came off
short. Also, there was shortage of trained farm managers; so at first, they
were party workers sent down to run the farm and coerce the peasants. Finally,
and most importantly, the peasants were unwilling to work hard because they
were paid very little and mostly in kind. So, in 1936, Stalin had to allow them
to have small private plots on which they could raise vegetables, fruit, and
even some livestock. He also had to allow them to sell this produce at their
own prices, thus creating a limited type of free market.
(Note on the Problems of Soviet agriculture. Soviet agricultural production was inadequate for most of the Soviet period. It is true that production tripled over the years, but the urban population increased dramatically at the same time. Urban growth also took place in most Western countries, especially in the U.S., yet agricultural production increased even more. We know that key Soviet problems were very low productivity and enormous waste. Peasants worked as little as possible. Also, Russian experts admitted under Gorbachev that at least one-third, and in some cases half of the collective farm produce rotted for lack of timely transport and adequate storage. At the same time, at least 33% of butter, eggs, chickens, vegetables and fruit came from small private plots.
Khrushchev began
importing grain from the United States in 1960. Here we should note that while
both the USSR and the U.S. had about the same amount of arable land, i.e., 11%
of the total area, the U.S. yields were, and are, very high, while Soviet
yields were much lower. It is true that according to official Soviet statistics
agricultural production in the 1970s was about four times as high as in the
1920s. However, in a good season, the USSR could barely feed itself while the
United States usually produced too much. Indeed, the U.S. government paid
farmers to leave some land untilled in order to prevent food prices from
sinking too low, thus ruining them. For Gorbachev's and Yeltsin's attempts at
reforming agriculture, see ch. 8).
Industrialization.
The production
targets set in the Five Year Plans of 1929-39 were totally unrealistic. So was
the basic assumption that - apart from government profits made on the price
difference between purchase price from the collective farms and the sale prices
in the towns - most of the investment capital would come from increased
production. However, this simply did not happen.
The standard of
living in the cities was definitely higher in 1930 than it was in 1913.
However, there was a 40% drop in workers' buying power between 1927/28 and
1930/31, while at the same time the cost of living went up by 150-200%. This
was pulling the country up by its bootstraps. It meant that industrialization
was achieved by exploiting the workers and peasants. After World War II and the
imposition of communism on most of Eastern Europe, a joke originating in one of
these countries stated: "What is the difference between capitalism and
socialism?" The answer was: "Capitalism is the exploitation of man by
man, while socialism is the exact opposite." A 1988 Hungarian joke asked:
"What is socialism?" Answer: "It is the longest and rockiest
road from capitalism back to capitalism."
No wonder that people
had to be dragooned to work. Strict labor discipline was imposed, as were piece
work wages along with constantly rising production targets. Leading workers
were called "Stakhanovites" after the miner Aleksei G. Stakhanov
(19061977). On August 30, 1935, he was given the most up-to-date machinery and
an excellent crew, with the result that they extracted more coal in a single
shift than any crew before them -- allegedly 102 tons of coal in one shift of 5
hours. and 45 min., or 14 times the standard output. After that, miners, equipped
only with pick axes, were told to produce the same amount of coal. Therefore,
Stakhanov's name was hated by the workers. [Curiously enough, while
"Stakhanovites" were rewarded in all branches of industry, Stakhanov
himself was forgotten until Leonid I. Brezhnev (1906-1982, Secretary General
1964-82) gave him the order of "Hero of Socialist Labor" on August
30, 1970, and designated the date as "International Miners' Day."
Brezhnev wanted to stimulate increased productivity, but this did not happen].
During the first two
Five Year Plans (FYPs) of 1929-39, huge hydroelectric dams were built as well
as canals, mines, and factories. They were built in record time, using both
free and prison labor. The latter formed an important part of all FYPs after
1934. Prisoners built the White Sea Canal, mostly by hand; they laid thousands
of miles of railway track, manned the lumber industry, also the gold mines of
Kolyma and the coal mines of Vorkuta. Millions of people died of cold,
malnutrition and disease in the labor camps. They became known as the GULAG,
the Russian acronym for State Administration of Camps.
In the
"free" areas outsise the camps, industrial accidents were frequent
because safety was not a factor. Workers were encouraged and often forced to
work overtime. Managers, who were party members, drove the workers relentlessly
because they risked prison, or deportation, or even death for
"sabotage" if production targets were not met. Indeed, in 1928, there
was a show trial of "wreckers" from the Skakhty industrial center in
the Donbas region (called the Skakhty Trial). Although this marked the
beginning of a wave of terror against the pre-revolutionary professional
intelligentsia, it also set a precedent for trying managers who did not meet
their production quotas.
Food was rationed, so
the unemployed could not get ration cards, or any place to live. Housing was in
very short supply, so workers often lived in barracks without their families.
The people who lived in existing housing had to share apartments, one family to
a room, and the housing shortage was never overcome, though much was built
later under Khrushchev and Brezhnev.. On top of all that, there was police
terror (see belows).
Stalin officially
justified forced collectivization and industrialization by claiming that Russia
was "threatened" by the Western Powers, i.e. Gt. Britain and France,
so it had to "catch up" with them in industrial production. He could
point to Western intervention in the civil war of 1918-21 as an example of
active western hostility. The Western Powers were constantly depicted as
scheming to invade the Soviet Union and overthrow the Soviet government. It is
true that there was a general Western distrust of the Soviet Union, due largely
to the subversive activities of the Comintern (Communist International).
However, the USSR had excellent relations with Weimar Germany (1919-1933).
There was, in fact, not only extensive Soviet-German trade, but also close
military cooperation (see ch. 4). As for France and Britain, in 1919, they gave
up all ideas of fighting the Soviets. Britain recognized the USSR in 1924.
Although relations were severed due to discovery of Soviet espionage in 1927
(the Argos affair), they were soon restored.
The administration of
President Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized the Soviet government in November
1933. Furthermore, Poland and France signed non-aggression pacts with the
Soviets in 1932. Hitler came to power in Germany in March 1933, but though the
USSR entered the League of Nations in September 1934 and signed an alliance
with France in May 1935 - Stalin showed signs of willingness to sign a treaty
of nonaggression with Hitler at the same time. (For Soviet foreign policy in the
interwar period, see ch. 4).
--------------------------
Whatever the input of
Stalin's fear of the western powers, the foundations of Soviet industrial power
were laid in the 1930s - though production statistics were almost always
inflated. This was partly due to the fact that managers had to show they had
fulfilled or overfulfilled their quotas, and partly to the propaganda need to
show the Soviet people and the world that the system was successful.
We can, however,
accept the following figures for 1939 as more or less valid:
Coal production rose
from about 40 milllion. to about 132 mln. tons.
Steel production rose
from about 4.9 mln. to about 18 mln. tons.
Oil production rose
from about 13.8 mln. to about 32.2 mln. tons.
These production
figures are impressive. Furthermore, the development of heavy industry in the
Ural Mountains region would provide the backbone of Soviet war industry in
1941-45. At the same time, however, the forced tempo of industrialization was
incredibly wasteful and inefficient. Indeed, waste and inefficiency came to
characterize both industrial and agricultural production in the Soviet Union,
as well as in other so-called socialist countries. Also, the cost of
collectivization and industrialization in terms of human lives was very high.
It is true that the standard of living for city workers was generally higher in
1939 than before the revolution, but compared with Europe and the U.S., the
Soviet urban standard was very low. The peasants, for their part, were
subjected to a new form of serfdom, for they had to work a certain number of
days for the collective farm in return for minimum quantities of food. They
were not given internal passports for travel inside the USSR like other citizens,
which meant they were tied to the soil. The general exception was military
service, from which most soldiers never returned home. Also, gifted young men,
who had proved reliable workers and had some local backing, could leave the
village for careers in the party, industrial management, sports, the sciences
and the arts.
The party and
managerial elite, as well as officially sanctioned scientists, artists and
writers, lived extremely well. The ones at the top had large apartments,
country houses, chauffeur-driven limousines, special shops, where they could
buy otherwise unobtainable goods, and access to well appointed hospitals and
vacation resorts The middle and lower ranks also enjoyed many perks. But all
were at risk of dismissal or worse if they displeased a powerful colleague, or
Stalin. The life style of the elites was, however, discreet and never flaunted
in public. Stalin himself wore a simple military tunic - until he gave himself
the title of Marshal and a splendid uniform in honor of Soviet victories in
1943. He assumed the title of "Generalissimus" in 1945.
III. The Stalin Terror,
1934-1938.
In these four years,
millions of people were arrested and killed, either by execution (sometimes by
torture) in prison, or by overwork and malnutrition in the labor camps, or
execution there. Hardly a family was left untouched, especially in the western
and central USSR. Those who remember the terror are still traumatized by it
today. (7a)
Why did Stalin launch
the terror and carry it to such extremes? The most likely answer is that he saw
any opposition, real or potential, as a deadly threat to himself and that this
perception con-firmed his determination to hold absolute power. At the same
time, like other Bolsheviks, including Lenin, Stalin believed that terror was a
legitimate political weapon, as well as the most effective means of making
people obey and work hard.. The difference was that while Lenin and other
Bolshevik leaders opposed the use of terror against their own colleagues, Stalin
had no such reservations.
It seems that the
impulse for launching the great terror was criticism of Stalin's policies and
methods within the party leadership in the years 1930-33, i.e. the period of
forced collectivization.. At that time, the most significant opposition came
from Martemyan N. Ryutin (1890-1937). Ryutin was expelled from the Party and
arrested in September 1930, but the OGPU (Security Police) Collegium acquitted
him of any criminal intent and he was only given a warning. However, in 1932,
he and a group of minor party officials - some of whom were followers of
Bukharin, who had opposed collectivization - wrote "An Appeal to All Members
of the All Union Communist Party (Bolshevik)." This paper, known as Ryutin
Platform, proposed an economic retreat, that is, a reduction of investment in
heavy industry and the liberation of the peasants, allowing them to leave the
collective and state farms. The authors condemned Stalin as "the evil
genius of the Russian Revolution." They pointed to the lawlessness and
terror existing both in the party and in the countryside, to the collapse of
genuine planning, and said the press was reduced "in the hands of Stalin
and his clique to a monstrous factory of lies." Finally, the appeal
stated: "Stalin and his clique will not and cannot voluntarily give up
their position, so they must be removed by force."
Stalin seems to have
interpreted this as a call for his assassination, but the Politburo refused his
proposal that Ryutin be shot. The party leaders still opposed the death penalty
for one of their own. Ryutin and his supporters were, however, expelled from
the party. He received a ten year sentence and later died in prison.
It is worth noting that the opponents of the death penalty for Ryutin were Sergei M. Kirov (real name: Kostrikov, 1886-1934), the head of the Leningrad party, as well as others, including Stalin's close supporter, the Georgian Grigorii K. Ordzonikidze (1886-1937), then Commissar of Heavy Industry. It was also clear at the 17th Party Congress, held in January-February 1934, that many deputies wanted a relaxation of the collectivization drive and that Kirov was a very popular figure. Stalin must have decided to get rid of his critics and potential rivals, but he needed a pretext.
It is worth noting that the opponents of the death penalty for Ryutin were Sergei M. Kirov (real name: Kostrikov, 1886-1934), the head of the Leningrad party, as well as others, including Stalin's close supporter, the Georgian Grigorii K. Ordzonikidze (1886-1937), then Commissar of Heavy Industry. It was also clear at the 17th Party Congress, held in January-February 1934, that many deputies wanted a relaxation of the collectivization drive and that Kirov was a very popular figure. Stalin must have decided to get rid of his critics and potential rivals, but he needed a pretext.
Stalin's pretext for
the purges in the party, which developed into the mass terror, was the
assassination of Kirov on December 1, 1934. Kirov was widely regarded as Stalin's
heir apparent and was popular in party circles. Some Western historians
suspected for a long time that Stalin had him killed. Many years later, this
view was confirmed by Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, whose father, was killed in the
purges. Anton himself was trained as a historian and became a dissident, having
spent many years in labor camps. In his book about Stalin's tyranny, he tells
us that for a brief time in the late 1950s, he had access to some members of
Khrushchev's Commission of Inquiry into the purges (1956-58/59). From them he
learned that Kirov opposed Stalin's brutal methods of collectivization, and
received many more votes than Stalin for re-election to the Central Committee
(and thus election as Secretary General) at the 17th Party Conqress of 1934. In
fact, only three votes seem to have been cast against Kirov, while some 270
were cast against Stalin.
However, Stalin's henchmen are said to have destroyed these except for three, also leaving three votes against Kirov. Finally, though Kirov refused to run against Stalin for the post of General Secretary, and told him so, Stalin apparently concluded that Kirov was a deadly threat to him.
However, Stalin's henchmen are said to have destroyed these except for three, also leaving three votes against Kirov. Finally, though Kirov refused to run against Stalin for the post of General Secretary, and told him so, Stalin apparently concluded that Kirov was a deadly threat to him.
[Note: This Congress
abolished the title of Secretary General, and replaced it with that of the
First Secretary, but the old title was restored under Brezhnev].
Most of the evidence
concerning Kirov's assassination was destroyed after being read by Khruschev's
Commission of Inquiry, but some of it has been confirmed recently by a
surviving member of the commission. It seems that NKVD operatives, under
Stalin's orders, used Leonid Nikolaev, a party member known for his disturbed
mind, to kill Kirov in his own office building in Leningrad. Nikolaev himself
admitted he did so with the active help of the NKVD, then headed by Genrikh G.
Yagoda (1891-1938). Later Nikolaev, as well as all others involved, including
Yagoda, were killed off in one way or another. In the meanwhile, Stalin raised
a great hue and cry claiming the whole party was in danger, having been "penetrated"
by spies and foreign agents. (8)
Thus, Kirov's murder
was Stalin's pretext to start a series of purges in the party. There were mass
arrests, which included not only the suspects, but also their families,
supporters, friends and acquaintances. This was a method often used in some
Asian countries, also in past clan wars in Stalin's native Georgia. The famous
Soviet writer, Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918), estimated that some 40
million Soviet citizens lost their lives under Stalin's rule. After the opening
of Russian archives in the early 1990s, estimates have been broken down into
victins of the GULAG (forced labor camps), and executions, of which most, over
600,000, took place in the "Great Terror" of 1937-38. At present, the
minimum estimate is around 15 million.plus an est. 27 mln killed in World War
II . The total number of those killed during collectivization, in the purges of
the 1930s and in later years, i.e. up to Stalin's death in March 1953, is
disputed but ranges between 5 and 7 million, the vast majority of whom were
Ukrainians. (9)
The visible part of
the Stalin purges were the show trials of well known Bolshevik leaders, all of
whom had opposed Stalin at various times in the past. Although all were accused
of belonging to "Trotskyite" conspiracies, and some of spying for
foreign powers, almost all were also accused of sharing the "Ryutin
Platform." Andrei Ia.Vyshinsky (1883-1935) rose to prominence as the
Prosecutor. These trials were:
(1) The Trial of the
16, August 1936, when Kamenev, Zinoviev, I. N. Smirnov, G. E. Yevdakimov and
others, were accused of being part of a "Trotskiite-Zinovievite Terrorist
Center," and of organizing a "terrorist plot" against Stalin and
his supporters. The accused were forced to implicate Bukharin, Rykov, and
Tomsky (the last committed suicide on being implicated). The accused had been
promised their lives and safety for their families, if they
"confessed," but they were shot the day after their conviction and
their families were sent to the GULAG.
(2) The Trial of the
Anti-Soviet Trotskiite Center, January 1937, in which Trotsky, who was in exile
since 1929, was the arch villain. This time the accused were headed by Grigorii
L. Pyatakov (1890-1937), who had consistently supported Trotsky in his disputes
with Lenin and Stalin, and was Grigorii K. Ordzhonikidze's assistant in
industrial planning. (Ordzonikidze was officially said to have died of a heart
attack 1937; in February 1956, however, Khrushchev said he had committed
suicide; in 1988, the Soviet press stated he died of a gunshot wound). The
other accused included the prominent expert on foreign affairs and former
leading member of the Trotskiite opposition, Karl Radek (realname: Sobelsohn
1885-1939), Grigorii Y Sokolnikov (1888-1939), a diplomat and member of the
"Left Opposition" (Trotsky); Leonid P. Serebryakov (1890-1937), a
leading member of Trotsky's former group, and thirteen others. They were forced
to implicate Bukharin, Rykov, and even Marshal Mikhail N. Tukhachevsky. Some
were executed and some died in labor camps.
(3) The Trial of the
21, or the "Case of the Anti-Soviet Bloc of Rightists and
Trotskiites," March 1938, in which the key defendants were Bukharin,
Aleksei I. Rykov (1881-1938), a leader of the "Right Opposition"
against collectivization; Nikolai N. Krestinskii (1883-1938), who had been the
Soviet ambassador in Berlin in 1922-30, and Genrikh G. Yagoda (1891-1938), the
NKVD chief who had conducted the inquiry into the assassination of Kirov and
organized the purges.
Again, most were executed,
while others died in the camps.
Trotsky, who was in
the West, publicly denied the charges and often proved that the so-called
"agents" could not have been in places where they were supposed to be
"conspiring." In those years, many foreign communists had doubts as
to the justice of the trials. Some of the Polish communists in Poland even
protested. Most of the Polish communist leaders had taken refuge in the USSR;
they were duly arrested and executed, or died in the camps. Finally, the
Comintern (read Stalin) dissolved the Polish Communist Party in 1938, on the
charge that it had been infiltrated by the Polish police. (The Polish Communist
Party was "rehabilitated" by the United Polish Workers' Party in
1956, when the charge was declared false and blamed on
"provocateurs"). Likewise, other foreign communists then in the USSR
were also executed while their dependents and lesser fry were sent to labor
camps. In the period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact (August 23 1939 -June 22 1941),
Stalin even delivered some German communists to the Nazis as a token of his
good will.
At the time of the purge trials, many sympathizers of the Soviet Union were taken in by the "confessions of guilt" made publicly in court by the accused. We know, however, that these "confessions" were obtained by physical or mental torture (e.g. threats against the family), as well as promises that the accused would be allowed to live. Some of the accused made extraordinary statements in admitting their "guilt." Thus, Bukharin - the author of the Stalin constitution of 1936 - said:
We found ourselves in
the accursed ranks of the counter-revolution, we became traitors to Socialist
Fatherland . . . .
I refute the
accusation of having plotted against the life of Vladimir Illyich [Lenin], but
my revolutionary confederates, and I at their head, endeavored to murder
Lenin's cause, which is being carried on with such tremendous success by Stalin
. . . . I am kneeling before the country, before the Party, before the whole
people. The monstrousness of my crimes is immeasurable, especially in the new
stage of the struggle of the USSR . . .
What matters is not
the personal feelings of a repentant enemy, but the flourishing progress of the
USSR and its international importance. (10)
This was, however,
far from a straightforward confession. In fact, Bukharin made it clear to those
who could read between the lines, that his confession of "guilt" had
been forced from him. Indeed, in his speech, he called confession "a
method of the medieval inquisition" - which it was.
He said what he did
say in order to save his wife and child. In his "Last Testament," a
letter which he made his young wife, Anna Larina, memorize for a "future
generation of party leaders," and which she recited to Khrushchev's Central
Control Commission in 1961, he admitted his "helplessness" before the
"hellish machine," and "organized slander" practiced by
Stalin, and declared his complete innocence. He appealed to future party
leaders to exonerate him. (11) His wife spent twenty years in the labor camps
and exile. She was only then reunited with her son who had been taken from her
at age 2. Gorbachev carried out Bukharin's wish and "rehabilitated"
him fifty years after his death, in 1988, when his letter was finally published
in the Soviet press.
Some of the other
Bolsheviks were "rehabilitated" by Khrushchev in the period 1956-64,
and as mentioned above, others were rehabilitated by Gorbachev. In 1987-88, the
Party Control Commission rehabilitated several of the better known purge victims,
including Kamenev, Zinoviev, Pytakov, and Radek. However, rehabilitations went
very slowly, on a case-by-case basis.
We should note that
the purge trials were only the tip of the iceberg. In all, some 90% of the
delegates of the 17th Party Congress of 1934 were purged, and most of them were
killed. Moreover, aside from the victims' families, friends, and dependents,
the NKVD had regional quotas to fill, so charges were fabricated -- as were the
charges against the old Bolshevisks -- to fill them. The NKVD investigators
were themselves under the gun. If they did not produce the required number of
confessions/convictions, they were arrested and sent to labor camps. The
explanation Molotov gave years later of this mass murder of party members was
that with the approach of war, anyone who had ever been dissatisfied or
disappointed with the regime, was a potential enemy of the USSR and had to be
eliminated. Kaganovich made the same point earlier, in the 1960s. (11a)
Of course, Stalin's
enemy no. 1 was Trotsky. As mentioned earlier, he was murdered by a Stalinist
agent in Mexico in 1940. The assassin, Ramon Mercader (alias: Jacques Mornard),
washelped by certain NKVD operatives to worm his way into Trotsky's confidence.
He asked Trotsky to read something he had written, and then killed him in his
study by driving an ice pick through his brain. The assassin was tried and
sentenced in Mexico to 20 years. After his release, he was allowed to live
peacefully in communist Czechoslovakia as a pensioner of the state, but moved
to Moscow in 1968. After Gorbachev came to power, Trotsky was mentioned again
in Soviet texts. (12)
The Purge of the Soviet
Military.
The Army. Navy, and
Air Force Officer Corps was decimated.. On June 11, 1937, the Soviet press
announced that the following had been charged with treason: Marshal Mikhai1
N.Tukhachevsky, who had led the Red Army into Poland in July 1920, had been
Deputy Commissar of Military and Naval Affairs since 1931, and Marshal since
1935; Army Commander General Yona E. Yakir; Army Commander I. P. Uborevich;
Corps Commanders Eidemann, Vitovt Putna. Feldman. and Primakov; Army Commander
Kork and 1st Deputy Commissar of Defense Yan Gamarnik, (whose suicide had been
announced on June 1st).
They were executed.
Also accused of
treason were Marshal Alexander I.Yegorov (1885-1937), Marshal Vasily K.Bluekher
(sometimes spelled Blucher, 1889-1938), and many other high-ranking officers.
They were condemned for "espionage" as German agents. It seems that
Stalin made some use of fake documents fabricated by the Nazi Security Service
- though they might have been "leaked" by Stalin himself. In any
case, the Germans planted them on the Czechoslovak intelligence, after which
they were transmitted to Stalin by President Edward Benes (1884-1948 - Czechoslovakia
was an ally of the Soviet Union since May 1935). But Stalin did not produce
these documents as "proof," and his real motive for these purges
seems to have been the fear that a claimant to his power might be found in the
leadership of the Soviet armed forces. Some of them, especially Tukhachevsky,
enjoyed great prestige and popularity among the Russian people.
As a result of the
military purges, four out of five Soviet marshals, some 90% of the generals,
80% of the colonels, and in all, 80% of officers above the rank of captain,
were shot or put in labor camps. Some survived to be released and serve again
in 1941, but onverall the purge greatly weakened the army. We may well wonder
whether Stalin really feared an attack on the Soviet Union by a coalition of Germany,
Poland, France and Britain ? (Hitler had come to power in January 1933 and was
rabidly anti-communist, although German-Soviet trade relations continued). (13)
If Stalin really had
such fears, why did he destroy the most experienced members of the Soviet
officer corps? The causes seem to have been internal. There were reports of
soldiers' and officers ' criticism of forced collectization for, after all,
their families suffered. Indeed, it was the security troops which attacked
resisting peasants because the army was considered unreliable.. (13a) Thus, it
seems likely that Stalin feared the mounting criticism of his policy in both
party and army circles, and viewed some popular army leaders as a serious
threat to himself.. Furthermore, he seems to have nursed resentments against
some of them and especially Tukhachevsky, who had blamed him for the 1920
defeat in Poland. Finally, he disagreed with the army leaders' views on what
the army should be; he supported the idea of a people's army rather than a professional
army. All these factors seem to have contributed to the military purge, but we
do not know which were the most important.
-----------------------------------------
In the Stalinist
period, Western symptahizers defended the USSR as a true socialist state; they
often condemned critics as "fascists" or "defenders of
capitalism" and "Western imperialism." This trend continued not
only in World War II but also during the Cold War era. Indeed, at that time,
strong criticism of the Soviet system was seen by some people in the West as
synonymous with defending the right-wing extremism of Senator Joseph McCarthy,
who hounded Americans suspected of being Communists in 1949-54. In general,
before official Soviet revelations came, under Gorbachev, of the depths of the
Stalin terror, some Western sympathizers either denied it, or played it down.
Others claimed that Stalin was not involved in everything, so all crimes could
not be blamed on him. Others expressed the view that instead of talking about
the terror, we should stress the "upward mobility" that resulted from
it. (14)
Now, however, there
is no longer any doubt about the dimensions of the terror and of Stalin's
complicity in it. It is true that there was an enormous upward mobility for
millions of Soviet citizens, primarily Russians, who took the places of the
purged officials and others. There is also no doubt that these upwardly mobile
people were grateful and loyal to Stalin for their promotions. But few would
now defend the terror as justified by the need to modernize the USSR and
provide upward mobility for its population. It is also clear that
collectivization was a disaster, and that industrialization was extremely
wasteful both in lives and products.
Under Gorbachev, Soviet scholars no longer
tried to minimize the Stalin terror, which uprooted whole communities and led
to the death of millions of people. However, the small Russian Communist Party
today, under its leader Zyuganov, has Stalin as its hero. They either deny or
minimize his crimes, while praising him for making the USSR a great military
power. They also stress the fact that under Stalin people had housing and jobs
- an argument that carries much weight with the great numbers of people who
suffer from the economic reforms begun by Gorbachev and carried on by Yeltsin.
Vladimir Putin, President of Russia in 2000-08, then Premier, patronised a
positive image of Stalin in history textbooks for schools.
How can we explain
and understand Stalin? It has been suggested that Stalin was mad, or that he
projected his own mistakes on to his victims, and that this explains the
venomous hatred with which he persecuted them (e.g. the American biographer of
Stalin, Robert C. Tucker (d. at age 99 in September 2010). Stalin may well have
been clinically paranoid but, as noted earlier, his aim was absolute power and
he was utterly ruthless in its pursuit.
We must also bear in
mind the burden of Russian history. Russia had a tradition of terror, as
exemplified by Ivan (IV) the Terrible (ruled 1547-1584), and by Peter the Great
(ruled 1689-1725), both of them great empire builders. We know that Stalin saw
himself as a latter day Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. In fact, he even
directed the refurbishing of their reputations in books and films, while clearly
hinting that he was cast in their mold. Finally, the imperial Okhrana (Security
Police) was powerful in the 19th century and penal labor camps also existed at
that time. However, the people sent to these camps were either hardened
criminals and/or political prisoners charged with conspiring to overthrow the
government, For e.g. violent Russian opponents of Tsardom and some the Polish
rebels against Russia in 1830-31 and 1863-64 were sent to labor camps, though
most people convicted of political crimes were exiled to Siberian villages.
There, they could live as best they could under police supervision, which was a
far cry from the horrors of Stalinist labor camps and the generally appaling
living conditions in "special settlements."
Aside from Russian
history, Stalin also had Bolshevik practice to guide him. Lenin had sanctioned
terror as a legitimate political weapon against enemies of Bolshevism,
including Mensheviks, S.Rs and rebellious peasants (Penza, 1919). Shoud this be
seen this only as a reaction to terror against Bolsheviks including Lenin
himself - attempts to assassinate him? Lenin also established labor camps for
political enemies.
Furthermore, even in Lenin's time, "plots" were
fabricated against the "Cadets" (Constitutional Democrats) and S.Rs,
which led to the execution or forced labor of many innocent people. The Cheka
(abbreviation of Vecheka, first name of the security police), was created as
early as December 1917. The Cheka arrested and killed untold numbers of people.
Rigged show trials of "wreckers" and "saboteurs" were
staged in the 1920; and early 1930s. Zinoviev indulged in smearing his enemies,
i.e. in political slander. Finally, Trotsky, who later attacked party
"bureaucratization" and demanded party democracy, had earlier
supported Lenin's ban on political "factions" within the party. He
had also crushed the Kronstadt revolt and proclaimed it to be a "White
Guardist Plot." Thus, Stalin had plenty of precedents for using terror,
both in Russian and Bolshevik tradition - although before he attained absolute
power, the leadership had opposed using terror against party members.
Even considering all
these precedents, however, there had been no terror in Russian history on the
scale carried out by Stalin, who even overshadowed Hitler in this domain --
talhough Ivan the Terrible might have killed as great a percentage of the
population living at his time. Some idea of the scale of Stalin's terror can be
obtained from reading the Soviet Penal Code, printed in Alexander
Solzhenitsvn's book The Gulag Archipelago (Gulag is the Russian acronym for:
Glavnoe Upravlenie Lageri = the State Administration of Labor Camps).
Most of Stalin's
victims were convicted on the basis of art. 58 of the Soviet Criminal Code of
1926. This catch-all article had 14 sections:
Section 1 stated that
any action directed toward the weakening of state power was considered
"counter-revolutionary." This could be interpreted to mean a prisoner's
refusal to work.
In 1934, new
subsections la, lb, lc, and ld, were added dealing with "treason to the
motherland". Thus, all and any actions directed against the military might
of the USSR carried the penalty of ten years of prison (la) or death (lb),
though the latter was most common. This meant that Soviet soldiers who were
taken prisoner during the war, were given 10 year sentences for "betraying
the motherland." Some Russians who emigrated abroad after the revolution
or civil war, and had the misfortune of being swept up in the Red Army's
advance into Eastern and Central Europe, were handed over by the allies and
were also convicted on the basis of this article. So were Poles who had fought
in the Polish underground army against the Germans in the territories annexed
by the USSR in 1939 and then occupied by the Germans, e.g. the Vilnius region
in Lithuania and the L'viv region in western Ukraine. Soviet law treated them
as Soviet citizens who had committed treason against the USSR. (Those who
resisted arrest or/and incoporation in the Red Army were sentence either to
death sentence or many years in labor camps).
Furthermore, the
section on "treason" was broadened by article 19 of the criminal
code, which allowed "intent" to suffice for conviction. Indeed, the
criminal code stated that it drew no distinction between intention and the crime
itself, and that this showed the superiority of Soviet over
"bourgeois" legislation. Of course, the NKVD, forced the accused to
confess that he or she "intended" to betray the USSR, and confessions
were often obtained under torture.
Section 2 of the criminal
code stated that armed rebellion, seizure of power in the capital or in the
provinces, especially with the intention of severing a part of the USSR by
force, was treason. This was read to mean that all Polish resistance fighters
against the Germans who were active in former eastern Poland, as well as
Baltic, Ukrainian or Transcaucasian patriots, were guilty of treason and
received automatic sentences of 10 or even 25 years of prison.
Section 3 stated that
it was treason to assist a foreign state at war with the USSR. In practice,
this meant that any citizen who tried to make a living in German-occupied
territory could be convicted as a traitor, if this suited the local NKVD.
Section 4 dealt with
aiding the "international bourgeoisie." This meant that any Russian
living abroad without Soviet consent was guilty of treason. Thus, all such
Russians found by the Red Army t the end of WW II in Eastern or Central Europe,
or handed over by the Allies, were automatically sentenced under art. 58-4,
even if they had left their country in the years 1918-21.
Section 5 dealt with
inciting a foreign state to declare war on the USSR. One wonders what private
Soviet citizens could be guilty of that? It is likely that this section was
used, along with others, to convict Soviet officers and men taken prisoner by
the Germans, who then joined the Russian army units which fought on their side,
led by General Andrei V. Vlasov (1900-1946). Most of these men had the option
of starving to death or fighting on the German side, though Vlasov -- who
distinguished himself in fighting the Germans before being taken prisoner --
fought from conviction. At the end of the war, Vlasov and his men were forcibly
rounded up by the western Allies, whose protection they had sought --. handed
over to Stalin, who put them to death.
The same fate awaited
the forces led by General Piotr N. Krasnov, leader of the Don Cossacks against
the Bolsheviks in the Civil War. He emigrated to Germany and fought on the
German side in World War II. He was captured by the Soviet army after the war
and executed in 1947. Hundreds of Cossacks were handed over by the western
powers to the Soviets; many committed suicide.
The western allies
handed over many Russian civilians. A total of some 2 million Soviet citizens
were forcibly "repatriated" at the end of the war. The vast majority were
put in Soviet labor camps.
Section 6 dealt with
espionage. According to Solzhenitsyn, this reflected Stalin's spy mania.
Indeed, this section allowed conviction even on the basis of "suspicion of
espionage," or of contacts leading to espionage.
Section 7 dealt with
subversion of industry, transport, trade and money circulation. It was
frequently used to accuse people of "wrecking," in order to punish
managers and sometimes workers, who failed to fulfill production plans - no
matter for what reason.
Section 8 covered
terror, and could be invoked even if someone hit an official or resisted
arrest. There was also a subsection for conviction via "intent."
Section 9 dealt with
explosion or arson; this was linked with "diversion," which meant
sabotage, and could be used as a pretext to obtain conviction.
Section 10 dealt with
propaganda and agitation for the overthrow or weakening of Soviet power, or the
preparation and/or circulation of literary material with the same intent. This
section could even apply to private conversations reported by informers, or to
private letters opened by the censors. (Solzhenitsyn was convicted for joking
about Stalin in a letter to a friend).
Section 11 stated
that any treasonous action was aggravated if undertaken in an organization or
if the accused then joined an organization. As in sec. 10, even an exchange of
letters between two persons could be construed as constituting an
"organization."
Section 12 dealt with
failure to denounce anyone suspected or known to have undertaken the actions
described above. This clearly encouraged informing on one's friends, colleagues,
and even family.
Section 13 dealt with
membership in the Tsarist security police, i.e., the Okhrana. Presumably, it
was little used after the mid-1920s. (Ironically, some Western historians
suspected Stalin of having served the Okhrana, but if he did, no documentary
evidence has survived).
Section 14 stipulated
penalties for conscious failure to carry out defined duties, or intentionally
careless execution of same. Obviously, anyone who failed in his duties,
whatever the reason, could be convicted on this charge.
Stalin even passed
legislation allowing the trial and punishment for political crimes of children
as young as 12 years old. This was a very effective means of pressure on people
with small children to "confess" to crimes they had not committed.
The children of convicted persons, who were under 12 years old, were put in
special communist orphanages and given new names, so they would not know who
their parents were.
Many books have been written about NKVD methods of obtaining confessions, which were always used as the basic evidence for conviction. This was a medieval practice abandoned in the West by the early 19th century. NKVD methods at first included beatings and/or torture, but after 1938, the NKVD mostly used the "conveyor belt" method of interrogation, that is, shifts of interrogators for many hours at a time. This meant depriving the prisoners of sleep, as well as limiting or denying them food and water. Also, threats were made against family members -- who were arrested anyway .After 1938, convicted prisoners were usually sentenced to labor camps, though many were shot there later. In any case, of those who were not, few survived the rigors of camp work.
Accounts of life in
Stalin's labor camps began to leak out when some of the Poles deported to the
USSR in 1939-40, left for the Middle East with the army led by General
Wladyslaw Anders in 1942. However, at that time the British government did not
allow such accounts to be published. Therefore, the world learned about the
camps from some books written by Polish survivors after the beginning of the
Cold War, though even then they often met with disbelief. Thus, an early
English language account of life in Stalin's labor camps A World Apart, written
by a Polish author and former Gulag prisoner, Gustav Herling-Grudzinski
(translation from the Polish, London and New York, 1951, reprinted 1996), did
not make a great impression at the time.
A dent was made in this attitude by Nikita Khrushchev's public attacks on Stalinism in 1956 and 1961. The first famous Soviet novel depicting life in the labor camps was Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, published in the main Soviet cultural periodical Novy Mir (New World), in 1962, and in English translation the following year. However, there was too much resistance by party bureaucrats to allow the publication of other similar novels even in Khrushchev's time, and Leonid I. Brezhnev (1964-1982), restricted such publications. Thus, many other works, including memoirs such as Evgenia Ginzburg's Journey into the Whirlwind (1967) had to be smuggled out and published abroad. Indeed, Brezhnev fostered the rehabilitation of Stalin as a great Soviet statesman for industrializing the USSR, and as a great war leader.Some Western sovietologists followed this trend and even questioned whether great numbers of people were really killed under Stalin's rule, claiming this was improbable.
Solzhenitsyn, whose
other novels circulated in "samizdat" (self-printing) was expelled
from the Soviet Writers' Union in 1969, but was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1970. Meanwhile, he collected hundreds of personal accounts of
NKVD "interrogations" and of life in the labor camps, which he used
to write Gulag Archipelago. 1918-1945. Since he could not publish this in the
USSR, it was published in the West in 1974. For this, and also because he had
become a leading dissident, he was forcibly deported in the same year. After a
brief stay in Switzerland, where he was joined by his family, he settled in
Vermont in the United States in 1974, but returned to Russia twenty years later
in July 1994.
Shortly after Mikhail
Gorbachev became Secretary General of the Party in March 1985, he took a leaf
from Khrushchev's book and launched a full scale attack on Stalinism. Thus,
publications on the Stalin terror began to appear in the USSR. This was so
because, in Gorbachev's struggle for political and economic change, he was
opposed by the old party bureaucracy, which could be identified with Stalinism.
Thus, in 1987-89, the condemnation or defense of Stalin became the "litmus
test" of being for or against Gorbachev.At the same time, the policy of
"Glasnost" or open discussion, allowed new historical research to
uncover the real face of Stalinism. As mentioned earlier, Dmitri Volkogonov's
biography of Stalin appeared in Russian in 1988, and in English translation in
1994. It was the first full scale biography based on hitherto closed Russian
archival materials, as were his biographies of Lenin and Trotsky. Under the
presidency of Vladimir Putin, however (2000-2008), Stalin was presented in a
positive light in history textbooks for schools as well as in government-controlled
media.
IV. Education. The
Sciences. Culture and the Church under Stalin (On the 1920s, see The NEP
Period, section 2).
(a) The Soviet
Russian Republic.
In the 1930s, the
former experimental methods of education were abandoned in favor of rigorous
discipline, tough grading, as well as the renewed use of school uniforms and
medals. Even greater emphasis was now placed on teaching all subjects from the Marxist-Leninist
point of view.
At the same time, the
number of schools increased greatly and in 1930 compulsory education was made
mandatory from the age of eight. This meant 4 years of school in the
countryside, but 7 yrs. in the towns, especially those located in industrial
regions. In 1934, the length of school education was increased; in general, 10
years of schooling became the prerequisite for higher studies. Finally, the
need for technical training led to the establishment of Higher Technical
Institutes. Political education made up between one-third and one-fifth of the
curriculum in both universities and technical institutes.
Most sciences were
subordinated to Marxism-Leninism, and this led to great distortions and
stagnation. The most famous "scientific" theory of the time was the
Lysenko theory, i.e., that characteristics acquired by one generation of plants
were transferable to the next. The creator of this theory, Trofim D.Lysenko
(1898-1976), was supported by Stalin and became President of the Soviet Academy
of Sciences in 1938. He instituted a reign of terror, persecuting all
scientists who disagreed with him. This led to stagnation in Soviet genetics.
Stalin also supported
Ivan P. Pavlov (1849-1946), in his research into conditioned reflexes, because
it coincided with Marxist teaching on the decisive influence of environment on
behavior. (Compare the work and theories of B. F. Skinner in the United
States).
In historiography
(the writing of history), the earlier blanket condemnation of prerevolutionary
Russia by Marxist historians was replaced, under Stalin's direction, by a
Russian nationalist interpretation. One characteristic example of this trend
was the condemnation of the Norse (or Viking) theory of the origins of Kievan
Rus, the first Russian state which existed between the 10th and 13th centuries
in the area of present-day central Ukraine. The old theory stated that it was
founded by Norse invaders, who came down the river network to Kiev. In reaction
to the Nazi theory of the superiority of Aryan, Germanic races over others,
this theory was condemned as an insult to the Russian people.
Most of Russian
history was now presented in nationalist terms. Under Stalin's direction, there
was particular praise for Peter the Great (ruled 1682-1725), as the
"modernizer" of Russia, for Stalin saw himself as his successor.
Indeeed, the writer Alexander N. Tolstoy (1883-1945) revised his biography of
Peter the Great several times to satisfy Stalin, and the last version served as
the basis for a film, also approved by Stalin. Likewise, the great film
director, Sergei M. Eisenstein (1898-1948), whose films on the Bolshevik
revolution and collectivization had been suppressed, came back into favor with
Alexander Nevsky (1938), showing the defeat of the German Knights of the Cross
who sank through the ice of Lake Peipus.
In 1934, a new era
began in Literature and the Arts, with the imposition of Socialist Realism.
This dogma demanded that artists paint and sculpt "heroic workers," -
e.g. the girl loves tractor style of paintings - and Bolshevik heroes, especially
Lenin and Stalin. Indeed, their statues came to be mass produced, while in
paintings Stalin was always shown right next to Lenin. Writers had to idealize
workers in factories and peasants on collective farms. Above all, they had to
portray Communists as "positive heroes" and anti-Communists as
villains. It is not surprising that most of the literary production of the
Stalin era can be classified as hack work. Exceptions to this rule are the
works of Mikhail I. Sholokhov (1905-1978), who portrayed Cossack opposition to
heroic Communist efforts to impose collectivization in Virgin Soil Upturned
(vol. I, 1931, vol. 2, 1959). His greatest work, however, dealt with the Civil
War; it was titled: Quiet Flows the Don (1934), and was followed by The Don
Flows Home to the Sea.(1959). The author won prizes for these works. However,
in the 1970s Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Roy Medvedev claimed that the first
book had been plagiarized from the work of a "White" Cossack writer,
Fyodor Kryvkov. Whatever the case might be, Quiet Flows the Don is fascinating
reading, even in translation.
Two other writers
managed to produce readable novels during the Stalin era. Boris A. Pilnyak
(1894-1942) wrote The Volga Flows into the Caspian Sea (1930), which was set in
the Five Year Plan. However, as mentioned earlier, he was liquidated in the
purges. Fyodor V. Gladkov (1883-1958), wrote two novels: Cement, and Energy.
The first focused on the reconstruction of a cement factory destroyed during
the Civil War, and the second dealt with the construction of the great
hydroelectric plant built near Zaporozhe on a dam in the Dnieper River in
1927-32. Both novels were popular with Soviet readers because they showed
people as human beings and not as cardboard characters in the Communist mold.
Writers who did not
want to follow party formulas generally made a living by translation. The poet
Boris L. Pasternak (1890-1960) translated Shakespeare, Goethe, and other poets
into Russian. (Later, his great novel, Dr. Zhivago, was published in the West
in 1957 and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1958. He declined
it because the book was rejected for publication in the USSR. It was condemned
as painting an unheroic picture of the Civil War and was finally published in
the USSR in 1988).
The Orthodox Church again came under attack in the years 1929-33. A campaign was launched to spread atheism and, for a while, Sunday was abolished as a day of rest. Many of the remaining churches, monasteries, and convents were destroyed or used for other purposes, while the religious were sent to labor camps. The Kazan Cathedral in Leningrad was turned into a Museum of Atheism. As mentioned earlier, Patriarch Sergei reacted to these developments by proclaiming his support of the Soviet regime.
(b) The Nationalities.
Secret societies were
formed in Soviet Ukraine, where resistance to collectivization was the
strongest. The most important of these societies was "The Union for the
Liberation of Ukraine." In 1930, the trial of 45 of its members spelled
the end of the former policy of "Ukrainization," and thus of the
Ukrainian cultural renaissance. In June 1933, the First Secretary of the
Ukrainian Communist Party, Nikolai A. Skrypnik (1872-1933), who encouraged
ukrainization and wished to establish some degree of Ukrainian autonomy, was
accused of leading a Ukrainian "counter-revolutionary organization. He
committed suicide.
In 1937, Nikita
Khrushchev. Vyacheslav Molotov. and Genrikh Yagoda were sent to Ukraine to
liquidate "the enemies of the People," which meant just about anyone
suspected of Ukrainian nationalism and/or potential political opposition to
Stalin. This led to the execution of most members of the Ukrainian Communist
Party and government in 1937-38. At the same time, many Ukrainian
intellectuals, including professors, were deported or killed. The same process
took place at this time in Belorussia.
There was also
renewed persecution of the Jews. Apart from having their synagogues closed and
their Rabbis arrested, they were discriminated against in education as well as
in military, political, and educational careers. In the purges of the 1930s,
however, many communist leaders and writers of Jewish origin were murdered for
real or suspected opposition to Stalin, not because of their racial origin.
In the Caucasus there
was a long struggle with the Moslem leaders of the Chechen-Ingush. In Georgia,
where prominent party leaders opposed Stalin, there was a radical purge of the
party.
The same type of
repression occurred in Soviet Central Asia. In Kirghizia and Kazakhstan, the
nomad people's resistance to collectivization was brutally crushed. Here, as
elsewhere in non-Russian regions, Stalin pursued a policy of intensive Russian
settlement. This took place mostly in the cities and ensured Russian control.
In the whole region, parties were purged and native cultural development came
to a virtual standstill. The same applied to the Tartar peoples.
Finally, the
histories of non-Russian peoples were rewritten to emphasize - and exaggerate -
their links with Russia. Thus, the great Ukrainian/Cossack leader of the 17th
century, Bohdan Khmelnitsky, who led the revolt against Poland in 1648 and
tried to establish a Ukrainian state (his own), was now praised as a great man
for forging an "unbreakable bond" between the Russian and Ukrainian
peoples. In reality, he had turned to Moscow for help against the Poles and
Turks, but did not intend to subject the Ukraine to Russia. In 1954, the USSR
celebrated the three hundredth anniversary of the Treaty of Pereiaslav
"uniting" Ukraine with Russia. This union ended with the collapse of
the USSR in August1991.
The combination of
forced collectivization and national persecution made some of the Ukrainians,
Belorussians, Cossacks, Crimean Tartars, Chechens, Ingush, and other peoples
welcome the Germans when they invaded the USSR in late June 1941. Stalin took
revenge by deporting many of them to Siberia. Khrushchev
"rehabilitated" most of them, and the survivors returned home, but
the Crimean Tartars are still struggling to regain their land, which now
belongs to Ukraine but has a large Russian population.
-------------------------------------
VI. The Stalinist Model
of the Party-State.
The Stalin era in the
USSR produced a political, economic, social and cultural model of the Party-
State which was to be imposed later on other peoples in postwar Eastern Europe
and, with certain modifications, in Red China, North Korea, Vietnam, Ethiopia,
the People's Republic of Yemen (PDRY), Cuba, and to some extent by the
Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
The Stalinist model
has been defined in many different ways, but for our purposes it can be
summarized as follows:
A. Political Power.
1. The Communist
Party held the monopoly of power. This was inherited from Lenin but
consolidated under Stalin.
2. The Party established
and expanded a bureaucracy which doubled that of the State. In fact, reliable
party members formed a Nomenklatura, or closed list of names of approved
comrades, who ran all the ministries, state enterprises and institutions, down
to and including the state and collective farms.
B. Economic Policy.
1. Nationalization,
that is, state ownership of all the means of production as well as all services:
shops, restaurants, etc.
2. Forced
collectivization of the land and forced industrialization. Later exceptions to
the latter were countries which clearly lacked resources for heavy industry,
e.g., Cuba. (Even though Castro himself decided to give it a try - and failed).
3. Central economic
planning, which concentrated on specific areas, mainly heavy industry, while
neglecting consumer goods and generally under- investing in collective
agriculture.
C. Education and
Religion.
1. Free school
education for all and higher education for the children of party members as
well as gifted children outside the party.. At the same time, however, all education
was heavily politicized.
2. The state
established communist organizations for children and teenagers, i.e. the Young
Pioneers and the Komsomol. Membership was a prerequisite for admission to
higher education and political careers. 90% of teachers and students at Moscow
State University were party members.
3 . Religion was
persecuted. However, churches subordinated to and controlled by the State were
allowed to exist. ( These were Orthodox and Catholic churches, though the
latter was severely restricted). Security personnel infiltrated the churches,
even becoming Orthodox clergy.
The Orthodox Church
again came under attack in the years 1929-33. A campaign was launched to spread
atheism and, for a while, Sunday was abolished as a day of rest. Many of the
remaining churches, monasteries, and convents were destroyed or used for other
purposes, while the religious were sent to labor camps. The Kazan Cathedral in
Leningrad was turned into a Museum of Atheism and the Church of the Savior in
Moscow was torn down. (It was rebuilt after the collapse of the USSR in late
1999). As mentioned earlier, Patriarch Sergei reacted to these developments by
proclaiming his support of the Soviet regime.
We should note that
the attack on religion included all other religious faiths and all sects not
recognized by the state, e.g. the independent Baptists and Pentecostals, as
well as the Uniates (Eastern Catholics) in the Ukraine and the Roman Catholics
in Belorussia. (Most of the latter were Polish peasants. Whole Polish villages
were deported to Soviet Central Asia in the purge years 1936-37). There were
also intensified attacks on the Jewish and Moslem faith. Hebrew and Arabic were
both forbidden.
D. The Judicial System
and Police.
The judicial system
was subordinated to the state. Furthermore, the judicial system was served by
an all-powerful security police, backed by vast networks of informers in all
institutions and places of work, as well as in apartment buildings, where
janitors were police agents expected to report on the inhabitants.
E. Control of Labor and
Professions.
The Party
controlled all trade unions and all professional associations.
G. Social Welfare and
Employment.
1. There was free
medical care. It was, however, generally of medium to low quality except for
the privileged elite. It was much better in key cities than in provincial
towns.
2. There was low cost
(subsidized) public housing. It was, however, always in short supply except for
party members and they were served in a strictly hierarchical order. Very
little new housing was built, so most people, even whole families, lived in
rooms in pre-revolutionary apartments, sharing kitchens and bathrooms. This
kind of housing was known as the "commoonalka."
3. There was full employment,
but working conditions and worker housing were often very bad. Also, political
dissidents were barred from working, then punished for not working and/or
"hooliganism."
This Soviet model was
imposed, with local variations, on all communist states.
{Heavily footnoted - see at above link...}
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