THE HANDSTAND

DECEMBER 2005

book reviews


"Stalin's Willing Executioners"?
By Prof. Kevin MacDonald
November 05, 2005

http://www.vdare.com/misc/051105_macdonald_stalin.htm


Yuri Slezkine's book The Jewish Century, which appeared last year to
rapturous reviews, is an intellectual tour de force, alternately
muddled and brilliant, courageous and apologetic. Slezkine's greatest
accomplishment is to set the historical record straight on the
importance of Jews in the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath. He
summarizes previously available data and extends our understanding of
the Jewish role in revolutionary movements before 1917 and of Soviet
society thereafter. His book provides a fascinating chronicle of the
Jewish rise to elite status in all areas of Soviet society-culture,
the universities, professional occupations, the media, and government.
Indeed, the book is also probably the best, most up-to-date account of
Jewish economic and cultural pre-eminence in Europe (and America) that
we have.

The once-common view that the Bolshevik Revolution was a Jewish
revolution and that the Soviet Union was initially dominated by Jews
has now been largely eliminated from modern academic historiography.
The current view, accepted by almost all contemporary historians, is
that Jews played no special role in Bolshevism and indeed, were
uniquely victimized by it.

Slezkine's book provides a bracing corrective to this current view.

Slezkine himself [email him] is a Russian immigrant of partially
Jewish extraction. Arriving in America in 1983, he moved quickly into
elite U.S. academic circles and is now a professor at U.C. Berkeley.
This, his second book, is his first on a major theme.

While the greater part of The Jewish Century is an exposition of the
Russian experience, Slezkine provides what are in effect sidebars
(comparatively flimsy) recounting the Jewish experience in America and
the Middle East. Together, these phenomena can in fact be seen as the
three great Jewish migrations of the 20th century, since within Russia
millions of Jews left the shtetl towns of the Pale of Settlement,
migrating to Moscow and the other cities to man elite positions in the
Soviet state.

Slezkine attempts to understand Jewish history and the rise of Jews to
elite status in the 20th century by developing the thesis that the
peoples of the world can be classified into two groups.

The successful peoples of the modern world, termed Mercurians, are
urban, mobile, literate, articulate, and intellectually sophisticated.

The second group, termed Apollonians, is rooted to the land with
traditional agrarian cultures, valuing physical strength and warrior
virtues.

Since Slezkine sees Jews as the quintessential Mercurians,
modernization is essentially a process of everyone becoming Jewish.
Indeed, Slezkine regards both European individualism and the European
nation state as imitations of pre-existing Jewish accomplishments-both
deeply problematic views, in my opinion.

There are problems with the Mercurian/Apollonian distinction as well.
The Gypsies whom he offers as an example of another Mercurian people,
are basically the opposite of Jews: having a low-investment, low-IQ
reproductive style characterized by higher fertility, earlier onset of
reproduction, more unstable pair bonds, and more single parenting.

The Overseas Chinese, another proposed parallel, are indeed highly
intelligent and entrepreneurial, like the Jews. But I would argue the
aggressiveness of the Jews, compared to the relative political
passivity of the Overseas Chinese, invalidates the comparison.

We do not read of Chinese cultural movements dominating the major
local universities and media outlets, subjecting the traditional
culture of Southeast Asians and anti-Chinese sentiment to radical
critique - or of Chinese organizations campaigning for the removal of
native cultural and religious symbols from public places.

Moreover, the vast majority of Jews in Eastern Europe in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were hardly the modern
Mercurians that Slezkine portrays.

Well into the 20th century, as Slezkine himself notes, most Eastern
European Jews could not speak the languages of the non-Jews living
around them. Slezkine also ignores their medieval outlook on life,
their obsession with the Kabbala-the writings of Jewish mystics-their
superstition and anti-rationalism, and their belief in magical
remedies and exorcisms.

And these supposedly modern Mercurians had an attitude of absolute
faith in the person of the tsadik, their rebbe, who was a charismatic
figure seen by his followers literally as the personification of God
in the world.

Slezkine devotes one line to the fact that Jewish populations in
Eastern Europe had the highest rate of natural increase of any
European population in the nineteenth century. The grinding poverty
that this produced caused an upsurge of fundamentalist extremism that
coalesced in the Hasidic movement and, later in the nineteenth
century, into political radicalism and Zionism as solutions to Jewish
problems.

By proposing the basically spurious Mercurian/Apollonian contrast,
Slezkine obscures the plain fact that Jewish history in the period he
discusses constitutes a spectacularly, arguably uniquely, successful
case of what I have described as an ethnocentric group competitive
strategy in action.

Slezkine conceptualizes Mercurianism as a worldview and therefore a
matter of psychological choice rather than a set of psychological
mechanisms, notably general intelligence and ethnocentrism. He appears
to be aware of the biological reality of kinship and ethnicity, but he
steadfastly pursues a cultural determinism model. As a result of this
false premise, he understates the power of ethnocentrism and group
competitiveness as unifying factors in Jewish history.

This competitiveness was of course notorious in Eastern Europe before
the 1917 revolution. Slezkine ignores, or at least does not spell out,
the extent to which Jews were willing agents of exploitative elites in
traditional societies, not only in Europe, but in the Muslim world as
well. Forming alliances with exploitative elites is arguably the most
reliably recurrent theme observable in Jewish economic behavior over
the ages.

Indeed, Slezkine shows that this pattern effectively continued in
Russia after the Revolution: Jews became part of a new exploitative
elite. But here boundaries between Jews and non-Jews were unusually
blurred-in traditional societies, barriers between Jews and non-Jews
at all social levels were always high.

Slezkine supposes that Jews and other Mercurians performed economic
tasks deemed inappropriate for the natives for religious reasons. But this is only part of the story. Often these were situations where the
natives were simply comparatively less ruthless in exploiting their fellows, which put them at a competitive disadvantage. This was
especially the case in Eastern Europe, where conducive economic
arrangements, such as tax farming, estate management, and monopolies on retail liquor distribution, lasted far longer than in the West.

Slezkine also ignores the extent to which Jewish competition may have
suppressed - arguably sometimes reversed - the formation of a native
middle class in Eastern Europe. He seems instead to simply assume the
locals lacked the abilities required.

But the fact is that in most of Western Europe Jews were expelled in
the Middle Ages. And, as a result, when modernization occurred, it was
accomplished with an indigenous middle class. Perhaps the Christian
taxpayers of England made a good investment in their own future when
they agreed to pay King Edward I a massive tax of £116,346 in return
for expelling 2000 Jews in 1290. If, as in Eastern Europe, Jews had
won the economic competition in most of these professions, there might
not have been a non-Jewish middle class in England.

Although in the decades immediately before the Russian Revolution Jewshad already made enormous advances in social and economic status, a major contribution of Slezkine's book is to document that Communism was, indeed, "good for the Jews." After the Revolution, there was active elimination of any remnants of the older order and their descendants. Anti-Semitism was outlawed. Jews benefited from
"antibourgeois" quotas in educational institutions and other forms
of discrimination against the middle class and aristocratic elements
of the old regime, which could have competed with the Jews. While all
other nationalities, including Jews, were allowed and encouraged to
keep their ethnic identities, the revolution maintained an
anti-majoritarian attitude. (Some might argue that the parallel with
post '65 Civil Rights Act America ironic!)

Beyond the issue of demonstrating that the Jews benefited from the
Revolution lies the more important question of their role in
implementing it. Having achieved power and elite status, did their
traditional hostility to the leaders of the old regime, and to the
peasantry, contribute to the peculiarly ghastly character of the early
Soviet era?

On this question, Slezkine's contribution is decisive.

Despite the important role of Jews among the Bolsheviks, most Jews
were not Bolsheviks before the Revolution. However, Jews were
prominent among the Bolsheviks, and once the Revolution was underway,
the vast majority of Russian Jews became sympathizers and active
participants.

Jews were particularly visible in the cities and as leaders in the
army and in the revolutionary councils and committees. For example,
there were 23 Jews among 62 Bolsheviks in the All-Russian Central
Executive Committee elected at the Second Congress of Soviets in
October, 1917. Jews were leaders of the movement and to a great extent they were its public face.

Their presence was particularly notable at the top levels of the Cheka
and OGPU (two successive acronyms for the secret police). Here
Slezkine provides statistics on Jewish overrepresentation in these
organizations, especially in supervisory roles, and quotes historian
Leonard Shapiro's comment that "anyone who had the misfortune to fall
into the hands of the Cheka stood a very good chance of finding
himself confronted with and possibly shot by a Jewish investigator."

During the 1930s, Slezkine reports, the secret police, now known as
the NKVD, "was one of the most Jewish of all Soviet institutions",
with 42 of the 111 top officials being Jewish. At this time 12 of the
20 NKVD directorates were headed by ethnic Jews, including those in
charge of State Security, Police, Labor Camps, and Resettlement
(deportation).

The Gulag was headed by ethnic Jews from its beginning in 1930 until
the end of 1938, a period that encompasses the worst excesses of the
Great Terror.

They were, in Slezkine's remarkable phrase, "Stalin's willing
executioners".

Slezkine appears to take a certain pride in the drama of the role of
the Jews in Russia during these years. Thus he says they were

"among the most exuberant crusaders against `bourgeois' habits during
the Great Transformation; the most disciplined advocates of socialist
realism during the `Great Retreat' (from revolutionary
internationalism); and the most passionate prophets of faith, hope,
and combat during the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis".

Sometimes his juxtapositions between his descriptions of Jewish
involvement in the horror of the early Soviet period and the life
styles of the Jewish elite seem deliberately jarring. Lev Kopelev, a
Jewish writer who witnessed and rationalized the Ukrainian famine in
which millions died horrible deaths of starvation and disease as an
"historical necessity" is quoted saying "You mustn't give in to
debilitating pity. We are the agents of historical necessity. We
are fulfilling our revolutionary duty."

On the next page, Slezkine describes the life of the largely Jewish
elite in Moscow and Leningrad where they attended the theater, sent
their children to the best schools, had peasant women (whose families
were often the victims of mass murder) for nannies, spent weekends at
pleasant dachas and vacationed at the Black Sea.

Again, Slezkine discusses the heavily Jewish NKVD and the Jewish
leadership of the Great Terror of the 1930s. Then, he writes that in
1937 the prototypical Jewish State official "probably would have been
living in elite housing in downtown Moscow . . . with access to
special stores, a house in the country (dacha), and a live-in peasant
nanny or maid". He writes long and lovingly detailed sketches of life
at the dachas of the elite-the "open verandas overlooking small
gardens enclosed by picket fences."

The reader is left on his own to recall the horrors of the Ukrainian
famine, the liquidation of the Kulaks, and the Gulag.

Slezkine attempts to dodge the issue of the degree to which the
horrors perpetrated by the early Soviet state were rooted in the
traditional attitudes of the Jews who in fact played such an extensive
role in their orchestration. He argues that the Jewish Communists were
Communists, not Jews.

This does not survive factual analysis.

One might grant the possibility that the revolutionary vanguard was
composed of Jews like Trotsky, apparently far more influenced by a
universalist utopian vision than by their upbringing in traditional
Judaism. But, even granting this, it does not necessarily follow for
the millions of Jews who left the shtetl towns, migrated to the
cities, and to such a large extent ran the USSR.

It strains credulity to suppose that these migrants completely and
immediately threw off all remnants of the Eastern European shtetl
culture-which, as Slezkine acknowledges, had a deep sense of
estrangement from non-Jewish society, a fear and hatred of peasants,
hostility toward the Czarist upper class, and a very negative attitude
toward Christianity.

In other words, the war against what Slezkine terms "rural
backwardness and religion" - major targets of the Revolution - was
exactly the sort of war that traditional Jews would have supported
wholeheartedly, because it was a war against everything they hated and
thought of as oppressing Jews.

However, while Slezkine seems comfortable with the notion of revenge
as a Jewish motive, he does not consider traditional Jewish culture
itself as a possible contributor to Jewish behavior in the new
Communist state.

Moreover, while it was generally true that Jewish servants of the
Soviet regime had ceased being religious Jews, this did not mean they
ceased having a Jewish identity. (Albert Lindeman made this point when
reviewing Slezkine in The American Conservative [article not on line].)

Slezkine quotes the philosopher Vitaly Rubin speaking of his career at
a top Moscow school in the 1930s where over half the students were Jewish:

"Understandably, the Jewish question did not arise there.All the Jews
knew themselves to be Jews but considered everything to do with
Jewishness a thing of the past...There was no active desire to
renounce one's Jewishness. The problem simply did not exist."

In other words, in the early decades of the Soviet Union, the ruling
class was so heavily a Jewish milieu, that there was no need to
renounce a Jewish identity and no need to aggressively push for Jewish
interests. Jews had achieved elite status.

But ethnic networking continued nonetheless. Indeed, Slezkine reports
that when a leading Soviet spokesmen on anti-Semitism, Yuri Larin
(Lurie), tried to explain the embarrassing fact that Jews were, as he
said, "preeminent, overabundant, dominant, and so on" among the elite
in the Soviet Union, he mentioned the "unusually strong sense of
solidarity and a predisposition toward mutual help and support"-ethnic
networking by any other name.

Obviously, "mutual help and support" required that Jews recognize each
other as Jews. Jewish identity may not have been much discussed. But
it operated nonetheless, even if subconsciously, in the rarified
circles at the top of Soviet society.

Things changed. Slezkine shows that the apparent de-emphasis of
Jewish identity by many members of the Soviet elite during the 1920s
and 1930s turned out to be a poor indicator of whether or not these
people identified as Jews-or would do so when Jewish and Soviet
identities began to diverge in later years: when National Socialism
reemphasized Jewish identity, and when Israel emerged as a magnet for
Jewish sentiment and loyalty.

In the end, despite the rationalizations of many Soviet Jews on Jewish
identity in the early Soviet period, it was blood that mattered.

After World War II, in a process which remains somewhat obscure, the
Russian majority began taking back their country. One method was
"massive affirmative action" aimed at giving greater representation to
underrepresented ethnic groups. Jews became targets of suspicion
because of their ethnic status. They were barred from some elite
institutions, and had their opportunities for advancement limited.
Overt anti-Semitism was encouraged by the more covert official
variety apparent in the limits on Jewish advancement.

Under these circumstances, Slezkine says that Jews became "in many
ways, the core of the antiregime intelligentsia". Applications to
leave the USSR increased dramatically after Israel's Six-Day War of
1967 which, as in the United States and Eastern Europe, resulted in an
upsurge of Jewish identification and ethnic pride. The floodgates were
eventually opened by Gorbachev in the late 1980s. By 1994, 1.2 million
Soviet Jews had emigrated-43% of the total. By 2002, there were only
230,000 Jews remaining in the Russian Federation, 0.16% of the
population.

Nevertheless these remaining Jews remain overrepresented among the
elite. Six of the seven oligarchs who emerged in control of the Soviet
economy and media in the period of de-nationalization of the 1990s
were Jews.

As mentioned above, Slezkine's discussions of the Jewish experience in
the Middle East and America are quite perfunctory in comparison.

Slezkine views the Jewish migration to Israel as heroic and believes
the moral debt owed to Jews by Western societies justifies the most
extreme expression s of Jewish racialism:

"The rhetoric of ethnic homogeneity and ethnic deportations, tabooed
elsewhere in the West is a routine element of Israeli political life.
no other European state can have as strong a claim on the West's moral
imagination."

He sees the moral taboo on European ethnocentrism, the designation of
Nazism as the epitome of absolute evil, and the identification of
Jews as what he calls "the Chosen people of the postwar Western world" as simply the inevitable results of the events of World War II. In
fact, of course, the creation and maintenance of the culture of the
Holocaust and the special moral claims of Jews and Israel might be
more fairly viewed the intended result of Jewish ethnic activism.

Slezkine's caricature of American history is close to preposterous. He
sees the United States as a Jewish promised land precisely because it
is not defined tribally and "has no state-bearing natives". In fact,
of course, the Founding Fathers very explicitly saw themselves as
Englishmen defending a specific political tradition. But (somewhat
like the Soviet Union's Jews in the early decades) they felt no need
to assert the cultural and ethnic parameters of their creation; they
asssumed the racial and cultural homogeneity of the Republic and
perceived no threat to its control by themselves and their descendants.

And when the Founding Fathers' descendents did percieve such a threat,
they reacted powerfully and decisively, with the Know-Nothing movement in the 1850s and the Immigration Restriction (and associated
"Americanization" requirements) in the early 20th Century Slezkine's
acceptance of the "Proposition Nation" myth reflects the triumph of
intellectuals and propagandists, many of them Jewish, led by Horace
Kallen in the 1920s. These succesfully replaced the previously
standard view by which many Americans thought of themselves as
members of a very successful ethnic group derived from Great Britain
and with strong cultural and ethnic connections to Europe,
particularly Northern Europe.

The fate of Russia in the first two decades following the Revolution
prompts reflection on what might have happened in the United States
had American communists and their sympathizers assumed power. Sectors of American society might perhaps have been deemed unacceptably backward and superstitious and even 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.

Those "red state" voters who have loomed so important in recent
national elections would have been the enemy. The cultural and
religious attitudes of "red state" America are precisely those
attitudes that have been deemed changeworthy by the left, particularly
by the Jewish community, which has been the driving force of the left
in America throughout the 20th century.

As Joel Kotkin points out, "for generations, [American] Jews have
viewed religious conservatives with a combination of fear and disdain."

And, as Elliott Abrams had noted, the American Jewish community
"clings to what is at bottom a dark vision of America, as a land
permeated with anti-Semitism."

The dark view of traditional Slavs and their culture that caused so
many Eastern European shtetl Jews to become "willing executioners" in
the name of international socialism is unmistakably related, however
remotely, to the views of some contemporary American Jews about a
majority of their fellow countrymen.

Slezkine's main point is that the most important factor for
understanding the history of the 20th century is the rise of the Jews
in the West and the Middle East, and their rise and decline in Russia.
I think he is absolutely right about this.

If there is any lesson to be learned, it is that Jews not only became
an elite in all these areas, they became a hostile elite-hostile to
the traditional people and cultures of all three areas they came to
dominate.

So far, the greatest human tragedies have occurred in the Soviet
Union. But the presence of Israel in the Middle East is creating
obvious dangers there. And alienation remains a potent motive for the
disproportionate Jewish involvement in the transformation of the U.S.
into a non-European society through non-traditional immigration.

Given this record of Jews as a very successful but hostile elite, it
is possible that the continued demographic and cultural dominance of
Western European peoples will not be retained, either in Europe or the
United States, without a decline in Jewish influence.

But the lesson of the Soviet Union (as also Spain from the 15th-17th
centuries) is that Jewish influence does wane as well as wax. Unlike
the attitudes of the utopian ideologies of the 20th century, there is
no end to history.


Kevin MacDonald is Professor of Psychology at California State
University-Long Beach. This article is adapted from a longer review
[pdf] published in the Fall 2005 issue of The Occidental Quarterly.
 


The Plot Against America,
by Gilad Atzmon      

As it happened, on the day the Iranian President decided to share his thoughts regarding the legitimacy of the Jewish state with some four thousand students, I picked up Philip Roth’s latest book. This was nothing but a mere coincidence. Already a year ago, I was advised by a few friends to pay attention to Roth’s ‘Plot Against America’. The chunky hardcover book was awaiting my attention beside my bed since last Christmas, yet somehow I couldn’t find the time and energy to launch into a journey through Roth’s imaginary world. It was only a chance occurrence that just when I decided to begin my solitary walk through Roth’s labyrinth, the entire international community joined forces against President Ahmadinejad. But it wasn’t just the international community that voiced its indignation on cue, it was principally every Western media outlet.

 
While the world was enthusiastically engaged in giving the Israeli government a green light to attack the emerging Iranian nuclear plant, something that would necessarily lead towards an escalation of the war against Islam, I was diving into Philip Roth’s plot.  


Roth is no doubt an astonishing writer but somehow he has always failed to convince me. I always had the feeling that Roth is just too aware of his enormous talent; something that made him slightly technical and pretentious at times. Being a prolific writer, Roth can be slightly impersonal to my taste and yet, in his latest book he is free from that. No literary imposed tactics or strategies can be traced. In his latest book, Roth is overwhelmingly personal. Astonishingly enough, the fictional reality he conveys is so convincing that I found myself totally captivated from beginning to end. So enthralled was I, that I even managed to forget how depressing the world is out there. I avoided the anti-Iranian media blitz. I switched it off for three days .

‘The Plot Against America’ is a fictional tale that unwinds like a historical document enriched with personal detail. Its theme is: what would have happened if ace pilot Charles Lindbergh, the man who made the first solo transatlantic flight in 1927, the man who later called Hitler ‘a great man’, and was decorated by the Führer for his services to the Reich, had run for the American presidency against Roosevelt in 1940 and managed to win? Lindbergh’s message to the American nation is a classic Republican isolationist one. ‘No more war! Never again will young Americans die on foreign soil’. The year is obviously 1940 and Lindbergh is referring to Europe and the Pacific rather than Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria or Iran. In Roth’s book, instead of Roosevelt being elected for an unprecedented third term, Lindbergh wins in a landslide victory. He then signs non-aggression treaties with Germany and Japan. Soon enough the charismatic Lindbergh is cheered by American society as a whole. Every American loves him except of course the Jews who are far from being happy with a ‘peace loving’ president who happens to make business with the enemies of the Jewish people. But in fact this isn’t entirely true, a single prominent liberal Rabbi named Bengelsdorf positions himself right behind the new president.  

The narrator is Philip Roth himself, a seven-year-old Jewish Ghetto boy from Newark, New Jersey. He tells a story of a Jewish family encountering a major disastrous political shift. Young Phil is telling the story of father Herman, mother Bess and brother Sandy. It is a story of collective fear, a story of a Jewish family’s reaction to the rise of anti-Semitism. However, throughout the book it is very hard to determine whether anti-Semitism constitutes a real objective threat or rather something the Jews bring on themselves. This very confusion is in my opinion the greatest literary asset of the book.  

Roth is sketching a very deep and complex narrative in which each family member responds differently to the ‘devastating’ historical circumstances. Roth managed to convey an interesting image of the difficult amalgam of the Jewish identity both psychologically and sociologically. Like most American Jews, Herman the father is overtly pessimistic from the very beginning. He wouldn’t give Lindbergh even a single day of mercy. However, he is a proud patriotic American. He demands his civil rights. Were he in our midst, he would criticise the emerging catastrophic reality applying to the American liberal ideology. The mother Bess is far more practical, she tries to maintain the family’s sanity, behaving as if life must go on. More than anything else, she must calm down her righteous husband. Phil’s brother Sandy is a gifted painter and assumes a very interesting role. In the summer he disappears for an "apprenticeship" with a tobacco farmer in Kentucky. In a way he makes it into the heart of America. Later he is joining a new assimilation scheme by encouraging Jewish city boys to follow his example. This program is put together by Rabbi Bengelsdorf, the devoted supporter of Lindbergh. Sandy is doing very well, eventually he is invited to a reception at the White House. This is obviously far more than Herman can take. For Herman, the democratically elected American president is nothing but an enemy of the Jews and he refuses to give his son permission to go to Washington. The tension between family members threatens the stability of the family itself, which is on the brink of falling apart. However, all that time, America has been kept out of the war. American boys aren’t dying in a far away country. American people are very happy but somehow the Jewish Americans aren’t.  

All the way through the book father Herman is portrayed as a paranoid Ghetto Jew. He is totally single minded in interpreting reality, he is overly tragic. But he isn’t alone in his obsession. Alongside his Newark Jewish Ghetto neighbours he draws a lot of support from the famous Jewish journalist and broadcaster Walter Winchell who is spreading his anti-Lindbergh poison to the nation. It doesn’t take long before Winchell is stripped of his positions as a journalist, first in the printed press and later in his prime time radio slot. But Winchell won’t surrender; once he loses his job, he decides to run for the presidency. Winchell, the Jew, decides to reshape the American future. In other words, he is determined to take America into war in Europe. Within a short time into his campaign, Winchell is assassinated. Again, the reader may wonder whether the assassination is an anti-Semitic act or rather a punishment Winchell and the Jews insist upon bringing on themselves.  

All the way through most of the book I couldn’t make up my mind whether the plot against America is a Jewish or rather a Nazi one. Clearly most of America into war that may serve their cause or if it was Hitler who employs an agent in the very centre of the American administration as the mastermind behind the plot. When time is ripe, young Phil provides us with a shadow of an answer.  

Towards the very end of the book Lindbergh disappears with his private fighter plane without leaving a trace. Mysteriously, the wreckage of his plane has never been found. No forensic evidence can suggest what happened to him. Foreign governments volunteer their versions: the Brits blame the Nazis for kidnapping the president, the Nazis suggest that it was ‘Roosevelt and his Jews’ who abducted the American hero. These suggestions are all highly charged, unfounded gossip that are there to serve an international political cause. However, Roth deliberately decides to leave us with a very personal account. We hear Rabbi Bengelsdorf’s account told by his wife Evelyn who happens to be Philip’s aunt. Brilliantly, Roth’s historical narrative takes the shape of modern ‘Jewish history’. History is then reduced to a mere personal account in the shape of gossip devoid of any factual or forensic reference.

  Following Rabbi Bengelsdorf’s account, we are entitled to assume that Lindbergh was indeed a Nazi agent. Anyhow, this is the time to remind us that Roth’s President Lindbergh is a fictional character. In fact Lindbergh, the real man, was an American hero, a man who ended the Second World War as a P38 combat pilot at the age of 42. ‘The Plot Against America’ is a fictional tale, Lindbergh wasn’t a traitor, he was an American patriot who happened, like many others, to have admired Hitler for a while. Lindbergh was an American nationalist who loved his people and truly believed that his country should stay out of the ‘Jewish War’. Roth’s Lindbergh is indeed imaginary, but the Jewish collective paranoia isn’t. It is very real. Moreover, the Jewish intent upon shaping American reality is more than real. Most importantly, while the Nazi plot to run America is totally fictional, the Jewish Plot to run America is now more vivid than ever. Nowadays, when the American army is acting as an Israeli mission force in the Middle East, when Syria and Iran are just about to be flattened by Anglo-American might, it is rather clear what the real meaning of the ‘Plot Against America’ may be.  

I read Philip Roth’s book while the entire international community was standing shoulder to shoulder behind the war criminal Sharon. While in Roth’s book the Herman Roths and the Walter Wichells were expecting America to sacrifice its best sons on the Jewish altar, we are now watching the entire world joining the Jewish war against Islam. It is rather depressing to see our Western politicians enthusiastically adopting the most corrupt version of Jewish morality: a totally blind worldview based on supremacist endorsement of the justice of the stronger. Clearly, there is no isolationist Lindbergh to save us all. Unfortunately, there is not even a single Rabbi Bengelsdorf to suggest an alternative friendly human Jewish morality.  

By the time I put Roth’s book down, the storm around the Iranian president subsided somehow. The Jewish world and the Jewish state had another great victory to be cheerful about. The UN's General Assembly has passed a resolution designating 27 January as the annual ‘Holocaust Memorial Day’ throughout the world.  

« Nous n'avions pas de montres, mais il devait être vingt-trois heures lorsque toutes les lumières s'éteignirent, y compris les projecteurs des miradors. On voyait au loin les faisceaux des éclairages photoélectriques. Une gerbe de lumières crues fleurit dans le ciel et s'y maintint immobile, éclairant violemment le terrain. On entendait le vrombissement des avions.

Puis le bombardement commença. [...] Le bruit semblait venir de; loin, de la ville d'Auschwitz peut-être. Mais voilà qu'il y eut une explosion toute proche, et avant même que j'aie pu reprendre mes esprits, une seconde et une troisième à crever les tympans.

[...] Quelques minutes plus tard, il fut évident que le camp avait été touché. [...]

On vit arriver des dizaines de malades, nus et misérables, chassés par le feu qui menaçait leurs baraques : ils demandaient à entrer. Impossible de les accueillir. Ils insistèrent, suppliant et menaçant dans toutes les langues ; il fallut barricader la porte. Ils continuèrent plus loin, éclairés par les flammes, pieds nus dans la neige en fusion.

[...] Les Allemands avaient disparu. Les miradors étaient vides. »

Primo Levi, Si c'est un homme (Julliard, 1987 - Version française : Pocket)

Why the 27th of January? Because this is the day Auschwitz was liberated. The resolution also rejects any denial that the Holocaust was a historical event in which the mass murder of six million Jews and other victims by Nazi Germany during World War II took place. Seemingly, the UN has a new role, while for years it has been engaged in securing world peace, now it is mainly concerned with securing Jewish history. No doubt, a very nice present for the Jewish state, a state that holds the highest record for failing to comply with UN resolutions.  

Orthodox Jewish response to criticism of Iranian president:
Orthodox Jews have always prayed and till today, continually pray for the speedy and peaceful dismantling of the Zionist state. As per the teachings of the Torah, the Jewish law, the Jewish people are required to be loyal, upstanding citizens, in all of the countries wherein they reside. They are expressly forbidden to have their own entity or state in any form or configuration in this Heavenly decreed exile. Furthermore, the exemplification of one-self, with acts of compassion and goodness, is of the essence of Judaism. To subjugate and oppress a people, to steal their land, homes and orchards, etc., is of the cardinal sins, of the basic crimes, forbidden by the Torah.

We have long stood together with the suffering Palestinian people in their struggle for self-determination and respect. Based on our religious teachings, we believe it is impossible that any lasting peace can be achieved, for so long as the state of Israel exists. It is towards this goal of true reconciliation that religious Jews strive, via Palestinian statehood, so that we can once again reside in harmony and brotherhood.http://www.mehrnews.com/en/NewsDetail.aspx?NewsID=248108


By the time I put Roth’s book down I am more or less ready to learn my lesson. Once again I failed to acknowledge that suffering is an exclusive, internal Jewish affair. No one is allowed entry, neither the Palestinians of Gaza’s concentration camp, nor the massacred inhabitants of Fallujah and Tikrit. One million victims of Rwanda are obviously out, two million in Vietnam are out as well, so are the innocent civilians of Hamburg, Hiroshima, Dresden and Nagasaki and millions of others who were killed in the name of democracy. By the time Roth’s ‘Plot Against America’ finds its way onto my bookshelf, I agree with myself at least: A young Rabbi Begelsdorf is long overdue. If we are being Judeified, we may as well take the best of Judaism rather than its supremacist brutality, namely Zionism. By the time Roth’s tome is resting I realize as well that the current plot isn’t just against America. It is a plot against humanity and human dignity
gilad@gilad.co.uk


Manstein: His Campaign and His Trial ,by Sir Reginald Paget
Somebody reading this book sent me an excerpt:
Typhus, an acute infectious disease characterized by high fever, extreme weakness and stupor or delirium, was a serious problem in the German concentration camps during WW2. Typhus is spread by lice in overcrowded conditions.[Why did the Germans put the Jews in these camps? Why did Franklin Roosevelt's government put all American-born Japanese-Americans into concentration camps?] Typhus was endemic to eastern Europe and Russia. In 1812 Napoleon assembled an army of 500 000 men to invade Russia. By 1813, only 3000 soldiers remained alive to complete the retreat. The vast majority of deaths were the result of typhus and dysentery rather than battle. In WW2 the German camp administrations tried to cope with the problem amongst camp inmates through shaving of body hair, showering and disinfection of clothing. After the war the photos of naked shaved people and the existence of showers were presented as proof of a campaign of extermination, rather than of an attempt to save lives. The trials of Germans accused of war crimes were conducted by their adversaries, rather than by a neutral party. Guilty verdicts were politically speaking the only possible outcome. [Extract from Sir Reginald Paget's book Manstein: His Campaign and His Trial (Collins, 1951).