Neocons resurrect tribal memories to fan the flames
Having just returned from a trip to Russia, I am pleased to report
that the Russian people and the officialdom that I encountered displayed none
of the vitriol towards Americans that I half expected as a response to the
vilifying of Moscow and all its works that pervades the U.S. media and
Establishment. To be sure, many Russians I spoke with were quick to criticize
the Trump Administration for its hot and cold performance vis-à-vis the
bilateral ties to Moscow while also expressing mystification over why the
relationship had gone south so quickly, but this anger over foreign policy did
not necessarily translate into contempt for the American people and way of life
that characterized the Soviet period. At least not yet.
Somewhat to my surprise, ordinary Russians were also quick to
openly criticize President Vladimir Putin for his autocratic tendencies and his
willingness to continue to tolerate corruption, but everyone I spoke to also
conceded that he had generally acted constructively and had greatly improved
life for ordinary people. Putin remains wildly popular.
One question that came up frequently was “Who is driving the
hostility towards Russia?” I responded that the answer is not so simple and
there are a number of constituencies that, for one reason or another, need a
powerful enemy to justify policies that would otherwise be unsustainable.
Defense contractors need a foe to justify their existence while congressmen
need the contractors to fund their campaigns. The media needs a good
fearmongering story to help sell itself and the public also is accustomed to
having a world in which terrible threats lurk just below the horizon, thereby
increasing support for government control of everyday life to keep everyone
“safe.”
And then there are the neocons.
As always, they are a distinct force for creative destruction, as they put it,
certainly first in line with their hands out to get the funding of their
no-expenses-spared foundations and think tanks, but also driven ideologically,
which has made them the intellectual vanguard of the war party. They provide
the palatable intellectual framework for America to take on the world,
metaphorically speaking, and constitute the strike force that is always ready
to appear on television talk shows or to be quoted in the media with an
appropriate intelligent sounding one liner that can be used to justify the
unthinkable. In return they are richly rewarded both with money and status.
The neocons believe in only two things. First, that the United
States is the sole world superpower, given license by something like a Divine
Entity to exercise global leadership by force if necessary. That has been
translated to the public as “American exceptionalism.” Indeed, U.S.
interventionism in practice has been by force majeure preferably as it leaves
little room for debate or discussion. And the second neocon guiding principle
is that everything possible must be done to protect and promote Israel. Absent
these two beliefs, you do not have a neocon.
The founding fathers of
neoconism were New York Jewish “intellectuals” who evolved (or devolved) from
being bomb throwing Trotskyites to “conservatives,” a process they self-define
as “idealism getting mugged by reality.” The only reality is that they have
always been faux conservatives, embracing a number of aggressive foreign policy
and national security positions while also privately endorsing the standard
Jewish liberal line on social issues. Neocon fanaticism on the issues that they
do promote also suggests that more than a little of the Trotskyism remains in
their character, hence their tenacity and ability to slither between the
Democratic and Republican parties while also appearing comfortably on disparate
media outlets considered to be either liberal or conservative, i.e. on both Fox
news and MSNBC programs featuring the likes of Rachel Maddow.
I have long believed that
the core hatred of Russia comes from the neocons and is to a large extent
tribal or, if you prefer, ethno-religious based. Why? Because if the neoconservatives were actually foreign policy
realists there is no good reason to express any visceral dislike of Russia or
its government. The allegations that Moscow interfered in the 2016 presidential
election in the U.S. are clearly a sham, just as are the tales of
the alleged Russian poisoning of the Skripals in Winchester England and, most
recently, the claimed assassination of journalist Arkady Babchenko in Kiev which turned
out to be a false flag. Even the most cursory examination of the past decade’s
developments in Georgia and Ukraine reveal that Russia was reacting to
legitimate major security threats engineered by the United States with a little
help from Israel and others. Russia has not since the Cold War ended threatened
the United States and its ability to re-acquire its former Eastern European
satellites is a fantasy. So why the hatred?
In fact, the neocons got along quite well with Russia when they
and their overwhelmingly Jewish oligarchs and international commodity thieves
cum financier friends were looting the resources of the old Soviet Union under
the hapless Boris Yeltsin during the 1990s. Alarms
about the alleged Russian threat only re-emerged in the neocon dominated media
and think tanks when old fashioned nationalist Vladimir Putin took office and
made it a principal
goal of his government to turn off the money tap.
With the looting stopped by
Putin, the neocons and friends no longer had any reason to play nice, so they
used their considerable resources in the media and within the halls of power in
places like Washington, London and Paris to turn on Moscow. And they also might have
perceived that there was a worse threat looming. The Putin government appeared
to be resurrecting what the neocons might perceive as pogrom plagued Holy
Russia! Old churches razed by the Bolsheviks were being rebuilt and people were
again going to mass and claiming belief in Jesus Christ. The former Red Square
now hosts a Christmas market while the nearby tomb of Lenin is only open one
morning in the week and attracts few visitors.
I would like to suggest that it
is quite possible that the historically well-informed neocons are merely
longing for the good old Bolshevik days in Russia. The fact is that much of
Bolshevik state atheism was driven by the large overrepresentation of Jews in
the party in its formative days. British journalist Robert Wilton’s
meticulously researched 1920 study “The Last Days of the
Romanovs” describes how David R. Francis, United States ambassador in Russia,
warned in a January 1918 message to Washington that “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.”
Dutch Ambassador William Oudendyke echoed that sentiment, writing that
“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.”
Russia’s greatest twentieth century writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
feted in the west for his staunch resistance to Soviet authoritarianism,
suddenly found himself friendless by the media and publishing world when he
wrote “Two Centuries Together: A Russo-Jewish History to 1972”, recounting some
of the dark side of the Russian-Jewish experience. In particular, Solzhenitsyn cited the
significant overrepresentation of Russian Jews both as Bolsheviks and, prior to
that time, as serf-owners.
Jews notably played a
particularly disproportionate role in the Soviet secret police, which began as
the Cheka and eventually became the KGB. Jewish historian Leonard
Schapiro noted how “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.” In Ukraine, “Jews made up nearly eighty percent of the
rank-and-file Cheka agents.”
In light of all this it should surprise no one that the new
Russian government pf 1918 issued a decree a few months after taking power
making anti-Semitism a crime in Russia. The Communist regime became the world’s
first to criminally punish any anti-Jewish sentiment.
Wilton used official Russian government documents to identify the
make-up of the Bolshevik regime in 1917-9. The 62 members of the Central
Committee included 41 Jews while the Extraordinary Cheka Commission Cheka of
Moscow’s 36 members included 23 Jews. The 22 strong Council of the People’s
Commissars numbered had 17 Jews. According to data furnished by
the Soviet authorities, out of the 556 most important functionaries of the
Bolshevik state in 1918-1919 there were: 17 Russians, two Ukrainians, eleven
Armenians, 35 Latvians, 15 Germans, one Hungarian, ten Georgians, three Poles,
three Finns, one Czech and 458 Jews.
In 1918-9, effective Russian governmental power rested in the
Central Committee of the Bolshevik party. In 1918 this body had twelve members,
of whom nine were of Jewish origin, and three were Russians. The nine Jews
were: Trotsky, Zinoviev, Larine, Uritsky, Volodarski, Kamenev, Smidovich,
Yankel, and Steklov. The three Russians were: Lenin, Krylenko, and Lunacharsky.
The Communist diaspora in Europe and America
was also largely Jewish, including the cabal of founders of neoconservativism
in New York City. The United States Communist Party was from the start
predominantly Jewish. It was in the 1930s headed by Jew Earl Browder, grandfather
of the current snake oil salesman Bill Browder, who has been sanctimoniously
proclaiming his desire to punish Vladimir Putin for various alleged high
crimes. Browder is a complete hypocrite who has fabricated and sold to Congress
a largely phony and self-serving narrative relating to Russian corruption. He
is also not surprisingly a neocon media darling in the U.S. It has been more
than plausibly claimed that Browder was a principal looter of Russia’s
resources in the 1990s and Russian courts have convicted him of tax evasion
among other crimes.
The undeniable historical
affinity of Jews for the Bolshevik brand of communism coupled with the
Jewishness of the so-called oligarchs rather suggests that the hatred of a
Russia that has turned its back on those particular aspects of Jewish heritage
might be at least part of what drives some neocons. Just as in the case of
Syria which the neocons, bowing to Israel’s interests, prefer to see in chaos,
some might long for a return to the good old days of looting by mostly Jewish
foreign interests, as under Yeltsin, or even better for the heady days of
1918-9 Bolshevism when Jews ruled all of Russia.
