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Israel/Zionism See other Israel/Zionism Articles Title: Oddities of Marxism About Ron UnzÂ’s article “American Pravda: Oddities of the Jewish Religion” What do the “Jewish Religion” and the Russian-American Goodwill Association (www.RAGA.org) have in common? Why do we plan to put on our website Ron Unz’s article about the “oddities of the Jewish religion”[1] both in the original and in Russian translation? Firstly, because Jews of varying degrees of religiosity have played an outstanding role in political, economic and cultural life in both the US and Russia. Moreover, RAGA has already hosted Ron Unz’s previous article American Pravda: the Bolshevik Revolution and its consequences,[2] devoted to the participation of Jews in the leadership of the Revolution and later in Soviet government. In fact, it was so huge that the total collapse of the USSR in August 1991 cast a 73-year long shadow on the reputation of both Russian Jews and those American Jews who helped the Bolshevik Revolution and later sympathized with the USSR. Secondly, this article is also an acknowledgement of gratitude and Goodwill to Ron Unz personally for his courageous readiness to take a critical look at the role of his fellow Jews in history. My thanks go also to Israel Shamir, “our former Soviet compatriot” and now Israeli citizen, who drew my attention to Ron Unz’s outstanding critical mind and civic courage. Fittingly, Shamir followed up Unz’s article with yet another brilliant essay, The Throne and the Altar[3] in which he gave a very sympathetic as well as critical appraisal of Unz’s. Moreover, as RAGA’s president, I see both of Unz and Shamir, each in his field, bring the goal of a rapprochement between the US and Russia closer. When we founded the RAGA in 1992, we set our goal high, thinking that better US-Russia relations would be good for both countries and also preserve the security and health of the entire Planet, certainly including Israel and the Middle East. I confess that my own knowledge of Jewish religion is rather limited. In any case, it is well below of Unz or Shamir. However, while studying ethnology at the University of Moscow in the late 1950s, I did take a semester-long course “Religions of the world” in which Judaism, as the well-spring of Abrahamic religions of Christianity and Islam, was featured prominently. The course was taught by Professor Sergei Tokarev(1899 – 1985), an outstanding Soviet ethnologist and the author of a survey book for all ethnicities of the USSR.[4] To be sure, as a member of Communist party, Tokarev had to teach this course as based on the famous Marxist premise that religion is “opium for the people”. However, to be fair to him, he knew what he was talking about. Besides, he was blissfully light of ideology and heavy on historical facts. He took up, for instance, the case of Socrates (c. 470 – 399 BC) who was teaching a dialogic method of searching for truth but was condemned to death for challenging the prevailing ideology of Athenian democracy. “By staying faithful to his convictions and accepting death for the sake of truth, was Socrates not a predecessor of Jesus of Nazareth by several hundred years?,” wandered Tokarev in front of our class. Though he did not specifically invite student input on the issue, he made clear that those who study history, anthropology and ethnology must have a mind open enough to wander why some good ideas capture imagination of masses and give birth to a new religion while other good ideas wither away—or just become under-currents? Tokarev also gave credit to Orpheus, the heroic Greek poet and musician to dared to descend to Hades, the Netherworld, for the love of Eurydice, and thus causing the creation of the Orphic religion. Tokarev also gave a lot of credit to the Jews for doing something extraordinary in the realm of religious thought: while the ancient Greek heroes challenged gods or even aspired to become gods, like Prometheus did, the Jews conceived of the opposite idea: of a heroic immortal god who in love for mortal humans voluntarily assumes the human shape of Jesus of Nazareth and descends to Hades for the love of humanity. Still, the most memorable lesson of the course was when he recommended that we go to the library to “see the sources”, such as the Bible, the New Testament, and the Quran. As it turned out, it was not the regular library with the windows of its reading rooms facing Mokhovaya St. (then Karl Marx Street!) where each of us spent countless hours during five years of study. No, it was a Special Library for graduate students. But since we were undergrads, we needed a special admission sticker, permitting us to check out those “sources” into a special reading room. Of course, growing up in atheist country we knew that people had a limited access of the houses of worship or religious texts. Still, looking back at these years of Nikita Khrushchev’s Secret anti-Stalin speech and the Thaw in cultural life, it is rather depressing to recall that one needed a permission of read The Bible. Yet, it seems that both Unz and Shamir may be overly over-estimating the impact of the “oddities” of Jewish religion on the overall image of Jews among Gentiles. After praising Unz for lifting taboo on reading and discussing such “right-wing” works such as Hitler’s Mein Kampf or, Henry Ford’s The International Jew, Shamir does suggest that the left-wing criticism, “like Karl Marx’s On the Jewish Question”,[5] might be even more damning. In any case, it was the first and paramount oddity that opened the gate for all others. Alas, I have to admit that Professor Tokarev failed to discuss Karl Marx as the founder of a secular religion, known in the USSR as “Marxist-Leninist scientific theory of world revolution”. After all, in retrospect, one has to wonder: Why the Marxist-Leninist anti-religion, as full of oddities and contradictions, as Judaism, was able to spread in the 20thcentury faster than any previous sacred creed? It is hardly far-fetched to speculate that Marx’s hostility to capitalism stems less from his knowledge of how capitalist economy works than his embarrassment at the fact that “secular religion” of the Jews, based on “money swindling,” was inherent to capitalism. Not for nothing some people call Marx a Jew-hating Jew, even though his father had converted to Christianity and young Karl was educated as an ardent Christian. No wonder that in the USSR it was even more difficult to obtain Marx’s anti-Jewish passages from his On the Jewish Question[6]than the New Testament, the Talmud and the Bible. Ironically, only after defecting to the West, I got full access to the works of Marx and those who wrote about him. In 1977, I condensed my research into an analytical essay “Karl Marx as Dr. Frankenstein: Toward a Genealogy of Communism”[7] which was soon translated to a Russian expatriate magazine GRANI. I subjected the young Marx to a sort of psychoanalysis. In his high-school years Karl used to be a devout Christian and as ardent in his faith as his newly baptized Jewish parents. At any rate, he wrote a number of papers testifying to his Christian devotion. However, later he lapsed into a romantic rebellion, envisioning himself as a messianic Luciferian poet rebelling against all existing gods. The point is that Marx’s economic and political theory aimed at a violent overthrow of capitalism was not his first ambition. The creation of social utopia was secondary to his youthful megalomania and god-fighting zeal, a new sort of Theomachy, in which violence and immorality were sanctified as means for the highest imaginable goal. In Mary Shelley’s prophetic horror story Victor Frankenstein, a well-meaning doctor, armed with the latest tools of science, succeeded in his ambition to create a human being in his lab. But just as he was about to celebrate his scientific feat, he saw that the creature was a Monster in human shape. The rest of his life, the conscientious doctor devotes to efforts to capture and render harmless his “child.” Curiously, unable to communicate with fellow humans, the Monster escapes to the wilderness of “Russia and Tartary” to do there lots of mischief. It is uncanny that Ms. Shelley chose Russia as the Monster’s domain as if suggesting that whatever—or whoever—is unacceptable in Europe might be dumped onto a “less developed” country. Ironically, at the time of my writing the essay, the flow of Jewish immigrants from the USSR to the USA—allowed since about 1973– was gaining steam. I saw it as yet another sign that the Utopia created in Russia in the name of Karl Marx, a Western doctor, who aspired to give birth to a New Happy Mankind, was about to disintegrate. ▲▼Not for nothing, few years later, Mikhail Geller(1922 – 1997) and Alexander Nekrich(1920 – 1993), two Soviet dissident scholars, both Jewish, published a book under an oxymoronic title, Utopia in Power: The history of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the present.[8] It was published in 1986 when Nekrich was already teaching at Harvard, while in the USSR, the Utopia was still feverishly clinging to power. Was it not an oddity? As I described it in more detail in my previous article,[9] it was the very same Utopia that the Russian writer Yevgeny_ Zamyatin had described in his novel WE in which he predicted degeneration of the “noble humanistic Marxist ideas of universal brotherhood” into a brutal “collectivist” totalitarian rule. It was the very same Zamyatin who before 1917 had clandestinely written for Marxist publications, joined the Bolsheviks and was twice exiled by the Tsarist police. WE was first published in 1921, of course, outside of the Bolshevik Russia, just as Geller’s and Nekrich’s 1986 “Utopia in Power”. Didn’t Marx dress himself in the toga of a secular Messiah? I wondered. Of course, in the spirit of his time Marx had to project himself as an economic expert who allegedly discovered an objective law of social development (OLSD). As a result, the false messiah turned out to be not just anti-capitalist, but also anti-Christian, anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist, as Avigdor Eskin would probably say. Some people have called Marx a self-hating Jew. Apparently at least since the Age of Reason and the French revolution, the “progressive” and “anti-clerical” Western intellectuals have become so enamored of their own “reason” that they lost all common sense, forgetting, for instance, that hatred, including self-hatred, can beget only more hatred and self-annihilation. As for the Russians, suffering from their ingrained century-old complex of inferiority toward the West, they merely followed the atheist Jewish Marxist shepherds, themselves a tiny minority of their small nation within the Pale of Settlement of the huge Russian Empire. The Russian turmoil and calamity of the 20th century grew out of the fermentation of the yeast of Jewish anti-Judaic heresy. My critique of Marxism (in the Frankenstein essay and elsewhere) was an abomination to the predominant school of American sovietologists who either adored or ignored the fact that Marxism-Leninism was the linchpin of Soviet state. The late professor Richard Pipes at Harvard (1923 – 2018) was among those who ignored it. In 1979, I challenged him in an article arguing that US strategy toward the USSR was wrong-headed as it was based on russophobia and failed to meet the global challenge of Marxist-Leninist ideology.[10] In his reply he described Marx as an obscure Western philosopher who had no impact on Soviet foreign policy. ▲▼Ten years later, as the Soviet Union was about to disintegrate, the flow of Soviet Jewish immigrants to the US became a flood,[11] even though the efforts were made to divert many of them to Israel. In mid 1980s, while teaching Russian Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, I envisioned the forthcoming demise of Communism in Russia. I wrote a book in which I argued that the most likely and the most wholesome future of the USSR should include the abandoning of Marxism-Leninism as state ideology and reverting back to Russia’s historical identity as a multi-ethnic state unified by Russian culture and Orthodox Christianity. In the Spring of 1991, the book was ready under the title, “Russia Beyond Communism: A Chronicle of National Rebirth”.[12]In August 1991, I was among the delegates at the Congress of Russian Compatriots in Moscow, the first such meeting of Russian diaspora people of non-Communist persuasion since early 1920s when Lenin deported undesirable Russian intellectuals[13] to the West. There were more than 400 people of us, coming from all corners of the world. On the opening day day, August 19, when we, the Congress expatriate delegates, began to stream from our hotel to the Uspensky Cathedral inside the Kremlin wall, the anti-Gorbachev putsch was underway. Boris Yeltsin (1931 – 2007), then President of the Russian Federation (still inside the USSR), managed to squash the putsch in a couple of days. As the principle host of our Congress, he gave a victory speech to the delegates assembled on August 22 at the Palace of Assemblies inside the Kremlin wall. He announced that he was about to take down the Red flag of Communism and replace it with Russian national tricolor. There was a storm of cheerful applause from the delegates, most of whom where ardent anti-Communists. I chose the moment to hand President Yeltsin a copy of my new book. He cordially thanked me. I don’t know whether he ever read it. In Solzhenitsyn’s footsteps, I assembled in my book a veritable polyphonic choir of “voices of glasnost” of Soviet and Russian émigré intellectuals of various political leanings who had argued that Communism cannot be reformed and should be abandoned. I focused on the “Ideocidal ideology of Marx.” The cult of Karl Marx in the West, I argued, was chiefly responsible for both the ‘Marxophilia and Russophobia’ among American sovietologists. Such attitudes contributed to the longevity of the otherwise moribund Soviet system. Leaving aside Marx’s critique of capitalism, much of which is in my view justified, I strongly objected to his pseudo-scientific theory of class struggle and violent world revolution. The failure of Western intellectuals to condemn Marxism-Leninism as the chief progenitor of violence in the world was monumental. “The West, where the idea of a free market sprang up and flourished,” I wrote in 1990, “did much more to ensure the freedom of movement of goods than for the free movement of ideas. And the most important reason was the reluctance to contain the spread (across the globe) of the virus of that expressly WESTERN (Marxist) idea that captured the intellectual monopoly over the minds of almost a third of humanity. ”[14] Around 1990, when the Soviet bloc started to disintegrate, George Will, a prominent conservative columnist for The Washington Post, wrote that there was “probably” a larger number of dedicated Marxists at Harvard University than in the entire USSR. He exaggerated, of course, but he hit the target of Western Marxophilia right on. To come back to Ron Unz’s previous article The Bolshevik Revolution and Its Aftermath, I think that the main reason for the original success of the Bolshevik revolution was not just unusually high concentration of Jews among the Bolshevik leaders, nor the amount of money they have received from Jacob Schiff and other Western donors, but rather the susceptibility of Russian intelligentsia, with many Jews in its ranks, to Marxism which was perceived as a progressive and “scientific” new Western fashion. Since Peter the Great Russia’s ruling class has been Westward-looking. On the eve of February 1917 revolution Russian intellectuals and, certainly, the mainstream media, were ready for more “Westernization”. However, in the game of Westernization they were soon beaten by the Bolsheviks who, armed with the allegedly “scientific” Marxist idea of class struggle and violent world revolution, seemed to be the embodiment of the “progressive” West. The brutishness, immorality and anti-religious profanity of the Bolsheviks seemed justified as the price to pay for the entry ticket to the eternal and blissful paradise-on-earth promised by Marx. I think that both Ron Unz and Isfael Shamir would benefit by reading professor John Murray Cuddihy’s (1922 – 2011) perceptive book, Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle With Modernity.[15] In his comparative survey of the German and other assimilated Jews from Western Europe and the USA, on the one hand, and East European Jews, primarily from the Russian Pale of Settlement, on the other, professor Cuddihy found out that the latter, as soon as they left the shtetl, suffered a complex of inferiority compared to their “more advanced and enlightened” Western cousins. However, being better grounded, more dynamic, and not burdened by Western “civility,” East Jews soon lost the feeling of inferiority and, going to another extreme, acquired the complex of superiority. One way to assert superiority was to beat the West in its Western game, and the Western game in vogue was Marx with his messianic vision of world revolution to end all misery and oppression. What I have just said about the East European Ashkenazi Jews largely applied to the “progressive” and increasingly atheistic ethnic Russian intelligentsia which saw Marxism as a sure way for Russia’s to catch up with the West. Moreover, with their Western-sounding names, like Goldberg, Silberman, Safire or Bernstein, even the provincial Shtetl Jews seemed to Russians as an embodiment of cosmopolitan outlook, progress and readiness for Western “science”. In their chase after the progressive affluent West, both Jews and Russians hurried to abandon their respective traditions, customs, spirituality and ways of life. Religious restraints were the first to go. Violence seemed to be not just acceptable, but laudable as an expression of the bravery and resolve in quest for liberty, equality and brotherhood. With the Marxist emphasis on the need for the proletarians to unite, the Revolutionary Internationalism became the catchword. Marxism was portrayed as the highway of the best of German philosophy (Hegel, Marx, and Engels), French theories of socialism, and the experience of British labor movement. Russians seemed to be called upon to lead the World on this highway of European progress.Both Russians and Jews abandoned their time-honored but now declared “harmful habit” of dependence on “the opium of religion.” Jews were now free to violate all of Moses’ Ten Commandments, and the Christians replaced Jesus’s Love thy neighborwith the “sacred hatred” of exploitative “bourgeoisie”. To be sure, no respectable newspaper dared to violate the Jew taboo as journalists and newspapers pointing out Jewish origin of one “heroic” terrorist or another were ostracized as “anti-Semitic”. ▲▼I am especially grateful to Ron for what he says about of Alexander Solzhenitsyn with whom I have a record of friendship and exchanged letters for a number of years, especially, at the time of his family’s adaptation in the United States. As the author of “Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky: A Study in the Polyphonic Nove l”,[16] I was acutely aware of the writer’s broad appeal to Americans of all walks of life. I certainly agree with Ron that Solzhenitsyn “was generally regarded as the greatest Russian literary figure of our modern era”. Solzhenitsyn late in life and my photo in front of Solzhenitsyn’s portrait in my office at the University of Texas, 1975, in a student newspaper All the more, I share Ron’s disappointment that Solzhenitsyn “literary star seems also to greatly wane in America since that time…” The main reason for this decline, Ron speculates, was that Solzhenitsyn fell afoul of the Jew taboo when he published his research of Russian-Jewish relations in his 2003 book “Two Hundred Years Together.”[17] Ron speculates that “perhaps the documentation of very heavy Jewish role in Communism was considered inappropriate for American audiences, as was the discussion of the extremely exploitative relationship between Jews and Slavic peasants in pre-revolutionary times, based on liquor-dealing and money-lending, which the Czars had often sought to mitigate”. ▲▼In fact, as the former head of Russian Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, I was one of the first to point out that a campaign of Solzhenitsyn’s vilification began to gain steam in early 1980s. In an article, “SOLZHENITSYN AND ANTI-SEMITISM: A NEW DEBATE,” published by The New York Times on Nov. 13, 1985, Richard Grenier wrote: “At a Washington conference of the World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, which ended just last week, Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s purported anti-Semitism was dealt with head-on in an address by Vladislav Krasnov, a former editor of Radio Moscow’s broadcasting division who is now a professor of Russian studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California. Mr. Krasnov said he found the charge ”completely groundless.”[18] ▲▼Fortunately, I was not alone: several other sovietologists, including Professor Adam Ulam (1922 – 2000) and Robert Conquest(1917 – 2015), came to the defense of Solzhenitsyn against the charge of “anti-Semitism”, advanced most prominently by Richard Pipes. In a later article “Wrestling with Leo Tolstoy”, I pointed out that in his novel August 1914 Solzhenitsyn created a memorable portrait of Ilyia Arkhangorodsky, a Jewish entrepreneur, who believed in Russia’s vibrant “capitalist” future and was engaged in economic modernization of the country.[19] ▲▼More generally, the very suggestion of a need for polyphony of various ideologies and more dialogue— be it between Jews or Gentiles, Americans or Russians– seems to be contrary to the current regrettable tendency in the United States toward “politically correct” monologue, especially, in the mainstream media.[20] In sum, as right as Ron Unz might be about the “oddities of the Jewish religion,” the Marxist efforts to mitigate and overcome them by denying the wisdom of ancient commandments, whether Judaic, Christian or Muslim, not only failed to cure the perceived illness, but added new afflictions. The 20thcentury history showed that all the “scientific” economic theories of godless science-possessed atheists, no matter how high their IQs might have been, are powerless to erase ancient wisdom based on high spiritual standards, fairness, dignity and common sense. It is paramount that the 21stcentury gets rid of the old vestiges and new temptations of Marxist “monological” thinking. Let me share with you a link I got in recent email on the topic I got from a Russian friend. In the link attached I found: “Israeli Rabbi Yosef Tzvi ben Porat has apologized to the Russian people, saying in behalf of his co-religionists and fellow Jews: “We are to blame for everything and we must know why we are being driven away. We created Marxism and Leninism. We captured Russia. We killed 30 million educated Russians. We are wise men and sat down to rule over them.“[21] Ben Porat is not alone. Yosef Mizrachi,[22] the American rabbi of the Orthodox denomination has been making similar statements. Of course, the American mega media strongly impede access to information that undermines their monopoly on political correctness, regardless of whether it comes from Jewish or Gentile sources. As I indicated in my latest article on the topic Sighing at the Secrets of Jewish Genius. Rebuttal to Bret Stephens’s The New York Times Column, in our quest for international peace and domestic justice, RAGA and myself have been working together with several Jewish organizations and individuals, and we intend to do more of the same. I believe that Jewish people throughout the world regardless of where they live and how identify themselves are perhaps the best endowed to have an impact on international relations in order to ensure the survival and well-being of the Planet. So I say again, the Planetarians of the World, Unite! Once again I welcome Ron Unz to the ranks of those for whom telling the truth, as they see it, has a higher priority than mere solidarity with one’s group, tribe or religion. By so doing Ron Unz confers an honor on the tradition of Jewish prophets who were not afraid to tell the truth to both the rulers and the mobs that had fallen for whatever “political correctness” ruled the day. This is especially urgent now when the safety and well-being of the Planet Earth is at stake. P.S. Actually, I started to write the above last summer which I spent in a small provincial town in the Russian heartland. I could not help noticing that my dacha was surrounded by streets bearing the names of notorious Bolsheviks: Moisei V. Volodarsky, Yakov Sverdlov (1885 – 1919), and Moisei Uritsky. All three were at the very top of the Bolsheviks, all three were Jewish. ▲▼Vladislav Krasnov (aka W George Krasnow), Ph.D., is the author of Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky: A Study in the Polyphonic Novel, Soviet Defectors: The KGB Wanted List, and Russia Beyond Communism: A Chronicle of National Rebirth. Since 1992 he has led Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA.org). We are now affiliated with the Global Harmony Association (GHA), founded by Dr. Leo Semashko of Sankt Petersburg, to advance Mahatma Gandhi’s ideal of Non-Violence. https://peacefromharmony.org/?cat=en_c&key=938 Notes [1] American Pravda: Oddities of the Jewish Religion. RON UNZ • JULY 16, 2018 https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-oddities-of-the-jewish-religion/ [2] See both English http://www.raga.org/news/welcome-ron-unz-and-american-pravda http://www.raga.org/news/american-pravda-the-bolshevik-revolution-and-its-aftermath-by-ron-unz and Russian http://www.raga.org/novosti/amerikanskaya-pravda-bolshevitskaya-revolutsiya-ron-unz [3] Israel Shamir, https://www.unz.com/ishamir/the-throne-and-the-altar/ [4] Ethnography of the USSR. Univ. Press, 1958. Translated into IT. Language/Professor Sergei Tokarev Poster Comment: “Israeli Rabbi Yosef Tzvi ben Porat has apologized to the Russian people, saying in behalf of his co-religionists and fellow Jews: “We are to blame for everything and we must know why we are being driven away. We created Marxism and Leninism. We captured Russia. We killed 30 million educated Russians. We are wise men and sat down to rule over them.“[21] Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 5.
#4. To: Horse (#0)
Good post. The author views the relationship of Marx and Zionists/Zionism, I shall politely, 'narrowly', nonethless provides very interesting insights from his unique perspective. One thought that had come to me was the intersection of another project and this article: The Neocon active seeds taking over the GOP roughly overlaps with the period that the USSR started exporting it's so-called Jews to the USA. Basically, Democrat Jews were plotting the absolute and final takeover. Or am I way off here?
Right on! I've been saying for years they're simply making the US the USSR replacement. It wasn't at all obvious when I started, but should be to a hellalotta people now. It wouldn't surprise me if this newer jew infestation is as you say. Please remember, all, it really got rolling when our great-great- grandparents were stupid enuff to let them come pouring in in the 1890s -- thus the Brighton Beach 'Russian' mafia, and every other actor having a New Yauk accent since then -- even in the many shows like Columbo that were expressly set in CA.
There are no replies to Comment # 5. End Trace Mode for Comment # 5.
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