The Snatch

By Israel Shamir

A fast guy had thought that a wallet was unattended, and tried to snatch it. But to his distress, he was stopped in his tracks by a burly wallet owner. This might be a fair description of Saddam Hussein’s effort to snatch Kuwait. It also fits the war over South Ossetia.

Georgian President Saakashvili thought he could take South Ossetia while nobody was looking; while everybody was busy watching the Olympiad. In order to maximise the surprise factor, he declared barely three hours before the snatch that he would never send troops in.

Here the similarity ends. While Saddam succeeded in taking Kuwait, Saakashvili failed to take over the SO. Saakashvili’s strategy also was different, and more reminiscent of the Israeli conquest of 1948: he wanted to have Ossetia without its native folk, the Ossetians. To this end he bombarded the SO capital, Tskhinvali, causing a mass exodus of the people – some thirty thousand of them, or almost half of population crossed the high mountains to the Russian side. The Russians rolled in and kicked Saakashvili’s troops out.

So far, so good.

(1) Saakashvili has had it coming for a long time. His flirtation, no, his heavy petting with the US and Israel, his fervent anti-Russian sentiments, his Kartveli nationalism had led him and his country to trouble. Like young Fidel, he wanted to turn his land into a match to set the global fire. He was the first to be burnt.

(2) Russia fulfilled its residual imperial duty: as the successor of the Soviet Union, it is duty bound to guarantee some well-being of its erstwhile junior member-states. Russia could not allow Saakashvili to ethnically cleanse the Ossetians, for practical reasons, too: fifty thousand refugees from South Ossetia would destabilise the North Caucasus.

(3) Russia demonstrated that beyond its bark, it has bite, too. Probably other adventurous neighbours, namely pro-American leaders of Estonia, Poland, and the Ukraine will entertain second thoughts before their next paroxysm of anti-Russian sentiment.

(4) Russia proved that it can use force quickly, efficiently and with moderation. There was none of the old Soviet overkill; rather it was a moderate and modest, well-executed military operation. The best thing about it was its brevity, two or three days of actual fighting and the rest just a bit of mopping-up.

(5) Russian leadership proved that they are not scared by Washington’s rhetoric. This is a very good thing after so many years of complicity and impotence.

(6) Military defeat may be very good for the Georgian soul. Georgians are wonderful people, warm, handsome, pleasant and generous. However, they are ferocious nationalists of the tribal kind. Like some of their neighbours, they tend to see others mainly through an ethnic prism. The first thing the Georgians did when they became independent in the wake of 1917 Russian Revolution was to expel all Armenians and confiscate their property. Joseph Stalin also acted in the Georgian way when he expelled the Chechens from their mountains and the Germans from Prussia. Georgia is by no means homogeneous: it is populated by a few smaller ethnic groups, in addition to the Kartveli majority (or at least plurality). Since Georgia became independent a second time, in 1991, the Kartvelis have tried to deal with the minorities by harsh methods, undermining their culture and language and even expelling them on the first suspicion. This was the reason three autonomous areas of the country decided to split off from Georgia. SO is one of the three, but unless the Kartvel nationalism would be reined in, Adgars, Svans and other ethnic communities may rebel, too. Military defeat might just cause the Georgians to re-think their attitude towards their immediate neighbours.

(7) Though Russia did not send in its troops in order to remove Saakashvili, this does not make such an outcome any less desirable. Saakashvili is dangerous for Georgia, Russia, Ossetia and the world. What a pity he did not lose the general elections a few months ago; what a shame that other candidates met with untimely deaths under suspicious circumstances or were jailed. One may hope the true patriots of Georgia will kick him out and choose a better president, opting for neutrality and for friendship with Georgia’s neighbours including Russia.

(8) Georgian communists expressed their distaste with the Saakashvili’s attack; they would like to lead their country back into a close union with Russia. It should be considered: many Georgians, say the Communists in their letter from Tbilisi, would love to see the end of Saakashvili’s adventurism.

(9) A neutral and neighbour-friendly Georgia would be able to re-integrate South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The Kartvel and Mingrel refugees would be able to return into their villages. The Caucasus is so poly-ethnic that mutual expulsions and transfers are unacceptable.

(10) This is the time to stop anti-Georgian propaganda in Russia and anti-Russian propaganda elsewhere. Russia has a long tradition of friendship with the Caucasian nations, with Georgians, Ossetians, Circassians; the tradition has been well established by Leo Tolstoy, Lermontov and Griboedov. Let it prevail. As Marshal Stalin would say, Saakashvili come and go, but the Georgian people endure forever.

Europeans showed more understanding of the Russian action than some might have expected. There was no mass hysteria, and the Ossetians were allowed to express their viewpoint. Israel stopped its supplies of military hardware to Georgia. While American leaders responded to the victory of Russian arms with expected verbal severity, they wisely avoided any action likely to enhance the military standing of Saakashvili. They could have made an airlift of American armour to Tbilisi, they could have shown more muscle, but they did not.

This was the true mystery of the campaign. Did the Americans encourage Saakashvili? Did he act at his own foolhardy will? There may be a few explanations of the enigma.

(1) Every Georgian president has tried to regain the lost provinces, so Saakashvili could have decided to give it a try, perhaps being carried away by the magic of auspicious triple eight, as his offensive was begun on 8.8.8.

(2) Saakashvili may have failed to understand the Americans. This happened to Saddam Hussein when he snatched Kuwait. He was convinced that the Ambassador Gillespie had given him the green light for the operation.

(3) The Americans and Saakashvili may have failed in their prognostication. They interpreted Russian inaction in the past as a harbinger of their inaction in the future. On 8.8.8, a pro-American Russian newspaper Gazeta.ru predicted that the Russians would not move their forces and would swallow the defeat, as otherwise they would have acted earlier.

(4) The Americans are planning some kind of operation in Iran, and they encouraged this Georgian diversion to keep the Russians busy. This could still be the case, as in its present position Russia has a weak hand in the UN to deal with the American demands or with direct aggression.

(5) Iran expressed its support for the Russian operation and condemned the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia. The New York Times and similar papers editorialised that the US should not push Russia too hard, in order to get Russian approval for anti-Iranian sanctions or other measures.

My preferred version of events is that the Americans (and the Israelis) encouraged the Georgian president as they were curious to see the Russian reaction and to observe the preparedness of the Russian Armed Forces. In military parlance, such a minor operation is called “contact reconnaissance”, or just a “feeler”. No one could be certain how the Russian army would operate. In 1996, having been sent to retake the rebellious Grozny, the Russian Army ran away in disarray leaving its burning tanks behind. Since then, the Russians had not fired a single shot in anger; they have been very much a mystery for the West. In such a situation, there is no substitute for a bout of actual fighting, and Saakashvili unwittingly presented this opportunity to the West.

This is rather an optimistic view, as the following comparison will make clear. In the 1930s, the Japanese occupying Manchukuo faced the Russians. The Japanese did not know whether the Soviet Russians would fight well or run away, as they had easily defeated the Russian Imperial Army in 1903-5 war but had taken a beating from the Bolsheviks in 1918. This is why they carried out a contact reconnaissance raid at Khalkhyn Gol (Nomonhan) to take the measure of Russian resistance. After General Zhukov destroyed their attacking force, they decided to keep peace with Russia, and despite many pleas by Hitler, Japanese troops stayed put.

If this reading is right, we may be optimistic. Weakness invites war; the Neocons attacked Iraq because it was the weakest link. Now, the Russian army demonstrated its fighting capability, the Russian diplomats have confirmed their abilities and the Russian society has shown itself remarkably united. Russia is not so weak as to invite pressure or war.

The Rise and Rise of Neocons

By Israel Shamir

(Review of Stephen Sniegoski’s The Transparent Cabal)

A much needed if scary book is about to be published by I.H.S. Press, the same people who published The Neoconned! Stephen Sniegoski follows the Rise and Rise of the Neocons, of the people who created Bin Laden, bombed Belgrade, gave you the Iraqi War and the Patriot Act; the people who boasted: “Creative destruction is our middle name”[1]. Sniegoski reveals the hidden origins of this warlike sect that hijacked the only superpower. Read this book because the Neocons are here to stay. Maybe they will have different names, or use somewhat different arguments, but the end of their rule is not to be expected any time soon. “The conjectures about their impending demise were completely off base. Far from being headed for the political graveyard, neoconservatives are poised to become even more powerful” says Sniegoski, quoting Jacob Heilbrunn.

Who are they? Neocons are mainly Jewish turncoats, who parted ways with the Left and became right-wing pro-Israel zealots because they felt that the Left was “bad for the Jews”. Despite some token Gentile presence, the movement has been Jewish inspired, Jewish-oriented, and Jewish-dominated. They are a leading party of Organised American Jewry, of sorts. Once, they were Democrats, until Ronald Reagan with his virulent hatred of communism and Soviet Russia (“Now we shall bomb Moscow”) hired them to win the ideological Cold War. The Neocons, the red-diaper babies, switched sides, betrayed the ideals of their fathers, and brought down the Left movement that got used to rely upon Jews.

“While traditional conservatives welcomed neoconservatives as allies in their fight against Soviet Communism and domestic liberalism, the Neocons in effect acted as a Trojan Horse within conservatism: they managed to secure dominant positions in the conservative political and intellectual movement, and as soon as they gained power they purged those traditional conservatives who opposed their agenda.” The old conservatives who invited them in the first place, were pushed out by the aggressive newcomers, and became irrelevant “Palaeo-Cons”.
Indeed, whoever tried to win a war while relying on Jewish help, he came to regret it – even if the war was won. If one needed a proof for this old adage, Stephen Sniegoski’s book supplies it.

President George Bush Sr. went to his war in Iraq using their abilities to mobilize the public opinion and make the Americans to support the war. He thought he could continue his own way after achieving victory, and refused to give Israel $10 b they demanded unless they stop their settlement activity. That was his mistake. While at power, the Neocons created their networks and infiltrated all levels of control. Stephen Sniegoski discloses that Neocons are not “seven or eight individuals” as per Seymour Hirsh, not even “some twenty five Jews”, as per Tom Friedman, but vastly spread networks of pundits, media, politicians, think tanks. When they decided that the president is not useful for them anymore, they brought Bush the Senior low by activating the networks against him. “And the George H. W. Bush who emerged from the Gulf War with an astronomical 90 percent approval rating went down to a humiliating election defeat.”

Stephen Sniegoski tells in detail about their connection to Israel, about their “Securing the Realm” war plan, where the ‘Realm’ in question is the Jewish state, while ‘securing’ should be done by and at the expense of the Americans. The reader will be surprised to learn why they chose Iraq as their first target. They claimed Iraq is the source of imminent and clear danger to Israel and even to the US, but Sniegoski proves that they chose Iraq because they considered it weak. In their war plan, they correctly surmised that Iraq can be broken into ethnic religious warring communities with relative ease. They also correctly assessed military and social weakness of Iraq and that is why they chose to attack the poor country.

It would be an error to think that the Neocons are just doing Israel’s asking. They are keen on war and strife everywhere. They admitted it cheerfully: “we are a warlike people and we love war. . . . What we hate is not casualties, but losing.”[2] Naturally, the “warlike people” in question are not Americans in general, but the Neocons’ own community, American Jews. Provided they and their sons hardly ever serve in the army, they may love war and disregard casualties with cavalier disdain.

Their first war was in Afghanistan. “The Neocons supported the provision of extensive military aid to the militant Islamic Afghan “freedom fighters” in their armed struggle against the Soviet occupation. The military aid, which had begun in the Carter administration, had been very limited. Richard Perle played a pivotal role in equipping the “freedom fighters” with the all-important shoulder-borne Stinger missiles, which proved to be lethal to the previously invincible Soviet helicopter gunships.[3] Ironically, the neoconservatives now portray these very same Muslims that they helped to militarize as a deadly terrorist threat to America and the world.”

Their next war was far from the Middle East, in the Balkans. They supported bombing of Serbia, but that was not enough for the “warlike people”. They demanded to send ground troops to fight the Serbs. “Members of the interventionist Balkan Action Committee, which advocated NATO ground troops for Kosovo, included such prominent neoconservative mainstays as Richard Perle, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Max M. Kampelman, Morton Abramowitz, and Paul Wolfowitz. Other announced proponents of a tougher war included Eliot Cohen, Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, Bill Kristol, William Kagan, and Norman Podhoretz. [4]”

Now they are all for smashing Iran, but destruction of the Saudi Arabia is on their plans, too. “In August 2002, Max Singer presented a paper to the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment in which he once again urged the dismemberment of Saudi Arabia.[5] The July/August 2002 issue of Commentary contained an article titled “Our Enemies, the Saudis” by Victor Davis Hanson who claimed “that the Saudi subversives were already in the process of taking over the United States itself” and called “to spark disequilibrium, if not outright chaos” in Saudi Arabia. The leading neoconservative expert on Saudi Arabia was Stephen Schwartz, who posited a Saudi/Wahhabist conspiracy to take over all of Islam and spread terror throughout the entire world.”

While these things are generally known to reading audience, and can be found in recent The Rise of the Neocons, by Jacob Heilbrunn, Sniegoski is at his scariest when he (correctly) explains the inevitability of Neocons’ program. They will get what they want for their powerbase – wealthy Jews and media lords – keeps all the options under control. Do you think that the problem is Bush the Dumb and Cheney the Vicious? Think again. Sniegoski takes us back to year 2000, when the Americans could have chosen John McCain.

“For those who blame Bush and Cheney for the war on Iraq, a significant hypothetical question is: How would a President John McCain have responded to the September 11 attacks? Given his willingness to make war on a country (Serbia) that did not threaten America in the least, his advocacy of forcible regime change in Iraq, and his staunch support for the actual attack on Iraq in 2003 (and his later hawkishness on Iran),[6] there is no reason to think that a President McCain would have avoided a war on Iraq. In fact, he likely would have pursued a belligerent approach to Iraq even if a major terrorist attack on the United States had not taken place.

Moreover, Senator John McCain, Bush’s Republican rival in the primaries, was the favourite candidate for many leading neoconservatives in 2000. As Franklin Foer, editor of the liberal New Republic put it: “Jewish neoconservatives have fallen hard for John McCain. It's not just unabashed swooner William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard. McCain has also won over such leading neocon lights as David Brooks, the entire Podhoretz family, The Wall Street Journal's Dorothy Rabinowitz, and columnist Charles Krauthammer”.[7]

Democrats would lead the US to the same war, with the same (or different) Neocons. Albert Gore and Joe Lieberman were even more pro-Israeli and pro-war than Bush and Cheney. This repeated in 2004. “Even though the Democratic grassroots were heavily anti-war, the presidential election of 2004 offered little choice regarding Iraq, since John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, advocated virtually the same policy.[8] In essence, the Kerry foreign policy would be neo-conservatism without neoconservatives, or at least without the same neoconservatives.”

One of the reasons for this inevitability is the Jewish media lords’ control over the US discourse. Sniegoski notes that “Murdoch’s News Corporation is the largest English-language news group in the world. In 2004, it consisted of more than 175 newspapers (40 million papers sold each week) and 35 television stations. During the build-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, all 175 Murdoch-owned newspapers worldwide editorialized in favour of the war.” Yes, Sniegoski notes that there are many Jews against the war, but alas, they do not own media.

[1] Michael Ledeen, “Creative Destruction,” National Review Online, September 20, 2001, http://www.nationalreview.com/contributors/ledeen092001.shtml

[2] Courtland Milloy, “War Hawks Blinded by Hardened Hearts,” Washington Post, March 31, 2003, p. B-1, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55427-2003Mar30.html

[3] Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004), p. 49.

[4] Balkan Action Council, Press Release, “Balkan Action Council Urges NATO Intervention, Ground Forces in Kosovo,” January 25, 1999, http://www.southeasteurope.org/documents/pr199.pdf ;

[5] “Saudi Arabia,” Disinfopedia, http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Saudi_Arabia&printable=yes ;

[6] Brian Knowlton, “Legislators demand more action on Iran,” International Herald Tribune, January 22, 2006, http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/01/22/news/policy.php

[7] Francis Foer, “The neocons wake up: Arguing the GOP,” New Republic, March 20, 2000, p. 13.

[8] Quoted in Thomas E. Woods, Jr., “The Progressive Peacenik Myth,” The American Conservative, August 2, 2004, http://www.amconmag.com/2004_08_02/article1.html

Pakistan in Turmoil

By Israel Shamir

Benazir Bhutto’s assassination has moved unhappy Pakistan a step closer to an unknown future which may include disintegration and American invasion at some stage. Her murder was organized by the Neocon team who intend to use the turmoil to take over Pakistani nuclear assets in the next stage of their world war. But do not fear the future. Our enemies do not keep Fate in their thrall. They are cocksure, but they might lose. We should not be forever scared of pending changes; leave this fear to rich and feeble old men. A storm is ahead, but there is no status quo worth saving and preserving anywhere in Asia, least of all in Pakistan.

Some pundits have already compared her assassination with that of Prince Ferdinand in Saraevo 1914, but even bloody and unnecessary World War I ushered in an unexpected victorious revolution and derailed imperialist plans for half a century.

Who killed her? The authorities try to blame some jihadis, but not only did al Qaeda leaders deny their involvement, not only did Benazir’s posthumous letters denounce the government rather than the Taliban, but Dr Shabir Choudhry, an expert, has well commented:

“Why would Al-Qaeda kill her? Maybe she was pro-West and went there to protect the Western interests, but she was not in power, and was not even close to getting elected. Even if she were elected Prime Minister of Pakistan, now most of the powers are vested in the post of the President, and not Prime Minister. Musharraf and his Ministers took pride in supporting and promoting the American interest or 'War on terror'. They, in order to stay in power, undermined the Pakistani or Muslim interest and have virtually made Pakistan a colony of America. So why target a person who had not yet become a Prime Minister, and had not practically done much to support the Western policy in Pakistan?”

The murder occurred just one month after the Neocons began a discussion on the pages of the NY Times calling for the undermining and dismantling of Pakistan, and the takeover of its nuclear devices. Frederick Kagan and Michael O'Hanlon called in the New York Times (Pakistan’s Collapse, Our Problem, November 18, 2007) for the invasion of Pakistan after it descends into chaos, liaison with pro-American elements in the army, securing the capital, and removing the bombs “to someplace like New Mexico; or a remote redoubt within Pakistan, with the nuclear technology guarded by elite Pakistani forces backed up (and watched over) by crack international troops… unless it fells into wrong hands [of Islamic terrorists]”. Abid Ullah Jan has rightly noted that “Pakistan's military is not as concerned about the myth of these weapons falling into the hands of militants as they are fearful of America using Pakistan's engineered instability as a ruse for implementing a unilateral disarmament scheme.”

After the assassination, leading Neocons and extreme Zionists John Bolton and Michael Savage already called for forgetting about democracy in Pakistan, and instead, for giving full support to General Musharraf. The idea of removing Pakistani nuclear weapons – so they would not fall into the hands of terrorists – is being voiced again and again. In order to conceal this plan, they speak now of Pakistan being unripe for democracy.

This is lie. The people of Pakistan are as good as anybody in Asia: they do not want American dominance, and real democracy can only liberate them from the American yoke. But the leaders of Pakistan have sold out; and the worst are the military and intelligence. Thus the choice was grim: a pro-American military dictator who turned Pakistan into a US invasion base, and a pro-American ex-PM who was about to add prestige to the rotten regime. The regime of Pakistan has to go, to be exchanged for people’s rule free from Washington orders. One doubts whether such a task can be achieved by elections; probably an insurgency based on the people’s will has a better chance, following achievements of such diverse inspiration models as Mao in China, Fidel in Cuba, Hezbollah in Lebanon. The insurgency is there, and with proper support it can succeed in Pakistan.

What insurgency? An insurgency would be good only if it fights against Western imperialism. There have been plenty of insurgencies for imperialism, from Savimbi in Angola to the Contras in Nicaragua to al Qaeda in Afghanistan. If an insurgency is blessed by an American president, if it helps the imperialists -- like al-Qaeda did (and does) -- it can bring only disaster to the people. In colour code, green is good together with red.

The long shadow of the tragic ten-year-long Afghani war (1980 to 1989) is still with us, for these events can’t be understood without it. A few years ago, Zbigniev Brzezinski boasted (“How the US provoked the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan and starting the whole mess”, Le Nouvel Observateur (France), Jan 15-21, 1998, read here) how he succeeded in trapping the Soviets in the war by starting an insurgency against the socialist government a long time before the Soviet troops came over to help the government. Al Qaeda and other mujaheds were but a local version of Contras, and they caused much sorrow to the people of Afghanistan. The Afghanis I have met say that the days of Najibullah’s pro-Soviet government were the best times their country ever knew.

Pakistan was allowed to become a nuclear power as a reward for its support for the American-led war. But was the price worth it? Pakistan was turned into a war base, and millions of refugees, thousands of weapons and endless traffic in drugs has undermined the weak country. Afghanistan descended into living hell. Support of the war gave rise to the ICI, the real rulers of Pakistan. The nuclear weapons once touted as the “Islamic bomb” became worthless as Pakistan was turned into an American colony. Indeed there is no blessing in the ill-gotten gains.

Even Reaganites, the right-wing Republicans who provoked the Afghan war, did not enjoy the fruits of victory. The anticommunist conservatives invited young children of Jewish Trotskyites to carry out the ideological war for them, and these young Neocons succeeded, but at the same time they completely displaced their erstwhile patrons. The conservatives became “Palaeocons,” out of power and out of influence, while their positions were taken over by Neocons.

The European and American Left (from French Communists to Noam Chomsky) agreed to play ball with their nephews the Neocons, condemned the USSR and warmly embraced the al Qaeda mujaheds. For this sin, the left went into abeyance after the USSR was undone.

Our good and admired friend Edward Herman wrote recently (ZNet Commentary, December 16, 2007) of Great Satan and Little Satan, of the US and Israel. Whatever these two satans touch, rots. Whoever relies upon their help, loses his soul. The people of Pakistan deserve freedom, prosperity and equality, but no union with Satan will help them. Musharraf served the Great Satan, and Bhutto played ball with the Little Satan. Now the NY Times reported that the US plans to use the native mountain tribes of Pakistan to carry out their war. Unless the people of Pakistan reject Satan and his allies, whether called al Qaeda or ICI or CIA or Special troops, they won’t be free. As long as they still believe that something good can come out of Satan’s friendship, they are doomed. Their country will be dismantled, and their useless nuclear weapons won’t help them.

However, dissolution of Pakistan does not have to lead to havoc. There is the alternative of reintegration of its provinces back into India. The partition of India in 1947 was a tragic mistake, as tragic as the partition of Palestine. It was engineered by the British imperialists, who planted the seeds of partition a century earlier, in 1857. In that year, the Brits killed millions of Indians while crushing the Great Uprising. Akhilesh Mithal I Itihaas wrote: “before 1857, there was an Indian Culture and Style, and there was no Hindu-Muslim divide. The defeat of 1857 meant a great culture fracture which continues to separate our people into mutually antagonistic shrapnel like fragments.” This great fracture can be healed.

Our friend Anthony Nahas wrote: “the Muslim population of Pakistan was - and is - smaller than that of India, though Pakistan was created to make Muslim's "safe" from presumed Hindu intolerance and oppression. If the Muslim population in India can live in peace, thrive and enjoy protection under secular law, what was the point of creating Pakistan in the first place? Although it is inconceivable for Pakistan to merge back into India, such an (impossible) event would probably be the greatest thing that could happen to both countries. It is true that Islam and Hinduism are the two beautiful eyes of one culturally diverse and pluralistic Indian subcontinent.”

Right Ho, Lobby

By Israel Shamir


The inhabitants of a stately house are embroiled in endless squabbling; the maids are getting snippy, the engagement ring has been returned and the cook has sent in his resignation. Into the midst of battle strides the confident and clever valet Jeeves (played by Stephen Fry in the BBC series), who successfully brings peace to the warring household by presenting them with a common enemy, the empty-headed Wooster. United in their animosity, the lovers renew their vows, and the servants line up behind their masters. This elegant ruse, once described in Right Ho, Jeeves, a pleasantry by P.G. Wodehouse, has just been employed with great success by the impalpable force sometimes called the Zionist Lobby.

In a letter[1] addressed to the Times’ Editor, yesterday’s adversaries are today united, falling into line as though directed by the persuasive manners of an unseen Jeeves. Our Wodehouse players once squared off over important principles, yet suddenly they find themselves uncomfortable bedfellows.

Let us review our cast: [See the full list[2]]

· Nobel Peace laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, enemy of apartheid, a friend of Palestine. Last week, the Jewish community caused the Minnesota University of St Thomas to ban him.

· The flamboyant Zionist, “Mr Lobby”, Bernard-Henri Lévy, the hairy heir to a slave owners’ fortune. He usually bashes Palestinians in his frequent TV appearances. When his Negrophobe friend Alain Finkelkraut was sued for too-explicit racist talk, Levy defended him. [Maria Poumier added: Bernard Henri Lévy tries to be known as a friend of Blacks. He inspired the “SOS Racisme” movement during Mitterrand’s presidency, in order to canalize the anger of young sons of immigrants; (the president of SOS Racisme is Harlem Desir, an unbelievable but real name of a son of Arab and Caribbean); now BHL leads the campaign against genocide in Darfour, supposedly for humanitarian reasons, but also because he does not want China to make business with Sudan, and he speaks very loud about it. Two weeks ago, he launched a big concert against the DNA tests that Sarkozy wanted to use in immigration matters - to prevent African fathers to bring too many children in France; (at last, the deputies voted for tests only to recognize the real link between children and mothers). BHL organized the banishment of Dieudonné, black comic, as an anti-Semite, though he was very popular; before Dieudonne made any antizionist joke in his one man shows, BHL had succeeded in ordering the French ministry of culture not to fund the film Dieudonne wanted to make about slavery; the film, called Le code noir, was written by a very respected professor and philosopher, Louis Sala Molins. Raymond Aron wrote in 1981 about BHL’s first mediatic book “L’idéologie française”: “Many Jews in France are feeling again threatened by anti-Semitism; as shocked people, they increase by their reactions the danger –somehow fictional- they face. This book says that danger is everywhere for Jews, because French ideology oblige them to fight at any time against an enemy that is hidden in the unconsciousness of millions of French people. The French who are not Jewish may conclude, after that book, that Jews are even more different from other French that what they supposed, if such an author, so much celebrated by the Jewish organizations, seems to be unable to understand a lot of expressions of French thought, being just able to reject them. BHL delivers “the truth” in order to make the French nation know its past and get rid of it; in fact, he is spreading salt on all the uncicatrized wounds. Being hysterical, BHL increases the hysteria of a sector of de Jewish community that already tends to insane acts.” L’Express, feb. 7, 1981.]

· Mairead Maguire, the brave Irish fighter for Palestine, who befriended our prisoner-of-conscience Mordecai Vanunu.

· Russian arch-Zionist Elena Bonner, the passionately anti-Muslim, anti-Communist, neo-liberal Reaganite. She fought against the “Evil Empire” for the rights of Russian Jews to emigrate to Israel and to take the homes of the Palestinian refugees.

· The great Nobel playwright Harold Pinter, who spoke so passionately against the Iraqi war.

· Zbigniew Brzezinski, the man who gave you the Afghani war with its millions of refugees – and boasted of it.[3] Anti-Communist and a hater of Russia to boot, he provoked the Soviet intervention of 1980 and guided Osama bin Laden.

· Our brave actress, Vanessa Redgrave, who fought and suffered from many Lobby attacks.

· A leading French Zionist Andre Glucksmann, member of anti-Communist liberal left, who supported both the Chechen separatists and the war.

· The dedicated enemy of Pinochet, Ariel Dorfman.

· Pinochet’s greatest admirer, Vladimir Bukovsky.



What is the power that has knitted together this patchwork quilt, this motley collection of the good, the bad and the ugly? Could it be this anonymous NGO that came into being just yesterday called RAW in WAR? Its proclaimed intention is to “recognise women who are defending human rights in zones of war and conflict,” surely a worthy aim; to deny your signature to such a commendable undertaking would be to court public damnation. Yet one might expect Rachel Corrie, the brave American woman from Seattle who was murdered by the Israelis, to be one of the first to be recognized as such. Rachel Corrie died defending a Palestinian home from destruction. She bravely placed herself in front of a stranger’s home, believing in her heart that the man at the levers of the Caterpillar bulldozer would not, could not crush the life out of her for the sake of making one more Palestinian family homeless. But the beast did not stop, he drove on and smashed her body. The Israeli courts exculpated him, and the US Jewish Lobby has successfully banned a play based on her story, adding “the antisemite got what she deserved”.

So, was Rachel Corrie the first to be recognised by this august grouping? Not on your nellie. This NGO has been created to commemorate the late Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. She was killed a year ago by persons unknown, and ever since that day the Zionist neocon machine has been attempting to implicate the all-too-independent Russian authorities in the murder. Her name, together with the name of Polonium-poisoned ex-spy Litvinenko, has become a battle-cry for neo-liberal anti-Putin forces. They even drafted Litvinenko’s widow to add her signature to the list, just in case you forgot one of the crimes laid at Russia’s door. Of course they included Daniel Pearl’s widow to add the obligatory anti-Muslim bias, and Warsaw Ghetto fighter Marek Edelman for the mandatory anti-Nazi angle.

How is it that the totally unknown Bulgarian researcher Mariana Katzarova (the official chairperson of RAW in WAR) could connect to so many lords and ladies, archbishops and barons, Nobel laureates, writers and VIPs to create this tour-de-force of a list? Is she more powerful than Berezovsky and Nevzlin put together? These two exiled multi-millionaire oligarchs have been keeping the Litvinenko and Politkovskaya stories alive for a year now, and they never generated anywhere near this kind of furore. The media events dedicated to the memory of Politkovskaya were organised by the New World Order destabilisation shock troops, a.k.a. the National Endowment for Democracy, or NED, a US government-funded organisation “set up to legally continue the CIA’s prohibited activities of support to selected political parties abroad” according to Wikipedia. The new NGO’s list continues and expands upon these anti-Russian pressure tactics, in order to breathe new life into old news. The aim is to put pressure on a Russian president who adamantly refuses to give a green light to the planned Israeli and American bombing of Iran, who supplies Syria with its air defence systems, who stopped the oligarchs at their asset-stripping of Russia.

I do not intend to besmirch memory of a murdered journalist, and it is not necessary to do so. Logic will suffice: Anna Politkovskaya never presented a danger to the Putin regime, being quite unknown to general public; the idea of Putin demanding her death sounds a bit melodramatic. The investigation of her murder is still going on, but it seems likely that she ran afoul of some persons in the Chechnya insurgency or counter-insurgency. The Chechnya War was still a hot story a year ago, and today some ten Chechens and a rogue security forces colonel sit in a Moscow jail implicated in the murder. The Russian Attorney General recently declared that the murder mystery is almost unravelled. Politkovskaya’s son has expressed his full confidence in police efforts[4]. He believes that the actual murderers and their patrons will be found soon. Many Russian observers believe the murder was ordered by persons desiring both to undermine Russian society and to frame Putin. I have also expressed this view. This technique brings to mind the reports that have emerged from Lebanon, where anti-Syrian activists have been killed by pro-Israeli gunmen to stir up “sectarian” violence[5].

The Russian government and people have all condemned the assassination of Politkovskaya. The police are tracking down the killers, and the family is satisfied with the progress of the case. Is there more to this story? The answer is Yes if you are a neocon: there must be a link to Putin. Neocons use her dead body to undermine Russia. Against the wishes of her family, and against the interests of the Russian people, her name has become the lever to bend Russia’s will. The letter to the Times dances to neocon music.

Nobody can fault the signatories of the letter to the Times for what they wrote. They wrote very carefully: “We call on the Russian Government to bring to justice, in full conformity with international standards, both those who killed Anna Politkovskaya and those who have ordered her murder.” It is impossible to refuse to sign such a letter; don’t we all wish to catch the murderers? Yet what is the purpose of this letter? It effectively demonstrates that Zionists can mobilise even dedicated anti-Zionists and anti-war activists against Russia. Strange bedfellows, indeed. United, not against a war-mongering America, but against a war-stopping Russia.

All this fancy manoeuvring reminds me of the Wallenberg case. Raul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat in the Nazi Germany and Hungary, saved many Jews by providing them with Swedish passports and visas. In 1945 he was arrested by the Soviet security in Budapest as a spy, and died in jail in 1947. But he was not allowed to rest in peace: the Zionists invented a fairy tale that he survived and is still kept in a secret jail somewhere in Russia. They have turned his honorable name into a slander. Over the years, from the end of WW2 until the collapse of the USSR, they put together thousands of rallies – from Washington to Wellington - demanding the “release of Wallenberg”. Many well-meaning westerners participated in these demonstrations, and each innocent, manipulated soul helped chip away at the USSR, ushering in the present unipolar world of Judeo-American hegemony. Only after 1991 did the Zionists leave the Wallenberg family in peace, for his 1947 death could no longer be denied.

It’s not that Zionists give a fig about Swedish diplomats who saved Jews. There is another Swedish diplomat in Germany who saved Jews: Count Folke Bernadotte. Bernadotte was sent as the UN representative to Palestine in 1948 exactly for this reason: because he saved so many Jews and had enormous sympathy toward Jewish refugees. But he was a witness to the mass expulsion (Nakba), and he demanded that Israel let the Palestinian refugees return home to their villages. This good man of conscience was immediately assassinated by a future Israeli Prime Minister. That’s how it goes. The name of Wallenberg is given to streets and squares in many cities around the world; the name of Bernadotte is forgotten. This is the power of Jewish Lobby: they can decide whose name will be known and whose name will be forgotten, who will be blessed and who will be cursed.

But this is no miracle: they have harnessed the true power behind modern democracies: the multitasking machinery of mass media and public relations. Modern Russia (like the USSR of old) does not dance to their tune primarily because the Russian mass media has been placed outside their grasp; consequently it has to be destroyed. They are now using directing a plethora of human rights organisations and humanitarian causes to this end, as they used it in the Soviet days. Mme Bonner and others of her ilk demanded the right of return for Russian Jews, while denying the same right to Palestinians. Actually, we must never forget that these two groups are not equivalent: the Palestinians were expelled from their homes in our lifetime, while Russian Jews were declared to be long-lost Hebrews. There were thousands of rallies all over the globe, packed with well-meaning westerners – maybe you? – demanding this right for Jews and singing “Let My People Go.” But there were no rallies demanding the right of return for the Palestinians. If they were, they remained unreported, and the participants were blacklisted.

They delivered speeches deploring the lack of human rights in the USSR until the great ship went down, and then they delivered the assets of the Soviet people to the oligarchs. Apparently Yeltsin kept human rights well preserved during this great period of privatisation, for no one spoke of them. Yet when Putin rose from the ranks to return some of these ill-gotten assets back to the people, when he regained media from Jewish control, suddenly human rights violations became headlines.

We would be very naïve to accept the human rights mantra for its face value. Yes, I am very sorry for Raul Wallenberg and for Anna Politkovskaya; but I am equally sorry for Folke Bernadotte and Rachel Corrie; and I would not sign a petition for the former unless it contains the names of the latter. Otherwise, this is a trap for well-intentioned people: they can find themselves speaking for causes that are not their own, for reasons that they would find repugnant. As they speak against the infringement of human rights in Cuba, Russia, Iran, and Gaza, they are denying these besieged states even a psychological respite. Lay off, friends: let us first deal with the basic right to be alive, for this right is severely threatened by the US Air force. When this right is finally assured, we’ll deal with the rest.

Still, Jeeves was right: one should remember the common adversary. The same thought was well formulated by Carl Schmitt: an enemy is a most important political asset; and he should be chosen as carefully as a friend. The truly formidable power of the Jewish Lobby is its ability to unite people against its enemy, and to block competing attempts to unite. When we try to unite people against Zionists, the Jews activate their “guilt by association” weapon, and the weak-hearted begin to make excuses, saying we cannot stand with you, because you have been linked to a right-winger, or a Muslim militant, or a Christian fundamentalist, or a Stalinist, or a Holocaust denier, or a nationalist, or a racialist, or a terrorist, or whatever. And our efforts fall apart.

Their tactics prove that they do not care about human rights or democracy. They demonise Muammar Qaddafi and David Duke and Roger Garaudy and Russian Communists, but find no fault in warmongers Bernard Kouchner, Zbiegnew Brzezinski, and Ariel Sharon. We all know that Putin served in the KGB, but we do not hear often that the great liberal hope, the Israeli Foreign Minister Tzippi Livni, emerged from the secret service.

When they want to unite people, there is no “guilt by association.” I might ask these wonderful (no irony!) people like Mairead Maguire, or Desmond Tutu, or Harold Pinter, how is it that they are not worried to put their signature next to that of war criminal and warmonger Brzezinski, next to Zionist and Negrophobe Levy, next to arch-thief Havel who privatised half of Prague for his own benefit? Probably they would not even understand me, because there is only one authority licensed to demonise and issue kosher certificates, and that is the Lobby.

Jews create and control the matrix of demonisation, and so they do not fear it, just as Neo could see through the Matrix of his world. Wasn’t the Borat movie plainly racist? You bet it was. However, this Cohen had only to say that he is a Jew, and all objections were voided. A Jewish organisation could write without hesitation “Sacramento's militantly anti-gay Slavic Christians are suspected of harboring the killer.”[6] Is it a racist statement? You bet it is. If you doubt, try to write “Sacramento's militantly anti-goy Jews are suspected of harboring the killer” and see how far you get.

In the last German elections, Frau Merkel made quite a few racist statements, stopping short of demanding the expulsion of all Turks living in Germany, but promising to stop Turkey’s membership bid in the EU so that no more Turks might come to Germany. She was allowed to say that and win, because she fully supported Israel and America, and therefore she has been certified kosher by the Lobby. As a result, Germany, a key member of anti-war coalition in 2003, is suddenly a potential participant in the coming war against Iran.

Besides its right-wing group of neocons, the Lobby has its left-wing project. In the 1980s, the Zionist Lobby-managed left-liberal (anti)communists provided the left leg for imperialism, for the war against the nations, for American hegemony. They were active in the last decade of the USSR's existence, when the Zionists succeeded in getting together many good and worthy people, from Jacques Derrida to Italian Communist leadership, and made them sing in unison, cutting off the left’s natural support for Soviet Russia. Their contribution to the end of the socialist experiment in Russia was decisive. After fulfilling this task, these French and Italian liberal communist parties simply faded away, no longer needed for the Zionist cause. Imperialism now firmly stood on its right, neo-conservative foot.

Yet the left is not dead. The letter to the Times is a first harbinger of the winds of change: the the Zionists have decided to bring their leftist play back to life. In France, they even present Levy as a symbol of “Left’s return”. With such Left, who needs Right?

Human rights idea could be good if these rights were universal. But the paragons of human rights usually stop where it is convenient for them. They are for the minority rights, rights of gays and rights of bankers and rights of Jews, but they are against rights of the majority, the right to live and to bring up children and to sustain one’s family, and the right to go to church or mosque unmolested. One of the darkest figures of the world affairs is Bernard Kouchner, the new French Foreign Minister. A Zionist and a human rights activist, he supported all past interventions based on human rights – the bombing of Serbia, the invasion of Somali and Iraq, you name it. He ruled over NATO-conquered Kosovo, and allowed his pet Albanian gangs to burn churches and to expel the Serbs. Now he supports Bush plans to attack Iran and Israel’s plans to strangulate Gaza[7]. This is the face of a human rights paragon.

Nor has an alleged socialist Kouchner any problem with serving under Sarkozy. Sarkozy ran for the President under the banner of Le Pen. He took Le Pen’s slogans, Le Pen’s ideas and Le Pen’s voters, with one big exception: Le Pen was against the Judeo-American Empire. That is why, while Le Pen was demonised by the Lobby, Sarkozy was extolled. Now France is going to renege on the greatest achievement of Charles de Gaulle, on his 1966 liberation of France from the NATO yoke. Sarkozy and Kouchner are to return French troops under the US command, and to return American bases into France in the greatest revert of French foreign policy since Petain-Laval. Sarkozy – Kouchner link gives the lie of the Left-Right dichotomy: they may be united in the support of Israel and the US, and they may be united in its rejection. This question – support or rejection – is, or should be the “Friend or Foe” signal on our radars.

This is a question of life and death: if we have a common Zionist enemy, we shall be at peace; if we have no common enemy, they will find us other enemies. Putin’s Russia, Ahmadinejad’s Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, Cuba and Venezuela, Zimbabwe and Burma, all can be turned into enemies. Until recently, the Arab states were united with Iran and Hamas in their rejection of Zionist schemes. Switching gears, the Zionists offered a different animosity: Sunni Arabs against Shia Persians. And it worked: the Arab states accepted their idea that Iran is the enemy; and that Islam of Hamas government is the enemy. . As soon people forget that Zionism is the main enemy, they are started on the march to a war.

Equally, democracy is a good idea. But only the democracy that comes from the word “demos,” people’s rule - not from the word “demo” like in “demo version” (in Victor Pelevin’s words). The democracy standard-bearers gather around George Bush, they are ready to justify every aggression by the need to establish democracy; but they reject the right of Palestinians to elect Hamas, or the right of Venezuelans to elect Chavez, or the right of Cubans to elect Castro, or the right of Russians to elect Putin. NED, the National Endowment for Democracy, that CIA-financed subversive organisation, is in reality the greatest enemy of democracy because their democracy is a tool of subjugation to the Judeo-American paradigm. What’s worse, in Russia and Burma, Cuba and Venezuela, the leaders become wary of democracy, and this is an unfortunate development.

Thus the distinction between Zionists and non-Zionists is the most important distinction, the great divide between war and peace, life and death. Do not cross this line. Read the “Friend or Foe” signals carefully. Do not support the enemy’s initiatives even if they appear to be of wonderful intention. Always remember the bottom line: what is the purpose behind every petition, each rally - even a letter. Do not let our adversary to set an agenda with his righteous indignation, honeyed words and sophistic devices. If we shall set the agenda, we can usher in peace; if we shall follow their agenda, we shall face war.



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[1] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/letters/article2599269.ece

[2] Mairead Maguire, Betty Williams, Jody Williams, Shirin Ebadi, Wangari Maathai, Rigoberta Menchú Tum, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Elena Bonner, Tatiana Yankelevich, President Vaclav Havel, Harold Pinter, The Hon Zbigniew Brzezinski, Vladimir Bukovsky, Andre Glucksmann, Gloria Steinem, Sergey Kovalyov, Terry Waite, Cbe, Susan Sarandon, Alexei Simonov, Gillian Slovo, Baroness Kennedy Of The Shaws, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Marek Edelman, Elisabeth Rehn, Mariane Pearl, Asma Jahangir, Sister Helen Prejean, Ariel Dorfman, Vanessa Redgrave, Michael Cunningham, Eve Ensler, John Sweeney, Jonathan Schell, Noam Chomsky, Marina Litvinenko, Lyudmila Alekseeva, Desmond O’Malley, Anne Nivat, Victor Fainberg, Lord Judd, Lord Rea, Lord Giddens, Lord Ahmed, Baroness Williams Of Crosby, Baroness Meacher, Professor Yakin Erturk, Elena Kudimova, Natasha Kandic, Caroline Mccormick, Sister Marya Grathwohl, Heidi Bradner, Meglena Kuneva, Elizabeth Kostova, Esther Chavez, John D. Panitza, Dubravka Ugresic, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Victor Navasky, Aidan White, Holly Near, Elizabeth Frank

[3] Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser in Le Nouvel Observateur (France), Jan 15-21, 1998 p.76. He admitted he intentionally provoked the USSR’s entry to Afghanistan by fanning and bankrolling the insurgency against the legitimate government in Kabul. Asked whether he regrets it, he replied: “Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists? B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?



[4] http://www.rian.ru/society/20071007/82792712.html

[5] http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/909946.html

[6] http://www.jewsonfirst.org/

[7] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/09/19/wiran119.xml

Russian Intifada

By Israel Shamir

The decision by the Estonian nationalist Prime Minister, Andrus Ansip, to uproot the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Tallinn brought this small Baltic state to the verge of civil war and severely disturbed peace in the region. The usually tranquil and delightful, Hansa-built Old Tallinn, surrounded by its long city wall with “Long Hermann” and “Fat Margaret,” two 15th century towers, is now full of heavily armed police, hundreds of detainees locked up and beaten up in Terminal D of the harbour, burned-down shops, torture and mistreatment, open ethnic conflict, vocal support of neocons – not what one expects to find in this pleasant country with its peaceful folks. The Eestlanes, the aborigines of the land -- tall, quiet and blue-eyed peasant folk -- were supposed to be so calm that “a red-hot Estonian lad” is a synonym for slow-wit among their neighbours. On the other hand, these good craftsmen and fishermen, fond of taking their coffee with the sweet liqueur Vana Tallinn, volunteered en masse for Nazi SS divisions and were prominent in ethnic cleansing campaigns.

For an Israeli, these Tallinn events had a strong touch of déjà vu. Uprooting of the Unknown Soldier Tomb was done by the nationalist government in a pointedly insulting and arrogant way. This triggered the Russian Intifada, the spontaneous uprising of the unprivileged. In a like manner, the provocative and arrogant visit of Ariel Sharon to the al-Aksa Mosque in the fateful September of 2000 had jumpstarted the Palestinian Intifada. In both cases a provocation was initiated by extreme nationalists of the ruling ethnic group keen on spoiling fragile inter-communal relations, for they feed on strife. In both cases, they claimed their unlimited right to do whatever they wish. In both cases, the media attention was concentrated on the response to provocation, rather than on its causes. For sure, the violent response of Palestinians in 2000 and Russians in 2007 -- their rioting, stone-throwing and shop-burning -- was obvious, visible and unpleasant. What is less visible is that each was a result of provocation, and of a long sequence of injustices leading to the outbreak of violence.

Estonia is notorious for coming as close to apartheid as any country in Europe since 1945. The Columbia Encyclopaedia tells us that “Estonians (Eestlanes) make up about 65% of the population; Russians constitute almost 30%, and there are Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Finnish minorities. Since independence (1991), citizenship has generally been limited to ethnic Estonians, a practice widely criticized because it denies political and civil rights to the many Russian-speaking inhabitants. In 1993 ethnic Russians were officially declared foreigners, raising even stronger objections.” The “Russians” of Estonia are of various origins – ethnic Ukrainian, Georgian, German, Armenian, Jewish, Russian – all non-aborigines are called “Russians”. The Russians were stripped of their citizenship, their ID cards are now stamped “Alien”, while in private, they are called ‘Negroes’ – an abbreviation of Ne-Gr, non-citizen.

This is not your ordinary immigrants-versus-natives conflict. The non-Eestlanes are no more “immigrants” in Estonia than Parisians are immigrants in Corsica, or Londoners in Wales. Estonia became Russian in 1721, before Corsica became French (in 1768), and remained in union with Russia until 1991, except for a short break (1921-1940). Non-aboriginal Estonians would be considered equal and ordinary citizens in every European country but new Estonia. Even “recent immigrants” moved to what became Estonia over fifty years ago in a perfectly legal way.

Estonia had all the preconditions for peaceful co-existence between its communities. The Russians had a positive attitude towards the native Eestlanes, their culture and their language in keeping with their tradition: indeed, the Eesti language survived and flourished, while the tongues of peoples with comparable territory and population, such as Breton, Cornish or Sorb (residing in the UK, France and Germany respectively) have all but vanished. Russian writers and poets were attracted by Tallinn’s Baltic charm, and made it a setting for many novels. While neighbouring Swedes considered Eestlanes uncouth and clumsy (“Estonian ballet” is a Swedish synonym for heavy and clumsy gait), the Russians nourished a flattering image of an Estonian as a silent, pipe-smoking he-man.

There is no clear racial divide, either: ethnic Russians are a fusion of Slav and Finnish tribes (like the French are a fusion of Celtic and Germanic ones), and they can’t be distinguished from the ethnic Estonians by their facial features. In the present conflict over the monument, Jurgen Ligi, Estonian ex-minister of defence, called for the removal of “the idol with monstrous Russian face”. The ignorant racist did not know that the “monstrous Russian face of the idol” was an Estonian face, sculpted after a known Estonian sportsman by Estonian artist Enn Roos.

The local Russians were extremely pro-Estonian: they liked the Estonians, they supported Estonian independence in 1991 and expected to remain citizens with full rights in new Estonia. “When the Eestlanes demanded independence, the Russian Estonian intelligentsia [the educated classes] not only supported them, but were in the forefront of the struggle” – writes Lara Larson, a Russian Estonian, whose blog http://laralarsen.livejournal.com/ is extremely popular these days. “Now we understand that the reasons were different: Eestlanes fought for their separate isolated life, while the Russians fought for democracy. The newly independent Estonia fitted the Eestlanes’ vision, while the democracy we looked for did not materialise. Non-Eestlanes were stripped of their civil rights. That was the first blow. There were many insults, we were habitually slighted. At first, we hoped it was a temporary development; and that soon, equality and fraternity would blossom. Indeed, there were improvements, but two years ago, an extreme nationalist government made things worse.”

“The Russian-speaking community is discriminated against. Officially, they just have no right to vote for the Parliament. But unofficial discrimination is much worse. The Russians suffer from heavy unemployment, they earn less; there are practically no Russians at the top. There are no Russians in the beefed-up state organisations. The Eestlanes practice full segregation in the working places. Does it mean that the Russians are less able, can’t be taught, are doomed to sweep streets? Probably not. The Language Laws provided the perfect machinery for discrimination, for they made it almost impossible for the Russians to become citizens: one has to show such a proficiency in the Eestlane language that an ordinary Eestlane can’t pass it. For instance, one has to pen a long essay extolling the advantages of investments in Estonia.”

“You could not get any job, even a verbally-non-demanding one, unless you pass the exam. The exams became more demanding every year; one has to be an extraordinary well-read and well-educated person to pass the test. Now they introduced a new measure: the language commission can check you anytime and void your exams if they would decide your knowledge of Eesti is not up to scratch. But even Estonian citizens of Russian origin were kept out of jobs and were discriminated against in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways.”

“The Tomb’s demolition was a trigger, rather. The discriminated part of population did not agree to take it laying down. Such sustained pressure and mistreatment could not last forever. Masses of people went out to the streets in protests, they had no leaders, no organisers, but they were fed up with discrimination. This is not a political conflict; this is a movement for civil rights, for equality.”

The strange idea of stripping natives of their citizenship because their fathers were born just across the present border seems out of place in Europe. In neighbouring Sweden every immigrant obtains Swedish citizenship, and becomes as much a Swede as the king (who is a descendent of immigrants himself, from France on his father’s side and from Germany on his mother’s). It is not necessary to master Swedish, though one may learn it at the state’s expense – as opposed to Estonia. An immigrant may take exams, get his driver’s license and fill out applications in his native tongue. In Finland, a small Swedish minority has full rights, and can freely use their language everywhere. There are no problems between the native majority and ethnic minorities in these countries.

The outbreak of the Russian Intifada should sound an alarm for Estonians. Instead of bewailing the burnt shops and writing offensive letters to their newspapers, they should give thought to what caused the riots, and change the situation to fit Swedish and Finnish model. They should void their language laws, give citizenship to their Russian-speaking minority and forbid discrimination. They should strive for equality, and elect a Russian for president, as the Indians elected a Muslim. Follow the Human Rights declaration. In short, they should get off the tree and enter 21st century.

The problem is, Estonians are the least believing, most godless folk in Europe, tells the Answers.com: according to the most recent Eurostat "Eurobarometer" poll, in 2005 [4], only 16% of Estonian citizens responded that "they believe there is a God". This, according to the survey, would have made Estonians the least religious people in Europe”, while the Russians of Estonia believe in Christ. So, though there are twice as many Eestlanes than Russians, Lutherans are 39% while the Orthodox are 28%. Godless population is easily trapped by nationalist myths. That is why they erect monuments to their SS fighters, foam about Russian occupation and Stalin’s repressions and publish racist attacks on “Slavic degenerates”. Forget Haider, forget Le Pen – these guys are liberals and democrats in comparison with the present Estonian leaders.

While Germany was severely punished and fully denazified, Estonia was considered a Nazi victim, rather than a willing collaborator with the Nazis. The Jerusalem Post noted “the active participation of numerous Estonians in WWII era crimes and the support of much of the local population for the Nazi occupation. There was no anti-Nazi underground or resistance movement of any kind in Estonia.” “Stalin’s repressions” were a form of de-Nazification less severe than that carried out by the Americans in occupied Germany. While Anglo-Americans caused the death of millions of Germans, while the French killed probably some 50,000 of their collaborators, Stalin’s denazification was not thorough enough. After 1991, the Nazi elements in Estonia made their come-back.

Ephraim Zurov of the Jerusalem Post writes: “The Estonian judicial authorities have invested much effort in prosecuting Communist criminals, mostly Russians, at least 10 of whom have already been convicted in Estonia. The same cannot be said, however, of the investigations carried out regarding Estonians who collaborated with the Nazis in the crimes of the Holocaust.
Not a single Estonian citizen who participated in the persecution and/or murder of Jews during WWII has been brought to trial by the Estonians, despite the existence of abundant incriminatory evidence”.

I have now spent a few days in Estonian Internet and it has been a shocking experience. Their writing oozes with hate and racism, much of it aimed at Russia. An official guide to Tallinn says that a Russian Tsar had built the beautiful Alexander Nevsky Cathedral “to obliterate the grave of Kalev, the Estonian hero”. It refers to destruction caused by the Red Army while taking Tallinn in 1944 in a most dramatic manner: not even the neo-Nazis in Germany speak in such terms.

This is one of the reasons for the trouble between the Eestlanes and the local Russians: the latter celebrate the V-day, while for the former this is a day of mourning. Surely there were native Estonians in the Red Army, but now their sons and daughters apologise that “they were forced to join”.

The pro-Nazi apartheid regime of Estonia is tolerated and supported by the West because the US and NATO needs an anti-Russian Estonia. The neocon flagship, the Wall Street Journal (30 April 2007, Estonia and the Bear), encouraged the Eestlanes to escalate their conflict with their Eastern neighbour. Once this newspaper pushed the Iraqi WMD threat, now, it decries “Russian involvement”: “Some of the 1,000 rioters arrested arrived only in recent days from Russia”, “The real inspiration was Moscow”.

This is far from true. Russia is doing good business with Estonia. Independent Estonia is rather useful for Russia, as a nearby banking centre, a good place for transhipping, for small import-export operations, for popular tourism. Russian businessmen send their oil via Estonian harbours and develop its infrastructure, use Estonian airline connections and build tourist projects. Russia does not want trouble in Estonia.

The Wall Street Journal and its neocons have no moral considerations; they preach human rights when it suits them, and ignore their breach when it fits their plans. They write: “[Estonians] insist, not unreasonably, that Russians learn a few words of their language to gain citizenship.” This is a lie. All inhabitants of Estonia know enough of the native language, but they can’t pass the test as its purpose is to deny equality to non-purebred Eestlanes. “And the majority of Latvian and Estonian Russians have gotten their citizenship”, says the WSJ, and this is another lie. Estonian apartheid is real, and it is obvious, but the neocons ignore it.

The Estonian PM Ansip explained his actions by the urgent need to rid central Tallinn of the graves of “marauders, drunkards and occupants”. His actions were applauded by the Wall Street Journal: “The Estonian government transferred the bronze statue of a Red Army soldier and exhumed remains of Soviet troops to a military cemetery near the capital. Estonians are generous to keep them at all: France doesn't have a memorial to the Nazi occupation.”

Who was buried there? The Unknown Soldier’s Tomb was a common grave of 12 Soviet soldiers who perished while taking Tallinn from the Germans. One of the twelve was a twenty-year-old Jewish girl soldier, Nurse Elena Warshawsky, born in Ukraine. Her revolutionary father Moses called her Lenina, but she preferred her less exotic name. She was killed in action on September 23, 1944. She was not an occupant; she was a young woman who died fighting the Nazis. Now her remains and the remains of her eleven comrades-in-arms have been removed by a tender Estonian bulldozer, while she is compared to the Nazis by the neocon WSJ.

The neocons are notorious for their lack of scruples, but this case takes the cake. A comparison of Israeli Jewish soldiers with Nazis is usually met with an outcry of condemnation by Israel and by its American friends including the WSJ. But no one objected when the WSJ compared Elena Warshawsky to the Nazis. Israel kept mum. Jewish organisations were silent as fish. The Jewish-owned and edited WSJ usually is quite vocal, and rightly so, when a Jewish grave is vandalised. But in this case, they applauded vandals.

Indeed why should they care about the dead Jewish girl, when they have bigger fish to fry: they try to cause confrontation between Estonia and Russia, they try to convince the Eestlanes that they may pull the bear’s whiskers under protection of the NATO shield: “the Kremlin can still stir the Baltic pot. Fortunately, as a NATO member, little Estonia doesn't fear for its life, circa 1940.”

Wrong again. In the 1930s, the predecessors of NATO, England and France, enticed Poland and Czechoslovakia in similar way to confront Russia and Germany. The Poles and the Czechs fell for the trick, they did all they could to provoke Russia and Germany believing that the West would help them. But in their time of need, the West dropped them like a hot brick. Tomorrow the West will repeat this manoeuvre with Estonia.

Estonians may learn much from their neighbour, Finland. In the 1930s, the Finns embraced an ambitious anti-Russian policy, to the great pleasure of the neocons’ spiritual fathers. They paid for it with two lost wars and a chunk of lost territory. After this painful lesson, Finland swapped its Mannerheim’s Line of confrontation with Russia for the Paasikivi Line of friendship with Russia. Finland has never had reason to regret it. The country flourished, prospered on its transit trade with the USSR, and afterwards with the new Russia. Finland stayed out of NATO, out of anti-Russian blocs, and remained perfectly independent, free and prosperous.

The external anti-Russian course of the present Estonian leadership is inherently connected with their internal apartheid. Unless Estonians change both, the days of their independence are numbered. One fine day, when the US tanks move in to establish “democracy” in Teheran, a Russian airborne division may provide an asymmetric answer by removing the apartheid regime in Tallinn. Great countries have their ways, and Russia may learn from the US treatment of independent and hostile Panama. The passage to the Gulf of Finland is no less important for the Russian fleet than the passage through the Panama Canal is for the American Navy. Unless the Estonian leadership wants to share the fate of President Manuel Noriega they should give thought to whether the US will fight for them. The Eestlanes will always have the Russians for their neighbours, unless they plan a great trek to Manitoba. The elimination of apartheid and the establishment of a Paasikivi Line of friendship with their great Eastern neighbour will guarantee Estonian independence better than NATO and the WSJ neocons.

Demons and Angels

By Israel Shamir

Demonisation of one’s enemy is a relatively new invention. In the good old times, men fought and then made friends – and then fought again, like the valiant heroes of the Iliad and like the gallant knights of King Arthur. The warriors who fought and killed each other will forever drink mead and fight at the same table in the Valhalla. True, the Old Testament tells of Joshua who initiated the first Nuremberg trial by killing five captive kings in the name of the Lord for they “hated Jews and fought against them.” [Joshua, 10]. But from the time of Joshua and until the 20th century, defeated kings were rarely killed and a good fight had little to do with hate. The ideological wars of faith – the Crusades – weren’t exceptional from this point of view as the Muslim and Christian warriors did not forget they – and their enemies - were human. Don Rodrigo El Sid served in turns the King of Castile and the Emir of Saragossa; Pagan Clorinda was a heroine of Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata. At the famous wedding in besieged castle of Kerak, the Crusaders had sent besieging Saladin a slice of wedding cake, and he enquired which tower the newly-weds would sleep in, so his army would turn their mangonels elsewhere. Prince Igor of Kievan Rus attacked the Kipchaks, the people of steppe, was defeated and captured, but married the Kipchak Khan’s daughter while in captivity. In 19th century, Goethe of Germany and Lermontov of Russia admired Napoleon the enemy of their countries, while Kamal and the Colonel’s son exchanged gifts after exchanging shots at Fort Bukloh of Kipling’s ballad.

Things began to change a hundred years ago, with advent of democracy and mass media as there was the need to convince a lot of people that a war is necessary and justified. The “good guys/bad guys” simplification of Hollywood supplanted the old division of “friend/foe”, and the foe became intrinsically and irredeemably “bad”. This was bad news, because a foe can become a friend, but a bad ‘un can’t become good. He had to be killed, and indeed he usually was killed at the high noon. Admiration for the enemy became impossible; every war became a war between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness. In such a war, there is no place for compassion; cruelty towards civilians is de rigueur.

A first serious bout of enemy demonisation was launched by the US media in order to pull unwilling America into the World War One against Germany, as the reward promised by Weitzman to Balfour for Palestine. In the words of Benjamin Freedman, “after the Zionists saw the possibility of getting Palestine, everything changed, like a traffic light that changes from red to green. Where the newspapers had been all pro-German, all of a sudden the Germans were no good. They were villains. They were Huns. They were shooting Red Cross nurses. They were cutting off babies' hands.”

The Germans were accused of making soap out of British POWs (yes, the soap story of Nuremberg fame is just a replay of the old sham), of bayoneting Belgian babies (this was replayed in 1991 when the Iraqis were accused of throwing Kuwaiti babies out of incubators), of sinking a passenger liner (loaded with munitions, but this was considered quite an atrocity thirty years before Dresden). There is a wartime poster showing the German as a dreadful gorilla snatching a fair maiden, a precursor to King Kong.

This demonisation of Germans only increased in 1930s, allowing for boycott of German goods with Zionist Palestine as an opening, and after the war it was crystallised into a new hierarchy of evil with Hitler incarnating a new Satan of flesh and blood. Since then, evil Nazis appeared more often than cowboys in so many Hollywood movies, and we live today in a world, where reference to Hitler equates to ultimate evil.

Now, in order to demonise, one has only to draw a similarity with Hitler, and that will do. Arabs and Muslims fight against Jews, thus they are Nazis and may be considered evil. In 1956, the British PM Macmillan described Jamal Abd el Nasser as a “new Hitler”, for he nationalised the Suez Canal. In 1982, Begin called Yasser Arafat “a new Hitler” as he had to justify his aggression and bombardment of Beirut. Stalin was “worse than Hitler” in a speech by President Bush. Now it is the turn of Iran, whose president is habitually described as “new Hitler” and his people – as “islamofascists”. Ironically, supporters of Iran compare Bush with Hitler, and Bushites with Nazis. This brings to mind Huey Long of Louisiana; when asked whether fascism could ever come to America, he replied, "Sure. Only it will be called anti-fascism".

Hollywood has produced a few movies featuring demon-exorcising priests; they can make one about a demonising rabbi based on Shmuley Boteach, an author of a book on the necessity of hating evil who wrote: “Ahmadinejad is an international abomination who can lay strong claim to being the single most hate-filled man alive.” The politicians weren’t far behind, thus Netanyahu: “Hitler went out on a world campaign first, and then tried to get nuclear weapons. Iran is trying to get nuclear arms first.” And Gingrich: “This is 1935 and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is as close to Adolf Hitler as we’ve seen”.

The Israelis wax livid with fury when they are compared with Nazis. They immediately open endless “point out the difference” contest: the Nazis shod boots, we boot shoes, they snarl in German, we sing in our melodious Hebrew, the Nazis were against wonderful Jews, we are against beastly Arabs. Surely Israelis are different from Nazis; and it’s preferable to be a Frenchman in German-occupied France, than a Palestinian in Jews-occupied Palestine. There is no Palestinian Celine, no Palestinian Sartre or Gide to side with the occupying power for the Jewish occupation is harsher.

The Americans like to consider themselves the ‘good guys’ vs. Hitler’s ‘bad guys’. But objectively speaking, there was not much to choose between the two sides. The Americans were beastly enough: they burned Dresden, nuked Hiroshima, starved to death millions of German POWs. Even their racism was quite comparable: in the US, a sexual union of an Aryan and a Black was considered a criminal offence many years before the Nuremberg Laws, and remained so many years after the Nuremberg Laws were voided (Alabama dropped it from their book of laws in 2000).

I do not bother even to speak about the Soviet side in the war, for it became a commonplace to view Stalin as morally equal to Hitler, and the Communists as being morally equal to Nazis, though this claim is based of some fantasy of Cold War statistics, and actually Stalin’s Gulag never had as many inmates as George Bush’s prisons.

Now, demonisation is a heathen thing. Only an arrogant and godless man can, in his hubris, claim inherent moral superiority over another mortal. This is why demonisation was not known until the Church was marginalised. It is no better to demonise flesh and blood than to idolise it. We have learned “Do not make for yourself a god”; now it is the time to learn “do not make for yourself a demon”. We are blessed with our friends, and we are blessed with our enemies. We are not angels, and our enemies are not demons.

In understanding this, we may learn from Jews who stubbornly and wisely refuse to demonise their own. Ariel Sharon was a brutal killer of women and children who reputedly wanted to be “a Hitler to Palestinians”; but The New York Times of Sulzberger disregarded our futile attempts to demonise him, he was well received by the high and mighty, and he went down in history as a kind old soldier. The Jews did not allow the demonisation of the Jewish executioners of Stalin’s Secret Police nor even of ruthless Jewish mob killers and recorded them all as “men who loved their Jewish mothers”.

The Jews do not fall into the trap of demonisation for they know: everyone can be demonised. This lesson is given in Talmud on the example of Job, who “was perfect and upright and feared God and eschewed evil”. Still the Sages proved him a bad ‘un, just for fun of it. The Writ said that Job did not sin with his lips. Sages said: but he did sin within his heart. If this were not enough, Job had said “he that goes down to Hell shall come up no more” – and thus denied the resurrection of the dead, etc. Thus anyone can be demonised, and therefore none should be demonised.

Moreover, the wise Jews did not demonise Satan himself. Why did Satan incite God against Job?, asked a Talmudic Sage, and he answered: God became overenthusiastic over Job, and He almost forgot the love of Abraham. Satan interfered for the best of reasons, in order to preserve the rightful place of Abraham. “When Satan had heard this homily he came and kissed the Sage’s feet”, says the Talmud (Baba Bathra 15). This was wise, for Satan is not equal to God, and he has a place in His plans.

This theological fallacy of demonisation was well understood by the German Catholic political scientist Carl Schmitt. He is often presented as a man of no moral scruples; but this is a result of misunderstanding him. For him, “the distinction between friend and foe cannot be grounded in morality. It is a matter of us against them, not of good against evil. Both sides are human, so a politician who characterizes “them” as morally inferior or “bad” risks not only the hubris of arrogance but also the blasphemy of denying God to be the creator of all. The power of the Lord is over all, even over one’s enemies. It would be blasphemy to treat one’s foes as less than human. We are all moral equals, on Schmitt’s view, even though politics sometimes makes it “necessary” to kill one’s enemies”, in the short but precise presentation of modern American philosopher Newton Garver.

Scott Horton misunderstood the idea of Schmitt so completely that one wonders whether it is even possible. He wrote: “For Schmitt, the key to successful prosecution of warfare against such a foe is demonisation… According to Schmitt, the norms of international law respecting armed conflict reflect the romantic illusions of an age of chivalry.” It's the ther way around: Schmitt was for the War of Uniforms, carried out between two armies, where civilians are kept out of trouble. He was against demonisation, for it is unacceptable for a religious man. Horton is aware that his reading of Schmitt is flawed, for he writes, correctly: “Schmitt expresses from the outset the severest moral reservations about his concept of demonisation. It is, he fears, subject to “high political manipulation” which “must at all costs be avoided.” He uses Schmitt to attack John Yoo, a Bush appointee who followed Alan Dershowitz into permitting torture, but instead of referring to Dershowitz the Zionist, he appeals to Schmitt who can be presented as a “Nazi legal thinker”. The goal (attacking Yoo) is worthy, but the means (connecting to Schmitt) are foul.

Horton’s article can be understood as a follow-up to the extreme demonisation of 30’s Germany. He refers to Leo Strauss, “a lifelong admirer of Carl Schmitt, a scholar and teacher of his works” but fails to see the great difference. Schmitt was aware of God, Strauss was so godless that he shocked Zionists in Jerusalem of 1930s by his total atheism. Of these two men, of Strauss the Neocon precursor and Schmitt the Nazi legal mind, it’s Schmitt who was calling for a human attitude to an enemy, while Strauss dehumanised all.

Horton writes: “Carl Schmitt was a rational man, but he was marked by a hatred of America that bordered on the irrational. He viewed American articulations of international law as fraught with hypocrisy, and saw in American practice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a menacing new form of imperialism.” I wonder what is irrational about it? Even a man on our side of the barricades (and Horton is here) can’t admit that the state that vetoes every resolution condemning Israel and calls to war on Iran is so hypocritical that Molière would rewrite his Tartuffe if knew about it? Horton’s typically Jewish attitude – “if we are criticised, this is irrational hatred” – became the hallmark of American thinking which grew out of demonisation of the enemy.

You can’t demonise just one person and stop: the demonisation of one causes more demonisations to follow. The attacks on Muslims, Arabs, Iranians are a follow up of the preceding attacks on Germans. Thus the Canadian Jewish columnist Mordecai Richler wrote: “Germans are an abomination to me. I'm glad Dresden was bombed for no useful military purpose. The Russians couldn't withhold and mistreat German prisoners of war long enough for me.” And Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel improved on him: “Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate—healthy virile hate—for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German.” From here, it was a short jump to Dan Gillerman, Israeli representative at UN, calling the Hezbollah “ruthless, indiscriminate animals”, to 1982 Israel's chief of staff Rafael Eitan pushing Palestinians as “drugged cockroaches into a bottle”. But now, even Germans happily follow this line of accusations against their late Fuehrer, and join in the universal condemnation of Iran and Arabs. “President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a rising Adolf Hitler with his stand on Iran's nuclear programme, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said”.

Indeed, people who suffered from attacks of hostility are keen to join the group and to be hostile to somebody else, it is only a human, or even simian quality. Enchanting Mexican painter Miguel Covarrubias mentions such a case in his immensely entertaining book on Bali. In a Balinese household, an angry tame ape climbed up on a tree and tossed coconuts all over. In vain the owners tried to get the ape down by offering him sweetmeats. Then they cornered a pitiful dwarf, a servant, and made a convincing scene of thrashing and punching him, and lo! The ape climbed down and joined the persecutors in the free-for-all. In no time the silly beast was back in a cage. In order to stay out of the cage, the ape should steer clear of the temptation to join in a permitted attack on somebody else. Apparently, this is a hard task even for humans.

Thus, if we want to restore peace in the world, we have to eschew demonisation altogether, including the Pole of Evil, Adolf Hitler. I really could not care less about Hitler, one way or other. I neither admire nor demonise, neither love nor hate him, nor Napoleon nor Genghis Khan. These scourges are dead. I have a warm spot for the present Hitler, Ahmadinejad; I feel no qualms about yesterday's hitlers, be they Saddam Hussein, Nasser or Yasser Arafat. My father fought for Stalin, and you were told by President Bush that Stalin is worse than Hitler. For me “Hitler” is a generic name of an enemy of Jews, like “Amalek”.

Indeed, a man who feels so strongly about Hitler is a heathen; he denies God and chooses flesh and blood as his personal god and his personal demon. That is why the observant Jews of Neturei Karta could go to the Teheran Conference, while godless ones were scared off by the name of the dead Austrian. The demonisation of Hitler caused the deification of Jews, and thus the new theology of thoroughly heathen neo-Judaism was created.

Creation of a man-made Pole of Evil caused a number of anomalies in public discourse. The demonisation of racism is a result. One may disapprove of a silly man who considers himself being of a better breed than others. Still this is a very common sort of vanity, shared by many people of “higher castes”, i.e. of noble, priestly and Jewish descent in our society. Belief in superiority of the white race, or of Anglo-Saxon stock is just a democratic version of the higher-caste vanity, suitable for people who can’t claim noble or Jewish descent. If and when these supposedly higher-caste persons will give up their vanity, when they renounce their titles and make a bonfire of the Threat of Assimilation book by Lipstadt, then they may attend to the mote in their commoner neighbour’s eye.

Small-time racism is hardly a problem in our society. I, a dark-skinned and moustachioed Mediterranean man, have never been on the receiving end of it for 60 years of my well-travelled life. Admittedly I never tried to annoy the native inhabitants by playing loud foreign music, practising strange customs in public or behaving in conspicuous way. There is some tribal like and dislike in Israel, mainly between various Jewish tribes, and it is surely unpleasant enough, but I am not sure it is up to bad old racism.

Racism is so little of a problem, that the search for sacrificial racist went completely astray. French MP Georges Freche was thrown out of his party because he said that the national football team of France should not be all black. He publicly said, “nine of 11 players in our national football team are black. Three or four black players would have been a normal proportion.” Blacks indeed are well endowed in sports and music, like the Greeks of Homer, but maybe the native French are also interested and are entitled to play football in their own team. Yes, this sentence appears slightly off the strict reading of political correctness; but it is certainly common sense.

These equality ideas should be given a say, not a free run. It is all right for Swedes to have a female pastor from time to time, but there are no male pastors anymore, and very few worshippers. Likewise, if all football players were black, maybe the native French will not be interested enough even to watch football anymore. Indeed, the French national football team should not be all (or predominantly) black; and the leading journalists and talking heads of French TV should not be all (or predominantly) Jewish. The Africans and the Jews came to France, are happy with French hospitality, and do not intend to displace the natives. If the French socialists continue to be that strict with their members, they will frogmarch into oblivion with the dinosaurs; and Segolene Royal will be just the name of a politician who stopped le Pen to advance Sarkozy.

In England, a ballet dancer Simone Clarke expressed her view that the country has enough immigrants, and the endless process of importing workers should slow down or even cease. Well, it is a view, certainly a reasonable one, and within the Bill of Rights, or Magna Carta or whatever nowadays authorizes freedom of speech. Some crazy anti-racists went to demonstrate against the dancer’s being engaged in the Ballet. The dancer is a good person, not a racist in any meaningful meaning of the word; not that it matters, but she is even married to a Chinese dancer; but for godless, obsessive Hitler-demonisers even such a moderate view may not be expressed, and if expressed, the person should be kicked to the street, unemployed and homeless. As a Communist, I do stand for Simone Clarke’s right to belong to BNP and to dance Giselle on the scene of English National Opera, and the active protesters should go first to protest Barbara Amiel writing in the Daily Telegraph.

In Germany, these anti-racists and anti-Nazis walk around with the Israeli flag and demand kaffiyehs to be taken off like Schneider of Leipzig:

“What we all share is support for Israel and coming out against any form of anti-Semitism, fascism and sexism,” says the center's director, Christian Schneider, 26.
A good example of the pro-Israel activity in Leipzig is the public campaign against wearing kaffiyehs, once an essential accessory in the European left-wing activist's wardrobe. "Do you have a problem with Jews or is it only that your neck is cold?" was the slogan for the campaign organized by the center in recent years. The campaign aimed to prevent young people from wearing what the center perceived as a symbol of identification with the Palestinians and with anti-Semitism, reported Haaretz.

These crazy things are a result of the extreme demonisation of Hitler. Again, we may learn from Jews, who expel immigrants by planeloads, fight miscegenation and assimilation while always adding “this is not racism”. Why is it not racism? In a Jewish joke, a Rabbi was delayed on a trip, he noticed Sabbath is approaching, so he prayed and a miracle occurred: it was Sabbath everywhere, but still Friday in the Rabbi’s Cadillac. Likewise, opposing (or even mouthing the word) miscegenation is racist; but miraculously, not for a Jew.

“Racism”, i.e. preference given by a native to a native at the expense of a stranger is a perfectly normal and normative behaviour. This attitude is ordered by the Bible, this attitude safeguards the intimate relationship between a man and his soil. In the Jewish prayer, God is asked to give rain and to disregard the prayers of a stranger who asks for a dry weather. Some moderate “racism” is the best guard of the land; and you have no reason to worry: cosi fan tutti, they all do it.

Mind you, “racism” is not a virtue in the Christian book. But nor are greed, gluttony, lust, envy and pride. Still we do not see a politician being expelled from, say, a Socialist party for running a gourmet column, for giving an advice on the stock market, for marching on a gay pride parade, for buying a car as good as that of his neighbour. There are “anti-hate” laws, but no “anti-pride” laws.

Whatever one may think of racists of old, today this title of contempt is given to anyone who does not deny roots and attachment of a man to its soil and community. The archetypal racist of our days, say, a racist saint, would be Simone Weil, who considered roots a virtue, and uprooting a sin. (She vehemently objected to the demonisation of Germany in France 1939). Thus, whoever supports immigration, sins, for he supports uprooting. So one can argue whether it is better to be good to one’s neighbour the potential immigrant by allowing him to come and stay; or by forbidding him to leave his home country. There is no sure-fire answer to this question, and I say that as a perpetual immigrant. And if you are told ‘you are racist’ for you object to mass immigration, respond with ‘You are uprooting poison’, as Simone Weil did.

Being unable to “demonise back” the Jews and the Americans; the Nationalists and the Far Right tend to demonise the Russians, the Soviets, the Communists. They are not too successful, so we do not have to fight it much. Suffice to say, the mad numbers of “millions killed by Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot” are just a figment of imagination. None of them killed as many as the American Empire did and does. None of them exiled so many as Israelis did.

There are no Evil Empires, only unchecked ones. Soviet Russia was not an Evil Empire, nor was Communism embodied in Stalin and the Gulag. Sholokhov, Block, Pasternak, Esenin, Mayakovsky and Deineka embraced the Revolution and expressed its ideas in art. It was a land of the great and partly successful experiment in equality and brotherhood of Man, of a brave attempt to defeat the spirit of Greed. Communists and their supporters tried to liberate labour, to bring the Kingdom of Heaven to earth, to remove poverty and free the human spirit. Communism brought forth the social democracy of Europe.

Germany was not an Evil Empire, nor was the spirit of organic traditionalism embodied in Hitler and Auschwitz. The Traditionalists tried to establish an alternative paradigm based on Wagner, Nietzsche and Hegel, to go to the roots and traditions of the folk. Not in vain, the best writers and thinkers of Europe from Knut Hamsun to Louis Ferdinand Celine to Ezra Pound to William Butler Yeats to Heidegger saw a positive element in the Traditionalist organic approach. If Russia and Germany had not been demonised, it is quite possible we would not have seen them coming to such extremes.

We have to restore the balance of mind and discourse lost in the aftermath of the World War Two, due to the too-complete victory of the bourgeois ‘Judeo-American’ thought. While condemning excesses and war crimes, we should regain the kingdom of the spirit from Mayakovsky to Pound. There are no evil men, we are created in the image of God, and all ideas are needed to produce new thought.