Charles Bausman, the editor-in-chief of Russia Insider, has chosen a path well-trodden: he decided to woo his audience by discovering the “Jewish origin” of today’s wars and tensions. Nothing could be a greater service to the globalist neoliberals and neoconservatives, who try to present the alternative voices (and primarily the alternative voices from Russia) as a chorus of anti-Semites, conspiracy theorists and Putin’s pals.
INTRODUCTION
Rodney Atkinson
I am pleased to reproduce on Freenations this article by my friend Dmitry Babich attacking an article on Russia Insider which treads the old anti semitic generalisations about “leading Jews” being behind so much international tensions. By implication the article disgracefully besmirches the Russian political establishment and the alternatives to the western mainstream media which daily spout the disastrous policies of Washington, Brussels and Berlin.
In fact there are few if any countries in the world where anti-semitism is such a non problem as in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Diplomatic relations with Israel were reestablished even before the collapse of the USSR, in the last years of Mikhail Gorbachev’s rule. Jewish leaders in Russia have expressed their admiration for Putin and for the treatment of Jews in Russia. Putin himself has a remarkably close relationship with the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In Israel there is one war memorial dedicated to foreign soldiers. The Victory Monument in Netanya is a memorial that marks the victory of the Russian Army over Nazi Germany in World War II.
For an objective assessment of the lack of anti-semitism in Russia we can see the results of an academic study by the University of Oslo’s Centre for Research on Extremism and its Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages.
Its conclusions are that there was virtually no anti-semitic violence in Russia during the period covered by the study (2005 to 2015) and that Jewish people in Russia are now physically safer than in any of the mature democracies of Western Europe covered by the study, and that attitudes towards Jewish people in Russia are strongly positive.
With a population in Russia of 190,000 there were only 33 incidents in the period 2005 to 2015. This contrasts with a horrendous number of attacks in Germany and France and the flight of Jews from the European Union in general.
The original absurd article (“It is time to drop the Jew Taboo”) is so racist that Mr Bausman would undoubtedly be prosecuted in Britain for “hate speech”. We should all – not just Russians – be grateful for Dmitry Babich’s article which rightly excoriates categorising people according to race rather than political beliefs.
Dmitry Babich:
Russia Insider goes Goebbels: debunking Charles Bausman’s warped vision of Russian reality
Going After Jews
Charles Bausman, the editor-in-chief of Russia Insider, has chosen a path well-trodden: he decided to woo his audience by discovering the “Jewish origin” of today’s wars and tensions.
Nothing could be a greater service to the globalist neoliberals and neoconservatives, who try to present the alternative voices (and in the first place the alternative voices from Russia) as a chorus of anti-Semites, conspiracy theorists and Putin’s pals.
The detractors of RT and Sputnik in the United States and the EU may quickly forget that RT’s Paula Slier made award-winning documentaries on the horrors of the Holocaust, which did not prevent Paula from reporting on the effects of Israel’s bombardment of Palestinian areas. But the detractors of RT and Sputnik will remember Mr. Bausman’s recent opus headlined “It’s Time to Drop the Jew Taboo.”
They will remember it and cite it as an example of “Putin’s man going fascist,” quickly spreading its ill fame to all the media outlets which Mr. Bausman happened to visit. Such reactions from the representatives of the Western mainstream media are already coming. Judging from the text of his article, Mr. Bausman was fully aware of this kind of reaction before starting to pen out his feelings about Jews, but nevertheless proceeded with its publication.
Nothing To Do With Russia
Attempts to connect Mr. Bausman’s article to our country or to its president are not just missing the point – they are outright deceitful. Mr. Bausman’s article was published on his own private media resource, for which he is trying to get donations from the public.
Bausman’s anti-Semitic article has nothing to do with Putin or with the “atmosphere in Putin’s Russia” (which is not anti-Semitic and not xenophobic).
Moreover, it has nothing to do with either modern reality nor the Russian intellectual tradition. Please note that no reference to Russian thinkers was made in Mr. Bausman’s article, except for a few illustrations from the legacy of the late Russian painter Ilya Glazunov, who dismissed accusations of anti-Semitism during his lifetime, but who died last year and so can defend neither his reputation nor for his copyright.
That is not an unusual situation for anyone dealing with Mr. Bausman: in his article he writes that Russia Insider “republishes the best articles about Russia with a link to the original,” but he forgets to add that Russia Insider usually does it without permission and, consequently, without any compensation for the holders of the articles’ copyright.
The vast majority of the Jews that found themselves on the territory of the Russian Empire and later of the Soviet Union as a result of our country’s expansions in the 18-20th centuries became our Jews. They call themselves Soviet, Russian, sometimes even Ukrainian, Moldovan or Georgian Jews, but nonetheless they are a part of what President Putin called the “Russian world,” and not just because the Russian language is native to them – as, in most cases, it is their mother-tongue.
“They” Made Everything, from Neo-liberalism to the Soviet Atomic Bomb
Here is what Mr. Bausman writes:
“On the policy side, the neo-conservative movement, Russia’s harshest foe, was conceived of, is led by, and consists mostly of, Jews.”
How very interesting! Following the same logic and sticking to the same standards of accuracy, I could say that the Soviet atomic bomb was conceived and developed mostly by, Jews. Yes, academician Abraham Joffe was the head of the physics’ department at the Soviet Academy of Sciences which had to answer Stalin’s question about the feasibility of a nuclear weapon back in 1942. Joffe’s conclusion was a positive one, with proposals on the way to make the bomb real (here we have the Jewish “conception” of the Soviet bomb). The works on producing plutonium for the first Soviet atomic bomb were headed by the chief engineer Rotshild and the chief technologist Zilberman (so their second names sounded in Russian).
In reality, of course, the Soviet atomic bomb was created by a multi-ethnic team, who had a variety of motivations. Some of them had an ideological motivation (serving communism), some wanted to protect mother Russia and mankind from an American nuclear monopoly (serving motherland and humanity). And some were just saving their lives, since the project was supervised by the sinister minister of state security, Lavrentiy Beria. And, according to eyewitnesses’ memoirs, Jews were present in all three groups.
Not Blood, But Ideology
In the same way it is profoundly unfair on Mr. Bausman’s side to reduce the cruel and extremist neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies to the Jewish origins of some of their proponents. Writing on the matter, Mr. Bausman forgets to mention that neoconservatism’s most vocal and best known opponent in the United States is none other than professor Stephen F. Cohen – a Jew and Britain’s leading foe of neo conservatism the Jewish Melanie Phillips.
And, talking about responsibility, where shall we stick the father of the drone killings’ program, CIA’s top Angel of Death John Brennan, who happens to be an Irish Roman Catholic (oh, my God, even a practicing one)?
Taking into account the color of the skins of Barack Obama and Condoleezza Rice, the father of the Ukrainian war and the mother of the invasion of Iraq, one could think of the IDEOLOGICAL similarities between neoliberalism and neo-conservatism rather than of any Jewish conspiracies.
Or, following Mr. Bausman’s logic, we must put the blame for America’s wars on people of African origin, probably with an even more “colorful” inclusion of Mr. Powell in this affair. (As Mr. Bausman puts it, “there is overwhelming ethnic imbalance.”)
The truth is that the affairs with Mr. Powell’s “lab tube speech” in the UN, as well as with Mrs. Nuland’s distribution of cookies to Maidan rebels, were indeed unseemly, but these affairs had nothing to do with their Jewish or non-Jewish origins.
These affairs reflected not ethnic hatreds, but the Western infatuation with its own ultraliberal ideology, an explosive mix of vulgarized 20th century “old dead truths,” justifying murders and lies in the name of “elections” and “justice,” which are somehow illegitimate when they bring “liberals” to power.
Mr. Bausman also forgets to notice one other important thing: very often neo-libo-conservatives declare themselves Jews out of sheer conformism.
Take Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s secretary of state during the NATO’s invasion of Yugoslavia in 1999. She conveniently found Jewish roots in her family only AFTER bombing Yugoslavia, until then she was a proud daughter of a prominent Czech diplomat, Joseph Korbel, who during the advent of Czech nationalism in the first half of the twentieth century felt himself the most Slavic of the Czechs.
Mrs. Albright rushed to fit the positive neo-liberal vision of Jews with the same passion that Mr. Bausman shows when trying to squeeze the Jews (Russian and non-Russian ones) into the negative stereotype.
Repeating the Mistakes of the White Russians
Charles Bausman writes:
“Many White Russians fleeing the revolution believed that it was mostly a Jewish coup d’etat, financed by wealthy bankers in New York and London who were sworn enemies of Christian Tsarism.”
Indeed, many White Russians thought so, and this is the reason why they lost the civil war.
Many of the White Guard’s generals considered Jewish radicalism Russia’s only (or at least Russia’s main) problem, and they did not bother to suggest to the Russian population a viable alternative to Bolshevism – only a return to the status quo before 1917.
The formula “let’s get back to the past + anti-Semitism” did not work in Russia during the civil war in 1918-1920, and it won’t work now. Even Gennady Zyuganov (Leader of the Communist Party of Russia) understood it, but Mr. Bausman is still stuck inside the mind of the least able White émigrés.
The wisest, such as the writers Vladimir Nabokov and Ivan Bunin, were against anti-Semitism. Nabokov had a Jewish wife (Vera Nabokov is frequently called the best writer’s wife in the history of literature) and made a scene in an American restaurant which had a sign “Gentiles Only.”
But Mr. Bausman will probably never understand THIS KIND of Russian.
