From: zeleny@husc10.harvard.edu (Michael Zeleny)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.soviet,soc.culture.jewish,soc.history
Subject: The Eternal Jew (was re: Reply to S. Borodin (was: Antisemitism and Ve
Date: 5 Nov 92 08:10:45 GMT
Organization: The Phallogocentric Cabal

In article <1d9f63INN9ou@rodan.UU.NET> 
avg@rodan.UU.NET (Vadim Antonov) writes:

>In article <Bx6ErE.MwE@news.cso.uiuc.edu> 
>didinsky@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (didinsky garry) writes:

GD:
>>I guess I do not understand what one means when he says "state antisemitism".
>>In the later part of your posting, you state that after Israel announced
>>that all Jews are its potential citizens Soviet government decided that all 
>>jews are potentially dangerous to the Russian security. To me that sounds 
>>like "state antisemitism", i.e., "state prejudice towards Jews".

VA:
>This particular kind of prejustice wasn't limited to Jews. ANY
>person who had ANY contacts abroad (relatives, friends, etc)
>was in the very same position. Need i to tell you that there
>was a numer of Russians abroad from "the first wave" of emmigration --
>their relatives usually ended up in Siberian camps. Now tell me
>that Jews were opressed MORE. The state itself was quite
>unaware of nationality -- thanks to the Israel government it
>became an earmark of "suspicious". Try to think of the Soviet
>System as of soulless and cruel machine for which all people
>are nothing more than small gears. It really was working this way.
>Now, some recognized enemy comes in and points finger to specific
>group of people saying "those are mine". What do expect from
>the machine?

You are contradicting yourself, Vadim.  If the Soviet state itself had
been "quite unaware of nationality", why would it regard *all* Jews,
_qua_ Jews, as "suspicious"? for that matter, why would it have a
rubric of nationality in the internal passport?

VA:
>The irony is that the Soviet Jews were in fact victims of
>nationalistic politics of their "own" country -- Israel.
>If Israel decided to defend ALL people who opposed to the
>Soviet regime and not only Jews they (as ethnical group)
>weren't considered enemy's allies. Racism breeds racism.

I am having a hard time parsing your syntax in the second sentence,
but the next one seems clear.  Do you really wish to call Israel a
racist state?

VA:
>[You needn't to enlighten me about the historical mission of
>Jewish unification, i know. I do not discuss reasons, i'm
>trying to explain actions].

Are you sure you are merely trying to explain actions, or also to
justify them?

GD:
>>Can you then agree that Jews had every right to feel pressures of 
>>anti-semitism that came to them on every level of the life expirience?

VA:
>I do not deny everybody's right to express their opinions. Unfortunately
>many of those "anti-semitism" complaits basically contains accusations
>against other nations and Russians in particular which are simply
>undeserved. It's not as there weren't Jewish communists and all
>Jews were dissidents. Probably right opposite for two thousand years-old
>struggle for survival as a dispersed ethnical group well taught
>Jews to be conformists.

There is some truth to the last statement, -- but also a lot of
falsehood.  The "official" Jewish culture indeed makes a merit out of
conformism to the laws of the host nation; but if this were the extent
of it, how would you explain Benedict Spinoza, Heinrich Heine, Karl
Marx, Leon Trotsky, or Emma Goldman?  Struggle against oppression (and
not just oppression aimed against Jews) is as much a part of Jewish
tradition as rabbinical conformity.

GD:
>>Here I agree with you. I would also wish that every oppressed minority
>>in xSU had a influential organization helping them.

VA:
>Er? Try to understand that EVERYBODY in xSU was an "opressed minority".
>There are infulential organizations like Helsinki Group helping all
>victims of political repressions DESPITE of their nationality.

I hope you mean `regardless', rather than `despite'.

VA:
>So far, the racist "influential organizations" dividing people
>by blood did more harm for their protegees than real help.

I agree.

GD:
>>I do not really care who in Russia was most oppressed.
>^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

VA:
>You too. If you don't care then you don't listen. If you don't
>listen you won't understand.
>
>The political repressions in xSU were a much bigger thing than
>barring Jews from getting jobs in military industry. The real
>repressions are shadowed by owerblown "Jewish question".
>An average American if asked who was opposing the Soviet regime
>will answer "Why, Jews". It implies that all others are morons
>who hate Jews beacuse they're Jews.

OK.

VA:
>This self-centered and racist perception of the pheomenon of
>totalitarism not only misled the entire world and prevented
>people from understanding (and therefore effective opposition) 
>to communism it actually costed lives to people who really
>were opressed and broke careers of many Jews who weren't
>political activists.

Granted for the sake of argument.

VA:
>The worst of all, this myth continue to fuel racism in the
>world even after the death of the Soviet system. How else
>can you call spending billions in subsidies to nationalistic
>country for resettling the streem of refugees created by the
>policy of that country instead of supporting true democratic
>forces trying to bury the communism forever?

Are you saying that the Jewish emigration from the xUSSR is created by
Israeli policies? if so, I find this claim most ludicrous.  When
Soviet Jews had the option, they mostly chose to emigrate to the US;
now they go to the only place that still accepts them _en masse_.  The
reason US supports them financially is called politics, not racism.
If you find this spending objectionable, I urge you to obtain American
citizenship and vote against it.

GD:
>>Most, Jews writing
>>here where trying to state that they, as Jews, felt oppressed. In responce
>>to their statements, you seem to contradict yourself. One hand you are saying
>>that anti-semitism existed, on the other hand, you do not take any stories 
>>told to you by Jews as substantial or real. You seem to create a lot of 
>>simple explanations for why things were the way they were, forgetting that
>>when you put all your explanations together the result is that "state 
>>anti-semitism" existed together with whole bunch of other "ism"s.

VA:
>I simply discard the notion of "soviet anti-semitism" as an
>phenomenon caused by ethnical intolerance of Russians. The
>state antisemitims siply could not exist simply because it wasn't
>a nationalistic state. What people telling that they were pursued
>BECAUSE they're Jews do is basically recycle the Jarmo's "Russians
>are untyruthworthy and will stab you in the back as soon as you'll
>turn". I'm trying to explain WHY it was without arguments of this
>type because they're racist in the literal meaning of this word.

Vadim, just a bit earlier you said that Jews were regarded as suspect
because of the Israeli policies.  I find your explanation plausible.
Now, please note that it entails that Jews were discriminated against
_en masse_, as Jews, because *they* were regarded as intrinsically
untrustworthy by the Soviet authorities.  Now tell me, in what sense
does such discrimination differ from antisemitism?

VA:
>Finally, if you like to be respected and loved the worst thing
>you can do is to accuse people whose sympathy you like to win.
>Don't you think that resurrection of antisemitism in Germany
>after WWII was mostly caused by Jews who keeps reprimaning people
>of crimes their grandfathers did? Nobody forgot. What happened
>you can't mend. But if you're trying to live on it forever you'll
>be basically telling the people that they're shit because of
>what THEIR nation did to YOURS. It implies the idea of superiority
>of one nation over another and no sane human will think that it's
>HIS nation which is inferior. To get rid of this self-perpetuating
>loop of racism enerybody needs to discard the idea of ethnical
>hatred BECAUSE of mass bigotry of [your least loved nation] and
>start to look for the REAL reasons instead. One very noisy "activist"
>armed with the old idea of racial inequality like Ice-T can stain
>relationships of entire nations. Don't you feel that many posters
>here in s.c.s are trying (probably unconsciously) to do exactly
>that. "They dissed us, they put us down" ALWAYS assumes
>"Let's reach out and kill 'em". Understood?

Let me try to explain what is wrong with your argument.  There *are*
objective historical reasons why antisemitism became a powerful
political force in Germany, especially since 1918, and, per your own
explanation, in the USSR since 1948.  On the other hand, there are
historical reasons why it was never a political force in modern Italy,
or in China.  If you have an honest interest in investigating these
reasons, I shall be happy to furnish you with a reasonably
comprehensive bibliography.  Regrettably, it seems worthwhile to note
for your edification that the most learned scholar of antisemitism in
the world, Gavin Langmuir, cannot be tarred with the brush of "telling
the people that they're shit because of what THEIR nation did to
YOURS", simply because he is not a Jew.  In fact, he can be said to be
doing just the opposite, namely telling HIS people that they are shit
because of what their CULTURE did to the Jews; so is Jean-Paul Sartre,
whose popular book on the subject I heartily recommend to you.

The point of my observation is this, -- to a lesser or greater extent,
*all* Christian cultures had quite *deliberately* promoted virulent
anti-Judaism for nearly two millenia; for various socioeconomic
reasons, this anti-Judaism has transformed itself into modern secular
antisemitism in the middle of the XIXth century.  Now, to the extent
that the Soviet Society both suppressed religious identity, and
revised the socioeconomic order, it is indeed true that neither
anti-Judaism, nor antisemitism had played an important part in its
political culture, *except* in the way analyzed by you above, -- which
was quite sufficient to alienate several generations of Soviet Jews.
If anything, at this time, with the so-called ethnic and religious
renaissance among the xSoviet population, antisemitism is bound to
flourish anew.  

This has nothing to do with any mythical intrinsic flaws of Russians,
Ukrainians, etc.; by contrast, it has *everything* to do with the
peculiar course of their history.  In particular, Russian history is
graced by the formation of the Pale of Settlement, the establishment
of Jewish quotas, the state prosecution of a ritual murder case, and
the forging of the most notorious piece of antisemitic propaganda by
an officially commisioned agent of the _okhranka_.  *All* of these
events have deeply entrenched historical causes; however none of them
cast any aspersion on the alleged Russian national character, nor
indeed demonstrate the very existence of such character.

The same thing goes for Germany: note that the new German racism is
resurging mainly in the former East Germany, whose political culture
is distinguished by nearly thirty years of Communist indoctrination to
the effect of being the true heir of the mythical German anti-Nazi
resistance, and the concomittant *lack* of expiation performed by
their Western counterparts with respect to the victims of Nazism.  The
lesson of this situation is left as an exercise for the reader.

>--vadim

cordially,
mikhail zeleny@husc.harvard.edu
" -- I shall speak bluntly, because life is short."