Thursday, March 29, 2018

718. Nicholas J.S. Davies: 2,4 miljoen doden in Iraq.

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How Many Millions Have Been Killed in America’s Post - 9/11 Wars? – Part 1: Iraq

The numbers of casualties of U.S. wars since Sept. 11, 2001 have largely gone uncounted, but coming to terms with the true scale of the crimes committed remains an urgent moral, political and legal imperative, argues Nicolas J.S. Davies.
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How many people have been killed in America’s post-9/11 wars? I have been researching and writing about that question since soon after the U.S. launched these wars, which it has tried to justify as a response to terrorist crimes that killed 2,996 people in the U.S. on September 11th 2001.
But no crime, however horrific, can justify wars on countries and people who were not responsible for the crime committed, as former Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz patiently explained to NPR at the time.
Samar Hassan screamed after her parents were killed by U.S. soldiers in Iraq in 2005. Credit Chris Hondros/Getty Images
“The Iraq Death Toll 15 Years After the U.S. Invasion” which I co-wrote with Medea Benjamin, estimates the death toll in Iraq as accurately and as honestly as we can in March 2018.  Our estimate is that about 2.4 million people have probably been killed in Iraq as a result of the historic act of aggression committed by the U.S. and U.K. in 2003.  In this report, I will explain in greater detail how we arrived at that estimate and provide some historical context.  In Part 2 of this report, I will make a similar up-to-date estimate of how many people have been killed in America’s other post-9/11 wars.
Mortality Studies vs Passive Reporting
I explored these same questions in Chapter 7 of my book, Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq, and in previous articles, from “Burying the Lancet Report… and the Children” in 2005 to “Playing Games With War Deaths” in 2016.
In each of those accounts, I explained that estimates of war deaths regularly published by UN agencies, monitoring groups and the media are nearly all based on fragmentary “passive reporting,” not on comprehensive mortality studies.
Of the countries where the U.S. and its allies have been waging war since 2001, Iraq is the only country where epidemiologists have conducted mortality studies based on the best practices that they have developed and used in other war zones (like Angola, Bosnia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan and Uganda).  In all these countries, as in Iraq, the results of comprehensive epidemiological studies revealed between 5 and 20 times more deaths than previously published figures based on passive reporting.
Body Count: Casualty Figures After 10 Years of the ‘War on Terror’ , a report published by Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) in 2015 found that the 2006 Lancet study was the most comprehensive and reliable mortality study conducted in Iraq, based on its study design, the experience and independence of the research team, the short time elapsed since the deaths it documented and its consistency with other measures of violence in occupied Iraq.  That study estimated that about 601,000 Iraqis were killed in the first 39 months of war and occupation in Iraq, while the war had also caused about 54,000 non-violent deaths.
In the other countries affected by America’s post-9/11 wars, the only reports of how many people have been killed are either compiled by the UN based on investigations of incidents reported to local UN Assistance Missions (as in Iraq and Afghanistan), or by the UN or independent monitoring groups like the Syrian Observatory for Human RightsIraq Body Count (IBC) and Airwars based on passive reports from government agencies, health facilities or local or foreign media.
These passive reports are regularly cited by UN and government agencies, media and even by activists as “estimates” of how many people have been killed, but that is not what they are.  By definition, no compilation of fragmentary reports can possibly be a realistic estimate of all the people killed in a country ravaged by war.
At best, passive reports can reveal a minimum number of war deaths. But that is often such a small fraction of actual deaths that it is highly misleading to cite it as an “estimate” of the total number of people killed. This is why epidemiologists have instead developed scientific sampling methods that they can use to produce accurate estimates of war deaths through statistically valid mortality studies.
The huge disparities epidemiologists have found between the results of mortality studies and passive reporting (between 5:1 and 20:1) have been consistent across many different war zones all over the world. In countries where Western governments are not responsible for the state of war, there has been no political controversy over these results, and they are regularly cited by Western officials and media.
But Western politicians and media have dismissed and marginalized the results of mortality studies in Iraq for political reasons. The U.S. and U.K.’s responsibility for the state of war in Iraq means that the scale of the slaughter is a serious matter of political and criminal responsibility for senior officials who chose to ignore legal advice that the invading Iraq would be “a crime of aggression”.
In 2006, British officials were advised by Sir Roy Anderson, the Chief Scientific Adviser to the U.K.’s Ministry of Defense, that “The (Lancet) study design is robust and employs methods that are regarded as close to ‘best practice’ in this area…”
President George W. Bush in poster by Robbie Conal (robbieconal.com)
The BBC obtained copies of emails in which British officials admitted that the study was “likely to be right,” and “the survey methodology used here cannot be rubbished, it is a tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones.” But the same officials immediately launched a campaign to discredit the study. President George W. Bush publicly declared, “I don’t consider it a credible report,” and the subservient U.S. corporate media quickly dismissed it.
In “Playing Games With War Deaths” in 2016, I concluded, “As with climate change and other issues, UN officials and journalists must overcome political pressures, come to grips with the basic science involved, and stop sweeping the vast majority of the victims of our wars down this Orwellian “memory hole.”
Some have argued that it is not important to know whether our wars have killed tens of thousands of people or millions, since all deaths in war are a tragic loss of life and we should just mourn them, instead of quibbling over numbers. But as the authors of Body Count noted,
“The numbers relayed by the media should in themselves be terrifying enough… But apparently they are still perceived as tolerable and, moreover, easy to explain given the picture of excessive religiously motivated violence.  The figure of 655,000 deaths in the first three war years alone, however, clearly points to a crime against humanity approaching genocide.”
I agree with the authors of Body Count that it makes a difference whether our wars kill millions of people or only ten thousand, as most people in the U.K. and the U.S. seem to believe according to opinion polls.
Most Americans would say that it matters whether Germany’s role in the Second World War led to millions of violent deaths or only ten thousand. Suggesting the latter is actually a crime in Germany and several other countries.
So American politicians, journalists and members of the public who say it doesn’t matter how many Iraqis have been killed are consciously or unconsciously applying a morally untenable double standard to the consequences of our country’s wars precisely because they are our country’s wars.
A War That Keeps Killing
While the 2006 Lancet study of post-invasion mortality in Iraq is recognized by independent experts like the authors of PSR’s Body Count report as the most accurate and reliable estimate of war deaths in any of our post-9/11 wars, it was conducted nearly 12 years ago, after only 39 months of war and occupation in Iraq. Tragically, that was nowhere near the end of the deadly and catastrophic results of the U.S. and U.K.’’s historic act of aggression.
The 2006 Lancet study documented ever-increasing violence in occupied Iraq between 2003 and 2006, and many other metrics indicate that the escalation of violence in Iraq continued at least until the end of the U.S. “surge” in 2007. The tide of mutilated bodies of death squad victims overwhelming morgues in Baghdad did not peak until late 2006 with 1,800 bodies in July and 1,600 in October. Then there was a five-fold increase in the U.S. aerial bombardment of Iraq in 2007, and January 2008 was the heaviest month of U.S. bombing since the invasion in 2003.
This pattern gives credibility to a survey conducted by a respected British polling firm, Opinion Research Business (ORB), in June 2007, one year after the Lancet study, which estimated that 1,033,000 Iraqis had been killed by that time.
The Lancet study estimated that 328,000, or more than half of the violent deaths it counted, had occurred between May 2005 and May/June 2006.  So, if the ORB’s estimate was accurate, it would mean that about another 430,000 Iraqis were killed in the year after the 2006 Lancet study was conducted.
While the figure of a million people killed was shocking, the continuing increase in deaths revealed by the ORB survey was consistent with other measures of the violence of the occupation, which continued to increase in late 2006 and 2007.
Violence in Iraq decreased in 2008 and for several years after that.  But the Special Police death squads recruited, trained and unleashed in Iraq by the Iraqi Interior Ministry, U.S. occupation forces and the CIA between 2004 and 2006 (rebranded as National Police after the exposure of their Al-Jadiriyah torture center in 2005, then as Federal Police in 2009) continued their reign of terror against Sunni Arabs in the North and West of the country.  This generated a resurgence of armed resistance and led to large swathes of Iraq accepting the rule of Islamic State in 2014 as an alternative to the relentless abuses of the corrupt, sectarian Iraqi government and its murderous death squads.
U.K.-based Iraq Body Count (IBC) has compiled passive reports of civilian deaths in Iraq since the invasion, but it had only counted 43,394 deaths by June 2006 when the Lancet study found an estimated 601,000 violent deaths, a ratio of almost 14:1.  Just Foreign Policy (JFP) in the U.S. created an “Iraqi Death Estimator” that updated the Lancet study’s estimate by tracking deaths passively reported by Iraq Body Count and multiplying them by the ratio between the mortality study and IBC’s passive reporting in 2006.
Since IBC is based mainly on reports in English-language media, it may have undercounted deaths even more after 2007 as the the Western media’s interest in Iraq declined.  On the other hand, as it became safer for government officials and journalists to travel around Iraq, its reporting may have improved.  Or perhaps these and other factors balanced each other out, making JFP’s Iraqi Death Estimator quite accurate. It may have become less accurate over time, and it was discontinued in September 2011. By that point, its estimate of Iraqi deaths stood at 1.46 million.
Another mortality study was published in the PLOS medical journal in 2013, covering the period up to 2011. Its lead author told National Geographic its estimate of about 500,000 dead in Iraq was “likely a low estimate.”  The study had a wider margin of error than the 2006 Lancet study, and the survey teams decided it was too dangerous to work in two of the 100 clusters that that were randomly chosen to survey.
The most serious problem with the PLOS study seems to be that so many houses were destroyed or abandoned and so many families wiped out or just disappeared, that nobody was left to report deaths in those families to the survey teams.  At the extreme, houses or entire blocks where everyone had been killed or had fled were recorded as suffering no deaths at all.
After the extreme violence of 2006 and 2007 and several more years of lower level conflict, the effect of destruction and displacement on the PLOS study must have been much greater than in 2006. One in six households in Iraq was forced to move at least once between 2005 and 2010. The UNHCR registered 3 million refugees within or outside the country, but acknowledged that many more were unregistered. The authors added 55,000 deaths to their total to allow for 15% of 2 million refugee households losing one family member each, but they acknowledged that this was very conservative.
The authors of Body Count calculated that, if only 1% of houses surveyed were empty or destroyed and each of these households had lost two family members, this would have increased the PLOS study’s overall mortality estimate by more than 50%. Ignoring the two clusters that in effect represented the most devastated parts of Iraq must have had a similar effect. The cluster sample survey method relies on the effect of surveying a cross-section of different areas, from the worst affected to many that are relatively unscathed and report few or no deaths. Most violent deaths are often concentrated in a small number of clusters, making clusters like the two that were skipped disproportionately important to the accuracy of the final estimate.
Map of Iraq. Kurdish territory is in the northeast.
Since 2011, a whole new phase of the war has taken place. There was an Arab Spring in Iraq in 2011, but it was ruthlessly suppressed, driving Fallujah and other cities once more into open rebellion. Several major cities fell to Islamic State in 2014, were besieged by Iraqi government forces and then largely destroyed by U.S.-led aerial bombardment and U.S., Iraqi and allied rocket and artillery fire.  Iraq Body Count and the UN Assistance Mission to Iraq have collected passive reports of tens of thousands of civilians killed in this phase of the war.
Former Iraqi foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari told Patrick Cockburn of the U.K.’s Independent newspaper that Iraqi Kurdish intelligence reports estimated that at least 40,000 civilians were killed in the bombardment of Mosul alone. Zebari said that there were probably many more bodies buried in the rubble, implying that the reports he saw were of actual bodies found and buried up to that point.
A recent project to remove rubble and recover bodies in just one neighborhood of Mosul yielded another 3,353 bodies, of whom 20% appeared to be IS fighters and 80% were civilians. Another 11,000 people are still reported as missing by their families in Mosul.
IBC has now updated its death count for the period up to June 2006 to 52,209, reducing its ratio to violent deaths in the 2006 Lancet study to 11.5:1. If we apply the method of JFP’s Iraqi Death Estimator from July 2007 to the present using that updated ratio, and add it to ORB’s estimate of 1.03 million killed by June 2007, we can arrive at a current estimate of the total number of Iraqis killed since 2003.  This cannot possibly be as accurate as a comprehensive new mortality study.But, in my judgment, this is the most accurate estimate we can make based on what we do know.
That gives us an estimate of 2.38 million Iraqis killed since 2003, as a result of the criminal American and British invasion of Iraq.
Minimum and Maximum Range  
With significant uncertainty underlying this estimate, it is also important to calculate a minimum and a maximum number based on possible variations in the numbers involved.
To arrive at a minimum and maximum number of people that may have been killed in Iraq, we can start with the minimum and maximum numbers of violent deaths that were each established with 97.5% probability by the 2006 Lancet study, which were 426,000 and 794,000. ORB in 2007 gave a narrower range for its minimum and maximum based on its larger sample size, but ORB was not considered as rigorous as the Lancet study in other ways.  If we apply the same margins as in the Lancet study to the ORB study‘s main estimate, that gives us a minimum of 730,000 and a maximum of 1.36 million people killed by June 2007.
To update those minimum and maximum figures to the present time using a variation of Just Foreign Policy’s method, we must also allow for changes in the ratio between IBC’s tally of deaths and the actual number of people killed. The ratios of the Lancet study’s minimum and maximum figures to IBC’s revised count for June 2006 are about 8:1 and 15:1 respectively.
These ratios are well within the ratios between comprehensive mortality studies and passive reporting found in other war zones around the world, which have varied from 5:1 to 20:1, as I noted earlier. But maybe IBC has counted more or less of the actual deaths since 2006 than than it did before. It must surely have tried to keep improving the scope of its data collection. On the other hand, in the most recent phase of the war, many people were killed by U.S.-led bombing and shelling in areas ruled by Islamic State, where people were punished or even executed for trying to communicate with the outside world.  So IBC’s data for this period may be more fragmentary than ever.
To arrive at a realistic minimum and maximum, we must allow for both these possibilities.  IBC’s 8:1 ratio to the Lancet study’s minimum number killed by 2006 may have fallen closer to the historic minimum ratio of 5:1, or its 15:1 ratio to the Lancet study’s maximum number in 2006 may have risen closer to the historic maximum of 20:1. Using a ratio of 6.5:1 to arrive at the minimum number of deaths and 17.5:1 for the maximum allows for a lower minimum and a higher maximum than in 2006, without equaling the most extreme ratios ever seen in other conflicts. That gives us a minimum of 760,000 Iraqis killed since July 2007, and a maximum of 2.04 million.
Adding these figures to the minimums and maximums we calculated for the period up to June 2007 gives us total minimum and maximum figures for the entire period since the U.S.-U.K. invasion of Iraq in 2003.  We can estimate that the number of Iraqis killed as a consequence of the illegal invasion of their country must be somewhere between 1.5 million and 3.4 million.  As is generally the case with such statistical ranges, the actual number of people killed is likely to be closer to our main estimate of 2.38 million than to either the minimum or maximum end of this range.
Call for a New Mortality Study in Iraq
It is very important that the public health community provide the world with accurate and up-to-date mortality surveys of Iraq and other post-9/11 war zones.
A new mortality study for Iraq must find a way to survey even the most dangerous areas, and it must finally develop realistic procedures to estimate deaths in cases where entire families have been killed, or where houses or apartments have been destroyed or abandoned.  This factor has been identified as a potential flaw in every mortality study in Iraq since 2004, and it is one that only becomes more significant as time passes.  This cannot be ignored, and neither should compensating for it be left to guesswork.
Survey teams could compile records of empty and destroyed homes within the clusters they are surveying, and they could ask neighbors about empty or destroyed houses where large numbers of people or entire families may have been killed. They could also survey refugees and internally displaced people to estimate deaths among these populations.
Epidemiologists have overcome very serious dangers and difficulties to develop techniques to accurately measure the human cost of war. Their work must continue, and it must keep developing and improving. They must overcome powerful political pressures, including from the guilty parties responsible for the carnage in the first place, to politicize and discredit their incredibly difficult but noble and vital work.
On the 15th anniversary of the illegal invasion of Iraq, the Center for Constitutional Rights in the U.S. renewed its call for the U.S. to pay war reparations to the people of Iraq. This is one way countries that are guilty of aggression and other war crimes have traditionally fulfilled their collective responsibility for the death and destruction they have caused.
In Blood On Our Hands, I concluded my account of the U.S. war in Iraq with a similar call for war reparations, and for war crimes prosecutions of the senior U.S. and U.K. civilian and military officials responsible for the “supreme international crime” of aggression and other systematic war crimes in Iraq.
Coming to terms with the true scale of the crimes committed remains an urgent moral, political and legal imperative for the people of Iraq, the United States, the United Kingdom, and for the whole world. The world will never hold major American and British war criminals accountable for their crimes as long as the public does not understand the full scale and horror of what they have done. And the world will not know peace as long as the most powerful aggressors can count on impunity for “the supreme international crime.”
Nicolas J.S. Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. He also wrote the chapter on “Obama at War” in Grading the 44th President: a Report Card on Barack Obama’s First Term as a Progressive Leader.

Wednesday, March 28, 2018

717. Mijn voorspelling: 10% kans op een kernoorlog.


Mijn voorspelling.

(Mijn worst case scenario. De kans dat het gebeurt acht ik 10%. Niet precies zoals hier beschreven, maar  in wel in grote lijnen: false flag door Amerika, pre-emptive strike door Rusland. )

De Skripal zaak is  zóóó klein  en wordt  zóóó groot gemaakt, dat ik denk dat er iets staat te gebeuren.
Ik denk dat binnen nu en 2 maanden KIEV een aanval op de Donbass zal plegen.
Twee dagen later zal er in de regeringsgebouwen in KIEV en in enkele andere steden een geweldige bom ontploffen.
Dit is het uur U.
Dit is een False Flag:  Amerika of de Mossad hebben de explosieven geplaatst. 

Onmiddellijk wijzen alle vingers naar Putin:  Hij had het motief en de middelen. Hij is een demon die nog veel meer kwaads  van plan is.

Trump komt bijeen in een kleine groep mensen die samen de bevoegdheid hebben om een kernoorlog te beginnen.
Al deze mensen zijn mogelijk die ochtend gedrogeerd: hebben een ontremmend middel gedronken, waardoor ze radicaal in hun beslissingen worden en last van hubris hebben.

Hun conclusie zal zijn: Putin laat zijn ware gezicht zien. Als we niks doen zal hij steeds verder gaan en heel Europa inpikken.
We moeten hem NU stoppen. Met een heel hard en duidelijk signaal.
We moeten als eerste kernwapens gebruiken.
Al  zijn bases uitschakelen. Enkele grote steden vernietigen.
Wij kunnen het: we hebben First Strike Capability.
De heren besluiten op de rode knop te drukken.
De ware motieven: zie (*)

In Moskou zit Putin.
Hij heeft dit scenario al vaak besproken met zijn medewerkers.
Hij kent de neiging voor Valse Vlag aanslagen  en voor Pre-emptive  Strikes  bij zijn opponenten. Hij weet dat ze geloven in hun  First Strike Capability.
En hij weet dat dit de enige kans is voor de Neocons  om hun PNAC droom  '100 jaar  Joodse  Amerikaanse  Alleen-heerschhappij ' te realiseren.
De enige kans. Zonder een kernoorlog zal Amerika over 25 jaar een middelmatig land zijn.
Dus WAT moet Putin doen als deze    False Flag  Aanslagen  in Oekraïne plaats vinden?
Afwachten tot zijn land in puin ligt ?
Of onmiddellijk kernwapens afschieten op Amerika?
Putin heeft het al gezegd:  Dan zal hij het zekere voor het onzekere nemen, en als eerste kernbommen lanceren.
Toen werd aan Putin gevraagd: “Maar dat kan het einde van de wereld betekenen.” Waarop Putin antwoorddde: “Wat heeft Rusland aan een wereld waar geen Rusland meer is?”

En zo eenvoudig ligt het: Amerika  begint met zeer hoog spel te spelen:  Zij hebben duidelijk gemaakt dat ze bereid zijn om kernwapens te gebruiken omdat ze denken dat ze een kernoorlog kunnen winnen. 
Dan weet Putin ook:  Als ik af wacht,  ben ik verslagen.  Sun Tzu zei al: ‘Als oorlog onvermijdelijk is, moet je de eerste slag toebrengen. ‘

Nòg een stap verder gedacht in dit spiegelpaleis: 
Wat ik hierboven beschrijf wéten de Amerikanen op hun beurt óók.
Hun conclusie kan dus zijn:  We moeten die False Flag overslaan.  Gewoon  Putin dermate demoniseren  dat  we hem onaangekondigd kunnen aanvallen.
Achteraf kunnen we de wereld wel wijs maken dat we veel aanwijzingen hadden dat  Putin zou gaan toeslaan.
Maar wàt hebben ze om Putin mee te demoniseren?  DDos aanvallen?  Meddling? Doping?  Collusion? 
Wie gelooft die onzin nu nog?
Bovendien: demoniseren doe je met babies die op de grond worden gesmeten ( Saddam) , of babies waarvan de botten worden gebroken ( WO1) of vrouwen van wie de borsten worden afgesneden ( WO1) . Het is de vraag of één Skripal genoeg is.  Ik denk dat er nog meer bloed en puin nodig is voor een Amerikaanse  ‘droge’ ( dus zonder False Flag) First Strike.

(*) De ware motieven van de Neocons heb ik al uitgelegd  in de tekst:  De PNAC droom eindigt als Rusland en China verder kunnen groeien en Amerika verder weg zinkt in interne strijd en nutteloze dure conflicten.  Als niemand nog bangis van Amerika, is hun macht weg.  

Friday, March 23, 2018

716. De grote lijnen. Carroll Quigley en de New World Order.

Tot de renaissance leefden we met twee Machten:  de Troon en  het Altaar.

In elk land hadden die de zaakjes in handen. Natuurlijk parasiteerden die twee machten op ht zweet van het gewone volk, maar dat olk moest weloveleven, want anders zouden de parasieten ( die trouwens wel degelijk een essentiele taak vervulden , en die je zeker niet altijd als bloedzuigers mag bechouwen) ook sterven.

Toen kwam de Verlichting: ( van 1700 tot 1800)
Steekwoorden:  de rede , Vrijheid, gelijkheid, broederschap, wetenschap, banken,  individualiteit.

Maar ook in die periode besloten de joden om te pogen als gewone burgers mee te mogen doen in de landen waar ze woonden.
Tot aan 1700 zochten ze bewust de afzondering.

Volgens bekende schrijvers als Sir Walter Scott en Archibald Maule werden de Engelse en Franse Revoluties door joodse agenten geproduceerd. ( bedacht en georganiseerd en betaald).
Volgens Disraeli werden alle revolutis sinds 1800 door joden  mede  op touw gezet.
De ambitie van 'de joden' om oude machtsstructuren kapot te maken en te vervangen door chaos of door eigen machtsblokken is door veel joden uitgesproken (Michael Ledeen,  DouglsRushkoff etc
etc.)
Dat is zelfs een onderdeel van hun religie: Alleen de joden waren bereid om een verbond met God te sluiten. God gaf hun de opdracht om er voor te zorgen dat alle andere volken voor Israel zouden buigen.  En hij gaf hun de toesteming om daarvoor alle middelen te gebruiken: ook genocide. 
De joden hadden de opdracht gekregen om - in naam van God-   de onwillige heidenen te controleren. Het was hun heilige plicht om zo de wereld beter te maken: tikkun olam heet die opdracht in het hebreeuws.. 

Nu hadden de joden al eeuwen lang een huwelijkspolitiek die er voor zorgde dat het volk steeds intelligenter werd. Hoe?  Jongens moesten de Talmoed bestuderen en creatief gbruiken en interpreteren. Wie daar in uitblonk moest huwen met de dochter van een rijke jood. Traditionele plicht.  Zo ontstond een elite die zowel cerbaal alsook praktisch veel talent had.  Die elite staat boven het gewone joodse volk, en een ongeschreven wet is dat die elite meer recht heeft om te overleven dan de gewone pionnen.  Kevin MacDonald heeft het allemaal in 3 boeken uitglegd.

De natuurlijke niche voor deze joden was tussen Volk en Koning.( Hofjuden)  Of in de hogere rangen van De Kerk,  nadat men  van jood tot christen bekeerd was ( Het Spanje van vlak voor de Inquisitie). 

Na de Verlichting namen de joden deel in het gewone openbare leven, in die landen waar ze gelijke rechten hadden gekregen.
Dat leidde dan steevast tot grote over -representatie van de joden in politiek, handel, media, cultuur etc.  Wat natuurlijk tot boosheid van de autochtonen  leidde.  Er werden vele boeken geschreven in de 19e eeuw over dit probleem, algemeen bekend als 'Het joodse vraagstuk".



Thursday, March 22, 2018

715. De 1903 Kishinev pogrom als PR project. Skripal

De Russische Revolutie was alleen mogelijk omdat joodse bankiers het poroject steunden en omdat vele honderden 'Americanised jews' ( Bertrand Russell)  naar St Petersburg trokken om leiding te geven aan de revolutie. Voor de joden was het wraak op die vreselijke Tsar. Voor de bankiers was het een stap naar wereld-heerschappij. Voor de Russen was het en stap in de hl, precies waar men de hemel  dacht te betreden. 
In onze dagen zien we alweer de grootscheepse demonisering van de 'nieuwe Tsar'.  
Maar nu is de urgentie veel en  veel groter:  Als de Neocons er niet in zouden slagn om Rusland nucleair te vernietigen, dan zijn ze over 20 jaar alleen nog maar de baas over een failliet land van de tweede orde:  China en Rusland  zijn tegn die tijd al tweemaal zo groot als Amerika. 
En als Putin NIET heeft gebluft op 1 maart, toen hij zijn 5 nieuwe superwapens bekend maakte, dan is een overwinning voor de Neocons NU al onmogelijk geworden. Cruciale vraag: weten ze dat? Of denken ze nog steeds een first Strike Capability te hebben? 

NB: Ik heb sommige regels bold gemaakt.  Ik heb eigen comments  [ tussen haken]  ingevoegd.

Scholar explodes (blaast op) ‘canonic’ American Jewish belief: Russian Czar was behind 1903 massacre.





Last month Yivo Institute in New York staged a lecture on European history that may itself be a piece of Jewish history: for it showed how a legendary anti-Semitic episode was mythologized and exploited by Jews and anti-Semites in ways that shape Jewish ideas of safety to this day. Steven Zipperstein’s talk focused on the Kishinev pogrom in Russian in April 1903, when 49 Jews were killed over two days, and as many raped; and he sought to demolish a “canonic” American Jewish belief, that the czar was behind the massacre.
The Stanford professor of Jewish history was introduced by Jonathan Brent, director of Yivo, who established the theme of the evening when he said that the intellectual and cultural medium American Jews exist in today draws on ideas about anti-Semitism in Europe. Our understanding of our victimization was based on parents’ and grandparents’ remembrances, and echoed in synagogues, the movies and popular literature. But these ideas involve black and white ideas of good and evil.
“When I was a kid and my father was feeling expansive,” Brent said, “he would summarize Jewish history in approximately the following way. ‘The Germans were the worst, the Poles were worse than the Germans, the Lithuanians were worse than the Poles, and the Ukrainians were worse than anybody. Except the Romanians.And this was the Jewish history that I grew up with.” Brent then related that when the phone rang in his grandmother’s apartment she would continue dusting as she made her way to the phone, by which time the caller had hung up. She would lift the receiver and curse in Yiddish, Anti-Semite.
[ Dit bevestigt wat ik  uit andere bronnen weet: de joden vertellen elkaar steeds ho beestachtig de Goyim zijn. Dit verhoogt hun krachtals groep: hun haat en hun agressie en bereidheid om te doden,  maar vooral ook de interne loyaliteit, zodat er eigenlijk ''en gigantische samenzwering ontstaat waarbinnen elke misdaad tegen de goyim geen enkel probleem is. ]
The purpose of the lecture, Brent said, was to lift a “veil” on “the complexity and the deep profound ambiguity of so many of the issues that have moved us over a 1000 years of history.” I.e., it’s not that simple.
Zipperstein, a noted author on Jewish history, spoke for more than an hour and said that the central myth of the Kishinev pogrom, based on half-truths projected by a global press responsive to the burgeoning immigrant Jewish community on New York’s Lower East Side, was that the Russian government—the czar– had fostered the pogrom and then failed to defend Jews in Russia’s fifth largest city. In fact, Zipperstein said, a radical rightwing circle of anti-Semites was responsible for the pogrom. [ Dus niet de Tsar
These same pogromchiks were likely also responsible for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the legendary text about international Jewish control, which came out two years after the pogrom. The Protocols are generally attributed to the Russian government. But this theory is surely inaccurate, Zipperstein said. While Russian leaders had deeply conservative and old-fashioned anti-Semitic views and saw Jews as radicals who could foment revolution [ dit is wel zacht uitgedrukt. Joden veroorzaakten OVERAL  opstanden en revoluties. Lees Disraeli ]  and threaten the rule of the Romanovs, these conceptions were mild next to the anti-Semitism of the likely authors of the Protocols, “apocalyptic” and latently fascist radicals who sought to generate instability out of fear that they were losing their Russia to an exploitative caste who had access to the world’s press.
[ Waren het inderdaad doemdenkers en radicalen die bang waren dat de joden hun hun land gingen afnemen?  Of hadden ze volledig gelijk,en waren het de weinige mensen die tijdig zagen wat er ging gebeuren, maar wins poging hun land te redden kansloos was teegen de overmacht  ? ]    
 Zipperstein almost apologized for reaching this conclusion. The political ramifications of his research ran contrary to what he believed. But he had come to understand that some of “my deepest political beliefs are predicated on historical half-truths.” [ respect voor Zipperstein !] 
Zipperstein went further, exploring the factual basis for the anti-Semites’ belief that Kishinev was the heart of a worldwide conspiracy of Jewish Zionists and leftwingers.
“This is fantasy to be sure, but like much fantasy there was an internal logic…Most legends spring from facts, as [British historian] A.J.P. Taylor once observed,” Zipperstein said.
Kishinev was one of four bureaus of the Zionist movement led by Theodor Herzl.
 Here Dr. Jakob Bernstein-Kogan headed worldwide correspondence efforts for the Zionists and had contacts to the world press. The second night of the pogrom, Bernstein-Kogan raised tens of thousands of roubles from wealthy Jews in Kishinev to relieve the victims, and used runners and telegrams to get news and photographs of the atrocities out to the newspapers abroad via Russia’s western border with Romania.
Soon Kishinev became a cause celebre in London and New York, commanding the attention of the world press in a way that no Russian event had before.
Millions were raised for the Kishinev victims, and William Randolph Hearst put a daily appeal for the victims on the front page of his New York Journal in an effort to gain Jewish support for his run to be NY governor and later the Democratic nomination for the presidency (both unsuccessful). Hearst also hired the Irish revolutionary Michael Davitt to write about Kishinev, and Davitt became a hero to American Jews—the subject of poems and plays. Jewish groups gave copies of Davitt’s book on the massacre to American leaders.
Similarly, the Forward, which was then a socialist Jewish newspaper, ran endless accounts of Kishinev in order to stoke opposition to the Russian monarchy and support for continued Russian Jewish immigration to the United States.  
These new “engines” of information drove a “cascade of Jewish public opinion” that was shocking to Russian anti-Semites, and that seemed to confirm their view of an international conspiracy, Zipperstein said. They saw “the claws of worldwide Jewry being stretched in a way that was terrifying.”
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is generally thought to be a forgery “produced in the recesses of the Russian government.” But citing many clues, including the fact that the Russian government’s dossier on Bernstein-Kogan was largely accurate and not overblown, [ hij bedoelt dat uit de correcte beschrijving van de joodse activist (Bernstein-Kogan  blijkt dat de regering zelf niet anti-semitisch was, en dus niet de Protocol geschreven zal hebben.]  Zipperstein said that the Protocols were most likely the work of the radical anti-Semitic circle. That group was led by a Kishinev editor, Pavel Krushevan, who published the Protocols in 1905 in his St Petersburg newspaper.
If the Protocols were a forgery representing anti-Semites’ views of Jewish motives, “the Plehve letter” was a forgery on the other side, caricaturing the Russian government’s thinking. Published in The Times of London a month after the pogrom, the letter was purportedly signed two weeks before the pogrom by the Russian minister of the interior, Vacheslav von Plehve. It ordered local authorities not to crack down too hard on anti-Jewish rioters lest they turn their rage on the regime.
The Plehve letter was a “smoking gun” that attained  “the most unassailable” and “canonic” status in Jewish consciousness, Zipperstein said: it showed that the Russian government was in on the pogrom. 
And it was “all but certainly a forgery,” he said. The Russian government denied it at the time, the police director said that Plehve had nothing to do with the pogrom, and researchers who later scoured the Romanov archives for it found nothing, even as they found embarrassing documents by Plehve.
Nonetheless, Jews widely blame the czar for Kishinev. Zipperstein said this was “the most resonant of all lessons to learn from the massacre, namely that the government at the highest level was directly responsible for it all,  that it was intent on wreaking havoc, perhaps little less than the annihilation of its Jews.” (I have asserted that the czar was behind the massacre. So does John Judis in his new book on Truman. So did Noam Chomsky recently on Democracy Now).
Zipperstein said the belief in the czar’s role in the massacre became the “resilient glue” of liberal Jewish identity in the U.S. “Vast and large and emblematic,” Kishinev’s mythology informed the Jewish understanding of right and left and our relationship to non-Jews and to government. It produced Jewish support for the NAACP and Barack Obama, and rendered the word pogrom “sketchily used before… into a phenomenon not less intrinsically Russian than vodka and the czar itself.”
During the q-and-a, Zipperstein said that only a fraction of the Jews emigrating from Russia were fleeing actual pogroms, but Kishinev represented for them the darkest example of a miserable life. (And I reflected, few of the Palestinians fleeing the Nakba actually had experienced a massacre, but they feared the worst.)
The message of Zipperstein’s lecture was that both Jews and Russians regarded one another through distorted lenses,  [ DAT DOEN WE ALTIJD ] exaggerating the other’s power. He considered this chiefly from the Jewish point of view, more frequently assailing the Russian than the Jewish exaggeration (and not saying that Jews forged the Plehve letter, even as he accused Krushevan’s circle of fabricating the Protocols).
And I would add one stipulation to Zipperstein’s dismissal of the anti-Semites. He said the rightwing anti-Semites believed the Zionists’ outlandish claims; and so when Zionists announced plans to buy land in Palestine in 1901 and even set up a bank to that end in Europe, these Russians feared that Jews would take over the holy places in Jerusalem. As I have repeated several times here, Herzl sought to allay these fears by promising the czar (and the pope, and Kaiser and sultan too) that the holy places of Jerusalem would remain internationalized. Below is my photograph of Muslim worshipers at Ramadan in 2012, walking under Jewish flags in East Jerusalem, which is occupied by Israel. The Kishinev Russians were hateful and murderous, but some of their concerns about Zionism look reasonable.
flags
FLAGS OVER THE CROWDS GOING TO PRAY AT AL-AQSA
Update: I told Zipperstein about this post and he offered two corrections:
I never proposed that I was the first to discover that tsarist authorities weren’t responsible for the Kishinev pogrom. This is well-known in scholarly circles, and [commenter] Stephen Shenfield is certainly correct that the best examination of the origins of the pogroms is the work of – my teacher – Hans Rogger. Second, by no means were Zionists the only ones to transmute the lessons of Kishinev’s pogrom into the heart of their politics. No less influential was the influence of the massacre – and its ostensible lessons – on the Jewish Socialist Labor Bund, and many others on the non-Zionist left. Your focus — singleminded, it seems to me — on the perfidy of Zionism obscured for you the broader ramifications of what I sought to argue in my talk.

About Philip Weiss
Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.
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64 Responses

  1. Pamela Olson
     February 17, 2014, 10:47 am
    When I got back from Palestine the first time, in early 2004, I spent six months just cramming my head with as much information as I could about the conflict and its history — I had a lot of catching up to do, as I had known virtually nothing before I visited Palestine.
    I audited Prof. Zipperstein’s class on the history of Zionism, and I was amazed that Palestinians were almost totally ignored in the class and the readings. As if they had never existed, had never been an issue. Once you leave the Palestinians out of the equation, Zionism sounds pretty nice in a lot of ways. It was easy to see how people could be seduced by a laughably incomplete narrative.
    I spoke with him in person, and his views were somewhat more nuanced than his class. But I remember him seeming to feel I was tiresome with my uncomfortable questions. I was still pretty ignorant about a lot of things, but one would hope a professor would welcome a young person coming in with burning questions. (In general, in fact, I did not find this to be the case at Stanford — the big-deal profs were largely disappointing in that respect, with some shining exceptions.)
    Anyway, it’s kind of a blast from the past to see his name popping up a few times lately. Glad he’s willing to follow at least some difficult truths to see where they lead. Hopefully pretty soon he’ll go all the way…
    • Krauss
       February 17, 2014, 1:18 pm
      From my point of view, Jews in Russia represented a radical faction intent of totally transforming the country.
      What percentage of the early communist leadership were Jewish in Russia? 70%? More? And NKVD was almost entirely Jewish in the beginning, a fact that was not lost on a lot of Russians.
      Trying to see it from their view, I could understand how they viewed Jews as a threat to their existence. I’m also not entirely sure they were all pro-monarchy. I wouldn’t be surprised if many of them were against the czar but didn’t want to see a bloody communist revolution and thus they probably felt like the young nationalists in Germany in the 1920s who saw who was leading the charge for a revolution which had devastated Russia in the previous decade, only that the Germans were, naturally, much more organized and not only that, but equally if not more radical.
      Zipperstein talks frankly about Jewish influence already in the early parts of last century, which of course goes against the narrative of the “powerless Jews”.
      I would, however, say that I disagree that the czar had no role. From what I’ve read, the czar and his aides had a stance of passive neglect. He didn’t exactly stand on the barricades but let a lot of it go on.
      Not intervening to stop bloodshed is also a form of support for said violence.
      Ultimately, early 1900s Russian history can be seen in two ways: either as ethnic competition between an ascendant minority with a hostile relationship with the host majority – the view typically shared by the right-wing radicals of Jews – or simply a society where Jews stood for a more just society but were unable (or perhaps unwilling) to reach out to the other side sufficiently well and just felt a revolution would be better, which in turn the other side saw as traitorous behaviour that had to be crushed; hence the pogroms.
      One thing I do not buy, however, is the standard narrative of “they just hate us.. because we are Jews”. Or “they hate us because we are successful”. This is the Jewish version of George W. Bush’s “they hate us because of our freedoms”.
      Passionate hatred rarely comes up without some fundamentally underlying reasons. If you go on through life thinking the world is always against you no matter what you do and you’re never at fault, what happens is what has happened with Israel and its Apartheid in the occupied territories.
      • Krauss
         February 17, 2014, 1:46 pm
        Just to add to my last point, these underlying reasons may or may not be logical, but the point I was making is that I’m tired of the simplified “they just hate us” narrative.
        Just like I don’t buy that all terrorism against America is somehow justified for past grievences, we cannot at the same time just tell us these self-comforting myths which may feel good but ultimately leaves us no wiser.
      • RoHa
         February 17, 2014, 9:07 pm
        “I’m tired of the simplified “they just hate us” narrative.”
        Brent hints that there is more to it than that with his story of his grandmother.
      • seafoid
         February 17, 2014, 11:29 pm
        I was watching French TV news about the Central African Republic . Nightly Christian vs Muslim clashes. It just happens like that. No context. No mention of the economic background. They just hate each other and it just happened like that.
        Much easier to gloss over the catalysts .
      • Walid
         February 18, 2014, 1:40 am
        OT, seafoid, have you been following the news this week about the Syria-fighting terrorists going home to roost that has Saudia, the Gulf states, Turkey, Russia and some European countries seriously concerned?
      • American
         February 17, 2014, 3:07 pm
        “I would, however, say that I disagree that the czar had no role. From what I’ve read, the czar and his aides had a stance of passive neglect.”…Krauss
        That reminds me of some of the historical Jewish explusions I researched a bit.
        It appeared that in the instances where the masses had a grudge against Jews, what it came down to for the Rulers was a matter of ‘numbers’, expell the minority Jews to satisfy the masses or have to face a rebellion against the crown or put down the larger population.
        So they opted for the majority demand.
      • seafoid
         February 18, 2014, 7:07 am
        Happens every so often with other well connected minorities- Lebanese in West Africa, Chinese in South East Asia, Indians in East Africa
        There was an article about el Nino in the guardian- the weather phenomenon doubles the likelihood of a civil war in the areas affected. That is typical pogrom time and it has nothing specific to do with Jews.
      • seafoid
         February 18, 2014, 7:13 am
        @ Walid
        I didn’t see anything
      • ToivoS
         February 17, 2014, 4:14 pm
        Kraus asks: What percentage of the early communist leadership were Jewish in Russia? 70%? More?
        Nope, much less. And then goes on to assert:
        And NKVD was almost entirely Jewish in the beginning
        I seriously question this assertion. I quickly scanned some of those who those who first organized the cheka and found a Pole of noble descent (Dzherzinsky himself) , a Russian peasant, a Georgian noble and a Latvian farmer. Perhaps you could provide some evidence for this claim. Be careful though, Nazi propaganda is not considered a credible source.
      • puppies
         February 17, 2014, 5:29 pm
        @ToivoS – In fact, it is 0%. How can a Communist belong to any religious grouping? How can a Communist acknowledge a racial fiction, even if racist Tsarist regulations and grandfathered Soviet rules allowed for “Jewish” (=essentially meaning Yiddish-speaking) “nationality”, which is not a nationality as we understand it now but a “Millet”, or nominal-religious category? Would be nice not to fall for fake language and avoid confusing “Yiddishkeit” with the Zionist categorization of “Jewish”, which mainly corresponds to the Nazi one.
      • shachalnur
         February 17, 2014, 6:49 pm
        Why is relevant quote by Russian President Putin reported in JTA(the global Jewish news source) being censored?
        He answers a question put by Krauss and ToivoS.
        What are you guys?
      • W.Jones
         February 17, 2014, 4:17 pm
        Krauss,
        In Chomsky’s book Fateful Triangle he mentions a Kahan commission that said that the Pogrom was intentionally organized. p. 405
        Chomsky mentions that leaflets were spread saying that a ukase (decree) by the Tsar had been published allowing a future pogrom. In fact, there is no such decree that was published that the leaflet could be referring to. That has to be considered in deciding whether the Tsar actually decided to make the pogrom.
        Chomsky says the police did not intervene. I assume that is true to a big extent. The thing is, that does not prove the Tsar himself actively did it- sometimes crowds trash the area in front of the Kremlin even today, and the police do not stop it, at least for some time. Look at the Maidan in Kiev. It doesn’t mean the prime minister wants it. They could be outnumbered or careless, without organizing it. Chomsky mentions that there were two fatalities among the pogromists. I would say it’s still a good and interesting question of how much the police were involved. It would not surprise me if it were rather the “police elements” Zipperstein mentions.
      • Stephen Shenfield
         February 17, 2014, 6:08 pm
        In-depth research on the Black Hundreds shows that many of them, especially from the lower classes, expressed social grievances, but they looked to the tsar to redress them (as the “little father”). They shared the centuries-old belief that the tsar himself was good and cared for the people, but that he was surrounded by corrupt officials who isolated him from his loyal subjects.
        Of course, many Russians wanted social reform rather than revolution. They were represented by parties like the Octobrists and Kadets (constitutional democrats) and in practice also by the Mensheviks, who believed that conditions in Russia were not ripe for socialism.
        Jews were politically active in large numbers almost right across the political spectrum. While a disproportionately large number of Jews were Bolsheviks, the proportion was even higher for the Mensheviks. Jews were prominent in liberal reformist politics. Some Jews were even patriotic conservatives, despite the anti-semitism rife in such circles.
        The proportion of Jews who were politically active must have been considerably higher than the proportion of politically active Gentiles, but that does not mean that a majority of Jews were politically active. Many remained loyal to religious tradition, which dictated abstention from Gentile politics. Trotsky was excommunicated by the rabbi in his home town.
        For all these reasons the association of Jews in general with “bloody revolution” was a stereotype that badly distorted a complex reality. When in my research I was reading Novoe vremya, a tsarist-era magazine aimed at a conservative gentry readership, I was struck by the fact that Jews were always portrayed either as an exotic curiosity or as “Jew-terrorists” and “Jew-revolutionaries.” This must have instilled a deep fear of Jews in the minds of the magazine’s readers. I was also struck by the parallel with today’s stereotyping of Palestinians as “terrorists.”
      • ToivoS
         February 17, 2014, 8:28 pm
        Stephen, your comment reminds me of a history about the Czar and the Jews I heard years ago. This might be an over simplified generalization but it makes sense.
        Going back 500 years the Russian state had a major problem on their hands and that was how to administer the vast territories they had under their control (hey, the military can conquer but who administers?). To make their empire work they needed administrators to collect taxes. This is not a trivial problem in a mostly illiterate country. The Czar hired the most literate and numerate people he could find. This very narrow filter included many Jews. In fact, he borrowed from the Polish nobility that had used Jewish scribes and accountants to manage their lands in the Ukraine and Southern Russia.
        What this did is to make Jews the tax collectors for the Czar. Over time those people paying the tax began to resent the Jews, and not the ‘little father’ czar as the enemy. I can see why the czar allowed that perception to persist. If only the US government could blame some minority for tax collection and not the government itself.
        This might be a major oversimplification of a few centuries of eastern European history but it makes some sense. One the czar needed the Jews to help manage his empire and two he needed them to provide an outlet for anger against the state.
      • W.Jones
         February 17, 2014, 8:34 pm
        Stephen,
        Russia had a long history of rebellions (eg. Stepan Razin), and there would have been instability in 1917 regardless of what national groups were involved.
        Both many Jews and nonJews were in the revolutionary movement, and no conspiracy theory is necessary to think about that. Russia’s Jews really were oppressed and its only natural they too would oppose the bourgeois autocracy.
      • American
         February 18, 2014, 10:01 am
        Jones says….
        “Both many Jews and nonJews were in the revolutionary movement, and no conspiracy theory is necessary to think about that. Russia’s Jews really were oppressed and its only natural they too would oppose the bourgeois autocracy.”
        I dont think you have a whole historical picture of Jews in Russia. Jews swung back and forth like a pendulum between being oppressed and granted special benefits…..’benefits’ in the sense that Russia kept trying to ‘intergrate’ them and other ethnics into ‘the national Russian fabric’ for lack of a better expression, so would create programs for or lift restrictions on Jews such as with land ownership and educational opportunities. But it always boomaranged with the general rural masses mainly and the pendulum would swing back against them.
        The translation of Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together is not complete but some chapters are available and you should read them to get a better idea of the Jewish pendulum in Russia. Contrary to what the Jewish and Zionist sector said about the book it is not anti semitic in the slightest, although as usual anti semites will use some of it to try to prove their case against the Jews.
        The wikispooks site saved the translations, what was available from the enthnopolitics site when it was disabled.
        http://wikispooks.com/wiki/200_Years_Together
      • Sibiriak
         February 17, 2014, 11:12 pm
        Krauss:
        What percentage of the early communist leadership were Jewish in Russia? 70%? More? And NKVD was almost entirely Jewish in the beginning, a fact that was not lost on a lot of Russians.
        FWIW, some excerpts from Yuri Slezkine’s “The Jewish Century” :
        [Jew’s]overall share of Bolshevik party membership during the civil war was relatively modest (5.2 percent in 1922), but their visibility in city squares was striking. After the February Revolution, all army officers had become suspect as possible “counterrevolutionaries”; the new soldiers’ committees required literate delegates; many of the literate soldiers were Jews. Viktor Shklovsky, the literary scholar, estimated that Jews had made up about 40 percent of all top elected officials in the army. He had been one of them (a commissar); he also remembered having met a talented Jewish cellist who was representing the Don Cossacks.
        In April 1917, 10 out of 24 members (41.7 percent) of the governing bureau of the Petrograd Soviet were Jews. 105 At the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets in June 1917, at least 31 percent of Bolshevik delegates (and 37 percent of Unified Social Democrats) were Jews. At the Bolshevik Central Committee meeting of October 23, 1917, which voted to launch an armed insurrection, 5 out of the 12 members present were Jews. Three out of seven Politbureau members charged with leading the October uprising were Jews (Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Grigory Sokolnikov [Girsh Brilliant]).
        The All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VtsIK) elected at the Second Congress of Soviets (which ratified the Bolshevik takeover, passed the decrees on land and peace, and formed the Council of People’s Commissars with Lenin as chairman) included 62 Bolsheviks (out of 101 members). Among them were 23 Jews, 20 Russians, 5 Ukrainians, 5 Poles, 4 “Balts,” 3 Georgians, and 2 Armenians. According to Nahum Rafalkes-Nir, who represented Poalei-Zion, all 15 speakers who debated the takeover as their parties’ official representatives were Jews (in fact, probably 14). The first two VtsIK chairmen (heads of the Soviet state) were Kamenev and Sverdlov. Sverdlov was also the Party’s chief administrator (head of the Secretariat).
        The first Bolshevik bosses of Moscow and Petrograd were Kamenev and Zinoviev. Zinoviev was also the chairman of the Communist International. The first Bolshevik commandants of the Winter Palace and the Moscow Kremlin were Grigorii Isakovich Chudnovsky and Emelian Yaroslavsky (Minei Izraelevich Gubelman). Yaroslavsky was also the chairman of the League of the Militant Godless. The heads of the Soviet delegation at the Brest-Litovsk negotiations were Adolf Ioffe and Trotsky. Trotsky was the face of the Red Army. 106 When, in March 1919, the Petrograd Soviet, headed by Zinoviev, launched a competition for the best portrait of “a hero of our age,” the suggested list of heroes included Lenin, Lunacharsky, Karl Liebknecht, and four Bolsheviks raised in Jewish families: Trotsky, Uritsky (the head of Petrograd’s secret police, assassinated in August 1918), V. Volodarsky (Moisei Goldstein, Petrograd’s chief censor as the commissar of print, propaganda, and agitation, assassinated in June 1918), and Zinoviev himself. 107 The Jewish share of the Party’s Central Committee in 1919– 21 remained steady at about one-fourth.
        In 1918, about 54 percent of all Petrograd Party officials described as “leading” were Jews, as were 45 percent of city and provincial Party officials and 36 percent of the Northern District commissars. Three out of five members of the presidium of the Petrograd trade union council in 1919, and 13 out of 36 members of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet in 1920 were Jews. In 1923 in Moscow, Jews made up 29 percent of the Party’s “leading cadres” and 45 percent of the provincial social security administration. Their share in the city Party organization (13.5 percent) was three times their share in the general population. Almost half of them were under twenty-five years old (43.8 percent of men and 51.1 percent of women); 25.4 percent of all female Bolsheviks in Moscow were of Jewish background.
        According to the historian of Leningrad Jewry Mikhail Beizer (and not accounting for pseudonyms):
        “It may have seemed to the general population that the Jewish participation in Party and Soviet organs was even more substantial because Jewish names were constantly popping up in newspapers. Jews spoke relatively more often than others at rallies, conferences, and meetings of all kinds. Here, for example, is the agenda of the Tenth City Conference of the Young Communist League (Komsomol), held in Petrograd on January 5th, 1920: Zinoviev made a speech on the current situation, Slosman read the report of the city Komsomol committee, Kagan spoke on political and organizational matters, Itkina greeted the delegates on behalf of female workers, and Zaks represented the Central Committee of the Komsomol.” 108
        The secret police did less quarreling in public squares, but it was one of the most public symbols of Bolshevik power. The proportion of Jews in the Cheka as a whole was not very high (compared to what White propaganda often alleged): 3.7 percent of the Moscow apparatus, 4.3 percent of Cheka commissars, and 8.6 percent of senior (“ responsible”) officials in 1918, and 9.1 percent of all members of provincial Cheka offices (Gubcheka) in 1920.
        As in the Party, the majority of Cheka members were Russians, and by far the most overrepresented group were the Latvians, consistently and successfully cultivated by Lenin as the Praetorian Guards of the Revolution (35.6 percent of the Moscow Cheka apparatus, 52.7 percent of all Cheka senior officials, and 54.3 percent of all Cheka commissars, as compared to about 0.09 percent in the country as a whole and about 0.5 percent in Moscow).
        But even in the Cheka, Bolsheviks of Jewish origin combined ideological commitment with literacy in ways that set them apart and propelled them upward.
        In 1918, 65.5 percent of all Jewish Cheka employees were “responsible officials.” Jews made up 19.1 percent of all central apparatus investigators and 50 percent (6 out of 12) of the investigators employed in the department for combating counterrevolution.
        In 1923, at the time of the creation of the OGPU (the Cheka’s successor), Jews made up 15.5 percent of all “leading” officials and 50 percent of the top brass (4 out of 8 members of the Collegium’s Secretariat). “Socially alien” Jews were well represented among the Cheka-OGPU prisoners, too, but Leonard Schapiro is probably justified in generalizing (especially about the territory of the former Pale) that “anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cheka stood a very good chance of finding himself confronted with and possibly shot by a Jewish investigator.” 109
        Specifically, and very publicly, Jewish names (and some transparent Jewish pseudonyms) were associated with two of the most dramatic and symbolically significant acts of the Red Terror. Early in the civil war, in June 1918, Lenin ordered the killing of Nicholas II and his family. Among the men entrusted with carrying out the order were Sverdlov (head of the the All-Russian Central Executive Committee in Moscow, formerly an assistant pharmacist), Shaia Goloshchekin (the commissar of the Urals Military District, formerly a dentist), and Yakov Yurovsky (the Chekist who directed the execution and later claimed to have personally shot the tsar, formerly a watchmaker and photographer). It was meant to be a secret operation, but after the Whites reoccupied Ekaterinburg, they ordered an official investigation, the results of which, including the Jewish identities of the main perpetrators, were published in Berlin in 1925 (and eventually confirmed).
        At the end of the civil war, in late 1920Рearly 1921, B̩la Kun (the chairman of the Crimean Revolutionary Committee) and R. S. Zemliachka (Rozaliia Zal-kind, the head of the Crimean Party Committee and the daughter of a well-off Kiev merchant) presided over the massacre of thousands of refugees and prisoners of war who had stayed behind after the evacuation of the White Army. For her part in the operation, Zemliachka received the highest Soviet decoration: the Order of the Red Banner. She was the first woman to be thus honored. 110
        ———————-
        […]Between 1924 and 1936, the rate of mixed marriages for Jewish males increased from 1.9 to 12.6 percent (6.6 times) in Belorussia, from 3.7 to 15.3 percent (4.1 times) in Ukraine, and from 17.4 to 42.3 percent (2.4 times) in the Russian Republic. The proportions grew higher for both men and women as one moved up the Bolshevik hierarchy. Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Sverdlov were married to Russian women (Kamenev was married to Trotsky’s sister). The non-Jews Andreev, Bukharin, Dzerzhinsky, Kirov, Kosarev, Lunacharsky, Molotov, Rykov, and Voroshilov, among others, were married to Jewish women.
        As Lunacharsky (the commissar of enlightenment) put it, echoing Lenin’s and Gorky’s views but also speaking from personal experience:
        ” It is with great joy that we view the immense increase in the number of Russo-Jewish marriages. This is the right path. Our Slavic blood still has a lot of peasant malt; it is thick and plentiful, but it flows a little slowly, and our whole biological rhythm is a little too rustic. On the other hand, the blood of our Jewish comrades is very fast flowing. So let us mix our blood and, in this fruitful mixture, find the human type that will include the blood of the Jewish people like delicious, thousand-year-old human wine.” 113
        —————-
        The revolutions of 1917 did not have much to do with either Pushkin or the Jews. But the civil war that followed did. Most of the fighting took place in and around the old Pale of Settlement, where ethnic Russians were a minority and Jews made up a large proportion of the urban population.
        For Polish and Ukrainian nationalists and assorted peasant (“ Green”) armies, the Jews represented the old Mercurian foe, the new capitalist city, the expansion of Russian high culture, and, of course, Bolshevism (which represented all of the above insofar as it was the religion of the modern city, ethnically Social Democratic but for the time being Russian-speaking).
        For the Whites, whose movement was hijacked early on by Russian ethnic nationalists and imperial restorationists, the Jews represented all those things that used to be called “German” (a combination of old Mercurianism and new urbanism as a form of “foreign dominance”) and, of course, Bolshevism, which appeared to be a particularly contagious combination of old Mercurianism and new urbanism as a form of foreign dominance.
        For all these groups, the Jews became an enemy that was easy to define and identify. The Ukrainian nationalists, in particular, could succeed only if they conquered the city, but Ukrainian cities were dominated by Russians, Poles, and Jews. The Russians and Poles had their own armies and were rather thin on the ground; the Jews were either Bolsheviks or defenseless shtetl dwellers. To the extent that they ceased to be defenseless, they tended to become Bolsheviks.
      • Daniel Rich
         February 18, 2014, 3:01 am
        @ Sibiriak,
        Thank you for your contribution and the time you have taken to put it together.
      • LeaNder
         February 20, 2014, 9:50 am
        For the Whites, whose movement was hijacked early on by Russian ethnic nationalists and imperial restorationists, the Jews represented all those things that used to be called “German”
        Marcel Stoetzler studied the late nineteen century antisemitism dispute and its main protagonists. Interestingly the Jewish German discussion partners of the famous “national liberal” historian von Treitschke made him drop the economic part of his argument by successfully pointing out to him that the Russians with German roots were attacked with a pretty similar argument in Russia.
        Of course the above mentioned Tzarists, the white Russians spread the Jewish threat lore in the West, and probably the Protocols too. Just as they influenced the highly exaggerated numbers the Nazis used in this context, which in turn renders the whole topic highly suspicious.
        Not too important in this context but interesting nevertheless, Marx clearly never had a political system like Russia in mind, that’s why I was pretty hesitant about my leftist Marxist Lenist or Maoist co-students. Although at the time I wasn’t aware of the extend the Nazis had support among the young and especially students in their own counterrevolution. As some kind of afterthought since Slezkine mentions age, a feature that surfaced pretty much in Mao’s own revolutionary troops too.
  2. Les
     February 17, 2014, 11:08 am
    It would be nice to hear how this will be received in Russia. This is a reminder that the anti-semitism of Stalin, et. al., was endemic to Russia as Jewish bolsheviks were well aware.
    • RudyM
       February 17, 2014, 12:10 pm
      This sounds like more oversimplification. I have only looked at this very casually (not for lack of interest, but for lack of energy and time), so maybe I’m wrong, but didn’t Stalin initially keep many Jews in leadership positions?
      • Stephen Shenfield
         February 18, 2014, 8:22 am
        Stalin kept a few Jews in leadership positions right to the end. The most prominent example was Kaganovich.
        I think that all the figures about the ethnic breakdown of various categories of officials in this or that year obscure a basic point. Even though Stalin and others had their personal ethnic prejudices (Stalin hated Jews, but perhaps not quite as much as he hated Poles), the regime as such always pursued goals that had absolutely nothing to do with ethnicity. Whatever their own ethnic background, it was never fully legitimate for officials openly to express ethnic interests. The way that different ethnic groups were treated changed with circumstances but always reflected the interests of the regime.
        Thus, Jews were initially favored because they included a very high proportion of the literate people available for service to the regime. Most educated Russians were unwilling to help the Bolsheviks. If there had not been a large number of Jews willing and able to serve as an alternative educated class, the regime would have been doomed (Lenin himself said so). At the same time, the Bolsheviks (including Jewish Bolsheviks such as Trotsky) realized that relying so heavily on Jews had the great disadvantage of causing ordinary people to view the regime as “Jewish” — that is, it made popular anti-semitism a factor that worked against the regime.
        With the enormous expansion of education under the Soviet regime, increasing numbers of loyal and educated Gentile personnel became available and the need to rely on Jews gradually declined. The policy of reducing the proportion of Jewish officials, managers etc had general support among leading Bolsheviks, including the Jews among them, because it reduced the danger that anti-semitism posed to the regime. This was already the policy before Stalin and it never depended on Stalin, although in the last few years of his life (from 1944 on) it developed into an anti-semitic campaign that Stalin’s colleagues opposed and halted after his death.
        In 1941-44 having Jews in prominent positions again served the interests of the regime — by facilitating efforts to mobilize solidarity with and aid for the Soviet war effort in the West, especially the US. Stalin took care not to turn against the Jews until it was clear that Germany was going to lose the war.
        In the post-Stalin period there were still many Jewish scientists, engineers, musicians, even managers, but very few Jews in the upper reaches of the state and party hierarchy and none at all in the KGB. Anti-semitism was therefore now a factor that worked for and not against the regime.
      • LeaNder
         February 20, 2014, 10:22 am
        (Stalin hated Jews, but perhaps not quite as much as he hated Poles)
        One way or another both groups, the Poles and the Jews, if one wants to differentiate it at all that way, wound up in Russia via one of the many Polish partitions.
        Can you ever trust the inhabitants whose land you annexed to start with?
    • MRW
       February 17, 2014, 12:36 pm
      Another myth, Les. Read Sever Plocker’s article about it.
      http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3342999,00.html
    • W.Jones
       February 17, 2014, 12:42 pm
      Kishinev’s population is and was mostly Romanian.
  3. CitizenC
     February 17, 2014, 11:11 am
    Pamela’s comments are interesting. His scholarly views are more nuanced, not to say critical.
    Zipperstein’s bio of Ahad Ha’am is also required reading. AH is of course the great liberal Zionist hope for an 1891 essay about Zionism and the Arabs. Zip says that he approached AH’s life expecting to find something relevant to contemporary critique of Zionism, but found only that AH was simply a 19th c conservative Zionist ideologue. Inter alia the distinction betw “cultural” and “political” Zionism vanished. AH was supremely political when it was effectual to be so; he was a confidante of Weizmann in London and was a key figure in the Zionist negotiations with Britain over the Balfour Decl. The bio is out of print, UC Press says, but surely available used
    Note also Alan Dowty’s translation, the first complete one, of the article on which AH’s reputation rests, published in 2000; Zipperstein echoed Dowty’s view of AH’s instrumental Zionist attitude toward the Arabs.
    Much Ado about Little: Ahad Ha’am’s “Truth from Eretz Yisrael,”
    Zionism, and the Arabs
    Alan Dowty
    Alan Dowty
    Israel Studies, Volume 5, Number 2, Fall 2000, pp. 154-181 (Article)
    • Pamela Olson
       February 17, 2014, 11:50 am
      It was just a general impression — which could have been colored by the fact that I was still in the turbulent rage stage about what I had witnessed in Palestine and how I had been lied to about it all my life. He might have found me tiresome because I was still a rank newbie.
      In any case, he was kind to meet with me and address some of my questions — and to allow me to audit his class even though I was no longer a student. I did learn a lot. But I was disappointed by how Palestinians were barely an afterthought.
      • MHughes976
         February 17, 2014, 12:22 pm
        The western academic world at that time encouraged discussion with a kind of deadly blandness about it and with a kind of tolerance of the Zionist view that Palestinians ‘don’t exist’. I remember, circa 1990, the response ‘Who are they?’ when I mentioned Palestinians. I’m afraid I reacted blandly, with amusement, now to my shame. The arrival of Muslim students, almost unknown for some time at least in the humanities departments of Western universities but now trickling in, must be making a difference.
  4. PeaceThroughJustice
     February 17, 2014, 11:21 am
    So the reports from Kishinev reaching the west, the reports that helped establish the “canonic” Jewish belief in eternal victimhood, were all issued by one of the four central bureaus of the world Zionist movement?
    Quite a coincidence.
  5. American
     February 17, 2014, 11:40 am
    Kishinev has come up here before and I cited the book below by Edward Judge that while written from the Jewish pov was still very through on what led up to the Kishinev conflict.
    In his book is a copy of a message from the Russian minister of the Interior to the Governor of the region and officals in Kishinev warning they had heard of unrest against the Jews and instructing them to bring a halt to it but avoid the use of firearms or violence if possible
    In short Kishinev was not a huge outbreak of Russian anti semitism but inspired by local complaints against the Jews–mainly caused by a sudden large immigration of Jews that upset the locals because it brought changes to the town–and by politics. This general town discontent was egged on by a small group of anti semites who had their screeds published by sympathic editors at various newspapers in the region.
    So Zipperstein has gotten closer to the truth of it—it wasnt a Russian government supported or approved action aimed at Jews or part of some larger conspiracy aimed at Jews.
    • Stephen Shenfield
       February 17, 2014, 2:28 pm
      This gels with what I have read on the subject (except that the local anti-semites were mainly Romanians, not Russians). One factor was apparently commercial rivalry between Jewish and Greek merchants.
      Zipperstein has it right but he has not discovered anything new. Serious scholars have always known that the interpretation of pogroms as a government conspiracy is at best a gross oversimplification. It does contain a grain of truth inasmuch as the anti-semites did have some influence within the government and the church. Both these institutions were deeply divided on the “Jewish question.” The best account of which I am aware is Hans Rogger’s book “Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia” (University of California Press, 1986).
      Regarding pogroms specifically, there were two schools of thought in official circles. Some believed that if the masses were encouraged to attack the Jews that would provide a safety valve and they would be less likely to attack the Gentile upper classes. Others believed, on the contrary, that once constraints on violence were relaxed the masses would not stop at attacking Jews but go on to attack Gentile landowners and capitalists. Curiously, there were corresponding schools of thought among the revolutionaries. Some saw pogroms as hopeful signs of mass rebellion and thought they might develop into uprisings against the upper classes, while others viewed them as diversions of mass anger against scapegoats and therefore reactionary phenomena.
      • irishmoses
         February 17, 2014, 5:37 pm
        One factor was apparently commercial rivalry between Jewish and Greek merchants
        The rivalry between Greek and Jewish commercial interests was also a critical component in the earlier and later Odessa pogroms.
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odessa_pogroms
      • LeaNder
         February 20, 2014, 10:37 am
        Thanks for the book hint, Stephen.
        Curiously, there were corresponding schools of thought among the revolutionaries.
        Is that really so surprising?
  6. W.Jones
     February 17, 2014, 11:56 am
    Thank you for an insightful article, Phil.
    I heard that the Russian Tsar Nicholas II attended a synagogue service at least once. It would be notable for several reasons if true, but I didn’t come across confirmation of this in a brief internet search. Under his government there were restrictions on the Jewish population, like education quotas.
    You write: “I have asserted that the czar was behind the massacre. So does John Judis in his new book on Truman. So did Noam Chomsky recently on Democracy Now.”
    I am curious what is the basis for the assertion that he actually was responsible for the massacre? That he or the government would be anti-Semitic, forging the Protocols, making discriminatory segregation, getting political support from the pogromists, or failing to do enough to stop it like the forged Plehve letter said, is not enough to say that he actually was responsible or created the pogrom. They go along with the idea that he did, but is there something more specific that he actually was behind this?
    Thanks to anyone who answers.
    • LeaNder
       February 20, 2014, 11:01 am
      W.Jones, if I may recommend you an article by one of my favorite scholars in Russian history and refreshingly interesting concerning the history of the protocols in this context. The Bern Trials are really important in this context. Already at that really early point in time it was obvious that the Russian government couldn’t have been behind the protocols, the Jewish lawyers challenging the spread of the Protocols in Switzerland had in fact a scholar who told them so. But after all one had to fight the Nazis in the Swiss court which threatened to turn the trial into a propaganda show with an alternative myth.
      If I remember correctly Hagemeister writes in this article that Norman Cohn at the time he published his book was well aware that much of the colorful stories around the protocols like it’s origin in France and the manuscript secretly smuggled to Russia wasn’t true. But his wife loved the Bern witnesses colorful tales more than the scholars statements. It is in fact very, very unlikely the original source or the ever existed. Thus Norman Cohn may in fact have cemented the Russian secret service narrative. And after that it was repeated ad nauseam in later books on the protocols.
      Phil: even as they found embarrassing documents by Plehve.
      Plehve, of course wasn’t such a bad suspect after all, considering his antagonism towards Sergei Witte. And strictly at the time of the pogrom he was still in charge and alive too.
  7. Stephen Shenfield
     February 17, 2014, 12:09 pm
    The term “Kishinev Russians” is inaccurate. Kishinev — now Chisinau, capital of Moldova — was a multiethnic city. The pogromists in this case were mainly Romanian (at that time there was not yet a distinct Moldovan identity). Krushevan is a Romanian name. Some were Greek. Most pogroms took place in Ukraine, with Ukrainians as perpetrators. One of the points in the standard narrative about pogroms that Solzhenitsyn objects to in his book on Russian-Jewish relations is the practice of blaming Russians for actions mostly committed by members of non-Russian ethnic groups. Russians have a right to take offense at this.
  8. W.Jones
     February 17, 2014, 12:34 pm
    A scholarly article in the journal Russian History, 2009, says: “Nicholas II constantly ordered the black hundred leaders and local administrations not to allow pogroms”. He says the black hundred group was parting ways with the Tsar when the latter was expanding Jewish rights or privileges in the early 1900′s.
    http://www.hse.ru/data/2012/06/17/1255493485/%D0%9A%D1%83%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B2%20%D0%A1.%D0%92.%20%D0%98%D0%BC%D0%BF%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80%20%D0%9D%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B9%20II%20%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%BA%20%D1%80%D0%B5%D1%84%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%BC%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80_%D0%BA%20%D0%BF%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BA%D0%B5%20%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B1%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BC.pdf
    A Moldovan newspaper claims that before the massacre happened, manifestos appeared that the Tsar allowed a pogrom there.
    http://www.vedomosti.md/news/V_Kishineve_Pochtili_Pamyat_Zhertv_Evreiskogo_Pogroma_1903_Goda
    Personally I am doubtful that the Manifestos were mentioning an actual order by the Tsar, based on the writer’s claim above. The Tsar was at times severe, but I think he would use cossacks for this. If for some reason he used the Okhrana, I really doubt he would make or need a public announcement for a mob. I am not ruling it out, I am just skeptical. Openly allowing “lawlessness” with an announcement just does not seem like his autocratic, regime style.
    Calling the Okhrana at that time “odd” would be an understatement. They actually were connected with all kinds of groups, including ones making anti-government violent provocations that the rest of the government, including I assume Nicholas II was apparently unaware of.