Two races

There have always been, and there always will be, two races in the world, and the boundary between them is more important than any other; crucifiers and crucified, oppressors and oppressed, persecutors and persecuted. Of course, in history the roles can be reversed but that does not alter the truth. Today Christians are being persecuted as in the early centuries. Today Jews are being persecuted as so often before in history. These facts are worth thinking about. Russian anti-semites, living in a condition of morbid emotion and obsession, allege that the Jews rule Russia and oppress the Christians there. This assertion is deliberately false. It was not the Jews in particular who were at the head of militant atheism; 'Aryan' Russians also played an active part. I am even inclined to believe that this movement represents a specifically Russian phenomenon. A nobleman, the anarchist Bakunin, was one of its extreme representatives, as was Lenin too. It was precisely on the subject of Russian nihilism and the inner dialectic of its nature, that Dostoievsky made such sensational revelations.

Nicholas Berdyaev, 1938

The History of Isolation

To coincide with the Victory Day celebrations in Moscow on May 9, Sergei Shoigu, Russia's Minister of Emergency Situations and co-head of the supreme council of Putin's United Russia party, gave a speech to military veterans in Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad) in which he called for a new law "to criminalize the denial of the Soviet victory in World War II". The law would affect not only Russian citizens, but also anyone in the world who makes such a denial. It appears that under such legislation, if their leaders and/or citizens contest the rightness of Stalin's victory, countries like Poland, the Czech Republic and the Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, which suffered Soviet occupation either during or after World War II will be considered rogue states, and diplomatic and economic relations with them will be severed.

According to a survey by the VTsIOM polling agency, 60 percent of Russians support such a law, and a recent Levada Centre poll revealed that 63 percent believe that the Soviet Union could have won the war alone, without the help of Britain and the United States.

At Grani.ru, Valeria Novodvorskaya has made clear her view of the matter [my tr.]:

Hitler's Germany, beyond any doubt, had to be smashed. For the sake of humanity, for the Germans' sake. The Hitlers of this world must not win. But the USSR should have lost, for the Stalins of this world, too, should not be handed victories. The Allies should have won the war: Britain and the United States. And they would have done so. No one would have left Hitler in power and at liberty, no one would have forgiven the Holocaust. Only - it should have been done wthout us. The Americans and British should have brought us liberation.

Soviet power would have fallen, and the country's agony from 1948 until 1953 would have been avoided. And there would have been no Khrushchev or Brezhnev or Afghanistan or Andropov, no Putin and no KGB. And we would not have appeared to the world like slaves. The USSR should have lost the war. The United States already had the atomic bomb, they would have finished Hitler, even if he had conquered the USSR all the way to the Urals. Leningrad should have been surrendered. Of course, it would not have been pleasant to live under the Hitlerites, but millions of Leningraders would not have died from hunger, just as the Parisians did not die, or the citizens of Lyons.

Vilified

At Z-Word Blog, the AJC's Ben Cohen has posted a YouTube link to the short film he wrote and directed about the world media's vilification of Israel.

Holocaust Remembrance Day

Via Haaretz:

In her speech to the assembly,[Professor Gabriela] Shalev [Israel's Ambassador to the UN] said the world has the "responsibility not to remain silent" to the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis during World War II.

"To remain silent and indifferent to the horrors of the Holocaust is probably the greatest sin of all, let alone denying it," she said. "We have a responsibility to act against the forces of anti-Semitism, bigotry and racism in any form."

Haaretz notes that UN General Assembly President Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann skipped the ceremony

after American Jewish leaders threatened to demonstratively exit Tuesday's if he used the podium to attack Israel.

D'Escoto, who has repeatedly made virulently anti-Israel statements, was to be the event's host by virtue of his official position and was scheduled give the opening speech.

Kristallnacht concert

Tomorrow, November 9, is the 70th anniversary of the Reichskristallnacht, the Nazi-inspired pogrom throughout Germany and Austria in which more than 91 Jews lost their lives, more than 1,000 synagogues were damaged and some 7,500 Jewish businesses were ransacked and looted.

The British violinist Daniel Hope has organized a concert in Berlin to commemorate the victims of Kristallnacht. From Daniel Hope's website:

I came across Gilbert’s book recently, and while I knew about the “Reichskristallnacht”, it wasn’t until I read the book that the historical consequences of that night’s events became clear to me. The horrifyingly meticulous description of the violence against the Jews was utterly overwhelming. Since then the question as to what I would have done in such circumstances has begun to haunt me.

“Reichskristallnacht” took place 70 years ago and yet its consequences are still reflected in today’s society. Situations that require civil courage, individual or collective, continue to arise, whether it’s an individual attack on a defenseless fellow human being or the brutality of groups such as rightwing radical skinheads. Remembering the 1938 pogroms is a much-needed symbolic action in our society today. It echoes a call to all civilized people never again to ignore unacceptable violence by inaction.

For Hope, whose family was forced to flee Berlin and the Nazis, the event has urgent political importance as well as obvious personal significance. Throughout his career, Hope has advocated – both in live performance and with recordings – the music of the so-called “Entartete” composers – those composers deemed “degenerate” and subsequently destroyed by the Nazis.

Holocaust Remembrance Day

Today, April 16, is Holocaust Remembrance Day. Haaretz reports that

Israelis stood silently for two minutes to remember the victims of the Holocaust, as sirens wailed throughout the country on Monday morning.

Israel marked Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day with vocal concern for the plight of aging survivors, many of whom are living in poverty in Israel.

“We must never accept a reality in which even one of the Holocaust survivors in Israel is living without dignity,” Acting President Dalia Itzik declared at the opening ceremony at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, referring to reports that a third of the Holocaust survivors living in Israel live below the poverty line.

Hundreds of people, many of them Holocaust survivors, sat in rows at the central plaza at Yad Vashem for the ceremony Sunday evening, bundled up against the cold weather. A youth choir sang, and Israeli leaders addressed the somber gathering. Itzik said at the beginning of the ceremony that "the Holocaust is not only a stain on the history of Germany, not only on the history of European peoples, but a mark of Cain on all of humanity."