[lh88gFzI]

I've never heard the expression "folderol". I take it to mean "an idea of genius". Stalin took Jews into his nasty campaigns, then got envious or paranoid, and had them murdered. The final solution, I would suggest, if you really want to make the big time as a dictator.

It is a little mean-spirited to briefly praise all my carefully crafted points, and them focus on the one thing you think was bullshit.

Yes, I use expressions like folderol to avoid stronger terms, like, um, balderdash or bunkum ...

Just trying to help out. Unfortunately, saying that Stalin was equally antisemitic to Hitler undermines your other carefully crafty points. As evil as is arguable, "as much an anti-semite as" is ludicrous, and not just to my way of thinking. So too the notion that Baltic anti-semitism originated with association with KGB which follows. By comparison with their neighbors, they may well have been better (Lithuania excepted, IIRC). And even up top of that post, Stalin was executing Lenin's blueprint.

Solzhenitsyn isn't exactly simonpure in this regard either, though it's more a complex legacy of his orthodoxy, and does nothing to diminish his merit in detaching the rise of Communism from Jewish influence.

Saliothomas: this is a lecture. When you know things and can find proof about them on the internet, then you have to show people that you're right xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe

[Axxflcaj]

I've never heard the expression "folderol".

Folderol is a lovely phrase...I can picture Noel Coward saying it and giving that 'r' a leisurely, effortless roll.

Saliothomas: this is a lecture. When you know things and can find proof about them on the internet, then you have to show people that you're right

For some reason this reminds me of a quote from an old movie:

"Years ago my mother used to say to me... She'd say 'In this world Elwood, you must be oh-so smart or oh-so pleasant.' Well, for years I was smart.... I recommend pleasant. You may quote me."
Elwood P. Dowd, Harvey

[Sanremogirl]

As evil as is arguable, "as much an anti-semite as" is ludicrous

(...)

Solzhenitsyn isn't exactly simonpure in this regard either, Yes and yes.

[verizon]

I've never heard the expression "folderol". I take it to mean "an idea of genius"...

Well ...

folderol • n. 1 trivial or nonsensical fuss. 2 dated: a showy but useless item. ORIGIN from a meaningless refrain in old songs.

Folderol is a lovely phrase...I can picture Noel Coward saying it and giving that 'r' a leisurely, effortless roll...

I could be wrong, but it makes me think of Shakespeare, Irene.

[Axxflcaj]

Well ...





I could be wrong, but it makes me think of Shakespeare, Irene.

Let's split the difference and say Ian McKellan, shall we?

[verizon]

Let's split the difference and say Ian McKellan, shall we?

~~LOL~~

Yup, I'll certainly agree with that.

[Sillaycheg]

OK, Nnyhav, what if I'm wrong, and Stalin only murdered a few Yiddish poets, and occasionally cosied up to Jews and was only 48% anti-Semitic, if compared with Adolf Schickelgr?ber, who probably had a spot of Jewish blood himself? I wasn't there, thank God. You could argue that Stalin practised equality when it came to deporting, enslaving and murdering people, and that the poor old Jews were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But another strand to my argument is that Russians have been anti-Semitic for centuries, hence the occasional pogrom. Stalin merely needed to steer Russians in a direction they would willingly go.

As for Lithuanian anti-Semitism, until WWII, Lithuanian culture was very much a rural affair, and I would imagine that Lithuanians were easily roused to help along with the murder of the Jews, as there were fewer intellectuals. In the 1930s, Kaunas was the centre of what Lithuanian culture and literature there was, with Vilnius, the present capital, belonging to Poland. Vilnius had more Poles and Yiddish-speaking Jews than Lithuanians, by the way. I remember reading that the Yiddish and Polish-speaking poets fraternised, but that the Lithuanians kept away. There are quite complicated movements of nations, hatreds, loves and so on between Poles, Lithuanians, Russians, Belarusians, Yiddish-speaking Jews and so on. The whole issue deserves reading about. It is complex.

But Russians imply nowadays that present-day Lithuanians, now westernised members of the EU, and living in a city that was not really theirs 60 years ago, are the same Lithuanians that helped Hitler murder Jews. This is a sleight of hand to prove, as always, that Russia is right.

And that's where we come full circle to that curious man Alexander (Aleksandr) Solzhenitsyn who, as Nnyhav points out, isn't entirely squeaky clean, when it comes to Russian chauvinism and anti-Semitism, despite his heroic publication of masses of material condemning the horrors of the Gulag. It cannot be denied that a lot of key members of early Communism in Russia were indeed of Jewish background. But unfortunately, if you try to find objective information on this on the internet, the only people discussing it seem to be neo-fascists (often websites with red and blue headings and many exclamation marks) written by rabid anti-Semites, who are only too eager to see everything in black-and-white terms. There appears to be a whole industry on the net of websites by revisionists of the David Irving type, and you can find little published by philo-Semites. So it's another ethnic minefield.

Anne Applebaum, who has written the well-researched book Gulag, and is of Jewish origin as you can see from her surname, mentions Solzhenitsyn as one of the chief sources of material for her book, but doesn't turn the Gulag into a Jewish plot, as others have done. There were Jews both as prisoners and camp administrators.

[Unhappu]

His majesty
But another strand to my argument is that Russians have been anti-Semitic for centuries, hence the occasional pogrom. Stalin merely needed to steer Russians in a direction they would willingly go.

And it's a Russian particularity surely.For century jewish have been the beloved people of most other nations.

[Klorissana]

Thomas, you can't deny it was particularly the case in Russia. That's where the Protocols of the elders of Zion originated and where some of the most vicious progroms of the 19th century took place. The anti-semite tradition of Russia is well-documented. It obviously doesn't mean it didn't happen anywhere else and I actually don't see anyone implying this.

[Unhappu]

Fausto,Antisemitisme was a classic for centuries in most countries.I do not know of a place in Europe where the ladders would blame the jews for the incoming calamities,and the people too ready to comply when it come to extermination.It just seems wrong to isolate Russia in a trade that was commun to most of his neighbours,with variation in it's viciousness according to specific of the time.
But maybe i was wrong in my impressions.

[Sanremogirl]

Just two words in from the sidelines.

"centuries of antisemitism"

it makes a lot of sense to differentiate between old-fashioned jew-hate and modern antisemitism. I wrote two papers on that and read more original texts to this than I care to remember. A good source would be Hannah Arendts thick book on totalitarianism, if I am not mistaken.
so. there have NOT been centuries of antisemitism, if we say that modern antisemitism and medieval jew-hate were two different things. what happened in Germany was due to modern antisemitism (of course, jew-hate had its part there, too, but that is not the important thing.)
Russian antisemtism (and indeed, I have never been in an environment that I felt to be more antisemitic than when I was in Russia) is more like jew-hate, or it used to be. things change.

POint is that you can debate the point about how immoral each of these two monsters was (equally evil?), you can compare the killing off of jews (and you might find significant differences there as well, which I, personally, value differently, morally, but even smart people disagree with me here, so that would be going too far, no?), but once you enter the hate, it becomes sort of an apples and oranges situation.

To sum up (w/ ERic that is necessary): "as much an antisemite as..." is plainly wrong, unless one uses terms which are neither helpful nor reasonable.

To say that S is not "squeaky clean" in respect to antisemitism is marginalizing the issue. One book of his (I have it in German on the shelf and am too lazy to check the english title) is Zweihundert Jahre zusammen (Two hundred years together), about jews in Russia. Just read that, if you want insight to the extent to which S is antisemitic. Pretty heavy there, actually.

[Klorissana]

All very good points, Mirabell.

[Sillaycheg]

On small rider to #27, when I mentioned the Lithuanians, I saw on the BBC website:

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Crossing Continents | Reopening Lithuania's old wounds

As for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, they would be hilarious, if they weren't so sad:

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I don't sit on the sidelines, I try to untangle, for myself, the tangled skein of truth and lies, when it comes to Nazi persecution, Communist persecution, and so on.

Finnish author Sofi Oksanen asks, pertinently, in an article in the Estonian press (must find my printouts of articles by her) why it is that the swastika is banned throughout Europe, but the hammer & sickle, representing the r?gime that sent millions to slave labour camps all over Russia (look at the map in Applebaum's book on pages 120-121), is regarded as quite OK to have on T-shirts, along with the head of Lenin (imagine Hitler's head T-shirts!). The article is at the following link. You won't be able to read it, but it is proof that I'm not making things up: http://www.epl.ee/artikkel/384915 ; (sirp & vasar = hammer and sickle; haakrist = swastika).

Let's stop quibbling about whether Joseph Stalin in person was as bad as Hitler in person, and look the facts squarely in the face: Stalin's r?gime was as murderous as Hitler's, if not more. That is what Solzhenitsyn was trying to convey by publishing his several works of non-fiction, or fact disguised as fiction to get it past the censor.

The specific aim of the Denisovich book, published during the Khrushchev thaw in 1962, was a brave attempt to draw the attention of ordinary Russians to the fact that their leaders had set up an irrational system of repression and slave labour, and what it felt like to be there in its midst.

The problem, when it comes to anti-Semitism is, as I have said, that there were indeed a lot of Jews that rose to key positions under the Soviets. That cannot be airbrushed away. But to liken the Soviet r?gime to a Jewish r?gime is calumny.

The fact that there has been anti-Semitism all over the world over the centuries is not relevant to the discussion as to whether the two r?gimes are comparable. (We even had a pogrom in York, England, in 1190.)

As for Russian pogroms, see:

Anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The motto of all this is: "Two wrongs don't make a right". The dangerous double-think that is prevalent in some circles is that while the Nazi atrocities were structural, the Soviet ones were "mistakes". Rather a concatenation of mistakes to create a whole system like the Gulag...

[Sanremogirl]

...aaaand I'm off again.

[Sillaycheg]

In the context of Solzhenitsyn, the following item of Mentalit?tsgeschichte is interesting, especially the last two paragraohs:

BBC NEWS | Europe | Russians remember murdered tsar