Damn it, there are so many things I need to do today. I need to jog, pay my rent, shop for groceries, go to the gym, finish a book, cook dinner for my kid.
But first, I must, FUCKING MUST talk to you about how important yesterday's "Hitler was a Jew" rant by Lavrov was.
🧡
First, facts:
1) No, he fucking wasn't. I can't believe I have to tell you that. See the link. The entire theory was born because Hitler's father's original last name (from his mom), Schicklgruber, sounded funny to Russians. And funny to Russians = Jewish
jewornotjew.com/profile.jsp?ID…
2) Lavrov's phrase is not an indicator of his own private anti-semitism or being misinformed. It's an indicator of wide-spread attitudes in Russia that have been present ever since the Third Partition of Poland, when Catherine the Great's empire inherited a big Jewish population
3) Those attitudes were absolutely shared, and often propagated, by the authorities who viewed Jews as "a corrupt, criminal and almost incorrigible race", to quote Count Ivan Tolstoy, the Empire's (quite liberal) Minister of Education in 1905 (he was critical of such attitudes).
Russia's government often sought motivation in "saving the Russian people from the damaging influence of Jews", which is why it instituted the Pale of Settlement (geographical segregation), higher education quotas, public service proscriptions and instigated pogroms...
This is also why it was the Russian government, decades before the the Nazi Reich, that produced the ultimate hoax, "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", that propagated the idea of a global Jewish conspiracy. So, yes, when @RepMTG raves about Rothschilds, that's what she quotes...
And yes, every single piece of conspiratorial anti-semitic bullshit you read on the internets more or less quotes the product of a fruitful imagination of a Czarist Okhrana official who thought it would be neat to have a "document" that could assign a blame for ANTYTHING on Jews
But anyway, most folks with a modicum of education know all this already. Let's concentrate on Ukraine in particular.
What we saw happening inside Russian minds in 2014 was a direct product of 2+ centuries of state-sponsored conspiratorial anti-semitism...
Since Jews are to blame for everything, whenever something bad happens, searching for the Jewish root of the problem is almost a reflex. To quote the Soviet dissident poet Igor Guberman, half of Russia is mad that a Jewess shot at Lenin and the other half is mad that she missed.
So, if you are a Russian liberal, you can hate Jews for Communism, because Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev (and Marx and Lenin themselves) were Jews. If you are a Communist, you can hate Jews for betraying Communism, as evidenced by the eventual fates of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev
If you are a Russian nationalist, you can hate Jews for killing the Czar (since the main executioner was a Jew), if you hate the West, you can blame Jews for controlling global finances and media, if you are an Orthodox Christian, you can hate them for killing god...
If you hate Putin, you can hate Jews for being among his most ardent enablers (the Rotenbergs, Abramovich) and if you love Putin, you can hate Jews for being among his most relentless opponents (Khodorkovsky, Nemtsov). But, of course, then comes Ukraine... And it gets funny.
You see, Russia has decided that Ukraine is a Nazi state? Why? Who cares. It hates Russia, so it's Nazi. And there's plenty of BS circumstantial happenstance (Azov in the present, Bandera and Shukhevich in the distant past) to make a half-assed argument that tars the very idea...
... of independent Ukraine as inherently Nazi. And "Nazi = bad", of course. But, in Russia, "bad" also equals "Jew", which meant that Ukraine's new leadership had to be presented as shadowy Jewish usurpers attempting to pit two brother nations against each other...
This is done all the time in Russia. In the 90s, those who pined for the USSR called Boris Yeltsin as a crypto-Jew, "Baruch Eltzin." Later on, those who disliked Putin and Medvedev spread rumors about their Jewish origins.
So, finding a "Jewish claw" behind the 2014 Revolution...
... was the obvious next step. And so, it was taken as ABSOLUTE FACT by a huge number of Russians that Ukraine's next president, Petro Poroshenko, was in fact a Moldovan Jew named Pyotr Valtsman. That his Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk was also a Jew (he wore GLASSES!)...
That acting president Olexander Turchinov was an obvious Hebrew (LOOK AT THAT NOSE! AND HE IS BALD!). They even painted Ukrainian nationalist Oleh Tyahnibok, an anti-semite, as a crypto-Jew, because at that point, why the fuck not.
All this anti-semitic propaganda was meant...
... to: 1) portray the 2014 Revolution of Dignity as a Zionist plot to undermine Russia (one of the theories about #MH17 propagated by Moscow was that it was shot down by an Israeli missile),
2) portray Ukrainians are pitiful, since they fell prey to such pathetic and weak race..
In fact, this is exactly the verbiage one of the leaders of the separatist "People's Republics" used, calling the new Ukrainian government "pathetic Jews."
Of course, in 2019, Ukrainians basically said "fuck you" to all of this and went ahead and elected an actual Jew...
Not only was Zelensky Jewish, so was his first Prime Minister, Volodymyr Groysman. And hey, Zelensky was even backed by a Jewish oligarch, Ihor Kolomoysky! Wasn't it just perfect?
But hey, didn't it just make it harder to keep presenting Ukraine as a Nazi state?
Not in the slightest, as Lavrov has happily demonstrated. First of all, as I have said many times before, for Russians, "Nazi" simply means "our enemy" and nothing else at all. It's not like any of them have studied about the Holocaust in schools (where WWII was taught as...
... purely a Germany vs. USSR conflict, and Hitler's only crime was invading The Motherland).
Secondly, if Nazis hated Jews - so what? Hey, who doesn't, amirite, fellas? And since "Hitler = bad" and "bad = Jew", then, by transitive property of equality, Hitler had to be a Jew...
You have no idea how popular and generally accepted this theory is in Russia. Not just because, to many Russians, the name Schicklgruber can only be Jewish (because, like I said, funny), but also because "bad = Jew." It's just a widely shared "knowledge."
And, besides, it chimes very well with another settled idea: that anti-semitism is largely a product of Jews themselves who purposefully spread it around the world to present themselves as victims and control the narrative.
And, of course, this is precisely what Lavrov said, too!
So, there you go.
And there I go. Off to do the things I must.
Jog. Eat. Read. Work out. Control the media. Make shrimp linguine for the boy. You know.
Heil Trotsky or whatnot.

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More from @SlavaMalamud

May 2
Was "the Holocaust" actually Jews murdering innocent Nazis? Opinions of this Yekaterinburg "Kroshka Kartoshka" regulars are not what you might expect.
"I have heard that Nazis hated Jews, which is a bad thing, of course", said Arseniy G., a 32-year-old veteran of the Third Glorious Alcoholic War. "But, on the other hand, Jews also hated Nazis, so they aren't exactly good either."
"Jews and Nazis, Nazis and Jews, who can tell!", wondered Olga D., 23, a nail extractor at the Order of Komsomol Verkhnyaya Pyshma Robotics Factory. "They say that an Iceberg had sunk the Titanic. To me, whether it's Iceberg, Rotenberg or Abramovich, they are all crooks!"
Read 5 tweets
May 1
Russia could've been celebrating all the amazing technology it invented.
Commemorating the great culture it's given the world.
Immortalizing its wonderful humanist philosophers.
But it doesn't have any.
So, instead, it's fetishizing the bloodiest war in human history it's won.
What else are you to do when your technology is an elderly woman with a sledge hammer, when your movies are shit, your literature is boring and depressing, no sane person ever watches ballet, and your philosophy boils down to Dying For Motherland?
You celebrate death. Forever.
Even the fucking sports. Even they. A bunch of doped-ass cheats incessantly begging the government for medal bonuses and pensions and bleating about "Defending the Honor of Motherland" before they even get off their fucking skis.
I'll take an NFL touchdown dance every time.
Read 6 tweets
Apr 27
A good and complex question. In 1990, even though there weren't any threats or aggression toward Russian speakers, there were good reasons to fear. Ethnic conflicts in many parts of the USSR had turned bloody. Ethnic Russians were called occupiers and colonizers...
1/?
Many Moldovans were adamant to institute Romanian as the only official language. Some rather bizarre racist laws were proposed (for instance, to change all Jews' names to be clearly and unmistakeably Jewish). All and all, this was pretty standard anti-colonial backlash...
But first and foremost, Russian-speakers were afraid of "Unirea", the reunification with Romania, which meant potentially becoming a powerless minority in a foreign country, dominated by people they used to subjugate. Not an appealing prospect.
Read 5 tweets
Apr 26
Transnistria, where I was born and raised, has been under Russian occupation since (and this is not a typo) 1992. The root of the conflict is the fact that the region, the eastern bank of the Dniester River and my native city of Bender, is mostly populated with Russian speakers🧡
The left bank of the Dniester was formerly a part of Ukraine, known as the Moldavian Autonomous SSR. It had some Romanian speakers, but the majority were ethnic Russians and Ukrainians, primarily concentrated in the city of Tiraspol.
After the war, Stalin reannexed Moldova...
(the region between the Dienster and Prut rivers, which was a part of Romania between the World Wars) and named it the Moldavian SSR. However, he detached the northernmost (Bukovyna) and the southernmost (Bugeac) parts of it and gave them to Ukraine...
Read 13 tweets
Apr 26
Here comes another long-ass Slava Russia/Ukraine-explainer thread. In this one, I would like to draw a contrast between the invader and Ukraine from an unusual yet pertinent point of view: the humor culture and the usage of humor in politics.
Believe it or not, it explains A LOT.
You may have heard that Zelensky is a professional comedian. The original source of his fame is the Russian TV show called KVN. I have a thorough explanation of KVN and Zelensky's role in it in this old blog post (from 2019). Below is the TL;DR version.
slavadoesamerica.com/a-ukrainian-jo…
KVN is a competition between comedy teams. Originally, in Soviet times, the teams were predominantly collegiate and their humor often strayed into satire. During Perestroika, KVN was the source of the most biting and fearless political discourse in the USSR...
Read 25 tweets
Apr 25
Watching #Navalny on CNN. It's nothing new to those who have followed his story, but it's great that the film features the brilliant work of @christogrozev, who is nothing less than a XXI-century, real-life Sherlock Holmes.
"It's elementary"
Really, Christo's explanations of how he solved Navalny's poisoning and unmasked his killers without ever leaving his house beats anything Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ever wrote.
Absolutely magnificent. Don't EVER get in this man's corsshairs.
When your own deductive brilliance shocks even you.
Read 4 tweets

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