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Jun 11, 2024 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
The characterization of Russians as subhuman “orcs” needs to be viewed in light of the post-WWI far right turn in Ukrainian nationalism, which began to conceive national identity in eugenic/racial terms. Russian aggression and alleged Jewish complicity became fixed racial traits

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Arguably no other figure has been more influential in shaping this ideology than Donstov, whose integral nationalism understood Russian empire building as not primarily dictated by geopolitical motives or economic factors but a deeply ingrained civilizational and racial logic
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Jun 2, 2024 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
The USSR was not “ethnonationalist.” It was a multiethnic state that facilitated extensive migration between its different republics, enabling a rich cross-cultural exchange—which included food. Soviet cuisine was comprised of regional dishes from throughout its vast territory


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From Ukraine to the Caucuses to Central Asia, the USSR encompassed territory that included, at one point, 1/6 of the earth, representing an incredibly diverse array of cultures. It’s inaccurate to reduce the USSR, and it’s cuisine, to a single ethnicity
May 28, 2024 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
People do tend to overlook how closely associated genetics and eugenics were in the past. The hegemony of Lysenkoism was, in large part, an overreaction to Nazi Eugenics. Polish geneticists like Skowron embraced Lysenkoism because of their experience in Nazi concentration camps

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In the 1920s, Eugenics was endorsed and supported by the mainstream American science establishment. By the time eugenics lost sway, tens of thousands of sterilizations had been performed with the backing of the nation’s scientific community
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May 24, 2024 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
It’s false that Soviet Georgians could not “read their own books.” Georgian literature was widely read and celebrated—and not only in the Georgian SSR. Due to the cultural patronage of powerful Soviet Georgians, Georgian cultural expression was exported throughout the USSR

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Georgians were a highly educated minority group, who, prior to the Russian revolution, often eagerly sought education in Russian schools. Here, many saw chauvinist policies of Russification as intertwined with economic domination of Russian bourgeoisie, drawing them to socialism
May 22, 2024 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
While antisemitism has historically been the dominant form of racialized conspiracism in the West, Islamophobia seems to have taken this role in recent years. Take “Eurabia,” a popular theory that posits a cabal of Arab elites are scheming with Western partners to Islamize Europe

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This is not a marginal idea, but one that is embraced by far right populist parties across Europe, as well as prominent European intellectuals. In this theory, Muslims are imbued with a voracious and innate drive for power, infiltrating and dominating state institutions Image
May 17, 2024 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
How George Washington felt about Indigenous people was nearly indistinguishable from how Israeli leaders talk about Palestinians, as these passages show. Here we see a common worldview of settler colonialism and genocide that was, and continues to be, put in practice 🧵

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Washington led efforts to displace, depopulate, and settle Ohio and New York, directing unimaginable violence upon native inhabitants in order to seize their land. Settlement was one reason for this, but it went beyond that—Washington was compelled by personal economic interests
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May 9, 2024 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
The portrayal of Jews as the shadowy orchestrators of revolt is a longstanding antisemitic caricature popularized by Hitler himself in Mein Kampf. Hitler saw Jews as embodying mass politics—the inciters of rebellion and social unrest. This was at the heart of Nazi ideology



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In a close reading of Mein Kampf, historian Ishay Landa notes how the primary feature of Hitler’s antisemitism was not an association of Jews with banking and finance, but with political radicalism, inciting rebellion, Marxism, and anti-capitalism
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May 6, 2024 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
Mussolini’s anti-slavery campaign was used to justify Italy’s imperial enterprise as a humanitarian “civilizing” venture. Fascist abolitionism gave racial expansionism a progressive veneer, sanitizing the use of concentration camps, chemical weapons, and other colonial atrocities


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Historian Amalia Forclaz describes this process as the fascistization of anti-slavery politics. It was not done out of any interest in liberation, but establishing whites as the benevolent stewards of uncivilized colonized subjects, facilitating a new kind of nationalist project
Dec 1, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Historians of Soviet nationality policy do not characterize this history in terms of state-racism or racial politics—cultural, social or otherwise—because its wrong. This is uncontroversial for specialists in the field but will get you yelled at by the historically illiterate

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If you look at the literature, contemporary leading scholars in the field (Holquist, Weiner, Martin, Hirsch, Khalid, Suny, etc) never describe this oppression as “racism” or “racial.” Warranted criticism of brutality abounds, but they’re careful with how categories are used
Nov 29, 2023 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
There was no state-sanctioned racism in the USSR. The Soviets did not repress citizens on the grounds of race, biology, or genetics. This is not to deny repression, but to properly categorize it as occurring on the basis of nationality, a sociohistoric grouping not unlike “class”

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This is not an exoneration given that Soviet policies could be terribly violent and exclusionary, but racism has a specific meaning that simply does not apply to the nature of Soviet national repression, which operated on a entirely distinct ideological foundation
Nov 24, 2023 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
Soviet nostalgia is not remotely the same as colonial nostalgia because its not just old Russian guys who are nostalgic. There is widespread nostalgia among central asians and ethnic minorities who bemoan the loss of an “affirmative action” state that safeguarded minority rights

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T. Martin writes “Affirmative action for all non-Russian people necessarily implied reverse discrimination against Russians” It would be unthinkable for a colonial state to favor natives over white colonists.Soviet egalitarian policies were part and parcel of “building socialism”
Nov 15, 2023 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Jews played a prominent role in Germany’s colonial rule over Africa, which included the genocide of the Herero. The experiences of colonial empire-making exposed Jews in the German colonies to ideas of racial superiority and settlerism that shaped the development of Zionism



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Although there was a tension here—Despite taking an active role in subjugating Africans, Jews were derided by many of their antisemitic German co-colonizers for being Jewish. Jews involved in colonization attempted to forge a patriotic German identity opposed to antisemitism
Nov 10, 2023 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
The constituent assembly was dismantled because it proved incapable of delivering a functioning government. R-SRs were the one party disconnected from the worker councils, and did not have support of the army or villages—this made the exercise of political sovereignty impossible


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Without a basis of support in these key constituencies and the robust council system of local administration, a SR government could not govern without widespread resistance and intractable political crisis, and would have likely been overturned not long after it’s establishment
Nov 8, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Perpetrators of genocide usually operate within a cultural universe that inverts moral norms in service of military imperative or security (ie “we had no choice”). This occurs through a process of cumulative radicalization that justifies increasing levels of collective punishment

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This is why so many UN experts are now speaking of “genocide risk” in Gaza. Genocides are usually not the result of a master plan meticulously designed by a leader or state, but often arise through the contingency of military conflict or security threat perceived as existential
Nov 2, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
It’s utterly wrong to conflate the typical war-time disinformation practice of spreading “atrocity stories” with extensively documented historical events universally recognized by historians. The British perfected this in WW1, propagating lurid stories of rape and baby killing

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It is an highly effective form of war propaganda that is able to mobilize popular support for a military cause by rousing emotions through exaggerated or fabricated stories. The British mastery of this psychological warfare profoundly influenced Hitler and Goebbels Image
Oct 28, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
It’s very telling that an Israeli official cited the Leningrad siege as a model for Gaza. One historian described the Nazi siege as “the greatest act of genocide” next to the Holocaust during WW2. The siege entailed systematic starvation of an entire city alongside mass bombing

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The starvation of the city’s population was enabled by a racial ideology that saw Slavs, Jews and other Soviet minorities as deserving of annihilation. The relentless and deliberate destruction of housing, schools, hospitals, etc. revealed the sheer brutality of Nazi warfare
Oct 25, 2023 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
A major factor in the genocidal escalation of Nazi antisemitism was a perceived security threat of Jewish resistance, as the Nazis began retaliating against uprisings and Partisan attacks through the murderous collective punishment of Jews🧵

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The broad anti-Semitic consensus within Nazi germany was not initially exterminationist. The desire to wipe out Jews developed contingently out of developments in the war. Increasing Nazi vulnerability to military defeats had a radicalizing effect on their antisemitism
Oct 20, 2023 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
The gaza siege is a “textbook case of genocide”—in the words of the Holocaust historian Raz Segal. Indeed, 800 scholars of international law, conflict studies and genocide studies had just signed a public statement warning of the possibility of genocide being inflicted by Israel



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The reporter, Chris McGreal, who covered the Rwandan genocide, wrote a recent article in the Guardian revealing a clear genocidal intent in Israeli leadership calls for collective punishment, failure to distinguish militants from civilians, and completely dehumanizing language Image
Oct 15, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Everyday white Virginians viewed Nat Turner as a “monster” whose slave revolt was driven by an inexplicable bloodlust. When relations of racial subjugation are so normalized, revolt against these relations defy moral explanation. This is the “common sense morality” of colonialism Turner’s revolt led to the massacring of countless “innocent” people. Yet, the historian Bryan Rommel-Ruiz is still right to describe it as “a shining moment in the otherwise dark history of American slavery … an example of slaves challenging an oppressive … regime” Image
Oct 12, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
In reality, Louverture had no qualms with mass killings of whites (or other enemies) if he deemed it politically or militarily advantageous. He just delegated these massacres to his subordinates. Your view of Louverture is a sanitized one, palatable for a liberal audience.

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You can’t neatly separate the violent legacy of Dessalines from Louverture. Louverture allowed Dessalines and other generals to carry out mass violence, and was complicit in it. It’s a mistake to confuse Louvertures carefully crafted self-representation with historical reality
Sep 30, 2023 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
This is false. The Soviets did not bury the history of Babyn Yar, as both Russian and Yiddish language journalism (and arts) brought these tragic events to the attention of a Soviet readership. Notably, this was made possible by the advocacy of Soviet Jewish intelligentsia


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OP is likely a reference to the Babyn Yar monument at the ravine in Kiev which did not have specific reference to Jews. On the other hand, there was Soviet recognition of Jewish Babyn Yar victims (and in the Holocaust more broadly) in a variety of other contexts and mediums
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