Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 19 – In the late
1940s, Joseph Stalin formed the Anti-Zionist Committee of Soviet Society whose
Jewish members advanced his thesis that “Zionism is fascism,” a claim the
Soviet dictator felt would be especially credible or at least influential because
of the crimes against humanity Jews had suffered under the Nazis.
These “’useful Jews,’” Alesandr Yakovenko
says, “traded on their national membership in the interests of anti-democratic
regimes and against the interests of their own people,” an action that under
the totalitarian regime in place at the time they could avoid only at the risk
of imprisonment or worse (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5A380170D5151).
Now,
and with less of a threat hanging over them, the Russian commentator continues,
the Putin regime is making use of Russian Jews who are prepared to cooperate
with it to charge that Ukraine is now a fascist state. The most prominent
representative of this group, Yakovenko says, is Moscow television host
Vladimir Solovyev.
“Until
2014, Solovyev did not hide his Jewishness, but he also did not mention it
every time he appeared on the air.” But
after the Crimean Anschluss and the Russian invasion of the Donbass, he has
mentioned his background all the time and spent 30 to 50 percent of his on-air
time attacking Ukraine.
Like
those of the Anti-Fascist Committee of the 1940s, Solovyev is very much “’a
useful Jew’ in the service of a dictatorship.” Those who did this 70 years ago
were acting in the service of the Soviet dictatorship; Solovyev and his ilk are
doing so in the service of the Putin dictatorship.
In
his statements, Solovyev makes three false arguments: First, he insists that the
small group of extremists in Ukraine is typical of all Ukrainians. Second, he “lies
that in present-day Ukraine anti-Semitic Nazi attitudes dominate” even though
Jews serve in prominent positions in Kyiv. And third, he says Bandera has been
christened a national hero, even though that isn’t true.
To
promote these falsehoods, Yakovenko continues, Solovyev has on his show people
who are prepared to do what he is doing, including Yevgeny Satanovsky, Yakov
Kedmi, ad Avigdor Eskin, and, “speculating on the theme of the Holocaust,
presents the war in Ukraine as a struggle between good (Putin) and absolute
evil (Ukraine and its American backers).
By mixing all these things together,
the Russian commentator says, Solovyev and his friends seek to blame the West
and not just the Nazis for the Holocaust, to claim that “exclusively the USSR
and Stalin personally” won the war over fascism, and, what is especially obscene,
to suggest that the conflict between Putin’s Russia and the West is “a
continuation of the struggle with Nazism which it turns out Putin is now
conducting.”
Putin in fact and not the West is
the one who has made friends with Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Asad, all of who
have elevated anti-Semitism and the destruction of Israel to “the rank of
official policy.” But “that is something
that “’useful Jews’” like Solovyev “prefer to close their eyes to.
Solovyev displays many aspects of a
megalomania that is fed by his appearances on television. He is “sincerely convinced
that he better than anyone” is able to understand all aspects of human
activity.” And he now constantly develops “his favorite idea that the Russians
are the Jews of today” and have taken “the baton” from the Jews to march
forward.
One
could dismiss the megalomania of Solovyev as his personal problem, Yakovenko
concludes; but his efforts to promote hatred of the West, Ukraine and the
Russian opposition is something else. “It is a crime,” one made more horrific
than otherwise because he uses “the greatest tragedy of the Jewish people” to
advance the cause of the latest Russian dictator.
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