Thank you for proving James' point. Why, if they had a more advanced culture, like that in sophisticated Germany or Scandinavian Estonia, the first country to be declared Judenfrei... oh wait no never mind.
"Nikulturny" is not a word.
--- On Tue, 8/5/08, andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> From: andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Dies at 89
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Tuesday, August 5, 2008, 2:05 AM
> Oh fuck that, James, anti-semitism is rife in the ex-bloc.
> Even in countries where there are no, or hardly any, Jews,
> like Poland. It's not a racist thing -- in fact it's
> not racist at all, since few people think that Slavs are
> "racially" inclined to anti-semitism. It's a
> primitive backwards and uncivilized culture. Nikulturny. If
> you think that's prejudiced, I'm quoting Lenin on
> the subject, I think he's a big hero of yours. And in
> fact you admit the widespread antisemitism and contradict
> yourself when you say that ex-Blocians express casually
> antisemitic sentiments that, thank God, are no longer
> permissible here, now that Hitler has given open
> anti-semitism a bad name. You can look at the polls (that
> is, surveys), or more entertainingly you can listen to
> illustrative anecdotes.
>
> My son was playing with his friend, their family, rather
> Irish looking although the kids are half Polish by descent,
> has a Polish nanny. (This being Chicago, those are who the
> nannies are, we had three, four actually, one only lasted a
> week.) Polish nanny comments to my friend, Joel's
> friend's mom, Joel is Jewish, isn't he? Ellen
> bristles. Yes, and? Well, says nanny rather stiffly.
> He's very nice anyway.
>
> I guess this is is the place for the story about my friend
> Irena, daughter in law of the well known Soviet-Russian
> novelist Anatoly Ryabakov. One time closer to the fall we
> were talking about goings on in the Writer's Union, when
> they had one, under or near the time of Perestroika, when
> the slavophiles, conservative opponents of Gorbachev, etc.
> were attacking the liberals for being Jew-lovers if not out
> and out yids themselves. Irena told me, without a trace of
> self-consciousness or self (or other-) awareness, that at
> one such meeting she stood up and proudly said, I am a
> RUSSIAN, not a Jew, and I am proud to be a liberal! Her FiL
> Ryabakov wrote a very good and at the time controversial
> novel, Heavy Sand, about the Nazi massacre of the Jews at
> Babi Yar in what was then the Ukrainian SSR. She wasn't
> being consciously antisemitic. It was just so much in the
> air that the thought that Jews might be Soviets, much less
> Russians, and might feel excluded (even
> in my case my proxy) and being informed by assumption that
> they were not and could not be did not occur to her.
>
> I'm not Holocaust wallower and I hate what some Jews
> have done with the holocaust and parading their victimhood,
> etc., but I guess a recent trip to Auschwitz left a deeper
> mark on me that I might have thought. Be that as it may,
> Ex-bloc and historical Slavic anti-semitism is real,
> persistent, widespread, pervasive, deep, and hard to uproot,
> and it's ignorant and dangerous to deny that.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --- On Mon, 8/4/08, James Heartfield
> <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > From: James Heartfield
> <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk>
> > Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Dies at
> 89
> > To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> > Date: Monday, August 4, 2008, 6:23 PM
> > I got the idea that Solzhenitsyn was not terribly
> > representative of much Russian opinion after he
> returned
> > from exile, and felt somewhat out of sorts with the
> new
> > Russia, so I am not so sure what his attitudes tell
> us. My
> > brief brush with the 'dissident' Russian
> diaspora
> > showed me that the their Western handlers were always
> > wincing at the default attitude of the epatriate
> > intelligentsia towards extreme reaction. Solzhenitsyn
> was a
> > bit of an old curmudgeon in the US, where he was out
> of
> > sorts with modern America, and seems to have been so
> on his
> > return.
> >
> > I think the question of east european attitudes
> towards
> > Jews and other ethnic minorities is easy to get wrong.
> I can
> > remember an excruciating holiday in (then)
> Czechoslvakia
> > with an Indian friend (who was often taken for a
> gypsy).
> > All of our party were astonished not at the prejudices
> -
> > coming from London you could hardly say that we had no
> > experience of race prejudice against Indians. But what
> was
> > unexpected was the bluntness with which the prejudices
> were
> > expressed. On the other side of the iron curtain,
> there
> > never was that politically correct veneer of apology
> > covering up the hostilities underneath (or if there
> was it
> > was discredited, being associated with authorities
> that were
> > without authority). I do hear Russians and Poles in
> London
> > express a kind of casual anti-Semitism that shows that
> they
> > do not understand the minefield of western race
> relations.
> > But whether it represents an endemic anti-Semitic
> movement
> > in those societies, I doubt.
> >
> > Also, you have to control for the ideological
> presentation
> > of East Europeans as anti-Semites in western accounts.
> There
> > is an expectation among west Europeans and Americans
> that
> > east Europeans are anti-Semitic and racist. It is in
> fact
> > itself a racial caricature, a western prejudice
> against
> > people from east Europe and Russia.
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
>
>
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