"Endemically is not the word about Slavic backwardness and antisemitism, " he says because he has been caught out condemning Slavs as a race. So, suddenly a quick swerve "There's nothing permanent about it." And now "andie" is flustered:
"racism is not the word. It has nothing to do with race, genetics, biology, or anything of the sort."
Which is that old ploy "I'm, no racist, ...*but*..."
And what is the "but"? The "but", it is not the Slavic *race* that is the problem, it is the Slavic *culture*.
"Slavic cultures are ...backwards"
You see what he did there? He's not objecting to their race, just their 'culture'. And of course, it is not there fault, exactly, it is all those "centuries of tyranny, poverty, and isolation" that make them backwards.
Of course we have heard this refrain from every two-bit racist. Read it in Ian Smith's biography: It is not that Africans are naturally inferior, it is just that they are culturally backward. Don't you get it? "Russians are X" is the very definition of prejudice. "Russians" are not any one thing. Some are good and some are bad, just like everyone else.
And, anyway, what is the proof of this gross generalisation?
"This has been the _constant_ lament of the Russian intelligentisia for over 200 years"
Well, pardon me, but doesn't every intelligentsia everywhere moan on about how backward the people are? That's what the intelligentsia is, the people who think they are of a higher class than the rest of us, but haven't got the money to back it up. Never mind, here's the 'intelligentsia' full of bile about the backward Russians, hawking their anti-mass prejudices to any foreign power that wants to fund a government in exile.
Is it "utter crap to attrubute this observation to Western prejudice"? I don't think so. Having spent some time talking to the Foreign Office in Britain, I can tell you that it is the one enduring note they have been striking for the last eighty years.
Nor am I impressed by the citation of Lenin and Trotsky on "backwardness." For Christ's sake, that was a century ago. When they were writing, most Russians were illiterate peasants, even cannibalism was not unheard of. Since then literacy is 99.4% (CIA Factbook, slightly higher than the US and Germany, both at 99%). Ten per cent work in agriculture, 28 per cent in industry and 60 per cent in services. Around three million (out of a population of 141 million) are in higher education, which is less, but not markedly less than the US, which by my rough calculations is around eight million out of a population of 300 million.
And what is the payoff in this fact-free detour through the uglier pathways of toffee-nosed prejudice against the Russian masses?
"Slavic culture is also virulently antisemitic, as surveys and experience show"
What? How is "virulently anti-Semitic" any different from "endemically anti-Semitic"? You really mean "virulently" - like a "virus"? Slav culture is a bacilli, are you saying, spreading across the east, infecting all who come into contact with it? You really need to stop and think about the intellectual framework you are using here.
Andie goes on to say that Slavs are 'nikulturny', without culture, null, a bit like saying that they are a people without history.
And then this, gratuitously deranged piece of second-guessing "it wasn't just because there were a lot of Jews nearby that they built the camps in Poland". No, indeed, it was because there were a lot of Poles nearby. The point of the camps was to annihilate East Europe's surplus population.
Poles, like Jews, were victims of the Nazis race policies, the German government was its perpetrator. Poles were enslaved by Germans, taken in chains to work in German factories. In Nazi ideology, the victimisation of the Jews was all part and parcel of creating a hierarchy of race in which the Slavs were a subject race.
The Nazis campaign was not evidence of east European anti-Semitism, it was evidence of *West European* anti-Semitism. East Europeans were the target of the Nazis race policies, the perpetrators were west Europeans. It was Eastern Europe's revolt against Nazi rule that liberated the death camps that west Europeans created.
Sensing that he has lost the plot (even Slav food sucks, apparently, though everybody knows that is US food that sucks the worst in the world) Andie is back-pedalling again:
"Nor is backwardness peculiar to Slavic cultures. No culture is more backward and more racist than American culture"
Oh, so all of this stuff about Slav backwardness is just eye-wash then? Slav culture is how bad? As bad as America. Well, then what is the big deal?
Then the slippage.. "especially the culture of the South." It's not the 1960s any more, "andie". And then just in case we don't get the "Mississippi Burning" images , "andie" explains " I mean the white South" - you know, the rednecks "the black South gave us most of what culture the South has" - really? Jim Crow and slavery were ennobling experiences that brought out the best in people, I suppose. But sensing that he has given too much away in suggesting the US culture might be just as bad as the evil virus of Slav culture, "ande" takes it all back. "The racism is improving (that is, there is less of it), partly because of sixty years of resistance which was not possible in the Slavic countries."
and on and on, digging further into that hole