--- On Tue, 8/5/08, James Heartfield <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> From: James Heartfield <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk>
> Subject: [lbo-talk] Anti-Slav Racism
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Tuesday, August 5, 2008, 4:19 PM
> "andie" - in a hole, just keeps on digging:
>
> "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
>
>
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