Russia Insider goes Goebbels: debunking Charles Bausman’s warped vision of Russian reality

Originally appeared at RussiaFeed.com

Going After Jews Instead of Neo-Liberals

Charles Bausman, the editor-in-chief of Russia Insider, has chosen a path well-trodden: he decided to woo his audience by discovering the “Jewish origin” of today’s wars and tensions.

Nothing could be a greater service to the globalist neoliberals and neoconservatives, who try to present the alternative voices (and in the first place the alternative voices from Russia) as a chorus of anti-Semites, conspiracy theorists and Putin’s pals.

The detractors of RT and Sputnik in the United States and the EU may quickly forget that RT’s Paula Slier made award-winning documentaries on the horrors of Holocaust, which did not prevent Paula from reporting on the horrors of Israel’s bombardment of Palestinian areas. But the detractors of RT and Sputnik will remember Mr. Bausman’s recent opus headlined “It’s Time to Drop the Jew Taboo.”

They will remember it and cite it as an example of “Putin’s man going fascist,” quickly spreading its ill fame to all the media outlets which Mr. Bausman happened to visit. Such reactions from the representatives of the Western mainstream media are already coming. Judging from the text of his article, Mr. Bausman was fully aware of this kind of reaction before starting to pen out his feelings about Jews, but nevertheless proceeded with its publication. 

Nothing To Do With Russia

Attempts to connect Mr. Bausman’s article to our country or to its president are not just missing the point – they are outright deceitful. Mr. Bausman’s article was published on his own private media resource, for which he is trying to get donations from the public. Mr. Bausman’s anti-Semitic article has nothing to do with Putin or with the “atmosphere in Putin’s Russia” (which is not anti-Semitic and not xenophobic in general).

Moreover, it has nothing to do with the Russian intellectual tradition. Please note that no reference to Russian thinkers was made in Mr. Bausman’s article, except for a few illustrations from the legacy of the late Russian painter Ilya Glazunov, who dismissed accusations of anti-Semitism during his lifetime, but who died last year and so can defend neither his reputation nor for his copyright.

That is not an unusual situation for anyone dealing with Mr. Bausman: in his article, Mr. Bausman writes that Russia Insider “republishes the best articles about Russia with a link to the original,” but he forgets to add that Russia Insider usually does it without permission and, consequently, without any compensation for the holders of the articles’ copyright.

This is not Mr. Bausman’s only omission. In this article, I will try to single out just the chief among Mr. Bausman’s many omissions. I am doing this in the hope of backing up my previous paragraph with facts, which are quite plentiful in the dramatic history of Russia’s more than 200 years long “blood liaison” with East European Jews.

The vast majority of the Jews that found themselves on the territory of the Russian Empire and later of the Soviet Union as a result of our country’s expansions in the 18-20th centuries became our Jews. They call themselves Soviet, Russian, sometimes even Ukrainian, Moldovan or Georgian Jews, but nonetheless they are a part of what president Putin called the “Russian world,” and not just because the Russian language is native to them – as, in most cases, it is their mother-tongue.

“They” Made Everything, from Neo-liberalism to the Soviet Atomic Bomb

Here is what Mr. Bausman writes: “On the policy side, the neo-conservative movement, Russia’s harshest foe, was conceived of, is led by, and consists mostly of, Jews.”

How very interesting! Following the same logic and sticking to the same standards of accuracy, I could say that the Soviet atomic bomb, Russia’s dearest friend, was conceived of and developed mostly by, Jews. Yes, academician Abraham Joffe was the head of the physics’ department at the Soviet Academy of Sciences which had to answer Stalin’s question about the feasibility of a nuclear weapon back in 1942. Joffe’s conclusion was a positive one, with proposals on the way to make the bomb real (here we have the Jewish “conception” of the Soviet bomb). The works on producing plutonium for the first Soviet atomic bomb were headed by the chief engineer Rotshild and the chief technologist Zilberman (so their second names sounded in Russian).

In reality, of course, the Soviet atomic bomb was created by a multi-ethnic team of heroes, who had a variety of motivations. Some of them had an ideological motivation (serving communism), some wanted to protect mother Russia and mankind from an American nuclear monopoly (serving motherland and humanity). And some were just saving their lives, since the project was supervised by the sinister minister of state security, Lavrentiy Beria. And, according to eyewitnesses’ memoirs, Jews were present in all three groups.   

Not Blood, But Ideology

In the same way it is profoundly unfair on Mr. Bausman’s side to reduce the cruel and extremist neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies to the Jewish origins of some of their proponents. Writing on the matter, Mr. Bausman forgets to mention that neoconservatism’s most vocal and best known opponent in the United States is none other than professor Stephen F. Cohen – a Jew.

And, talking about responsibility, where shall we stick the father of the drone killings’ program, CIA’s top Angel of Death John Brennan, who happens to be an Irish Catholic (oh, my God, even a practicing one)?

Taking into account the color of the skins of Barack Obama and Condoleezza Rice, the father of the Ukrainian war and the mother of the invasion into Iraq, one could think of the IDEOLOGICAL similarities between neoliberalism and neo-conservatism rather than of any Jewish conspiracies.

Or, following Mr. Bausman’s logic, we must put the blame for America’s wars on people of African origin, probably with an even more “colorful” inclusion of Mr. Powell into this affair. (As Mr. Bausman puts it, “there is overwhelming ethnic imbalance.”)

The truth is that the affairs with Mr. Powell’s “lab tube speech” in the UN, as well as with Mrs. Nuland’s distribution of cookies to Maidan rebels, were indeed unseemly, but these affairs had nothing to do with their Jewish or non-Jewish origins.

These affairs reflected not ethnic hatreds, but the Western infatuation with its own ultraliberal ideology, an explosive mix of vulgarized 20^th century “old dead truths,” justifying murders and lies in the name of “elections” and “justice,” which somehow must always bring “liberals” to power. 

Mr. Bausman also forgets to notice one other important thing: very often neo-libo-conservatives declare themselves Jews out of sheer conformism.

Take Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s secretary of state during the NATO’s invasion of Yugoslavia in 1999. She conveniently found Jewish roots in her family only AFTER bombing Yugoslavia, until then she was a proud daughter of a prominent Czech diplomat, Joseph Korbel, who during the advent of Czech nationalism in the first half of the twentieth century felt himself the most Slavic of the Czechs.

Mrs. Albright rushed to fit the positive neo-liberal vision of Jews with the same passion that Mr. Bausman shows when trying to squeeze the Jews (Russian and non-Russian ones) into the negative stereotype.

Repeating the Whites’ Mistakes

Charles Bausman writes: “Many White Russians fleeing the revolution believed that it was mostly a Jewish coup d’etat, financed by wealthy bankers in New York and London who were sworn enemies of Christian Tsarism.”

Indeed, many White Russians thought so, and this is the reason why they lost the civil war, even though the White Guard was supported by those same American, British and French interventionists, whom Mr. Bausman so rightly despises now.

Many of the White Guard’s generals considered Jewish radicalism Russia’s only (or at least Russia’s main) problem, and they did not bother to suggest to the Russian population a viable alternative to Bolshevism – only a return to the status quo before 1917.

The formula “let’s get back to the past + anti-Semitism”  did not work in Russia during the civil war in 1918-1920, and it won’t work now. Even Gennady Zyuganov understood it, but Mr. Bausman is still living encapsulated inside the mind of not the wisest of the White émigrés.

The wisest, such as the writers Vladimir Nabokov and Ivan Bunin, were against anti-Semitism. Nabokov even had a Jewish wife (Vera Nabokov is frequently called the best writer’s wife in the history of literature) and made a row in an American restaurant which had a sign “Gentiles Only.”

But Mr. Bausman will probably never understand THIS KIND of Russian.