The Doublethink of Right Wing Zionism and the Far Right Nationalism of Mikheil Saakashvili.

The sheer level of hatred that has been directed against me amongst those combatting what they consider Holocaust Denial is curious.

For it is very reminiscent of the very kind of hatred any fanatical nationalist has against those who refuse to take a monomaniacal and one dimensional interpretation of the way the Holocaust has become caught up in current propaganda battles.

The Holocaust was one genocide amongst many in the twentieth century and nowhere was it based more fanatically and with such racialised zeal than with Nazi Germany's domination of Europe during the Second World War.

To state that though is a heresy'. As it was when I compared the theft of the Auschwitz sign with Saakashvili's destruction of the Glory Monument.

One commenter AbeT claimed that I had distorted the meaning or Borowski's This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentleman

”The first duty of Auschwitzers is to make clear just what a camp is. ? But let them not forget that the reader will unfailingly ask: But how did it happen that you survived? Tell, then, how you bought places in the hospital, easy posts, how you shoved the 'Moslems' [prisoners who had lost the will to live] into the oven, how you bought women, men, what you did in the barracks, unloading the transports tell about the daily life of the camp.? But write that you, you were the ones who did this. That a portion of the sad fame of Auschwitz belongs to you as well.?”

My reply was that Borowski was seeing the "concentration camp universe" as a distilled and refined microcosm of the cruelty human inflict on others and that racism is rationalisation of psychopathological competition for land and resources and has been throughout history which is the history of genocide and enslavement.

Borowski made that clear when he wrote in Chapter 7 of Auschwitz Our Home ( A Letter )

We carry huge sacks of cement, lay bricks, put down rails trample the earth....We are laying the foundation for some new, monstrous civilisation. Only now do I realise what price was paid for building the ancient civilisations. The Eygyptian Pyramids, the temples and the Greek statues-what a hideous crime they were !

How much blood must have been poured on to the Roman roads, the bulwarks, and the city walls. Antiquity-the tremendous concentration camp where the slave was branded on the forehead by his master, and crucified for trying to escape ! Antiquity-the conspiracy of free men against slaves. "'You know how much I used to like Plato.

Today I realise he lied. For the things of this world are not a reflection of the ideal, but a product of human sweat, blood and hard labour. It is we who built the pyramids, hewed the marble for the temples and the rocks for the imperial roads.... We were filthy and died real deaths.... What does ancient history say about us?... We rave over the extermination of the Etruscans, the destruction of Carthage, over treason, deceit, plunder. Roman law! Yes, today too there is a law!."

If the Germans win the war, what will the world know about us? They will erect huge buildings, highways, factories, soaring monuments. Our hands will be placed under every brick, and our backs will carry the steel rails and the slabs of concrete.

They will kill off our families, our sick, our aged. They will murder our children.

And we shall be forgotten, drowned out by the voices of the poets, the jurists, the philosophers, the priests. They will produce their own beauty, virtue, and truth. They will produce religion.

The world is one large concentration camp in space and time in Borowski's part of the world and this is history in the making. The disconcerting message was the nihilistic one-All higher culture is based on cruelty.

The civilisation of the West, including Israel is founded on the suffering of people in Muslim land whose nations have been regarded as semi-oil colonies for decades

Ostensible racism is merely one way of concentrating power and Hitler had ambitious plans he wanted to realise quickly in his gamble for global hegemony when threatened with the rise of the Soviet Union to the East, an enfeebled France and increased US dominance in the Western hemisphere.

In 2009 the USA is the power faced with the great gamble for global hegemony and afriad of the ascendency of China.

That is what Iraq was about in 2003. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of Arabs is a consequence of the higher power of History which requires victims so the new world can be built, The victims will be forgotten once the new world comes into being.

This was as true of the Soviet Union as it has been a strand of neoconservative thinking in invading Iraq and launching the War on Terror.

The differences between the USA and Nazi Germany are vast. The USA has no intentional genocidal plan based on race as the Nazi Empire was. Yet most Empires are ruthless.

The US Empire bears more similarity to the Roman Empire as it is not racially exclusive and based on the pursuit of material enrichment, oil to fuel it's high octane economy, minerals and the principle outlined by Michael Ledeen, who admires Mussolini, and think that that the USA is in the business of "creative destruction".

Israel is part of the geostrategic plan to retain dominance over the Middle East and the Great Game for the resources of Eurasia.

As with Israel, the USA is a highly militarised democracy, something that allows critical Americans and Israeli's to speak out against their governments aggressive policies.

That kind of analysis is strictly verboten though with fanatical right wing Zionist who run CiF Warch. A chap called Brian fulminated,

"You ignorant SOB, Naylor, AbeT is referring to your interference with Tadeusz Borowski’s work, for which there are no words. He’s countering the lies in many of those comments on CIF, that far from Jews trying to own the Shoah, some fight even now for the recognition of other victims, hence Gorin’s article. There isn’t anything else you’ve said I care to comment on".

Well I have not read Gorin's argument. I can't read everything. But the point is that Borowski's message is that cruelty is not the sole property of any one nation for all time and nations once on the right side can become bad and corrupted.

Anyway, AbeT can counter as many lies as he wishes so long as he does not distort or misrepresent what I have said. I have the right to respond and defend myself from smears and false allegations of anti-semitism. I'm not an expert on the Israel-Palestine question which is complex.

There is no "interference" with Borowski's work, whatever "interference is supposed to mean. The reason you won't comment on the rest and resort to abuse is simply the reaction of the uneducated mind frightened by one that puts forward an argument that is logical and clear.

The historical vandalism of the Glory Monument is one erected to commemorate the defeat of Hitler's Nazi Germany. The regime that initiated the Final Solution. It was not a commemoration of Stalin but of the Red Army soldiers who died.

The destruction of the monument was an unnecessary act of state driven vandalism based on ideology and an insult to the 300,000 Georgians who died in World War II.

This kind of iconoclasm is part and parcel of the same attempt to wipe out history and rewrite it, erasing all traces. The kind of nationalism of which Nazism was the most extreme version. There is nothing remotely anti-semitic in pointing that out.

Salome Zurabishvili, who formerly served as foreign minister under Saakashvili, said the demolition showed blatant disregard for Georgia's wartime sacrifices. The monument was demolished. The Polish government said nothing about an act as disrespectful as the theft.

Why are you so bigoted and closed minded that you cannot see the double standards. The reason is that Israel is an ally of Saakashvili and even though Georgia has allied with 'revisionist' right wing governments in the Baltics, anybody who points out that is "anti-Israeli".

Some years back Ariel Sharon, hardly the most popular Israeli leader, paid homage to the Jewish contingent in the Red Army that liberated Auschwitz. It would not be too much to ask for leading Israeli politicians to reprimand Saakashvili.

Imagine in Poland if an entire monument to the Jewish ghetto Rising was simplt demolished. That would rightly mean an international condemnation. But Soviet lives lost in a struggle along with Russia to free Europe from genocidal anti-semtic Fascism mean nothing.

Zurabishvili attacked the president as a "barbarian" and saaid "This is a memorial to those people who fought for freedom against Nazism. Georgians and non-Georgians, Europeans and Jews who were killed in World War II,".

The Auschwitz theft was appalling but the demolition of this Glory Monument was non news in the West, though it killed Eka Tsutskhvashvili-Jincharadze and her daughter Nino when flying chunks of concrete caused by the blast hit them.

Saakashvili has made no secret of his dislike for the Glory Monument's creator, 82-year-old sculptor Merab Berdzenishvili whose previous sculpture of King David the Builder was moved from central Tbilisi to an outlying street several years ago on Saakashvili's direct orders.

It is shocking that those who remember the Holocaust have nothing to say about the destruction of the Glory Memorial, which featured an armed horseman stabbing a Nazi with a spear, an image reminiscent of St. George, a patron saint in Georgia, slaying the dragon.

The Dragon is Nazi Germany. As the artist stated,

"It's an antiwar statement. It's a very complex composition, with a lot of interwoven motifs. Every epoch has its dragons. And for the 20th century, it was fascism."

If anything is shocking it is that those who claim to care about the Holocaust for its cruelty and mass murder feel wholly incapable of condemning this action merely because of the lucrative arms contracts and geopolitical alliance Israel has with Georgia.

Condemning people who oppose the particular foreign policies of governments as "anti-semitic" is close to those who labelled opponents to Hitler "un-German". It is a way of smearing the legitimate criticism of double standards.

Happy New Year for 2010-The Anniversary of Chopin's Birth

This year is the 200th anniversary of Chopin's birth. I thought I'd ride out the New Year peacefully without celebrations



Well, that's the last article for the year. Happy New Year to all those who read this blog. I suppose I am getting pretty focused on the Great Game and the destruction of Krakow under neoliberal consumer pressures and irresponsible Tourists as I've not even bothered celebrating the coming of the New Year. Tomorrow the blog continues as usual. As it has over the last year since early January 2009. Well, it is 01:19 AM. Time to go to bed.

Radek Sikorski's Pointless Patriots.

The fact that Sikorski's Public Diplomacy with regards the Patriot Missiles is about maintaining face after Obama pulled the plug on the Missile Shield inherited from the Bush administration is even admitted by an article in the U.S. semi-official military newspaper Stars and Stripes

Which is not the way it was reported in Poland. Which is ironic given the way that when the Missile Shield deal was negotiated just after the Russo-Georgia War of August 2008 was all meant to be about attaching conditions to the US deployment in Poland's interests.

Stars and Stripes states that the Obama administration’s plan for placing a limited number of Patriot missiles in Poland has no military significance and is being implemented largely for diplomatic reasons to appease Warsaw.
As Opinia US or Amerikanskie Opinie revealed,

Stars and Sripes published by the Pentagon but maintains editorial independence. The Obama administration, eager to get Russia’s cooperation in dealing with Iran, is putting out several conflicting public relations messages.

After cancelling the Bush anti-ballistic missile defense plan in an effort to appease Russia, it wants to appease Poland and other Central European nations by promoting a militarily insignificant Patriot missile placement.

At the same time, the U.S. administration also wants to send a signal to Russia that the Patriot system to be placed in Poland has little military value and will not lead to a large number of U.S. soldiers being stationed in Poland.

They certainly sound browned off by that as is evident in the repetition of the term "appeasement" which has to be one of those overworn and cliched terms that Orwell termed meaningless word in Politics and the English Language.

Russia bears no resemblance to the Soviet Union nor even the Tsarist Empire never mind Hitler's Germany which is conflated as the equivalent of the Stalin's Russia and thus to not defend Saakshvili against "Russian Aggression" is thus "appeasement".

Apart from the fact that Saakashvili attacked South Ossetia in August 2008, after having risen to power on a far right nationalist platform based on the insistence on reintegrating South Ossetia and Abkhazia, words like "appeasement" work to to the thinking without facts.

It is a form of what the writer Steven Poole calls Unspeak, byte size chunks of language into which a whole host of assumptions and connotations are packaged into order to enforce ideological orthodoxies that allow complex political dilemmas to be reduced to propaganda.

A propaganda that advances power unchallenged. The "appeasement" trope is one peddled out to all those who did not believe in the highly risky venture of invading Iraq in 2003, as ir every conflict was an action replay or from the same World War Two narrative.

Opinie Amerikanskie reveal Unspeak in the following sentence,

The Poles believe that President Obama’s foreign policy goals in dealing with countries like Russia, Iran and Cuba are based on naive assumptions. They also realize that the proposed Patriot system is of little military value to them but want a larger number of U.S. soldiers to be stationed in Poland as an extra guarantee of U.S. commitment to protect its ally against Russia.

"The Poles" do not believe that: only the Polish government believes that and most of "the Poles" are not even informed what's at stake in these wars, whether the TAPI pipeline being central to the surge in Afghanistan and the Great Game against Russia.

Onlt neoconservative fanatics like Radek Sikorski and his government onlt pretend its the beginning of getting the US army bases to locate into Poland rather than remain in West Germany where they have been since the Cold War

As Stars and Stripes reported,

....the battery is expected to come from U.S. Army Europe’s one remaining Patriot unit, the 5th Battalion 7th Air Defense Artillery, based in Kaiserslautern....

"It is coming from Germany," said Jan Filip Stanilko, an analyst at the Warsaw-based Sobieski Institute, a political think tank. "It was settled during previous negotiations."

The previous negotiations were under the Bush administration, which had agreed as part of its ballistic missile-defense posture to place 10 ground-based, long-range missile interceptors on a base in Poland. "It’s totally nonsense," Stanilko said. "One battery doesn’t change anything. It can defend one district (of a city.) From a military point of view, it’s irrelevant; it won’t defend Poland at all. It’s a symbolic gesture."

John Pike, director of globalsecurity.org. seconded the opinion that the move of missiles and troops was a "a complete waste of everybody’s time in order to save face".

The Stars and Stripes report shows that Poland's foreign policy is based on a neurotic and paranoid interpretation of Russian interests which lie not to the West but in 'the stans' and consolidating the nation state against attempts to gets Ukraine and Georgia into NATO.

That, the surge in Afghanistan, the illegal and criminal attack on Iraq in 2003 , the pouring of billions of dollars into boosterising Georgia a US style democracy, at least in PR terms even if the reality remains different on the ground, and Polands uncritical support means it fears conflict.

Conflicts anticipated as the result of its continued support for the most hawkish and aggressive aspects of US neoconservativism which in Catch 22 logic figures that the U.S. would be more likely to respond if Poland were attacked if Americans were on the ground.

That is after Russia was unnecesarily provoked in the first place by a Missile Shield that was supposed to be directed at Iran but which Sikorski did everything to hint would be aimed at those who has threatened Poland in the past. Which means Russia.

Bad history is routine with Polish based "think tanks"

Stanilko pointed out that Poland had defense pacts with Great Britain and France before it was invaded in 1939. But neither came to its defense as it was invaded by both Germany and the Soviets.

After 40 years of Soviet domination, Poland views Russia as its biggest threat. "It’s from historical experience," Stanilko said. "If you ask any neighbor of Russia, they say that they are aggressive and imperialist."

Then again its gone down the Orwellian memory hole that Poland made a pact with Hitler's Germany in 1934 which was a major tactical mistake and which made the Soviet Union even more paranoid that it was before.

The Big Lie in all this is that Poland is part of NATO and Article 5 means that Russia could not attack Poland and would have no reason to as it would destroy its market for its oil and gas. Only the Bear Baiting, the attempt to surround and encircle Russia will poison relations.

Unfortunately, it is the Polish elites in the vanguard of causing trouble because it cannot break out of the mindset of hating and distrusting Russia as the Tsarist enemy and then the Soviet Union. It's understandable but there comes a time when a line has to be drawn under it.

"Anti-Semitic" Watch Dog Brands Me "Anti-Semitic".

A certain unimportant website like CiF Watch has accused me of anti-semitism for daring to compare the theft of the Auschwitz sign with Saakashvili's demolition of an entire site dedicated to the Soviet War dead in Georgia.

This absurd smear could not be allowed to pass uncontested.

CiF Watch makes the following claim,

Peter Lazenby wrote an appropriately sensitive piece about the theft of the sign from the Auschwitz concentration camp which displayed both empathy for the victims of the Holocaust and an understanding of the real lessons of that part of history.

Many of the comments below the line displayed the exact opposite. Some were even decidedly perverse; I cannot put this down to mere ignorance.There were those who tried to diminish the scale and meaning of the Holocaust.

In my case the charge was clear-"there were those who had things to say about the ‘Holocaust industry’ and ‘propaganda"’.

My letter of response was this,

Parrotting words like "Holocaust Denial" and "Anti-semitism" in relation to individuals like myself ( pseudonym undergroundman ) who make it quite clear that the Holocaust was a definite and undeniable fact is more and indictment of your own Stalinoid style smear tactics.

I made it clear and have in every article I have written comparing Saakashvili's ideological state vandalism of the Kutaisi monument with the theft of the Auschwitz sign that direct comparisons should and ought to be made for reasons those who are against anti-semitism should agree with.

The double standards are in my view

1) The theft of the sign was not ideologically motivated. The crooks who stole it intended to pass it on to a Swedish Nazi memorobilia collector, at least as far as the Polish police investigations have so far revealed. The demolition of the Kutaisi War monument was ideological

2) Avner Shalev, director of Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, said the theft “constitutes a true declaration of war”, he made it into an ideologicval act of violence which it was not, despite how offensive the theft was.

3) Saakashvili demolished an entire war monument, wiping out the entire memory of the joint Russian and Georgian struggle against Nazi Germany. The Arbeit Mach Frei sign was recovered. The demolition of the war monument was not news in the West

4) Free thinking people have every right to challenge this without paranoid ideologues accusing those who criticise Israel's geopolitics as being "anti-semites". The same is true of those thought policemen who have accused me of Islamophobia for criticising Islamism.

5) Disagreement is possible. There should be no hierarchy of victims nor politicisation of either the Holocaust nor of the fact many Red Army soldiers died in defeating Nazism and had no choice but to fight the Nazi regime.

6) That such nuance, subtlety and the universal value of all human life whether Jewish or Russia or Arabic is beyond you is clearly something both vulgar and unbecoming of honourable people. Anti-semitism and Jew hatred is repugnant. So is hating Muslims or Russians.

On my website I have exposed the far right anti-semitic backround to organisations backed by the West, including Liberal Democratic Baroness Nicholson who were behing Moldova's Twitter Revolution. To smear me as an anti-semite is a propaganda smear without substance.

You really are just very stupid people.

Yes, there are those who scrawl "Zionazism" on the Guardian's website, who propose conspiracy theories etc and their arguments should be dissected. To label anybody who questions the way the Holocaust has been commemorated as anti-semitic, however, is to devalue the concept.

The most stupid allegation was the one where a certain AbeT accused me of anti-semitism for quoting Tadeusz Borowski's ironocally entitled This Way gor the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,

AbeT

”The first duty of Auschwitzers is to make clear just what a camp is, but let them not forget that the reader will unfailingly ask: But how did it happen that you survived?. Tell, then, how you bought places in the hospital, easy posts, how you shoved the Moslems' [prisoners who had lost the will to live] into the oven, how you bought women, men, what you did in the barracks, unloading the transports, tell about the daily life of the camp. But write that you, you were the ones who did this. That a portion of the sad fame of Auschwitz belongs to you as well?”

I responded to this utter dolt in the only way possible,

This was written by Tadeusz Borowski in a masterpiece of Polish and world literature.

Borowski was an inmate of Auschwitz. You were not. He knew what he saw. He was a Pole and his work This Way to the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen is an excoriating attack on the way Auschwitz became a normal way of life.

Most Polish and Jewish literary scholars regard this book as a great work of art and searing description of Auschwitz. Your ignorance on the Holocaust is a matter for deep concern if you think quoting Borowski is an act of anti-semitism. Deeply, deeply stupid

Holocaust Commemoration and Geopolitics.

Norman Davies in Europe at War 1939-1945: No Simple Victory writes that there are some historical sites that appeal so powerfully to the collective memory that they exclude or minimise others.

As Davies writes, as regards Jewish history, Auschwitz has "become a near sacred subject" that "actively obstructs the broader vision and discriminating approach so badly needed". As Davies points out Auschwitz is not the most appropriate choice of site as most Jews perished at Treblinka and Sobibor.

Moreover, to do so in a way that "offends" the sensibilities of current Israeli interests, politicians and lobby groups runs the risk of having the branded as guilty of "anti-semitism" by various Orwellian thought policing watchdogs of the Anti-Defamation League variety

In 2009 the enforced orthodoxy on how the Holocaust just must be privileged and commemorated over all else was shown in the double standards evident in the run up to the season of goodwill that was Christmas 2009.

On December 17 2009,the banner Arbeit Mach Frei was stolen from the gates of Auschwitz and caused, understandably, international condemnation as being more than theft but, as museum spokesman Pawel Swicki said "a desecration of this place".

Then Silvan Shalom, one of Israel's deputy prime ministers, denounced it an as "abominable act that amounts to profanation" claiming that it demonstrated "hatred and violence against Jews" but, curiously, not against Poles, Roma, homosexuals or, most significantly, Russians.

For then a hierarchy of victimhood became apparent. On December 19 2009 a Soviet War memorial in Kutaisi in Georgia was blown up and completely destroyed without a peep in the West. Unlike the Auchwitz theft the botched explosion killed a woman and child of eight.

Now Auschwitz is listed as World Heritage site whilst the monument in Kutaisi was not but the point at stake was that Saakashvili's state driven act of iconoclasm received virtually no media attention whilst the Auschwitz theft was subject to rumours of a "Neo-Nazi plot".

Avner Shalev, the president of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, said that the theft was a "declaration of war." and added hysterically that "We don't know the identity of the perpetrators, but I assume they are neo-Nazis".

There was no evidence of that at all but it was obvious that Saakashvili's regime was consciously destroying in entirety a monument to an event of world historical significance too: the Red Armies defeat of Hitler's Nazi Germany in 1945.

The pretext was that it needed to be demolished for a new Parliament building, a symbol of "Georgian democracy" replacing "Stalinist Soviet totalitarianism", as if, of course, the Parliament building could not be built anywhere else.

Such pretexts are little different from the sneering condescension implicit in the Nazis belief that Synagoues had to be knocked down to make way for new car parks which would be useful in the New Reich unlike past monuments to a culture and people that would no longer have priority.

The contrary contention could be that as Auschwitz was a place where civilians, men women and children were intentionally exterminated and therefore different from a memorial dedicated to the fallen soldiers of the Soviet military the destruction is different in its magnitude.

Yet the Auschwitz sign was returned, though broken in three pieces, whilst all that was left of the Soviet War Memorial was a rubble of concrete and twisted iron. So the scale of the destruction was not comparable.

True, the War Memorial in Kutaisi could be rebuilt as Putin and Moscow's Mayor have indicated that it will but what makes an iron banner made by the Nazis a more precious relic than an entire monument other than the significance attached to it by those who suffered in the war ?

The Arbeit Macht Frei banner could have been replaced with a replica, as it quicky was by the Museum authorities, for it possesses in itself no supranatural qualities of evil as an authentic relic and is far more easy to replace than an entire monument. It's a symbol.

Moreover, the Soviet War monument was demolished in a nation ruled by a leader whose gesture signifies that anything Russian is now a symbol of evil incarnate whilst the Auchwitz sign was pilfered by crooks who wanted to make a fast buck from selling it to a Swedish collector.

The fact that Auschwitz is a symbol of the Nazi treatment of civilians whilst the Soviet monument was dedicated to soldiers who were combantants is no comparison either: Red Army soldiers had no choice whether they could fight or not.

Nazi Germany regarded the Slavs of the USSR was untermensch, perhaps not as low on the scale as Jews, but scheduled for a massive project of ethnic cleansing and "relocation" East of the Urals with most of its leaders, intellectuals and people exterminated in the process.

In the commemoration of those who perished during the Second World War there should be no hierarchies of collective victimhood. Yet as is usual this happens because of partisan nationalist agenda want to prioritise the suffering of one group to advance current policies.

That's clear with the joint Israeli and Polish attitude towards Saakashvili and the silence in both nations over the demolitions of Soviet War monuments as was clear with the demolition of munument of the Bronze Soldier in Tallinn in Estonia in 2007.

For Polish and Baltic leaders the Soviet Union which liberated Auschwitz was a totalitarian state run by a dictator who ran a network of concentration camps even larger than that of the Nazis and that consumed hundreds of thousands of Poles.

The idea that the Soviet Union 'liberated' the Poles and Balts was a sick joke. Yet the Soviet War monuments, no matter their monumentalist and imposing design, were still monuments primarily to the Red Army soldiers and not Stalin and the hated NKVD commissars.

The difference between the average "Ivan" and the political commissars riding around in their US provided jeeps and arresting those grumbling at the military directives of propaganda of The Party was commented on by Vasily Grossman in his novel Life and Fate and his journalism.

It was Grossman's belief that victims are people to whom things are done and they have no innate tendency to virtue which they may or may not have. To establish a hierachy of victimhood is morally wrong, though it was necessary to finish off Nazi Germany.

As Grossman knew ideologically rationalised mass murder for a 'higher cause' was wrong no matter who commits it, whether the Nazis or the Soviets. Yet Grossman was still proud of the Soviet war acheivement for all its incompetence, callous waste of lives and the dominance of Stalin ( a Georgian ).

For the simple fact is that without the Soviet war effort on the Eastern Front, the Second World War would not have been won and most Jews would have been comprehensively and conclusively exterminated. The Soviet victory stopped the Final Solution.

Moreover, Grossman was one of the first reporters to witness and write on the extermination camp at Treblinka where his mother from Berdichev in Ukraine was transported and then perished. This is why despite the Stalinist regime he lauded the Soviet War effort.

The Soviet Union was a multinational Imperium and not Greater Russia writ large, a notion encouraged by Stalin to galvinise the largest component of the Soviet Union to fight to the last after the epochal battles outside Moscow, Stalingrad and Leningrad.

For tactical reasons that had more traction as Hitler sought primarily to exterminate Slavs and Jews in the Soviet Union and not Georgians and certainly not Balts, some of whom resisted the Soviet occupation of their nations in 1940 by joining Nazi SS units.

That it was a matter of course that Jews in the Soviet Union were scheduled for extinction was obvious: Hitler had come to power and continually played on Judeo-Bolshevism in his propaganda even before the outbreak of war in 1939.

Hence insulting the memory of those all those killed by destroying monuments raised to commemorate those who defeated Nazism is ethically wrong and repugnant to those with humanity and dignity who remember all those ordinary people who were killed.

The double standard of politicians in 2009 who wax indignant about the theft of the Auscwitz sign but remain silent on the destruction of the Soviet War memorials is a stain on their dignity as statesmen.

David Miliband, himself of Polish-Jewish origin, is always ready to invoke Holocaust Denial as a way of discrediting the Tories who at this moment are making alliances with right wing populists in Poland and in the Baltics with shadowy pasts and strains of anti-semitic propaganda.

Yet when Saakashvili makes racist statements about 'the Russians', blows up monuments to the soldiers whose struggle essentially won the Second World War there is no mention of that because Saakashvili is a strategic Western ally, albeit a highly unreliable and dangerous one.

Double standards and hierarchies of collective victimhood, the egg of ethnic conflict and war, play a part in the silence of Western politicians as might in many cases, simple plain ignorance of events there.

Yet the moral reckoning is clear: the theft of the Arbeit Mach Frei sign was committed by crooks for non-ideological reasons and to please a ghoulish Nazi memorabilia collector. Saakashvili blew up the Soviet war monument in Kutaisi for nationalistic ideological reasons.

Saakashvili did so and not one mention of it in the Western media whilst the Auschwitz story ran and ran in the media. The Guardian, the Telegraph, The Times and The Independent all ignored what should have been a major news story.

Yet to even dare to make comparisons between Saakshvili's actions and the theft of the Auschwitz sign was to invite censure, anger and censorship. I made the comparison in relation to a piece by Peter Lazenby and the Guardian censored these comments.

Lazenby, without caring to establish much in the way of the facts in the Auschwitz theft incident simply used it to mouth commonplaces about the Holocaust that any reasonable and sane person would with regards its horrors and minutely calculated cruelty.

The theft of this symbol filled me with horror, reminding me of the continuing attempt by Holocaust deniers and apologists to erase evidence of the depravity of nazism. Indeed, the theft risked symbolising the nazism's resurgence, and the continuing growth of racism embraced and promoted by organisations such as the British National party.

The theft had nothing to do with neo-Nazi organisations but Lazenby continued to insinuate all that as a matter of course being the 'good anti-fascist' he wants to amply demonstrate that he is rather like those banal ideological jobsworths Orwell satirised in Coming Up for Air.

With the sign now returned and the five suspects arrested, however, reports are quoting the district police chief denying that those responsible are members of a neo-Nazi group.

In which case, why see the theft as 'symbolic' of Holocaust Denial. There was no ideological motivation behind it. In which case why draw all those cliched and tired out tropes about 'the evil of racism' as if most people who know about the Holocaust accept it and realise ?

Not least when at precisely that moment a far right nationalist in Georgia who supports the historical revisionism that obfuscates the collaboration between Baltic Nazis and Hitler's regime was blowing up a war monument dedicated to the Soviet soldiers who liberated Auschwitz.

Lazenby opined,

It is worth remembering that now, as in the 1930s and 40s, lies are the foundation on which the philosophy of racism is built.

No, it just isn't. Racism is not necessarily based on 'lies' as such but on corrupt governments seeking to legitimise their power and using racist ideas and ethnocentric 'identity politics' to bolster what are often geopolitical agendas based on the hunger for natural resources.

The great Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski, who had the distinction of living through Auschwitz and writing one of the finest works of world literature on it, realised that Auschwitz was a microcosm of real life naturalistic conflicts over commodities and struggle to survive.

That kind of evil is not sole prerogative of the Nazis who have been singled out as the ultimate exemplar of ultimate evil in a secularised West dominated by the USA, a simplistic narrative of seamless Allied Good from the Second World War to Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003.

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a blatant resource war and though racism was not used as an explicit rationalisation for why 'we' should invade predominantly Muslim lands and control their oil, the narrative of "Islamofascism" can be used as a pretext to occupy their lands.

The propaganda trope of "Islamofascism" was able to function in the same manner as "Judeobolshevism" or even "Neo-Sovietism" to denote a resurgent threat that conflates Al Qaida, the Taliban, Iran, Iraq and other nations as an imminent existential threat to 'us'.

One that shares the same psychopathology of dividing the world into Manichaean categories of Good and Evil that Nazism did, though without the more explicit racial philosophy and without the exterminatory intent.

This, of course, is a large difference but the point is that atavistic 'them' and 'us' dichotomies and narratives of Civilisation versus Asiatic Barbarism were a staple of Nazi thinking and a perverted outgrowth of the hubristic elements of eighteenth Enlightenment thinking on modernity.

Israel continually justifies current policies towards the Palestinians upon this basis and it is hardly coincidental that in the pantheon of worthy and unworthy victims of history that Israel's strategic position for the USA in the Middle East requires investment in the Holocaust narrative

Holocaust Remembrance has become part of the mythology of the Good War tradition that the Anglo-American or Atlanticist power bloc wishes to stress as reason for why NATO should have a right to intervene, the idea of 'liberal' or 'humanitarian intervention'.

This is why in Serbia in 1999 Milosevic was "another Hitler" an evil dictator intent on exterminating Kosovan Albanians when the truth about the ethnic conflict there was far more complicated and the USA had already built up the KLA before outright war had begun.

Hence the narrrative in the global media culture was already there when Milosevic and Serbian forces, barely requiring much provocation, responded to KLA guerilla attacks on Serb police stations and to drive out Albanian villlages whilst the KLA killed Serbs.

That was all screened from perception by the "stop genocide" propaganda that has since been used since 1999 to justify invasions on a moralistic and oversimplified version of events refracted through an increasingly pliant and uncritical media. As witnessed with Iraq.

The opening of a Holocaust Museum in London in 2000 is one was of cementing this narrative as was the opening of the huge US Holocaust Museum in Washington in 1993. However, whilst the Holocaust was a fact and needs to be remembered so too should the political subtext.

As Norman Davies writes,

For reasons that are more connected to post-war politics than with the USA's war effort, Americans have chosen to make the Jewish tragedy the focal point of their remembrance.

In fact in the immediate and traumatic aftermath of the Second World War little attention was paid to the Holocaust, though the facts has come out during the war and were transmitted West by Poles like Jan Karski who leaked it West in 1942-1943

By which time the USA had only just entered the war as a result of the Pearl Harbour attack and the Japanese threat in the Pacific. The USA did not go to war to save the Jews and barely responded at all to the news as conveyed to Karski in July 1943.

Most of the USA's resources went into winning the war in the Pacific theatre as that had been from the late nineteenth century its predominant sphere of interest after colonising the West and then grabbing overseas colonies such as the Phillipines, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and Cuba.

The emphasis on the Holocaust only began in the 1960s when Israel became an integral part of the USA's strategy in the Middle East to counteract the influence exerted by the Soviet Union within the Arab nationalist dictatorships after it had abandoned its earler support for Israel.

In fact, it was the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakian armaments that had been given to the infant Israeli state created in 1948 just three years after the War in Europe and the Holocaust had ended. The USA had very little role in the Middle East until the late 1950s and 1960s.

That was when it was clear that the European Empires of Britain and France were collapsing and that the USA would have to step in to shore up its interests and contain the spread of Third World anti-colonial movements often influenced by the Soviet Union's Leninist ideology.

At the same time it became more convenient for Soviet republics and satellites to peddle a low grade anti-semitism to divert discontent at the system and with the later collapse of the land remaining great European land Empire in the Soviet Union in 1991, a new trend emerged.

That of 'anti-totalitarianism' as being a new faith creed of the neoconservatives, many of whom believed that the realpolitik of the Cold War should only be a method towards the end of the global emancipation of all nations under the sway of the remnants of the old Cold War order.

The two main targets for that in the 1990s would increasingly be Russia, because it stood in the way of US dominance in the oil and gas rich ex-Soviet republics of Central Asia, and states like Iraq, Syria and Iran which were scheduled for 'regime change'.

This geopolitics explains the reason why Polish and Israeli politicians had nothing to say about the demolition of Soviet War memorials in ex-Soviet republics. As in 1984, this past no longer exists. Georgia is a strategic asset for the passage of oil from the Caspian Sea to the West.

Georgia under Saakashvili also has invested millions of dollars on rebranding its image as a New Israel under threat from hostile big bully neighbours, i.e Russia, whose elite is merely neo-Soviet and this the moral equivalent of other totalitarians like the Nazis.

The historical fact that the Georgians, some 30,000 of whom fell in the fight against Nazism was no longer an established fact to be remembered, unlike the Holocaust whose memory was in danger of being obliterated.

At least according to shrill and sententious windbags like Lazenby, who saw the theft of Arbeit Mach frei sign as an indication of a massive neo-fascist resurgence despite being unconnected to even the most oddball cranks who spend their lives denying the Holocaust

Naturally just to mention that those Georgians and Russian officials who protested at the detonation of the Kutaisi monument as sacrilege and reminiscent of the Nazi iconoclasm again Jewish graveyards and Synagogues was strictly verboten.

In bringing to attention this matter to the Guardian, my comments on the blogsite were not only removed but I have had my status as a commenter rescinded. Which is not important in the scheme of things but indicative of a petty mindset that affects liberalism without being liberal.

The parallel between what Saashavili has done and the Nazis did is a legitimate comparison that does nothing to diminish the Holocaust but draws attention to the universal significance of wiping out monuments and landmarks of memory.

Bringing up the comparison does not diminish the theft of the sign over the Gates of Auschwitz but was meant to extend the debate in as thoughful manner was possible. In 2009 a liberal newspaper in the United Kingdom decides it can not and will not accept that.

Sergei Karaganov-Russia, the EU and USA versus China

Sergei Karaganov is a Russian political scientist, a close associate of Yevgeny Primakov, and has been Presidential Advisor to Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin. In the Guardian he has written

Rapid changes in the global economy and international politics are raising, once more, an eternal issue in Russia: the country's relations with Europe, and with the Euro-Atlantic region as a whole. Of course, Russia partly belongs to this region.

Yet it cannot and does not want to join the west wholeheartedly – at least not yet. Meanwhile, this choice looks very different now compared with just a few years ago.

It is becoming obvious that the Euro-Atlantic world, whose economic and political model seemed so triumphant 20 years ago, is now lagging somewhat behind China and other Asian countries.

So is Russia, where, despite encouraging talk about innovation-based development, the economy continues to demodernise as corruption has been allowed to metastasise, and as the country relies increasingly on its natural resource wealth.

Indeed, it is Asia that has turned out to be the true winner of the cold war.

The idea of Russia becoming part of NATO is not as absurd as it first seems to those who are not hardened neoconservatives. US foreign policy has always been ambiguous towards Russia on the principle laid down by Machiavelli that,

"...it must be noted, that men must either be caressed or else annihilated; they will revenge themselves for small injuries, but cannot do so for great ones; the injury therefore that we do to a man must be such that we need not fear his vengeance"

The shifting realpolitik line in Washington in recent years towards Russia has been dictated by the idea that Russia can act as an ally where there are shared geopolitical interests such as combatting Islamists who threaten the best laid pipeline plans from Chechnya to Afghanistan.

It is often forgotten that in 2001 Putin was content to allow bases in ex-Soviet lands to be used to bomb Afghanistan and Obama's 'reset' of relations with Russia is a strategy to get enough breathing space to get the TAPI pipeline built and divert control of gas from the Kremlin.

On the other hand, the Obama's 'reset' is about trying to break up the Moscow-Tehran-Damascus axis by offering Russia the prospect of greater investment opportunities and mutually beneficial partnerships if it proves willing to trust in US global leadership.

Yet what the US is prepared to offer with the one hand if authoritarian powers 'unclench their fists' will be taken as a weakness ready to unleash what Thomas Friedman called the 'hidden fist' of US as opposed to the 'iron fist' of Russia.

Friedman is important because he also is a member of the same Council on Foreign Relations that Sergei Karaganov was as an International Advisor from 1995 to 2005 and he regulary media frames current US foreign policy to fit in with current fad that the elite toy along with.

To Friedman Russia's 'iron fist', as revealed belief in Russian "aggression" against Georgia, is reversion to previous form as well as others that Karaganov has tried to mollify in suggesting that the USA, the EU and Russia have more mutual areas of interest than division.

The problem has been that Russia insists on being treated as an equal in any partnership with the USA which is anathema to those like Zbigniew Brzezinski who is both a member of the CFR, the Trilateral Committee and Obama's foreign policy advisor.

For Friedman, Bill Emmot of the Economist etc etc that cannot happen until Russia has yielded control over its economy to US and EU corporations, the real meaning of ending the idea of the 'nation state' which Karaganov believes the EU has in its 'post-modern imperium'.

As Friedman has opined,

The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15.

And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.

This statement is curious as his neoliberal dogma is that democratic states do not attack others, though this is patently disproved by Saakashvili's ethnically divided Georgia which is at least partly democratic depite the USA endorsing the rigged election of 2003's "Rose Revolution".

But ,of course, his "theory" is disproved by the actual history of NATO expansion in the 1990s as the USA, a democracy, regarded non-communist Russia under Yeltsin as a democracy but one which was Russian and still hence innately prone to aggression. Unlike the USA.

Which makes a farce of Karaganov's statement that,

Europe is overcoming state nationalism, while Russia is building a nation state. Broken by history and not wishing to be ravaged by war again, Europeans have embraced compromise and renounced the direct use of force in international relations

Without that line, the USA would never have had to be able to draw on fear of Russia to bring states next to Russia into NATO and make a fortune from the sale of weapons systems in which the war on Serbia in 1999 was the first step in establishing real credibility.

Credibility that NATO, under US auspices, will be able to win global hegemony back through the plan to dominate Eurasia and in which regard Russia is either for it or against it but never going to be treated as a permanent 'regional power' Which is why Brzezinski terms it 'a black hole'.

And why Karaganov writes without irony that,

Russians, on the other hand, emphasise their "hard power", including military force, because they know that they live in a dangerous world and have no one to hide behind.

Internal political developments in Russia are also pushing the country in a different direction from the west. Quite simply, Russia is moving away from democracy.

Russia is not moving away from democracy. It is becoming an hybrid of authoritarian government and democracy and, in that sense, the USA has actually moved more in its direction in recent years.

If Russia's 'soft' power is not as developed as the USA's it is because Karamagov has not seen that this takes time: the USA has been perfecting a stage managed oligarchical form of democracy since the beginning of the twentieth century.

More subtle mechanisms of indocrination, persuasion and mind control over the masses were developed in corporate America as Aldous Huxley knew than the crude ones of totalitarian propaganda that ultimately failed along with Soviet Communism.

The fear of China is based not only on its emerging economic stregth and ascent to superpower status but also because Enlightenment ideas of human rights have little traction there as they do amongst Russians, though distorted by fake NGOS led by hirelings posing as "dissidents".

The mostly unanimous support across the board, including many in the CFR, for the invasion of Iraq was based on the fear of securing energy ( i.e oil and gas ) and using that as a lever on an energy hungry China which is making inoroads on controlling resources across the globe.

The membership of the CFR reads like a Who's Who Guide to recent proponents of "liberal interventionism" from Serbia, to Afghanistan to Iraq such as Richard Holbrooke and Madeleine Albright on the Board of Directors.

Other members include Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Mikhail Fridman ( Russian oligarch ), Robert Gates, Robert Kagan ( of PNAC fame ), John Kerry, Henry Kissenger, John McCain, Richard Pipes, PBS's Charlie Rose, George Soros and Angelina Jolie ( UN Goodwill Role ).

Karaganov, as an ex-Communist and member of the Trilateral Commission as well and fervent believer in Westernism and the Enlightenment, clearly sees that if Russia and the West worked together total global dominance over the 'the rest' would be assured.

Narurally conspiracy theorists will see the whole thing as one united sinister plot but in the real world, of course, the elite are divided over tactics and strategies though the goal of dominating Euraia is not as it became the ultimate geopolitical gambit of Great Britain after WW1.

Yet the CFR derives from Wilsonian ideas about advocating the break up of all Empires ( other than the obvious one ) and which was contemporaneous with the geopolitical theories of Sir Halford MacKinder in the twilight of the British Empire.

The Heartland Theory stated in 1919 runs,

"Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;

who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island;

who rules the World-Island controls the world."

Any Great Power which controlled the World-Island would control well over 50% of the world's resources. The Heartland's size and centrality made it the key to controlling and dominating the World-Island where the world remaining major resources of oil and gas lie.

The vital question was how to secure control of the Heartland. This question may seem pointless, since in 1904 the Russian Empire had ruled most of the area from the Volga to Eastern Siberia for centuries.

Yet throughout the 19^th century the possibility was always there when West European powers had combined in the Great Game to prevent Russian expansion as in the Crimean War or at the Congress of Berlin ( 1878 ) and in Asia through Britain's position in India.

The First World War saw the Great Powers in Europe destroy one another whilst the Russian Revolution led to the creation of the USSR, the rise of Stalin, the defeat of Hitler's threat after a brief carve up of Eastern Europe between them and then the USSR's Eurasian dominance.

With the demise of the USSR in 1991 the Russian Commonwealth was a shrunken version of even the Tsarist Empire before World War One and that provided the USA, or 'the West, to try and expand influence into the chain of ex-Soviet Republics from the Caucasus to 'the stans'.

Mackinder held that effective political domination of the Heartland by a single power had been unattainable in the past because of poor transport networks but today the what Brzezinski terms the Grand Chessboard is there with the pieces already on it a more of less positioned.

The problem is the "reality on the ground" where control is hindered by 'barbarian tribes' who threaten to destroy those pipelines which play the same strategic equivalent that the transcontinental railroads did to the Great Powers before World War One.

Karaganov's agenda is to incorporate Russia into NATO or the West as a counter to Russia merely being a weak and corrupt energy exporter surrounded by the richer EU to one side, China to the other and states that are essential US geopolitical clients to the south ( e.g Georgia ).

The Continuities between the Soviet Union and Yeltsins's Neoliberal Russia of the 1990s.

Whenever the fall of the Soviet Union is discussed, there tend to be those who fall into rival camps. Some pro-Soviet "Ostalgics" and those neoliberals who think native Russian political conditions thwarted perfectly good economic reform proposals.

The economic conditions of Russians in the 1990s was seldom considered news after the end of the Cold War and the triumphalism that greeted the demise of the Evil Empire in the West.

Partly because Putin has now thwarted Western investors ripping of Russian assets, some $300 billion in the Yeltsin era, and for removing the pro-Western oligarchs like Berezovsky and Khodorkovsy from power.

That is bad news for an energy hungry West that wanted Russia as a semi-colonised outpost of Western influence and to be able to control the oil and gas of the 'the stans'. Which is why Zbigniew Brzezinski referred to it in the Grand Chessboard in chapter Two as 'The Black Hole'.

So the media propaganda in the Western NGOs and think tanks grind out petty screeds parrotting in shrill tones the same line that Putin is a Stalinist dictator, the "Russian attack on Georgia" in 2008 and, the key cliche, "a resurgent Russia".

However, the real emphasis should be put not on the respective merits of the Soviet Union as against Yeltsin's Russia, though the changes were obviously considerable and of huge geopolitical significance. Either-or dichotomies appeal only to witless ideologues.

The stress should be on the continuities, what Tony Judt calls in his Reappraisals 'the forgotten twentieth century'.

There are plenty of studies about the scale of the unnecessary suffering caused to Russia after 1991 through the imposition of IMF 'shock therapy' .

Robert Service's Russia: Experiment with a People deals with it as does Glinka and Reddaway's Market Bolshevism: The Tragedy of Russia's Market Reforms are examples.

The scale of the deaths caused by "shock therapy" are not comparable with Soviet Communism at the peak of its power with Lenin's Red Terror, the forceable collectivisation of the 1930s, the Terror Famine and Stalin's Great Terror of 1936-38.

Yet that is hardly any reason to belittle the drop of life expectancy for makes from 55 to 68 or the way 'reforms' and price liberalition wiped out the value of savings and pensions overnight and the reduction of most Russian's to insecurity, crime, alcoholism and prostitution.

It was the scale of Russia's immiseration and fall into anarcho-capitalism that led moral prophets and anti-Soviet dissidents like Alexander Solzhenitsyn to turn more thoroughly against the West.

This was something that most displeased those like Timothy Garton Ash and Anne Applebaum.

Needless to say, neither of these two bien pensants as liberal anti-communists had actually lived in the Gulag and though Applebaum wrote a magnificently researched work on the Soviet camp network, the postscript drew many wrong and hypocritical moral lessons.

Instead of condemning shock therapy, all mention of the way Washington Consensus and the IMF and World Bank had imposed such badly conceived reforms on Russia was airbrushed out of history.

The reason is that Applebaum works for The Economist as does Edward Lucas who also crudely portrays Russia as a Neo-Soviet threat in his blatant work of propaganda The New Cold War Like Bill Emmot, its editor, they were tub thumpers for the IMF neoliberal reforms.

As John Gray wrote in 2003 of Emmot's vision as set forth in works like 20/21 Vision,

.....it contains no discussion - indeed, no mention - of the costs and failures of the transition to free markets in post- communist countries.

If you look for the names of Gorbachev or Yeltsin in the index, you will find nothing. Like Trotsky during the Soviet period, they have been airbrushed out of history.

It is as if the tragicomic history of post-communist Russia - the catastrophic drop in population and living standards, the crime-based anarcho-capitalism of the Yeltsin era and the emergence of a subtle form of authoritarian rule under Vladimir Putin - had never occurred.

In consigning the failures of Russian market reform to an Orwellian memory hole, Emmott shows he has something in common with western defenders of the Soviet Union. Like them, he is cavalier in his attitude to the human casualties of economic development.

To pass over the failed transition to a western-style market economy in Russia in silence is a grotesque omission. It suggests an inability to learn from the past - an unfortunate feature in a book that claims to draw on the lessons of the 20th century.

Such a blank denial of history is a common failing of ideologues, and it has been particularly conspicuous among market liberals over the past decade.

Old-style Trotskyists refuse to admit that the failures of existing socialist regimes in any way undermine Marxism: if the Soviet system caused the deaths of millions of people, that only shows it was not really socialist.

In exactly the same way if, in Argentina, neoliberal policies have turned a rich first-world country into an impoverished chaos, for neoliberals, that can only mean free-market policies simply were not implemented consistently enough.

The same organisation that carried out the meticulous study of the scale of casualties in Iraq caused by the US invasion after 2003, the medical journal Lancet, carried out a study, on the scale of the deaths caused by shock therapy

As many as one million working-age men died due to the economic shock of mass privatisation policies followed by post-communist countries in the 1990s, according to a new study published in The Lancet in 2009

The study by David Stuckler from Oxford, and colleagues Dr Lawrence King from Cambridge University and Professor Martin McKee, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine was generally ignored

Not by Jeffrey Sachs though who fulminated against in the FT by blaming the deaths not on shock therapy but on the Soviet habit of eating fried food which all of a sudden caused a delayed effect of then just suddely having heart attacks after 1991.

The Oxford-led study measured the relationship between death rates and the pace and scale of privatisation in 25 countries in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, dating back to the early 1990s. They found that mass privatisation came at a human cost: with an average surge in the number of deaths of 13 per cent or the equivalent of about one million lives.

During the 1990s, former communist countries underwent the world’s worst peacetime mortality crisis in the past 50 years – with over three million avoidable deaths and 10 million ‘missing’ men, according to the United Nations.

There were, large differences netween ex-Soviet nations which lost millions and former communist nations like Slovenia though, so the study was flawed in my view for not concentrating on what is really "Eastern Europe" as opposed to Central Europe ( Poland, Hungary et al ).

John Gray, a staunch anti-communist, was as scathing of neoliberal Utopianism as both it and Bolshevism were two rationalistic Utopian peas from the same progressive pod which tried to use authoritarian means to force Russia to be 'Western'

Gray wrote in the New Statesman in 2002,

Russia as we know it today is a product of two experiments in westernisation, one imposed by Lenin, and the second by the market Leninists who ruled the country during the ill-fated years of neoliberal "shock therapy".

Both were disastrous. In the wake of these failed attempts to achieve modernity by blindly following western models, Russia is returning to its pre-communist, Eurasian past.

The government of Boris Yeltsin was one of a long line of westernising regimes that have sought to make Russia an unequivocally European country.

Like Lenin's Bolsheviks, the market liberals of the Yeltsin era tried to reshape the country in accordance with what they perceived as the most progressive current in European thought.

The Yeltsin era saw a rerun of the Bolsheviks' forced modernisation from above, but this time the western model was American, not European, and it demanded the creation of free markets rather than central planning.

As in the past, Russia's westernising elites were keen to implement what they took to be the most advanced ideas.

Western opinion had changed from the time when Sidney and Beatrice Webb had written of Stalinist Russia as the embryo of a new world civilisation; but the conventional wisdom had not become any wiser.

It still insisted that the only possible future for Russia was for her to remake herself on a western model, and it continued to approach this prospect with missionary zeal.

Just as in the 1930s, a stream of political pilgrims flowed from west to east - not, this time, the communists and fellow-travellers who lauded Soviet achievements while millions starved, but instead a motley band of international civil servants, investment bankers and tacky think-tank operators.

They all preached the gospel of the free market as the Russian economy spiralled into one of the greatest depressions of the 20th century.

Millions of people did not die of starvation as they had during the Stalinist experiment, but a large part of the population was entombed in hopeless poverty. As in the past, millions survived on the output of private, peasant-style plots.

History returned with the end of ideological divides of the Cold War, a lesson that has been learnt by Russia far more than it has is the whooping, hubristic and uncritically ideological outlook of Anglo-American neoliberals.

Back to the USSR.

Indian journalist MJ Akbar has claimed that he he has changed his mind about supporting the fall of the Soviet Union in the light of the way it has given the USA a free hand to invade Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. In the Guardian he writes,

In the first decade of this century, there is a vacuum where once lay the brooding, looming Soviet shadow, a force that kept its own citizens under a form of house arrest and yet inspired enough fear in Anglo-American hawks to restrain their imperial tendencies.

The notion that the USSR was a force for peace and 'stability' is only a post ex-facto rationalisation given the subsequent rise of the neoconservatives into power by 2000 which was a result of US Imperial hubris after 'defeating' the USSR and 'winning' the Cold War.

Would the Bush-Blair partnership have invaded Iraq in 2003 with such brazen impunity if Uncle Stalin, or even Cousin Brezhnev, had been around?

Akbar is not defending the USSR ideologically but from the perspective of Central Asian realpolitik. As such the condition of people within the Soviet Union or the misrule and repression of the one party states in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary et al does not interest him.

There have been power worshipping realists in the past such as EH Carr who supported the Soviet Union on that basis and on the notion that the alternative to the Imperium in the East was, as it subsequently has been, one of ethnic irredentism and conflicting religious enmities.

Yet these were already happening before the final demise of the USSR. Brezhnev was pushed into Afghanistan in 1979 not only because Brzezinski had already pushed to arm and fund the mujahadeen but because Islamist ideas were spreading in the Soviet Muslim Republics.

There were concerns, as Geoffrey Hosking points out in his History of the Soviet Union that the Slavic races were starting to be displaced and potentially outnumbered by the demographic increase in the number of Soviet Muslim citizens.

This makes it difficult to accept Akhbar's contention that,

In the best of all possible worlds, we would have had, in the first decade of the 21st century, a half-Brezhnev as head of the Union of Semi-Socialist Soviet Republics, a muscular superpower in which Pravda was as free as the Guardian and Izvestia as irreverent as the Sun.

That ignores the centrifufal forces breaking up the USSR before 1991 and the continuities in US policy which served to accelerate that. In particular, the desire of the Soviet Islamic elites to control the oil and gas wealth and Brzezinski's policy of encouraging that from the 1970s.

That US policy was intiated by Brzezinski because he exploited Soviet weaknesses and not, as some claim, because was so clever as to destroy the promise of a secular democratic experiment of the PDPA in Afghanistan singlehandedly by supporting the mujahadeen.

Often the case for preserving the USSR depends on the belief that detente between Carter and Brezhnev could have worked and the USSR reformed into a more politically liberal empire without losing all the 'social acheivements'. It is tempting to believe so but unfortunately a myth.

Moreover, the Soviet Union certainly did not make for 'stability'. It did not deter the US invasion of Vietnam ( result two million dead ) Nor the proxy wars between the USA, China and the USSR in SE Asia. Nor did Cold War bipolarity prevent the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

The Cold War is a misnomer in many ways. As Niall Ferguson points out in The War of the World it was distinctly 'hot' in other parts of the globe beyond the developed world and the Communist bloc Warsaw Pact nations of what was then "Eastern Europe".

Certainly the end of the Soviet Union was a 'geopolitical catastrophe' but from its inevitable demise came good ( the liberation of Central Europe ) and bad ( the ethnic irredentist wars in the Caucasus and the competition for oil and gas in 'the stans'.

Yet this was a return to history and not the End of History espoused by Fukuyama. With the revival of classic geopolitics the Great Game of the nineteenth century for control of Eurasia has resumed as has the friction between the ethnic groups of the former imperium.

That has been shown dramatically by the War in Chechnya as well as the wars between the Georgians and the South Ossetians and Saakashvili's nationalist attack on Russian peacekeeping forces in the successionist territories in August 2008.

On Slavoj Zizek: Designer Revolutionaries and the New Consumer Leninists

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has a lot of interesting nuggets of wisdom to offer when it comes to dissecting the credos of the neoliberals and liberal left. Here are some examples of his scorn for the kitschy left.

Zizek is excoriating on those like Havel whilst understanding the tensions that led him to turn anti-communism into support for the NATO War against Kosovo in 1999. In the LRB in that year he wrote,

Havel seems now to be blind to the fact that his own opposition to Communism was rendered possible by the utopian dimension generated and sustained by Communist regimes.

In ‘Kosovo and the End of the Nation-State’....he tries to say that the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia placed human rights above the rights of the state, that the Nato alliance’s attack on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia without a direct mandate from the UN was not an irresponsible act of aggression, or of disrespect for international law.

It was, on the contrary, according to Havel, prompted by respect for the law, for a law that ranks higher than the law which protects the sovereignty of states. The alliance has acted out of respect for human rights, as both conscience and international treaties dictate.

Havel further invokes this ‘higher law’ when he claims that ‘human rights, human freedoms . . . and human dignity have their deepest roots somewhere outside the perceptible world . . . while the state is a human creation, human beings are the creation of God.’

He seems to be saying that Nato forces were allowed to violate international law because they acted as direct instruments of the ‘higher law’ of God – a clear-cut case of religious fundamentalism.

The ultimate paradox of the Nato bombing of Serbia is not the one that was regularly rehearsed by Western opponents of the war: that by an attempt to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, Nato triggered cleansing on a larger scale and created the very humanitarian catastrophe it wanted to prevent.

All very true but then Zizek wanders off into psychobabble without facts.

A deeper paradox involves the ideology of victimisation: when Nato intervened to protect Kosovar victims, it ensured at that same time that they would remain victims, inhabitants of a devastated country with a passive population – they were not encouraged to become an active politico-military force capable of defending itself.

Well, most Kosovans were not but substantial numbers of them in the diaspora community and in Kosovo were mobilised to fight, even if this led to the creation of large clan based mafia business links and Thaci's current narco-state and sex trafficking entrepot model of free enterprise as termed by Misha Glenny as part of the new global McMafia

Then he has a dig at other modish leftists,

...academic leftists aren’t interested in activity – merely in ‘authentic’ experience. They allow themselves to pursue their well-paid academic careers in the West, while using the idealised Other (Cuba, Nicaragua, Tito’s Yugoslavia) as the stuff of their ideological dreams: they dream through the Other

..liberal leftists - they're interesting, one can learn from them. I read a wonderful essay by Orwell from 1938. There he has a wonderful analysis of the typical leftist liberal. He says they ask for a change, but they do it in a hypocritical way: they ask for a change but it's almost as if to make sure that no real change will happen.

.....radical leftist friends want total openness and so on. I say to them, are you aware that anti-immigrant are mostly spontaneous, lower working-class attitudes? They talk as if some big imperialist power centre decides to be against immigrants. If anything, capital is more liberal about immigrants.

So, I think this is not a good thing - I think of all these theorists, like Giddens and Held, who are left-wing, but left within the establishment ...

Zizek also criticises the ,

.....abstract, moralistic politics where you focus on groups which are obviously under-privileged -other races, gays and so on- and then you can explode in all your moralistic rage.

Or, another thing that I really hate as a leftist who tries to be a communist - did you notice how the standard academic left likes nothing more than an attempted revolution going on, but far away from where you are? Today it's Venezuela, which is why I like to be critical from time to time of Chavez.

It's a very comfortable position: you can do all the dirty work, you struggle for your career, compromises in your country in the west, but your heart is somewhere far away but it in no way affects what you are doing. This is another thing which I think is a fake.

This is pretty much in line with what can be written about Anti-War protestors in Britain in the Stop the War Coalition who simply change the propaganda slogans to maximise inchoate outrage that leds to nothing but an adrenalin rush and a feeling of being on the Grand March of History without actually having any concrete proposals.

....one should distinguish between short-term battles worth fighting and short-term battles where your protest is of the kind that those in power like. There was a little bit of that in the marches against the Iraq war.

Everyone was satisfied. Those who organised the protests knew they wouldn't change anything. Blair like the protests - he or Bush said, you see, this is what we want in Iraq: a society in which people will be able to protest like we do.

Zizek does have some highly perceptive comments about how this reflects the impotence and sense of the 'decline of the West'.

Something genuinely new is emerging today in the guise of what are ridiculously called "Asian values", authoritarian capitalism.

Why the phrase 'Asian values' is completely absurd is curious, Clearly Chinese capitalism is different from Indian capitalism but none of these regional powers are not following the US universalist neoliberal model that was foisted on smaller states by Washington across the globe in the 1990s.

A capitalism which, we can see now, is doing better in the crisis than the west. A capitalism that is more dynamic and efficient than our Western, liberal capitalism, but precisely as such functions perfectly with an authoritarian state. My pessimism is that this is the future.

Against this Zizek proposes quite rightly,

We who pretend in some way to be more radical, where we should make a pact with honest liberals is precisely along this axis: we should all be aware that what was precious in the liberal democratic legacy.

Yet clearly this 'pact' is simply a tactical one to then try once more to push a Utopian Communist agenda as when Zizek claims to be a Leninist,

I hate the position of "beautiful soul", which is: ""I remain outside, in a safe place; I don't want to dirty my hands." In this ironic sense, I am a Leninist. Lenin wasn't afraid to dirty his hands. That's what I miss in today's left. When you get power, if you can, grab it, even if it is a desperate situation. Do whatever is possible.

John Gray was dismissive of this part of Zizek's thought. In the Independent in September 2009 he wrote with devastating irony,

One of history's most discredited ideologies is having a comeback - not as a political force but as a commodity in the marketplace.

No longer confined to dingy meetings of ageing Trotskyites or the longueurs of the academic seminar, communism has been reinvented as a kind of intellectual cabaret act.

The 20th century's biggest mistake is being marketed as high-end entertainment, with a modish neo-Bolshevism promising the jaded consumer an exciting experience of forbidden ideas.

A Slovenian philosopher, psychoanalytical theorist and film critic, Zizek has become a gadfly of the left establishment, a prolific provocateur whose principal aim seems to be to confound his tender-minded readers.

His target throughout this book is not the right but the soft, democratic, meliorist left, which imagines that the egalitarian goals of communism can be realised by non-repressive, liberal means.

Zizek is savagely scornful of this view, writing sharply that "One of the mantras of the postmodern left has been that we should finally leave behind the 'Jacobin-Leninist paradigm' of centralised dictatorial power.

But perhaps the time has now come to turn this mantra around... Now, more than ever, one should insist on the 'eternal Idea of Communism' - strict egalitarian justice, disciplinary terror, political voluntarism, and trust in the people."

In other words, dictatorship is indispensable to the communist project. Mass coercion and terror are not departures from a humane vision, brought about by tyrannical leaders acting in backward conditions.

Lenin and Stalin were genuine masters of revolutionary strategy, who knew that without organised terror their goals would never be achieved.

In this if in nothing else, Zizek is unquestionably right. In the real world, communist revolutions are not achieved by rhetoric; they require firing squads, secret police and gulags.

This is as near as Zizek ever gets to the realities of revolution, however. He passes over the fact that systematic terror has nowhere realised the utopian goals of communism, but instead created new and worse forms of tyranny while killing millions of people.

When applied to contemporary conditions, his much-vaunted Leninism is comical. First As Tragedy, Then As Farce differs from the pap dispensed by the authors of Commonwealth chiefly in virtue of the gleeful enthusiasm with which Zizek defends the necessity of terror. For all his insistent tough-mindedness - "If you can get power, grab it", he declared in an interview the other day - he is at the furthest possible remove from anything that could be described as serious politics.

The essential frivolity of this latter-day Leninism is a pointer to the true reasons for the revival of radical leftist thinking at the present time.

The global financial crisis has left many people frightened and confused. Faced with the failures of capitalism, they look around for alternatives - and here capitalism itself comes to the rescue.

A feature of the hyper-capitalism of recent years is that it abolishes historical memory. The squalor and misery of communism are now as remote to most people as life under feudalism.

When Zizek and others like him defend communism - "the communist hypothesis", as they call it - they can pass over the fact that the hypothesis has been falsified again and again, in dozens of different countries, because their audience knows nothing of the past.

Hence the appeal of Zizek's works, which are being avidly consumed by young people across much of Europe and beyond......Zizek's parodic Leninism, the intellectual revival of communism is best understood in terms of capitalism's ability to produce compensatory spectacles.

The media-confected communism of the present time has as little connection with everyday life as does reality television - possibly even less. But precisely because of its unreality, the neo-Bolshevik spectacle has a definite function in contemporary society.

The clowning cabaret of 21st-century communism does what entertainment has always been meant to do. It distracts those who watch it from thinking about their problems, which secretly they suspect may be insoluble.