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Learning English liberated me from one totalitarian slave state; Now for China


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By Lev Navrozov
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

Lev Navrozov emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972 He settled in New York City where he quickly learned that there was no market for his eloquent and powerful English language attacks on the Soviet Union. To this day, he writes without fear or favor or the conventions of polite society. He chaired the "Alternative to the New York Times Committee" in 1980, challenged the editors of the New York Times to a debate (which they declined) and became a columnist for the New York City Tribune. His columns are today read in both English and Russian.
Lev Navrozov

Monday, May 8, 2006

In his e-mail to me of March19, a reader of mine, an American residing in Germany, says:

    Lev,
    Just read your latest column. So let me play "devil's advocate" here and ask: why should China NOT dominate the world? They are the largest single nation with one of the oldest cultures in the world.

Indeed, in the 19th century the West "dominated the world" owing to weapons, resulting from the Industrial Revolution. Now it will be China's turn.

The German, Russian, and Chinese dictatorship resemble one another more than each of them resembles whatever was glorious in its past. I was born in the Russian dictatorship, which was described in the West during the Cold War in the most critical terms. But in my teenage years I already was (secretly!) more critical of Stalin's Russia than the most critical Western critics at the height of the Cold War, such as George Orwell, who published in 1949 his "1984," which my Britannica of 1970 calls "the most savage criticism" of a social order.

However, the mentality of every civilization is limited by its language(s). The word "slavery" in the Western languages (and in Russian!) means "private" slavery. It is thus implied that the historical stage called slavery (as in antiquity) has been succeeded by that of states and governments. Indeed, Orwell prophesied a world perpetually laid waste by warring states and governments, which had become "totalitarian."

In my "savagely critical" teenage years, I came to deny "slavery" as it was defined in Western, Russian, and Stalinist textbooks of history. In my view, Stalin was a big slave-owner as compared with small slave owners in ancient Athens-or in the South of the United States before the Civil War.

One aspect of Stalin's slavery made me more savagely critical of it than Orwell was. We, "citizens" of Soviet Russia, were slaves. Hence Stalin's chief of slave-overseers, a Georgian named Beria, regarded all female slaves of his boss Stalin as their harem and raped those female slaves who had struck his sexual imagination. The word "rape" is taken from the vocabulary of societies where a woman had the will to choose her sexual partners. But in Stalin's harem, she should have been happy that the chief of slave owners paid his sexual attention to her, and not to another member of the harem.

Of course, if Stalin himself paid his sexual attention to her, her bliss should have been infinite, but Stalin was too infatuated with his slave-ownership in toto to pay much attention to his individual female slaves. Besides, in 1953, Beria was 54 and in good health (he was shot after Stalin's death), while Stalin was 75, and this was when he died.

Beria's country-wide harem was described after Stalin's death in 1953 in that Khrushchev's letter, which was read to "members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union" only. That letter has never reached the West because Khrushchev did not intend it to. He wanted to oust Beria, but not to prove that dictatorship is large-scale slavery.

Where was the way out of slavery? Neither Orwell, nor any other "savage critic" of the political predicament of the 20th century, answered the question. According to Orwell, the future of mankind is a permanent world war (the scene of "1984" is laid in England in 1984). According to Tolstoy, who died in 1910, the goal of mankind is to stop all sexual activity, whereupon mankind will die out in a heavenly bliss.

The West as a solution for Russia?

In the 19th century, the heart and soul of the West was Germany with its music, which included all of great music ever created except for several composers who were not Germans. The German philosophy (from Kant to Marx) was taken in Russia as the culmination of human thought. But in 1933 to 1945, Hitler's enslavement was no better than Stalin's.

Italy, the cradle of the Renaissance, had proudly invented "Fascism" more than a decade before Hitler's advent to power. By 1941, continental Western Europe had been enslaved, but to make his enslavement global, Hitler invaded Russia to use its enormous natural resources for the buildup of global military forces, able to enslave the English-speaking.

The language studied at the Moscow Energy Institute (which I joined out of hatred for the Soviet propaganda "humanities") was not German, as before the Patriotic War (WW2), but English. I pounced on it as though it were the key subject. Soon I knew enough of it to understand the English and American radio broadcasts in English, while their broadcasts in Russian were jammed. And here was a news item that was broadcast by the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) and changed my life.

A Soviet sailor jumped from his warship, swam to a British merchant vessel, and asked for political asylum, which was granted. Then the Soviet warship, approached the British merchant vessel and the Soviet officers demanded the return of the fugitive.

They were told that he had been granted political asylum, and hence was now a British subject. The Soviet warship officers declared that the fugitive was just a thief, fleeing from justice, searched the British merchant vessel, found the fugitive, and took him to the Soviet warship.

The finale? A British naval squadron came up and surrounded the Soviet warship. As the English (and American) habeas corpus act begins in Latin: "Habeas corpus"! "You should have the body (of a British subject)!" So the British officers searched the Soviet warship, found the British subject and took him to England.

You see? A WW3 was risked by the British to retrieve a former Soviet sailor, possibly a thief. His soul would belong after his death to God, but his body (corpus) was sacred as long as he was alive. Give it back-come hell or high water or WW3!

I was reborn. The way out of slavery was not in the continental Western Europe as a whole, but in the English-speaking countries. I became obsessed with English.

For centuries in the post-Roman West, the cultural elite wrote and spoke Greek and Latin as though the elite had been born in Athens or Rome respectively. Then the cultural elite of continental Europe from Portugal to Russia spoke French as though the elite had arrived from Paris just yesterday.

Not dissimilarly, I finally knew English as though the English-speaking world were my "native land." But how to make a living? I became the first and possibly the last Russian who translated classical Russian literature into English without having ever lived in any English-speaking country.

My infatuation with English played a crucial role even in my personal life. The publishing house for which I translated classical Russian literature elected one of its editors "Miss Publishing House," and I had the impudence to court her. Fortunately, she was also obsessed with English, and it became obvious that we two were created for each other.

Finally, in 1969, the Soviet slave-owners announced that Jews (or half-Jews) and Germans (or half-Germans) could apply for exit visas and be permitted to leave the country, that is, cease to be slaves!

Why this leniency, unheard-of since the early 1920?

The owners of Russia were developing post-nuclear superweapons, contrary to the international conventions they had signed or were going to sign. What if the West got wind of it?

Nothing would propitiate the West better than the Russian slave-owners' enfranchisement of their Jewish (or half-Jewish) and their German (or half-German) slaves, given their freedom!

I was a Russian according to my Soviet "internal passport" because my father was a Russian and hence my second name was Russian. But as the Talmud says, I was "born to a Jewish woman." Stalin had been making preparations for HIS Final Solution: the "liquidation" of Russian Jews. Now my Jewish ancestors were enfranchising us, Soviet slaves, including my mother.

We immediately "applied for exit visas." Apart from everything else, I was duty bound to warn the West about the Soviet development of post-nuclear superweapons.

The Moscow correspondent of the New York Times, Ray Anderson, called his newspaper and advised that they receive me: perhaps, I would be their columnist. Imagine me in this capacity, making (with syndication) $200,000 a year and speaking weekly on mainstream television.

However, when I told the New York Times, on our arrival in New York in 1972, that the owners of Soviet Russia were developing post-nuclear superweapons in their "quest for world domination" (to use JFK's phrase), the newspaper evidently decided that I was insane. In twenty years, from 1972 to 1992, after the "Soviet system" collapsed and Yeltsin opened to international inspection the biosection of the countrywide superweapons project, the New York Times did not publish a word on the subject, though what subject was more important for the West than the threat of the Soviet annihilation or at least enslavement of the West?

In 1986, the owners of China founded Program 863 for the development of post-nuclear superweapons in seven fields. My struggle for the survival of the West became even harder, especially in the 2000s, when the owners of China and those of Russia founded in 2001 the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

For my part, I had co-founded the nonprofit Center for the Survival of Western Democracies, Inc. So my political biography is not yet over. I hope to save the West from Chinese (or Sino-Russian?) annihilation/enslavement by awakening a majority of the Western public to the Sino-Russian superweapons and the need to develop them ahead of the Sino-Russian alliance, just as the U.S. was ahead of Germany by 1943 in the development of nuclear weapons.

Remember that Soviet sailor, saved by a British naval squadron from Soviet slavery? This is what I am going to say to the world of enslavement: Habeas corpus of the West!

Lev Navrozov's (navlev@cloud9.net] new book is available on-line at www.levnavrozov.com. To request an outline of the book, send an e-mail to webmaster@levnavrozov.com.

Monday, May 8, 2006

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