Wednesday, October 15, 2008 Free Headline Alerts
Lev Navrozov emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972. 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.
Will the 21st Century Be Less Murderous Than Was the 20th Century? It is often assumed today that the 20th century caused so much bloodshed because having lived in the century were absolutely ruthless bigots (such as Hitler, Stalin, or Mao), who became, due to their ruthless bigotry, the de facto owners of their countries and would, out of their ruthless bigotry, exterminate human beings like so many insects or microbes.
But let us look at the history of the 20th century not as a volume published because its author has a high academic rank, but as bits of undeniable evidence.
After WW1, Germany was declared by the Treaty of Versailles to have caused that war, and the Treaty made Germany virtually defenseless, ignoring, as the Treaty did, the possibility of Soviet Russia’s aggression. There was one German WW1 solder named Adolph Hitler, who began to speak out and write in Munich after WW1 against the Treaty of Versailles and thus rose to power in 1933 because his Reichstag anti-Versailles-Treaty party received 44 votes, more than twice than any other Reichstag party.
Alfred Rosenberg, a son of a Russian shoemaker of German extraction, appeared at the age of 26 in Munich after Lenin and other Russian Marxists had come to power in Russia in1917 and 1918. On the advice of the editor of a Munich magazine for which both Hitler and Rosenberg wrote, they met.
Since many Soviet Marxists were Jews, just as was Marx himself, Alfred Rosenberg argued that what had happened in 1917 and 1918 in Russia had been a conspiracy of Jews as a “race” for the benefit of Jews.
Yes, many of Lenin’s and then Stalin’s top subordinates were Jews! Well, there had been under the Russian monarchy a fairly vicious anti-Semitism in Russia (recall the pogroms, massacres of helpless civilian inhabitants of a Jewish town or settlement). Now some Jews had reacted by becoming anti-monarchist, Marxist, and “revolutionary.” The father of Alfred Rosenberg was a shoemaker, and Marxism had been against private enterprise. That was yet another cause for some members of the Russian middle class to hate Jewish Marxists.
Hitler digested Rosenberg’s speeches, articles, and books. Why not add anti-Semites to his potential voters? Hitler included Rosenberg’s anti-Semitism into “National Socialism.” He assigned to Rosenberg the top position on the radio, which later he transferred to Goebbels. Alas, Rosenberg had a Russian accent, and so his career became confined to the press.
In contrast to Rosenberg, Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not “a cry of the heart,” but a move in a political game. The family doctor of the Hitlers in Austria was a Jew. Even later, when Germany occupied Austria in 1938 (Anschluss), Hitler ordered his official to help the physician and his family to sell their house and emigrate safely from the now anti-Semitic Austria. The Jewish doctor described Hitler’s care for him and his family in the U.S. press.
When Hitler sustained a defeat at Moscow late in 1941 from the newly arrived Soviet Far Eastern and Siberian troops, he feared that now his subordinates would betray him to the English-speaking countries to earn their mercy for themselves. So he ordered them to begin the extermination of Jews (“The Final Solution”), but it was not to be known that he had ordered it. Well, some Western historians refuse to know this even today, though the trick had been used way back in the 19th century—the chief of a criminal gang made his subordinates commit crimes. If they betrayed him to the police, the latter would know about their crimes.
Hitler was a foot soldier of WW1. Mentally, no more. Germany could have produced the atom bomb ahead of the United States, and Hitler could have begun WW2 after he had acquired it. But he was so inept (yes, he was at the mental military level of a WW1 foot soldier) that he attacked Russia and starved financially his atom bomb project. He lost the war as an ordinary foot soldier in the role of the supreme commander-in-chief.
Even before the war was over, Stalin began to imitate Hitler’s anti-Semitic “National Socialism.” Mass dismissals of Jews began after the war. Phony trials were to demonstrate that the Jewish doctors were killing their patients. All Jews were to be sent to an uninhabited area, and it was said that on the way there, they would be thrown into a lake off the bridge across the lake.
Only Stalin’s death in 1953 prevented the Soviet “final solution.”
When WW2 was still on, there was emerging yet another (huge) state slavery cage country—Mao’s China, resembling Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany. The Islamic world remains as a huge mosaic of countries, but they may yet be united into a China-like giant.
In the 21st century the free world is more endangered than it was in the 20th. The post-nuclear weapons are being developed in China in the 21st century on an unprecedented scale, while the geostrategic mentality in the free countries is hardly better than it was in the 20th century (I recall the first two “Presidential Debates” I saw).
It is still insufficiently understood in the free West that the totalitarian owners are motivated not by their evil pathology, but by the fear of losing their absolute power (along with their lives!). When Hitler began to sustain defeats in WW2, an attempt on his life was made by his subordinates, one of whom brought a bomb in his briefcase to their meeting at a table. The bomb exploded, but Hitler survived yet was traumatized to the end of his life when he committed suicide. Either you gain the world or lose your own life.
By the Falun Gong tortures, the pseudo-emperors of China of the 21st century surpassed Hitler, Stalin, and possibly Mao in cruelty not because they are more evil but because it is harder for them to preserve their absolute power. They could not hate Falun Gong practitioners as anti-Semites hated Jews. In the 20th century, that is, before the 2000s, they had encouraged Falun Gong practitioners to show Falun Gong to the West as an aspect of Chinese culture, along with silks and Chinese cuisine. But in the 2000s, that is, in the 21st century, Falun Gong practitioners began to be tortured to death.
We hear of another possible Great Depression, similar to the one in the 1930s. The Western attention to the outside mortally militarily dangerous world is then likely to decrease even compared with its infinitesimal today.