EUROPEANS HAVE BEEN UNDER THE DOMINATION OF THE USA. ANGELA MERKEL HAD TO BE SUPERSMART TO KNOW HOW TO NAVIGATE THE INFESTED WATERS.

WHAT FOLLOWS IS PURE SPECULATION.

OUR GUESS IS THAT MERKEL KNEW THAT THE US WERE PLAYING WITH FIRE IN UKRAINE TO BOTHER THE RUSSIANS. THE US HAD BEEN PLAYING A GAME OF CONQUEST AND ANYONE WHO THINKS UKRAINE CAME WILLINGLY TO LOVE “WESTERN CULTURE” IS A FOOL. THE US PROPAGANDA AND THAT OF SOROS PLAYED VIOLINS 24/7 WHILE THE LURE OF CASH WAS ATTRACTING THE CORRUPT POLITICIANS OF UKRAINE. THE ORDINARY PEOPLE WERE BEING FOOLED.

AS USUAL, SITUATIONS SUCH AS THESE ARE COMPLEX, ESPECIALLY IN REGARD TO UKRAINE AND RUSSIA. UKRAINE HAS BEEN A DIVIDED ENTITY EVEN BEFORE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION OF 1917. HERE WE GO....

Upon the outbreak of World War I, Ukraine was not an independent political entity or state. The majority of the territory that makes up the modern country of Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire with a notable far western region administered by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the border between them dating to the Congress of Vienna in 1815

During World War I the western Ukrainian people were situated between Austria-Hungary and Russia. Ukrainian villages were regularly destroyed in the crossfire. Ukrainians could be found participating on both sides of the conflict.

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION CHANGED THE DYNAMICS OF THE REGION. YET WE NEED TO KNOW A FEW INFLUENCERS:

Was the Russian Revolution Jewish?

A hundred years after the Bolsheviks swept to power, historians and contemporaries still struggle to understand the prominent role played by Jews.

On April 9, 1917, a train pulled into a station at Thayngen, a Swiss town on the German border. There was a group of 32 Russians on board and the customs officials confiscated chocolate and sugar from them. The passengers were exceeding the legal limit on importation of goods. Then the train shuffled in to Gottmadingen on the German side of the border. Two German soldiers boarded the passenger cars and separated the Russians from the rest, moving them to second- and third-class berths.

The “Russians” were an eclectic group, including 10 women and two children. Their names would have been known in left-wing and revolutionary circles of the time, so some traveled under aliases. On board was Karl Radek from Lvov in what is now Ukraine, and Grigory Zinoviev and his wife, Zlata, also from Ukraine. There was the half-Armenian Georgii Safarov and his wife as well as Marxist activist Sarah “Olga” Ravich. Grigory Useivich from Ukraine was accompanied by his wife Elena Kon, the daughter of a Russian woman named Khasia Grinberg. The vivacious French feminist Inessa Armand sang and cracked jokes with Radek, Ravich and Safarov. Eventually their shouting angered the leader of the group, who poked his head into their berth and scolded them. The leader was Vladimir Lenin, and he was taking his small group by sealed train for a weeklong journey that would end at Finland Station in St. Petersburg. Half a year later Lenin and some of his cohorts would be running a new state, the Russian Soviet Republic.

Some observers saw Lenin and his band as a motley group of Jewish revolutionaries. Alexander Guchkov, the Russian minister of war in the Russian Provisional Government after Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917, told the British military attaché General Alfred Knox that “the extreme element consists of Jews and imbeciles.” Lenin’s train had included 19 members of his Bolshevik party, several of his allies among the Mensheviks and six Jewish members of the Jewish Labor Bund. Almost half the passengers on the train were Jewish.

On April 9, 1917, a train pulled into a station at Thayngen, a Swiss town on the German border. There was a group of 32 Russians on board and the customs officials confiscated chocolate and sugar from them. The passengers were exceeding the legal limit on importation of goods. Then the train shuffled in to Gottmadingen on the German side of the border. Two German soldiers boarded the passenger cars and separated the Russians from the rest, moving them to second- and third-class berths.

The “Russians” were an eclectic group, including 10 women and two children. Their names would have been known in left-wing and revolutionary circles of the time, so some traveled under aliases. On board was Karl Radek from Lvov in what is now Ukraine, and Grigory Zinoviev and his wife, Zlata, also from Ukraine. There was the half-Armenian Georgii Safarov and his wife as well as Marxist activist Sarah “Olga” Ravich. Grigory Useivich from Ukraine was accompanied by his wife Elena Kon, the daughter of a Russian woman named Khasia Grinberg. The vivacious French feminist Inessa Armand sang and cracked jokes with Radek, Ravich and Safarov. Eventually their shouting angered the leader of the group, who poked his head into their berth and scolded them. The leader was Vladimir Lenin, and he was taking his small group by sealed train for a weeklong journey that would end at Finland Station in St. Petersburg. Half a year later Lenin and some of his cohorts would be running a new state, the Russian Soviet Republic.

Some observers saw Lenin and his band as a motley group of Jewish revolutionaries. Alexander Guchkov, the Russian minister of war in the Russian Provisional Government after Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917, told the British military attaché General Alfred Knox that “the extreme element consists of Jews and imbeciles.” Lenin’s train had included 19 members of his Bolshevik party, several of his allies among the Mensheviks and six Jewish members of the Jewish Labor Bund. Almost half the passengers on the train were Jewish.

“I will always differentiate between layers of Jews. One layer rushed headfirst to the revolution. Another, to the contrary, was trying to stand back. The Jewish subject for a long time was considered prohibited.” Unsurprisingly, his book has been posted in PDF form on antisemitic websites.

On October 16, the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow hosted an exhibition called “Freedom for All? The History of One People in the Years of Revolution.” With exhibitions and first-person accounts, it focused on Jewish luminaries of the era, such as Trotsky, Julius Martov, Marc Chagall, Vera Inber, Simon Dubnov and Vasily Shulgin.

Dubnov, born in 1860 in what is now Belarus, was an enthusiastic Jewish activist. A professor of Jewish history in St. Petersburg (then called Petrograd), he supported Jewish self-defense units and literature and thought the revolution would bring equality. However, he left in dismay in 1922, eventually settling Riga, Latvia. He was murdered by the Nazis in 1941. Before his death he reflected on Jews like Trotsky who joined the Revolution.

“They appear under Russian pseudonyms because they are ashamed of their Jewish origins. It would be better to say that their Jewish names are pseudonyms; they are not rooted in our people.”

Winston Churchill agreed. In a piece in the Illustrated Sunday Herald in 1920, he broadly stereotyped Jews as either “international” communists, loyal nationalists or Zionists. He called it the “struggle for the soul of the Jewish people” and claimed the Jewish role in the Russian Revolution “probably outweighs [the role] of all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews.”

Churchill claimed that the driving power came from Jewish leaders, who eclipsed their counterparts. He named names: Maxim Litvinoff, Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Radek, Leonid Krassin. He called this tendency “astonishing” and accused Jews of playing “the prominent, if not indeed the principal part in the system of terrorism” that had then become known as “red terror” or the suppression of those in the Soviet Union who deviated from the communist line.

One of those whom Churchill singled out for opprobrium was Bela Kun, the Hungarian Jew who briefly played the leading role in Hungary when it was a Soviet republic in 1919. Kun fled when Hungary was invaded by Romania, fleeing to the Soviet Union where he was put in charge of the Revolutionary Committee in Crimea along with Rosalia Zemlyachka. Their regime there was responsible for murdering around 60,000 people. Kun was arrested during Stalin’s purges, accused of promoting “Trotskyism” and executed in 1938. His life was symbolic of so many others: a young revolutionary whose idealism was colored by the murderous methods of Communism and who ended up a victim of the very regime he sought to create, like so many Jewish revolutionaries, accused of being counter-revolutionaries.

HOW DID it all go so wrong? To look for some answers, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research held a conference on Jews in and after the Russian Revolution earlier this month in New York City. In the introduction to the conference they note the paradoxical role of Jews and their fate during the revolution.

“The Russian Revolution liberated the largest Jewish community in the world. It also opened the floodgates for the greatest massacre of Jews before the Second World War amid the civil war and its aftermath in 1918 to 1921.” However, Jews also “entered into nearly every sphere of Russian life while, in time, much of the singular richness of Jewish cultural life in Russia was flattened, eventually obliterated.”

The roughly three million Jews of the Soviet Union at the time of the revolution constituted the largest Jewish community in the world, but they were only around 2% of the USSR’s population. They were concentrated in the Pale of Settlement (a western region of Imperial Russia) and in Ukraine and Belarussia, where they were 5% to 10% of the population, whereas in Russia itself the 1926 census found only 600,000 Jews.

As a group in the vastness of the USSR, they were one of the largest minorities, alongside Georgians, Armenians, Turks, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Kyrgiz, Tartars, Moldovians, Poles and Germans. None of these other groups played such a central role in the revolution, although members of many of them rose to senior levels. Stalin was a Georgian. Felix Dzerzhinsky, who established the Soviet secret police, was a Polish aristocrat.

Given the Soviet Union’s complexity and predilection for numerous layers of bureaucracy it is a difficult to quantify the number of Jews throughout senior leadership positions during and just after the revolution of 1917. Half of the top contenders in the Central Committee of the Communist Party to take power after Lenin’s health declined in 1922 – Lev Kamenev, Trotsky and Zinoviev – were Jewish. Yakov Sverdlov, the chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee from November 1917 to his death in 1919, was Jewish. Born in 1885, he had joined the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1902 and became a member of the Bolshevik faction with Lenin early on. Like others of his generation he took part in the 1905 revolution. His father converted to Russian Orthodoxy.

The large number of Jews in leading parts of the party was not lost on those non-Jews around them. V.M. Molotov, the powerful foreign minister of the Soviet Union under Stalin, made many remarks about Jews to Felix Chuev in a series of conversations between 1969 to 1986 that became the basis for the 1991 book Molotov Remembers. He recalled that as Lenin lay dying “at the time Jews occupied many leading positions, though they made up only a small percentage of the country’s population.” Of Zinoviev, he recalled, “He didn’t even look like a Jew.”

Antisemitism was an issue within the party. Molotov recalled in 1912 when he was at the Russian newspaper Pravda, “We received a letter from [Nikolay] Krestinsky. He wrote that Lenin was an antisemite.” This was because Lenin had opposed the Mensheviks, a separate communist faction.

“Almost all the Mensheviks were Jews. Even among the Bolsheviks, among the leaders there were many Jews. Generally, Jews are the most oppositional nation. But they were inclined to support the Mensheviks.”

Molotov also claimed that many of the men around Stalin had Jewish wives.

“There is an explanation. Oppositionist and revolutionary elements formed a higher percentage among Jews than among Russians. Insulted, injured and oppressed, they were more versatile. They penetrated everywhere, so to speak.” He claimed that Jews were more “active” than average Russians.

“Biding their time, they sniff around, stir things up, but are always prepared.” Molotov also acknowledged Zionism’s pull on Jews. “The Jews had long struggled for their own state under a Zionist flag. We, of course, were against Zionism. But to refuse a people the right to statehood would mean oppressing them.”

The fork in the road of history that led some Jews in the Russian Empire to embrace Zionism and many others to embrace various leftist revolutionary movements that eventually led to the Soviet Union was reached in the 19th century. Beginning in 1827, the Russian Empire sought to modernize its army through a universal draft. Jews had to serve 25 years and their own communities had to choose approximately four conscripts for every 1,000 members of the community (1,500 to 3,000 a year), according to the YIVO Encyclopedia.

Although non-Jews served the same amount of time, Jews were recruited at age 12 and not 18 like others, which led to their “Russification.”

Tsar Alexander II abolished this system and allowed Jews to move out of the Pale of Settlement into Russian cities, such as Moscow and St. Petersburg.

“As a result of these policies, many Jews became more involved in the cultural and intellectual life of Russia,” notes the Center for Israel Education in Atlanta. After Alexander II was assassinated in 1881, a wave of hundreds of pogroms swept the country.

New restrictions were imposed, limiting where Jews could live and work. This helped cause a vast migration of Jews abroad, including 2.3 million who left for the New World between 1881 and 1930.

When Theodor Herzl visited the Russian Empire in 1903, he met Count Witte, the minister of finance. According to Leonard Schapiro, who authored The Role of the Jews in the Russian Revolutionary Movement in 1961, Herzl found that “50% of the membership of the revolutionary parties was Jewish.” Herzl asked Witte why.

“I think it’s the fault of our government. The Jews are too oppressed.” Schapiro argues that Jews moved into revolutionary circles as they gained access to intellectual circles. Ironically then, the more Jews gained wealth and freedom in the empire, the more they also awakened to their predicament and joined the slow gurgling rebellion against the ancient regime.

Distinct choices emerged among Jews. Many, like former Israel prime minister Golda Meir’s family, went to the New World. Around 40,000 decided to move directly to the Land of Israel, becoming the leading members of what became known as the First Aliya. Among those were men like Joseph Trumpeldor, who was born in Pyatigorsk, Russia, in 1880 and moved to Ottoman Palestine in 1911 after serving in the Russian army. Isaac Leib Goldberg, the founder of the Hovevei Zion movement in 1882, was born in Poland in 1860 but grew up under the Russian Empire, and played and influential role in Zionist circles, co-founding Haaretz in 1919.

Immigrant Jews founded the Society for the Support of Jewish Farmers and Artisans in Syria and Eretz Israel in 1890, which helped settle Rehovot and Hadera. Often called the “Odessa Committee,” this group had over 4,000 members. Similarly, the Bilu group founded in Kharkov sent its members to found Gedera in Palestine.

Jews embraced self-defense in reaction to the pogroms as well. The writer Leon Pinsker from Odessa was emblematic of that awakening, turning from embracing assimilation to realizing that Jews would always suffer antisemitism as the proverbial outsiders.

Pinsker’s friend Meir Dizengoff, a veteran of the Russian army, was the first mayor of Tel Aviv. Among the founders of the first self-defense organization in Palestine, called Hashomer, were Alexander Zaid from Siberia and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi from Poltava in Ukraine.

Of those millions who chose to stay under the empire, many fought for Jewish rights in Russia. Maxim Vinaver, a resident of St. Petersburg from 1906 to 1917, was born in 1862 in Warsaw. A lawyer, he founded the Party of Popular Freedom (Constitutional Democratic Party-Kadets) and was chairman of the League for the Attainment of Equal Rights for the Jewish People in Russia (Folksgrupe). Described as a “tall, imposing, cultured man” by the Russian Jewish Encyclopedia, he was elected to the first State Duma created in the wake of the 1905 revolution. He arrived alongside 12 other Jewish deputies out of 478. Two of these Jews were Shmaryahu Levin and Leon Bramson, who had the support of the Jewish Labor Bund. Levin went on to support the creation of the Technion in Israel, and Bramson helped found ORT. Another Jew elected was Nissan Katznelson, a friend of Herzl.

Vinaver came to lead the group of Jews in the Duma and pressed for equality of minorities in the empire. “We Jews represent one of the nationalities which have suffered more, yet never once have we spoken only about ourselves. For we consider it to be inappropriate to speak just of this and not of civil equality for all,” he said in a speech.

Vinaver created and chaired a cornucopia of Jewish groups, including the Jewish National Group, the Jewish Society for the Encouragement of the Arts and Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society. In contrast to Jews who gravitated toward more radical communist groups, or toward Zionism, Vinaver represented those who sought equality in the empire in a milieu that was proudly Jewish.

Trotsky’s 1930 autobiography My Life sought to downplay his Jewishness. Lessons at school on the Jewish people “were never taken seriously by the boys,” he writes in discussing his Jewish classmates. Although he admits the discriminatory atmosphere of the 1880s and he lost a year of schooling due to anti-Jewish quotas, he writes, “In my mental equipment, nationality never occupied an independent place, as it was felt but little in everyday life.”

Furthermore, he argues that although “national in-equality probably was one of the underlying causes of my dissatisfaction with the existing order, it was lost among all the other phases of social injustice. It never played a leading part, not even a recognized one in the lists of my grievances.”

Of particular interest, Trotsky never mentions the word “Jew” after his fifth chapter dealing with his early education up to the year 1891. Despite being surrounded by Jews, he buries this ethnic and religious issue entirely.

How could he skip over the Jewish context when it was all around him? Stepan Mikoyan, born in 1922, a test pilot and son of prominent Stalin-era politician Anastas Mikoyan, wrote an autobiography in 1999. In it, he calls Stalin a “militant antisemite.” Molotov, however, insisted that Stalin was “not an antisemite… he appreciated many qualities in the Jewish people: capacity for hard work, group solidarity and political activeness.”

However, being from a non-Russian minority, Stalin always seemed suspicious of this other minority group. When he was commissar of nationalities from 1917 to 1924, he was called upon to investigate a “mess,” according to Molotov. He didn’t appoint a single Jew to the committee and Lenin wondered why. Trotsky’s aversion to seeing himself in a Jewish context likely derived from the early disputes in 1904 when the revolutionaries had to decide whether Jews would be included as a distinct group in the organization.

FOR THE Jewish revolutionaries, the years from 1904 to the revolution were spent in a fever of activity. In 1904, a dispute at the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party between Julius Martov and Lenin led to the creation of Lenin’s Bolsheviks and Martov’s Mensheviks.

Martov was Jewish, as were many Mensheviks. At the heart of the debate that led to the split in the RSDLP was a dispute over whether the General Jewish Labor Bund (the “Bund”), which had cofounded the RSDLP in 1898, could remain an autonomous group. This was a harbinger of things to come. Eventually those Bund leaders, such as Mikhail Liber, who sought to remain part of the revolution, but distinctly Jewish, would be sent into exile or shot in the 1930s. Martov left Russia in 1920, calling the civil war that erupted after the revolution a “growing bestiality of men.” He died in exile. Some Jewish Bundists remained in the USSR and rose to senior positions. Israel Leplevsky from Brest-Litovsk became minister of internal affairs of Ukraine before being arrested and shot in 1938. David Petrovsky from Berdychiv became an influential economic planner until being arrested and shot in 1937. His wife, Rose Cohen, a founder of the Communist Party of Great Britain, was also shot.

Trotsky’s life before the revolution is more instructive of the networks of Jewish Bolsheviks. Arrested in 1906, he was sent into exile by the tsarist state. He escaped and made his way to Vienna, where he became friends with Adolph Joffe. Joffe came from a family of Jewish Crimean Karaites and became an editor of Pravda. Close friends for the rest of their lives, they opposed the more lenient attitude of their fellow Jews Kamanev and Zinoviev on the Central Committee in 1917, opposing the inclusion of other socialist parties in the government that emerged after the revolution. Trotsky was expelled from the Central Committee in 1927 along with Zinoviev. He went into exile in 1929 and was assassinated on Stalin’s orders in 1940. Joffe committed suicide in 1927; his wife Maria and daughter Nadezhda were arrested and sent to labor camps and were not released until after Stalin’s death in 1953.

Late in life, as many thousands of Jews were being executed in the purges by Stalin, not as Jews but as leading communists, Trotsky penned several thoughts on Jewish issues. He said that in his early days, “I rather leaned toward the prognosis that the Jews of different countries would be assimilated and that the Jewish question would thus disappear.” He argued, “Since 1925 and above all since 1926, antisemitic demagogy – well camouflaged, unattackable – goes hand in hand with symbolic trials.” He accused the USSR of insinuating that Jews were “internationalists” during show trials.

The Central Committee of the USSR is instructive as an indicator of the prominence of Jews in leadership positions. In the Sixth Congress of the Bolshevik Russian Social Democratic Labor Party and its Central Committee elected in August 1917, we find that five of the committee’s 21 members were Jewish. This included Trotsky, Zinoviev, Moisei Uritsky, Sverdlov and Grigori Sokolnikov. Except for Sverdlov, they were all from Ukraine. The next year they were joined by Kamenev and Radek. Jews made up 20% of the central committees until 1921, when there were no Jews on this leading governing body.

The high percentage of Jews in governing circles in these early years matched their percentage in urban environments, politburo member Sergo Ordzhonikidze told the 15th Congress of the party, according to Solzhenitsyn. Most Jews lived in towns and cities due to urbanization and laws that had kept them off the land.

Jewish membership in top circles continued to decline in the 1920s. By the 11th Congress, only Lazar Kaganovich was elected to the Central Committee in 1922 alongside 26 other members. Subsequently few Jews served in these leadership positions. In 1925 there were four Jews out of 63 members. Like the rest of their comrades, almost all of them were killed in the purges. Others elected in 1927 and 1930 were shot as well, including Grigory Kaminsky, who came from a family of blacksmiths in Ukraine. With the exception of Lev Mekhlis and Kaganovich, few senior communist Jews survived the purges.

During the 1936 Moscow Trials, numerous defendants were Jewish. Of one group of 16 high-profile communists at a show trial, besides Kamenev and Zinoviev, names like Yefim Dreitzer, Isak Reingold, Moissei and Nathan Lurye and Konon Berman-Yurin ring out as Jewish. In a twisted irony, some of these Bolsheviks who had played a prominent role executing others, such as NKVD Director Genrikh Yagoda, were themselves executed. Solzhenitsyn estimates that Jews in leading positions went from a high of 50% in some sectors to 6%. Many Jewish officers in the Red Army also suffered in the purges. Millions of Jews would remain in Soviet territories, but they would never again obtain such prominent positions in the USSR.

In a July 1940 letter, Trotsky imagined that future military events in the Middle East “may well transform Palestine into a bloody trap for several hundred thousand Jews.” He was wrong; it was the Soviet Union that was a bloody trap for many of those Jews who had seen salvation in communism and thought that by total assimilation and working for a zealous greater good they would succeed.

Instead, many ended up being murdered by the system they helped create.

WITH 100 years of hindsight it is still difficult to understand what attracted so many Jews to communism in the Russian empire. Were their actions infused with Jewishness, a sense of Jewish mission like the tikkun olam and “light unto the nations” values we hear about today, or were their actions strictly pragmatic as a minority group struggling to be part of larger society? The answer lies somewhere in the middle.

Many Jews made pragmatic economic choices to leave for the New World when facing discrimination and poverty. Others chose to express themselves as Jews first, either through Jewish socialist groups or Zionism. Still others struggled for equality in the empire, so they could remain Jews and be equal. One group sought a radical solution to their and society’s predicament, a communist revolution, and one that would not include other voices such as the Bund or Mensheviks, but solely that of their party. They had no compunction at murdering their coreligionists. They were not more or less ethical than their non-Jewish peers. How can we explain their disproportionate presence in the leadership of the revolution? It would be as if the Druse minority in Israel made up half of Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet, or Armenians were half of Emmanuel Macron’s government in France.

Perhaps the only way to understand some of it is to recognize that at Nelson Mandela’s 1963 Rivonia trial in South Africa five of the 13 arrested were Jewish, as were around one quarter of the 1960s Freedom Riders in the US. The 20th century was a century of Jewish activism, often for non-Jewish causes and often without an outwardly “Jewish” context. The Freedom Riders didn’t go as a “Jewish voice for African- Americans,” they went as activists for civil rights.

We prize minorities today who act for social justice as minorities, but the 20th century required a more nuanced approach. The situation Jews were born into in the 19th-century Pale of Settlement has no parallel with today’s Jewish experience. But despite economic hardship there was a spark in this community amidst unique circumstances of radical change that impelled it forward to leadership in numerous sectors in Russia and abroad.

https://www.jpost.com/magazine/was-the-russian-revolution-jewish-514323

On January 22, 2010 Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko honored Stepan Bandera by posthumously bestowing on him the state honor, “Hero of Ukraine.”  The Soviet KGB assassinated Bandera, a Ukrainian nationalist-in-exile, in 1959.  Many Ukrainians, including Ukrainian émigré groups in Canada, pressed Yushchenko to grant the honor, which, according to one statement, "would restore justice and truth about the Bandera and the...struggle for liberation that he headed."  To this day, many Ukrainians view Bandera as a martyred freedom fighter.

As an uncompromising leader of the militant, terrorist branch of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), Bandera became a Nazi collaborator who lived with his deputies under German protection after World War II began.  In preparation for the attack on the USSR, the Nazis recruited Bandera’s followers to act as Ukrainian-speaking policemen and to serve in two Ukrainian volunteer army battalions.  By working with the Nazis, Bandera hoped to free Ukraine from Soviet rule and establish his own government there.  An independent Ukraine, Bandera promised, would remain friendly to Germany.

Historian Karel Berkhoff, among others, has shown that Bandera, his deputies, and the Nazis shared a key obsession, namely the notion that the Jews in Ukraine were behind Communism and Stalinist imperialism and must be destroyed.  “The Jews of the Soviet Union,” read a Banderist statement, “are the most loyal supporters of the Bolshevik Regime and the vanguard of Muscovite imperialism in the Ukraine.”  When the Germans invaded the USSR in June 1941 and captured the East Galician capital of Lvov, Bandera’s lieutenants issued a declaration of independence in his name.  They further promised to work closely with Hitler, then helped to launch a pogrom that killed four thousand Lvov Jews in a few days, using weapons ranging from guns to metal poles.  “We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,” a Banderist pamphlet proclaimed to Ukrainian Jews.

The Germans intended to keep Ukraine for themselves.  They arrested Bandera for his intransigence on the issue of independence, but released him in 1944 when it appeared that his popularity with Ukrainians might help stem the Soviet advance.  But whatever their disappointment with the Germans, the Banderists never disagreed with their Jewish policy in Ukraine, which eventually killed over 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews.

This is a truth that many in Ukraine, particularly in its western parts, deny.  In his book Erased (2007), Omer Bartov discusses the large bronze statue of Bandera that stands in a park in the east Galician town of Drohobych, most of whose 15,000 Jews were murdered.  The park stands on the site of the town’s former Jewish ghetto, but there is not so much as a plaque in the park to memorialize the Jewish dead.  This and other examples like it make a condemnation of Yushchenko’s step necessary.

But the rest of the story, much of which is revealed in CIA records released in 2007, reveals irony in Yushchenko’s award.  After the war Bandera lived in Munich.  British intelligence used him to help run agents into Ukraine to gather intelligence and to help the Ukrainian underground against the Soviets.  The CIA used some of Bandera’s former cronies for similar reasons, but never used Bandera himself, owing to Bandera’s infatuation with his own legend.  “Bandera,” said one CIA report from 1948, “is by nature a political intransigent of great personal ambition [who] has…opposed all political organizations in the emigration which favor a representative form of government in the Ukraine, as opposed to a mono-party, OUN/Bandera regime.”

Ukrainian sources confirmed that “fighting people in the homeland … [were] not prepared to accept [Bandera] as a dictator,” and that Bandera’s program “was unacceptable to the resistance movement inside [Ukraine].”  In 1952 Bandera temporarily resigned as head of the OUN, pressured “by the growing opposition to his leadership among … top-ranking nationalist leaders who opposed him on the grounds of his totalitarian tactics….”  Bandera’s subsequent petulance and his insistence on directing all facets of the Ukrainian underground at home and abroad led the British to drop him in 1953.  With no high level contacts to listen to him, Bandera was now on the outside looking in.

Owing to his self-promotion in print and on West German radio, Bandera remained popular with thousands of Ukrainian émigrés in West Germany.  His superficial effectiveness prompted West German intelligence (the BND) to establish contact in 1956.  By 1959 the BND was helping Bandera to run a new generation of Ukrainian agents from West Germany into the USSR.  General Reinhard Gehlen, the head of the BND, had lead German Army intelligence in the USSR during the war.  He and his subordinates were surely familiar with Bandera’s wartime record.  They were less familiar with the fact that the BND was by now thoroughly penetrated with Soviet agents.  On October 14, 1959, Bandera had lunch with senior BND officials to discuss the expansion of operations in Ukraine.  The next day the KGB assassinated Bandera in his apartment building.

Because Bandera effectively promoted his own legend, and because the Soviets were behind his death, émigrés who did not know any better labeled him as the martyred leader of Ukrainians abroad.  Fifteen hundred attended his funeral in Munich.  US officials, on the other hand, noted that Bandera’s “strong arm tactics” and “competition with other émigré groups” meant that “many émigré figures clearly do not personally lament his passing.”  His death meant nothing for CIA operations against Soviet rule in Ukraine, which depended on the very same émigré leaders who, though followers of Bandera during the war, had dumped their former chief as a self-promoting caricature.  They continued their work under CIA tutelage until the USSR collapsed.  Such is another story.

It is a sad comment on Ukrainian memory that the man declared a Hero of Ukraine in January headed a movement that was deeply involved in the Holocaust.  It is more gratifying to know that by the time of Stepan Bandera’s death, most Ukrainian leaders had long rejected him as a dangerous charlatan who harmed his own cause.  By the time of his death, Bandera was reduced to dancing with the Cold War’s most compromised intelligence agency, where the Soviets could watch his every move. Those who label him a hero today, in other words, are as foolish as they are offensive.

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/122778

Ukraine experienced a brief independence during World War I after the collapse of Imperial Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Soon, though, it was subsumed into Poland in the west and the Soviet Union in the east.

The years between the establishment of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the German invasion in June 1941 brought their own misery. A famine caused by forced Soviet collectivization of farms resulted in the death of millions of men, women, and children living in Ukraine, which was called “the bread basket of Europe.” Purges targeted intellectuals and Communist Party leaders, and after 1939, Soviet authorities targeted a wide range of “class enemies” in the western territories it annexed according to its agreement with Germany, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

On the eve of the invasion in 1941, the territory of Ukraine in its current internationally recognized borders was home to one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe. The fate of those Jews depended on many factors, including the local occupying authority and whether they were among the very few evacuated to the interior of the Soviet Union ahead of the invading forces. While scholars are still researching the scale of the Holocaust in Ukraine, they estimate at least one and a half million Jews were killed there. The Museum is in the process of gathering written records and oral testimony to fully tell the story of what happened in Ukraine during the Holocaust.

What we do know is that following the brutal invasion of the Soviet Union by the German military, special forces called Einsatzgruppen arrived with orders to kill civilians perceived to be enemies of Nazi Germany. They divided the local population in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, identifying the Jews and recruiting local collaborators. Most Jews in Ukraine were shot to death close to where they lived, not deported to distant camps. Their executioners were German but also Ukrainian, Russian, and other local collaborators.

After the war, Soviet authorities tended to minimize the uniquely Jewish tragedy that occurred during the occupation, while in the West the inaccessibility of Soviet archives compelled scholars to write the history of the Holocaust in the East using German documents. Following Ukraine’s declaration of independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, scholars have begun piecing together a more complete history of the Holocaust in Ukraine.

https://www.ushmm.org/information/exhibitions/online-exhibitions/special-focus/ukraine

Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy[a] (born 25 January 1978), also transliterated as Zelensky or Zelenskiy,[b] is a Ukrainian politician and former comedian and actor[4] who has served as the sixth and current president of Ukraine since 2019.

Born to a Ukrainian Jewish family, Zelenskyy grew up as a native Russian speaker in Kryvyi Rih, a major city of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast in central Ukraine. Prior to his acting career, he obtained a degree in law from the Kyiv National Economic University. He then pursued a career in comedy and created the production company Kvartal 95, which produced films, cartoons, and TV shows including the TV series Servant of the People, in which Zelenskyy played the role of the Ukrainian president. The series aired from 2015 to 2019 and was immensely popular. A political party bearing the same name as the television show was created in March 2018 by employees of Kvartal 95.

Zelenskyy announced his candidacy in the 2019 Ukrainian presidential election on the evening of 31 December 2018, alongside the New Year's Eve address of then-president Petro Poroshenko on the TV channel 1+1. A political outsider, he had already become one of the frontrunners in opinion polls for the election. He won the election with 73.23 percent of the vote in the second round, defeating Poroshenko. He has positioned himself as an anti-establishment and anti-corruption figure.

As president, Zelenskyy has been a proponent of e-government and of unity between the Ukrainian- and Russian-speaking parts of the country's population.[5]: 11–13  His communication style heavily uses social media, particularly Instagram.[5]: 7–10  His party won a landslide victory in the snap legislative election held shortly after his inauguration as president. During his administration, Zelenskyy oversaw the lifting of legal immunity for members of parliament (the Verkhovna Rada),[6] the country's response to the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent economic recession, and some progress in tackling corruption in Ukraine.[7][8]

During his presidential campaign, Zelenskyy promised to end Ukraine's protracted conflict with Russia, and he has attempted to engage in dialogue with Russian president Vladimir Putin.[9] His administration faced an escalation of tensions with Russia in 2021, culminating in the launch of the ongoing full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022. Zelenskyy's strategy during the Russian military buildup was to calm the Ukrainian populace and assure the international community that Ukraine was not seeking to retaliate.[10] He initially distanced himself from warnings of an imminent war, while also calling for security guarantees and military support from NATO to "withstand" the threat.[11] After the start of the invasion, Zelenskyy declared martial law across Ukraine and a general mobilisation of the armed forces. His leadership during the crisis has won him widespread international praise, and he has been described as a symbol of the Ukrainian resistance.[12][13] Social polls have ranked Zelenskyy Ukraine's greatest president.[14][15][16][17]

ZELENSKYY IS A NON-INTELLIGENT JEWISH TURD. 

TO UNDERSTAND THIS STATEMENT, ONE HAS TO READ GUS LEONISKY’S RANTS AND ALSO UNDERSTAND HOW THE USA HAS BEEN USING ITS SECRET CORRUPT DEALING — AND FAKE MEDIA PROPAGANDA STORIES — WITH THE VARIOUS CORRUPT UKRAINIAN GOVERNMENT.  WITH ZELENSKY (A JEWISH NAZI), THE USA HAVE FOUND THE IDEAL FOIL TO DESTROY RUSSIA — BECAUSE THE NAME OF THE GAME ISN’T TO “SAVE” UKRAINE, BUT TO DESTROY RUSSIA AND CHINA. 

ARE THE JEWS SECRETLY AT THE HELM OF THE ANGLO-SAXON CONQUEST OF THE HEARTLAND (RUSSIA AND CHINA)? 

This paper aims to reassess the role played by Sir Halford Mackinder (1861–1947) in the reconstruction of Eastern Europe after the First World War, highlighting a key issue behind the formation of his popular geopolitical ideas about the Eurasian ‘heartland’. Influenced by the democratic spirit of the early inter-war years, Mackinder used his geographical expertise in support of a loose federal reorganisation of the vast region between Germany and Russia, hoping to create a new, balanced international system capable of guaranteeing freedom and stability on the European continent. In 1919–20, this ambitious design became the basis of a short diplomatic mission to South Russia, where Mackinder tried to create a large regional defensive alliance against the Bolshevik regime externally supported by the Western powers. But the military weakness of local anti-Bolshevik forces and the political inconsistency of the British government led to the complete failure of this great imaginative project, revealing all the strategic limits and ideological flaws of Mackinder's geopolitical views on Eastern Europe.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07075332.2015.1005113

THE HEARTLAND THEORY OF SIR HALFORD JOHN MACKINDER: JUSTIFICATION OF FOREIGN POLICY OF THE UNITED STATES AND RUSSIA IN CENTRAL ASIA

Abstract

The paper examines the foreign policy of the United States and Russia towards Central Asia by reviewing selective foreign policy discourses in the context of the Heartland theory. In effect, the central formulation of the study rests on this research question: to what extent is the Heartland theory influential in the foreign policy of the United States and Russia? The analysis is therefore organized by first conducting a comparative/contrast approach of USA and Russian policies via each other. The analysis seeks to suggest and/or establish some relationship between the predictions of the theory and current foreign policy relations. The study has reached to a conclusion that literature around the United States and Russia is indicative to the relevancy of Heartland theory.

https://www.academia.edu/24741911/THE_HEARTLAND

THE INFLUENCE OF RELIGION ON FOREIGN POLICY - Влијанието на религијата врз надворешната политика на државите

Aleksandar Spasenovski

Abstract

In all historical periods people have searched for the answers that concern life’s basic questions that, inter alia, receive their finalized expression in the form of religious teachings. In this context, we arrive to the conclusion that these religious teachings have played and continue to play a crucial role in the development of people as individuals, as well as cumulatively, within the development of societies. This conclusion serves as a foundation for the further development of the thesis based on a connection between religion and the foreign policies of states. Hence, the aim of this paper is to argue the existence of a connection between religion and foreign policy. This shall be achieved through a systematic overview of the relevant theoretical views that support this connection from the aspect of established value systems of states, and the aspect of personal levels of values of state leaders, as well as through an elaboration of relevant historical examples.

https://www.academia.edu/11605871/THE_INFLUENCE_OF_RELIGION 

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy[1] is a book by John Mearsheimer, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt, Professor of International Relations at Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University, published in late August 2007. It was a New York Times Best Seller.[2]

The book describes the lobby as a "loose coalition of individuals and organizations who actively work to steer U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction".[3] The book "focuses primarily on the lobby's influence on U.S. foreign policy and its negative effect on American interests".[4] The authors also argue that "the lobby's impact has been unintentionally harmful to Israel as well".[5]

Mearsheimer and Walt argue that although "the boundaries of the Israel lobby cannot be identified precisely", it "has a core consisting of organizations whose declared purpose is to encourage the U.S. government and the American public to provide material aid to Israel and to support its government's policies, as well as influential individuals for whom these goals are also a top priority".[6] They note that "not every American with a favorable attitude to Israel is part of the lobby",[6] and that although "the bulk of the lobby is comprised of Jewish Americans",[7] there are many American Jews who are not part of the lobby, and the lobby also includes Christian Zionists.[8] They also claim a drift of important groups in "the lobby" to the right,[9] and overlap with the neoconservatives.[10]

The book was preceded by a paper commissioned by The Atlantic and written by Mearsheimer and Walt. The Atlantic rejected the paper, and it was published in London Review of Books.[11] The paper attracted considerable controversy, both praise[12][13][14][15][16] and criticism.[17][18]

Mearsheimer and Walt argue that "No lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essentially identical".[29] They argue that "in its basic operations, it is no different from interest groups like the Farm Lobby, steel and textile workers, and other ethnic lobbies. What sets the Israel Lobby apart is its extraordinary effectiveness." According to Mearsheimer and Walt, the "loose coalition" that makes up the Lobby has "significant leverage over the Executive branch", as well as the ability to make sure that the "Lobby's perspective on Israel is widely reflected in the mainstream media." They claim that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in particular has a "stranglehold on the U.S. Congress", due to its "ability to reward legislators and congressional candidates who support its agenda, and to punish those who challenge it."

Mearsheimer and Walt decry what they call misuse of "the charge of anti-Semitism", and argue that pro-Israel groups place great importance on "controlling debate" in American academia; they maintain, however, that the Lobby has yet to succeed in its "campaign to eliminate criticism of Israel from college campuses", such as with Campus Watch and the U.S. Congress Bill H.R. 509. The authors conclude by arguing that when the Lobby succeeds in shaping U.S. policy in the Middle East, then "Israel's enemies get weakened or overthrown, Israel gets a free hand with the Palestinians, and the United States does most of the fighting, dying, rebuilding, and paying."[20] According to Mearsheimer, "it's becoming increasingly difficult to make the argument in a convincing way that anyone who criticizes the lobby or Israel is an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew." The authors pointed to the growing dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq, criticism of Israel's war in Lebanon and the publication of former President Jimmy Carter's book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid as making it somewhat easier to criticize Israel openly.[13]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

The_Israel_Lobby_and_U.S._Foreign_Policy

CONCLUSION:

THE RUSSIAN INTERVENTION IN UKRAINE SHOULD BE VIEWED WITH “REALIST’S EYES”.

UKRAINE ISN’T “UKRAINE” — A UNIFIED COUNTRY WITH A COMMON CAUSE. IT IS MADE UP OF VARIOUS PROVINCES WITH THEIR OWN ETHNICITY. IN THE WEST, WE HAVE THE GALICIANS WHO WERE MOSTLY NAZIS (WHO MURDERED 1.5 MILLION JEWS) DURING WW2 AND HAVE KEPT THIS NAZI SPIRIT TO THIS DAY. THIS IS WHY THE GLORIFICALTION OF STEPAN BANDERA  STILL PERMEATES THE POLITICAL UNDERLAYERS OF THIS PART OF UKRAINE. THE COMPLICATION HERE IS THAT THE JEWISH UKRAINIAN LOBBY HAS MANAGED AN ALLIANCE WITH THESE NAZIS — AGAINST THE RUSSIAN SPEAKING UKRAINIAN WHO LIVE IN THE EAST OF “UKRAINE”… AND WHO HAVE DEMANDED AUTONOMY AND/OR SECESSION FROM UKRAINE. THIS IS A CIVIL WAR WHICH RUSSIA HAS TRIED TO SORT OUT.

PROGRESSIVELY, THE RUSSIAN-UKRAINIANS HAVE BEEN SQUEEZED OUT BY THE “NAZIS”, WITH THE HELP OF THE USA, THAT FOR THEIR ULTIMATE GOAL OF CONQUERING THE HEARTLAND, SAW AN OPPORTUNITY TO WEAKEN RUSSIA — THAT DID NOT HAVE ANY CHOICE IN DEFENDING THE RUSSIANS OF “UKRAINE”.

HAVING TAKEN THE BAIT, THE RUSSIANS HAVE TO KEEP ON PROTECTING THE DONBASS REGION UNTIL PEACE IS NEGOTIATED ON RUSSIAN TERMS. THIS IS A GIVEN. BUT THE WEST WON’T HAVE ANY QUALMS IN PROLONGING THE CONFLICT WHICH, IF THE JEWISH ZELENSKY WAS SMART HE WOULD STOP BY CONCEDING TO RUSSIA — SOMETHING HE WILL EVENTUALLY HAVE TO DO.

ZELENSKY IS LUCKY BUT HE IS NOT SMART. HE HAS BRAVADO BUT HE IS A CORRUPT PUPPET OF THE USA THAT ARE PROFITING FROM THE CONFLICT.

THE RUSSIANS DO NOT WANT TO HURT CIVILIAN POPULATIONS OF UKRAINE DESPITE MANY CLAIMS BY THE WESTERN PROPAGANDA. ZELENSKY WANTS TO INFLICT AS MUCH DAMAGE TO THE RUSSIAN CIVILIANS IN UKRAINE. THE WEST DOES NOT WANT TO RECOGNISE THIS THIS BECAUSE IT DOES NOT FIT THE PROPAGANDA OF GLORIOUS NICE ZELENSKY, WHOSE NAZI ARMIES/BATTALIONS HAD KILLED AROUND 3,200 UKRAINIANS IN THE DONBASS REGION SINCE HE HAD BECOME PRESIDENT (UNTIL THE RUSSIAN INTERVENTION)— UNDER HIS SECRET ORDERS (AND INFLUENCE FROM THE USA) IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF PREVIOUS UKRAINIAN PRESIDENTS.

AT THIS STAGE, WE CAN (BUT THE WEST WON’T) RECOGNISE THAT THE CONFLICT IN UKRAINE WAS SET UP BY THE USA. THE USA HAS ALSO FORCED EUROPE TO SHOOT ITSELF IN THE HEAD, USING THE DEVIOUS “EUROPEANS” LEADERS WHO ARE AMERICAN STOOGES: 

SO WHAT’S NEXT? IT IS OUR BELIEF, AND WE COULD BE WRONG THAT RUSSIA HAS RETREATED AS FAR AS IT CAN. THE NEXT STAGE OF THIS CONFLICT COULD BE :

— A STALEMATE LIKE THE KOREAN CONFLICT.

— THE DESTRUCTION OF WESTERN UKRAINE BEYOND RECOGNITION.

— A PEACE TREATY THAT RECOGNISE THE DONBASS REGION AND CRIMEA AS RUSSIAN.

THIS PEACE TREATY SHOULD BE A JEWISH LOBBY PREROGATIVE.  

JEWISH PEOPLE ARE SMART [except Zelensky]. TIME TO PROVE THIS TO THE REST OF THE WORLD — BEYOND MAKING MONEY ON THE BACK OF SUPPLYING WEAPONS TO WHAT WILL BE A LOOSING CAUSE.

OVER TO YOU, NETANYAHU.

Gus Leonisky

Loony. CARTOONING SINCE 1951

AUSTRALIA SHOULD STAY OUT OF THIS — ENTIRELY....

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW