Exonerating Stalin

 

For a certain species of lowbrow anti-Semite – or, at any rate, people who present themselves as anti-Semites – every bad actor in culture, politics, and business must be a Jew. Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, David Rockefeller, and even Stephen Colbert have all been accused of being crypto-Jews. “All serial killers, pedophiles, organ harvesters, usurers, and terrorists are Jewish,” the blog Shadow Masterminds claimed in 2013, for one egregious example of this phenomenon [1]. The natural effect of such gross exaggeration, whatever its intent, is to taint, trivialize, and discredit more reasonable criticisms of Zionism or forms of criminality in which Jews play a disproportionate role. I recently came across a particularly stupid specimen of the genre, and one too laughable not to share. In “Stalin the Crypto-Jew”, Fitzpatrick Informer contributor “Josh” dramatically points the finger at the Soviet Union’s Man of Steel.

At the top of the post is a photo collage of Stalin and other figures striking a Napoleonic pose, with one hand tucked into their coats – evidencing the omnipresent “Masonic Hidden Hand” by way of the “Sign of the Master of the Second Veil”, the caption reads. Less ominously, however, “the hidden hand was a feature of some statues of the ancient Greeks and Romans and […] later painters based their poses on classical models,” explains Tom Holmberg:

The pose was recommended by certain classical writers as a useful posture for orators. Aeschines of Macedon (390-331 B.C.), an actor, orator and founder of a school of rhetoric, who wrote an important book on oratory, postulated that speaking with one’s arm outside the toga was considered ill-mannered. A number of textbooks on oratory published in the eighteenth century, following Aeschines, recommended this gesture. [2]

“Josh” next highlights the Jewish Virtual Library’s claim that Stalin’s birthplace, the Georgian city of Gori, was “home to one of the largest Georgian Jewish populations of the time”, following this up with Edvard Radzinsky’s details that Stalin’s mother had a Jewish friend and that she “often worked […] in the houses of rich Jewish traders.” “Josh” strategically omits these key passages from the same source:

As a small child Soso [i.e., Stalin] was given his first lessons in malice toward the Jews by his father. […]

To the end of his days he went on naively settling accounts with his poverty-stricken childhood. It was then, in his childhood, that his beloved mother’s humiliation, their everlasting hunger, their poverty, sowed hatred and resentment in the morbidly touchy boy’s mind. Hatred above all for them – those rich Jewish traders. […]

Soso’s feelings were reinforced by jealousy and resentment. Insulting gossip about his mother and her visits to the homes of rich Jews made its furtive appearance at this time. This is how anti-Semitic feelings, so alien to the Caucasus, developed in little Soso. His friend Davrishevi remembered his grandmother reading the New Testament to them – the story of Judas’s kiss of betrayal. “‘But why didn’t Jesus draw his saber?’ little Soso asked indignantly. ‘He couldn’t do that,’ Grandma answered. ‘He had to sacrifice himself for our salvation.’” That was something little Soso was incapable of understanding. All through his childhood he had been taught to answer blow with blow. He resolved to do what seemed to him the obvious thing: to take vengeance on the Jews! Even in those days he was a good organizer, but he himself remained behind the scenes for fear of his mother’s heavy hand. One typical plan was carried out by little friends – they let a pig into the synagogue. They were found out but did not give Soso away. Shortly afterward an Orthodox priest told his parishioners in church, “There are those among us, some lost sheep, who a few days ago committed a sacrilege in one of God’s houses.” That was quite beyond Soso’s understanding. How could anyone defend people of another faith?! [3] 

"Josh" spies a kiddie cup at Stalin's mother's grave.

“Josh” next visits the cemetery where Stalin’s mother is buried, linking to a Russian-language message board with the claim, “Stalin’s mother’s grave has a Jewish Shabbat Kiddish [sic] cup covered with a shroud. This is a standard mark for a buried Jew”; but, as Jennifer Geraghty-Gorman explains in a post at her cemetery blog Over Thy Dead Body, the representation is not of a kiddush cup or wine goblet, but an urn:

In many cemeteries you will find stones with urns atop them. The urn is a classic Greek and Roman symbol of mourning. With the body viewed as a vessel of the soul, the urn holds the cremated remains so that the soul might ascend to Heaven. The ancient Romans used the urn as a repository for the ashes of the dead, and it was always shrouded out of respect. The urn is a very popular symbol of mourning in Victorian cemeteries, and [Dublin’s] Mount Jerome is no exception […] [4]

As for Stalin’s father, “Josh” links to a Russian blog post asserting that the B’nai B’rith Messenger acknowledged Stalin’s Jewish origins in its issue of March 3, 1950. Fitzpatrick Informer proprietor Timothy Fitzpatrick himself chimes in with a comment under the post, reiterating: “Speaking of B’nai B’rith, let me remind you that in the official journal of this organization, the Bulletin of B’nai B’rith, David Weissman directly described that Stalin was a Jew (March 3, 1950).” Neither “Josh” nor Fitzpatrick appears to have consulted the Weissman column they cite, which reads in context:

A former Soviet General claims that Joseph Stalin is of Jewish ancestry. (Remember the fascists in this country who tried to Judaize Franklin Delano Roosevelt? Same type of mentality). Bet a dollar that the guys who’ll throw it up to us, will forget that Jesus Christ was also a Jew. [5]

Then “Josh” quotes Soviet apologist Louis Levine’s boast in the November 1946 issue of the Stalinist propaganda organ Soviet Russia Today that “Jewish people are unanimous in their love for Stalin.” Humorously, Anatoliy Golitsyn, a goofy Soviet defector and conspiracy-peddler whose anti-communist work The Perestroika Deception Fitzpatrick is fond of recommending, says of the postwar period in which Levine was writing that, “Anti-Semitism became for a while official Party and government policy.” [6] In the Fitzpatrick Informer article’s most embarrassing moment, “Josh” links to an anonymous Gab post attempting to conflate Hasidism, Zionism, and Leninism – wholly ignoring the tension that existed between the Bolsheviks and the Zionist movement, as discussed by Guido Goldman in his study Zionism under Soviet Rule (1917-1928). “Josh” also quotes “Pan-Aryan Alliance” leader Ernest Elmhurst’s 1938 book The World Hoax for the insight that Stalin “only speaks Yiddish at home”. It was presumably Elmhurst’s privileged vantage as head waiter at Washington’s Shoreham Hotel that put him in a position to know the intimate details of Stalin’s life [7].

“Josh” subsequently excerpts Joseph Bernard Hutton’s 1961 biography Stalin: The Miraculous Georgian for the contested claim that the “Dzhu” component of Stalin’s original surname, Dzhugashvili, “means ‘Natives of the Island Dzhu’ and was the actual description given to Israelites.” More plausibly, Kerry Bolton cites Simon Sebag Montefiore when he “states that the name is derived either from Ossetian, meaning ‘herd’ or Georgian (djuga) meaning ‘steel’,” adding, “The latter Georgian meaning would surely account for the adoption of ‘Stalin’, ‘Man of Steel’, by Iosif Vissarionovich.” [8] That Hutton’s 1969 autobiography, On the Other Side of Reality, concerns supernatural phenomena such as the “spirit surgery” that saved the author’s eyes and “the strange and frightening facts concerning the mysterious phantom that regularly haunted the attic of the author’s childhood home”, moreover, does little to enhance his credentials as a thoroughgoing Stalinologist [9].

Stalin’s alleged Judeophilia, as evidenced by his disastrous indulgence of the Zionist project in 1948, as well as his alleged anti-Semitism, as charged by many in relation to the subsequent affair of the Doctors’ Plot, are likely both exaggerated. However, the “dichotomy of the Stalin/Trotsky split symbolised the clash of two world-outlooks,” Bolton concludes. “Anti-Stalinism drove the thoughts and actions of many of those who became the formulators of US foreign policy, which continues to dominate US thinking.” Further: “Had Stalin been Jewish the shape of the post-1945 world would have been fundamentally different, and there would have been no real discord between the USA and the USSR. In short, there would have been no constraint placed upon American global adventurism.” [10]

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.

Endnotes

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140306150636/https://shadowmasterminds.wordpress.com/2013/09/10/all-serial-killers-are-jewish/

[2] Holmberg, Tom. “Why Is Napoleon Depicted with His Hand in His Coat?”. The Napoleon Series (July 2013): https://www.napoleon-series.org/faq/c_hand.html

[3] Radzinsky, Edvard. “Stalin: The First In-Depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia’s Secret Archives”. The Washington Post (1996): https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/stalin.htm

[4] Geraghty-Gorman, Jennifer. “Tombstone Tuesday: Urns: Classic, Shrouded, and Heavily Cloaked”. “Over Thy Dead Body”: A Cemetery Blog (December 14, 2010): http://stiffsandstones.blogspot.com/2010/12/tombstone-tuesday-urns-classic-shrouded.html

[5] Weissman, David. “Here’s the Point”. B’nai B’rith Messenger (March 3, 1950), p. 5.

[6] Golitsyn, Anatoliy. The Perestroika Deception. New York, NY: Edward Harle Limited, 1995, p. 76.

[7] https://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Frederick_Elmhurst

[8] Bolton, Kerry. “Was Stalin Jewish, and Does It Matter?” Counter-Currents (November 26, 2012): https://counter-currents.com/2012/11/was-stalin-jewish-and-does-it-matter/

[9] https://archive.org/details/onothersideofrea00hutt/page/n259/mode/2up

[10] Bolton, Kerry. “Was Stalin Jewish, and Does It Matter?” Counter-Currents (November 26, 2012): https://counter-currents.com/2012/11/was-stalin-jewish-and-does-it-matter/