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VDARE.COM - http://www.vdare.com/misc/051105_macdonald_stalin.htm
 
 November 05, 2005
“Stalin’s Willing Executioners”?
ByKevin MacDonald
[
 Also by Kevin MacDonald: Thinking about Neoconservatism; Was the 1924  Immigration Cut-off “Racist”?;  Immigration And The Unmentionable Question Of   Ethnic Interests
]Yuri Slezkine’s book 
The Jewish Century
 
 ,
which appeared last year to rapturous reviews,  is an intellectual
tour de force
, alternately muddled and brilliant, courageous andapologetic. Slezkine’s greatest accomplishment is to set the historical record straight onthe importance of Jews in the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath. He summarizes previously available data and extends our understanding of the Jewish role inrevolutionary movements before 1917 and of Soviet society thereafter. His book providesa fascinating chronicle of the Jewish rise to elite status in all areas of Soviet society— culture, the universities, professional occupations, the media, and government. Indeed,the book is also probably the best, most up-to-date account of Jewish economic andcultural pre-eminence in Europe (and America) that we have.The once-common view that the Bolshevik Revolution was a Jewish revolution and thatthe Soviet Union was initially dominated by Jews has now been largely eliminated frommodern academic historiography. The current view, accepted by almost all contemporaryhistorians, is that Jews played no special role in Bolshevism and indeed, were uniquelyvictimized by it.Slezkine’s book provides a bracing corrective to this current view.Slezkine himself [
email him
] is aRussian immigrant of partially Jewish extraction. Arriving in America in 1983, he moved quickly into elite U.S. academic circles and isnow a professor at U.C. Berkeley.This, his second book, is his first on a major theme. While the greater part of 
The Jewish Century
is an exposition of the Russian experience,Slezkine provides what are in effect sidebars (comparatively flimsy) recounting theJewish experience in America and the Middle East. Together, these phenomena can infact be seen as the three great Jewish migrations of the 20
th
century, since within Russiamillions of Jews left the shtetl towns of thePale of Settlement, migrating to Moscow andthe other cities to man elite positions in the Soviet state.Slezkine attempts to understand Jewish history and the rise of Jews to elite status in the20
th
century by developing the thesis that the peoples of the world can be classified intotwo groups.The successful peoples of the modern world, termed Mercurians, are urban, mobile,literate, articulate, and intellectually sophisticated.
 
The second group, termed Apollonians, is rooted to the land with traditional agrariancultures, valuing physical strength and warrior virtues.Since Slezkine sees Jews as the quintessential Mercurians, modernization is essentially a process of everyone becoming Jewish. Indeed, Slezkine regards both Europeanindividualism and the European nation state as imitations of pre-existing Jewishaccomplishments—both deeply problematic views,in my opinion.  There are problems with the Mercurian/Apollonian distinction as well. The Gypsieswhom he offers as an example of another Mercurian people, are basically the opposite of Jews: having a low-investment, low-IQ reproductive style characterized by higher fertility, earlier onset of reproduction, more unstable pair bonds, and more single parenting.TheOverseas Chinese,another proposed parallel, are indeed highly intelligent and entrepreneurial, like the Jews. But I wouldarguethe aggressiveness of the Jews,compared to the relative
 political 
passivity of the Overseas Chinese, invalidates thecomparison.We do not read of Chinese cultural movements dominating the major local universitiesand media outlets, subjecting the traditional culture of Southeast Asians and anti-Chinesesentiment to radical critique —or of Chinese organizations campaigning for the removalof native cultural and religious symbols from public places.Moreover, the vast majority of Jews in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries were hardly the modern Mercurians that Slezkine portrays.Well into the 20
th
century, as Slezkine himself notes, most Eastern European Jews couldnot speak the languages of the non-Jews living around them. Slezkine also ignores their medieval outlook on life, their obsession with theKabbala —the writings of Jewishmystics—their superstition and anti-rationalism, and their belief in magical remedies andexorcisms.And these supposedly modern Mercurians had an attitude of absolute faith in the personof the
tsadik 
, their rebbe, who was a charismatic figure seen by his followers literally asthe personification of God in the world.Slezkine devotes one line to the fact that Jewish populations in Eastern Europe had thehighest rate of natural increase of any European population in the nineteenth century. Thegrinding poverty that this produced caused an upsurge of fundamentalist extremism thatcoalesced in the Hasidic movement and, later in the nineteenth century, into politicalradicalism and Zionism as solutions to Jewish problems.By proposing the basically spurious Mercurian/Apollonian contrast, Slezkine obscuresthe plain fact that Jewish history in the period he discusses constitutes a spectacularly,arguably uniquely, successful case of what I have described as anethnocentric groupcompetitive strategyin action.Slezkine conceptualizes Mercurianism as a worldview and therefore a matter of 
 
 psychological choice rather than a set of psychological mechanisms, notably generalintelligence and ethnocentrism. He appears to be aware of the biological reality of kinshipand ethnicity, but he steadfastly pursues a cultural determinism model. As a result of thisfalse premise, he understates the power of ethnocentrism and group competitiveness asunifying factors in Jewish history.This competitiveness was of course notorious in Eastern Europe before the 1917revolution. Slezkine ignores, or at least does not spell out, the extent to which Jews werewilling agents of exploitative elites in traditional societies, not only in Europe, but in theMuslim world as well. Forming alliances with exploitative elites is arguably the mostreliably recurrent theme observable in Jewish economic behavior over the ages.Indeed, Slezkine shows that this pattern effectively continued in Russia after theRevolution: Jews became part of a new exploitative elite. But here boundaries betweenJews and non-Jews were unusually blurred—in traditional societies, barriers betweenJews and non-Jews at all social levels were always high.Slezkine supposes that Jews and other Mercurians performed economic tasks deemedinappropriate for the natives for religious reasons. But this is only part of the story. Oftenthese were situations where the natives were simply comparatively less ruthless inexploiting their fellows, which put them at a competitive disadvantage. This wasespecially the case in Eastern Europe, where conducive economic arrangements, such astax farming, estate management, and monopolies on retail liquor distribution, lasted far longer than in the West.Slezkine also ignores the extent to which Jewish competition may have suppressed — arguablysometimes reversed— the formation of a native middle class in Eastern Europe.He seems instead to simply assume the locals lacked the abilities required.But the fact is that in most of Western Europe Jews were expelled in the Middle Ages.And, as a result, when modernization occurred, it was accomplished with an indigenousmiddle class. Perhaps the Christian taxpayers of England made a good investment in their own future when theyagreed to payKing Edward I a massive tax of £116,346 in returnfor expelling 2000 Jews in 1290.If, as in Eastern Europe, Jews had won the economic competition in most of these professions, there might not have been a non-Jewish middleclass in England.Although in the decades immediately before the Russian Revolution Jews had alreadymade enormous advances in social and economic status, a major contribution of Slezkine’s book is to document that Communism
was,
indeed,
“good for the Jews.”
After the Revolution, there was active elimination of any remnants of the older order andtheir descendants. Anti-Semitism was outlawed. Jews benefited from
“antibourgeois”
quotas in educational institutions and other forms of discrimination against the middleclass and aristocratic elements of the old regime, which could have competed with theJews. While all other nationalities, including Jews, were allowed and encouraged to keeptheir ethnic identities, the revolution maintained an anti-majoritarian attitude. (Somemight argue that the parallel with post ’65 Civil Rights ActAmericaironic!)
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