Putin and the Jews

The op-ed “Save the New Ukraine” in the New York Times by Bernard-Henri Levy and George Soros (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/27/opinion/bernard-henri-levi-george-soros-save-the-new-ukraine.html) makes me wonder what prominent Jews are up to regarding Ukraine and Russia.  Levy, who is supposed to be a French philosopher, was the man behind the ouster of Kaddafi in Libya, which has led to much chaos and bloodshed.  He no doubt relished the humiliating death of Kaddafi and the ensuing Arab on Arab bloodletting in Libya.  So, now what violence and chaos does he want to create in Ukraine and Russia?  Soros, an extremely wealthy and powerful Jew, lends his name to this enterprise, whatever it is.  To the extent that Ukraine separates from Russia and joins the West, it weakens Russia.  Putin realizes he is in trouble, but is being pressed on so many sides that he is having difficulty dealing with the situation. 

There is clearly a Jewish issue in Ukraine.  Ukraine has the third largest Jewish community in Europe and the fifth largest in the world, more than 250,000.  Before World War II there were over one million Jews in Ukraine.  (http://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/communities/show/id/91)  So, it makes sense for Jews to concern themselves about Ukraine, not just from an international relations perspective, but from a Jewish racial perspective. 

Meanwhile, Jews played an outsized roll in the creation of the Communist state back in the early 1900s.  Then 75 years later, many (about half) of the billionaire oligarchs created by the destruction of the Communist state were Jews.  It’s these Jewish oligarchs who I think are a thorn in Putin’s side and likely to be shoved out in favor of KGB and old party types who are closer to him.  In 2007, the Guardian wrote (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jul/02/russia.lukeharding1)

…in a country where anti-Semitism is still rife and openly expressed, nationalist rabble-rousers have made much of the fact that of the seven oligarchs who controlled 50% of Russia's economy during the 1990s, six were Jewish: Berezovsky, Vladimir Guzinsky, Alexander Smolensky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Mikhail Friedman and Valery Malkin. 

The 2007 Guardian article goes on to say that some of the Jewish oligarchs were replaced by Slavs who were closer to Putin.  The 2007 oligarchs included Roman Abramovich, Oleg Deripaska, Mikhail Khodorkovsky (a Jew who ended up in jail), Boris Berezovsky (a Jew who lives in London as Putin’s enemy), Mikhail Prokhorov, Viktor Vekselberg, and Mikhail Friedman (a Ukrainian Jew then on decent terms with Putin). 

A 2012 Jerusalem Post (http://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-Features/At-Putins-side-an-army-of-Jewish-billionaires) article, “At Putin’s Side, an Army of Jewish Billionaires” described the unveiling of the Red Army monument in Netanya, Israel.  With Putin were Mikhail Friedman, Moshe Kantor, as well as several other wealthy Russian Jews who now live in Israel. 

A January 2015 Bloomberg article (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-22/putin-said-to-shrink-inner-circle-as-ukraine-hawks-trump-tycoons)

 said: 

Businessmen who have long been close to Putin are “on the periphery now,” said Sergei Markov, a political consultant who helped monitor the referendum in Crimea that led to Russia’s annexation of the peninsula in March.

The core group around Putin is led by Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, Federal Security Service head Alexander Bortnikov, Foreign Intelligence Service chief Mikhail Fradkov and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, according to Markov.

It will be interesting to see how Putin’s relationship develops with Russia’s Jewish oligarchs as he comes under increasing international pressure from the West.  Will he trust the Jews to continue to support him?  The Jews close to him will come under increasing financial pressure from Western sanctions, which may make them rethink their support for Putin. 

 Meanwhile, what to powerful, influential Jews like Levy and Soros have in mind.  Jews play an important roll in financial activities throughout the world.  They will be very involved in sanctions on Russia, and thus on at least some of their fellow Jews.  If Putin is making it more difficult for Jewish oligarchs in Russia, will the Jewish financial community act together to try to force him out.  If he perceives that they are trying to do that, how will he react?  If they were trying to do something sneaky to Putin, they would hardly call attention to it by writing an op-ed in the New York Times. .  But Putin must know that Levy succeeded having Kaddafi killed and throwing Libya into bloody chaos. 

  

The Moneychangers

I just finished reading The Moneychangers by Upton Sinclair, and was surprised by how little the financial industry has changed in the 100 years since he wrote the book.  Sinclair is best known for The Jungle about tainted food and general poor living conditions of immigrants in America, which resulted in the creation of the Food and Drug Administration.  Since he wrote The Moneychangers, the US has created the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, but the main difference is that the unscrupulous bankers and traders are now billionaires instead of millionaires, and the old trusts are now called hedge funds.

The 2008 “Great Recession” was very similar to the Panic of 1907 that Sinclair wrote about.  Lehman Brothers went down in bankruptcy in 2008 as the Gotham Trust Company did in The Moneychangers.  One of Sinclair’s main points was that Wall Street tycoons made their money by using other people’s money, usually leaving the little guys exposed to the loss if anything went wrong.  In the housing meltdown, it was the homeowners and retiree pension funds that suffered most of the losses, while the fat cats got bailed out by the government.  The nation can endure thousands of small individual foreclosures and bankruptcies, but not one huge one.  Lehman was just small enough to let die.

Relating to my obsession with the involvement of Jews in the financial industry, The Moneychangers only mentions the word Jew once, when a cleaning woman tells the main character that a man who looked like a Jew had paid her to go through his trash.  Presumably all the stock market manipulators were Episcopalian Christians, who perhaps had not paid too much attention to the sermons.  They all loved the show of money in their elegant town houses, their massive Newport beach “cottages,” their yachts, etc.  It sounds like the titans of Wall Street today.  And the banking practices still sound almost the same.  They have made some changes to get around the regulations designed to protect the public, but the results are pretty much the same, and as 2008 showed, the public is still not protected.

The Charlie Hebdo Terrorists Won Something

The Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack aftermath showed serious problems with democratic institutions and  national security among western nations.  By publishing a cover that was a challenge to Muslim terrorists, Charlie Hebdo put the West on the spot after all its protestations that “We are Charlie.”  Clearly we were not Charlie.  Only CBS TV news initially began showing the new Charlie Hebdo cover, and after all other major news outlets turned out to be absolute cowards, CBS began showing only pieces of the cover, like everyone else.

Certainly there are restraints on free speech.  Just ask anyone remotely controversial who has tried to speak on a college campus recently.  Colleges are the leading centers of censorship.  Students abhor free thought and college administrators let them have their way.  Certainly there should be limits on free speech, but we find free speech much more restricted than it was fifty years ago.  Big brother is here and monitoring what you say.  Surprisingly, it is not so much NSA or the FBI, but your friends, neighbors and fellow students, who stand ready to attack you for anything you say that they think is “wrong.”  America is less free than it used to be.

In addition, there is the national security issue.  News organizations do not believe that the various levels of government (national, state, local) can protect them from terrorism.  They are afraid that if they show the Charlie Hebdo cover they will be killed on the way to work, or at work, like Charlie Hebdo.  They have some good arguments.  The best is probably that they have Middle Eastern correspondents in the region and that showing the cover would put those correspondents lives in danger.  But there is also the implication that the network anchors and newspaper editors are afraid for their own lives and refused to show the cover out of cowardice, which means that the terrorists won.

I think on balance you have to say that the Charlie Hebdo terrorists won something.  They did not significantly change the societies they attacked, but they did illustrate the moral and security weaknesses of those societies.  France claimed to be a home for unfettered free speech, but then restricted the free speech of those criticizing Jews and some others.  These restrictions may be reasonable but they do not correspond to the high ideals enunciated after the attacks.

Israeli Dishonor of the Holocaust

I am disappointed that there has not been more of an outcry from the Jewish community about the terrorist killings of thousands of civilians by Boko Haram in Nigeria.  This is exactly the kind of indifference that the Jews accuse America of during the World War II Holocaust.  Many Jews disparage Roosevelt (and Churchill) for not acting sooner to end the Holocaust by invading continental Europe sooner to reach the death camps.  The Jews believe that millions more Christians should have died in order to save millions more Jews in the camps.  Roosevelt and Churchill insisted on waiting until the invasion had a better chance of success.  Of course the reason it had a better chance of success was that something like 11 million Soviets died fighting Hitler in Russia along the Eastern Front softening up the Germans for the D-Day invasion.

If they are not racists, Jews in general and Israelis in particular need to speak out about the atrocities in Nigeria,  Ideally, Israelis should come to the aid of the Nigerians, if not, at least they should lead a worldwide campaign to protect the Nigerians from Boko Haram.  It’s a Holocaust issue.

While it did not point out the Jewish hypocrisy on the matter, a recent op-ed in the Denver Post pointed out the worldwide hypocrisy in reacting so strongly to the Charlie Hebdo killings in France and so weakly to the killings in Nigeria.