Lightning Times

World Today: 2014-02-26

Ukraine after Yanukovych; whither Crimea? Following a period of intense protests beginning in mid-February, Ukraine's president Viktor Yanukovych was deposed last weekend. He's now out of sight while Ukrainians, and the rest of the world, take a look at how he spent his wealth (video). Attention is now turning to the Crimea, that big peninsula that extends from continental Ukraine into the Black Sea. Stratfor has a video (registration) on the Crimea, and a free video on Russia and Ukraine (dated from before Yanukovych was overthrown). As of this morning, Reuters is reporting that Putin has put Russian troops on alert:

President Vladimir Putin put Russian combat troops on high alert for war games near Ukraine on Wednesday, the Kremlin's most powerful gesture yet after days of sabre rattling since its ally Viktor Yanukovich was toppled as president in Kiev.

Thousands of ethnic Russians, who form the majority in Ukraine's Crimea region, demonstrated for independence for the peninsula that hosts part of Moscow's Black Sea Fleet. They scuffled with rival demonstrators, mainly from the Tatar minority, who support the new authorities in Kiev. ...

RIA Novosti describes this as a "snap check" and RT calls it a "surprise drill", but Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu insists that “The drills are not connected with events in Ukraine at all.” Finally, the specter of anti-Semitism haunts yet another revolution.

Nigeria: Boko Haram killings continue. Nigeria's ongoing battle with the jihadi terrorist group Boko Haram continues to claim innocent lives. The latest Boko Haram attack in Yobe state in northern Nigeria has killed 59 students as of this morning.

President Goodluck Jonathan called the attack "callous and senseless murder ... by deranged terrorists and fanatics who have clearly lost all human morality and descended to bestiality".

The Islamists, whose struggle for an Islamic state in northern Nigeria has killed thousands and made them the biggest threat to security in Africa's top oil producer, are increasingly preying on the civilian population.

Militants from Boko Haram, whose name means "Western education is sinful" in the northern Hausa language, have frequently attacked schools in the past. A similar attack in June in the nearby village of Mamudo left 22 students dead.

Venezuela: Protests continue. Reuters: 'At least 13 people have been killed, about 150 injured, and more than 500 arrested during protests and violence that have flared since the start of February.' Anti-Chavez protesters say they have been beaten, tortured, and threatened with guns to the head and other places since the beginning of the current wave of protests. Fausta's 2/24 Carnival links to Rory Carroll at Guardian / Observer:

Hugo Chávez used to call it la revolución bonita (the pretty revolution), but the world looked at Venezuela last week and saw only ugliness. Protesters gunned down in the streets, barricades in flames, chaos. One of the dead was a 22-year-old beauty queen shot in the head.

With the government censoring and cowing TV reports, many of the images came from smartphones, grainy and jerky snippets filled with smoke and shouts. One fact loomed through them all: Chavismo, a hybrid system of democracy and autocracy built on populism, petro-dollars and quasi-socialism, was reaping the consequences of misrule.

Demonstrations in Caracas, Valencia, Mérida and other cities turned lethal, with student-led rallies provoking a fierce backlash from National Guard units and paramilitaries. They roared on motorcycles into "enemy" neighbourhoods, guns blazing. Families piled mattresses against windows to shield against bullets. ...

Video here. Carlos Eire at Babalu writes:

Somewhere, in their Cuban-authored playbook, the Chavistas are surely counting on future visits to a remaining tiny number of Jews by Jewish congregations from around the world who come loaded with gifts.

The playbook probably reads something like this: "Be sure to make life so miserable for the Jews that they have to leave. But also make sure a tiny minority stays behind. In a few years, Jews from all over the world will come to visit them and provide your "Revolution" with a very significant revenue stream."

Also (video - Español, de CNN En Español) Entrevista con Gen. Ángel Vivas.

“Los cubanos están en todas las estructuras del Estado venezolano”, dijo.

A "Great Paradox": The Atlantic, 1939

"'Mother,' I said quietly, 'remember the greatest Man who ever lived was a Jew – Jesus.' That held her for a minute. 'Yes,' she murmured, 'it is the great paradox.'"


Marc Tracy at Tablet brings us this little gem from The Atlantic, January 1939: I Married a Jew.

Of course we eventually come to Hitler, Ben and I. In the eyes of Ben, as in the eyes of all his people, Hitler stands for the Jewish equivalent of the Antichrist—a little, strutting monster whose sole purpose and pleasure in life is to flog, imprison, impoverish, humiliate, and plague Israel. Few history books trace the path of persecutions against the Jews as they have occurred throughout the ages. They have occurred in ancient Rome, Poland, Russia, Spain, England, and France, usually whenever Jewry becomes too numerous and too powerful, whenever it becomes, in the eyes of Gentiles, a threat, potential or actual, to Gentile supremacy. I try to tell Ben that Hitler is merely writing another page in a history that will continue so long as the status quo between Jews and Gentiles remains—a status that only the willing shoulders of both protagonists can remove.

But it is hard for Ben to take the long view. ...

Odd sort, this Ben. Read the whole article - it's worth the time. And as I've mentioned before, it's easy - now - to condemn the Nazis, and it's a great way to distract ourselves from the antisemitism and totalitarianism raging in the world today.

Easy Targets

Nobody is going to complain about Naziphobia. - Barry Rubin

There's no downside to being against Nazis. Anyone can declare that the Holocaust was a great evil, anyone can say "never again". As I wrote in an earlier post,

That the Nazis did horrific things to humanity in general and the Jews in particular is well known; "Nazi = evil" is not a controversial statement. But Nazis are a "safe target". They were white, nominally Christian Europeans acting on a professed ideology of white supremacism; so it's easy to conflate them with the likes of the KKK. Best of all, they lost the war!

Commenting on the reconstituted anti-semitism program at Yale, Barry Rubin picks up this line of thought here:

But now Yale has sidestepped criticism about ending the program by changing its name slightly and choosing a new head who is an expert on Jews in France and especially the Holocaust and French literature there. No doubt we will be fed a steady diet of things like the Dreyfus affair, antisemitism in nineteenth-century French literature, and the situation in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. As if masses of studies haven't been done on such things. But obviously nothing on antisemitism from certain groups, ideologies, and individuals in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. So you see academia really cares about antisemitism, as long as the Jews involved (and in most cases their persecutors) are already long dead. Nobody is going to complain about Naziphobia.

I hope he's wrong about the Yale program, and I'm willing to give the new department head a fair chance. But the main point is this: there's little value in studying the antisemitism of the past if we ignore its most dangerous present manifestations, and by this of course I mean the ideologies of radical Islam.