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anti-Semitism, cultural transfer, history, intellectual history, intellectual poisoning, intellectual transfer, Russia and Germany, Vinberg, Walter Laqueur
Excerpted from Walter Laqueur’s Russia and Germany: A Century of Conflict (1965) in the interest of understanding anti-Semitic ideation as a transferable cultural technology useful for controlling and leveraging mobs. Of course, for anti-Semitic theorists, expression may not be so cold but rather driven by their own malignant narcissism and related contempt, defensiveness, and paranoia — and Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation — that goes with it.
Wikipedia has an entry on the benighted star of the following paragraph: Fyodor Viktorovich Vinberg
Vinberg was a most loyal and devoted subject of his Tsar and his writings are full of invective against all Russian politicians, particularly of the centre and the right, who had been deficient in this respect. Shortly before the October revolution, Vinberg took part in a conspiracy to overthrow the provisional government, was arrested and sent to the Peter and Paul fortress. There he had ample time to write his diaries and to bring some order into his ideas; like Hitler in Landsberg prison, he then and there prepared himself for his future political and publicist career. Vinberg was released, or escaped, in 1918, and went first to the Ukraine and later to Germany, where he systematically developed his ideas in the short-lived Berlin newspaper, Prizyv, the yearbook Luch Sveta (A Ray of Light), published first in Berlin and subsequently in Yugoslavia, his book Krestny Put (Via Dolorosa), and a number of other writings. Vinberg’s ideas can be summarized as follows:
- The Jews are the source of all evil. They must be exterminated.
- The liberals and the constitutional monarchists are responsible for Russia’s ruin. Any form of democracy and republican regime is bad. A strong dictatorship is needed, for the people are stupid and bad and can never be trusted.
- Russia and Germany must unite in order to crush the revolution.
- The Catholic and Orthodox Churches must unite against the combined power of the Judeo-masonic sects now operating as a new International.
. . . In his ‘Berlin letters’ published in Luch Sveta, we learn that nature loves the strong, the brave, the agile, those who act and do not talk; she loathes weakness and democratic half measures. Vinberg has only contempt for the masses, and his only criticism of Nicholas II is that the late Tsar unduly idealized the muzhik, and the Russian people in general, who are really a good for nothing lot and deserve to be punished for having betrayed their Tsar. The people will always remain a blind, ignorant, senseless mass which has never and nowhere understood anything apart from the crudest material needs.
Starting well before Vinberg and moving far past him, Laqueur connects the dots between the Tsar’s White Russian loyalists and emigres who had carried from the experience of the royals the anti-Semitic cant and nurtured racial contempt and supremacism of that medieval world. The transfer of thought from Vinberg to Germany’s Rosenberg ensues.
What Rosenberg says of Jews and Jewish history can be traced, chapter and verse, to Vinberg’s ‘Berlin letters’ of 1919: the Jewish religion is highly aristocratic; the Jews have been engaged for many hundreds of years in a struggle against the gentile aristocracies; they use in this fight democratic, liberal, and socialist doctrines which act as a poison in the non-Jewish body politic. Thus they destroyed the Roman empire through the deadly injection of democratic-Jewish Christianity . . . . (op. cit. p 116)
And on goes Walter Laqueur’s documentation of the intellectual history involving the transfer of such thought from the Russian experience and invention into a German culture soon to embrace Nazism.
Vinberg died in February 1927, and did not witness his ideas coming to fruition. His views are of historical interest because they constitute something in the nature of a half-way house between the old Black Hundred and National Socialism (op. cit. p. 117).
Related Reference
Alpha History. “19th Century Anti-Semitism”.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Pogroms”.
The Aufbau Vereinigung (Reconstruction Organisation) was a Munich-based counterrevolutionary conspiratorial group formed in the aftermath of the German occupation of the Ukraine in 1918 and of the Latvian Intervention of 1919. It brought together White Russian émigrés and early German National Socialists who aimed to overthrow the governments of Germany and the Soviet Union, replacing them with authoritarian régimes of the far right. The group was originally known as Die Bruecke (The Bridge). Aufbau was also the name of a periodical it brought out.[1]
According to Michael Kellogg,[2] the Aufbau Vereinigung was a vital influence on the development of Nazi ideology in the years before the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 as well as financing NSDAP with, for example, funds from Henry Ford. It gave Hitler the idea of a vast Jewish conspiracy, involving a close alliance between international finance and Bolshevism and threatening disaster for mankind.[3] Recent research on Hitler’s early years in Vienna (1905-1913) appears to have shown that his antisemitism was at that time far less developed than it became under the new influences.[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aufbau_Vereinigung
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