Russophobia and the Logic of Imperialism

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Allen17
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Joined: Fri Sep 01, 2017 5:02 pm

Russophobia and the Logic of Imperialism

Post by Allen17 » Wed Feb 14, 2018 4:05 am

Thought this was interesting....


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On the border between "Europe" and "Asia", Russians have historically maintained at best a vacillating, conditional relationship with whiteness and "European civilization". The most historically openly terroristic, revanchist manifestation of European supremacist ideology was undoubtedly Nazism. What was the relationship between Nazism, Bolshevism, and the Slavic peoples?

In War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century (2015), Italian Marxist Domenico Losurdo seeks to reclaim the revolutionary tradition and reevaluate the character of Nazism, which he argues has been whitewashed by revisionist historians. Losurdo emphasizes several key points in relation to Nazism and Bolshevism.

Perhaps most importantly, Losurdo argues that in rejecting the revolutionary tradition (from the Jacobins through the Bolsheviks), the revisionist historians have also concealed the colonial character of the Nazi project. Even a cursory reading of Nazi ideology and its goals and practices indicates an essentially colonial dynamic with respect to Jews, Romani, Slavs, and other oppressed peoples. However, U.S. and European historians prefer to whitewash this history, ripping the Holocaust from its historical context and presenting it as an anomaly in human history, rather than an integral manifestation of colonial conquest and imperial terror.

A central aspect of the Nazi project, outlined in Hitler's Mein Kampf, was the plan to colonize Eastern Europe, specifically through exterminating Eastern Europeans and settling throughout the Soviet Union. What historians have traditionally suppressed is that this plan did not come from nowhere: it was inspired in large part by the U.S. settler-colonization of "North America" and the genocide carried out against both the Indigenous people and the people of Africa. Nazi concentration camps were influenced by U.S. concentration camps (i.e. "Indian reservations"); Nazi eugenics was largely inspired by reactionary U.S."scientists" .

Anti-Semitism, anti-Ziganism, and anti-Slavic racism fused to produce the fascist Nazi ideology of turning Eastern Europe into an Aryan settler-colony. In this process of counter-revolution, Nazi ideology racialized its most ferocious enemy: Bolshevism. Bolshevism, a revolutionary working class movement, was the primary existential threat to Nazism, the counter-revolution of big capital. The Bolsheviks, who supported the rebellion of the toiling colonized masses, were the antithesis of imperialism in general and especially its Nazi iteration. Losurdo writes:

"[Revisionist historiography] forgets that, in addition to calling for the transformation of the imperialist war into revolutionary civil war, the Bolsheviks also appealed to the slaves of the colonies to break their chains and wage wars of national liberation against the imperial domination of the great powers. Such repression makes it impossible adequately to understand Nazism and Fascism, which also presented themselves as a movement in reaction - extreme reaction - against this second appeal." (103)

Nazi demagogues painted the Russian Revolution as a "Judeo-Bolshevik" conspiracy, bankrolled by the supposedly economy-controlling Jewish capitalists. As Bolshevism, a movement born out of Russia, took on an anti-colonial character, Russian workers were increasingly racialized for "betraying" Europe and placing their lot with the oppressed rather than with imperialism and colonialism. In a way this process was the opposite that took place among ethnic minorities in the United States, particularly Italians, Poles, and Irish. While the latter groups assimilated into whiteness fully from their conditional status through embracing cross-class white supremacy (and especially anti-Black racism), the Bolsheviks embraced the toiling masses and national liberation; thus, their "whiteness" was "revoked." Hitler himself stated directly in Mein Kampf that the Tsarist Empire was a product of "the state-forming efficacity of the German element in an inferior race," whereas the "inferior" Slavic elements took power in October 1917.

The racialization of Bolshevism was a direct manifestation of historical Orientalism. Nazi SS leader Heinrich Himmler told a group of Waffen SS fascists three weeks after the invasion of the Soviet Union:

"When you, my men, fight over there in the East, you are carrying on the same struggle, against the same subhumanity, the same inferior races, that at one time appeared under the name of Huns, another time- 1000 years ago at the time of King Henry and Otto I- under the name of Magyars, another time under the name of Tartars, and still another time under the name of Genghis Khan and the Mongols. Today they appear as Russians under the political banner of Bolshevism."

However, this was not the first time that the Soviet Union faced an invasion of reactionary terror. After October 1917, the Bolsheviks fought a "Civil" War against the pro-Tsar White Army, the latter enjoying military support from 14 countries. As Losurdo notes, the anti-Semitic pogroms and lynchings carried out by the anti-Bolshevik White Army against Russian Jews and other ethnicities was "a chapter of history that seems to be a direct prelude to Nazi genocide." Anti-Bolshevism, anti-Slavic racism, and colonialism thus became intermeshed in the anti-Semitic Nazi program of extermination. Losurdo explains:

"Denunciation of October [1917] as a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy now reached its most tragic conclusion. General Blum communicated the orders received: 'Eastern Jewry constitutes the intellectual reserve of Bolshevism and hence, in the Führer's opinion, must be destroyed.' As well as building the new colonial empire, the crusade in the East now aimed to detect and destroy the bacillus of dissolution wherever it was to be found. The 'poison of dissolution' that acted via Bolshevik cadres was to be neutralized once and for all, but without forgetting that 'the chief "carriers of the Bolshevik infection"' were the Jews. In Goebbels' words, 'Jewish terror' was the core of 'eastern Bolshevism', that mortal enemy of civilization. The Jews were doubly Oriental and doubly barbarous. They were an 'Asiatic people' alien to Europe and the West, as had been stressed by Houston Chamberlain and the anti-Semitic tradition that fed into Nazism; they therefore formed part of the 'native' populations. Furthermore, they were the inspirers of 'eastern Bolshevism' - were, in fact, the ethnic basis of the virus eroding civilization that was to be eliminated for good." (190)

This racist ideology of anti-Semitism provided the ideological narrative for the Nazi colonial project, which killed millions of Jews, Slavs, Romani, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, and other oppressed groups. According to Nazism, Russia, far from being a bastion of "Aryan civilization", was a "host body" of the "Judeo-Bolshevik virus" that "infected" Europe.

The relationship that Russians and other Slavic peoples have with whiteness today cannot be evaluated in isolation from the history of Nazism and the racialization of Slavs and Bolshevism that went hand-in-hand with anti-Semitism and the entire Nazi project, a project deeply rooted in settler-colonialism, directly inspired by the United States and Canada.




------------Pietz states: "American cold war discourse about totalitarianism served a double function: in regard to the Soviets, it justified a policy of global anti-communism by reinterpreting all struggles for national self-determination in terms of the geopolitical contest for zones of power against totalitarian Russia; in regard to Nazi Germany, it saved the traditional pre-war faith concerning 'the values of Western civilization' held by post-war foreign-policy 'wise men' by displacing the human essence of fascism into the non-Western world... The necessary conscience-soothing exorcism was achieved by affirming the equation of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, combined with an historical interpretation of the essential Orientalness of the Russian mentality. The basic argument is that 'totalitarianism' is nothing other than traditional Oriental despotism plus modern police technology. The appearance of the first truly totalitarian state in the heart of Europe was thus an accident, explainable by the fact that the technology permitting totalitarianism was invented by Western science and was thus first accessible in the West. Moreover, Germany's totalitarian moment is characterized by Kennan as a 'relapse' into barbarism; far from showing a flaw in Western culture, it proved the need for constant alertness in preserving our distinctly Western values."

A supposedly anti-racist theory reveals its racism in its implied upholding of "Western values", a distinctly fascistic, colonial ideal. As "European civilization" faces an existential threat of "barbarism", it tightens its ranks and purges itself of all but the purest elements. According to the Orientalist worldview, Russians have only been able to masquerade as white due to their frequent contact with Europe. However, once the veil is lifted, an essentially Oriental mind is revealed. Pietz again writes:

"History - specifically the pre-modern geopolitics of the Eurasian 'ecumene' which produced the 'Russian-Asiatic world' - explains the Oriental essence of the Russian mind. This mentality is distinguished by its ability, after centuries of direct contact with Europe, to appear civilized and to use this facade of civility for its own barbaric ends."

Not only was Cold War discourse anti-communist; it, in effect was also deeply racist, Orientalist, and provided cover for Nazi terror and its colonial origins. While Russians may have enjoyed conditional whiteness under Tsarism via participation in European imperialism, this privilege was quickly revoked upon the world-historic Bolshevik revolution for its anti-colonial character. The facade of whiteness evaporated, and all that was left was Oriental despotism, or so the racists argue.

On the one side there is Bolshevism, national liberation, and revolution; on the other, Nazism, colonialism, and imperial conquest. To reject the former is to provide tacit support for the later.
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http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/russo ... oO0SqinGUk

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