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My argument wasn't that they are powerless, of course. The argument was that they do not hold absolute power; Kanye cannot in fact be stopped from spreading his message, even if there are inefficiencies. At least if the triumphalist narratives from various antisemites I've seen hold, this is having a real effect, too.
Likewise, when it comes to the specific claim of Bolshevism as Jewish agenda, the Jews in the Soviet Union never held anything like absolute power; for a while, many important Bolsheviks were Jewish, sure, but even during this period we cannot talk of "Jewish rule", and most of the powerful Jewish Bolsheviks fell from their heights pretty much right after the Revolution, which especially in hindsight serves as more proof about the tendentious nature of their power even during the period.
Frankly, all the talk about Soviet Union under "Jewish rule" or "Caucasian rule" or even Russian Empire under "German rule" just seems like deflection from the most obvious narrative: Russian Empire, Soviet Union and the current Russian Federation have all been fundamentally Russian projects, with the reigning group, in the end, being Russians or Russified/Russianizing minorities. The same eternal Russia, just changing garbs from one to another.
Well, have they ever held? Did the «sheeple» ever «wake up» from some media imbroglio? What's the exact scenario here? I can tell what the most probable and boring one is: Kanye burning through his remaining social and financial capital and simply becoming irrelevant; some kooks following him into the depths of Q-adjacent conspiracies; his image in the public eye gradually transforming from «that rap icon with a few wacky ideas» to «that schizo antisemite who was popular for a while somehow; man, Millenials sure were gross bigots». This isn't the first time this has happened to the biggest guy in his respective arena – Ford, Disney, Fischer to name a few; probably Musk soon.
Do you happen to disagree with me and agree with triumphalist antisemites?
I think you are the one dutifully deflecting from noticing the sovereign – as befits a politician.
I guess that's how it must look from a de facto ethnostate.
One might look at it that way. From my perspective, though, all the Russian nationalist talk about "it was the JEWS who did the Soviet Union! Not us! The Jews!" just looks like fundamentally a gigantic pile of cope, a complete deflection of national responsibility.
That's just a "one man's modus ponens..." type of disagreement. I am arguing that his defining characteristic that has allowed his views certain exposure is his near-unrivaled eminence as a brand name and public entertainer, not his Black Hebrew opinions one could as well get from a deadbeat with a crack pipe on a seedy back alley in Baltimore. For you it's «even this schizo cannot be stopped from mouthing off», for me it's «even this celebrity can be canceled, barely making a splash».
The reason I believe my frame is more correct is that if even this schizo could be «stopped» – that is, stopped sooner and more completely, erased from the public consciousness like Yezhov from that photo – we'd have been living in a totalitarian world, walking on tight leashes, much like Chinese businessmen for the last few years, humbled by Jack Ma's adventures. Like, I've asked you the last time – what then? If not even a batshit crazy billionaire celebrity can realistically do something like this, what's happening?
I guess the answer is something like «credible politics is happening».
But you're not talking of nations here; and Bolsheviks were explicitly opposing Russian nationalism (which, by the way, earned them enthusiastic support of such currently anti-Communist peoples as Latvians). Do you hold Chinese nationalists to the same standard of collective ethnic responsibility? Or is escaping to an island under American patronage, instead of dissolving in Paris on the account of having no such islands around, enough to earn your pardon?
How do you think Russian Nationalists fared post-1917? Specific career trajectories, please. For example, Mikhail Osipovich Menshikov – a typical Jew-counting nationalist of the type you're ridiculing here, who was screaming bloody murder about Jews distributing anti-Tsarist agitation since early 1900's. Did he hop on the Soviet bandwagon to glorify the slightly transformed Motherland? No, he predictably got executed by a bunch of Cheka Jews (according to his wife, shot by a certain unsettlingly bloodthirsty youth called Davidson). Ilyin escaped such a fate to Switzerland. On the less effete side, what about Vrangel, Ungern, Denikin and so on?
As a movement, Russian Nationalists, whether of Russian, German, Polish or any other ancestry, did take responsibility, as well as they could, which was perhaps not well at all. They had their intellectuals, their extremist factions, their attempts to steer the discourse. First, their preferred (albeit not particularly interested in their input) regime was toppled using terrorism and propaganda, disproportionately organized by people like Gershuni and Azef and financially supported by people like Jacob Schiff; then they were defeated in the course of a civil war, in which the principal agency on the opposing side belonged to people like Trotsky. That those cerebrally inclined victors soon lost to a more primitive mafia, which in turn was supplanted by Slavs in the long run, changes little.
It can be said that vae victis, and anyway Russians en masse chose Reds over Whites. It is certainly easy to understand how neighboring nations do not give much of a fuck whether Kremlin is White or Red and hold that the only good Russian is a dead one. Nevertheless, it's clear that at the time of those events Russians en masse were ignorant apolitical peasants and frustrated workers with just about enough agency to get a clue which side promises gibs or will punish them harder for non-cooperation, and that intellectually the broader Socialist and specifically Bolshevik movement was dominated by Jews, this trend starting long before Lenin.
After all, even he discovered Das Kapital through the lecture of Moisey Mandelshtam – as told by Radek.
"Russian nationalists" is quite obviously a different thing than "Russians", just like "Jewish nationalists" (arguably a more compact name here is "Zionists") is different from "Jews". Russian nationalists, as a specific ideology, obviously didn't fare very well in the Russian Revolution and Soviet Union, but Soviet Union was still fundamentally mainly a Russian project (though, as said, often supported and advanced by Russified and Russianizinf minorities), a continuation of the previous Russian state, just as the current Russian Federation is the (direct) continuation of RSFSR, and Soviet Union more generally.
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