Russian author Dostoevsky grappled with the Jewish question in his book, 'The Diary of a Writer.'
Joseph Cinqué, of Amistad fame, was a slave turned enslaver.
An excerpt from, "Dostoevsky on the Jews" by Dr. William L. Pierce, Renegade Tribune, March 6, 2016:
As much as his people loved him, Dostoevsky in turn loved them — and despised their enemies and exploiters. Foremost among the latter were the Jews of Russia. In Dostoevsky’s time there were some three million of them, some descended from the Khazars, an Asiatic tribe of southern Russia which had converted to Judaism a millennium earlier, and some who had flocked into Russia from the West during the Middle Ages, when they were forcibly expelled from every country in western and central Europe.
Scorning honest labor, the Jews had fastened themselves on the Russian peasants and craftsmen like an army of leeches. Money-lending, the liquor trade, and White slavery were their preferred means of support — and their means of destroying the Russian people.
So great was the Russians’ hate for their Jewish tormentors that the Russian rulers were obliged to institute special legislation, both protecting the Jews and limiting their depredations against the Russian people. Among the latter was a ban against Jewish settlement in central Russia; they were restricted to the regions of western and southwestern Russia (the “Pale of Settlement”) where they had been most heavily concentrated at the time Catherine the Great had proclaimed the ban, in the 18th century.
This, of course, was regarded by the Jews as “persecution,” and it was their incessant wailing about not being allowed to fasten themselves on the people of central Russia which first moved Dostoevsky to set his pen to paper on the Jewish question. In the section of his Diary published in March 1877, the writer remarked:
. . .I know that in the whole world there is certainly no other people who would be complaining as much about their lot, incessantly, after each step and word of theirs — about their humiliation, their suffering, their martyrdom. One might think it is not they who are reigning in Europe, who are directing there at least the stock exchanges and, therefore, politics, domestic affairs, the morality of the states.
Dostoevsky, who had become all too familiar with Jews and their personal attitudes toward their Russian hosts, first as a boy on his parent’s small estate, where he observed the Jew’s dealings with the local peasants, and later in prison, where he noted the aloof behavior of the Jewish prisoners toward Russian prisoners, went on to speculate about what would happen to the Russians if the Jews ever got the whiphand:
. . .Now, how would it be if in Russia there were not three million Jews, but three million Russians, and there were eighty million Jews — well, into what would they convert the Russians and how would they treat them? Would they permit them to acquire equal rights? Would they permit them to worship freely in their midst? Wouldn’t they convert them into slaves? Worse than that: wouldn’t they skin them altogether? Wouldn’t they slaughter them to the last man, to the point of complete extermination, as they used to do with aliens in ancient times, during their ancient history?
This speculation turned out to be grimly prophetic, for only a little more than four decades later bloodthirsty Jewish commissars, who made up the bulk of the Bolshevik leaders, were supervising the butchering of Russians by the millions.
Dostoevsky correctly identified the secret of the Jews’ strength — indeed, of their very survival over a period of 40 centuries — as their exclusiveness, their deeply ingrained mental outlook upon the whole non-Jewish world as an alien, inferior, and hostile thing. This outlook led the Jews to always think of themselves as having a special situation or standing. Even when they were trying most ingratiatingly to convince the non-Jews that Jews were just like everyone else, they maintained the inner attitude of a people who constituted a special community within the larger, Gentile community. Dostoevsky pointed out:
. . . It is possible to outline, at least, certain symptoms of that status in statu — be it only externally. These symptoms are: alienation and estrangement in the matter of religious dogma; the impossibility of fusion; belief that in the world there exists but one national entity, the Jew, while, even though other entities exist, nevertheless, it should be presumed that they are, as it were, nonexistent. ‘Step out of the family of nations and form your own entity, and thou shalt know that henceforth thou art the only one before God; exterminate the rest, or make slaves of them. Have faith in the conquest of the whole world; adhere to the belief that everything will submit to thee. Loathe strictly everything, and do not have intercourse with anyone in thy mode of living. And even when thou shalt lose the land, thy political individuality, even when thou shalt be dispersed all over the face of the earth, amidst all nations — never mind, have faith in everything that has been promised thee, once and forever; believe that all this will come to pass, and meanwhile live, loathe, unite, and exploit — and wait, wait . . . .
An excerpt from, "Dostoevsky and the Jews, by David I. Goldstein" by Steve Zipperstein, Commentary, June 1981:
Dostoevsky’s first trip abroad in 1862 was a major turning point in his intellectual and artistic development and in his attitude toward the Jews. He took the trip within a year of the emancipation of Russia’s serfs, an event which Dostoevsky, and nearly all Russia’s intellectuals, applauded, though they sensed that it might lead to a convergence between Russia and the rest of Europe, a prospect which many had come to view with skepticism. Seeing Europe (for which, as he writes, “I had been dreaming . . . in vain for almost forty years”) persuaded the increasingly conservative Dostoevsky that Russia must at all costs resist going the way of the West, with its complacent bourgeoisie utterly indifferent to the misery surrounding it. Drawing on Russia’s immense spiritual resources—still, for the most part, untainted by the decadent materialism that he thought had overwhelmed Europe—Dostoevsky envisioned a Russia that would redeem the world from the despotism of Western liberalism.
But Dostoevsky came to feel that the Russian messianic ideal was challenged by a discredited yet mysteriously obdurate opponent—the Jews. Though they complained incessantly of persecution at the hands of others, the Jews constituted the most potent threat to the triumph of those ideas which Dostoevsky held dear, still intent as they had been since the days of Moses to impose their will on all mankind. The Jews were thus transformed in Dostoevsky’s mind from contemptible to wickedly impregnable figures. He posited a strange Manichean opposition between the Russian-Christian ideal and the Jewish ideal, an opposition which suggests, though Goldstein does not raise this point, an iconoclastic and even heretical interpretation of the traditional Christian view of the relationship between the Old and New Testaments.
An excerpt from, "Catholicism and the Old South" by Gary Potter, Catholicism.org, May 16, 2005:
If much about slavery in the Old South is successfully misrepresented today, doubtless it is for two reasons: 1) A very great deal of hypocrisy has surrounded the issue at the time of the War Between the States and ever since. 2) Much has been successfully misrepresented in the past.
On the latter score, the most important misrepresentation has been that the North went into the war as a crusade against slavery. That myth was born while the war still raged and it was given birth by the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, probably the most widely unread important document in American history (except perhaps for the Declaration of Independence with its talk of “merciless Indian Savages” so shocking to modern sensibilities).
According to the myth, Mr. Lincoln’s Proclamation “freed the slaves.” In truth, not one slave was freed because of it. It spoke of “all slaves in areas still in rebellion,” not the ones in parts of the C.S.A. already militarily occupied by Union forces, nor those in border states or anywhere else. Naturally those in “areas still in rebellion” were not freed by the Proclamation. Mr. Lincoln knew they would not be. His purpose, plain and simple, was to incite them into a rebellion of their own. In that he failed.
That his purpose was successfully misrepresented at the time, and has been ever since, is not owed exclusively to his careful and lawyerly language going widely unread. It also has to do with the hypocrisy that has always surrounded the slavery issue and the matter of race in general in this country. Northern whites, not being willing openly to admit their own feelings of superiority over “inferior” African Americans, have preferred to impute such “racism” to Southern whites, as if this made the Southerners, also, inferior to themselves, at least morally. In this they have been somewhat like famous modern televangelists thundering against sins of the flesh even as they privately seduced young women or men or were patronizing prostitutes. Only, the truth about Northern whites was not exposed by investigative journalists or trial proceedings. It was desegregation of the public schools that did it. Then the whites showed their true feelings by fleeing to the suburbs.
One case will suffice to illustrate the immensity of Northern hypocrisy in the matter of slavery and race. Outside the South, few today know that Gen. Robert E. Lee freed his slaves before the War Between the States broke out. Even fewer know that Julia Grant, wife of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, still owned three slaves at the end of the war. Two of them were rented out. The third, a female also named Julia, was kept by Mrs. Grant as a maid. When Richmond fell and the war was effectively over, Mrs. Grant traveled down there from Washington, D.C., to visit her husband. She took Julia with her. Thus, at that moment, the only slave in the former Confederate capital who was not freed belonged to the wife of the commanding general of the Union forces!
That is the kind of small but illuminating fact that is kept obscured by writers and others who must distort or hide true past reality in order to fabricate a history on which to base a present and future shaped according to their own idea of what they should be.
Here are some other obscured facts:
• We have just reported that the wife of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant was a slave-holder. So was Abraham Lincoln’s father-in-law, and Mrs. Lincoln profited from it. Her share in her father’s estate was derived in part from the sale of his slaves.
• No more than one out of fifteen Southern whites ever owned a slave. That means there were fewer than 350,000 slave-holders in all the South. Yet, about 600,000 soldiers served in the Confederate Armies. If, then, every slave-holder was in uniform — and, certainly, that was not so — there were still hundreds of thousands of soldiers with no personal stake in slavery. So much for the idea that it was to keep their slaves that Southerners fought!
• The price of an able-bodied slave at the time of the war was about $1,000 — still a fair-sized sum today and a very large amount of money in the 1860s. How many slave-holders would starve, beat or otherwise abuse such valuable property? Rare was the mistreatment of any slave.
• Most African laborers brought to America as slaves were animists. Nearly all would embrace the Christianity of their eventual owners. Is it likely they would convert to the religion of owners who brutalized them?
• The English were responsible for most of the slave traffic into North America, but not all. This was illustrated in the recent hit movie, Amistad. What the movie did not show was that the leader of the slave uprising, Cinque, went back to Africa and himself became a big-time slave-trader. (The misrepresentation of historical reality never stops.)
