Dostoevsky On The Jewish Question + Some History About Slavery And The Civil War

 

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.)

Anti-Catholicism In Part Inspired The American Revolution

 

To the founders an American Pope would have probably been a sign of the Apocalypse.

An excerpt from, "The role of anti-Catholicism in framing the American Revolution" by Michael Sean Winters, NCR, November 26, 2025:

Back in 2014, I published a weeklong historiographical look at books which, in part, examined the ways anti-Catholicism was in the political air the American colonists breathed and which shaped their increasing hostility to British rule. Linda Colley's Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 considered the ways anti-Catholicism was deployed to overcome differences between the Scots and the English, fashioning British identity. Bernard Bailyn's seminal work, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, argued that country whig ideas united the various ideological currents of the time, and created a narrative that was especially potent in New England's colonies. Bailyn was in Burns' documentary but did not discuss religion. Patricia Bonomi's Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America examined the ways religious belief and practice stoked the fires of the American Revolution. And, Robert Emmett Curran's Papist Devils: Catholic in British America, 1574-1783, looked at the ways anti-Catholic prejudices were fed by, among other things, the French and Indian War and the British parliament's passage of the Quebec Act.

Once the Revolution began, and the few Catholics in Maryland and Pennsylvania rallied to the patriot cause, anti-Catholicism became largely dormant until the 19th century. Anti-Catholicism was not a central force driving the colonists to revolt, but it played a role, shaping their political beliefs in profound ways. Even enlightenment figures like Thomas Jefferson were deeply prejudiced against Catholicism: There simply were not enough Catholics in the early United States to sustain any substantive fear of their influence.

When waves of Catholic immigrants arrived at our shores in the 1800s, that prejudice came to the surface again, still shaping political ideas, still suspicious of Catholics' ability to be loyal to both the Constitution and the pope. Not until President John F. Kennedy's election can we say that anti-Catholicism ceased to be a political factor. During the revolutionary era, it still was, and my one complaint about Burns' documentary was that he did not pay enough attention to it.

An excerpt from, "The Catholic stories Ken Burns left out of his new American Revolution documentary" by Anthony D. Andreassi, America Magazine, December 5, 2025:

Among the other European powers that had shaped the region were the French, whose defeat in 1763 and the subsequent British annexation of Quebec set the stage for the Continental Army’s first major initiative—to conquer the territory—under Major General Benedict Arnold 12 years later. Although that campaign failed, the documentary does not address a diplomatic attempt to draw French Canada into the colonies’ rebellion, which had a decidedly Catholic connection. 

A 1775 draft of the Articles of Confederation invited every British colony—from Bermuda to Quebec and even Ireland—to join this new “Association.” Hoping to win over Canada, that November, Washington forbade Continental troops to observe the usual Guy Fawkes (Pope’s) Day festivities, mindful that gestures hostile to Catholicism would hinder that effort. 

Then, in 1776, Congress sent a four man delegation, including Benjamin Franklin and the Rev. John Carroll of Maryland (technically no longer a Jesuit because the Society of Jesus had been suppressed three years earlier), chosen both for his fluency in French and his Catholicism, to Montreal to encourage the Canadians to, in the words of Washington, “unite with us in an indissoluble union.”

Although the mission to Canada, like Arnold’s invasion, ultimately failed, it nonetheless helped shape the course of Carroll’s later life. Prior to meeting him, Franklin harbored the general anti-Catholic sentiments of Protestants of his day. However, Carroll’s learning and his kindness toward Franklin likely softened Franklin’s view of Catholicism, a point underscored by Carroll’s decision to accompany him from Montreal to Philadelphia when he became ill. 

An excerpt from, "Catholics and the American Revolution" The American Catholic Historical Researches, January 1906:

"American Independence," says Bancroft, "like the great rivers of the country, had many sources."

It was not due solely to oppressive tax laws nor to restriction on popular rights. Indeed though these hold the main place in the popular narration of causes which brought on the Revolt, it is a question for historical consideration whether these oppressions alone would have moved the body of the people to acts of resistance had not Religion been a moving force upon the minds of the people. The active malcontents or leaders of the Revolt sought to impress upon the people that Protestantism had been assailed and might in America be overthrown.

Charles Carroll, The First Citizen

Wikipedia: 

Charles Carroll (September 19, 1737 – November 14, 1832), known as Charles Carroll of Carrollton or Charles Carroll III, was an American politician, planter, and signatory of the Declaration of Independence. He was the only Catholic signatory of the Declaration and the longest surviving, dying 56 years after its signing.

A Founding Father of the United States, Carroll was known contemporaneously as the "First Citizen" of the American colonies, a consequence of signing articles in the Maryland Gazette with that pen name. He served as a delegate to the Continental Congress and Confederation Congress. Carroll later served as the first United States Senator for Maryland. Of all of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, Carroll was one of the wealthiest and most formally educated. A product of his 17-year Jesuit education in France, Carroll spoke five languages fluently.

Born in Annapolis, Maryland, Carroll inherited vast agricultural estates and was regarded as the wealthiest man in the American colonies when the American Revolution commenced in 1775.[citation needed] His personal fortune at this time was reputed to be 2,100,000 pounds sterling, the equivalent to £338,402,985 in 2023 (US$375 million). In addition, Carroll presided over his manor in Maryland, a 10,000-acre estate, and claimed as his property approximately 300 slaves. Though barred from holding office in Maryland because of his religion, Carroll emerged as a leader of the state's movement for independence. He was a delegate to the Annapolis Convention and was selected as a delegate to the Continental Congress in 1776. He was part of an unsuccessful diplomatic mission, which also included Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Chase, that Congress sent to Quebec in hopes of winning the support of French Canadians.

. . .The Carroll family were slaveholders and Carroll was reputedly the largest single slave owner at the time of the American Revolution. Carroll was opposed in principle to slavery, asking rhetorically: "Why keep alive the question of slavery? It is admitted by all to be a great evil.; let an effectual mode of getting rid of it be pointed out, or let the question sleep forever;" However, although he supported its gradual abolition, he did not free his own slaves. Carroll introduced a bill for the gradual abolition of slavery in the Maryland Senate, but it did not pass. In 1828, aged 91, he served as president of the Auxiliary State Colonization Society of Maryland,[30] the Maryland branch of the American Colonization Society, an organization dedicated to returning Black Americans to lead free lives in African states such as Liberia.

. . .According to Hix, when it was Carroll's turn to sign the Declaration of Independence, he rose, went to John Hancock's desk where the document rested, signed his name "Charles Carroll" and returned to his seat. At this point another member of the Continental Congress, who was prejudiced against Carroll because of his Catholicism, commented that Carroll risked nothing in signing the document, as there must be many men named Charles Carroll in the colonies, and so the King would be unlikely to order Carroll's arrest without clear proof that he was the same Charles Carroll who had signed the Declaration. Carroll immediately returned to Hancock's desk, seized the pen again, and added "of Carrollton" to his name.

Video Title: Charles Carroll. Source: The White House. Date Published: June 26, 2025.

Four Way Suicide

 

Canada is committing national suicide for Ukraine. Ukraine is committing national suicide for America. America is committing national suicide for Israel. Israel is committing national suicide for. . .

The Ukraine War keeps getting crazier and crazier. It's a fire that is being used to burn Europe and suck the wealth out of NATO countries. There's no chance of its victory. Ukraine is just being used to bring other nations down. 

Ukraine has never been a rational actor. It is a mad dog that under the orders of its foreign masters is now attacking Hungary and Slovakia, provoking a larger war in Europe. 

It has to be tranquilized. Russia is foolishly taking its sweet ass time in this war, and Europe is suffering as a result.

The Master of Alternate History An Interview with Harry Turtledove

 

Wikipedia:

Harry Norman Turtledove (born June 14, 1949) is an American historian and author who is best known for his work in the genres of alternate history, historical fiction, fantasy, science fiction, and mystery fiction.

. . .Publishers Weekly dubbed Turtledove "The Master of Alternate History". Within the genre, he is known for creating original alternate history scenarios, such as survival of the Byzantine Empire or an alien invasion during the middle of the Second World War. In addition, he has been credited with giving original treatment to alternate themes that had been dealt with by many others, such as the victory of the South in the American Civil War or the victory of Nazi Germany during the Second World War. His novels have been credited with bringing alternate history into the mainstream.

Video Title: The Master of Alternate History An Interview with Harry Turtledove. Source: MQ English Discipline. Date Published: August 6, 2025. Description:

Stephanie interviews the prolific novelist Harry Turtledove, known as the Master of Alternate History. They discuss alternate history as a genre, how to do historical research when you're writing alternative history, and why alternative histories are so relevant right now.