God help them. The slaughter to come is probably beyond our imagining

    • 2Password2Remember [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      On the one hand Jewish people absolutely needed their own country after the Holocaust

      L take. the solution to anti-Semitism in Europe was not to steal land from the Palestinians and give it to the Jews. the solution was to kill the anti-Semites, but naturally the bourgeois states in the UKkk and amerikkka were never going to actually de-nazify europe

      Death to America

      • nonailsleft@lemm.ee
        ·
        1 year ago

        The choice of this area was a surprise to Komzet; the area had been chosen for military and economic reasons. This area was often infiltrated by China

        General Pavel Sudoplatov writes about the government's rationale behind picking the area in the Far East: "The establishment of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in Birobidzhan in 1928 was ordered by Stalin only as an effort to strengthen the Far Eastern border region with an outpost, not as a favour to the Jews." The area was constantly penetrated by Chinese and White Russian resistance groups, and the idea was to shield the territory

        In the spring of 1928, 654 Jews arrived to settle in the area; however, by October 1928, 49.7% of them had left because of the severe conditions. In the summer of 1928, there were torrential rains that flooded the crops and an outbreak of anthrax that killed the cattle

        Weird that it wasn't more popular

          • JuneFall [none/use name]
            ·
            1 year ago

            Plenty of decisions of the central committee and the politburo during that time were aimed at securing the Soviet Union, which includes actions against reactionaries and white army terrorist leftovers especially in border regions and those in which power couldn't be projected well into. However the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, while having a slapping flag that would make our 2SLGBTQ* comrades proud, never was home to more than 20 000 people labeling as Jews, who remained a minority and who were also not as much in political control as the name implies.

            More Jews fought in the Red army than lived in the JAO.

            • Vncredleader
              ·
              1 year ago

              Wasn't a large contingent of the Jewish population in the JAO Canadian Jews? The project was doomed partly because Soviet Jews already had a place in their communities more or less.

              • JuneFall [none/use name]
                ·
                1 year ago

                The project was doomed partly because Soviet Jews already had a place in their communities more or less.

                Since the worst antisemitism of the Tsar was ended with the October revolution and the years after it, that rings as if it could be true.

                • Vncredleader
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  Keep in mind the resurgent antisemitism post WW2 in several Eastern Bloc countries was over a decade off at this point and the idea of Jewish nationalism had greatly diminished. For various reasons it came back and caused a huge reaction ( ie the rootless cosmopolitan campaign) and split in communist Jews. So end of the 20s they are riding high and integration and an embracing of Yiddish culture was a very clear reality for most people. The JAO had significant Canadian Jews come, and the USSR in general attracted a lot of the diaspora in this time because it was actively fighting against antisemitism.

        • Vncredleader
          ·
          1 year ago

          Keep in mind Sudoplatov is famously unreliable. Even western historians doubt his memoirs and the man was incredibly bitter, spending the rest of his life from being sacked after Beria fell slandering the USSR, taking credit for every success, and being very self serving. Wikipedia using a whole paragraph for his view uncritically is pathetic, particularly given his own wiki page stresses his untrustworthiness. He got reinstated during Glasnost and said this shit

          The Soviet Union—to which I devoted every fiber of my being and for which I was willing to die; for which I averted my eyes from every brutality, finding justification in its transformation from a backward nation into a superpower; for which I spent long months on duty away from Emma and the children; whose mistakes cost me fifteen years of my life as a husband and father – was unwilling to admit its failure and take me back as a citizen. Only when there was no more Soviet Union, no more proud empire, was I reinstated and my name returned to its rightful place.

          • nonailsleft@lemm.ee
            ·
            1 year ago

            Ok of course ol' Pladoplatov is the only source for the RU-CN border conflicts or the area being a climatological F location. Tell me more about his memoirs

            • Vncredleader
              ·
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              Sudoplatov wrote his works decades after he was disgraced and kicked from the party. He was writing as a bitter man for sensationalism and self-aggrandizing. His memoir "special tasks" was sold to the west as this grand tell-all, only to quickly be rescinded by the US press like NYT after historians pointed out how sloppy it was and that no one had consulted other sources. He overstated his intelligence influence in the Manhattan Project, making it seem that many figures had been assisting him, and that the Soviet atomic bomb was the product of his intel, and not Soviet scientists.

              https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1996/09/27/pavel-sudoplatov-89-dies/46d6e456-cf25-40e4-aeef-2b0e2f69b59b/

              The FBI and SVR both heavily criticized the work.

              Now the border conflicts are real. The north was controlled by the Republic of China which was backed by Japan, the KMT had tried and failed with the first Northern Expedition in 26-27. The Soviets had already dealt with Japanese invasions during the Civil War and threats made to their Mongolian People's Republic allies. In December of 1927 the Communist uprising in Guangzhou happened and was put down, causing the KMT to cut ties to the USSR. So come 1928 Japan, its allied government, white emigres, and the KMT all existed as threats in the region. The whites had a couple armored trains operating in the north as well which they used to fight the KMT, and in 1928 when the KMT won they captured a train and tortured the Russian mercenaries in a very public manner. The expedition also was a factor in Stalin and Trotsky's split, with Stalin wanting to support the KMT and have the CPC join them.

              However it wasn't till 1929 that full border war began between China and the USSR, and the Soviets won that definitively, so clearly JAO going along in development was not solely to plug a gap. Though the Far Eastern Bureu did deport and imprison the Chinese population after this conflict and moved Siberians and Europeans in instead. Sort of a trial run for later deportations.

              edit: wait are you being sarcastic? Obviously Im not claiming the only info on this comes from him, my point is wikipedia uncritically citing him and a statement that the "only" reasons something happened was pertaining to his field and work is suspect and not a good source. The existence of these events is not in dispute and you'd have to be very dense to think that was what anyone was implying. It is the validity of Sudoplatov's claim and its definitiveness that is in question.

              Every source that is used belies a bias and constructs a narrative. Them using one from an untrustworthy guy that just so happens to simplify everything down to "Stalin didn't care about the Jews at all" IS telling. It is not adequate and needs to be given the caveat at the very least. Actually challenge wikipedia's choices of sources

    • HumanBehaviorByBjork [any, undecided]
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      On the one hand Jewish people absolutely needed their own country after the Holocaust.

      Where? If the Zionist project had been carried out solely by anti-colonial leftist Jews without massive support from the US and European empires, where would they have gone? How would they have treated the people living there? As soon as you commit to a racially pure nation, you are committed to fascism. "Liberal Zionism" has always only been a fantasy.

      • the_kid
        ·
        1 year ago

        they should have carved up part of Germany and gave it to them, it's the only thing that makes sense

    • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      On the one hand Jewish people absolutely needed their own country after the Holocaust

      I don’t know that I agree with this on its face, ethnostates are bad, full stop. If you’re committed to an ethnostate you’re ultimately committed to fascism to keep that ethnostate pure. And where do you draw the line, should every group the Nazis targeted get an ethnostate to themselves?

      But if that is the decision we landed on, we should’ve given them like, Bavaria. Not a random location already inhabited by people unrelated to the Holocaust.

                • bumblebeehellbringer [fae/faer, they/them]
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  Yes, there was a genocide against indigenous peoples, and also that same genocide still continues. You called it

                  a completed project. A holocaust that went the full distance.

                  It's racist to claim that indigenous people were fully wiped out, when they have survived and continue to live and struggle against the ongoing genocidal violence against them. Pretending that they were all wiped out is harmful to indigenous people and furthers the narrative of colonizers. If indigenous people were all gone (they're not), then there would be no one to pay reparations to, no one to cede land back to. The idea that indigenous people are all dead and gone is part of the ongoing narrative of violence against them. While it is true that indigenous peoples are still struggling against the genocide of governments and settler colonialism, it is also true that many indigenous cultures have undergone a renaissance, with renewed projects to teach and preserve languages, and online spaces for sharing culture. Talking about the genocide against them like it was a "completed project" is wrong and racist. Despite the harm done to them, indigenous people still exist, and we should listen to them and work with them to create a better future.

      • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
        ·
        1 year ago

        Uhhh I think Native Americans would have something to say about Europeans settling in Utah not being colonialism...

        • D3FNC [any]
          ·
          1 year ago

          Joseph Smith: that's weird... I don't hear anything at all

          wipes blood onto his jeans

        • TheDialectic [none/use name]
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Maybe I am an optimist but I feel like they might find kinship in a people who suffered a genocide at the hands of European powers

          • mkultrawide [any]
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            There would be peace in Palestine if that was the case.

            • D3FNC [any]
              ·
              1 year ago

              Israel can have Palestine, TX , as a treat

              Final offer

              • mkultrawide [any]
                ·
                1 year ago

                I've said before that we should give them Eastern Florida from Ft. Lauderdale to St. Augustine since it's basically West Israel anyways.

          • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
            ·
            1 year ago

            Many of the first American colonists were escaping persecution in Europe weren't they?

            • CommunistCuddlefish [she/her]
              ·
              1 year ago

              Not really, they just like to play the victim card.

              The Puritan settlers from England weren't some persecuted minority -- they had been part of the ruling class that turned England into a theocracy for a couple generations. They eventually got overthrown because they were shit rulers with no popular support. I'm fuzzy on the historical details of whether they were expelled or just decided to go somewhere else but either way, the "freedom to practice our religion" they wanted was really the freedom to oppress others, and the legacy of that DARVO-filled spin on "religious freedom" is still abundantly present in the theocratic fascist Evangelical Christians who plague America to this day.