Alaskaball [comrade/them]

Why are you profile stalking like a creep?

  • 338 Posts
  • 1.68K Comments
Joined 5 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 28th, 2020

help-circle

  • Oh wild the sheriff that responded to the Idaho shooter was a former LA pig that got specialized federal training for counter-terrorism and has multiple security clearances and connections to every u.s intelligence agency and had also been trained by mossad and shin bet.

    Shooter’s step-dad may have also had connections to the war industry via ammunition manufacturer “The Kinetic Group” formerly connected to “Vista Outdoor”

    Folks this stuff is screaming bungled conspiracy to me. The cops destroyed the evidence scene, pushed the perp’s car off a cliff or some shit to make it hard to immediately investigate it too in the name of “preventing the perp from possibly fleeing” and how first-hand witnesses described the gunfight as the cops taking fire from multiple directions and how there was circumstantial evidence of spent/unspent ammo scattered around suggests a small possibility that this was a multiple perp operation instead of a single perp operation.

    With not much info on the shooter still being known beyond the fact he liked firefighters, this whole event is still shrouded in Conspiracy Wrapped in a Mystery Inside of an Enigma.

    Edit: just found out that the shooter was a nazi gunfucker who’s remembered by his classmates as being a nazi gunfucker who wanted to go to college to join ROTC and be a murdering boot like his real dad (who was a FUCKING CAV SCOUT WITH THEIR DUMB FUCKING HATS AND SPURS! folks anyone that’s a part of the fucking Cav scouts with their shitty lamp gear is fucking sus)








  • 62 Adeeb Khalid, “Locating the (Post-)Colonial in Soviet History,” Central Asian Survey 26, no. 4 (2007): 465–73, https://doi.org/10.1080/02634930802017895.

    63 Yaacov Ro’i, Soviet Decision-Making in Practice: The USSR and Israel, 1947–1954 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1980), 40.

    64 Laurent Rucker, Moscow’s Surprise: The Soviet–Israeli Alliance of 1947–1949, Working Paper no. 46 (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, July 15, 2005), 26.

    65 Greg Dropkin, interview with Ilan Pappé, LabourNet, September 13, 2002, https://www.labournet.net/world/0209/pappe1.html.

    66 Laurent Rucker, Moscow’s Surprise: The Soviet–Israeli Alliance of 1947–1949, Working Paper no. 46 (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, July 15, 2005), 33.

    67 Ibid., 34.

    68 Ibid.

    69 See the work of Golia Golan, Yaacov Ro’i, Roman, Brackman, Joseph Heller. Laurent Rucker is cited in this article as well, but his book length texts are in French.

    70 Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds., Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Domenico Losurdo, “Stalin and Hitler: Twin Brothers or Mortal Enemies?,” Crisis and Critique 3, no. 1 (March 29, 2016).

    71 Afterword

    As I wrote this article, I could not help but reflect on the connections between this history and the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The Nakba cannot be understood as a singular event in which the Soviets briefly and regrettably played a role before shifting course.


  • Conclusion

    Backshadowing is a form of historical distortion that occurs when a presumed outcome is treated as inevitable, and the past is selectively reconstructed to fit that conclusion. Rather than analyzing events on their own terms, this approach imposes a predetermined endpoint, and forces the facts to fit the narrative, leading to the omission of contradictory evidence. The notion of Stalinist antisemitism has become something of a historiographic trope, largely based on the legitimate fears and perceptions of Soviet Jews, but it does not accurately reflect the motivations of the Soviet state as documented in the archival record.

    This writing should not be perceived as a defence of Stalinist repression; if anything, I’m arguing that the focus on antisemitism actually reduces the scope of Stalin’s violence by downgrading the other anti-nationalist repressions into a less visible category. While it may be tempting to add antisemitism to the litany of charges levelled at Stalin, we do not need to embellish or invent charges to prove that Stalin wielded repression brutally—the existing evidence is clear. Stalin’s repression of perceived nationalist movements were usually unnecessary and ruthless, causing immense suffering to its victims. It may seem that only a deep, primordial racial hatred can explain the scale of these repressions. After all, an antisemitic Stalin is intuitively satisfying, a figure who fits neatly into a familiar one-dimensional narratives of psychopathic dictators and totalitarian terror in the mold of Hitlerism. But the insistence on casting him as a Soviet Hitler tells us less about Stalin himself than about the preconceived notions and ideological reflexes that shape our understanding of history, and which separates worthy victims from unworthy ones.

    CITATIONS

    1 Benjamin Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 181.

    2 Ibid., 181-185.

    3 Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 341.

    4 Christopher Read, Stalin: A Biography (London: Routledge, 2005), 304-305.

    5 Yu Xiao and Ji Zeng, “Antisemitism or Political Purge? Stalin’s Jewish Policies Revisited,” Journal of Cold War Studies4, no. 1 (2002): 66–80

    6 Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 568.

    7 Benjamin Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 157; Pinkus is a historian who does defend the concept of Soviet antisemitism, though this conclusion is undermined by much of his own evidence.

    8 Ibid., 151-155

    9 Mironov, Boris N. “Социальная история России периода империи (XVIII—начало XX века).” Accessed June 21, 2025. https://www.hrono.ru/libris/lib_m/mironin37.html; Zhores Medvedev, Stalin i evreiskii vopros [Stalin and the Jewish Question] (Moscow: Prava cheloveka, 2003).

    10 Jiwan Lee, “An Interview with Geoffrey Roberts about ‘Stalin’s Library’,” Yale Books Blog, March 22, 2024, https://yalebooksblog.co.uk/2024/03/22/an-interview-with-geoffrey-roberts-about-stalins-library/.

    11 Joseph Stalin, Marxism and the National Question, March 1913, Marxists Internet Archive, accessed June 21, 2025, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1913/03a.htm.

    12 Terry Martin, “An Affirmative Action Empire,” in A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

    13 Ibid,. 81.

    14 Ibid., 84.

    15 Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).

    16 Inna Shtakser, review of Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk, by Elissa Bemporad, accessed June 22, 2025, https://conservancy.umn.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/368096ee-472f-401a-9b02-ac38db3eb15a/content.; Elissa Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).

    17 Stephen J. Rees, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Patriotism (London: Routledge, 2012), 202-207.

    18 Ibid., 205.

    19 Ibid.,

    20 Ibid. Unlike Roberts, Read, Medvedev, and Xiao, Van Ree does attribute a degree of personal antisemitism to Stalin, though he presents it as secondary to the broader anti-Zionist campaign. He frames Stalin’s antisemitism primarily in terms of etatism and patriotism, rather than any racial, religious, or cultural animus. However, if Stalin’s hostility toward Jews was rooted solely in political calculations—and given that non-Jews were also targeted and some Jews were involved in carrying out the repression—it is worth questioning whether this qualifies as antisemitism in any meaningful sense at all.

    21 Joseph Stalin, Speech at Celebration Meeting of the Moscow Soviet of Working People’s Deputies and Moscow Party and Public Organizations, November 6, 1941, in Works, vol. 14 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), 18–31. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1941/11/06.htm.

    22 Yu Xiao and Ji Zeng, “Antisemitism or Political Purge? Stalin’s Jewish Policies Revisited,” Journal of Cold War Studies4, no. 1 (2002): 66–80

    23 Ibid.

    24 Stephen J. Rees, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Patriotism (London: Routledge, 2012), 206-207.

    25 Christopher Read, Stalin: A Biography (London: Routledge, 2005), 305.

    26 Trevor Erlacher, “Mykola Khvyl’ovyy, Dmytro Dontsov, and the Transgressive Symbiosis of Communist and Nationalist Visions for a Revolutionary Ukrainian Literature,” Connexe: Les Espaces Postcommunistes en Question(s) 5 (October 2020): 53–75, https://doi.org/10.5077/journals/connexe.2019.e250.

    27 Ibid., 62.

    28 Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005),

    29 Albert Lindemann, Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 454.

    30 Christopher Read, Stalin: A Biography (London: Routledge, 2005), 305.

    31 Michael Parrish, The Lesser Terror: Soviet State Security, 1939–1953.

    32 Terry Martin, The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017),

    33 Ibid.

    34 Nicolas Werth, “The NKVD Mass Secret National Operations (August 1937 - November 1938),” Mass Violence & Résistance, May 20, 2010, accessed June 22, 2025, https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/nkvd-mass-secret-national-operations-august-1937-november-1938.

    35 Espresso Stalinist, “Stalin’s ‘Anti-Semitism,’” The Espresso Stalinist, July 27, 2016, https://espressostalinist.com/2016/07/27/stalins-anti-semitism/.

    36 This was the view of Khrushchev professed in his problematic memoir that has been criticized by a number of historians for its historical distortions, fabrications, and omissions. See: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1974/08/08/khrushchev-forgets/

    37 Edele, Mark, “More Than Just Stalinists: The Political Sentiments of Victors, 1945–1953,” in Fürst, Juliane, ed., Late Stalinist Russia: Society between Reconstruction and Reinvention (London, 2006), 173

    38 Albert Lindemann, Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 454.

    39 Stephen J. Rees, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Patriotism (London: Routledge, 2012), 205.

    40 Ibid.

    41 Elissa Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).

    42 Diana Dumitru, “Jewish Social Mobility under Late Stalinism: A View from the Newly Sovietizing Periphery,” Slavic Review 78, no. 4 (Winter 2019)

    43 Ibid.

    44 Ibid.

    45 Diana Dumitru, The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)

    46 Diana Dumitru, “Jewish Social Mobility under Late Stalinism: A View from the Newly Sovietizing Periphery,” Slavic Review 78, no. 4 (Winter 2019), 987; Leonid Smilovitsky, Jewish Life in Belarus: The Final Decade of the Stalin Regime, 1944–1953 (Budapest : Central European University Press, July 20, 2014);

    47 Ibid.,

    48 Ibid., 127.

    49 Ibid., 235.

    50 Christopher Read, Stalin: A Biography (London: Routledge, 2005), 305.

    51 Olga Baranova, “Politics of Memory of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union,” Junior Visiting Fellows’ Conferences, vol. XXXIV (Vienna: Institute for Human Sciences, 2010),

    52 Ibid.

    53 Dan Stone, The Holocaust: An History. (London: Oxford University Press, 2016),

    54 David Shneer, review of Unwelcome Memory: Holocaust Monuments in the Soviet Union, by Arkadi Zeltser, Slavic Review 79, no. 1 (Spring 2020): 231–232,

    55 Arkadi Zeltser, Unwelcome Memory: Holocaust Monuments in the Soviet Union, trans. A. S. Brown (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem Press, 2018).

    56 Laurent Rucker, Moscow’s Surprise: The Soviet–Israeli Alliance of 1947–1949, Working Paper no. 46 (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, July 15, 2005), 17.

    57 Ken Kalfus, “Imagining Stalin’s Plot to Exile the Jews,” The New Yorker, February 1, 2016.

    58 Ibid.

    59 Michel Réal, “The Forgotten Alliance,” Le Monde diplomatique (English edition), September 2014, https://mondediplo.com/2014/09/07israel-russia.

    60 Yaacov Ro’i, Soviet Decision-Making in Practice: The USSR and Israel, 1947–1954 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1980), 33.

    61 Laurent Rucker, Moscow’s Surprise: The Soviet–Israeli Alliance of 1947–1949, Working Paper no. 46 (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, July 15, 2005), 30.


  • While the Soviets were formally opposed to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, their support for a plan of peaceful Arab-Jewish coexistence was undermined by the extensive material support they provided to the Zionist movement. Armed with Soviet-supplied weaponry, these militias carried out brutal operations that included massacres, forced expulsions, and the destruction of entire villages. It must be noted that the violence unleashed by the Zionist movement was not incidental or accidental but part of a systematic effort to establish a Jewish state with territorial dominance at the direct expense of the indigenous population. Indeed, the Soviet indifference to crimes against Palestinians is especially disturbing. Ruckert writes:

    Another aspect of the Soviet Union’s demographic contribution to the Israeli war effort was its noticeable support of the Jewish state’s position on the fate of the 700,000 Arab Palestinians expelled or exiled from the territories gained by the Jewish forces. The mass forced departure of the Palestinians allowed Israel to expand and homogenize its territory. The Soviet press ignored the massacre of the Arab village of Deir Yassin committed by Irgun and Lehi groups on 9 April 1948. During the UN debate, the Soviet delegates denied that Israel had any responsibility for the fate of the Palestinian peoples and deflected it instead to Great Britain and the Arab countries. They also supported the Israeli position rejecting the plan of Count Bernadotte, the appointed mediator in the Arab/Jewish conflict, which proposed a Palestinian right to financial compensation.66

    Moshe Shertok, head of the political department of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, describes how in all his interactions with the Soviets, there was an “absence of any interest in, or concern about, the fate of the Arab refugees, utter contempt for the progressive forces in the Arab states, and so forth.”67 The Soviets had even voted against a UN resolution that would allow Arab refugees wishing to return to their homes to do so or be compensated for loss or damage to property.68 The Soviet position on Palestine decimated the reputation and standing of communism in the Arab world, where Communist Parties in the region saw a mass exodus in their membership.

    While the (false) claim that the Soviets prohibited any acknowledgment of the Nazi genocide of Jews is often cited as further evidence of Stalinist antisemitism, scholars of Soviet history analyzing Soviet policy in the Middle East typically have not conceived of Soviet complicity in the displacement of Palestinians as an atrocity or a crime for which moral culpability is due, let alone make accusations of anti-Arab or anti-Palestinian racism. Instead, it is treated as a minor footnote in the broader story of Soviet diplomacy in the region. While there are only a handful of book-length texts on Stalin-era Middle Eastern policy by historians of the USSR or Soviet international relations in English, I have yet to read one that even mentions the word Nakba or uses the term “ethnic cleansing” in relation to Palestinians.69

    This reflects an enduring hierarchy of victimhood in which the suffering of certain groups is granted greater moral legitimacy than others. Nakba denial has enjoyed mainstream acceptance within Soviet scholarship and beyond, while disproportionate emphasis is placed on Soviet antisemitism—so much so that antisemitic motives and incidents have, at times, been exaggerated or asserted without any substantiating evidence in certain historical accounts. The ease with which a non-existent plan to deport Jews has come to be accepted as fact reflects the distorting influence of the “totalitarian” thesis, a popular anti-communist theoretical framework that casts Hitler and Stalin as mirror images of each other, collapsing the essential differences between these figures and the distinct historical contexts that shaped their motives and ideology.70 Within this reductive comparative framework, it becomes easy to project Nazi atrocities onto the Soviet Union (and vice versa). Soviet programs of social equity for minorities or campaigns against antisemitism do not fit neatly within this schema and are overlooked, smoothing out the contradictions that complicate dominant narratives of Stalin’s state-endorsed antisemitism. While historians have searched in vain for evidence of an antisemitic expulsion of Soviet Jews, an actual ethnic expulsion took place during the same late Stalinist era as a result of Soviet decision-making. This expulsion was then actually suppressed by the Soviet press, unlike the demonstrably false claims of Soviet Holocaust denial.

    Part of this privileging of Jewish suffering over other victims stems from the Holocaust’s status as the paradigmatic genocide in modern historical consciousness; it endures in our collective memory as the purest form of distilled racial hatred. As a result, antisemitism has come to occupy a singular position as the archetype of evil, which, in turn, shapes how we read and interpret history. During the Cold War, Western scholars and institutions often emphasized Soviet repression to highlight contrasts with liberal democratic values. Within this context, focusing on alleged antisemitism in the USSR became a compelling narrative, as it resonated with broader Western concerns about human rights and totalitarian threats. It is easy to see how Stalin’s paranoid anti-Zionist campaign was taken up as antisemitic in the literature.


  • Perceptions of Soviet Antisemitism

    The perception of Soviet antisemitism has also been shaped, in part, by two widely believed misconceptions about the USSR. The first is the claim that the Nazi genocide of the Jews became a forbidden topic in the Soviet Union, and that Soviet commemoration of those killed by the Nazis deliberately refused to acknowledge the extermination of Jewry. While Soviet historians of the first postwar decades did not define the Nazi extermination as “a separate, uniquely Jewish phenomenon,” as it is currently understood in the West, they nonetheless acknowledged the exceptional brutality of Nazi treatment towards Jews while situating this violence within a broader narrative of a distinctly Soviet tragedy. Baranova writes: 51

    When Soviet historians did discuss the Nazi atrocities against the Jews, they usually viewed that catastrophe as an integral part of a larger phenomenon – the Nazi genocide and the tragedy of all Soviet people (whether Jews, Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians) occasioned by Nazi racism directed not only at Jews, but also at Slavs who all were targets of the Nazi policy of enslavement and extermination. In other words, Soviet historians acknowledged that many Jews were killed by the fascist and that Jews were often treated in a most brutal way, but they asserted that similar things happened also to other national groups in the occupied areas of the Soviet Union. 52

    While some critics have expressed concern over highlighting non-Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide, we should not overlook the historical reality that millions of Slavic people were systematically killed by a regime that explicitly regarded Slavs as racially inferior beings fit only for slavery and death. The Nazi vision of settler-colonial genocide and expansion (Lebensraum) in Soviet lands cannot be separated from the Holocaust.53 For the Soviets, Nazi extermination was undoubtedly a Soviet-wide tragedy, and the downplaying of this historical reality is part of a larger attempt in the Western world to minimize both the sacrifice and the achievements of the Soviet people during the war effort. This denialism reflects a deeply rooted form of anti-Slavic racism and Russophobia that, regrettably, continues to permeate much of Western media and scholarship.

    While the Soviets did not elevate Jewish suffering above other ethnic groups in their commemorative activity, they still acknowledged the horrific treatment of Jews at the hands of the Nazis and permitted space for their commemoration—often made possible through the activism of Soviet Jews who mobilized within their communities to ensure their loved ones were honoured. Indeed, Arkadi Zeltser, a research historian at Yad Vashem, “shows that, on the contrary, Soviet Jews memorialized the Holocaust in the Soviet Union similarly to Jews elsewhere in the world.”54 Zeltser describes how Jewish communities in over 700 locations mobilized to set up memorials to Holocaust victims, each of which required state approval.55 It was an onerous and bureaucratic process, and some requests were denied, but the claim that the Soviets strictly forbade recognition of Jewish victims is demonstrably false. In fact, the USSR’s own ambassador to the United Nations explicitly cited the Holocaust as part of the justification for the colonial imposition of a Jewish state on Palestinian territory, stating:

    The Jewish people suffered exceptional calamities and sufferings in the last war. On the territory dominated by the Hitlerites, the Jews were subjected to almost complete physical extermination - about six million people died. The fact that not a single Western European state was able to ensure the protection of the elementary rights of the Jewish people and protect it from violence by the fascist executioners explains the Jews’ desire to create their own state. It would be unfair not to reckon with this and deny the right of the Jewish people to carry out such a desire.56

    This reflects a darker dimension of Soviet Holocaust recognition, its instrumentalization in service of geopolitical ambitions that ultimately enabled horrific atrocities against Palestinians, who experienced displacement and settler-colonial violence during the creation of a Jewish state, which we will return to later in this piece. Nonetheless, it is false that the Soviet state embraced a form of Holocaust denial in its commemorative activities.

    The second major myth of Stalinist antisemitism is that Stalin was planning to ethnically cleanse the entire Soviet Jewish population by deporting them en masse to Siberia or the Far East, a campaign believed by some to have been imminent on the eve of his death in 1953. Ken Kalfus correctly notes that historians “have not yet found evidence that further actions against the nation’s roughly 2.2 million Jews were contemplated.”57 A campaign of that scale would have required extensive logistical preparation and the full mobilization of the Soviet state apparatus. The absence of any such documentation makes clear that no such plan ever existed, as it is difficult to imagine an operation of that magnitude leaving no bureaucratic trace.58

    The notion of a coming deportation of Jews was largely the product of fear, rumour, and speculation in the wake of the fabricated Doctors’ Plot and the earlier dissolution of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Nonetheless, the idea that Stalin was preparing a mass expulsion of Jews has been endlessly recycled as a self-evident truth despite the complete lack of concrete evidence.

    Palestine and Israel

    While the alleged plan to deport Jews within Soviet borders was never real, the USSR was indeed implicated in a mass expulsion that did take place around the same time: the Nakba of 1948. As part of its initial support for the creation of the State of Israel, the Soviet Union played a significant role in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Through diplomatic backing, demographic support, and arms transfers, the USSR facilitated the emergence of the new Israeli state, directly contributing to the forcible expulsion of Palestinian Arabs. Réal writes::

    Before 1948, the USSR directly or indirectly supported secret immigration operations organised by the Jewish Agency for Israel, sending Jews from eastern Europe, especially Romania and Bulgaria (66% of the Jews who arrived in Palestine between 1946 and 1948 came from there)59

    This was made possible through the USSR’s influence in its aligned nations in Eastern Europe: “Support for Jewish emigration from the People’s Democracies was the USSR’s most effective lever for affecting developments in and concerning Palestine.”60 The demographic contribution proved vital in ensuring the success of Israel’s settler-colonial project, which relied on an influx of settlers that the USSR was eager to facilitate. Demographic support “meant in essence contributing to the Israeli war effort against the neighboring Arab states,”61 as the growing settler population directly translated into military advantage. The Soviet alliance with Zionism stood in stark contrast to the USSR’s historical condemnations of colonialism and its rhetorical support for anti-colonial struggles across the Global South. The historian of Central Asia, Adeeb Khalid, has noted how the anticolonial “Third Worldist” dimension of Bolshevik thought especially struck a chord in the Soviet “East” of Central Asia, where revolutionary practice was seen as the antidote to imperialist and colonial domination by the capitalist world.62 For these reasons, Stalin’s support of a colonial movement in the Middle East was especially shocking.

    The Soviet reversal in support of Zionism was largely determined by geopolitical calculations in the region, as they saw it as an invaluable strategic opportunity to assert themselves in a region in which the Soviets had no footing. It would also, in their view, divide the “capitalist powers” and primarily serve as a major blow to the imperialist enemy Great Britain, which had only recently lost India and was now open to another blow. Palestine was a strategic hub for British imperial interests, serving as a key junction for Middle Eastern oil pipelines and global trade routes.63 The allure of a new geopolitical equation favourable to the Soviets seemed to greatly outweigh any moral considerations, leading to the USSR’s shameful disregard of the Palestinians.

    In addition to crucial demographic support, the USSR also facilitated covert arms shipments, primarily through Czechoslovakia, to the Haganah, the main Zionist military force. These arms played a key role in the 1948 war, during which Zionist forces carried out a campaign of violence and displacement against the Palestinian population.64 Ilan Pappé, who wrote the seminal text on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, affirms the Soviet role in this process, though qualifies it, writing:

    [The USSR] supplied arms to the Israelis, and this is something which of course helped the ethnic cleansing. On the other hand they supported the Partition resolution which did not call for an ethnic cleansing. In fact it called for the creation of a bi-national Arab-Jewish state. According to the Partition resolution, almost 50% of the citizens of the future Jewish State were supposed to be Palestinians.65





  • Yesterday, rural Idaho firefighters were responding to a bushfire when they were shot.

    Two fire fighters dead, third wounded but stabilized after being sniped at by unknown shooter in Idaho

    Suspect Idaho sniper dead, unknown cause, sherif department grabbed body and evidence as they were at risk from the fire.

    It is likely the unknown shooter set the fire as bait to lure in firefighters with the intent to murder them.

    Local speculation guesses shooter had ties to neo-nazis, though no information about the shooter has been released yet, due to the fact that exatly 24 years ago to the date, on June 29, 2001, firefighters participated in a training exercise in which they burned down a former security house at the Aryan Nations compound near Hayden Lake, Idaho. The house was located just a few miles from the site of Sunday’s ambush.