THE SMEAR OF “ANTI_SEMITISM”
When Tross Publishing published its latest book, Who was behind the Bolshevik Revolution?, we expected criticism from the highly organised lobby that seeks to intimidate into silence any publication that shows any group of Jewish people in a bad light no matter how accurate such description might be. And, of course, the more powerful the book (and this is a very powerful and convincing book), the more intense the criticism and the mindless cries of “anti-Semitism”. What Tross Publishing did not expect was how unnecessarily nasty and utterly pathetic such criticism would be – and here we are talking of Peter Cresswell’s review of the book, which is more a diatribe of smear tactics than a review.
He vents his fury on virtually everyone who has ever said the slightest thing against Jewish activities, including people who are not even mentioned in the book and are therefore irrelevant to a review of it. In his very first paragraph the reviewer calls for the book to be “withdrawn” – i.e. BANNED. And this from someone like Mr. Cresswell who has always presented himself as an advocate of free speech – unless, of course, any book gets up his nose, in which he urges that it should not see the light of day.
His 24 page (A4) review of a book of only 98 pages is a case of overkill and suggests that he is working to an agenda. His lengthy review is mostly nit-picking about citations (is it the first edition of a book or the second?) and complaints that a quoted sentence should have included further citation from the same quoted book. Very hard going for any reader of the review.
He wrote in his review, “They [the Jews] were driven to it, says the author, because they were Jews”. The author never wrote that. On the contrary, the last paragraph of his Introduction to the book is: “In his 1922 book, entitled The Jews, Hilaire Belloc wrote: ‘Bolshevism is a Jewish movement but not a movement of the Jewish race as a whole’. It is important to keep this in mind when reading the book as the crimes of some members of a group cannot and must not be attributed to all of them”. Can’t be much clearer than that. This is an instance of the reviewer using misinformation as part of his smear campaign.
He then says that Lenin “was not at all Jewish”. If he had read the book, he would have known that Lenin was one quarter Jewish through his maternal grandfather whose parents, Alexander and Miriam Blank, were Yiddish speaking Ashkenazi Jews.
The reviewer claims that “Jews as a community suffered enormously under Soviet rule”. That came two decades after the Revolution and is not relevant to the events of 1917 and its immediate aftermath, which is the subject of the book.
Another of the reviewer’s strange and unsubstantiated claims is that there were only five Jews out of twenty-one on the Bolshevik Central Committee
The review claims that Hilaire Belloc rejected the idea of a “vast age-long plot [of the Jews] culminating in the contemporary Russian affair”, and that this “contradicts Asher’s thesis”. Well, it doesn’t because Mr. Asher, the author of the book, neither wrote of nor implied and “vast age-long plot” or even anything like it.
Unable to help himself in his rage, the reviewer wrote of the “Recrudescence of Anti-Semitic feeling of which Mr. Asher’s book is an ongoing part” the usual standard smear of “anti-Semitism” and further misinformation. His barely concealed anger even resulted in him devoting two paragraphs in lashing out at Kerry Bolton, a writer who was neither mentioned nor cited in the book. Why this irrelevance?
However, Mr. Bolton was not alone in being the victim of the smear. In fact, virtually every person and authority quoted in the book has suffered the same fate. Some examples. Belloc – “the noted anti-Semite” (again, the standard smear), Denis Fahey – “a fascist, would-be theocrat”, a JU.S. Congressional report of 1919 headed “Bolshevism and Judaism” – “a dumping ground for everything anyone had ever heard about the topic”, the claim by Jacob Schiff’s grandson, John, that Jacob had given US$20 million to finance the Russian Revolution – “comes only from a 1949 gossip column”, and “the White Russian propaganda tradition into which Mr. Asher is trapped”. However, only one White Russian is quoted in the whole book and that is A, Stolypin, the son of the former Tsarist Minister, Pyotr (Peter) Stolypin.
The reviewer even damns Winston Churchill as an “old bluffer”. Churchill was the most widely acclaimed man of modern times and everyone of us owes our present freedom to his courage and leadership in 1940 when the British Empire stood alone against Nazism and, but for the leadership of Churchill and his government, things could so easily have gone wrong. This particular smear suggests that the reviewer is ignorant of the events of 1940 or is just plain ungrateful.
In the relevant newspaper article of 1920 Churchill, the best informed member of the British government on Bolshevism and events in Russia at the time, wrote: “With the notable exception of Lenin the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders”. The reviewer denies this, relying – wait for it! – on a 1922 party census from the Bolsheviks, who were always such notorious liars. “These figures”, claims the reviewer, “from the Bolsheviks’ own census, directly contradict Churchill’s ‘majority’ claim and every percentage figure Asher deploys”.
This is unbelievable as Mr. Asher’s figures are taken from informed observers in Russia at the time – people like Victor Marsden, the Saint Petersburg correspondent of Britain’s Morning Post newspaper, Robert Wilton, the London Times correspondent in Russia during the Revolution, Rev. George Simons, the Superintendent of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Saint Petersburg, and Captain Montgomery Schuyler, the chief intelligence officer of the American Expeditionary Force based in Omsk, Russia. And yet the reviewer takes his figures from the most notorious machine of deceit that Europe had seen in many a long year. This alone destroys the credibility of the entire review.
Unable to help himself, the reviewer claims that Robert Wilton’s number of nine Jewish members out of twelve on the Central Executive Committee of the Bolshevik Party “is contradicted by Soviet records showing six Jewish members out of fifteen”. Ah yes, those honest Soviet authorities and that horrid Mr. Wilton.
In the next paragraph the reviewer claims that after the Bolsheviks took over, the preponderance of Jews in its government “quickly died”. So how does he explain the fact that by 1935 the Central Executive of the Third International, which ruled the Soviet Union, consisted of 58 men of whom 55 were Jews. (Their names are given on Pages 32 and 33 of Mr. Asher’s book). The other three, Stalin, S.S. Lobow and V.V. Ossinsky, were married to Jewesses.
The reviewer claims in respect of a paragraph quoting Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the Introduction to the book that “He [Solzhenitsyn] didn’t write it”. And neither he did. In the book the relevant quote is preceded by the words “In the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn…” You see, like all human beings Solzhenitsyn had a mouth as well as a hand for writing. These words of Solzhenitsyn were quoted by David Duke in his book, The Secret Behind Communism, and were spoken to Duke by Solzhenitsyn during an interview in 2002.
The reviewer’s final smear is in respect of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which are neither mentioned in the book nor even been read by the author. But, says the reviewer, “one does wonder if our author may have a copy near his desk” – both an assumption (wrong) and a smear. As Socrates said, “When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the losers”.
The reason for the unnecessarily savage and brutal tone of the review is because the book, using facts, figures and observations of reputable witnesses of the time, is so conclusive in showing that the Bolshevik Revolution was largely – but not exclusively – the work of Jewish revolutionaries – 9 Jews out of 12 on the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, 17 Jews and 5 Gentiles on the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) in 1918, 43 Jews and 18 Gentiles on the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (1918), 45 Jews and 5 Gentiles on the High Commissaries of the People (1919), 23 Jews and 13 Gentiles on the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (the Cheka secret police) while of the 17 countries in which the Soviet Union had ambassadors in 1935-6, 14 were Jews. In the book names of all the members of these groups are given, together with their ethnicity. Why shouldn’t all this be known?
And next time the reviewer bangs on about the value of free speech he, who says that the book should be withdrawn, should be laughed off the stage. Why not let people read it themselves and form their own opinion? The best way for anyone to understand these important historical issues is to get a copy of the book and read it – especially Chapter 10 which contains quotes from 21 rabbis, Jewish writers and magazines actually boasting about the dominant Jewish role in Bolshevism at the time.