It's "war zone" at the Zundel-Haus, what with the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal hearings in full swing. All of this week will be taken, we hope, with questioning and qualifying two important witnesses: Dr. Robert Faurisson of France, a renown specialist in document analysis, and Dr. Tony Martin of Wellesley College, who wrote a book with the provocative title "The Jewish Onslaught."
Therefore, intermittently, there will be filler ZGrams, unless something important develops that I can report without breaking the stride of our defense team. It is always safer to report once events and developments have taken place than to speculate and forecast and thus reveal our strategies.
My filler ZGrams for this week are a series of excerpts from a speech Ernst Zundel gave more than four years ago at the 1994 Revisionist International conference. He had just come back from Russia, and his title was: "My Impressions of the New Russia: Is a 'National Socialist' Russia Emerging?"
In light of what has since happened in Russia, this speech has particular poignancy, I think. Here's Mr. Zundel:
"For some time I had heard that all kinds of nationalist groups were springing to life in Russia, some of them with newspapers of fairly large circulation, and even one or two emblazoned with swastikas. After wondering, "What are these Russkies up to?", I decided to go see for myself.
I first sent three colleagues to Russia as a fact-finding advance party. They made contacts, did the preliminary work, and came back with interesting tape-recorded interviews. I assessed these interviews and the other material they brought back. I was (amazed) to see copies of Russian newspapers with swastikas on them, illustrated with lurid Jewish stars dripping with blood.
So, on August 5, 1994, five of us took off for Russia with an invitation in our pocket from Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party, which is represented in the Russian parliament (Duma). We appreciated that his Party had booked several hotel rooms for us in Moscow, which are normally costly and not easy to get. Even for people from the West, Russia has become a very expensive country.
I arrived with my own interpreter, just in case, a man who speaks five languages. Because I wanted to be sure that what my own interpreter said was accurate, a second interpreter met me in Moscow - a Russian native and a writer by profession. I also brought along my own video cameraman, Jerry Neumann, as well as a photographer and a coordinator/troubleshooter.
Vladimir Zhirinovsky
Within the first few days of our two-week stay in Russia, we met with Vladimir Zhirinovsky. He invited us for a private lunch at his dacha, his weekend retreat in the woods outside Moscow. Many of you perhaps saw him interviewed on the David Frost television show, when he talked about how all Russia will rejoice when he comes to power. Seeing this interview, you might think this guy is stark-raving mad, that he's a crazy buffoon.
Let me caution you, though. This man is not only a lawyer, he was perhaps the only human rights lawyer in the country during the final years of the Soviet regime. He never joined the Communist Party. When everyone else was still a loyal apparatchik, he worked as a human rights lawyer. Since his rise to prominence, stories in Russia's tabloid press have said that he was a KGB agent, that he worked for a Zionist organization called Shalom, that his father was Jewish, and so on. Such stories hurt him, not least because many Russians hate Jews with sometimes irrational passion. In today's Russia, calling someone a Jew can ruin his reputation.
I found that intelligent Russians suddenly got starry-eyed when the conversation turned to the Jewish question. One thing that Russians are absolutely wise to, and very sore about, is the role of Jewish revolutionaries in wreaking havoc in Russia during the first decades of this century. [See "The Jewish Role in the Bolshevik Revolution and Russia's Early Soviet Regime," in the Jan.-Feb. 1994 Journal.]
Based on all my conversations during that visit, I make this prediction: The Russian people will one day take revenge for what has happened to them and their country over the last 70 years, frequently at the hands of Jewish Bolsheviks, and many innocent Jews are going to be hurt in the process. The Jews who are leaving the country to move to Tel Aviv, Toronto and New York are wise, because the anti-Soviet revolution in Russia is not yet over.
The upheaval I foresee in Russia won't be neat and orderly, as it was in Germany. It will be brutal and messy. If Boris Yeltsin and his government are not able to halt the country's economic deterioration and political instability, I predict massive anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia. And I mean massive. Many ordinary Russians blame the Jews for their present and past problems. There are still many Jews in very influential positions, and because there are many more Jews in Russia than statistics indicate, it's likely that there will be many more victims.
In conversations about Zhirinovsky since I returned from Russia, people have said to me, "Oh, he's half-Jewish"-as if that settles the matter. Some of my Russian contacts similarly said to me: "Oh, his name is Vladimir Wolfovich. He's a half-Jew." Although the hostile (Canadian) media treats me as a fire spewing anti-Semite, actually I have always been very cautious about judging people by labels or stereotypes. First of all, whoever Vladimir Zhirinovsky's father really might have been, only his mother really knows. Anyway, none of us can choose our father.
What's important is what this man has made of himself, and what he will do for Russia and, consequently, for the world. My own impression, based on a meeting for two hours over lunch, is this: Zhirinovsky is a highly intelligent, agile, flexible thinker. He is a clever tactician. Like me, he is a natural and accomplished publicity seeker. (After all, his birthday is April 25th, one day after mine. So it figures.)
He told me that because he was not a member of the Communist Party, and because the media in Russia was entirely in the hands of Communist apparatchiks, the only way he could get public attention was by creating publicity stunts, by grandstanding, by being outrageous, by saying things that he knew many Russians felt but never had the courage or opportunity to say.
Minority Nationalities
One of the main points that Zhirinovsky keeps making is that under Soviet rule the Communist leaders drained enormous energy and resources from white, Slavic Russia to build up the peripheral, non-Russian republics in the southern USSR, such as Uzbekistan, Tadzhikistan, Turkmenistan and those other southern republics. He attributes this policy to a cosmopolitan obsession in the Marxist ideology.
Zhirinovsky says that the Communist rulers did not allow the various nationalities to rise or fall to their proper cultural and economic standard. It was wrong, he says, to divert energy and resources from Slavic Russia to build opera houses, cultural centers, railroad stations, highways, and atomic power plants for these backward, non-Russian minority nationalities. The Soviet rulers tried to artificially raise these non-Slavic peoples - some of whom had been little more than nomadic sheep-herders - to the cultural and economic levels of the Russians. Instead of expending Russian sweat and treasure on them, says Zhirinovsky, these backward peoples should have been allowed to keep on tending their sheep. He often mentions that his own grandfather perished while building a Stalin-era railroad in Kazakhstan, and was buried far from home in the empty steppe.
What white, Slavic Russians said to me about these minority nationalities were very, very similar to the arguments I hear from white American nationalists about the minority racial and ethnic nationalities in the United States - about wasteful welfare payments to parasitic ghetto dwellers, and so on. Russians speak about non-Russians - about their lack of productivity and high birth rates - in the same way that white American speak of some racial minorities in the US. So, this is a sentiment that Slavic Russians share with many European Americans and western European nationalists."
Tomorrow: A Zundel Trip to Russia - Part II