The Ukraine-Russia-USA Conflict, Part 4: The “But Zelenskiy is Jewish” Jason Stanley Propaganda Special
In part 4 of this article series about the Ukraine-Russia-USA conflict I will examine and refute the Western “Zelenskiy is Jewish, therefore no significant Ukrainian neonazi problem” line or strand of Western propaganda in six ways. More specifically, I will focus on the refutation of the respective propaganda of Yale philosopher Jason Stanley who, ironically, wrote a book about propaganda and another one about fascism.
6.1 The “President Zelenskiy is Jewish, Therefore No Significant Ukrainian Neonazi Problem” Line of Western Propaganda
When you bring up the Zelenskiy-neonazi connection or the very impactful neonazi presence in Ukraine which Western propaganda managers try to refute that by pointing out that “Zelenskiy is Jewish”:
6.2 A Jason Stanley Propaganda Special
Ironically, as a demonstration of how very powerful and far-reaching Western propaganda is and as the focus of this part, it is even Yale philosopher Jason Stanley who wrote a decentish 2015 book about propaganda (How Propaganda Works) and who happens to be Jewish who falls for and disseminates or propagates this nonsense.
From his above February 2022 Guardian article and to do a philosopher vs. philosopher thing:
Ukraine is a democratic country, whose popular president was elected, in a free and fair election, with over 70% of the vote. That president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, is Jewish, and comes from a family partially wiped out in the Nazi Holocaust.
Putin’s claim that Russia is invading Ukraine to denazify it is therefore absurd on its face.
But the actually absurd thing here is the (pseudo-)logic behind that claim which can be refuted as follows and together with that claim or conclusion.
6.2.1 Refutation 1: Reductio ad absurdum
P1: If Stanley’s and others’ claim were true, it would also be true that there is no white nationalist, violent far right, neonazi, etc. problem in the USA because a black Obama got (s)elected.
P2: But there is a white nationalist problem despite Obama getting (s)elected; those far right crazies did not magically disappear all of sudden, as we also saw during the later Trump presidency.
C: Therefore, it is just as absurd to think that a Jewish Zelenskiy getting (s)elected to play the part of Ukrainian president makes all those Ukrainian neonazis disappear who, by their own admission and as shown by the available evidence, for instance played a key role in the 2014 US-backed Maidan coup (see part 2, section 4; also part 3, section 5.1).
6.2.2 Refutation 2: The Unsound Method of Ignoring the Evidence (that Does Not Fit Into Your Cultist Narrative)
My March 2, 2022, Twitter conversation with Stanley not only made it clear that Stanley displayed massive ignorance of US history, foreign policy and motives — something which is unfortunately typical for US Americans who have failed to study key works such as William Blum’s classic Killing Hope — and that he instead went for some non-sequiturs, wild accusations and misinterpretations as well as cheap ad hominems or personal attacks:
Most importantly, that conversation unfortunately also made it clear that Stanley had and has no interest whatsoever in even looking at the evidence that I spelled out for him, just like a certain Italian pseudo-philosopher had no interest whatsoever in looking through Galileo’s telescope in the 16th century:
But Stanley never addressed or answered my question if he had in any way taken into account the provided evidence. In both cases, the evidence was or would be too contradictory to and to upsetting for their respective false worldviews, create more “cognitive dissonance” than they could handle.
Stanley consequently did what all methodologically clueless and insane cultists and Orwellian ‘goodthinkers’ have done throughout the ages: Instead of adapting their worldview to the contradictory evidence or even looking at it, they a) dismiss and ignore the evidence, b) attack, block, cancel, hate, marginalize, etc. those who present it and c) delude themselves into thinking that it is surely people like myself who use much sounder methods than people like Stanley who must be evil, in error, insane, etc. (“lol you’re simply nuts”):
Another totally mature and sane response of a Yale philosophy professor when confronted with evidence that does not fit into his deeply propagandistic mainstream worldview: His “Please never email me again” reply on March 3, 2022.
[Edit: I had to remove the screenshot of the email where I had already blacked out the personal data since medium.com does not permit the publishing of such content].
This furthermore goes to show how absolutely worthless and even harmful elite ‘education’/indoctrination institutions such as Yale, Oxbridge, etc. tend to be and the key role they play in maintaining Western propaganda and dumbing down the next generation.
The above it in turn explains why genuinely knowledgable and wise people such as the journalist Glenn Greenwald who are well out of that propaganda loop, cannot and will not take the aforementioned institutions and group members such as the left-flirting/-faking liberal Jason Stanley seriously:
So instead of wasting your time with the Stanleys’ of this world whose thinking and beliefs are evidently still trapped by and in propaganda despite or rather because of only having some superficial understanding of it, you instead need to study those who have made it well outside that Platonian cave such as Noam Chomsky and his works. I also need to mention a brilliant but less well-known Caitlyn Johnstone whose articles such as her 2021 “If The Rich Were Propagandizing Us, We’d Have Heard About It In The News” are of utmost importance for ripping the 1%’s harmful propaganda and ideology out of your minds:
The primary obstacle in getting people to realize that they are being propagandized by our rulers is their unquestioned assumption that if there were a mass-scale narrative management operation geared at manufacturing consent for the status quo, they would have heard about it in the news or learned about it in school.
And, of course, they would not have, because both the plutocratic media and the modern schooling system are designed to indoctrinate people into accepting the status quo. From the time we are children our minds are deliberately and systematically warped to psychologically align us with the interests of the ruling class, and then we are passed on to the news media to ensure that we are continually shaped and reshaped in real time throughout our adult lives based on the specific needs of the oligarchic empire from year to year. A brainwashing institution is never going to teach you to be skeptical of their brainwashing.
Our indoctrination into the establishment worldview is not just in training us to espouse certain beliefs and think a certain way, it’s in training us to look to the sources of our indoctrination for guidance throughout our lives. What do we do when we are unsure about something, class? That’s right, we go to reliable, authoritative sources like The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and any other outlet that has consistently supported every war we’ve ever been deceived into by our rulers.
Our indoctrination isn’t just in what to think, it’s in how to think.
Like all propagandized people and Orwellian goodthinkers, Stanley focussed on the what or the beliefs instead of the far more fundamental how or methods, and that is a clear giveaway that he himself is still a victim of Western propaganda — something which is not only highly ironic and bizarre but also highly fitting for the Orwellian times that we live in and for sickening Western hypocrisy and double standards in general.
6.2.3 Refutation 3: The “Cult(ure) of Jewish Victimhood”-Bias
One thing that you can trust all non-left and well-indoctrinated Jews such as Jason Stanley to do at some point is to play the Jewish victim card and even when highly inappropriate. This is due to the fact that, as a result of the traumatising historical event of the Holocaust and cynical political-propagandistic instrumentalization of it, they grew up in a “cult(ure) of Jewish victimhood” in which Jews are always the (greatest and worthiest) victims, never the perpetrators, no matter what the circumstances or facts are. Others are also waking up to that fact:
A well-known and prime example for that cult(ure) of Jewish victimhood and the thereupon based impunity as perpetrators is the sick sentence that Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir uttered in 1972 and which, in this Orwellian world, is for instance found under “inspiring quotes”(!): “We cannot forgive them [i.e. Palestinian Arabs] for forcing us to kill their children.” So according to that Orwellian logic and Jewish cult of (permanent) victimhood, it is supposedly the Jewish-Israeli-Zionist settler-colonizer killers who are the victims here and not the colonized and killed Palestinians who have their rights trampled on as usual.
While not as extreme, Stanley’s thinking is fuelled by the fundamentally same cult(ure) of Jewish victimhood: In his ‘Jews above everything and Jewish victimhood in(to) everything’ fantasy world, Putin’s claim about wanting to “de-nazify” Ukraine, whatever you may think about its truthfulness, is supposedly “antisemitic”:
Echoing familiar fascist antisemitic tropes, in a 2021 article, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev denounced Zelenskiy as disgusting, corrupt and faithless. The free democratic election of a Jewish president confirms in the fascist mind that the fascist bogeyman of liberal democracy as a tool for global Jewish domination is real.
By claiming that the aim of the invasion is to “denazify” Ukraine, Putin appeals to the myths of contemporary eastern European antisemitism — that a global cabal of Jews were (and are) the real agents of violence against Russian Christians and the real victims of the Nazis were not the Jews, but rather this group.
Unfortunately, Stanley appears to suffer from astonishing reading comprehension problems. The article by Stephen Blank from November 18, 2021, which Stanley linked actually states the following about Medvedev:
He accused the Ukrainian people of losing their identity (which for him and his colleagues is Russian) and described Zelenskyy as disgusting, corrupt, and faithless, having repudiated his (Jewish) identity to serve rabid nationalists. This, Medvedev continued, meant Ukraine’s head of state resembled a Jewish Sonderkommando, a reference to those incarcerated Jews forced on pain of death to dispose of gas chamber victims during the Holocaust. Negotiations with such people and such a state are, therefore, “pointless,” he said.
So contrary to the Jewish cult of victimhood delusions or outright lies of Stanley, Medvedev did *NOT* call Zelenskiy “disgusting, corrupt, and faithless” due to Zelenskiy being Jewish, but due to Zelenskiy “having repudiated his (Jewish) identity to serve rabid nationalists.” In other words: Medvedev accused Zelenskiy of abandoning his Jewish identity, of cooperating with traditionally antisemitic ultranationalists, of being a traitor to Jews and a servant of their abusers (of course, Medvedev and other Russian elites also object to Zelenskiy acting as a useful idiot for the USA and their for the entire region harmful plans — something which once again has nothing to do with Zelenskiy being Jewish).
That Stanley tries to pervert that into Medvedev allegedly calling Zelenskiy “disgusting, etc.” due to Zelenskiy being Jewish is consequently a complete 180 degree reversal of what was said or reported — and furthermore the usual wild and baseless ‘antisemitism accusation porn’ that braindead liberal virtue signallers and moral posturers like to fabricate and jerk off to in this post-truth era in order to feel morally superior. Since the Guardian has been a regular provider of that baseless antisemitism accusation propaganda against former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn for years — see especially this analysis — and since the cult of Jewish victimhood member Jason Stanley is a provider of that propaganda, it follows that they are a great fit for each other.
Aside from Stanley suffering from very strange reading comprehension issues that most likely result from his cult of Jewish victimhood biases, it also does not seem to occur to him that (as per the principles of simplicity and charity) the simplest and most obvious explanation for why Putin said the thing about denazification is that Ukraine simply does have a massive neonazi problem.
Other relatively obvious facts are that the Ukraine-Russia-USA conflict is — *gasp* — about Ukraine, Russia and the USA, their political and other interests and conflicts, geopolitics, a serious (nuclear) world war 3 danger, massive realignments, a potential dedollarization, exploding commodity prices, etc.
But you can trust self-centered US-Jewish liberals like Stanley who apparently had their minds fried by the cult(ure) of Jewish victimhood to try to turn all of that into a ridiculous Western propaganda fairy tale of ‘the non-Jewish Hitleresque Putin (“Putler”) is attacking the poor Jewish victim Zelenskiy’ (international conflicts are after all just conflicts between individuals and follow a clear good vs. evil pattern, just like in Hollywood movies which would never be abused for propagandistic purposes by the 1%).
6.2.4 Refutation 4: The Conflation of Political with Street and Military Power
Stanley’s claim is furthermore “absurd on its face” since he conflates or fails to distinguish between political power and street and military power. It may be true that, as he writes,
In the 2019 election, the Ukrainian far right was humiliated, receiving only 2% of the vote. This is far less support than far-right parties receive across western Europe, including inarguably democratic countries such as France and Germany.
But the reverse is true for their street and military power, as demonstrated the massive role of the Ukrainian far right in the 2014 Maidan Coup and ever since, such as in their constant shelling of or attacks on the two Eastern separatist regions which killed more than 13.000 mostly ethnic Russians since 2014. The street and military power of France’s or Germany’s neonazis does not come close to that of Ukrainian neonazis who already received all sorts of funding and aid from inside and outside of Ukraine before the February 2022 conflict broke out and who are now showered with all sorts of weapons so that they can fight the West’s and especially the USA’s proxy war against Russia.
I later found my thoughts echoed in the following thread:
So when Stanley pretends that there is no particular Ukrainian neonazi problem since they did not do so well at political elections, then that is flawed logic and a false conclusion that results from his omission of their considerable street and military power. More generally, it just does not follow that, if you do not have official political power, you do not have power at all. That is all the more true given that real power and influence, such as that of oligarchs, including Ukrainian ones such as former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko (2014–2019), is wielded from behind the political scene and its actors.
In August 2023, there was then also this meeting which furthermore confirms access of the Ukrainian neonazis and Banderites to Zelenskiy and, through that, their influence and power:
6.2.5 Refutation 5: The Omission of Erica Chenoweth’s “3.5% rule”
Stanley is furthermore unaware of or conveniently fails to apply Erica Chenoweth’s “3.5% rule” about how “a small minority can change the world”:
Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts — and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.
This is exactly what applies to Ukrainian neonazis despite being violent instead of peaceful. It is also what one of their leaders Yevhen Karas already explained earlier (see part 3, section 5.1): Despite only constituting 10% or 8% of protestors during the 2014 Maidan Coup according to his estimates, they wielded disproportionately greater influence. 8 to 10% is also well above the 3.5% threshold and hence yet another indicator of a successful coup.
The 2% in the 2019 vote are below that but can also suffice for a “small minority” of well-organised and well-funded Ukrainian neonazis to wield massive influence in Ukraine, especially when you look at street and military power and strongholds in certain cities or provinces.
6.2.6 Refutation 6: Ukrainian Neonazis’ Integration Into Official Ukraine
Another grave omission of Stanley and other Western propagandists is that, contrary to countries such as Germany or France, Ukrainian neonazis are increasingly integrated into official Ukraine. That point would be made a couple of days later by Glenn Greenwald:
To compare: We for instance know that there is a bit of a neonazi problem in Germany’s or other militaries which is owed to the fact that violent and authoritarian right wing people are generally fond of and inclined to work in the military or, for that matter, in law enforcement. But I have yet to see a street or place or perhaps battle ship named after Adolf Hitler in post-World War 2 Germany. Official Germany would not have it, and that is good and well.
In post-Maidan Coup Ukraine, however, and as already outlined in part 3, section 5.5, there are dozens of streets or places named after the Ukrainian Hitler-counterpart Bandera, just as statues or museums were erected in his honor or commemoration. And that is as official as it gets since Ukrainian state or province officials or politicians are behind naming such streets or places or erecting such public statues.
I furthermore already outlined how the Banderite “Slava Ukraini/Glory to Ukraine!” and the response “Heroiam slava/Glory to the heros!” slogan was made the official Ukrainian army salute in 2018. Some further details:
The phrase “Slava Ukraini!” (Glory to Ukraine!) first appeared in different military formations during the Ukrainian War of Independence (from 1917 to 1921). It became part of the lexicon of Ukrainian nationalists in the 1920s.
The modern response “Heroiam slava!” (Glory to the heroes!) appeared in the 1930s among members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) who started using this slogan to commemorate veterans of the 1918 to 1921 Ukrainian-Soviet War, including leader of the OUN Yevhen Konovalets. The greeting “Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the heroes!” became an official slogan of Stepan Bandera’s Nazi allied OUN-B in April 1941. During World War II, Ukrainian nationalists often used it in addition to a roman salute.
The parallels to the roman Hitler salute with raised right arm are quite obvious.
But I guess that fact or how weird and inappropriate it would be if Germany introduced “Hail Germany!” or “Glory to Germany!” as its army salute and the fact that similar standards ought to apply to Ukraine and other countries apparently never occurred to Stanley who is too busy constructing stories about Jewish victimhood.
To make matters even worse and the differences even more obvious: Contrary to Germany or France, Ukraine made the neonazi Azov Batallion an official part of their army:
Another interesting question to ponder: If Ukrainian neonazi influence is indeed as relatively insignificant as Stanley believes it is, then why do we see Ukrainian kids screaming Ukrainian neonazi paroles in marches on the streets? Why does the Ukrainian state, officially headed by Zelenskiy, seemingly allow that children are systematically indoctrinated into hating Russians? Where are the counterparts to that in Germany and France, the out in the open marches where kids scream anti-Jewish paroles? Once again, Ukraine also appears to stand out negatively in this respect:
What this evidence once again points to is that official Ukraine is increasingly embracing fascism and neonazism — another thing that Stanley does not seem to register in his self-absorbed cult and delusions of Jewish victimhood which, in line with US propaganda, just so happen to be directed against the USA’s geopolitical enemy Russia.
Conclusions
So much for six complementary types of refutations of the Western “Zelenskiy is Jewish, therefore no massive Ukrainian neonazi problem” type of propaganda and my respective takedown of Jason Stanley’s Western and cult(ure) of Jewish victimhood propaganda. There are several bigger takeaways from from this.
First, it seems that we need to add ‘jewishwashing’ as another type of “diversitywashing” or “intersectional imperialism” (Benjamin Norton) and more generally whitewashing (of crimes, bad intentions, etc.) to our concepts and categories:
What is jewishwashed in this case — also with the aid of a for that purpose useful cult(ure) of Jewish victimhood — is the massive neonazi problem in Ukraine for which the Jewish president Zelenskiy serves as a fig leaf, as the proverbial “lipstick” on the (nazi) “pig.”
Secondly, the above also serves as a demonstration of how immensely powerful and effective Western propaganda is: When even Jason Stanley, a Yale philosophy professor who published a peer reviewed book about propaganda, falls for Western propaganda, then it should be clear that a great many other people and a very high percentage of the population who are even less well aware of how Western propaganda works will likewise have fallen for it.
Third and as pointed out by Caitlin Johnstone, Glenn Greenwald, Noam Chomsky and others and as demonstrated by Stanley’s failures which go all the way down to basic reading comprehension, the above also demonstrates that formal Western (higher) education/indoctrination is not only essentially useless for countering Western propaganda but, if anything, a pathway of propaganda into people’s minds.
Fourth, it seems that we have once again reached a new low point of absurdity, double standards and doublethink in our Orwellian times with Jason Stanley: On the one hand, he is Jewish, had his family partially wiped out in the Holocaust, wrote a book about fascism and another one about propaganda. On the other hand, he uses Jewish cult(ure) of victimhood style propaganda to jewishwash Ukrainian neonazi fascists whose predecessors and idols had collaborated with Nazi Germany in the extermination of Jews and other undesirables. How it is possible for Stanley to reconcile these two things in his mind — if not with a great dose of sickening Orwellian doublethink that is typical for establishment liberals like him — is beyond me. And those are the types that teach ‘philosophy’ at university (the great Arthur Schopenhauer already deplored these academic pseudophilosophers in the 19th century, and rightly so).
Fifth, Malcolm X is once again proven correct that white liberals like Jason Stanley are much more dangerous than they appear, because while they are seemingly opposed to fascism and propaganda, they effectively (and apparently without even realizing it) use propaganda to support and usher in fascism in Ukraine on the other hand. But I suppose that is just yet another amazing aspect of the Orwellian world that we currently live in.
[continue with part 5 (link to follow)]
