Dr Matthew Raphael Johnson begins with a summary of current events concerning Donald Trump and Black violence in the USA, before getting to the bulk of the podcast which debunks two big myths about Joseph Stalin, that he was a Russian nationalist and that he was an anti-Semite. He was neither.
It is one thing to show Stalin was not a nationalist and was philo-Semitic but it is another to explain why these myths have been around for so long, as Stalin’s writings and policies were not secret and his works are available to all. The explanation is that the leftist mind eventually tired of the USSR and its misery and sought for ways that it could be denounced.
A search for legislation that assisted the cause of labor in the USSR will prove fruitless as it was never about the workers, but rather the enrichment of a small oligarchic elite that was overwhelmingly Jewish. The USSR could not be hated by leftists just on these grounds, so other foundations were needed. If he could be depicted as “another Hitler” then not only would it be OK to hate Stalinism, but it would also give the left an excuse to say that “Leninism has never been tried.”
Almost without exception, American and western historians paint Stalin as both a “Russian nationalist” and an “Anti-Semite.” The latter especially being believed without question. Stalin is presented this way because it allowed the western left to oppose the USSR in good conscience. Nationalism was universally hated by the ruling class from campus anarchists to corporate billionaires, hence, to recast Stalin as one is to make him non-socialist.
Communism as a vague ideology was never a problem in the minds of the US, the State Department or western corporate capital. Obviously, since corporate capital built the USSR, socialism was a part of the profit structure of American capitalism. Only nationalism was to be fought and therefore, allowing Stalin to be hated by the left required him to be recast as a nationalist and anti-Semite. As with all American academic dogma, this is false.
The myth has been deliberately created. Jewish writers need the gentiles to believe that Hitler and Stalin were the same, lest they be forced to admit that Jews in the USSR slaughtered Christians. By claiming that Stalin was anti-Jewish, they can blunt this claim and argue that the Jews were also targeted. The fact is that the USSR was largely Jewish, was based far more on Jewish ethnic identity than Marxism and certainly had nothing to do with labor. Stalin continued this trend and backed Jewish ethnic interests indirectly throughout his life.
[A paper soon to be published in the Barnes Review on this subject is called: Self-Indulgent Historical Mythology:The Fantasy of Stalin’s “Anti-Semitic Russian Nationalism”]