An article on the BBC webpage caught my attention.
It appears that historical revisionism is alive and well in Russia.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6933401.stm
Quote:
"A giant cross commemorating the victims of Stalin's terror 70 years after the worst of the purges has reached Moscow after a journey from northern Russia.
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Russian human rights activists fear that the Gulag and Stalin's crimes are not being properly commemorated by the Russian authorities, and the memory of the victims may be lost to future generations. "
A large number of Stalin's victims were Jewish or Muslim.
In that, he followed in the footsteps of Lenin (and the Czars).
His successors did not deviate from his example.
Erecting a cross to commemorate victims of Russia's communist dictators implies three things:
1. Only Christians were victims.
2. Only Christians are worth commemorating.
3. Only Christians are Russian.
I am not entirely convinced that any of those implications have any validity.
And, given what the Russians are known for (Vodka and Pogroms), I do not think it wise to give Russia's dominant ethnicity of depressed and bloody-minded Slavs yet another reason to drink...... we've seen what happens when they get into a funk.
PS. Any implied stereotype or snarky subtext in the text above applies not just to Russians, but also liberally to Byelorussians and Ukrainians. I'm not biased.
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3 comments:
You are probably reading more into this than is meant. Russians (but also other cultures) are just less sensitive to the feelings of minorities. It is not necessarily malicious.
People from small towns in the South will say that Joe Goldberg goes to the Jewish church on Saturday, because that is the only way they conceptualize a house of worship. To a Russian, a cross is what you put on a grave (or by extention a monument)
Though far be it from me to deny the Slavs their antisemitism. Don't know if you caught my recent post about the Putin-jugend
There is something wrong with reading far more into things than what may (or may not) be meant?
If so, then perish the art of rhetoric.
>If so, then perish the art of rhetoric
From your comment to G-d's (metaphorical) ears :)
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