From what I generally knew of contemporary Eastern European attitudes towards Jews (in two words “not good”) I expected that the Russian public’s attitude towards Israel would be decidely frosty, if not outright hostile… But what seems noteworthy to me is not the downward blip in 2006 but the generally high level of Russian support for Israel over the past 9 years and the generally small number of Russians who will outright say they relate poorly towards it (the balance being made up by people who said they have a hard time answering). – Mark Adomanis.
There are several reasons as far as I can see, some of them obvious, some of them not so obvious because they are clouded over by noxious PC fumes.
* There are now simply a lot fewer Jews in Russia. There were 1.4mn in 1989 in the USSR, and 550,000 in the RSFSR; as of 2010, only 158,000. Jews typically occupy positions in the economy, culture, etc. out of all proportion to their population size. This is typically ascribed to conspiracies whereas in fact it is a simple function of their IQ’s which are about one S.D. above the white European average. This typically causes resentment in places where Jews settle with a few major exceptions like the Anglo-Saxon world. In fact much of Tsarist and Soviet “discrimination” against Jews was (in modern US terms) an affirmative action plan for the indigenous population.
* While Jews in the late Soviet era were heavily associated with dissidence, a function of their relative exclusion from mainstream politics, now they range all over the spectrum. While a majority are still probably more liberal than not you now have Jews like the TV games star and Stalinist blogger Anatoly Wasserman not to mention Zhirinovsky (aka Eidelstein) who is a half-Jew as well as the head of the biggest nationalist party.
* Migrants from the South Caucasus who are seen as more criminalized and dependent on welfare (“Stop feeding the Caucasus!”) – and not mistakenly so, regardless of what the PC brigade wants to claim – are far more of a everyday concern than ZOG conspiracies. For a typical Muscovite there is simply far more reason to fear the Chechen who will beat up his nerdy son in school than the besuited Jewish IT professional who would hire him.
* While the USSR supported the Arabs, today’s Russia balances between them. There is military cooperation between Russia and Israel, e.g. on drones, and there exists a visa-free travel regime between them. Something on which the EU not to even mention the US has long dragged its feet on.
* Critically Israel does not criticize Russia for HR abuses, illiberalism, etc. as most Western countries love doing. This makes sense because Israel is hardly a very liberal state itself and besides it is not in its interests to make additional enemies if it can possibly help it. Even on a site like Inosmi where commentators tend to be pretty nationalist Israel does not get bad rap. Whenever “Gayropean” do-gooders sail a “freedom flotilla” to Israel, the good people of Inosmi sympathize with the Israelis, and wish Russia could retaliate in similarly uncompromising fashion against foreign liberal interventionists who undermine its sovereignty.
* As Mark Adomanis correctly noticed, both Russia and Israel have problems with Islamist terrorists. Who happen to be supported by liberal forces abroad.
* Jews and Israelis are seen as distinct. Jews are the rootless cosmopolitans, more loyal to their in-group than their country of residence. Israelis on the other hand are a nation of blood and soil.
* According to (Russian Jewish-American) historian Yuri Slezkine the history of the 20th century is one of peoples around the world “becoming Jewish” in terms of values. This has been especially true in post-Soviet Russia. Case in point: While most of the oligarchs were Jewish, most Russians would still rather emulate than dispossess them. Among Europeans, Russians and Israelis are the two peoples who most agree that “it is important to be rich, have money and expensive things.” This is no longer a picture of peasant, honest Russians vs. urban, mercantile Jews as it was a century ago. There are no longer any irreducible value differences between the two peoples. (The same of course cannot be said for urban Russians vs. clannish Chechens, Avars, etc., from the mountains).
Hope that goes some way to explaining things.
Jews in the Pale of Settlement (80% of Jews) were mostly poorly educated and poor, living in rural communities, likely monolingual Yiddish-speakers. (Killed off by the Nazis, they no longer exist.) You’re projecting 21st-century conceptions of succesful Jews upon Tsarist-era ones.
Not really.
This is 1926.
Average evrei in the Russian Empire (mid-1800s say) was poor, rural, with no education above village school, which was mostly religious content. Kaganovich (50 years later) had a fifth-grade education. Now they were better off than serfs, who would have been their peers c. 1850, that is true.
Re: intelligence of Jews in Tsarist times.
Anatoly’s other blog got me interested in the history of IQ tests, so I read some sources, for example this one about Binet, a smart guy in his own right who invented the word “moron” to describe a certain class of people who continue to vex to this day. (One example: my boss). But I also saw this interesting piece , which claims Jews were not nearly the smarty-pants in WWI days that they are now:
Russian-born Jews who became American soldiers in World War I also scored low on IQ tests. So low, in fact, that Carl Brigham, the creator of the Scholastic Aptitude Test, declared that the results “disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent.”
So, what happened in the last 100 years? How did Russian Jews start off so dumb and get so smart? My conclusion: IQ scores cannot be (completely) genetic, because it is not possible for human DNA to evolve that quickly.
There I just did a two-fer: joining content of 2 blogs in the same comment.
Q. How does a smart Moscow Jew talk to a dumb Moscow Jew?
A. On a cell phone from New York.
Taken from a US publication of translated Soviet “anekdoty”. The book appeared a couple of years back and was reviewed in the Moscow News. I recall how the reviewer (possibly Mark Teeter, a US citizen) reckoned the publication might have been a neat way of avoiding the wrath of the PC watchdogs in the USA – “We didn’t say it, those terrible anti-semitic Soviets did!”
The gag always makes me think of the Moscow Times columnist Alexei Beyer, that denigrator of all things Russian, whom the “only Moscow English daily” describes as a “native Muscovite” but who, after having emigrated with his family from the USSR when he was 17, has lived for over 40 years in the USA, where he works as a financier.
“Russian-born Jews who became American soldiers in World War I also scored low on IQ tests. So low, in fact, that Carl Brigham, the creator of the Scholastic Aptitude Test, declared that the results “disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent.”
It has a simple explanation. The tests were conducted in English. Jews from Russia had poor language skills.
Besides, it’s is not quite right to say that all Jews are highly intelligent. There are Ashkenazim Jews whose IQ indeed is the highest, but there are also Sephardic Jews whose IQ is 14 points lower. Arab Jews’ IQ fluctuates somewhere around 88.
Nobody, and I mean NOBODY in psychometry claims that IQ scores are “(completely) genetic”.
Obviously, at least basic literacy has a vast impact as does nutrition (the Flynn effect, i.e. why IQ scores have steadily risen in the Western world but largely plateauing by the 70’s or 80’s = mostly, better nutrition).
Ashkenazi Jews newly arrived in the US would as Ni123 correctly points out have had difficulties with the English language, hence it is to be expected that they would do poorly on a Scholastic Aptitude Test. The same would not be true of their children.
@AK
“Ashkenazi Jews”
Another fact to consider is their matrimony traditions and religious restrictions towards marriages with outsiders. Only in 1847 (?) those restrictions were loosened. Until then 1st/2nd cousin marriages (hence inbreeding) were very common. And inbreeding lowers IQ. So I think it is safe to assume that first generations that followed the changes in marriage practices were affected.
“least basic literacy has a vast impact as does nutrition”
Yes, basic literacy is important, but there are numerous ways to measure intellectual capacity even in person who is completely illiterate. For example, Raven’s Matrices or tests measuring reaction time. And the results of those tests show that intellect more likely has genetic nature.
Now, about nutrition. Yes, severe malnutrition should be taken into account. But, again, multiple IQ tests show that blacks in the US have lower IQ than whites. The gap is still there, even though malnutrition is not. Which brings it back to genetic origin.
“Nobody …. claims that IQ ….(completely) genetic”.”
In fact, they do
http://www.news-medical.net/news/2005/04/26/9530.aspx
I said completely. Your link: “Race differences in average IQ are largely genetic”.
Yes, I see.
The best way to look for genetic links between IQ and intelligence is adoption studies (because in addition to nutrition, culture, poverty, etc. impact IQ). Are there differences between black kids taken from infancy and white kids taken from infancy and both raised in the same environment (keep in mind, even such studies may be flawed because they don’t take into account prenatal care)? The results of such studies have been mixed and do not support the idea that there are large genetic differences between races in terms of IQ. Wikipedia summarizes this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#Uniform_rearing_conditions
Somewhat unrelated, but educational achievement correlates with IQ. PISA scores for African-Americans are higher than for Romanian, Albanians, Montenegrans and Bulgarians:
http://www.vdare.com/articles/pisa-scores-show-demography-is-destiny-in-education-too-but-washington-doesnt-want-you-to-k
Is something wrong with the Balkans?
(btw, the author of that article mentioned you here, AK: http://isteve.blogspot.com/2012/04/pisa-scores-by-region-in-russia-and.html)
Thank you, I’m trying my best to follow the VDARE blog.
In return let me give you a link as well. Have you heard of Occidentalist? So Chuck has finished his extensive research and analysis of different score data he was able to find. And as much as he was hesitating between environmentalist and hereditarian approach to racial differences in intelligence his conclusion is “I can now with confidence say that I am convinced that the Black-White IQ gap in the US is probably more genetically conditioned than not.”
http://occidentalascent.wordpress.com/2012/06/19/finished/
“The results of such studies have been mixed and do not support the idea that there are large genetic differences between races in terms of IQ. ”
Children’s IQ can be somewhat boosted with the help of early education and intervention programs, and improved social environment. The problem is that by the age when heritability factors and regression to the mean come into play their IQ lowers towards the mean IQ of their race. This is what critiques of Minnesota Adoption study didn’t account for.
Thanks, but I know; Sailer and I sometimes exchange emails.
There’s many exceptions to general rules in HBD/IQ, however I prefer to focus on them at my other blog as this one is about Russia after all.
“Is something wrong with the Balkans?”
(Anatoly, I apologize for yet another posting on IQ)
Yeap, there probably is. Long history of inbreeding.
http://polishgenes.blogspot.com/2012/06/long-ibd-gives-clues-to-migrations.html
My bad, I meant to post this link
http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2012/07/01/ibd-runs-of-homozygosity-and-historic-mating-patterns-in-europe/#comments
I know about this research because it is one of the most quoted examples of “scientific bias” in the course of social psychology. IQ of Russian-born Jewish soldiers in American army was indeed low and the reason was ridiculously simple: the IQ tests were in English and many of Jews were not fluent enough in English at the time of taking the tests.
Actually, the average Jewish IQ is not 1 std higher but 2.5 std higher than that of Gentiles. The anti Semites like Yalensis above, quote anecdotal data concocted possibly by other anti Semites. However, we do have hard objective facts, the total US and world population, the average Jewish IQ and Gentile IQ in US and Europe and the total number of Nobel Prize winners, as well as the value of 1 std=8pts. Using statistical integral Calculus, one can compute the average IQ of Nobel Prize winners (143), knowing that the American Jews have 33.3% of all Nobel prizes in US while constituting only 1.8% of the total American population. There were 185 Jewish Nobel Prize Winners among 850 total awardees and Yalensis may fantasize about the golden times when Jews were “stupid” and his IQ did not look quite as abysmal in comparison. However, hard facts are, apart from anti Semitic wishful thinking, is that it takes roughly 110 times more Gentiles than Jews to produce a Nobel Prize.
“as well as the value of 1 std=8pts…” – The S.D. is almost always set to 15 in IQ tests.
yalensis is quite obviously not an anti-Semite but a racial egalitarianist.
“yalensis is quite obviously not an anti-Semite but a racial egalitarianist”
Not even that. I don’t believe that all people were “created” equal, but I do believe they should all be “treated” equal, in terms of civil rights, access to economic resources, and so on.
At the same time (maybe a contradiction, I’m not sure), I do believe that in just about every society just about every job or position should be based on a meritocratist civil service exam. This does not contradict the occasional use of quotas to correct imbalances. For example, if there are 10 jobs of a particular rank, and 100 qualified applicants who passed the exam, then why not ensure that the 10 who are ultimately picked are diverse (based on whatever criteria) rather than all from the same group?
Also, for the record, I do believe that Jews are, on average, more intelligent than other “races” (although Leon Lentz is obviously a striking exception to that rule, since he is ALWAYS wrong about everything). Hence, I quoted that bit about “dumb Jews” in WWI as a debating point to debunk the notion of IQ tests as valid indicators of intelligence. However, as I am reading and learning more, I am starting to come around a bit and maybe admit these tests have some validity. But I am going to need some more convincing. For example, since the IQ tests are in written form, they heavily depend on (1) literacy, (2) fluency of the particular language in question, and (3) ability to focus and follow instructions.
“For example, if there are 10 jobs of a particular rank, and 100 qualified applicants who passed the exam, then why not ensure that the 10 who are ultimately picked are diverse (based on whatever criteria) rather than all from the same group?”
You’re a little too late with your great idea. This is exactly what is being done now. The employers are required to have an employee body that is diverse enough to satisfy racial and sex quotas. But you know what? The huge problem is that there are not enough minorities (including women) to fill out those above mentioned 10 positions as soon as the whatever job test they are taking has the same requirements for all applicants. Why? Because black’s IQ is lower than whites’, female’s IQ is lower than whites’ and Hispanics’ IQ is lower than whites.
But the solution has been found. In order for minorities to be hires they lowered the entrance tests scores requirements for them. And it’s being done only employment wise, it’s being done in colleges too. So now if you’re a white male you will be required to score higher on job test than if you’re a woman or a colored man.
And if employer refuses to lower job tests scores requirements for applicants (of course, who wants to hire dummies or unprofessionals), minorities sue him. There are plenty of precedents.
“the IQ tests are in written form, they heavily depend on (1) literacy, (2) fluency of the particular language in question, and (3) ability to focus and follow instructions.”
(1)Once again, there are tests that do not depend on literacy at all. And all of them show the same. Language proficiency aside Blacks and Hispanics have lower results than Whites, women have lower results than men, and Whites have lower results than Asians.
(2) and (3) SAT tests high school students are taking very closely correlate with IQ tests. Does it bother you that high school graduate actually is supposed to be fluent in his native language and be able to focus and follow instructions? If you were an employer would you voluntarily hire an applicant who cannot speak English and is unable to follow instructions?
“female’s IQ is lower than whites’”
No “edit” here? How inconvenient. what I meant was “females’ IQ is lower than males’ ” 🙂
AFAIK there are no significant gender differences with overall IQ.
AP is correct; male and female IQ’s are about the same. (Males do however have a broader distribution so there are significantly more male morons and male geniuses than their female counterparts; this makes sense in evolutionary terms as men are far more disposable and nature can more afford to do experiments on them).
There is however a significant difference in the structure of male and female IQ. Males tend to be higher on visuo-spatial. This is correlated with being good at math hence the much higher prevalence of males in math-heavy science and computing work. Females are relatively better than men at verbal IQ. That is no doubt why in the literate arts they have posed some competition to males from Murasaki Shikibu to J.K. Rowling.
(1) IQ tests exist that do not depend on literacy. Also, interpetation of results takes literacy into account (IQ tests have verbal and non-verbal/pattern recognition components)
(2) IQ tests are normed in specific countries and only valid when administered to people from those countries. In the USA there are IQ tests norms for primarily English-speaking people and for primarily Spanish-speaking people
(3) Ability to focus and follow instruction is a component of intelligence.
“In the USA there are IQ tests norms for primarily …Spanish-speaking people”.
I didn’t know that. Thank you for this info.
Yalensis has denied a very well known fact that USSR had institutionalized, State sponsored, anti Semitism, (he possibly thought that “Physicians’ case” was true and Stalin and Hitler were “social egalitarianists”). According to Yalensis, I am “always wrong about everything”. If so, he probably would disagree with my statement that he (Yalensis) and a retarded Neanderthal have quite disparate IQs.
I had a friend who was always wrong about stock market and I made some money placing trades opposite to what he suggested. Following this strategy, one can sweep up the whole stock market. I suggest Yalensis follow his own ideas and place trades opposite to what I suggest. He would simultaneously convince himself of his thesis and make money, which he can donate to his favorite Jew/Israel hating entity.
“Yalensis has denied a very well known fact that USSR had institutionalized, State sponsored, anti Semitism”
I grew up in the USSR. When it collapsed I was 16 y.o. I cannot argue what you’re saying because I simply don’t have any verifiable information in my possession to argue your statement. But from what I recall my music teacher was a Jew, my English private teacher was a Jew, our family dentist was a Jew, quite a few of my classmates were Jews, my grandmother’s multiple friends were Jews and I cannot recall any outrageous anti-Semitism towards them not from my family nor from the others. All of them had nice jobs, they were wealthy enough and prosperous enough.
So if you call this an”institutionalized, State sponsored, anti Semitism” than you probably need to verify the definition of “anti Semitism”.
By an institutionalized anti Semitism I do not mean that all Jews who were hired before 1967, were suddenly fired. What I mean is that enrollment in MGU and Fiztech and other prestigious universities went from 50% to 1% in one year, VAK threw out 90% of dissertations defended by Jews, while before the percentage of rejections was about 1-2%, it was difficult to find a good research job and Jews were music teachers with a talent to be top notch performers. To prove my point, those who emigrated to US became University professors, highly paid musicians, top notch engineers. Many world famous mathematicians never became academicians even though they got Fields medals (equivalent of math Nobel) . When they emigrated, they became the world leading professors at the top Universities. Many average Jews with University degrees couldn’t find a job or couldn’t publish. I had 6 publications in the most prestigious Soviet math journals, solving a long standing problem in math, by the age 19, but my scientiic advisor was told I will never be admitted to a graduate school, a Jew to be admitted to a graduate school had to be a Communist party member, so I left for US, even though I was not really Jewish, just a Jewish last name, of which I am very proud and I never said to anybody that I wasn’t, so they always assumed that I was, good for me, to be considered Jewish is a great honor. My advisor, has recommended that I get a ffirst prize award for my discovery and publications and he was told to never present people with such last names for awards anymore. In US, I found out that I did not have to work very hard to get a Ph.D. and a tenured position as a professor. It was also very easy to publish. Money was never a problem, not for a second. Just had to live in a concrete jungle and drive a car everywhere. Even Gentiles who had a scientiic position at that time, 1967-1985 would tell you the Jews were discriminated against, even though they still had disproportionatey high percentage of intellectual jobs. In the math olympiad in Moscow, 50-60% of all awards were given to Jews, despite the fact that only 2% of moscovites were Jewish, but in Kiev it was almost none. Apparently, anti Semitism was stronger there. A friend of mine told me, his papers were always lost in Kiev olympiad until he moved to Moscow and became the USSR champion in the 10th grade math. Another Jewish friend of mine, solved a famous open problem, but wasn’t confirmed in his dissertation defence, when he emigrated to US, he got a tenure at an Ivy league school very shortly. Israel Gelfand, arguably the greatest 20th century mathematician, did not become an academician until 1990, he was routinely blocked by the anti Semitic establishment in the Academy of Sciences, as well as the score of other Jews who solved Hilbert problems such as Arnold, Gelfond (not Gelfand), etc. I think to deny there was persecution/discrimination of Jews in 1967-1985 is the same as to deny the Holocaust. Everybody who lived through it remembers.
Dear Leo,
One should steer away from allegations of anti semitism except when they are clearly merited and in Yalensis’s case they certainly are merited and are definitely not true.
I should say that my view of history and yours differs radically in many places. For example I do not agree that the two big revolutionary parties in tsarist Russia, the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Social Democrats were under Jewish ideological influence. I do not know what “Jewish ideology” is. Anyway the Socialist Revolutionaries had their origins in the far left Russian terrorist groups and movements of the 1860s and 1870s such as the People’s Will which were emphatically Russian and not Jewish (a disproportionate number of their members were the children of Orthodox priests). As for the Social Democrats the influence here was German not Jewish and the first important Russian Marxist and the founder of the Russian Social Democrats, Georgy Plekhanov, was emphatically a Russian not a Jew. There was a disproportionately large number of Jews amongst the senior leaders of the Russian Social Democrats (less so amongst the Socialist Revolutionaries), a fact by the way that strongly refutes the view of widespread anti semitism amongst the Russian lower classes, but the Social Democrats were never a Jewish dominated party and as is well know the Jewish socialist party in tsarist Russia known as the Jewish Bund was refused admission into the Social Democrats when it insisted on maintaining its independent organisation and identity.
As for it being a well known fact that the USSR had institutionalised anti semitism, that is a widely held opinion rather than a fact. Certainly it is an opinion that is difficult to reconcile with the first decades of the Soviet government. Three of Lenin’s closest associates in the Bolshevik party and in the Soviet government, Zinoviev, the head of the Comintern and the party chief in Petrograd, Sverdlov, the first Soviet head of state and Kamenev, Sverdlov’s successor, were Jewish. Lenin’s first Foreign Minister and subsequent Defence Minister, Trotsky, was Jewish. So was Lenin’s Finance Minister during the NEP period Sokolnikov.
As for Stalin one of his closest associates Kaganovich was Jewish, the wife of his other close associate, Molotov, Polina Zhemchugina, was Jewish and a minister in the Soviet government in her own right, as was the second wife of his dreaded secret police chief, Yezhov. Of Stalin’s other officials, his longest serving Foreign Minister, Litvinov, was Jewish as was one of his other secret police chiefs, Yagoda, and one of his wartime Marshals, Chernyakhovsky. As is well know Stalin also employed extensively important Jewish cultural figures to propagandise his policies, first and foremost the film director Sergei Eisenstein and the writer and publicist Ilya Ehrenburg.
As for the Doctors’ Plot, the motivations for it are obscure and it is far clear whether those who were arrested were arrested because some of them were Jews or (which is actually more likely) because all of them were doctors and there happened a disproportionate number of senior doctors at that time in the USSR who were Jews. If it was intended as the start of an anti semitic campaign (for which there is in fact no evidence in anything Stalin himself ever said) then it must be considered a complete failure because it achieved no resonance amongst the wider Soviet public and was immediately abandoned after Stalin’s death when all the persons arrested were released and rehabilitated.
There is no doubt that a shift did take place after the Six Day War in 1967 with Soviet hostility to Israel resulting in a number of deeply unpleasant anti semitic individuals on the fringes of the Soviet political and literary establishment coming out of the woodwork and tensions between the USSR and Israel and the effect of Jewish emigration causing tensions between Jews and the Soviet authorities to an extent that had simply not been the case before. However I personally would not describe even this period as one of “institutionalised anti semitism” as any comparison with the genuinely institutionalised anti semitism of pre Second World War central and eastern Europe shows.
Just to clarify I have an eyesight problem (my left eye is clouded and lazy) and I occasionally miss words. The first paragraph of the above comment should say that descriptions of Yalensis as anti semitic are definitely not merited.
I for one find genuine Jewish supremacists (as opposed to those who’re merely comfortable admitting IQ may be why Jews punch so far above their demographic weight) significantly rarer than Mexican supremacists aka advocates of total amnesty for illegals who slip across our borders while keeping all those damn Asians out. Because that’s what La Raza/MeCHA are.
But then again, I don’t live in a neighborhood with Jewish supremacists but Mexicans who blast everyone with umpah Ranchero ballads that consist of accordion/tuba music stolen from my German ancestors who came to the Americas and long since abandoned by their descendants. That’s why when Anatoly gets criticized by trolls for calling Mexican women on average fat (or at least the ones in the U.S.) despite the statistics backing him up that Mexico is rapidly approaching the U.S. for the most fat people on earth, I can sympathize.
I am not, in any case, an anti-Semite. I actually admire Israelis for what they create rather than merely for the fact that Islamists hate them like they hate everyone who isn’t Islamist. However I think much of the legendary Israeli curtness, directness, to the pointedness, and even the Slavic hotness of some of their leading ladies (how many American Jewish supermodels are there currently? Maybe there were some in the 60s-70s) owes to their ancestry in the Pale of Settlement.
The Nobel Prize is hardly an objective metric of intelligence. It is a metric of western bias towards the un-west. Starting with Mendeleev.
I would have to agree with that. It would make sense to assume that at least the Nobel Committee is not biased toward Jews and evaluate separately percentage of Nobel Prizes given to Russian Jews vs the Russians in general and do the same for the US.
Adomanis’s comments in no way surprise me since it has always been my view that the extent of anti semitic feeling in Russia has always been vastly exaggerated. There was a certain period in the nineteenth century when anti semitic feeling was prevalent in court and government circles but if there was an actual policy to use anti semitism to mobilise support for the tsarist government (which is doubtful) then all one can say is that it was an abject failure. For the rest no government anywhere had as many Jews in senior positions as did the Russian government in the period from 1917 to the emergence of the state of Israel in 1948 and there is no evidence that this fact had in itself any bearing on the degree of support enjoyed by that government during this period.
As for policy towards Israel, this has varied from strongly supportive in 1947 to 1948, hostile from 1948 to 1953, formally correct from 1953 to 1967, strongly hostile from 1967 to 1988 and reasonably close from 1988 to the present day.
There is no reason for Russia to change its current policy towards Israel and the history of Russia’s relations with the Arab world shows why. Russia gave utterly vital support to the Arabs in 1967 and 1973 in answer to the earnest pleas of the Egyptian government and the governments of the other Arab states, actually sending troops to Egypt in 1969 to secure Egypt’s frontiers and airspace from Israeli attack. Russia’s reward after 1974 was to become the target of a relentless campaign of vilification and abuse orchestrated by all the most important Arab governments, Egypt’s first and foremost. Egypt in fact expelled its Russian advisers, doing so in the most public and humiliating way imaginable, refused to honour its Russian debts, concluded a peace treaty with Israel which pointedly excluded Moscow and enthusiastically armed together with the other Arab states the anti Russian rebels in Afghanistan. As for the remaining Arab states, for all their big talk about Palestine and Israel their actual actions show that they are and always have been far more hostile to Russia than to Israel. The various Arab Islamicist condotierre have for example always rushed to join anti Russian jihads in Afghanistan and the northern Caucasus whilst showing absolutely no interest in fighting Israel. Given that this is so why should Russia not pursue good relations with Israel and why should Russians have hostile feelings towards that country?
I would vouch that there was an institutionalized anti Semitism in the USSR in 1967-1985 and it wasn’t at the time you are refering to. If you lived in the USSR at that time as an adult and were Jewish or had Jewish friends, you would know. Yalensis is belligerently ignorant about Soviet anti Semitism or actually anti Semitic, I do not know what is worse. What would prevent him from studying literature, starting with memoirs of Novikov, Gelfand, etc.
Dugin has never been anti-Jewish, but he certainly has been anti-Zionist and of course viewing it as part of the American Empire which must be opposed by Russia. I hope you will not reply that those who are in Dugin’s circle are relaxing their anti-Zionist sentiment.
There are lots of websites out there that can help people prepare for an IQ test. For example:
http://test-iq.co.uk/real-iq-test-instruction-manual/
In completing an IQ test:
– Read the rules – Every test can differ somewhat in its requirements – find out whether there is a time limit for completing the test, whether you can make notes, etc.
– Read the question carefully – Pay attention to the way the question is formulated, especially to the negative statements contained in the instructions (e.g. iq test online » which of the objects is suitable/not suitable…)
– Do not guess – Try to complete the tasks dutifully – do not guess the results without having read the question.
(etc etc) – lots of other good tips.
The website is not very realistic. Unlike aptitude tests such as SAT or GRE, IQ tests are administered by psychologists, not self-administered, so preparing or reading questions carefully does not apply: the psychologist provides the instructions. “Guessing” is allowed; often people may be unsure but intuitively know the right answer and test norms account for that. There is a “practice effect”, which is why tests are not supposed to be administered more than once in a year; in that case the results would be considered invalid (although several valid tests exist so one could be administered a different test).
I am sorry for misprints in my previous post here, it is due to the improper display on this site. I would like to offer a brief discourse into the causation link between the anti Semitism in Russia on one hand and the fall of the Czarist Russia and the collapse of the USSR on the other. The pogroms and the Black Hundreds instigated by the Russian Orthodox Church and the Czar fomented revolutionary movement among the Jewish youth who took the ideas of Marx and transformed them into two basic political movements: Socialist Revolutionary Party and RSDRP, both ideologically dominated by the Jews.
The WWI was obviously a catalyst but the Communist Revolution wouldn’t have happened, hadn’t the Czar antagonized and revolutionized the most politically active and somewhat wealthy part of the Jewish population in Russia. Moving 50 years forward to the Israeli victory in the Six Days War of 1967, when anti Semitism has greatly increased in the USSR, dropping the regular 50% Jewish enrollment in the Moscow State University to a meager 5% and then even less, when defending a dissertation, getting a good job, etc., has become very difficult, the Jewish refusnik and dissident movement has generated internal instability and inspired the West to economic and political sanctions. This, together with the resulting Jewish brain drain to the West, was a major factor of the USSR’s collapse. I would estimate the number of Jews in Russia closer to 220k, which is still very small, less than 0.2% and I would agree with Adomanis that Putin is certainly not anti Semitic, so it won’t be a factor in any ffuture problems of Russia. The WWII, was single handedly won by the USSR, the US and UK were a minor nuisance at best, sometimes to Russians, sometimes to Germans. The decisive factor in the second half of the war was the total air superiority USSR had over german Luftwaffe due to MIGs and LAs invented by Gurevich and Lavochkin, respectively, both Jewish.
And Anatoly,
I just want to thank you for your blog. It was a nice surprise for me when I discovered that somebody’s actually trying to give an objective review about Russia. Usually that’s not the case 🙂
“AFAIK there are no significant gender differences with overall IQ.”
Oh, of course, gender differences in IQ are not that significant as racial. But, nevertheless, they’re still there.
@AlexanderMercouris, continuing above thread:”The first paragraph of the above comment should say that descriptions of Yalensis as anti semitic are definitely NOT merited.” Ha ha! Thanks, Alexander, that’s okay, your typo made me laugh because I knew what you meant. And no, I am not anti-Semitic at all. Thanks for defending me against that unfair accusation.
🙂
P.S.
Funny discussion of intelligence and relative IQ:
Kevin Klein: “Apes don’t read philosophy.”
Jamie Lee Curtis: “Yes they do, Otto. They just don’t understand it!”
The fact of the matter is, the mainstream Jewish community has pivotted around
Zionism and the pro-Zionist appeal to a certain reading of events of the Second World War for the past few generations,
So it is inevitable that anti-Zionists will be labelled anti-semites in such an atmosphere.