I didn’t know about a certain “sports journalist” and emigre called Slava Malamud until the following amusing exchange with RT journalist Bryan MacDonald came up on my feed.
You are also welcome to go and perform various sexual acts on yourself, Putin's lickspittle useful idiot.
— Slava Malamud 🇺🇦 (@SlavaMalamud) June 7, 2021
Out of curiosity, I did a few searches on his feed. He is not completely inconsequential, having 35,000 followers.
So far as the US goes, he repeats the typical pro-BLM and progressive talking points expected of handshakeworthy members of society, while not forgetting to lecture Americans on how they should live:
Helpful hint, my native-born friends.
Immigrants do not want to change America into their old countries. Think logically, my old country is THE LAST place I want to live in. Which is why I am here.
Conservatives, on the other hand, want to change America into XIX century America.— Slava Malamud 🇺🇦 (@SlavaMalamud) June 18, 2021
However, his real venom is reserved for Russia. For instance, he took strong exception to Russian fans booing virtue signaling Belgian football players taking the knee, calling it a joke country.
Please, let me know when Russia is down by 3. I want this joke of a country out of the tourney ASAP https://t.co/gZ1j5hlaf5
— Slava Malamud 🇺🇦 (@SlavaMalamud) June 12, 2021
All well and good.
Curiously, though, for all the very progressive, anti-racist, and pro-immigration stances he adopts, he does seem to have very strong feelings about the necessity of a “Jewish ethnostate” in Israel.
Which you won't. And even if you did, we wouldn't believe you because history. So, here we are. Accept our right to have an ethnostate, and we can work from there.
If Rep. Omar gets on board, I will give her opinions more thought.
As of now, she still has the right to voice them.— Slava Malamud 🇺🇦 (@SlavaMalamud) June 10, 2021
I am not pretending to be objective. I am a Jew. But I am also realistic. Israel as a Jewish ethnostate is not going. The only way to get rid of it is to outnuke it. Wanna try? Or, maybe, let's not?
— Slava Malamud 🇺🇦 (@SlavaMalamud) May 17, 2021
But what’s good for the goose is not so for the gander:
It also defines the Russians as "state-founding ethnicity", officially designating the country as an ethnostate. Well, isn't fascism swell now?
— Slava Malamud 🇺🇦 (@SlavaMalamud) March 2, 2020
Russian ethnostate: “Isn’t fascism swell now?”
Jewish ethnostate: “The only way to get rid of it is to outnuke it. Wanna try?”
Also, pointing this out makes you a Russian Nazi:
Try to live your life in a way that upsets Russian Nazis. pic.twitter.com/b5HBmWbIUm
— Slava Malamud 🇺🇦 (@SlavaMalamud) June 16, 2021
Unsurprisingly, he plugs Julia Ioffe, who has a broadly similar profile – Vice-President of the Israel Public Affairs Committee during her time at Princeton, castigates Putin as an anti-Semite for saying that it wasn’t just Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust.
All fans of Russian pessimism (and I assume all my followers are) should sign up for @juliaioffe's newsletter, appropriately titled "Tomorrow Will Be Worse." Even I get wonderfully depressed reading it. It's like Dostoyevsky, with less reactionary hysterics and more relevance.
— Slava Malamud 🇺🇦 (@SlavaMalamud) June 15, 2021
Since March 2020, his LinkedIn lists him as a “social media manager” for the Khodorkovsky-funded Free Russia Foundation.
Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.
If you are new to my work, start here.
Commenting rules. Please note that anonymous comments are not allowed.
Frankly, if my name were “малые муды” (“malyie mudy”, i.e., “small balls”), I’d hate Russians too. Growing up must have been an oftentimes unpleasant experience for Slava.
His understanding of the close connection between nuclear weapons, the willingness to use them, and a secure ethnostate are commendable. Everything else less so. Hypocrisy is just the worst.
Though, without continued US-subsidies and support (unofficial and otherwise), Pure Jewish Ethnostate Israel will have to choose between Sparta and “Relatively Luxurious”, rather than its current “can enjoy them both” lifestyle. Israel would have more of my respect as a North-Korea adjacent state if they had to go it alone and pursue the same aggressive policies they pursue.
Forget Khodorkovsky, he is a math teacher at Anne Arundel County Public Schools.
https://www.linkedin.com/company/anne-arundel-county-public-schools?trk=public_profile_experience-item_result-card_subtitle-click
He is probably grooming next generation President WASBAPPIN.
I typed his name into Google, and it says he is a school teacher. People that attract attention on social media by promoting stupid and aggressive views i.e. trolls.
But if you are school teacher, then at least you have to be careful not to say anything too offensive or anti-social, or you can lose your job. So I doubt he can be too bad as a troll, or he would soon lose his job.
Although perhaps if you met in real life, rather than the toxic atmosphere created by dehumanizing social media technology, would be friends over a more healthy culture like lezginka.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bf5KWa_CcAEFJ8h.jpg
That, sir, is a slanderous lie!
We American conservatives have absolutely no desire to turn the clock back to the nineteenth century.
We want to turn the clock back to 1762:
https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/.premium-1762-rhode-island-nixes-jews-1.5335008
Yes.
The United States of America has a clear duty to obliterate Israel’s nuclear arsenal in a massive preemptive first strike.
This is the only course of action that can reliably protect our NATO allies from Israel’s threat of a “Samson Option”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson_Option
Actually, I don’t really think he’s being inconsistent.
Liberal principles are pretty clear; minorities who were historically persecuted can legitimately engage in etnocentrism, because it can be seen as self-defense.
Conversely, historically powerful countries who persecuted minorities and engaged in imperial adventures are considered to have an aggressive form of ethnocentrism, which is therefore illegitimate and dangerous.
Zionism framed itself as an essentially defensive project; a safe haven for Jews who were persecuted second citizens in every country they lived in Europe and the Middle East.
Now, of course, liberals are divided on Israel; half see Israel as an oppressive White imperialistic country, and half as a safe haven for a persecuted minority not accepted anywhere else in the world.
Now, a right-wing Jew who supported Jewish ethnocentrism but opposed it for others would indeed be a hypocrite, because that can’t be justified from within the right-wing world view. But Jews on the right, especially Israelis, are comfortable with ethnocentrism for others.
Similarly, we see “hypocrisy” on Zionism from both Right and Left. Many on the Left support Arab and Palestinian ethnocentrism but oppose Zionism, and many on the far-Right support White ethnocentrism but oppose Zionism (especially on this site).
But if you look closely at their principles, you find that they are actually being internally coherent and not hypocritical. The anti-Zionist Left simply sees Zionism as a White colonial project, while the anti-Zionist Right sees Jewish ethnocentrism as being hostile to White ethnocentrism (because the right generally does not have the “meta-cognition” that would allow them to enter into the liberal world view and see it’s internal consistency), and therefore as the exception to nationalism that needs to be suppressed.
In general, I find that highly ideological people tend to develop internally consistent world views, even if at first this isn’t apparent to outsiders, because their cognitive style is characterized by reducing the complexity of the world to a single explanatory principle, which they then apply with terrifying consistency.
For liberals it might be; strength bad, weakness good. And possibly, by extension; my group bad, other groups good (one sees how this mentality developed out of the self-flagellating ascetics of medieval Christianity, and is a form of elite “self-overcoming” and “will to power” in the Nietzschean sense. A liberal Jew who is anti-Zionist actually displays greater elite “self-overcoming” and asceticism).
For right wingers; my group good, all others bad. Any setback for my group is the fault of nefarious enemies. It is a more simple and strait forward mentality with an extremely simple heuristic to explain reality. It has none of the elite self-overcoming and asceticism of the Left. It is both stupider and healthier, but also wrong and prone to getting into pointless wars.
As always, either extreme is unhealthy.
I feel filthy after reading this imbecile’s drivel. It’s like having a mental septic tank poured directly in your head.
Sure, it is. It also doesn’t matter in an all-out existential fight. Of course anything goes: lies, narratives, double standards, censorship. The whole point of having an ethno-state is to prevent others from having one or denigrate it.
We are not living in a common universal reality world – that world only existed partially on and off for a few years. It is gone now, mankind is back to animal passions. What matters are the nukes and willingness to fight (and die), as the small-balls fellow correctly says.
This is the Old Nationalism that led to WW1.
It was basically imperialism in disguise.
Why can’t we develop a new kind of nationalism based on genuine respect for pluralism? Not even to “tolerate” other nations – but to take pleasure in their distinctions.
For instance, I love the fact that there is a Britain, a France, a Germany, each richly distinct.
But we would need a massive cultural and philosophical overhaul to do this. The problem is that the West is philosophically imperialistic in a cultural sense – philosophically “monist”, if you will. And this philosophy is reflected both internally and externally.
Much internal political fighting in the West is based on imposing the “one, correct” vision on everyone else – instead of recognizing that there are multiple ways for humans to thrive.
Similar in external policy, the West feels driven to impose “one way” on every other nation.
19th century Liberalism was based on “tolerance”. This is good but perhaps it does not go far enough. Tolerance also presupposes a kind of contempt, and therefore is a very fragile thing. It is a kind of “truce” between competing centers of power. It merely holds intolerance in abeyance.
Perhaps we can develop a genuine philosophical and moral appreciation for plurality as regards different ways of human flourishing? This would have to be reflected internally as well as externally – because external policies are always a reflection of the same philosophy you use to order your internal affairs.
That sounds a little bit like a major plot element of “the Double Life of Veronique”.
Nah, not troll, he probably really believes it and getting paid for it is just a bonus.
He teaches the kids of US military officers and NSA spooks. His math lessons probably boil down to “estimate the damage area in Moscow caused by a salvo of Trident II missiles” and “precisely calculate the level of Russian subhumanness using derivatives”.
He is supposed to be an authority on Russian sport but routinely writes things on the topic that are incredibly dumb and demonstrably untrue, but that get retweeted thousands of times.
My favorite occasion was in 2018, when he published a long Twitter thread/tirade on how the ice hockey team SKA St. Petersburg is in fact a personal Putin project, and the entire KHL is rigged by the Kremlin to make them win Gagarin Cup. He had tons of heavyweight proof of this, citing things left and right, while deriding Russia and Russians in every other sentence.
Ak Bars Kazan won that year.
In 2019, CSKA Moscow won. 2020 was cancelled but 2021 was won by Avangard Omsk.
He has published similar things regarding the Russian Premier League, rife with conspiracy theories and a general disgust of everything Russia/n.
Stop lying, most on the left support Two state solution, both Jews and Palestinians having their own states, which is totally different from the Anti-Zionism of Iran and Hizbollah. Or are you claiming that left is not only against occupation of Palestinian territories, but also against the existence of Israel?
Many on the far-Left are completely against the existence of Israel as a separate state. They want one democratic state for all the inhabitants of Palestine, not a Jewish ethnostate. Although they are fine with the other Arab ethnostates in the region.
Some of them think Jews should “go back to Europe”, while others accept Jews can remain as part of a single state with no Jewish character.
Just yesterday I was speaking to two acquaintances – one a Jew who used to be orthodox, one an Egyptian, with these views.
I don’t blame them. Once you understand their principles, they are merely applying them fairly.
Because until recently support for Israel was socially acceptable for centre-left politically citizens in America (as it was a “bipartisan special ally”), and to support Israel was socially cringe only for the far-left and far-right politically Americans.
So politically centre-left Americans were socially permitted to say “I support Israel, and I support abortion rights, I like the speeches of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, and I vote for Bill Clinton”.
However, this is changing, from the university level down this century. In the 21st century, Israel is becoming socially unacceptable for the centre-left in the USA, which will converge with the European left perspective on Israel, which views it as the last example of European colonialism.
That Americans start to call Israel “ethnostate” is a sign that the Israel is becoming unfashionable and socially toxic for the leftwing politically people in America. In reality Israel is more like anti-ethnostate, as life in Israel is stressfully multicultural/multiracial/multireligious. But this discussions is about “Israel” as a social symbol, rather than a minor country in the Middle East.
As Israel becomes socially unacceptable for the centre-left in America, then the nonautistic American Jews with leftwing friends, would begin to say “I am a Jewish and I don’t agree with Israeli government’s policy, in particular to Palestinians. ”
Meanwhile, more socially autistic people might continue to troll about support of “Israeli ethnostate”, but they will stop being invited to hipster parties in Brooklyn (if they was ever fashionable enough to be before). After some decades of failures in their social media image, such people might fall into the deplorable category, and start watching Fox News as ostracized pensioners.
Western people have been brainwashed by the democracy propaganda, to think that their personal opinion is important, and has a causal effect on world – this combines with their innumeracy about their own smallness and irrelevancy in relation to modern population sizes*.
You see it in the way that people argue in forums like one, where they seem to believe that their opinion will change the trajectory of geopolitics and world history.
The only part of the world your political beliefs might change, is your own social life, and the marketing image of yourself that is projected into public space.
In reality of life in Western countries, the role of political opinions is mainly relating to social life, and shows whether the person is responding to the current fashions and trends, or whether they might be difficult nonconformist personalities.
As for geopolitical alignments, it doesn’t much relate to public fashions. America’s best friends include unfashionable governments like Saudi Arabia (that ban women from driving) and Colombia (that shoot protesters). And nobody has polled anyone in Russia, about whether to support Assad, or not to support Armenia.
When a country’s geopolitical alignment is unfashionable, then the government will try to reduce its public visibility. If the country that is being aligned with is fashionable, then the public visibility of the relationship will be increased.
Meanwhile, today, Ireland is one of the most fashionable and beloved countries in the USA, and many presidents including Biden are from Irish descent – yet Biden is still preparing to rape the Irish economy. Biden will be doing it to a fashionable country like Ireland quietly, with a smile and polite letter, while against an unfashionable country like Russia there would have been condemnatory words.
Wales is on good form. Russia should tremble.
Malamud has been authoritatively debunked:
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/open-thread-153/#comment-4718133
On Russian sports issues, he has gotten some prime airtime on sports shows involving hosts who don’t know any better.
He made Artemi Panarin into some kind of a virtuous freedom fighter, under threat which was never the case. Related:
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/02/27/putting-artemi-panarin-situation-in-proper-perspective/
The stuff he says about Alexander Ovechkin is off the wall. Love to see him say that to Ovechkin’s face under the guidelines of NHL etiquette.
Over the decades, consciously proud (of their ethnic roots), Russian-Americans have experienced his kind of views expressed by some American grade school teachers, who’ve never been penalized.
Saying such about some other groups is another story.
When I was writing it, I was imagining if they had both signed to an international relations class in university.
In the first week, Anatoly has to miss class, to go to the video games convention. But Malamud finds the empty seat at the front of class, and spends the time arguing with the professor and classmates.
Next week, Malamud has to miss the class, to fly to Israel and attend to his cousin’s Bar Mitzvah in a West Bank settlement. But Anatoly finds the unoccupied seat at the front of the class, and continues to argue passionately with classmates, who at this time believe they are talking to the same man (as we often confuse people we only saw once).
At the end of day, professor says to himself. “Anatoly Slava is an interesting fellow. First week, he was telling us about the importance of African American rights, and Israel’s victory in 1967 which “taught Arabs a lesson their sore beaten asses won’t forget”. A week later, he is declaring to us about racial differences in IQ and the need to “knock Ukrainian coupists from the Holy Russian Donbass.”
“The views of Anatoly Slava seem coherent somehow, like a mobius strip, or as if they were connected together by the logic we experience in our dreams and nightmares. This is no normal student.. – it is a Hegelian dialectician.”
Yes, I sometimes laugh at myself for being deluded enough to think I can effect any kind of solution. Things take their own course for big reasons we can’t control. Understanding is fun – but real understanding leads to paralysis, as Hamlet understood and agonized over. And as Spinoza, more encouragingly, made into the basis of his philosophy of freedom (everything is predetermined, but genuine understanding frees us from the desire to change anything).
As for Israel, I think your conclusions are premature and too sweeping. Israels reputation goes up and down – pretty much since it’s dazzling victory in the 67 war. I remember it being really bad in the 90s, much worse than now.
We are now in the grip of an extreme Left hysterical mania – these things fizzle out, but even so, the situation in Israel is simply too complicated to fit into a neat Leftist narrative. In too many ways, Israel lives up to Leftist principles and doesn’t conform to the simple White European colonialist narrative.
Any really serious Leftist campaign against Israel would have to deal with the optics of White Nordic types trying to crush an Israel that is majority brown and “ethnic”, and I don’t think it can survive that kind of optics. There are amusing videos of Israeli Rudi Rothman, who looks brown, confronting some hysterical Leftist blond girl agitating against Israel, only for her to become flustered and puzzled and visibly deflated. And I have had Europeans tell me they were astonished to discover Israel was not a country composed entirely of blond and blue eyed Europeans oppressing dark natives when they visited.
In my extended circle of acquaintances, I am hearing anti-Zionist views only from hard core Leftists – so far. That may change.
Other influences are also changing the landscape. The rise of illiberal regimes like China are going to have an influence on the strength of liberalism, especially as our elites seem in various ways to be quite enamored of the Chinese model and democracies are begining to show signs of weakness.
This too is a good point. Geopolitics proceed by rules of their own. As long as the world depends on Middle Eastern oil and the region is unstable, Israel will remain an irreplaceable ally in that volatile region for hard headed pragmatic reasons.
Perhaps. Maybe confronting the modern day liberals with their insane narcissistic obsessions would be a good way to start. Short of that, you got nothing.
Good for you. But not liking the English, French, or even Germans has never been a big issue in the West. Occasionally they fought, killed each other, then made up. Family squabbles. The real issue are much deeper hatreds and dislikes that Westerners as a whole share about the “others”. Your choice of examples is infantile. Are you ok with others, like Russia, Turkey or Iran having their own distinct and rich cultures? No matter how you respond, I sincerely doubt that West will ever be ok with it.
So back to WWI and the usual schemas that are endlessly swimming in your mind. If just we could learn how to respect the Belgians all would be great…
https://youtu.be/R67V4v12Azg
https://youtu.be/_nw7FOgOgtA
Oh so now it’s the Far Left, always changing the goal posts, aren’t we? However I have not heard of European left or far left mainstream parties supporting such solution. So you are just speaking about fringe minority and claiming that they represent the whole left.
I would rather they called them “fags” (Russian equivalent), but I guess that is against the rules?
Yes, not the mainstream left. I specifically referred to Leftist anti-Zionists, which are one element within the Left.
I am only saying there is a – sizeable and vocal – element within the Left that has a hard anti-Zionist position while nevertheless being ok with Arab ethnostates, and that before we simplistically call the hypocrites – as I may be tempted to do – we should see if their position makes internal sense according to their principles.
I was merely citing this as an example of apparent hypocrisy being, upon closer examination, to be no such thing.
Look, it may be that my program of genuine philosophical “respect” for the Other is a human impossibility, and the Way Of The World is a perpetual and ceaseless struggle for dominion – certainly Nietzsche believed that was how the world works.
Or more likely, periods of philosophical “large mindedness” alternate with periods of philosophical fanaticism and contraction. Yes, that is most likely.
I have stupidly fallen into the folly of making political prescriptions, which is always idiotic.
Rather, the value of my observations can only be for individual culture. The perspective I am describing is always an open possibility for an individual to adopt, in any age, and it’s value lies solely in it’s ability to make one live better and more freely and fully, free of petty hatreds and obsessions against various groups and nations.
As for myself, I appreciate both Turkey and Iran having their own distinct culture, and am glad they aren’t European. I immensely enjoyed the exoticism of Turkey – although Egypt even more so. As much as I appreciate European culture, Eastern cultures are fascinating for not being European. Of course, I condemn the same “monistic” and imperialistic tendencies in them as well – and they definitely have them, Islam is intensely monistic and imperialistic.
And it may be that it is the fate of Europe to be monistic and imperialistic, although as I note, Islamic civilization may be even more so.
I feel Eastern civilization escapes the monistic trap much better, but at the cost of not caring about the world and regarding it as a dream and an illusion. A price I delight in paying 🙂 But the average hard-headed Westerners with a sense of facts will likely not – and increasingly, the East neither.
Oh well, I will settle back into my dream, then.
Anatoly, it’s high time you did a comprehensive debunking of “bne”, and how it’s basically a neoconservative publication. Here is the latest exhibit:
https://twitter.com/bneintellinews/status/1406166611875155968