CONTENTS

 

 

 

Preface

 

Ⅰ. BURNING VEANGEANCE

1 Neocon Revenge

(1) Ukraine is the “Latest Neocon Disaster”

(2) Neocon Origins and “Pogroms”

(3) Nationalism as a Detonator

(4) Incitement by mass media

 

2 Putin’s Revenge

(1) Mass media’s failure to see that “de-Nazification” is concealed

(2) Revenge for the coup d’état to 2014

(3) Putin’s exaltation of nationalism

(4) The setback of the Putin scenario

 

3 Zelensky’s Revenge

(1) Revenge stirred by rage

(2) Jewish Zelensky

(3) Vengeance of Ukrainian immigrants

(4) Russia’s move to “cancel

 

Ⅱ. REVENGE OF SANCTIONS

4 On the Spirit of Revenge (Ressentiment)

(1) Nietzsche’s teachings

(2) The Justice of Reciprocity

(3) The primordial stage of sacrifice to God

(4) From Substitution to Atonement

 

5 From Revenge to Punishment

(1) Crime and Punishment in Christianity

(2) Religions that deflect the spirit of revenge

(3) The court system

(4) Punishment by the State

 

6 War in the Perspective of International Law

(1) The Birth of European Public Law (International Law)

(2) The Birth and Fluctuation of European Public Law

(3) The Erosion of European Public Law by the United Kingdom and the United States

(4) Just War Theory Today

 

7 Revenge, Retaliation, and Sanctions

(1) Revenge and Retaliation

(2) Retaliation under international law

(3) Retaliation and sanctions

(4) Criticism of secondary sanctions

(5) The West’s inclination toward consequentialism

(6) Doubts about the cause of sanctions

(7) The perspective of “transitional justice

(8) “Impunity” Preventing Revenge

 

Ⅲ. CHALLENGES FOR THE 21^ST CENTURY

8 Questioning the West and the Christian World

(1) Questioning Western Civilization

(2) “Blame” of Western Civilization

 

 

 

Acknowledgements

Notes

Bibliography

Index

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PREFACE

 

 

 

  This book will argue that the war in Ukraine is unfolding under the interplay of three vendettas: the vendetta of the “neocons” in the United States against Russia, the vendetta of Russian President Vladimir Putin against Ukraine, and the vendetta of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky against Russia. This sense of revenge is the basis of the Ukrainian war. This feeling of revenge will also help to show how difficult it is to end the war in Ukraine.

  To understand the Ukrainian question, one must know the history of the U.S. government’s long-standing interference in Ukraine’s political and economic affairs. Since the existence of the Soviet Union (USSR), the U.S. government, as part of its foreign policy strategy, has paid attention to the republics that made up the USSR and has continually tried to influence the internal order of the USSR by fomenting nationalism in the various countries. This strategy has had concrete results in the “Ukrainian crisis” that surfaced in 2014.

  Behind the crisis was a Jewish woman, Victoria Nuland, who was then Assistant Secretary of State at the U.S. State Department. She is the representative of the “neocons” (neoconservatives) in the United States. As I explained in my book Putin 3.0, written in Japanese, they (1) view the world in terms of a binary opposition between good and evil and seek moral clarity in foreign policy, (2) believe that the U.S. should actively use its power to achieve what it wants. should actively use its power to achieve what they consider to be the “moral good,” including the liberalization and democratization of the Middle East and other parts of the world, and (3) believe that the U.S. should not be afraid to use its own power to achieve this “moral good,” and that the U.S. should not be afraid to use its own tyranny if necessary. (4) The U.S. has a negative view of international treaties, agreements, and international organizations such as the United Nations as binding on U.S. freedom of action, and is extremely skeptical of international cooperation. In addition, many of them are Jewish intellectuals, and many of them have actual ties to the Israeli government.

  Some of these neocons hold deep grudges against the Soviet Union and its successor, the Russian Federation, because of the loss of their property and misery caused by the Russian Revolution and the murder of their relatives in the Stalinist genocide. Therefore, they are not afraid to hurt Russia badly in order to avenge their losses.

  These neocons led the February 21, 2014 coup behind the scenes (see my books Ukraine-Gate and Ukraine 2.0 for more details. Both are written in Japanese). It was the violent overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych, who had been democratically elected president. The neocons had won a victory to the point that Yanukovych, whom the neocons had taken the liberty of calling pro-Russian, was forced into exile in Russia. However, the ultra-radical nationalist groups (the Light Sector) that the neocons had encouraged repeatedly committed violence against the Russian population that had oppressed them. This led to Putin’s intervention under the guise of protecting the Russian people, and the Crimean Peninsula was annexed by Russia after a referendum. This is a major blunder for the neocons, leading to resentment of Putin and a new vow of revenge.

  Nuland now holds the key position of Undersecretary of State in the Biden administration and is on the front lines of a possible vendetta. More on the “Neocon Revenge” in Chapter 1.

  Although it may seem abrupt, Putin officially listed revenge as one of the goals of the “Special Military Operation. On the morning of February 24, 2022, the day he launched his invasion of Ukraine, he gave a speech in which he listed the “demilitarization” and “denazification” of Ukraine as the purpose of launching the “Special Military Operation. Many in the Western and Japanese mass media have ignored (neglected) the “de-Nazification” of Ukraine. The focus tends to be on the demilitarization of Ukraine to prevent it from joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). But in reality, the mysterious goal of de-Nazification is what lies at the heart of Putin’s war against Ukraine.

  What we translate here as de-Nazification is a Russianization of the German word Entnazifizierung. It refers to a series of measures aimed at eliminating Nazi (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) influence from post-war German and Austrian society, culture, press, economy, education, law, and politics.

  In Putin’s view, there are nationalists in Ukraine who are so infatuated with Nazism that they not only ostracize the Russian population, but even try to abolish the Russian language. Despite this, Putin notes, “major NATO countries are supporting extreme nationalists and neo-Nazis in Ukraine in order to achieve their own goals. Catching and bringing to justice these nationalists and “neo-Nazis” who are oppressing the Russian population is considered an important goal along with “demilitarization.

  Putin’s vengeance against the neo-Nazis is clearly evident here: on June 19, 2022, he made an interesting statement at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, explaining that the decision to launch the “special military operation” that began on February 24 was a decision to protect our people, who have been subjected to eight years of genocide by the Kiev regime with the full support of the West and the neo-Nazis. The decision to launch the “special military operation” on February 24 was taken “to protect our people, the residents of the Donbass People’s Republic, who for eight years have been subjected to genocide by the Kiev regime and neo-Nazis with the full support of the West,” he explained. Putin is bent on revenge against the Ukrainian neo-Nazis for the slaughter of the Russian population.

  In particular, Putin must have in mind revenge for the May 2, 2014 incident in Odesa, where an officially reported 42 people were killed in a trade union hall (six others were shot in the street). The case remains unsolved, and that is why Putin’s revenge is being pushed. This “Putin’s revenge” will be discussed in Chapter 2.

  It may be easy to understand the composition of Zelensky’s revenge against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which was attacked. However, Zelensky’s vengeance against Russia must have been simmering long before the Ukrainian crisis in the spring of 2014, when the Crimean Peninsula was annexed by Russia and the eastern Donbass region subsequently fell into a state of war.

  In September 2020, Zelensky would approve the new Ukrainian National Security Strategy (NSS), which would replace the National Security Strategy of May 2015. The new strategy presents an updated security policy for Ukraine based on three pillars. The first pillar is to improve defense capabilities; the second pillar is to strengthen the ability of society and the state to adapt quickly to changes in the security environment. The third pillar is cooperation with foreign partners with the strategic goal of joining the European Union (EU) and NATO.

  As a step towards the concretization of the NSS, Zelensky would issue a presidential decree on the approval of a “Military Security Strategy” on March 25, 2021. Approval of the strategy, which identifies “Ukraine’s full membership in NATO” as a high priority, will lead to a decisive confrontation with Russia.

  On August 23 of that year, the first summit of the Crimean Platform, a consultative body for the retaking of Crimea, was held in Kyiv. Zelensky told the 46 delegates, “I myself will do everything possible to retake Crimea and make it part of Europe along with Ukraine. I will use all possible political, legal and, above all, diplomatic means”. He was indeed bent on revenge against Russia for its annexation of Crimea. This “Zelensky’s Revenge” will be discussed in Chapter 3.

  Chapters 1, 2, and 3 make up the first part of the book as “Burning Vengeance. Up to this point, this is only a superficial analysis of the war in Ukraine. A more in-depth discussion will follow in Part II, “Revenge of Sanctions,” which will explore the political philosophy of war.

  If the war in Ukraine is a war of revenge, how should we understand the situation of revenge? In this book, chapters 4 and following provide a thorough analysis of revenge itself.

  Chapter 4 focuses on Friedrich Nietzsche’s ressentiment (vengeful spirit or vengeful emotion). It considers the historical transformation of the ancients from the primordial stage of sacrifice to substitution to atonement.

  Chapter 5 examines the shift from revenge to punishment in the Christian world. By examining the problem of the place of crime and punishment in Christian theology and various issues up to the institutionalization of punishment by sovereign states, the chapter clarifies the historical changes that revenge has undergone.

  Chapter 6 analyzes international law. The view of war as a punishable crime is closely related to the development of international law. Therefore, the relationship between international law and war crimes is clarified by focusing on (1) the period leading up to the birth of “European public law,” (2) after the birth of European public law, and (3) the current period in which “global international law” has supplanted European public law.

  Chapter 7 carefully discusses revenge, retaliation, and sanctions. In particular, by learning about the relationship between revenge, retaliation, and sanctions in just war theory, we hope that the reader will understand that retaliation and sanctions that have nothing to do with revenge are not currently being carried out. In other words, what the West is doing now is revenge with the word “sanction,” and it seems to be violence by the ruling power that has been hidden by Western Christian civilization.

  Finally, in “Part III: Challenges for the 21st Century,” Chapter 8 presents “Questioning the West and the Christian World. The Christian world seems to have become civilized by limiting revenge to retribution and sanctions, but this does not mean that revenge itself has been eliminated for all time. Rather, this concealment of revenge is sometimes repeated historically in the form of wars and the use of force. Western civilization, based on Christian theology, may be forced to repeat violence in the form of revenge. I would like to develop such an argument.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ⅰ. BURNING VEANGEANCE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1 Neocon Revenge

 

 

 

 

 

　　(1) Ukraine is the “Latest Neocon Disaster”

 

  The war in Ukraine does indeed appear to be a war of aggression by Russia, brought about by Vladimir Putin. From the standpoint of focusing only on the “results” (consequences) of the outbreak of war, the view that Russia’s Putin is “absolutely evil,” and that the Putin regime must be brought down seems to be correct. However, this consequentialism is only one approach of normative ethics to govern human behavior and is not an absolutely correct statement.

  There is also the position of non-consequentialism, which holds that the responsibility for the war can be clarified only after a thorough examination of the processes leading up to the outbreak of war and taking into account the various factors that led to the war in Ukraine.

  Among the commentators who, like myself, take a non-consequentialist position, two are particularly noteworthy: John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Jeffrey Sachs, a prominent development economist. I explained Mearsheimer’s argument in detail in my book Putin 3.0, written in Japanese, so I will only introduce Sachs’ opinion here.1 He published an essay on June 27, 2022, titled “Ukraine is the Latest Neocon Disaster.”2 Its contents are extremely interesting. We hope that by presenting them, you will gain a correct understanding of the reality of the war in Ukraine.

  It begins, “The war in Ukraine is the culmination of a 30-year project of the American neoconservative movement.” This neoconservatism is what the “neocons” claim refers to. Sachs himself explained that its main message is that “the U.S. must predominate in military power in every region of the world and must confront rising regional powers that could someday challenge U.S. global or regional dominance, most importantly Russia and China.”

  As for the origin of these neocons, he attributes their emergence in the 1970s to a group of several intellectuals influenced by University of Chicago political scientist Leo Strauss and Yale University classics scholar Donald Kagan. The former is a German-born Jew who immigrated to the U.S. in 1937; the latter is a Lithuanian-born Jew who immigrated to the U.S. as a child. Neocon leaders include Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan (Donald’s son), Frederick Kagan (Donald’s son), Victoria Nuland (Robert’s wife), Elliot Abrams and Kimberly Allen Kagan (Frederick’s wife).

  It is important to note that Kimberly Kagan is the founder and president of the now much-discussed Institute for the Study of War. The neocons themselves are analyzing the war in Ukraine. Nevertheless, it must be noted that information that does not seem to be accurate, relying heavily on information from the Institute for the Study of War, is being spread around the world by the mass media.

  Sachs notes that “the Biden Administration is packed with the same neocons who championed the U.S. wars of choice in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Syria (2011), Libya (2011), and who did so much to provoke Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” and that ” the neocon track record is one of unmitigated disaster, yet Biden has staffed his team with neocons.” He added, “As a result, Biden is steering Ukraine, the U.S., and the European Union towards yet another geopolitical debacle. If Europe has any insight, it will separate itself from these U.S. foreign policy debacles.”

  In other words, Sachs is concerned not only with the consequences of the war in Ukraine, which Putin started, but also with the circumstances that led up to that war.

 

Neocons who turned Ukraine into a battleground

  As early as 1992, it was known that Wolfowitz was calling for the expansion of the U.S.-led security network into Central and Eastern Europe, despite German Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher’s explicit commitment in 1990 not to expand NATO eastward following German reunification.

  In 1993-94, Sandy (Alexander) Vershubov, Nick (Nicholas) Burns, and Dan (Daniel) Fried, who were on the staff of the U.S. National Security Council, drew up a roadmap “Toward NATO Enlargement.”

The three will build on the “Toward NATO Enlargement” of October 4, 1994, and complement the “Toward NATO Enlargement” of October 12, 1994.3 It is notable for the addition of a section that was not included in the first draft: “Open the doors of membership to Ukraine, the Baltic States, Romania, and Bulgaria, emphasizing that all candidates must meet the same principles.”

  Not only that. Neocons had been advocating for NATO expansion into Ukraine even before it became official U.S. policy under George W. Bush in 2008. Robert Kagan, then a regular contributor to the Washington Post on April 30, 2006, wrote, “Might not the successful liberalization of Ukraine, urged and supported by the Western democracies, be but the prelude to the incorporation of that nation into NATO and the European Union — in short, the expansion of Western liberal hegemony? “4 This shows the ambitions of the neocons, who wanted to bring Ukraine into NATO and the EU after the pro-American President Viktor Yushchenko came to power in Ukraine in 2005.

 

Current Bosses Nuland and Biden

  Nuland, who served as NATO Ambassador to the United States during the Bush years (Permanent Representative to NATO from 2005-08) and Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs under Barack Obama from 2013-17, assumed the key position of Under Secretary of State in the Biden administration.

  The aforementioned Fried served as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs from May 5, 2005 to May 15, 2009, with ties from Fried to Nuland. Nuland was behind the Ukraine crisis when she was Assistant Secretary of State, and in February 2014 she successfully ousted then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in a coup.

  A neocon, she even turned the smoldering poor Ukrainian-speaking population of western Ukraine into nationalists and indoctrinated them into armed struggle. Some of them even include the Right Sector, an ultra-radical nationalist group willing to use violence against the Russian population. The violence of these radical nationalists against the Russian population led to Putin’s intervention, and eventually the Crimean Peninsula was annexed by Russia.

  So you can imagine that Nuland developed an ever-growing resentment and hatred of Russia. Not only that. The neocons planned to avenge their hatred through revenge, in other words, through the violence of war. The war in Ukraine was prepared with an eagle eye. In short, the U.S. government will continue to provide military aid to Ukraine after 2014, and will rapidly become more active in providing military aid after the Biden administration comes to power in January 2021.

  In the process, they will try to undermine President Donald Trump’s policy of détente. The manipulation of information through furious disinformation drove Trump to even allow the U.S. to provide lethal weapons to Ukraine.

  Not only that, but it was the neocons who killed any chance of introducing a UN peacekeeping operation in eastern Ukraine in 2017, even though there was an opportunity to do so. The neocons preserved the radical nationalists in Ukraine. This was possible because since 2014 Ukraine has been a “client” of the United States, that is, a client state, and almost a colony of the United States politically and economically.

  Zelensky was elected president in 2019 with the goal of achieving peace in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, i.e., the implementation of the so-called “Minsk agreements.” For radical nationalists, however, the implementation of the Minsk agreements means the disintegration of the Ukrainian state and its cession to Russia. Therefore, they threaten Zelensky with another violent coup that will determine the future of Ukraine. On March 25, 2021, President Zelensky issues a presidential decree approving the Military Security Strategy. The approval of a strategy in which “Ukraine’s full membership in NATO” is listed as a high priority makes the confrontation with Russia decisive.

  For Zelensky, the war strengthens his own power base. In fact, under the martial law and general mobilization that began on February 24, 2022, he was able to act in a very dictatorial manner, so to speak. He was able to do whatever he wanted, including banning men between the ages of 18 and 60 from traveling outside the country, suspending the activities of some political parties, and unifying mass media coverage. For some reason, however, the Western mass media have been unwilling to report on the true face of this dictator, Zelensky. This is in line with the failure of the press to report on such U.S. intransigence after the February 2014 coup, which is believed to have been led by Nuland.

  Behind Zelensky was the support of the US neoconservatives, who were hardened in their hatred of Russia. Later, Ukrainian President Zelensky openly called for, among other things, the recapture of Crimea. The neocon-led Biden administration openly pursues policies that seem to encourage Russian anger. In other words, they have incited and provoked Russia to go to war. This has been tacitly endorsed or supported by Secretary of State Antony Blinken. As I wrote in my book Putin 3.0 in Japanese, his biological father was Donald M. Blinken, a Ukrainian Jewish banker; his mother was the daughter of a wealthy Hungarian Jew; and his stepfather, Samuel Pisar, was a Nazi death camp survivor liberated by the U.S. military near the end of the war. In other words, the suspicion arises that Nuland and Blinken, Jewish Americans, may be the ones who provoked the war in Ukraine.

  And let’s not forget that Biden was Nuland’s boss at the time of the coup in February 2014, and at the outbreak of the war in Ukraine in February 2022. Biden could never be said to be “unaccountable” for the war in Ukraine.

  Well aware of these incitements by the “Nuland-Biden” line, Putin cuts off his own patience. In this respect, it is precisely the neocons who have driven Putin into a corner, is it not? We have to ask ourselves this question.

 

The neocons “provoked a military conflict with Russia.”

  Sachs notes that “yet in the ‘battle for Ukraine,’ the neocons were ready to provoke a military confrontation with Russia by expanding NATO over Russia’s vehement objections because they fervently believe that Russia will be defeated by US financial sanctions and NATO weaponry.” The reason for this is that neocons “fervently believe that Russia will be defeated by U.S. financial sanctions and NATO weaponry.” Indeed, sanctions in the financial sector, where Jewish influence is strong, have been imposed since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine.5 Driven by the desire for revenge, the neocons led by the Biden administration have imposed harsh sanctions against Russia. It is also trying to weaken Russia through sanctions and military support by asking European countries, Japan and others to do the same.

  The neocons also continue to deceive people around the world through their almost insane disinformation operations using the Jewish mass media. They are making Putin out to be a villain, and they continue to cover up the being “ready to provoke a military confrontation with Russia” that they have been orchestrating.6 From the standpoint of normative ethics, which is not consequentialist but non-consequentialist, this “being ready” is at least a serious “evil.”

  Sachs does not write about what this “being ready” means.7 If one were to speculate, the “being ready” for war have been steadily underway since 2021, beginning with the provocations by the Ukrainian military in the Donbass, followed by the strengthening of military assistance and a series of exercises. For example, on August 27, 2021, Biden authorized $60 million in defense weapons to be drawn from U.S. inventories and sent to Ukraine, and in December he approved an additional $200 million in weapons from U.S. inventories.

  Sachs’ assessment of these neocons is harsh. He takes a stab at the “the neocon outlook is based on an overriding false premise: that the US military, financial, technological, and economic superiority enables it to dictate terms in all regions of the world.” He accuses the neocons of “a position of both remarkable hubris and remarkable disdain of evidence.”

  I am inclined to fully support Sachs’ view. The problem is that claims like Sachs and mine are too little known. Even in countries that claim to be democracies, these very legitimate views are largely ignored by the mass media, in collusion with the powers that be in each country. Through the so-called “neglect” they manipulate information and consequently deceive many people. For them, who only care about “consequences,” this is not the same as spreading misinformation. However, we would like to draw attention to the fact that the information spread by such mass media is the aforementioned disinformation. They dare to ignore it and they speak ambiguously by spreading “inaccurate information.”

  The aforementioned consequentialism has prevailed in the United States until now. Although its content is complex, this consequentialism includes maximizing utilitarianism, which believes that only those actions that maximize merit are right. For the calculators, consequences are everything, and no matter how dirty the tricks they use to provoke them, they hold everyone accountable for what is done as a result. But Sachs and I are not inclined to subscribe to a view that emphasizes only such consequences. What is worrying is that European countries are sympathetic to this one-sided view.

 

The “Road to War” from the Viewpoint of Consequentialism

  From a consequentialist perspective, was the United States right in its actions immediately prior to the outbreak of the war in Ukraine? On August 16, 2022, the Washington Post published an article in large part titled “The Road to War,” a compilation based on extensive interviews with more than 30 U.S., Ukrainian, European, and NATO officials.8 According to the report, as of October 2021, the heads of the national intelligence, military, and diplomatic agencies that comprise the Biden administration shared a common understanding that the risk of a Putin invasion of Ukraine was increasing. The subsequent responses are discussed in detail. By this point, Putin’s decision to invade seemed to have been made, but did the Biden administration really make an effort to reverse that decision?

  The U.S. government attempted to reverse Putin’s decision by warning the Russian government that it would face severe sanctions if it invaded. However, this is only a prelude to the imposition of sanctions, as discussed in Chapter 7. If they really wanted to stop the war, they could have found another way. There must have been some way to make concessions to Russia. Since the 2014 coup was initiated by the U.S., we should not be surprised if the U.S. admits its own culpability, and consequentialists who focus on the consequences of the outbreak of war should analyze this point carefully. Although the credibility of the WP article, which is based on information convenient to the U.S. government parties, is questionable, it is worth reading for readers.

 

　　(2) Neocon Origins and “Pogroms”

 

  According to Mutuo Mabuchi’s book, The New Communism Eroding Japan, written in Japanese, the original neocon was Lev Trotsky. He advocated a simultaneous world revolution, the establishment of a unified world government through socialism. How this ideology relates to the neocons is that the “Soviet Jewish Trotskyists,” who inherited the ideas of Trotsky, who was defeated in a line struggle with Stalin, who advocated socialism in one country, who was expelled from the Soviet Union and murdered after defecting to Mexico, took over the Socialist Party in the United States, where they immigrated, and merged it with the Democratic Party to gain a position in the core of the left wing of the Democratic Party. They will abandon the Trotskyist idea of “exporting the socialist revolution” and adopt a new global strategy of world unification through the “export of freedom and democracy.

  Behind these moves is the elimination of Jewish revolutionaries by Stalin, a Georgian. Among those who made the Russian Revolution a success were Lenin, Trotsky, Khamenev, Bukharin, Radek, Sverdlov, Kaganovich, and others of Jewish descent. Stalin would have taken Russia back from the Jewish revolutionaries who led the Russian Revolution into the hands of non-Jewish revolutionaries.

  From this perspective, the Russian Revolution was aimed at liberating the Jewish minority in Russia from the persecution of the Czarist regime, and it can be said that the revolution was carried out by exiled Jewish revolutionaries with the help of Jewish international financiers (Jacob Schiff, Paul Warburg, Bernard Baruch, etc.).

  However, when the Jewish people who led these revolutions are eliminated or purged, it would not be surprising if they develop hatred and resentment toward Stalin and his ruling country, the Soviet Union (USSR), which carried them out.

 

Neocon Revenge Drama

  The Jewish people must have been persecuted in various parts of Europe and must have had a burning desire for vengeance against them.

  There is a Russian word for “pogrom” (погром). The term originally came to permeate English and other European languages as a way of describing attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire (mainly in the settlement blocs) during the 19th and 20th centuries. Famous pogroms include the 1821 riots against Jews in Odessa, as well as the Warsaw pogrom (1881), the pogrom in Chisinau (1903), the current capital of Moldova, and the Kiev (Kyiv) pogrom (1905). The most significant pogrom to occur in Nazi Germany was the “Kristallnacht” of 1938, which burned down synagogues throughout Germany, arrested tens of thousands of Jews, and murdered hundreds.

 Pogroms in the Russian Empire are generally divided into four periods: sporadic pogroms from 1821 to 1871, waves from 1881 to 1884, intensification during the revolution from 1905 to 1907, and the civil war. In this light, it is difficult to deny that the Russian Revolution was a revenge play by the Jews, who, as will be discussed later, were repeatedly subjected to pogroms.9 After all, many of those who led the revolution were Jewish, including Lenin.

  Conversely, the persecution of Jews in Germany is linked to the “irresistible vengeance of many Germans in the 1930s” against the strategy of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, Nazis), which had restored the collective pride of the German people after the humiliations of World War I.10

  Of particular note is the scourge of revenge that occurred around the time of World War II. A tragedy occurs when the same number of German soldiers are killed in the last ten months of the war as in the entire five years before. Analyzing this, Frank Biess, a professor of history at the University of California, San Diego, analyzed that “fears of revenge and the ensuing commitment to fight to the last minute resulted from the fearful anticipation that the victors of World War II would do to Germans what Germans had previously done to millions of victims of Nazism.”11

  Moreover, according to Biess, fears of reprisals “resulted from the fact that, paradoxically, the number of Jewish survivors in post-war Germany increased rapidly from only 20,000 in 1945 to 250,000 in 1947.” This was largely due to the influx of Polish Jews who survived the war in the Soviet Union and fled a series of anti-Semitic pogroms in Poland after the war. The Germans were said to have resented the treatment given to Jewish survivors by the American occupation authorities, including high food quotas and preferential housing. Yes, because there was a key figure in the U.S. government who wanted “revenge” on Germany. The names are Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Undersecretary of the Treasury, and Harry Dexter White, whom he had recruited to his cause. Both men were Jewish Americans.

  According to World War II: America’s Defeat: Soviet Spies Manipulated the United States by Soki Watanabe in Japanese, the U.S. government’s approach was for White to formulate a concrete plan, for Morgenthau to approve it, and for Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) to work it into an Allied agreement. White believed that industry had to be uprooted in order to destroy the German spirit, and that separating the Ruhr, the country’s heartland, from Germany would be an effective way to do so. As a result, White proposes that the region be placed under international administration and that the revenue from it be used to pay the prize money to the Allies (for 20 years). In fact, some of White’s proposals were modified, but the very logic of “never again Nazism” was agreed between FDR and Winston Churchill at the Second Quebec Conference (September 1944). In the end, Churchill was offered a $6.5 billion loan to Britain as a “souvenir,” and the idea of Germany becoming an agricultural nation was accepted.

  This “Morgenthau Plan” would spell disaster for Germany. Specifically, in response to the Quebec Agreement, the War Department presented General Dwight Eisenhower with the new JCS 1067 (Joint Chiefs of Staff Order) (October 17, 1944). This order was followed by the new President Harry Truman, who succeeded FDR, who died on April 12, 1945 (May 1945). Watanabe writes: “Germany’s intention to thoroughly demilitarize and become an agrarian state was clearly stated in JCS No. 1067, paragraphs 30-33. German occupation policy based on JCS 1067 began in earnest in the fall of 1945 and continued until July 1947. However, the backlash against such a harsh policy led to its replacement by the famous “Marshall Plan”.

  Knowing the history of these vendettas, it is not surprising that many Jewish Americans who make up the neoconservatives have plotted revenge against Russians or Russia for past pogroms.

 

　　(3) Nationalism as a detonator

 

  Interestingly, the neocons turned to nationalism. Initially, the policy of fomenting nationalism in its constituent republics and shaking up the Soviet Union as a whole was adopted as a pillar of U.S. foreign policy as an effective means of weakening the Soviet Union. This is the neocon method. If the goal is to weaken Russia, the neocons are willing to use any means necessary.

  Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as presidential adviser to Lyndon Johnson from 1966 to 1968 and as assistant to the president for national security affairs in the Jimmy Carter administration from 1977 to 1981, argued that the establishment of U.S. hegemony in Eurasia would lead to the maintenance of American unilateralism. (However, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists [OUN] had existed for some time, and the United States had been protecting the remnants of the OUN since the end of World War II).

  Brzezinski himself has been a major influence on the foreign policy of the liberal hegemony of the United States. According to University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer, author of The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, Yale University Press, 2018, the liberal hegemon, i.e. the United States, will wage wars around the world and pursue a highly interventionist foreign policy. Its main goal will be to spread liberal democracy, overthrow authoritarian regimes, and create a world of liberal democracy only. In other words, liberal hegemonic states will seek to remake the international system in their own image. They will also promote an open world economy and build international institutions in both economic and security matters.

  Of particular importance is Brzezinski’s protégé, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (1997-2001). It was she who presided over the NATO bombing of Kosovo. Her parents converted to Roman Catholicism during World War II and raised her as a Catholic without telling her of her Jewish heritage. She had the experience of fleeing twice from the Czech Republic to London. The first was when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, and the second when the Soviet-backed Czech Communist Party overthrew the Czechoslovak government in 1948, after the family had returned home after the war. The second would take the form of immigration to the United States.

  As secretary of state, Albright led air strikes against military targets and research facilities in Iraq in December 1998 to reduce Iraq’s ability to produce weapons of mass destruction. She also supported the 1999 NATO bombing of Kosovo to stop Yugoslav forces from attacking Albanians. In this context, the term “ethnic cleansing” was coined to characterize Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic’s slaughter of different ethnic groups as “genocide,” and Albright argued strongly that the U.S. intervention was justified by the protection of human rights. She firmly believed that the use of force could be justified if there were also humanitarian reasons. The BBC reports: “She claimed that he (Milosevic) was no more than a schoolyard bully who would retreat after a good punch on the nose”.12

  In contrast to Albright, Yasushi Akashi, the UN Secretary General’s Special Representative for the Former Yugoslavia, is known for not even giving the go-ahead for the NATO air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs that began on August 31, 1995.

  Albright can be classified as a “liberal interventionist” who believes that individuals, not states, are the primary actors in the world and that they have a responsibility to protect those at risk from their own governments, especially when there is an international consensus to intervene. While neoconservatives despise international institutions (which they see as a constraint on US power), interventionists see them as a useful way to legitimize US rule. In bombing Kosovo, the U.S. joined British Prime Minister Tony Blair and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in calling on NATO not to make the same mistakes in Europe as Nazi Germany, and decided to launch an armed attack in the form of NATO airstrikes.13

 

The ‘Arab Spring’ born of nationalism

  The neocons also began to use the technique, long advocated by Brzezinski, of influencing the Soviet Union through the use of nationalism. Nuland incites nationalism against the inhabitants of the western part of Ukraine, the poorest region of the country. They were persecuted under Soviet rule, even though Ukrainian is their native language. Dissatisfied with the situation where Russian is still the dominant language, despite the fact that Ukraine was created as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union, they believe that the best thing for Ukraine would be to move away from Russian influence and join NATO or the EU.

  The social networking sites used in the transformation that began in Tunisia after the end of 2010, which Western journalism arbitrarily dubbed the “Arab Spring,” played a major role in the spread of nationalism. But this means that there is no reflection on the havoc wrought by the Arab Spring in the countries of the Middle East and Africa. In short, they tried to apply to Ukraine the same utterly ridiculous belief that overthrowing an existing dictator or authoritarian leader would create a democratic state.

  As a result, some nationalists are willing to harm the Russian people. The U.S. government has also used non-governmental organizations (NGOs), such as the American Foundation for Democracy, to supply weapons to various extremist groups and train them in fighting methods.

  Such nationalist agitation is actually the remote cause of the subsequent war in Ukraine. This is because the ultra-radical nationalists remained in power after the coup and continued to have enough violent destructive power to shake the new government by force. For example, a 10,000-strong demonstration on October 6 of that year was seen by the newly elected president in 2019, Zelensky, as a demonstration of nationalist influence and a reminder that the Minsk agreements would be difficult to implement. On the first of that month, a trilateral contact group (representatives of Ukraine, the unrecognized Donetsk People’s Republic [DNR] and Lugansk People’s Republic [LNR], Russia, and the mediating OSCE [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe]) agreed in Minsk on a “Steinmeier formula” acceptable to all parties, based on Ukraine’s recognition of the special status of Donbass and full elections in Donbass under European supervision. Ultra-radical nationalists, however, saw the Minsk agreements as a concession to Russia. As a result, they have shown that they are determined to retake Crimea and that they have the power to stage another coup and overthrow the current government if they so choose.

 

The Other Side of Nationalism

  In closing this section, I would like to briefly explain the nationalism that has caught the attention of the neocons. According to Masachi Osawa’s Philosophy of ‘World History’: The Modern Age Arc 2, written in Japanese, what makes nationalism possible is a “double commitment.” First, there is a commitment to a potentially universal human civil society (Gesellschaft). The initial commitment takes on substance when it is integrated with a commitment to a concrete “Nation” that has the appearance of the Gemeinschaft with which humans have long been familiar, such as the family and the local community. To put it plainly, “human rights” are nothing more than empty ideas, but by taking the form of “French rights,” “Japanese rights,” etc., the substance of the rights will emerge.

  Applying this view to Ukraine, the fueling of Ukrainian nationalism is a call to come together as a “Nation” (people) in order to advance the transition to the Gesellschaft, leading to the creation of a Ukrainian state through the spread of the Ukrainian language.

What must not be forgotten here is that the Gesellschaft is based on the premise of self-interest first. In the Gemeinschaft phase, the family and the community govern human behavior, but the Gesellschaft is different. If so, this transition from the Gemeinschaft to the Gesellschaft must have changed mankind dramatically.

  In the opening section of Chapter 2 of Book 1 of The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith points out that the division of labor is a consequence of “a certain disposition in human nature,” that is, “the disposition to trade, barter, or exchange one thing for another.” He then recognized that although each person is almost always in need of the help of his fellow man, it would be futile to expect help only from his benevolence, but rather if he could stimulate the self-love of his fellow man to his advantage, and if he could show his fellow man that doing for him what he wants from him is also for his own good, this would lead to a division of labor based on his own interests. The emphasis here is on “sympathy,” which is envisioned as compatible with self-interest, unlike what Smith’s mentor, Francis Hutchison, calls “moral sentiment” (the opposite of self-interest). It is to take the position of acknowledging the other party’s self-interest. Here the importance of imagination increases, but what is important is that the Western tradition that morality must be subject to a transcendent cosmic order is broken at this time. Instead of judging right and wrong from a transcendental perspective such as divine providence, human experience based on sympathies creates morality.

  In fact, it was not long ago that people began to pay attention to the interests mentioned here. The shift from virtue to manners that occurred before modernization corresponds to the shift from passions to interests.14

  It was Benedict Anderson who revealed the secret of the modern state, that a “nation” is created when people imaginatively connect with each other using their own self-interest as the basis for self-interest. At this time, the community centered on agriculture that had existed until then collapsed, and the permanence of the agricultural community was lost. Put another way, urbanization will rapidly increase the number of people who will be separated from the community they have inherited from their ancestors to their descendants by living in an agricultural community rooted in mutual benefit. This is where the collapse of the agricultural community occurs, which leads to the ideological decline of religion and the retreat of kin selection. Instead, mutual interests rooted in compatible self-interest encourage reciprocal altruism, causing the development of a capital economy through the division of labor and, at the same time, the creation of another imagined product: the Nation. Hence, nationalism is a substitute for religion, Anderson pointed out. The transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft proceeds along with this structural shift.

  At this time, if nationalism as a substitute for religion is ignited, its incitement will increase the likelihood of even a severe armed struggle similar to a religious conflict. Knowing this, the neocons have continued to pour oil on the fire.

 

　　(4) Incitement by mass media

 

  Sachs’ description of the neocons’ fervent belief that “Russia will be defeated by US financial sanctions and NATO weaponry.” Here I would like to introduce a reality that he did not mention that the neocons are using the mass media to incite revenge.

  What I strongly feel to be vicious is the movement to decry Putin as a fascist and to fuel the argument that we must fight fascism until it is eradicated.

  In the May 19, 2022, edition of the New York Times (NYT), Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University known for Bloodland: the Truth About Hitler and Stalin’s Genocide and Black Earth: History and Warning of the Holocaust, writes, “We should say it. Russia is Fascist.”15 As the title suggests, it labels Russia and Putin as fascists and advocates their eradication.

  According to Snyder’s explanation, fascism originated in Italy and became popular in Romania. In Romania, fascists were orthodox Christians who dreamed of purification through violence. Fascists had followers throughout Europe, as well as in the United States. However, Snyder notes that fascism cannot be satisfactorily defined. Plausibly, he writes, “today’s Russia meets most of the criteria that scholars tend to apply.” But when I saw the provocative statement that Russia “has a cult around a single leader, Vladimir Putin,” I thought Snyder was making an entirely emotional argument rather than a dispassionate academic statement. Without even defining “cult,” the statement that Putin is the head of a cult, and that cult is a fascist group, contains no evidence for this at all.

  Some are completely wrong. Patiently reading on, he writes, “After all, fascist politics begins, as the Nazi thinker Carl Schmitt said, from the definition of an enemy.” This statement is incorrect. Schmitt merely pointed out in The Concept of the Political that “the phenomenon of the political can be understood only in the context of the ever present possibility of the friend-and-enemy grouping, regardless of the aspects which this possibility implies for morality, aesthetics, and economics.”16 Fascist politics does not distinguish friend from foe; politics distinguishes friend from foe.

  By writing lies, Snyder seems to want to make Russia look like a fascist. To insist that we should fight the fascist Putin until he is driven to his death, or until the nation of Russia is exterminated. The last sentence, ” If Ukraine does not win, we can expect decades of darkness,” has the ring of a threat to incite vengeance, not only against the Ukrainian people, but also against those belonging to Western democracies.

 

Agitation by The Economist

  In July, The Economist now begins to propagate “Russian Fascism.” At the end of July 2022, a lengthy article appeared, “Vladimir Putin is in thrall to a distinctive brand of Russian fascism.”17 As manifested in the title, it makes the argument that under Putin’s fascism, Russia is on a path from which there is no turning back.

  This article also does not define fascism.

  He asks the question, “What is Russian fascism?” and states, “It has no settled definition, but it feeds on exceptionalism and ressentiment, a mixture of jealousy and frustration born out of humiliation.” The article goes on to say that “in Russia’s case, the source of this humiliation is not defeat by foreign powers, but abuse suffered by the people at the hands of their own rulers,” and that “deprived of agency and fearful of the authorities, they seek compensation in an imaginary revenge against enemies appointed by the state.” Like Snyder, it seems to see fascism as characterized by making enemies and taking revenge on them. In addition, “fascism involves performances—think of all those rallies and uniforms—laced with the thrill of real violence,” it said. That “Z” symbol reminds me of the Nazi “卐” (Hakenkreuz).

  Then, the history of fascism in Russia is discussed. The article’s view is that “Russian fascism has deep roots, going all the way back to the early 20th century.” This was probably in consideration of the establishment of the “Duma” as an advisory body on legislation in August 1905, the granting of legislative power in October of the same year, and the enactment of a new electoral law in December of the same year. Subsequent elections, however, were indirect, with voters electing electors and electors electing legislators, and the right to vote was reserved for men with property. In this sense, it is difficult to say that it had the characteristics of fascism, which presupposes the existence of a representative parliament.

  The article states that Stalin, fearing that the victory over fascism he had won with the United States and Great Britain would empower and liberate his own people, “turned Soviet success into the triumph of totalitarianism and Russian imperial nationalism” and “re-branded war allies as enemies and fascists hellbent on destroying the Soviet Union and depriving it of its glory.” This, it said, means that Western countries are fascist, an ideology that forms the background of the U.S.-Soviet conflict during the Cold War.

 

The Difference Between Fascism and Stalinism

  This article is a messed-up way to impress Russia as a fascist state.18 Therefore, I would like to summarize fascism with reference to The Philosophy of ‘World History’: Contemporary Edition, From Freud to Fascism by Masayuki Osawa, which was just published in July 2022.

  When we speak of fascism, it seems more typical of Nazi-controlled Germany than of Italy, the fascist party from which the term was derived.

  Fascism is characterized by (1) the emergence of a charismatic leader (personal worship), (2) dual power of party and government (in the case of the Nazis), and (3) horrific attitudes and actions toward the “enemy.” There was personal worship of Adolf Hitler in Germany, Benito Mussolini in Italy, and Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union. In Germany and the Soviet Union, the Nazis and the Soviet Communist Party had established a dual-power system in which they controlled the government. In this sense, fascism and Stalinism are very similar. However, there is a big difference between the two in terms of their horrific attitudes and actions toward their “enemies.”

  Fascism (Nazism) made the Jews its enemy. Who is the enemy for Stalinism? It was the Soviet Communist Party members and the Soviet people. In contrast to fascism, which slaughtered at least 5 million Jews, Stalinism conservatively claimed the lives of some 1.34 million party members and people. Comparing the two, Osawa summarizes as follows:

 

      “In fascism, the enemy was a particular category of people, a particular race. The enemy was concentrated on the Jews. Other races, the mentally handicapped, homosexuals, etc. were also discriminated against and persecuted, but the worst enemies were the Jews. What would happen if we removed this limitation that narrowed the enemy down to a specific category of groups? In other words, what happens when you generalize the enemy to any extent? The distinction between friend and foe will become blurred, eventually leading to the equation “friend = foe.” This is what may have occurred under Stalinism.”

 

  The Nazis did not make up Jews for the slaughter of Jews. Conversely, under Stalin, the court procedure of “confession” was emphasized for purges, and fabrications were rampant there. They fabricate charges against those they deem traitors, and they promulgate false accusations. In other words, the fascists sought to eliminate or conceal the very fact that they were trying to eliminate their enemies, whereas the Stalinists were obsessed with getting their enemies to confess in public.

  Another point that needs to be made is that fascism emerged as a reaction to the “success” or “threat” of communism after the Russian Revolution.

  Hence, a distinction must be made between fascism and Stalinism. Likewise, the current state of Putin’s domination of Russia should not be casually dismissed as the same as fascism. If they do so, that alone will give them a sneaking suspicion of their misdemeanor. Yes, it appears that disinformation is being used to make Putin out to be as villainous as Hitler and to incite the Jews to take revenge on him, just as they took revenge on Hitler.

  The real question depends on how we answer the following questions. In other words, the question is: “If we have to choose between two evils, do we have to choose the lesser evil?” For example, the question is how to answer the challenge of choosing between Bolshevism and Nazism or Stalinism and fascism. To be more precise, perhaps we should add nihilism as an option in addition to the two evils, since there is also the evil of nihilism. What I want to take issue with is the mechanism of evils, and the rigorous attitude of identifying evils for what they are. Western mass media reports seem to lack awareness of these issues. Let me write that this will not solve the problem.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTES

1 Neocon Revenge

1 I would like to point out one interesting point in Mearsheimer’s argument. Mearsheimer clearly describes the events that toppled Ukraine’s pro-Russian leaders in February 2014 as a “coup d’état.” Despite causing such a serious incident, “Once the crisis started, however, American and European policymakers could not admit they had provoked it by trying to integrate Ukraine into the West,” Mearsheimer noted (see the article of the Economist [https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/03/11/john-mearsheimer-on-why-the-west-is-principally-responsible-for-the-ukrainian-crisis]). It goes on to say, “They declared the real source of the problem was Russia’s revanchism and its desire to dominate if not conquer Ukraine.” Revanchism refers to a foreign policy of revenge or reacquisition of lost territory. Those involved in Western diplomacy are accusing the Russians of revanchism, but in fact, the act of overthrowing the Ukrainian government by coup d’état may be neoconservative revanchism.

2 See https://www.jeffsachs.org/newspaper-articles/m6rb2a5tskpcxzesjk8hhzf96zh7w7/

3 See https://www.archives.gov/files/declassification/iscap/pdf/2016- 140-doc05.pdf for the former and https://www.archives.gov/files/declassification/iscap/pdf/2016-140-doc07.pdf for the latter.

4 See https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2006/04/30/league-of-dictators-span-classbankheadwhy-china-and-russia-will-continue-to-support-autocraciesspan/5948eda4-ccde-46d7-8655-9ae991d0bf6f/

5 For more on Jewish financial domination, see Takashi Hirose, Akai Tatei: Rothschild no Nazo (Akai Tatei: The Mystery of Rothschild, First and Second Edition) (Shueisha, 1991). Most recently, it is worth noting that on September 19, 2022, Zelensky and Lawrence D. Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, met by video to discuss attracting investment to the war-torn country’s economy. Fink is Jewish-American and “discussed ways to provide pro bono advice to the Ukrainian government on the establishment of a reconstruction fund to help rebuild the Ukrainian economy,” according to the Ukrainian presidential administration (see https://president.gov.ua/en/news/volodimir-zelenskij-i-golova-blackrock-obgovorili-zaluchenny-77861). It is obvious that the aim is to favor Jewish capital and make huge profits. Furthermore, when considering the issue of Jews and the Jewish nation, it is important to take the view that “the nation did not create the state, but the state created the nation” (Kojin Karatani, Power and Mode of Exchange, Iwanami Shoten, p. 128). Therefore, from ancient times, the group that believed in the religion that later became Judaism should not be seen as a single ethnic group. We should assume that it was basically the same group of people who later believed in the same God, and because they did, they spread to different parts of the land. The perspective of the Jewish people emerged “only after they were persecuted by the modern nation-state, strictly speaking, at the end of the 19th century, when Zionism was born to counter the persecution,” according to Karatani.

6 For more information on the Jewish mass media, please read “Chapter 12: The Satanic Verses” in The Red Plaque: The Rothschild Mystery (Part 2), written by Takashi Hirose in Japanese. In particular, Hirose writes on pages 836-841, “The ‘Satanic Verses,’ echoing high in the Western press world,” reveal “the tremendous dominance of journalism in Britain, France, and the United States” (p. 834).

7 This “readiness” seems to be consistent with the fact that the Minsk agreements have been neglected for more than 7 years. On December 7, 2022, in an interview published in the German magazine Zeit (https://www.zeit.de/2022/51/angela-merkel-russland-fluechtlingskrise-bundeskanzler/komplettansicht), former German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, “The Minsk agreement of 2014 was an attempt to give Ukraine time. And Ukraine used that time to grow stronger.” If this is true, then the Minsk agreements, which were signed to achieve peace in Donbass, were merely a means of buying time by pretending to Russia that peace was being achieved while the Ukrainians built up their military forces. Then, after the spring of 2021, the speculation that the Ukrainian side might have been more active in provoking Russia and pushing Russia into war would be true. In a sense, Putin sincerely believed in the implementation of the Minsk agreements, but the parties to the agreement and the German and French leaders who witnessed it agreed to it only to buy time. One could conclude that Putin was deceived. Upon hearing these remarks, Putin said on December 9: “To be honest, this is totally unexpected for me. It is a disappointment. To be honest, I did not expect to hear such a thing from the former federal prime minister. For Putin, who says, “I always assumed that the leaders of the Federal Republic were acting in good faith toward us,” he may be saying that he was deceived by Germany, France, and Ukraine, which guaranteed the Minsk agreements, and by the United States, which was pulling strings in the background.

8 See https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/interactive/2022/ukraine-road-to-war/?itid=hp-top-table-main/

9 Whether vengeance is passed from one generation to the next is debatable. In accordance with religious principles, Judaism does not accept the basic Christian principle of “original sin” of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. A well-known issue concerns the interpretation of the doctrine of intergenerational punishment (Exodus 20:5). Interested parties can read Dov Weiss, “Sins of the Parents in Rabbinic and Early Christian Literature,” The Journal of Religion, Vol. 97, No. 1, 2017, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/688993). The political use of vengeance is a common phenomenon. A prime example is former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, who appears in Chapter 3, Section 2. He is a pro-American figure who came to the presidency on the initiative of the United States. The Japanese sociologist Kinya Abe sees the establishment of the individual in Europe in the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which made it the duty of all believers to confess all their sins to a priest once a year (Abe, Kinya, Narrative History of Germany: What is Germanness?). This is the same opinion as that of Foucault, who emphasizes “confession”(Michel Foucault, L’Histoire de la sexualité, I, La volonté de savoir, Gallimard, 1976). This practice is Catholic, but what the Jews did about it is a subject for future study. In this confession of confronting his own sins, how he repeatedly took to heart the sins of others may also be an important point of view in considering the inheritance of vengeance.

10 See Kit R. Christensen, Revenge and Social Conflict, Cambridge University Press, 2016, p. 217.

11 Frank Biess, Fears of Retribution in Post-War Germany, https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/fears-of-retribution-in-post-war-germany/

12 See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/special_report/1999/03/99/kosovo_strikes/315053.stm/

13 As noted in Chapter 7, the war is “overtly pro-Albanian,” and interventionism is openly carried out as if whatever is convenient for the United States is right. On the other hand, NATO’s 1999 bombing of Kosovo, over Russian objections, to prevent Serb ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, was for Putin the height of Russian weakness and humiliation after the collapse of the Soviet Union, so Putin’s desire for revenge must have been inflamed in this regard as well(see https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/10/06/the-war-in-ukraine-has-awakened-memories-in-the-balkans).

14 Albert Hirschman is the one who tells us this (see Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph, Princeton University Press, 1977).

15 See https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/opinion/russia-fascism-ukraine-putin.html/

16 Carl Schmitt , The Concept of the Political, Expanded Edition, The University of Chicago Press, 2007, p. 35, https://www.docdroid.net/cNhoLIH/the-concept-of-the-political-carl-schmitt-pdf#page=5/

17 See https://www.economist.com/briefing/2022/07/28/vladimir-putin-is-in-thrall-to-a-distinctive-brand-of-russian-fascism/

18 The aforementioned Economist article introduces the thinker Ivan Ilyin, who was forced into exile by the Bolsheviks in the 1920s and embraced fascism in Italy and Germany. It notes that his book, Our Tasks, was recommended by the Kremlin in 2013 as required reading for state officials. Ilyin was returned to Russia later that year from Switzerland, where he had gone into exile in 1954, and died in Moscow.

The article of The Economist attempts to give the impression that Putin is a fascist, based on the fact that he is said to have paid for the tombstone out of his own savings and that he laid flowers on Ilyin’s grave in 2009. It wrote: ” The fact that “Mr Putin has embraced fascist methods and fascist thinking holds an alarming message for the rest of the world.”

  I would like to emphasize that even if Putin condones fascist ideology, it is necessary to rigorously examine whether his own ideology is fascist or Stalinist. On September 30, 2022, when Putin quotes Ilyin’s description at the end of his speech about signing a treaty on the accession of four Ukrainian oblasts to Russia, the comment “Putin is a fascist” may appear more and more. But he quoted Ilyin in his “Manifesto of the Russian Movement” as saying: “The Fatherland is not merely the place where I was born, or where my father or mother was born, or where I “live”, but it is the spiritual place from which I was spiritually born and from which I proceed in my life’s work. And if I consider my homeland to be Russia, it means that I love, think, think, sing, and speak Russian, that I believe in the spiritual power of the Russian people, and that I accept its historical destiny by instinct and by will”. This is just an excerpt from the statement “Their spirit is my spirit, their fate is my fate, their suffering is my suffering, their glory is my glory. This is the part that emphasizes that the Russians who fought in the Great Patriotic War fought for the Fatherland, not for the Communist Party, and is not directly related to fascist ideology.

 

2 Putin’s Revenge