Before the Armenian Question, was the Circassian. In the great power competitions between France, the British, the Persians, and Russians, they projected their power through currying favour with ethnoreligious factions in the decaying Ottoman Empire as part of the Eastern Question, and the Great Game within the sphere of influence of Qajar Persia. In this was Russia's expansion into the Caucuses, their support of the statehood of Armenia which started this conflict with Muslim Tartary. In Russian attempts to establish their idea of a pure, ancient Christian state, it birthed it into the world with blood.
"Russia wanted control over the Black Sea straits and to increase its influence in the Balkans. This desire was met with resistance from England and France, who themselves wanted to increase their leverage in those areas. The strongest states of the European continent were looking eastward toward India, the path to which passed through Asia Minor. England not only wanted to force Russia out of the eastern markets, but also to limit its presence in the Black Sea – in Crimea and the Caucasus."
The Circassian massacre was the first modern genocide, with systematic exterminations of villages - first carpet bombing with artillery, then ground raids to finish the injured and frightened off. The brutality stemmed from the Russian view that the Circassians were backwards Muslim Tartary, and the brutality of the Russian military. Many soldiers were Russian Jews who lived in the Pale. They were canonists, raised from births to be soldiers like Wulf Trumpeldor, the father of the famous Zionist martyr. He was considered a "useful Jew" who fought brutally in the Russian Conquest of the Caucuses and likely participated in the the genocide.
To counter the Holy Alliance, Britain and France worked to curtail Russian expansion around the Black sea. However with it's defeat in the Crimean War, and relative peace in Europe through the Concert, the Anglo-French alliance fell apart. The peace treaty greatly weakened the Ottomans, and forced Russia to look eastwards for expansion lest it upset the European "balance of power". In a renewed push, the Russians decided as subjects of the Russian empire, as established by the treaty of Paris, that the only way to put down the Circassian insurgency was not to practice the tolerance of the Ottomans, but to wholly exterminate the people.
"Britain had great interest in the Caucasus, because English capital was rapidly entering the Black Sea basin. English diplomacy supported the “Circassian Question”, i.e., they supported the Circassians against Russia. The consolidation of Russian power in the Caucasus was a blow to British interests in the region, because Russia had wound up in the immediate vicinity of the Ottoman Empire, which could not but worry England."
The British, like they would do later with Zionists, set themselves on a campaign of romanticism of the Adyghe tribes - the Romantic Other. Circassians were characterized as almost white - the beauty and paleness of their women supporting the pseudo-ethnographic theory that the Caucuses were the origin of Christian White Europeans. The British promised nominal support - but despite desperate pleas from the Circassians, they never intervened.
The ensuing genocide and exile that ensure that brutality that would spread throughout the Ottoman Empire, through acceleration of the enslavement of Circassians into mamelukes worsening both ethnic tensions and nationalism. They would play crucial roles in strengthening Mehmed Ali's dynasty in the Egyptian Khedive and in the Urabi Revolt, worsening the tension between natives, foreign Muslim elites, and European imperialists. They would play a similar role in conflicts with Georgia, and in Bulgaria with the Kalofer massacre.
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Before the Jewish Question was the Polish Question. With the unification of German lands, the question of what to do with the divided Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth was on the mind of many German nationalists in the empire. The Poles to them were "the most dangerous, fanatic enemy of German existence, German honour and German reputation in the world".
This a seminal moment in the development of German national identity, especially for the national conservatives, as fundamentally opposed to an insidious outside menace. However with Germans integrating into Polish communities, especially the Poznan Bambrzy, German nationals were aghast at what seemed to be the failure of the Drang Nach Ost national project. This manifested in German anxieties as a reverse-colonization, where a tide of instead Polish wanderers, with vague attachments to nationhood and state, would corrupt the German nation. These anxieties were reflected in nationalist-conservative tracts, Poles were depicted as non-white and savages, a racial other that reflected all the darkest fears of Germans.
This would intensify with the Kulturkampf started by Bismark, anti-Polish sentiment rode on crackdowns on both Catholicism and Polish language under a regime of Germanization. Led by the Prussian Settlement Commission, it sought to dispose Poles of land ownership and repress Polish nationalism. Nominally, this campaign ended with Bismark's replacement, however it was in the service of Wilhem II's greater imperial ambitions. German landowners in the Ruhr however were astruck with this nationalist anxiety - without the backing of the commission or Bismark, their lands were liable to be seized by Polish, or even the communists.
"Your map of Africa is all very fine, but my map of Africa lies in Europe."
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There is a lot of continuity with white russian emigrees and Nazism such as the Aufbau-Vereinigung's critical role in the Beer Hall putsch. their specific strain of exterminative antisemitism is inspired by white ultraconservatism from centuries of the oppression of the pale. The Pale and the hinterlands, Central to german nationalism for centuries as a form of internal european colonization
Neither NS nor State Shinto in my view should not be considered fascism. Italian fascism had a strong modernist bent, eventually completely rejecting the monarchy at Salò. Monarchs however were encouraged to join the NSDAP which preserved their noble titles within the party.
Thus historiographic focus on Hitler is a artifact of the fascism framing of Il Duce and flawed histories which singularly blamed Hirohito for the refusal to surrender. It was easier to concentrate blame and then allow the regime to continue functioning under American occupation.
Wrong. It's trite, but Russo-Japanese: It formed the Anglo-Russian Entente, and a factor in 1914 revolution. Riding on the same fault line that the Sino-Soviet split in the future would be defined, the same that Columbus tried to exploit finding India. That grand maw of earth.
you could even draw a historical continuity between the Blagoveshchensk Utopia and the Poznan Bambrzy, fears of reverse-colonization, demographic upheaval, reproducing the eliminationist frontier logic of the Qing against the Dzungar and the Russian against the Circassian
One could argue that in the process of the enclosure of the eurasian steppe by land empires, that it produced the greatest atrocities in history. The pivot point being treaty of Nerchinsk, and thus every modern genocide is it's legacy, a genealogy. The symbolic handover of the Nerchinsk treaty, it is the tipping point between west and east rims. The Jesuits translated the language of Westphalia into Eurasia, carrying the sovereign logic of the religious wars into Chinese geopolitics, setting the ethical and legal stage for the modern world.
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Before the "final solution" was the "final Germanification". This nationalist anxiety and resettlement program did not suddenly go away with the advent of the Nazis. It found its full form in Nazi racial ideology - not just against the Poles, but too against Jews and any other group deemed undesirable to the Aryan ideal. Under Himmler, The SS Race and Settlement Main Office had main[ two directives](https://web.archive.org/web/20060615221403/http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/WCC/greifelt1.htm):
> (a) the removal of foreign elements and their transportation back to their native districts;
>
> - mainly the Jews and Romani - and:
>
> (b) the return to the Reich of Germans of Polish extraction living in Western Poland.
Nominally meant to ensure the racial purity of marriages of SS, it's role was expanded under Himmler's orders, establishing the Lebensborn association. Only playing a small role in a number of children, it was part of a larger effort which was involved in the forced adoption and kidnapping of children across German occupied lands, especially Poland and Yugoslavia. This resentment, anxiety over this longing for imperial glory was widespread and motivated
Rundstedt, Field Marshal for the Army Group South during the Polish invasion was questioned during the Nuremberg trials, denying knowledge of Hitler's expansionist plans, however he eventually admitted "In cross-examination that the regaining of former German territory had become a [question of honor](https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/naeve.asp) for many members of the German Army." still insisting that he believed that the German-Russian treaty would prevent this war. However, even though the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact which contradicted this was discovered during the trials, it was not allowed into evidence and only released top the public when it was convenient propaganda against the Soviets. Rundstedt was not charged during the trials and died soon after.
As Naomi Klein says in Doppelganger:
Hitler—the twentieth century’s most despised villain, and rightly so—was not the
civilized, democratic West’s evil “other,” but its shadow, its doppelganger.
This draws on Lindqvist’s argument that the exterminatory mindset lies at
“the core of European thought … summing up the history of our continent,
our humanity, our biosphere, from Holocene to Holocaust.”
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the Anglo-Norman Abrahamics
The fact is that the French and British were more allies than otherwise, especially when it came to balance the Germanosphere
For example the Rothschilds first made their fortune relaying money to Prussia during the Napoleonic Wars, using German relatives in banking to circumvent the French embargos
Ever since then, Britain has regretted propping up the "uniquely militaristic" Prussia which they helped create as a counterbalance to Napoleonic France
>Foremost among Britain's commitments was the Prussian alliance itself, undergirding Pitt's vision of “winning America in Germany.” Joseph Yorke and the Prussian Baron Heinrich Dodo von Knyphausen joined talks for an official treaty, signed 11 April 1758, featuring a wartime subsidy of £670,000 per year.30 Meanwhile, British leaders nullified Hanover's neutrality and remobilized “His Britannic Majesty's Army in Germany,” with all but 5,000 electoral troops funded from British coffers. Frederick offered some cavalry and a new commander for the army—Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick—and British soldiers entered the theatre through Emden in Prussian Ostfriesland.31 British ministers kept a regular correspondence with Prince Ferdinand throughout his campaigns, and Anglo-Prussian relations arguably peaked with a marriage proposal for Frederick's nephew, the future King Frederick Wilhelm II, in November 1759.32 Behind the lines, British diplomats played vital roles in espionage and secret missions, alongside their public functions. James Hollford monitored the war from Genoa, and Onslow Burrish sent early reports from southern Germany; amid failing Anglo-Austrian relations, Robert Keith forwarded copies of the _Vienna Gazette_; George Cressener forwarded intelligence and intercepted mail from Cologne and later Maastricht; Dutch agents under the names of Marteville and Wilkinson offered information from Sweden. 33
https://gale.com/academic/essays/politics/international-relations-general/matt-j-schumann-british-foreign-policy-during-seven-years-war
This was also why Exchange Alley in London was rumored to know the Queen had died before the royal family themselves, because of a belief in such information networks Rothchilds produced
So you can see the British using pseudomyth of Britain being the New Zion (As a rebuttal to Moscow's Third Rome) and Christian Zionism - cynically propped up both British Jews and German nationalism, eventually fomented the widespread antisemitic fervor that characterized the continent before the world wars
Philosemitism in Europe is as much about anti-Russianism as humanitarianism, the British didn't really care about Jews just like they didn't care about the Arabs, or the Circassians, or any countless ethnics because they served a purpose in ethnoreligious disputes in the near east
Which is ironically a Byzantine-Russian obsession
Further events have strengthened my belief that the best way to understand Russia is to understand its deep parallels to Britain after its Westernization - the centrality of a nationalized religious institution, land reform, industrialization, and revolution
Thus British with their "support" of humanitarian causes like abolitionism and Jewish nationhood are in fact promoting the most deeply conservative beliefs with a new face, and like all conservatism it is built on an imagined past - either it be they're a lost tribe of Israel, the Anglo-Norman Arthurian legends, or now Pax Britannia
They said to the (upper class) Jews and the Hindus - you can be part of the colonial project too
It is not unlike what the Soviets did in the Caucuses with Armenia and Georgia, and in Central Asia where they mobilized the remnants of the Mongol empire against the sickly Chinese and Persian empires - you can be part of the colonial project too
But that doesn't produce a clean and neat story for Westerners, like now what American liberals when they believe in "liberalization", "democratization", and "decolonization"
After all for them Rhodesia was a story of liberalization, and Israel was a story of decolonization
Now Russia is seeking to reverse that logic - that's why they have so many claims about Ukraine, they are doing an intervention in Ukraine to save Russophone human rights, cynically mobilizing the modern semantics of the US-led world order - the Washington Consensus - against itself.
"Once the Polish threat was over, the Slavophiles formulated another set of goals. Without renouncing the 300-year-long objective of seizing Constantinople and the Straits, they argued that the coming clash would be between the Slavs and Teutons (Germans)." Russian Imperialism: Development and Crisis page 54, "Thus Slavophilia transformed itself into Germanophobia."page 55 by Ariel Cohen, Praeger Publishers 1996
Thus Germany has always been the nexus of Russo-American influences - inspired by both the divine edict of manifest destiny and the essentially American program of eugenics, and by the neoprimitivism of Russian Slavophilia and and the blood and soil of Pochvennichestvo
thus with the current administration we suffer a similar dignity - the chickens are finally coming home to roost. With the paperclip Germans, protecting Japanese from war crimes, and Jews émigrés - all enemies of the Russian empire, we in fact recreated in America a "permanent revolution" in the old sense that resembles the French one - but instead one deeply conservative and Anglo-American in character - one fragmented across the world in terms of "liberalization", "democratization", and "decolonization"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bCjMgvK5BE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavon_Affair
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Yachin
https://archive.org/details/inshadowofholoca0000rein/page/n7/mode/2up
https://themobmuseum.org/blog/israel-awash-in-mob-crime-and-corruption/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Tom_explosion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Pastorius
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Underworld
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborations_between_the_United_States_government_and_Italian_Mafia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Connection
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Giancana
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tina-sinatra-mob-ties-aided-jfk/
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/nov/04/kennedy-sinatra-and-the-mafia-review-a-barely-believable-tale-of-corruption-and-betrayal
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/oct/07/michaelellison
https://culture.pl/en/article/dangerous-knowledge-or-what-polish-authors-always-knew-about-russia
https://www.socialeurope.eu/did-socialism-keep-capitalism-equal
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00076791.2023.2202909