mentalblog.com comments:
Reading your blog the last few years has enlightemed me in many ways.
My parents were White Russian Jews living in Eastern Poland when the War broke out in Sept. 1939 and again in June 1941.While Hitler profoundly shaped their lives, Stalin and his henchman had no influence over their lives.
My parents were born and lived in small Lithuanian (White Russian) towns. My mother in a Lithuanian Misnagdishe sviva and my father in a Chabad sviva.
After the War and Concentration camps they came to America.
Thus they and thousands of other Holocaust survivors in the US and Israel were influenced by their childhood culture in Poland and Lithuania and their war years spent in Concentration Camps , or as partisans or hiding or in many instances as refugees in Central Asia.
From reading this blog I see that the Soviet culture - including politics, language, music, Art, urban life, Russian culture, etc etc all influenced those Jews who lived in the USSR certainly those who lived there until the 1970's . Their mother lode was not the shtetel, rather the new Soviet culture.
This seems to be true of lubavitcher too.
Older Anash like Rabbis Dworkin, Futterfass,Duchman etc still remembered the shtetel and that was their chief influence.Certainly that was true of the 6th Rebbe (the 7th rebbe was also influenced by Westrern ideas) But most Lubavitchers born after the Revolution were influenced by the new Soviet man, even if they did not attend Soviet schools.
I can not relate to that way of thinking, acting and frame of reference.By that I mean that I have no idea what thats all about. We the Second generation are influenced by American ideas rather than the Soviet new Man culture.
Thus unlike the rest of the Chassiidc Charedi world like Satmar, Bobov, Ger, Belz whose frame of reference is the shtetel and the Holocaust, the reference point and chief cultural transmitter of most older Lubavitcher today of Russian descent is not the shtetel of their parents but the New Soviet Man.
Thats all very interesting and important to understand present day Lubavitch especially those who grew up in such homes.
Schneur, the last thing you want to do is to make any generalizations, particularity generalizations about pre or post Soviet Chabad culture based on this blog.
Schneur, by the way of example I have to confess that I can’t relate to BT s who came out Russia in the 90s. Like you say I don’t know what its all about. I can’t relate to these people at all. At the same time I always felt a strong connection to the Schtettle Yidden. Go figure.
So with the murder of Litvinenko the signal to oligarchs is that despite of the fact that you always anticipate assassination and you protect yourself accordingly with the small armies and careful movements, etc. you do not know how I (Putin) can take you out…
Good one. It has as an unmistakable smell of truth.
Tzemach,
In response to your question: Why kill Litvinienko with nuclear radiation.
The answer is I think simple:
To provide an indelible signature. The method of the murder was something that only a major State organization could execute. Therefore, Putin in putting the lie to all of the feints at misdirection in the press.
Only the Soviet State could have done this.
If Putin had wanted to hide that fact, he could have had Litvinienko shot, stabbed, run over by a ruck (a favorite Soviet method), or poisoned with a more conventional poison.
He wants the whole world to know that he can send his agents to a sovereign nation and kill one of that nation's citizens, and there is nothing you can do about it, and he doesn't care that you know it.
In other words, he is saying, f**k you.
And the horse you came in on.
At any rate, that's how it seems to me.
Funny, Gandalin, this "f**k you and your horse" theme seems quite common these days (Iran, North Korea, Iraq, ...). It hardly seems impressive when everyone can do it.
Well sometimes the humblest of men upon whom all heap scorn and abuse . . .
Totally correct Gandalin; The message is that even though Communism failed, you must respect us because Russians are clever and ruthless (chess players with guns). Does anyone see a connection between this message of this event and Putin's sponsorship of the Iranian nuclear industry?
Schneur; Shkoach for pin pointing the important difference between the shtetl and Soviet head space. It is very insightful distinction. The people who can fill in the details are getting hard to find. And they probably don't use the internet much.
the information from most sources is very amateur; several good sources of information are: kompromat.ru;
inopressa.ru; but those are in russian. Their analysis show that
1. the litvinenko personality is not
what alex goldfarb pictures;
2. everything goldfarb says (and
about conversion to islam too) is
absolutly unsubstantiated;
3.even autenthity of so called last
letter is more then questionable;
4. the version that putin is not connected to his death, even so believable in the beginning, after
understanding the nature of polonium-210 seems very unlikely; he could be involved in building "DIRTY BOMB"
and it could be an accident.
We have to wait and see.
inopressa.ru is trasnlation of ino 'foreign' articles into Russian, what's the point?
inopressa.ru is probably aimed at readers of Russian to whom other languages are foreign... n'est pas?
I would like to withdraw the substance of my comment, above, and apologize to President Vladimir Putin for leaping to the conclusion that he ordered the murder of Aleksandr Litvinenko.
As I noted in a subsequent comment to a subsequent post about Litvinenko, it is hard to believe that even Putin would use $50Million worth of polonium to kill the man. It seems that at least that much was involved in the contamination of, at last count, 12 or 14 hotel rooms and other locations in London.
Since then, I have learned that polonium-210 or a combination of polonium-210 and beryllium is commonly used as the trigger for a thermonuclear weapon. Because of the short life of polonium-210, even so-called suitcase bombs that use such a trigger would require frequent replenishment in order to remain viable.
See this article for the details:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyd...i/
Hydrogen_bomb
In view of this information, I now think it likely that Litvinenko was helping Al Qaeda assemble the trigger for one of the suitcase bombs they reportedly purchased from Chechen terrorists and subsequently smuggled into Britain.
The recent news of increasing terrorist chatter about an impending mass-casualty attack in London, and the report that a cell of English-speaking terrorists was recently dispatched from Waziristan to the West are quite worrisome.
See also www.strata-sphere.com.
We need to pray that any severe decrees be sweetened by all the chesed that is available.
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