This New York Times book review says how terrible it is that Putin steals. “Her verdict is not merely that Putin’s boast of having built a potent, efficient state that fights for the little guy and against the venality of the powerful is bunk. Her bedrock claims are that the essential character of Putin’s system is colossal corruption and that he is a prime beneficiary. The thievery, she says, has made him fabulously rich, along with a coterie of trusted friends dating back to his days as a K.G.B. officer in Communist East Germany, then as first deputy mayor in 1990s St. Petersburg, then as head of the Federal Security Service.”
The article never mentions Jews even though the Russian Mafia is really a Jewish mafia. From Wikipedia: “Robert I Friedman was an American investigative journalist. In 1993, Friedman castigated the FBI for ignoring information it had developed on the Muslim extremists behind the first bombing of the World Trade Center. Robert is probably best known for his writings about violence-prone Jewish fundamentalists and the book “Red Mafiya” about a Jewish criminal organization.”
Jews have done well under Putin. A disproportionate number of Russian billionaires are Jewish. As Steve Sailer notes: “In reality, Jews are doing extremely well under the pro-Semitic Putin, being disproportionately represented in the ranks of Russia’s billionaires by perhaps a couple of orders of magnitude. That’s an important fact that shouldn’t be hushed up: knowing the truth can help cool off the war fever.”
Why didn’t the press do a good job of covering Russian corruption and the Harvard scandal? Well, who was disproportionately involved in the corruption at both the Russian and Harvard ends? I, for one, had no idea until I read Amy Chua’s 2003 book World on Fire about “market dominant minorities,” that six of the seven “oligarchs” who paid for Boris Yeltsin’s 1996 re-election in return for the privilege of buying ex-Soviet properties at absurdly low prices (e.g., Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky was put in charge of auctioning off Yukos Oil, which owns about 2% of the world’s oil reserves — he sold it for $159 million to … himself) were Jewish. (Five Jewish on both sides of the family, one on one side). And that’s in a country where the Jewish population is about one percent.
For some reason, the American media hadn’t been very enthusiastic about publishing that highly interesting fact in the seven years following the 1996 Russian election. We all saw what happened to Gregg Easterbrook in 2003 over a triviality, so you can understand why the reticence about this gigantic story.
As I’ve said before in the context of exploring how Scooter Libby could serve as a mob lawyer for international gangster Marc Rich on and off for 15 years and then move immediately into the job of chief of staff to the Vice President of the United States, the problem is not that Jews are inherently worse behaved (or better behaved) than any other human group, but that they have achieved for themselves in America in recent years a collective immunity from anything resembling criticism. And being immune to criticism doesn’t make human beings behave better.
