BOOK REVIEW: 'Who Was Behind the Bolshevik Revolution?' by Ron Asher [updated with reply by publisher]

I have in front of me a new book by Tross Publishing, which I have been invited to review. Having written a chapter or two for the publisher, it is my unpleasant job not just to recommend you not buy it, but that the publisher withdraw it. (Recommending withdrawal is not a matter of "free speech" -- the right to speak includes the right to take the consequences, including criticism -- simply a recommendation for good editorial hygiene.) Withdraw, because it sits poorly with his other titles, because it sits badly with genuine scholarship on any subject. ...

... and because it's not even a good read.

In 1917 in the midst of a war for survival on the First World War's eastern front, Bolshevists seized power from a provisional Russian government fighting the war, and proceeded to enact terror on the population and thereafter on the world. Far from a revolution, it was a squalid little coup, and what came of it was disaster, starvation, death, and mass-murder. 

There had been a revolution that swept away the Tsar -- swept away him and his autocratic regime -- what Ayn Rand was to call "the good revolution." But it wasn't the Bolsheviks who revolted against the Tsar's regime; they came to power instead in a squalid little backdoor coup eight months later -- orchestrated in part by the Imperial German High Command, who had sent Lenin into Russia to kill the war on their terms -- a backroom revolt that stabbed in the back the Provisional Government and squashed like a bug Russia's first stumbling chance at real freedom. 

The Bolsheviks didn't sweep away oppression; they brought it back.

And our friend Mr Asher has now written 93 pages (and 5 pages of notes) to tell us who really did it. And oddly, the important wartime context is never mentioned ...

The wartime context of the coup. (From Louis Fischer's

 The Life of Lenin (NY: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 109

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT WAS SUPPOSED TO have said that "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people."

This short book claims to reveal who was really behind the Bolshevik Revolution. Really and truly. And it will do so, we are promised, "with meticulous care and references" [p. 5; all uncredited page notes will refer to Mr Asher (2026)]. Take careful note: This is not a book about the ideas that caused the event in question. It is about the people. And, spoiler alert, our author says it was the Jews wot dunnit. They were driven to it, says the author, because they were Jews. 

That's it. That really is it.

And note the argument: it wasn't that those who driven to it because they happened to be Jews. They were driven to it because they were Jews. It was "vengeance," says our author, for earlier Russian pogroms against Jews. Or just because their religion was weird. Or ... something.

A remarkable claim, not least because head Bolshevik and the revolution's driving force was one Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who was not at all Jewish. (He was raised in a Russian Orthodox Christian family, baptised as an infant, and identified culturally and ethnically as Russian; historians who have examined distant links, such as the author of Lenin's Jewish Question, emphasise any link was irrelevant to his identity, ideology, or actions: he critiqued all religion, including Judaism, and saw ethnicity as secondary to class struggle). Nor was Lenin's successor known as Stalin any more Jewish (he was, famously, an ethnic Georgian christened as Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili), and nor was the head of Lenin's feared secret police, the Cheka (the brutal Feliz Dzerzhinsky, who was a Pole). 

None of the heads of the snake were Jewish.

Indeed, of the 21 members of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party in August 1917, there were at most just six who could be categorised that way. Such niceties however do not disturb our author. (Indeed, he adds three more, without any reference for doing so.) 

And in any case.a similar ethnic make-up can be found for many other Russian movements of the time, including the Russian Orthodox priesthood, the rival Menshevik party (whose founders were both Jewish, and which actually had double the proportion of ethnic Jews to the Bolshies), and of course the Jewish Bund (a secular Jewish socialist party active between 1897 and 1920). A similar make-up can be found because any intellectual movement attracts intellectuals -- and Jewish Russians were among the most educated of the time, and were barred by the Tsar's regime from other political involvement.

So the claim is not just remarkable for being bold, but also (as we will see) for lacking the kind of "meticulous care and references" the boldness demands. It's true that historians of the various Russian revolutions and coups d'etat have generally recognised that Jews were represented in early Bolshevik leadership, but so were many other educated ethnic minorities who all faced persecution under the Tsar. (Most of whom were excluded by being non-Russian from advancement in Russian culture or in the vast Russian bureaucracy.) And of course the vast majority of Jews were not Bolsheviks, and Jews as a community suffered enormously under Soviet rule.

This is especially important today to understand. The book comes at a time when ethnic Russian fascism and anti-Semitism has escalated dramatically following Putin's insane aspirations for empire, and Hamas's murderous October 7 attack followed by Israel's bloody response. It's said that Hamas's “Sinwar placed his money on the 2,000-year belief that Jews were inherently vengeful, greedy, and lustful for the blood of innocents and children [and] in betting on Jew-hatred, Sinwar hit the jackpot."  

The irrational hatred continues even here in New Zealand, once considered a relatively safe environment for Jewish folk, and yet the NZ Jewish Council recorded 227 antisemitic incidents in the 12 months following October 7 -- more than the 166 recorded across the entire eight-and-a-half years prior.

So things are ramping up, and you might well ask yourself about such a book's publication: "Why now?" 

And about the thesis, even if proven: "So what?"

WHILE YOU PONDER THOSE QUESTIONS, consider again what such a proof might look like -- proof that it was the Jews wot dunnit -- and about that promise of "meticulous care and references." 

Let's begin by looking at some contemporary (or near-contemporary) quotes adduced by Mr Asher to describe the Bolshevik coup and the Jews' alleged responsibility for it: some examples drawn from a diplomat's alarmed despatch, a gossip columnist's interview, a White Russian general's memoir, and a State Department intelligence file drawing on a known forgery -- all of which are treated as equivalent historical evidence ...

Paranoid politics is not going away.

 

It's happened here and, as commentator Robert Tracinski describes below, it's happening over there. 

What do I mean? I mean the morphing of anti-Covid culture warriors into oddly conservative anti-everything zealots.

Tracinski outlines the trajectory.

Moms for Liberty, an activist organisation founded and led by conservative women, has emerged in the last two years to oppose, in the name of “parental rights,” what it sees as leftist indoctrination in public schools.
    There are worthwhile arguments to be had about contemporary gender ideology and about how to respond to the history and legacy of race in America— ... [and] there will be no shortage of controversial examples to be debated.
    But a thoughtful debate is not what Moms for Liberty has offered as its defining contribution. Instead, it has become the driving force behind a sweeping wave of book bans and politicised restrictions on teaching.
    It is a curious outcome for a group with such a libertarian-sounding name. How did Moms for Liberty come to be one of the nation’s chief censors? ...

Turns out it's in much the same way that NZ's 'Voices for Freedom' (anti-'globalist,' anti-mask, anti-vaccine, anti-trans, anti-science ... ) has always more about freedom from reality than any other kind, and more about keeping their anti-Covid ball rolling: "The origin of Moms for Liberty," explains Tracinski, "was not in the culture wars over race and gender but the Covid culture war." There you go, you see:

It began in Florida as a rebellion against rules requiring masks for public school students. ... It was the pandemic that provided Moms for Liberty with the opportunity to mobilise and radicalise conservative parents. Descovich explained, “If you miss this opportunity, when [parents] are really engaged … it’s going to be hard to engage them in the future.” When the debate shifted from masks to vaccines, Moms for Liberty appealed to anti-vaccine sentiment on the right. ...
    That’s the supposed meaning of “for liberty” in Moms for Liberty: the freedom to ignore mask and vaccine mandates. The group emerged from a combination of dogmatic rejection of any anti-pandemic measures and legitimate frustration with school closures, which in some areas dragged on for a year ...
    The anti-mask cause summoned a great deal of violent fury, but it was perhaps too small and temporary for a national movement that had ambitions to persist beyond the pandemic. Yet this issue established the kind of energy that has characterised Moms for Liberty ever since: an upwelling of anger, a distrust of experts, a volcanic hatred of “the establishment,” and a deep suspicion that the powers that be are out to destroy our way of life.

Sound familiar?

Paranoid politics is not going away.

"The paranoid style in politics..."

"The paranoid style in politics and the paranoid style in entertainment are connected by the need for a simplified narrative that eliminates words and emphasises action…. The existence of the conspiracy reduces politics from a need for argument to a mere need for action to go stop the bad guys.... the simplified narrative of a conspiracy is used to escape the messy and inconvenient fact that other people actually disagree with you, and that you have to convince them."

~ Robert Tracinski, from his op-ed 'The Paranoid Style in American Entertainment'

 

The great libertarian conspiracy theory [updated]

 

"Libertarians are part of a vast conspiracy to take over the government and have it leave everybody alone."

~ Anonymous  

UPDATE:

"Labour are the party that says big government works, and then get elected and prove that it doesn't. National are the party that says government doesn't work, and then get elected and prove it."

~ apologies to PJ O'Rourke

"I find the virtual hostility to Zelenskyy incredibly disturbing. It is most pronounced among what we might refer to as the post-Covid right"

Pic by Getty

"Then there’s the other side in the memeification of Zelenskyy. His haters. And man, do they hate him. I find the virtual hostility to Zelenskyy incredibly disturbing. It is most pronounced among what we might refer to as the post-Covid right – that corner of the world wide web where the understandable agitation with lockdown has morphed over time into anti-vax conspiracism, an unhealthy obsession with the World Economic Forum, a distrust of everything and everyone, and a cast-iron conviction that Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a puppet of the globalist elites determined to drag us all into World War 3.
    "It’s like a mirror image of the liberal-elite fawning: where that lot dreams Zelenskyy will help to bring about the ‘rebirth of the liberal world order’, the Ukraine cynics think he is the liberal world order. The new world order. A mouthpiece of globalism. Zelensky is ‘working with globalists against the interests of his own people’, says Candace Owens. He’s a ‘globalist puppet for Soros and the Clintons’, said Arizona State senator Wendy Rogers. Apparently he’s aligned with those ‘global bankers’ who are ‘shoving godlessness and degeneracy in our face.’ Donald Trump Jnr reckons he’s an ‘international welfare queen’. You don’t have to be a fan of the West’s sending of ever-more weaponry to Ukraine to recognise how infantile it is to describe an invaded nation’s plea for arms as welfare queenery. Talk about globalising the culture war....
    "There’s a very important debate to be had about Russia, Ukraine, the West and war in the modern era. But what we’ve mostly had over the past year is the cheap exploitation of a serious global conflict to score points in petty wars at home. Chaise-longue Churchills on one side, armchair Chamberlains on the other. And they’re all really talking about themselves, not Ukraine. Let’s change the record. Maybe Zelenskyy is neither saint nor sinner. Neither the world’s saviour nor its destroyer. Maybe he’s just a man doing what he thinks is best in the most horrifying and existential of circumstances. Call me a brainless dupe of Davos propaganda, but that’s what I’m going with."

~ Brendan O'Neill, from his op-ed 'The Two Zelenskyys'

Quote of 2022: "I don’t want an air ticket. I want ammunition."

"[Y]ou can’t really be an historian without a philosophy of history. You have to understand the nature of causation. These days, nobody bothers with that, which is why a lot of academic history is garbage ... There [is] a very central problem, namely that any causal statement ... implies a counterfactual....

    "Lewis Namier was a great Cambridge historian who said that the key to history was having a sense of what didn’t happen. And I always think of Thelonious Monk’s line about jazz. 'It’s the notes you don’t play.' And as a jazz fan, I think history has to have that kind of Thelonious Monk feel to it where you’re telling the reader, 'This didn’t happen, but it nearly did, and people at the time thought about it.' ...

    "[T]here is [therefore] a very important role for contingency, and that continues to be true today.... Contingency here means a relatively small event or decision. And it doesn’t need to be a decision. It can be something accidental, [that] has very major consequences. And historical causations like that, something relatively small, can have tremendous ramifications.
    "I’ll give you [a contemporary] illustration. This year, most people, including the US government, thought that if Russia invaded Ukraine, the Ukrainian government would quite quickly fold, and it was assumed that Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, would bail. He didn’t. He gave his famous response, 'I don’t want an air ticket. I want ammunition.' And Zelenskyy’s courage when they were closing in on Kyiv with a high probability that they [the Russians] would assassinate, turned the course of history in a way that I think is now quite widely understood....
    "[I]t emboldened ordinary Ukrainians not to fold, and it also intimidated the collaborators who were ready to help the Russians, not to act. So the contingency there is if Zelenskyy had gone according to our expectation and taken the plane, then Putin would’ve had Kyiv within a matter of days or weeks, and the war would be over.
    "So I think one of the things that’s exciting about the study of history is you are trying to remind yourself again and again that what happened, that what we know happened, might have gone the other way. That the Cuban Missile Crisis ended in both sides essentially backing down was not predetermined. There was a moment when a Soviet submarine commander gave the order to fire a nuclear torpedo at US naval surface ships. So we came within a hair’s breadth of World War III. These alternate worlds, these histories that didn’t happen, have to be alive in your mind when you are writing history.
    "The fatal mistake is to write history as if it was bound to happen the way it happened. And this, of course, is the mistake that a great majority of historians make. Forgetting that, we don’t know at the time, at the moment, we didn’t know the morning of the 24th of February that Zelenskyy would stand his ground. Nobody knew that. I wonder if even Zelenskyy at that moment knew what it was that he was going to do.
    "So I say all this because I think it’s really important to convey ... how exciting history is, and how studying it makes you understand the course of events in your own life better -- removes that passivity to which people sometimes succumb. If you think great historical forces are going to have inevitable outcomes, if you have a deterministic view of the historical process, it’s very easy to lapse into fatalism. (There’s the other trap, which is the conspiracy theories. 'Well, the truth of the matter is that actually, Soros and the Rothschilds are orchestrating all this.' Again, you throw up your hands and you abandon the attempt to understand how the historical process works.)"

~ Historian Niall Ferguson, in conversation with Tim Ferriss, taken from 'The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Niall Ferguson, Historian — The Coming Cold War II, Visible and Invisible Geopolitics, Why Even Atheists Should Study Religion, Masters of Paradox, Fatherhood, Fear, and More'

Here's Thelonious Monk... 

"A theory is a sophisticated, systematic organisation of evidence, a real intellectual achievement. The intellectual monstrosities constructed without attention to the evidence that are often dubbed 'conspiracy theories are nothing of the sort. They don’t even qualify as valid hypotheses." #QotD

"From 'truthers' and 'birthers,' and from Flat Earthers to 'QAnon,' so-called conspiracy theorists have been garnering more and more attention, especially because President Donald Trump himself has been known to promote this kind of baseless speculation...
    "One flaw with the practice is that it explains events by reference to hidden agendas of nefarious agents when appealing to the conventional motives of ordinary public figures can do the job.
    "It is important to distinguish real theories and real hypotheses from what are commonly called 'conspiracy theories.' A theory is a sophisticated, systematic organisation of evidence, a real intellectual achievement. Even to form a valid hypothesis about a matter, you first need to know a lot. The intellectual monstrosities constructed without attention to the evidence that are often dubbed 'conspiracy theories are nothing of the sort. They don’t even qualify as valid hypotheses...
    "Baseless claims about conspiracies tend to attract 'crackpots' precisely because they are claims about secret plots. It is all too easy to claim that the reason there is no evidence for a conspiracy is that the conspirators have worked to cover it up. When claims about secret plots or coverups spread quickly, before there is time for the evidence to come in, it’s a good early sign — like smoke where there’s fire — that the claims spreading are mere conspiracism. This is the proper pejorative term to describe the phenomenon of asserting baseless claims about the existence of conspiracies..."
          ~ Ben Bayer, 'Analysing the Conspiracist Firestorm over Notre Dame'
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A skeptic went to a 9/11 Truthers convention. You probably will believe what happens next.

 

A skeptic decided to attend a 9/11 ‘Truthers’ weekend conference near Chicago – 400 people who believe the United States government planned and orchestrated the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Many at the conference do not seem to be looking for new information that might lead to more accurate perspectives about the events of 9/11. A fellow sitting near me admits, “We already know this stuff; we’re here to reconfirm what we already know.”
    The conference is a way for attendees to consolidate their group identity, and try to bring their message to those people at home and abroad who believe the “official story” of 9/11. As someone who does not share the views of the 9/11 Truth Movement, I have another objective. I want to listen to their arguments and view their evidence, and understand the reasons why so many likable and otherwise intelligent people are convinced that the United States government planned the murder of nearly 3,000 of its own citizens.

An outrageous theory for which you would require astonishing evidence. But what they have is astonishing only in its paucity.

Our skeptic friend analyses and soundly slam dunks the frankly pathetic excuses for evidence thrown up by the Truthers (sample: photos of an undamaged north side of WTC 7 ignoring the almost-completely destroyed lower south side) and concludes by trying to answer his opening question:

Why do so many intelligent and promising people find these theories so compelling?

He has several possible answers:

One of the first and most obvious is distrust of the American government in general, and the Bush administration in particular. This mistrust is not entirely without basis…
    However, there are a few things to be said about suspicion. First, there is the simple philosophical point that suspicion alone demonstrates nothing — any theory needs evidence in its favor if it is to be taken seriously. Second, the mistakes made by our government in the past are qualitatively different from a conscious decision to kill thousands of its own citizens in order to justify the oppression of others…
    Another reason for the appeal of 9/11 conspiracies is that they are easy to understand. As previously mentioned, most Americans did not know or care to know much about the Middle East until the events of 9/11 forced them to take notice. (The brilliant satirical newspaper ‘The Onion’ poked fun at this fact with its article “Area Man Acts Like He’s Been Interested In Afghanistan All Along”). The great advantage of the 9/11 Truth Movement’s theories is that they don’t require you to know anything about the Middle East, or for that matter, to know anything significant about world history or politics.
    This points to another benefit of conspiracy theories — they are oddly comforting. Chaotic, threatening events are difficult to comprehend, and the steps we might take to protect ourselves are unclear. With conspiracy theory that focuses on a single human cause, the terrible randomness of life assumes an understandable order.

But does this excuse the focus on fluff? Not when it’s dangerous fluff.

Solace is something all of us needed after the horrible events of 9/11, and each of us is entitled to a certain degree of freedom in its pursuit. However, there is no moral right to seek solace at the expense of truth, especially if the truth is precisely what we most need to avoid the mistakes of the past. Truth matters for its own sake, but it also matters because it is our only defence against the evils of those who cynically exploit truth claims to serve their own agendas. It is concern for the truth that leads us to criticise our own government when necessary, and to insist that others who claim to do so follow the same rigorous standards of evidence and argument. 9/11 was a powerful reminder of how precious and fragile human life and liberty are — the greatest possible rebuke to those who would live in service to delusions.

READ: 9/11 Conspiracy Theories: The 9/11 Truth Movement in Perspective – Phil Molé, eSKEPTIC

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Fisk for 'troof'

It had to happen. Robert Fisk -- the man for whom the verb "to fisk" was invented -- the man who stood on the road to Baghdad telling his worldwide television audience that Saddam's defences were "impenetrable" and American tanks would never pass -- the reporting of whom Osama Bin Laden famously declared to be "neutral," and by whom Bin Liner specifically asked to be interviewed -- has signed up to the bogus, braindead, era-defining 9/11 conspiracy theory: Bush did it. Rove did it. Osama apparently didn't do it. So suggests the "neutral" Fisk.

And there are people who still consider this entity a journalist. As Simon Hoggart once said of him, he is "not just mistaken, but reliably mistaken."

UPDATE 1: Cartoonists Cox and Forkum recommend the blog Screw Loose Change as a comprehensive rebuttal of the conspiratorial nonsense of the misnamed "truth" movement. Backing up this recommendation, they're already onto Fisk's folly.

UPDATE 2: After thoroughly fisking Fisk with a welter of specifics (and please visit and digest before you start peddling conspiratorial crap here at this blog), Ed at the 26H blog reflects on motive:

Now that the specifics are out of the way, allow me to indulge in some conspiratorial thinking of my own: According to one Robert J. Hanlon, one should “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity”. Wise words though they are, Hanlon’s Razor, as it is known, only goes so far. It just doesn’t seem particularly feasible, for instance, to think that an experienced journalist like Fisk could have written such a straightforwardly error-ridden and innuendo-laden article due to incompetence alone. Further, he’s also reasonably well known for both fostering and manifesting a Westerner’s self-loathing of the most wretched kind. So, it seems at least possible that Fisk wrote this piece for purely ideological reasons: To spread misinformation and doubt about the core premise for some of the United States’ least popular actions – to groundlessly and cynically call 9/11 itself into question.