Aung San Suu Kyi, the State Counsellor of Burma (Myanmar) and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, met up with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in early June this year. State Counsellor is the equivalent position of prime minister. The meeting in Budapest is significant because both leaders bonded over their shared hostility towards Muslim immigration. Both leaders agreed that immigration from Islamic nations presents a threat to their respective countries.

One can only imagine the howls of outrage if these leaders had expressed their mutually agreed disdain towards Jews, or other ethno-religious minorities. Be that as it may, Aung San Suu Kyi, upheld as an icon of democracy and human rights in the West, has provided credibility to Islamophobic bigotry by forming a cross-continental alliance with Orban, a far-right and anti-immigration politician known for his hateful views.

Lamenting the growth of Muslim populations in Europe has long been a staple lie recycled by Orban. A viciously anti-immigrant politician, Orban has called for the expulsion of asylum seekers from Hungary, demanded that the European Union impose harsh restrictions against refugees from Muslim-majority countries seeking entry into Europe, and has praised the Hungarian wartime fascist regime of Admiral Horthy. The latter, allied with Nazi Germany, persecuted and killed members of another ethnic-religious minority, the Jewish people.

Orban is on record endorsing the neo-fascistic ‘Great Replacement‘ conspiracy theory, promoted by racist and white nationalist groups internationally. This paranoid racial fantasy holds that white populations face the threat of being swamped by non-white – and in particular Muslim – immigrants. The Hungarian Prime Minister has spoken of Europe as a Christian entity under existential threat from Islam and Muslim minorities.

It is beyond the scope of the current article to analyse the many flaws and falsities promoted by ultra-rightists such as Orban regarding Muslim immigration. However, for Aung San Suu Kyi to lend a platform for such views is not only reprehensible, but a perverse inversion of reality. It is the Rohingya minority in Burma – a largely Muslim population – that has been the target of ethnic cleansing and state-sanctioned violence in that country.

In fact, Suu Kyi has consistently downplayed, and outright denied, the plight of the Rohingya people in Burma. While not using as explicitly Islamophobic language as Orban, Suu Kyi has refused to use the term Rohingya when describing the problems in Rakhine state, the region where the Rohingya are located. The Burmese military, motivated by an ideology of Buddhist supremacism, has been carrying out a genocidal campaign against the Rohingya for many years.

However, since assuming office in 2016, Suu Kyi has remained silent on the Rohingya issue, and has done her utmost to whitewash the actions of the Burmese military. The Rohingya have been forcibly displaced, with thousands fleeing into neighbouring Bangladesh, or forming makeshift refugee camps as internally-displaced persons. The United Nations has documented the homicidal campaign against the Rohingya by the powerful Burmese military – which includes the tactics of rape, burning villages and denial of basic social services.

Suu Kyi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize back in 1991, ostensibly for her commitment to nonviolence and peaceful dialogue. Yet here, by combining with Hungary’s Prime Minister, she is providing a ‘peaceful’ face for an underlying campaign of hate and ethnic violence. Promoted by the Nobel committee as an outstanding voice of the powerless against power, she became an icon of universalist human rights and peace from the 1990s onwards.

Leading the National League for Democracy, Suu Kyi was feted by Britain, the United States and other imperialist powers as a democratic alternative to the rule of the generals. From 1989 until 2010, she spent in one form of detention or another, or under arrest by the junta. Her willingness to stay in Burma, and face imprisonment for her purported commitment to democratic principles, invited comparisons to Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi.

The Burmese regime, playing the political game, released Suu Kyi, held elections in the country, and the NLD took office. While keeping a firm grip on power, the junta made enough concessions to at least maintain the pretence of a democratic transition. Suu Kyi, hardly a political novice, saw her moment to lead Burma – and she is not an innocent bystander with regard to the machinations and policies of the Burmese regime.

Hailing the 2015 elections, the United States and Britain rapidly dropped their criticisms of the Burmese regime, and welcomed it as a ‘developing democracy’ under Suu Kyi. The latter duly reciprocated, allowing Western investment in the country, pushing for the privatisation of state-owned assets, and demanding that the US and Britain not refer to the Rohingya minority as a distinct ethnic group.

Sholto Byrnes, longtime journalist and commentator, writes that the halo that once crowned Suu Kyi, has not only slipped, but has been replaced by a badge of shame. Her failure to condemn the Burmese military’s murderous rampage against the Rohingya is a serious failing in itself. Her exemplary reputation as a beacon of human rights has taken a battering.

Actively seeking an alliance with the ultra-rightist and racist Orban, is not just a dereliction of duty. Suu Kyi has demonstrated her true colours as an ethnic chauvinist. Suu Kyi’s fall from grace, and the demolition of her anointed status as a democracy icon, exposes the fraudulent pretext that is ‘human rights’. This is not a denial of human rights per se, but a realisation that ‘human rights’ is a cynical ploy used by calculating politicians to promote predatory agendas.

The comparisons of Suu Kyi with Mandela and Gandhi are woefully inaccurate and misleading. The more appropriate historical comparison, and one that highlights the similarities in political outlooks, is between Aung San Suu Kyi and former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir. Both political figures are characterised by an ethnic chauvinism that denied human rights to the Rohingya and Palestinian peoples respectively.

The political trajectories of both these political leaders demonstrate a ravenous egotism and sense of entitlement. Rather than govern for the promotion of gender and ethnic solidarity, they both display a narrow commitment to building states based on ethnic-supremacist exclusivity. Suu Kyi and Orban have found common ground – racial and ethnic exclusion. It is high time to build bonds of solidarity and break down falsehoods and fear.

In the previous article, we examined how, in the official 75th anniversary D-Day commemorations, the role of Russia in defeating Nazi Germany was completely ignored. This official snub of Russia, while disappointing, is not entirely unexpected. This behaviour on the part of the US and Britain is completely in line with the latest round of Russophobia, encapsulated in the purported ‘scandal’ of ‘Russiagate’.

Since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the American political elite – lead by Democratic party leaders and former members of the military/intelligence apparatus – have waged an unrelenting campaign to portray Trump’s election victory as a product of Russian meddling in the American electoral process.

The Mueller report, released to the public in April this year, examined the main allegations of the ‘Russian interference’ conspiracy theory – and found no evidence whatsoever that there was any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian business and political entities. The Mueller report was a stinging rebuke to the proponents of the Russiagate conspiracy hoax, and Matt Taibbi stated that the ‘Russian interference’ trope is this generation’s equivalent of the WMD lie of the 2003 Iraq war.

This is not a defence of Donald Trump – even though the latter has been gloating about the ‘vindication’ of his administration offered by the Mueller report. While there is no Presidency-destroying conspiracy, there are many reasons to oppose Trump. His misogyny and enabling of white supremacy, his attacks on refugees and migrants, his policies that help billionaires accumulate wealth at the expense of working people – Trump is definitely no friend of the working class he claims to represent.

The allegation that the Trump campaign is a servant of the Kremlin derives from a long-standing practice in American politics – smearing your political enemies as puppets of a foreign power. The former Soviet Union was a convenient scapegoat – no need to listen to domestic critics, just slander them as dupes of the Communist Kremlin. Since the end of the Cold War, Russia – in particular under President Vladimir Putin – has assumed that role of foreign bogeyman.

Chris Hedges, writing in Truthdig magazine, notes that since the election of Vladimir Putin in Russia, replacing the Western-subservient (and frequently drunk) Boris Yeltsin, Russia has become more assertive on the world stage. Russia is no longer the economic basket-case that it was in the 1990s, but it is not an aggressive super-petro-state about to gobble up the entire world either. The US establishment now began to treat Russia with open hostility.

Russophobia was back in fashion, replacing the expressions of goodwill and friendship that marked relations between Moscow and Washington in the 1990s. Domestic criticism of Washington was yet again portrayed as subsidised and manipulated by the overarching activities of the Kremlin. Political opponents of the Democratic party, particularly those from the Left of the spectrum, were smeared as willing apologists of the nefarious Russians.

Russian Jews and the anti-Russia hysteria

One of the interesting consequences of the Russophobia of the American political and economic elites has been the impact of a group of formerly privileged white migrants – Russian Jews from the former Soviet Union. In the late 1980s, as the Gorbachev premiership implemented its policy of glasnost (openness), Jews from the former USSR began emigrating in large numbers to the United States. The plight of Soviet Jews (if the stories are to be believed) became a major cause celebre in the West, and in particular in the United States.

Numerous American political figures, writers and cultural spokespeople advocated for the ‘liberation’ of Soviet Russian Jews, and lobbied the American government to open its doors to the refugees. One such prominent and educated Soviet Jewish figure, Natan Sharansky, became an emblematic example of the struggle by these ‘refuseniks’ to achieve their much desired liberation.

Sharansky, a mathematician by training, settled in Israel and has spent his political career as a rightwing advocate for Zionism and the suppression of the Palestinian people. But what of the thousands of other Russian Jews, who went to the United States, an allegedly altruistic nation extending a helping hand to those trapped by tyranny? For an answer to this question, let us look to Yasha Levin, a Soviet-born Jew who grew up in America.

Levin writes that as a fresh young immigrant, it was all too-easy to view America as the ‘land of opportunity’, where anyone could make it if they worked hard enough. Surely Russian Jews would be welcomed – had not the liberal establishment fought for them to leave the USSR? After all, Russian Jews occupied a special, privileged place at the apex of the migratory pyramid – they are white.

Not for them was the experience of xenophobic and racist attacks by a bigoted law enforcement establishment. They were not black, Hispanic or indigenous American. Of course settling into a new country was full of challenges and difficulties – every migrant group confronts problems as they adjust to a new culture, language, political and economic system. However, the Soviet Russian Jews surmounted difficulties – had not all the lobbyists and lawmakers in America advocated for them?

Occupying a special place in the official folklore of American immigration, Soviet Jews were upheld as an example of the willingness of the United States to welcome foreigners, particularly those immigrants who were seeking liberty. Here was a clear-cut case of American altruistic superiority winning out over Soviet cruelty. But all that began to change in the 2000s, and especially with the 2016 victory of Trump.

The Soviet Russian Jews find themselves in the crosshairs of the American ruling elite’s bigotry – a spot previously occupied by other ethnic and religious minorities. The Russians became the internal enemy, a potential fifth column working to subvert American liberalism.

The cloud of xenophobic suspicion is cast over the entire Russian community in the US – quite a change from the initial welcoming days. Russians are devious, treacherous and deceitful; as the American media helpfully and frequently reminds us, is not Putin himself a former KGB agent? The pall of conspiratorial suspicion casts a large shadow.

Blaming the country’s economic woes on the presence of groups of foreigners only serves to distract attention from the root causes of social and economic breakdown. The convenient excuse of ‘the Russians did it’ enables us to avoid examining our own failures, and indeed conditions the population for a possible future military confrontation with Russia. As Jacobin magazine’s staff writer Branko Marcetic says, it is time to end this national hallucination – close the gate on Russiagate.

The 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings earlier this month was an occasion for solemn reflections on the bravery and sacrifice of the D-Day veterans. It is timely to consider a largely forgotten episode of that particular conflict – the plight of the African American D-Day veterans, who gave of themselves fighting Nazism in Europe, only to face the institutionalised white racism of Jim Crow legislation when they returned home to the United States.

In an article published by Voice of America news, the experiences of black D-Day veterans were recounted by the remaining survivors. While the American military at that time remained segregated, the dangers and horrors of warfare were faced equally by all US soldiers. The 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion, a unit composed of African American soldiers, had the job of making and launching explosive-laden balloons to protect Allied troops from attack by Nazi aircraft.

A number of the black American veterans recounted their experiences of heavy fighting, the dead bodies, trauma and tensions of that invasion. Many struggled with nightmares and PTSD after the war was over. Haunted by their harrowing ordeal, they survived, only to return home to a nation unwilling to accept them as equals.

They risked their lives fighting violent white supremacy in German-occupied Europe, only to be forced to sit at the back of the bus upon their arrival home. One black veteran recalled that he could not sit with the very same soldiers he had served with on the battlefield. This juxtaposition of Nazi white supremacy and legalised white racism in America is not my invention, nor is it meant to be malicious.

Creating a whites-only homeland

It is instructive, when looking at the intellectual precursors to German fascism, how the United States and its system of racial segregation inspired the Nazi party and its co-thinkers. The Nazi objective of a pure white race, purging the undesirable elements from the society, conquering much-needed land from the interior races, and cultivating the land for the preservation of said race, found its best expression in the policies and history of the United States.

Adam Serwer, writing in The Atlantic magazine, states that these ideas – preserving the white race against the migratory influx of blacks, Jews and other ‘inferior’ stock – were considered mainstream and respectable by the ruling class of American society. Denounced as extreme today, these notions of racial purity – and its corresponding eugenic goal of restricting the numbers of ‘lesser stock’ – were advocated by influential and scholarly circles in the early part of the 20th century.

The book that Adolf Hitler called his ‘bible’ was authored by an American – The Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant. The book, published in 1916, provides a scholarly, respectable veneer to pseudoscientific racism, advocating a racialised interpretation of European and American history. Grant, a lawyer, amateur anthropologist and eugenics advocate, stated that the intellectually superior white race was being diluted by intermixing with racially inferior stock.

Grant never used the word ‘genocide’, because that term was coined after World War Two. However, his warnings about the white race being swamped by black, Jewish and other inferior breeds finds resonance today in the mythical ‘white genocide’ allegation recycled by the conspiratorially xenophobia Alternative Right.

It is noteworthy that Grant deliberately classified humans into distinct ‘races’ – fixed biologically-determined categories, and from there drew firm conclusions about their social and intellectual characteristics. He lamented the fact that America continued to allow people from poorer nations entry into the United States. He condemned, for instance, the presence of swarms of Eastern European Jews as exerting a deleterious effect on the country.

He advocated the increased immigration of white ‘Nordic’ types to sustain the purity and intellectual growth of the white race. He denounced the darker, swarthy and Mediterranean peoples, and proposed tough legislative immigration restrictions against those he considered inferior breeds. Notice that while never used the word ‘genes’ in his work, he deliberately drew conclusions about the intelligence capacities of different hereditarily-fixed races – a debate that also has modern implications.

Grant was certainly not the first person to advocate ‘race science’, however, his theories found a receptive audience among American political and economic elites. Politicians of various stripes proposed strict eugenics legislation to reduce the numbers of people they deemed to be ‘feeble-minded’ – and they based themselves on the works of Grant and his co-thinkers.

Willing co-thinkers in Europe

Doctrines of white supremacy found a willing audience not only in the United States, but also across the Atlantic – in Germany. To be sure, Germany had its own tradition of volkisch nationalism – a racist and populistic appeal to a mythical German past of racial purity and sturdy agrarian connection with German soil. However, German ultra-rightists and white supremacists found inspiration in the legalised racial discrimination, and whites-only doctrines, of the United States.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing in The Atlantic, elaborates that Hitler and the Nazi party used the United States as an example of how to successfully construct a white supremacist economic and legal edifice. When the Nazi theorists were planning their eastward expansion, the depopulation of the Eastern European Slavic cities and their replacement with German settlers, we can see the striking analogues with the white American experience of settling indigenous lands and transatlantic racial slavery.

When the Nazi authorities were considering implementing eugenics legislation to reduce the numbers of the ‘feeble-minded’, they were drawing from the American experience. When Nazi race theorists were debating how to enact racial-exclusion legislation – which they did for instance, with the 1935 Nuremberg Laws – they were inspired by similar American models of legalised racial discrimination. James Whitman, a law professor at Yale University, made a detailed study of the similarities between the race laws implemented by the Nazis, and the American precursors which inspired them.

None of this is to suggest that America was responsible for the rise of Hitler. After the horrors of the Second World War were exposed to the world, the likes of Grant and his white Nordic idolatry were forgotten. Indeed, American economic and industrial support for Germany in the 1930s was also quickly forgotten. American racism, having found a monstrous reflection of itself in Nazi Germany’s crimes, was relegated to a place of historical amnesia. The successful export of white American racism was soon forgotten.

Speaking of historical amnesia…..

One of the disappointing, but not entirely surprising, aspects of the official 75th anniversary D-Day commemorations was the deliberate snubbing of Russia and its contribution to the defeat of Nazism. The role of the Soviet Union was decisive in beating Nazi Germany, yet you would not know this going by the official commemorative ceremonies. This is not the first time that Russia was pointedly excluded from D-Day activities – former US President Barack Obama purposefully disregarded the Soviet contribution to the Allied victory during his term in office.

What is noteworthy is that the most recent example of disdain towards Russia occurred in the context of a malignant Russophobic campaign of conspiratorial xenophobia mounted by the American (and British) ruling classes. The Russiagate paranoia has enveloped American society, and has kindled a kind of respectable racism – not overt like the racial segregation of yesteryear, but an insidious kind of xenophobic boosterism nevertheless.

What does this mean? Russiagate and the resurgence of xenophobia will be the subject of the next article.

Stay tuned.