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January 04, 2025
The Gaggle Book Club

Each week, the Gaggle Book Club recommends a book for Gagglers to read and—most important—uploads a pdf version of it.

Our practice is that we do not vouch for the reliability or accuracy of any book we recommend. Still less, do we necessarily agree with a recommended book's central arguments. However, any book we recommend will be of undoubted interest and intellectual importance.

Today's book club selection is Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "200 Years Together." Published in two volumes--in 2001 and 2002--the book explores the history of Jews in Russia from the late 18th century to the late 20th century, with a particular focus on the Soviet era.

Solzhenitsyn traces the historical relationship between Jews and Russians over two centuries, beginning with Catherine the Great's establishment of the Pale of Settlement in 1791, which confined Jewish populations to certain regions in the Russian Empire. He goes on to document the integration of Jews into Russian society during the 19th century, exploring their contributions to commerce, education and culture, while also addressing tensions over assimilation and discrimination.

Solzhenitsyn provides a historical account of Jewish communities in Russia following their inclusion in the empire after the partitions of Poland during the late 18th century. He examines their initial confinement to the Pale of Settlement and their gradual but uneven assimilation during the 19th century.

Solzhenitsyn argues that Tsarist policies were both protective and restrictive.
On the one hand, Jews faced exclusion and quotas; on the other hand, Jews were also encouraged to participate in the cultural and economic life of Russia. This led to social and economic mobility, and to rise in Jewish prosperity. He demolishes the myth of the supposedly unmitigated oppression that Jews lived under during the reign of the Tsars.

The heart of the book however is a detailed account of the role the Jews played in the the Bolshevik Revolution and during the subsequent Soviet era. Critics of the book have claimed that Solzhenitsyn blamed the Jews for the revolution and for the imposition of the Soviet system on the Russian people. This is untrue. While acknowledging that many Jews did play a prominent role in the Bolshevik movement and in the terror that followed Lenin's seizure of power, Solzhenitsyn does not hesitate to detail the repression that Jews lived under during Soviet times. Jewish religious and cultural practices were suppressed as brutally as Russian Orthodox religious and cultural practices were.

Nonetheless, Jews will forever be associated with Bolshevism. This is understandable. Jews were prominent among the Bolsheviks, and they had a wildly disproportionate presence--relative to the size of their population--among Soviet officialdom.

However, as Solzhenitsyn points out, there is something very self-serving about the Russian habit of blaming Bolshevism on the Jews. It serves to get Russians off the hook. Most of the Bolsheviks, particularly Lenin and Stalin, were not Jews. Moreover, Jewish Bolsheviks never thought of themselves as Jews; in fact, they disdained their Jewish origins and upbringing, and did little to advance Jewish culture and identity. To be sure, the Jewish Bolsheviks, like all of the Bolsheviks, harbored a deep animus toward the Russian people and Russian culture.

When it comes to the last years of the Stalin era, Solzhenitsyn describes the purges of Jewish intellectuals and the dismantling of Jewish institutions. However, unlike most Western commentators, Solzhenitsyn refuses to see this repression as uniquely targeted against the Jews. It was of a piece with Stalinist repression as a whole. The brutal treatment accorded to the Jews was not very different from the brutal treatment accorded to everyone else.

Solzhenitsyn concludes with a call for reconciliation between Russians and Jews, as well as mutual acknowledgment of shared suffering. It's unlikely to happen, but Solzhenitsyn was a devout Christian, and reconciliation and acknowledgment of sins are key parts of the Christian faith.

Naturally, Solzhenitsyn's call for mutual reconciliation didn't sit well with critics. How could Solzhenitsyn draw any parallels between the pain endured by Jews and that endured by Russians? How could there be any symmetry between victimizers and victimized? The value of Solzhenitsyn's book is that it demolishes the simple-minded, anti-Russian tropes that Western commentators, neo-conservatives, professional Russophobes, and Jewish emigres in the West have been peddling for years.

The book is not an easy read. Nothing Solzhenitsyn wrote ever is, but it's an important book that all Gagglers should at least attempt to get through.

Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn_-_200_Years_Together_(2002).pdf
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The Gaggle Music Club: Aram Khachaturian’s Violin Concerto in D minor

This week's selection for The Gaggle Music Club is Aram Khachaturian’s Violin Concerto in D minor. Composed in 1940, the work is one of the major violin concertos of the 20th century and constitutes an important moment within Soviet musical history.

Aram Khachaturian (1903–1978) was a Soviet composer of Armenian ancestry who was one of the leading musical figures of the USSR. Born in Tbilisi, Georgia, into an Armenian family, he initially studied science but switched to music in the 1920s when he moved to Moscow. There, he studied at the Gnessin Institute and later at the Moscow Conservatory.

Khachaturian became a central figure in Soviet music, much admired for his colorful orchestration, use of folk rhythms and accessibility. Along with Dmitry Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev, he was part of the Soviet "big three," though his style was generally more tuneful and extroverted than that of the other two.

The Violin Concerto in D minor premiered in Moscow on Nov. 16, 1940. David Oistrakh, to ...

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The Gaggle Book Club: "The Psychoanalytic Movement: Or the Cunning of Unreason" By Ernest Gellner

Each week, the Gaggle Book Club recommends a book for Gagglers to read and—most important—uploads a pdf version of it.

Our practice is that we do not vouch for the reliability or accuracy of any book we recommend. Still less, do we necessarily agree with a recommended book's central arguments. However, any book we recommend will be of undoubted interest and intellectual importance.

Today's book club selection is Ernest Gellner's "The Psychoanalytic Movement: Or the Cunning of Unreason." Published in 1985, Gellner's essay is one of the most incisive and controversial critiques of Freudian psychoanalysis ever published.

Ernest Gellner (1925–1995) was a Czech-born British philosopher, anthropologist and historian of ideas. He taught at the London School of Economics, Cambridge, and later at the Central European University in Prague. His work spanned a wide array of fields: the philosophy of social science, nationalism, Islam, modernity and epistemology. He shot to fame during the 1950s with ...

The_Psychoanalytic_Movement_(Paladin_Movements_and_Ideas_--_Gellner,_Ernest_--_Paladin_movements_and_ideas,_London,_United_Kingdom,_1985_--_9780586084366_--_89dc8c02c9e9f5a866844d3e45fcddeb_--_Anna’s_Archive.pdf

It's been a pleasure! Thanks for all the great shows. :)

January 21, 2023
More Leftie Than Thou
"Jacobin" Magazine Celebrates A Strike Against Ol' Blue Eyes

Here at "The Gaggle" we have very little time for the "more Leftie than thou" school of thought--that's the approach to life according to which the only thing that matters is whether you take the right position on every issue under the sun from Abortion to Zelensky. No one in the world meets the exacting standards of this school of thought; any Leftie leader anywhere is always selling out to the bankers and the capitalists. The perfect exemplar of this is the unreadable Jacobin magazine. 

The other day I came across this article from 2021. It's a celebration of trade union power. And not simply trade union power, but the use of trade union power to secure political goals. Of course (and this is always the case with the "more Leftie than thou" crowd), this glorious, never-to-be-forgotten moment on the history of organized labor took place many years ago--in the summer of 1974 to be exact. Yes, almost half a century has gone by since that thrilling moment when the working-class movement of Australia mobilized and prepared to seize the means of production, distribution and exchange. 

Well, not quite. Organized labor went into action against...Ol' Blue Eyes, the Chairman of the Board, the Voice; yes, Frank Sinatra. Why? What had Sinatra done? Sinatra was certainly very rich, and he owned a variety of properties and businesses. But if the Australian trade union movement were, understandably, searching for the bright, incandescent spark that would finally awaken the working class from its slumber there were surely richer, greedier, more dishonest, more decadent, above all more Australian individuals it could have discovered. Australia was never short of them. Rupert Murdoch immediately springs to mind. Why Sinatra?

 

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