Demjanjuk Files | 03June2009 | Will Zuzak
/fc/2001/rosenthal20090527Pimp.html

John Rosenthal: Agent for the Holocaust Industry and Ukrainophobe

We have noted that many so-called defenders of John Demjanjuk have no real interest in defending John Demjanjuk at all. Rather, they are interested in promoting the agenda of the Holocaust Industry. They allege that there are still thousands of Nazi war criminals living in Germany, in Eastern Europe and elsewhere and attack Germany (and other countries) for not prosecuting more of these aged survivors of WWII.

Of course, they never call for the prosecution of Soviet war criminals and genocide perpetrators, who perpetrated their dastardly deeds before, during and after World War II. Nor do they call for the prosecution of American, British and Jewish war criminals from that era or from more recent conflicts in Palestine, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel and countless other trouble spots.

Two recent articles on 21May2009 and 27May2009 (reproduced below) by John Rosenthal are a perfect example of this hypocrisy. Going back to the time of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine circa December 2004, one finds that Mr. Rosenthal considers the President of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, to be a fascist anti-semite and that in "Viktor Yushchenko's "orange" coalition, orange is just a lighter shade of brown".

His antipathy to Ukrainian patriots who try to defend Ukraine and Ukrainians against calumny is illustrated by three of his postings (appended below) from the time of the Orange Revolution, which refer expressly to Dr. Lubomyr Prytulak and his Ukrainian Archive (ukar.org, now defunct). Not being able to counter Dr. Prytulak's reasonable argumentation on the topic of "Anti-Semitism", he simply labels Lubomyr Prytulak as an antisemite.

Other issues which arouse the ire of Mr. Rosenthal are references to ethnic nationalism (but not Israeli-Jewish nationalism), Vladimir Putin link to Viktor Yanukovyvh, Yuri Shapoval and Silski Visti, Bolshevik Jews in the Soviet apparatus, John Laughland and his BHHRG (British Helsinki Human Rights Group).

Pleasant reading!

Will Zuzak; 2009.06.03

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newmajority.com | 27May2009 | John Rosenthal
http://www.newmajority.com/ShowScroll.aspx?ID=42cd060f-b42f-4b26-9f03-3e083fdf11b7 

Germany prosecutes Demjanjuk to conceal its own guilt

In his recent book Unser Kampf: 1968 -- “Our Struggle: 1968” -- German historian Götz Aly discusses an emblematic and still widely-debated episode in the history of post-War Germany: the fatal shooting of student protestor Benno Ohnesorg by a police officer in West Berlin in June 1967. As flagged by the heavily ironic title, Aly’s book suggests that there are important ideological similarities between Germany’s left-wing radicals of the “1968” generation and the earlier generation of German radicals known as National Socialists. The book and its thesis are eminently worth discussing in their own right. But I want to cite it here just for some details that Aly provides about the biographies of two leading Berlin police officials at the time of the Ohnesorg shooting and for the instructive light that these details cast on Germany’s arrest and pending prosecution of John Demjanjuk.  (For background, see my earlier NM post on Demjanjuk and "The Amazing Hypocrisy of German Justice" here).

Aly writes (p. 28):

The chief of the West Berlin riot police, who headed the deployment on 2 June 1967, was named Hans-Ulrich Werner. He joined the SS in 1939, received a mark of “very good” in his course on the National Socialist “world view,” and in 1943-44 won accolades for his role as a unit commander of the Ordnungspolizei in Ukraine during punitive actions against partisans, which as a rule involved massacres of innocent civilians….

The Chief of Police of West Berlin in 1967 was the Social Democrat Erich Duensing. From 1936 to 1945, he was a career officer in the Wehrmacht. He had been in charge of the West Berlin police since 1962 and systematically handed out appointments to old comrades from the Wehrmacht and SS -- including such as had worked in the Reich Security Main Office -- as well as to former chiefs of Gestapo branch offices.

The Ordnungspolizei were German police units that were dispatched to the occupied territories and that were largely implicated in German war crimes. The role of one Ordnungspolizei unit in implementing the “final solution” in Poland is, for instance, the subject of Christopher Browning’s study Ordinary Men.

Specifically in Ukraine, Ordnungspolizei units are known, for instance, to have participated in the infamous Babi Yar massacre in which tens of thousands of local Ukrainian Jews were murdered. (For a novelistic account, see Anatoly Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar.)

[W.Z. On reading the book of recent-immigrant Anatoly Kuznetsov, Malcolm Muggeridge (the English journalist, who witnessed the Holodomor in March 1933) expressed doubt as to the impartiality of the author and of the veracity of his descriptions.]

If the Reich Security Main Office sounds familiar, that is because it is the SS agency where Adolf Eichmann worked. The Reich Security Main Office -- or RSHA, according to its German initials -- was responsible for the planning of the Holocaust. If the lowly foreign “volunteer” John Demjanjuk was in fact involved in any Nazi crimes, then those crimes will have been devised by the SS bureaucrats in the RSHA. (On Demjanjuk’s lowly status and the highly equivocal character of his designation as a “volunteer,” see here.)

There is no special reason why Götz Aly should have happened upon the likes of Werner and Duesing in conducting his research. The section of his book in question is not about former Nazis in the German police. It is simply about the Benno Ohnesorg incident and the government’s response to it. On the latter level as well, incidentally, one quickly encounters former Nazis in prominent positions. The chief bureaucratic official in the Ministry of the Interior at the time was one Werner Ernst. Ernst wrote a “discussion paper” for his colleagues on the student unrest. Aly notes that “he began his career in the Reich Ministry of Labor in 1936 and thereupon joined the NSDAP….” (NSDAP are the German initials of the Nazi party: or, more fully, the “National Socialist German Workers Party.”) Indeed, the then German Chancellor, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, was himself a former Nazi. As Aly parenthetically reminds us, Kiesinger already joined the Nazi party in 1933.

What the examples reflect is quite simply the pervasive presence of former Nazis in West German institutions and not only of former Nazis, but indeed of former Nazis who by virtue of their positions were virtually surely involved in crimes and atrocities: persons such as Ordnungspolizei unit commander Hans-Ulrich Werner or the RSHA officials and “former Gestapo branch office chiefs” appointed by Duesing. This is the German reality. This was the German normality, which only changed by slow attrition as the generation of the perpetrators passed into comfortable retirement. But, of course, Germany’s pursuit of John Demjanjuk suggests precisely the contrary: in effect, that Germany must have made a clean break with its Nazi past. Otherwise, how could it have the moral authority (to say nothing of the jurisdiction) to try an alleged low level foreign auxiliary to Nazi crimes like Demjanjuk?

It is possible that younger Germans do not know the truth. But virtually all Germans of a certain age know it perfectly well: Germans like, for instance, Kurt Schrimm, the 59-year-old prosecutor who has spearheaded the efforts to put Demjanjuk on trial in Germany. Germany’s pursuit of Demjanjuk is a sort of a lie to the rest of the world.

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[L.P. John Rosenthal publishes another commendable article on the theme "Germany prosecutes Demjanjuk to conceal its own guilt". He seems disinclined, however, to touch on other objections to the Demjanjuk persecution, such as the mendacity of Demjanuk's accusers, the unreliability of the Trawniki ID card, the implausibility of the alleged crimes ever having taken place, or the creation of the myth of "Ivan the Terrible" only in the 1970s -- objections that Rosenthal might be expected to have become acquainted with during his scrutiny of ukar.org, scrutiny that is evidenced in the three links below.]

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Transatlantic Intelligencer | 05Dec2004 | John Rosenthal
http://trans-int.blogspot.com:80/2004/12/follow-up-ii-viktor-yushchenko.html

Follow-Up II (Viktor Yushchenko, Democrat and Anti-Semite?)
- Nicholas Kristof and a "Ukrainian Democrat"

Niko in the comments section to the first follow-up to "Viktor Yushchenko, Democrat and Anti-Semite?" notes that NYTimes columnist Nicholas Kristof has gone to Ukraine to join the "Orange Revolution".

"Since my father grew up in what is now southwestern Ukraine," Kristof writes, "I decided to come here to join my people - and I found that waging revolution has rarely been such fun." I did not know that belonging to a "people" was inheritable in this way, though I do know that according to a certain ideology of nationhood - namely, ethnic nationalism - it is indeed and that this ideology, which provided the ideological foundation of National Socialism and affiliated movements in the 1930s, is having a certain renaissance in Europe today. (I have written on this renaissance of ethnic nationalism and its connection to the contemporaneous resurgence of European anti-Semitism in my "Anti-Semitism and Ethnicity in Europe".) Always at the forefront of importing all things that its editors and authors imagine to be properly "European" - and thereby good and just - into the US, ethnic nationalism is apparently now also finding its way into the pages of the NYTimes.

If, however, Nicholas Kristof had bothered to read some of the Ukrainian "democrats" whose "revolution" he has gone to Ukraine to join, he may have found that - however much they are no doubt delighted to have the support of an eminent columnist from the NYTimes - the mere fact of his father having "grown up" in Ukraine might not have been sufficient for them to count their eminent visitor part of "the Ukrainian people". It would not be, for instance, if his father was, say, Russian...or Jewish, for instance. In the ethnic-national ideology, the quality of "belonging to a people" - or, in other words, "nationhood" in the ethnic-national sense - is purely heritable, purely genetic, and thus unrelated to place of residence. The question of which territory "belongs to" which "people" is an important but secondary matter, with the criterion of so-called "autochthoneity" supposed to be decisive in this connection, i.e. a territory should "belong to" that "people" that "originally" inhabited it - whatever that is supposed to mean. [W.Z. Is Mr. Rosenthal referring to the state of Israel?] Thus, for the ethnic-nationalist, a Jew - even if born on the national territory and no matter how many generations of his or her ancestors also were born and/or "grew up" on it - remains, in effect, a resident alien: or, as according to the organicist metaphors dear to ethnic-nationalist ideologues, a "foreign element in the body of the people". (For the use of this metaphorics by history's most famous ethnic-nationalist ideologue, Adolf Hitler, see Chapter 11 on "Nation and Race" of his Mein Kampf.)

One Lubomyr Prytulak, writing on the English-language site Ukrainian Archive, has greeted Friday's court decision annulling the results of the 21 November 2004 Ukrainian election in terms reminiscent of Nicholas Kristof's NYTimes column. "The historic decision of the Supreme Court of Ukraine to void the fraudulent runoff election of 21-Nov-2004 marks the decisive defeat of the Kuchma-Putin-Yanukovych conspiracy to suppress Ukrainian democracy," Lubomyr Prytulak writes. Prytulak is also in tune with Kristof on the relevance of Yanukovich's Soviet-era prison convictions and on the fact that, in the last analysis, it is Vladimir Putin who is the villain of the piece playing itself out in Ukraine today. "President Bush and other Western leaders need to make it clear to Mr. Putin that he has no right to extend his quasi dictatorship to other peoples," Kristof writes. Of Yanukovich, he observes that the latter's "criminal history (he served almost four years for robbery and assault as a young man) would make him a fine Putin stooge." Lubomyr Prytulak's titles his piece on the Putin-Yanukovich relation "Vladimir Putin: Dictator wanted - only degenerates need apply".

As anyone who takes just a bit of time to browse its content will quickly discover, Lubomyr Prytulak's Ukrainian Archive site also contains quite a lot of material on "the Jews". One contribution from 1998, for instance, is titled "Jewish Conquest of the Slavs" and summarizes in tabular form the findings of a study by one Yuri Shapoval supposed to demonstrate the over-representation of Jews in the Soviet-era secret services. Prytulak concludes his reflections on what he calls the "Shapoval volume" by posing the question "Is anti-Semitism gratuitous?", to which he responds as follows:

Anti-Semitism is a topic that not only arises often in the Western media, but one may say is pressed incessantly into our consciousness, and one of the conclusions concerning anti-Semitism that is repeatedly proposed, particularly by Jewish sources, is that it is and always has been gratuitous, that from the Jewish point of view it is an antagonism based not on "what we have done" but on "who we are." What the Western media inculcates us to believe is that anti-Semitism is a variety of mental illness, and not a natural and understandable reaction to demonstrable provocation. The closest that this view comes to identifying a cause is to point to Jewish success, particularly Jewish economic success, and to portray anti-Semitism as grounded in an envy of such success.

However, a more thoughtful examination of the phenomenon of anti-Semitism reveals many reasons for viewing it - at least in some of its manifestations - not as an irrational and unexplainable and gratuitous hatred, but as a natural and understandable antipathy arising from an acquaintance with Jewish misbehavior. The Shapoval volume, then, provides us with one such reason why some Ukrainian anti-Semitism might exist. The reason is that Ukrainians have been aware of the Jewish domination of the experiment in government through mass murder which went under the name of "Communism," and in which experiment Ukrainians more than any other peoples have been conscripted into playing the role of guinea pigs.

Prytulak does, however, offer a "truce" with Jews. "Were I authorized to represent the Ukrainian position in negotiating with Jews a cessation of verbal hostilities," he writes, "I might open with 'If you stop fabricating lies about us, we will stop disclosing the truth about you.' "

The over-representation of Jews among Bolshevik and Soviet cadres - and hence supposed "Jewish responsibility" for Soviet Communism - is, of course, a standard argument of modern European anti-Semitism. Just last year, the German MP Martin Hohmann was expelled from the Christian Democratic party for employing it in order to show that Jews could well be qualified a "nation of perpetrators" [Tätervolk]. It is thus curious to find German politicians associated with the ruling "red-green" coalition unequivocally celebrating a Yushchenko-led "orange revolution" that clearly federates anti-Semitic forces of exactly the same stripe. Thus SPD Foreign Policy expert Gernot Erler has spoken lyrically of "the orange fire of the youthful rebellion associated with the name of Yushchenko" and affirmed that "orange Ukraine deserves our curiosity, our friendship and our support" (Hat tip German-Foreign-Policy.com).

Of course, Lubomyr Prytulak (whose writings, incidentally, are favorably cited by noted Holocaust-revisionists like Ernst Zundel and David Irving) is only one supporter of Viktor Yushchenko. But the Silski Visti affair shows that Prytulak's anti-Semitism is by no means out of place within what is at least a broad current of opinion in the "orange" camp. Indeed, according to citations given on the Ukraine Now website, the 2003 insert at the center of the case against Silski Visti went so far as to accuse Jews of being responsible for the 1933 Ukrainian famine.

NYTimes columnists may be excused for knowing little about history - or, at any rate, it is as a rule only to be expected of them. But German politicians at least ought to be able to recognize that for significant parts of Viktor Yushchenko's "orange" coalition, orange is just a lighter shade of brown.

posted by John Rosenthal at 11:49 PM

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Transatlantic Intellegencer | 29Dec2004 | John Rosenthal
http://trans-int.blogspot.com:80/2004/12/follow-up-bhhrg-effect-with-update.html

Follow-Up: The BHHRG Effect (with Update)

In "How Did the Blogosphere Get Fooled on Ukraine?", I failed to address one important factor influencing the stubborn refusal of the greater part of the blogosphere to recognize the complexities of the Ukraine situation: namely, the role played by John Laughland and the British Helsinki Human Rights Group (BHHRG), of which Laughland is a trustee, in first raising the alarm about both certain tactics of the "Orange" coalition in Ukraine and certain ideological currents in its ranks: most notably, anti-Semitic and fascistoid currents. Given Laughland’s record of opposition to the Iraq war and his tendency to see American geo-political machinations at work in every regional crisis, he was quickly identified by the more conservative, more pro-American – or, as I put it, anti-anti-American – sectors of the blogosphere as part of the loony “left”. These sectors of the blogosphere – including some of the most influential addresses on the web – were thus immunized from having to examine any of Laughland’s or BHHRG’s factual claims.

Laughland has in fact been known to spin some rather outlandish yarns on the ubiquity and perfidy of American power: yarns that have that hermetic quality that is so characteristic of anti-Americanism as an ideology or indeed of ideology in general. Arthur Chrenkoff has discussed a particularly egregious example of Laughland’s lack of lucidity, to say the least, when it comes to American matters. Nonetheless, if one is to judge by Laughland’s earlier scholarly efforts – notably, his books The Death of Politics, on France under Mitterrand, and The Tainted Source, on what the book's sub-title provocatively labels “the undemocratic origins of the European idea” – Laughland is decidedly not a “leftist” or at least he was not one when he wrote them. His scholarly writings reflect more what one could call a broadly “liberal” inspiration, i.e. in the classical sense of the term, comprising commitments to, among other things, economic liberalism and free trade, the balance of power in international relations and, perhaps most importantly for Laughland’s itinerary, the nation-state as the framework for democratic politics. These are, namely, commitments that ought, if anything, to mark Laughland as a “conservative”. Indeed, as this article from the Guardian illustrates, in “leftist” circles it is precisely Laughland’s and BHHRG’s direct or indirect, substantial or circumstantial, links to conservative figures and institutions – Mrs. Thatcher, Bill Cash, the Spectator, the Wall Street Journal and so on – that is supposed to discredit their factual claims about the Ukraine election crisis. The ideological diversity of the attacks on Laughland and BHHRG in connection with the Ukraine crisis lends support, incidentally, to my hypothesis that what is at stake in the latter escapes the traditional “left”/”right” divide as inherited from the Cold War.

Whereas, moreover, Laughland seems nowadays to be particularly animated by the anti-American Zeitgeist, in geo-political terms he seems at one time or another to have been against just about everything. The Tainted Source is or ought to be a standard text of Euroscepticism and, if memory serves (I am afraid I do not have the text to hand at the moment in order to verify), it ends with a decidedly Russophobe warning of a possible rapprochement between a German-dominated Europe and a renewed Russian empire. So, I suspect that those who have wanted to dismiss Laughland as a shill for Putin would find some cause for pause if they actually examined his writings more carefully.

Unfortunately, Laughland has given free reign to his current idées fixes on American “empire” also in his reporting on the Ukraine elections. Thus, for instance, in an editorial that he has published in various outlets, he says that the “Orange” youth organization PORA was “created and financed by Washington”. No evidence is given in support of this claim. If Laughland has some supporting evidence, I would be curious to see it. Other sources have identified George Soros and the Democratic Party’s National Democratic Institute (NDI) as possible sources of PORA funding. Considering the fervency of their opposition to the current inhabitant of the White House, it would hardly seem reasonable to identify either the Democratic Party or Soros with “Washington”. Moreover, as I have noted here, the NDI itself receives funding not only from the American government, but also from European ones and international institutions. In a similar vein, BHHRG’s report on anti-Semitism in the “Orange” coalition states that Viktor Yushchenko “enjoys the open support of the Bush administration” and implies that George W. Bush in person has “endorsed” Viktor Yushchenko. Again, no evidence is provided to support these claims, and in light of Viktor Yushchenko’s and the “Orange” coalition’s open opposition to the Bush administration’s foreign policy – notably, as concerns Iraq – it is extremely far-fetched to imagine Yushchenko enjoying any such “endorsement” from President Bush. (The outgoing Secretary State Colin Powell is, of course, another matter.)

I say that it is unfortunate that Laughland and BHHRG have indulged such phantasms in their reporting on Ukraine, since their doing so has provided a large part of the blogosphere and the public more generally all the excuse it needed to ignore the massive evidence supporting many of the core claims in their reports on the Ukraine election crisis. All that Laughland’s and BHHRG’s detractors would have needed to do to verify the claims of the latter regarding anti-Semitic and fascistoid currents in the “Orange” coalition, for instance, would have been to click through to the sources provided in the BHHRG report. These include numerous direct citations from both members and key backers of the “Orange” coalition. That this evidence has by and large gone unexamined provides an object lesson in the efficacy of ad hominem argument. Despite its efficacy, however, ad hominem argument is, of course, fallacious, and the common inference made in much of the blogosphere to the effect that the Laughland and BHHRG claims must be false since it was, after all, Laughland and BHHRG that were making them, provides a text book illustration of this fallacy.

What might be called the "BHHRG effect" has also, incidentally, been observed here on Trans-Int. For instance, when I first called attention to the BHHRG report on anti-Semitism and the "Orange", one DavidP. saw fit to leave a comment to the effect that "nobody takes BHHRG seriously". I wrote in reponse: "Well, if BHHRG cites the editor of a major 'pro-opposition' Ukrainian newspaper saying 'I personally have nothing against common Jews, but rather against a small group of Jewish oligarchs who control Ukraine both economically and politically. I believe the point of Zionism today is Jewish control of the world, and we see this process at work in Ukraine today' - then maybe it is about time for somebody to take BHHRG seriously."

I believe my point still stands....

UPDATE: By the way, the "Discoshaman" on the Postmodern Clog also uses the ad hominem approach to evading the specific charges of the BHHRG, "informing" his readers in a 28 November post that "[t]hey're an extremely biased group with no ties [link in the original] to the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights." Since BHHRG does not claim to have any connection to the International Helsinki Federation, the inclusion of the latter point is itself something of a dodge. (The word "Helsinki" in the title of both groups refers to the 1975 "Helsinki Accord", the implementation of which by state parties is officially supposed to be monitored by the OSCE. The BHHRG - which is also known as the "OSCE Watch" - makes no secret of its disdain for the OSCE.) Apart from this single sentence impugning the character of the BHHRG, the "Discoshaman" merely offers a link to another site that is supposed to reveal the group's "actual nature". The linked page offers no more detailed information on the subject than the Discoshaman himself, but includes a link in turn to the Guardian article mentioned above.

In the comments section, however, one of the Discoshaman's readers by the name of Christopher Price contributes to the cause by linking to a detailed exposé on John Laughland and the BHHRG titled "Can a Lobbyist for Dictators Work as a Journalist?" (The title, incidentally, is quite similar to that of the Guardian piece, which calls Laughland a "PR Man" for "Europe's nastiest regimes".) Lest anyone miss the point of his contribution, Christopher Price helpfully adds: "They [the members of the BHHRG] are not nice". The link leads to the Ukrainian Archive website of the anti-Semite and Ukrainian patriot Lubomyr Prytulak, who is also a favorite reference of Holocaust deniers or "revisionists" such as David Irving and Ernst Zundel. The esteem enjoyed by Prytulak in such circles is hardly surprising. His own site, as another reader of the Postmodern Clog points out in reponse to Christopher Price, contains passages such as the following:

Jews have an overpowering motive to gather the evidence. The story of the Jewish Holocaust has been widely disseminated, and yet the argument that the story is in part a fabrication is gaining ground. Thus, Jews have a powerful motive to discover physical evidence of Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Babyn Yar — the motive of demonstrating to the world that they are people of integrity, that they have an abiding committment to truth, that they are not corruptors of history, and that the reparations and sympathy that they have won for themselves have been deserved.

Jews have the means to gather the evidence. The Jewish Holocaust has become possibly a multi-billion dollar industry, such that the funding needed to substantiate the story on which the industry depends can easily be gathered.

As readers will be able to confirm in consulting the text from which the passage is taken, Lubomyr Prytulak's clever implication in this passage is that the required evidence of Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Babyn Yar is not to be found - and hence that some of the key episodes of the Holocaust are "myths".

I discuss Lubomyr Prytulak's "Ukrainian Archives" at greater length here in "Nicholas Kristof and a 'Ukrainian Democrat'". In light of Discoshaman's seeming non-sequitur concerning the lack of ties between the BHHRG and the International Helsinki Federation, it is interesting to note that much of Lubomyr Prytulak's exposé on Laughland and the BHHRG is devoted to demonstrating the "bogus" character of the BHHRG and its unconnectedness to a "genuine" BHHRG (which, however, does not in fact use this acronym) that is a member of the International Helsinki Federation. Prytulak's exposé, furthermore, links the same document from the International Helsinki Federation dissociating itself from the BHHRG as is linked by Discoshaman. The BHHRG is apparently supposed to be an ideologically suspect source for the Discoshaman and his admirers: "extremely biased", as the Discoshaman says. Perhaps it is. But is Lubomyr Prytulak's Ukrainian Archives supposed to be a reliable source, by contrast?

posted by John Rosenthal at 5:17 PM

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Blue Moos | 02Jan2005 | O. Marian
http://bluemoos.blogspot.com/2005/01/song-of-anti-semite-by-vladimir.html

Song of an Anti-Semite by Vladimir Vysotsky

John Rosenthal's writings on international politics have appeared in English, French and German in such publications as Policy Review, Newsday, The Opinion Journal, Les Temps Modernes and Le Figaro, as well as numerous scholarly journals and collective volumes. He has taught Political Philosophy and History of European Philosophy at, among other institutions, New York University, Rutgers University and the École Normale Superieure of Lyon.John Rosenthal is also a devoted Libra Radio listener. He runs a blog called Transatlantic Intelligencer where he publishes his articles. This his from his last post.

"In honor of Lubomyr Prytulak, Silski Visti, and all anti-Semites around the world, and with the kind permission of translator Boris Gendelev, here is a complete English translation of Vladimir Vysotsky's

"Song of an Anti-Semite".


Just being a hoodlum appears so trite
I ought to convert to an anti-Semite
This cause might not yet have the law on its side
But millions of zealots support it worldwide

One would get a thrashing if I so decide
But I need to know who is a Semite
What if they are held in the highest regard
What if for the trouble I get myself barred...


"BTW, I discovered Vysotsky's song by listening to Libra Radio. If you are interested in hearing the music and you ask nicely, Marian at Libra might play it for you".


posted by O. Marian at 20:29