“‘Civil Wars’ happen when the victimized are armed.
Genocide happens when they are not.”
You have two options:
1) Deny the unpredictability of life and manufacture your own false sense of security
2) Accept the vagaries of life and learn to live with them”
Steve Pavlina
Some Jewish History:
Jewish families, fleeing religious persecution (mostly in Europe and the Ottoman Empire), have been immigrating to the USA since the early 1800s. Many fought during the American Civil War, on both sides!
In the early part of the Twentieth Century, the Russian Army was a brutal place (much as it still is today). “Traditional” Russian wartime strategy was to combine an incompetent officer corps (due to rampant nepotism), stupid tactics, and the routine pitiable sacrifice of masses of soldiers (that hasn’t changed much either).
Russian army recruitment quotas had to be filled, and among Jews it was the poor ones who were drafted, because they couldn’t afford to pay required bribes.
From that depressing domain, and desperate to escape the Czar’s (and later Lenin’s) Army, we saw a large (5,000,000 at least) Jewish immigration to America from 1880-1920.
Jewish religious leaders of the era actually discouraged such emigration, particularly to America, as they saw America as a place where Jews would lose their piety, traditions, and eventually their identity.
Jews who came over here during those years possessed a naive but universal sentiment, long-held by Jewish families, that Jews represent such a minuscule minority, that their only hope is to be so useful to local ruling regimes that their presence is tolerated, even protected.
Today, this is laughingly referred to as “The Pre-Holocaust View!”
By John Farnam
