A Weaponized Immigrant's Month in Review #3
While everyone is preparing for the end of the wold, I realized that I’ve been forgetting to do my monthly recaps.
It’s March 1. I’m in San Francisco visiting my parents right now. Seems like the city is really starting to freak out about the virus. My folks say that Costco is full of people stocking up on basic goods and water. Meanwhile, the mayor has been doing TV interviews from Chinatown to tamp down people’s fears about coming into contact with the city’s Chinese community. In our globalized age, pandemics come with xenophobia and nativism. Or maybe that’s always been true.
Anyway…while everyone’s preparing for the end of the wold, I’ve been going viral on Twitter. I also just realized that I’ve been forgetting to do my monthly Immigrants as a Weapon recaps. Gotta have priorities!
So here are my top 13 picks from the last several months — in no particular order. Enjoy!
New Year in Los Angeles — “Kinda weird for a Soviet immigrant like me to realize that you fled one failing society only to end up in a society that was also entering an accelerated phase of decline and degradation.”
Twitter censored my tweet, locked my account — “Surveillance Valley meets Immigrants as a Weapon…and Surveillance Valley wins.”
Weaponizing American Jews — “My grandfather Aaron was active in Jewish Communist circles in Ukraine. He was almost certainly against Zionism…”
Check me out on Media Roots Radio talking about the weaponization of immigrants — “We discuss all sorts of things — everything from Yakov Smirnoff, to my immigrant history, to to America and Israel’s use of Soviet Jews like me as pawns in their own geopolitical battles.”
Julia Ioffe: The Weaponized Immigrant Journalist — “In another life — if her family hadn’t fled the Soviet Union — Julia would have been very successful and happy pumping out propaganda for Putin and his oligarchs on Russian state TV.”
Weaponizing Fascism for Democracy: The Beginning — “Here I go back to the end of World War II — to the days when the weaponization of nationalism was just beginning to crystalize as an American foreign policy strategy.”
Trump's Impeachment, Ukraine, and War With Russia — “If America doesn’t fight Russia and kill Russians in Ukraine, Russian tanks are going to roll through the Donbass, past Kiev, into Poland, then Germany and France…and then get on a boat and sail all the way to America.”
Auschwitz, the Holocaust, and the Fog of Propaganda War — “There's a lot of western historical revisionism about the Soviet Union and World War II. As a Soviet Jew, I’ve come to expect it. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t bother me.”
Respectable Racism: Only backward savages in Russia have oligarchs. Civilized Americans have “rich guys.”— “Is Michael Bloomberg really an oligarch? And is America even capable of having oligarchs? It’s not that kind of country, is it?”
Check me out on Filmsuck talking about a new Netflix doc: “The Devil Next Door”— “We talked about The Devil Next Door, a new Netflix doc series that tells the convoluted story of Nazi collaborator and death camp guard John (aka Ivan) Demjanjuk.”
Nazi collabo families and racist propaganda in the New York Times — “A Russophobic New York Times journalist married to Canada’s powerful Nazi-loving Deputy Prime Minister? It was a match made in heaven!”
Episode #1: the Ukrainian Canadian left & Chrystia Freeland's Nazi grandpa — “I talk to Alex Boykowich, who is one of the people responsible for surfacing information about Chrystia Freeland’s Nazi collaborator grandfather a few years ago.”
Fascist Bumfight in Israel — “This is what happens when you run a state based on religious fundamentalism and ethnonationalism.”
—Yasha Levine
PS: Check out the last recap here. And thank you to all my subscribers. Sign up if you haven’t already!
I am leaving SF tomorrow, but looking forward to catching up with the articles Yasha has left in the next couple of weeks.