200 Years Together

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's book 200 Years Together is a history of Jews in Russia up to the disastrous, genocidal Communist (Jewish) revolution.

The backstory of the Jews in Russia (and across the world) is very interesting and illuminates the general pattern of European History since the collapse of the Roman Empire.

The germanic tribes, like the Swabians, the Visigoths, the Saxons supposedly moved into Europe from the Black Sea region in the early centuries AD. Nobody really has an explanation for why that happened. There are hints about how it happened in various sources, but the aggregate movements of the people are pretty hard to explain. It seems like the home base would send out young people to seek their opportunities abroad as populations grew.

Anyway, shortly after they settled in Europe, their traditional way of life was replaced by force and persuasion, and they became Christians and were drafted into new nations and new systems of economic organization. Their tribal religion and identity was wiped away so by around 1000 AD there were no pagans left in Europe.

Christianity was like a highly edited and stripped down version of the prior era of classical civilization, and that legacy was split in two pieces between the Eastern and Western Empire. The west was the Latin civilization, and the east was the Greek. The catholic church ended up as a sort of meta-state and super NGO to the newly emerging western nation states, like France. It was like the main-stream-media and CFR today.

The Jewish people went through a parallel passage from the classical world to the medieval world. However, their tribe had been destroyed by the Romans as a military force in the early century AD while the Germans had warred with the Romans and also served as mercenary forces and even officers in the Roman Empire. It seems like the left-over elements of Jewish society moved up into the Black Sea region and merged with one of the tribes there--the Ashkenazi.

While eastern and western Europe were christianizing and forced into new nations, the Jewish tribe remained independent. I don't know if there's a good explanation of this anywhere. The germanic tribes in the west had their ancient religion removed at sword point. For some reason that didn't happen to the Jews. You could probably explain and understand the whole of the modern world if you knew how and why that happened.

For the next several centuries, the jews ended up as merchants and intermediaries between the nations, and between rulers and the serfs. (Solzhenitsyn keeps hinting that they really worship Hermes/Mercury.) In Russia, France, and England that happened. I don't know the history of other countries in Europe, but I assume it happened there too.

The 200 Years Together backstory shows the uneasy and comical relationship between the aristocracy and rulers of the Russian Empire and the jews, who lived in a parallel society with it's own laws and rules and leadership. It's sort of similar to the interaction of the US government and the native tribes in the United States, except the jewish people had strategic assets to bargain with, like established trade and intelligence networks, plus bribery and blackmail operations. In the Russian Empire there were endless attempts and regulation and integration of the jews as a body of people, rather than as individuals. This same ethnic minority integration has been going on forever in the United States too. It seems to be a feature of multi-ethnic empires and nation states.

The "Christianized" Europeans were already long conquered by the rulers of the different nations and Empires of Europe and formed up into subjects and nominal citizens of nations like France and England by the 19th century, while the Jews were still separate people. Even in the United States in the civil war, Jews were operating as a separate nation in the South.

The Jews in 19th and 20th century Europe gradually turned into a modern version of the Christian churches and assumed their functional role as an intermediary and news provider, and teaching of values to children via mass media and the entertainment industry. It's basically the inversion of the church's Christian teaching. That brings us to now, when the whole western culture has turned rotten and governments and corporations are dysfunctional and corrupt. By the way, it's not "the jews" that corrupt everything, it's prosperity. Since the jews seem to excel at being merchants, they're  most prevalent in the most merchant-like times, which are the most prosperous, and the most corrupt.

It seems like the world of man is sometimes a stable mix of these different cultures and groups but easily goes out of equilibrium. The Roman world expanded, but went insane and imploded once it got Greeked out. Then we got the germanic christian world which expanded around the globe and established links among all the peoples' of the world, but appears to be going insane and imploding now because it's also getting Greeked and Jewed out.

What comes next? I don't think there's any bridge to the Sci-Fi future that's sold by talking heads like Bill Gates. Imperial Russia's hamfisted and sometimes earnest and well meaning attempts to integrate the jews or the United States repeated attempts to engineer life outcomes of various minority groups, and the repeated mega failures of central planning seem to auger against the technocrat schemes.

I think deep down, the germanic people hate the corporate culture of this current moment in the story of the western people. The corporate culture hates the germanic people too. This is at the root of the rural and urban political split in United States politics. I don't even think this split is Jew versus Christian. It's really the urban classical Mediterranean world and its chronic Empire parasite versus the Germanic tribes all over again.