Immigration as Weapon (vaņiki by other means)
Ar nenogurstošo Rietumu nopelšanu un revizionismu Jaša Levins ir sevišķi kaitinošs, jo tādi ir visi, kas zāģē zaru uz kura sēž vai apdzied lielo padomju "tautu brālību". Tomēr, ja atsijā kaitniecisko ideoloģiju, izklāstītie fakti ir interesanti paši par sevi, pat ja tos vērtē pilnīgi pretēji — viens kā pierādījumu Rietumu ļaunuma impērijai, otrs kā vēlamu parādību. Tostarp, tas sniedz labu ieskatu ASV "lawfare" caur t.s. "Jackson–Vanik amendment".

Soviet Jews were seen as a means to an end. We were seen as a weapon.

The US government’s push to liberate Soviet Jews is not normally seen as an attempt to leverage and weaponize nationalist identity against the Soviet Union — but that is precisely what it was.

In the 1960s and 70s, a Jewish nationalist and cultural movement began to take off organically in the Soviet Union. It was highly illegal and started out in secrecy. People went to jail for it and had their lives destroyed. But it kept growing. Combined with USSR’s systemic antisemitism, repression of Jewish culture and language, and a crackdown on activists who wanted to emigrate to Israel, this cultural and nationalist awaking began to congeal into a small but committed anti-communist and anti-Soviet movement — with its own underground samizdats, leaders, and organizations.

Israel was the first to offer covert support for the movement in the hopes of using Soviet Jewish immigration as an untapped demographic weapon against what its leaders saw as the Palestinian population threat.

But in America people had much grander plans for it.

As the movement grew in the Soviet Union and received massive support of the American-Jewish community, an increasingly powerful neoconservative foreign policy element saw it as an opportunity. Here was a ready-made humanitarian cause with a powerful built-in domestic support base that could be leveraged to first derail Richard Nixon’s efforts at detente and then to ratchet up America’s economic and military pressure against the USSR, with the ultimate goal of bringing the Red Menace down once and for all.

So began a full-spectrum attempt — which included economic sanctions, diplomatic maneuvering, and psychological warfare ops — to turn Jewish national identity and Zionism into a geopolitical weapon. The program first got going under President Jimmy Carter, but really came into its own under Ronald Reagan.

It was incredibly subversive and successful, puncturing the Soviet Union’s restrictive controls on immigration and helping further discredit the Soviet project.

Obviously most Soviet Jews didn’t pay much attention to the geopolitical dimension of the support that we were getting from America. But their lack of knowledge didn’t change the fact that as far as America’s foreign policy blob was concerned, Soviet Jews were of no real importance, not outside of Cold War politics. My fate, the fate of my family, and the fate of hundreds of thousands of Jews like us…well, we only mattered because we were useful in the fight against the Soviet Union.

This covert plan to utilize immigrants and nationalist movements against communism was officially launched by President Truman in 1948. The scheme was cooked up by the leading lights of American foreign policy — people like George Kennan, Allan Dulles, Frank Wisner, and Richard Helms. And it was run by the CIA, in partnership with the State Department and US Army Intelligence. Under programs masterminded by these men, thousands of Nazi collaborators and fascist-friendly immigrants streamed into Northern America.

They came from Ukraine, Hungary, Croatia, Latvia, Lithuania — you name it. Some were given military training and used for black ops. Others were put to work running intelligence networks and psychological warfare projects, including CIA propaganda stations like Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe. The CIA bankrolled all sorts of front groups in these communities. They published books, magazines, and served as cultural hubs, and engaged in a sustained effort to whitewash their history of Nazi collaboration and mass murder and to rebrand themselves into democratic activists fighting communist totalitarianism. And it worked. The idea behind supporting these groups was simple: use their nationalist, ethnic, sectarian, and religious identity as an anti-communist propaganda weapon — a kind of ideological and cultural crowbar.

America’s focus on Soviet Jews came way later — decades after these larger covert programs had been established. But the more I looked at it, the more I began to see the US government’s efforts to “free” Soviet Jews were just one microscopic part of this much larger foreign policy strategy.

https://yasha.substack.com/p/immigrants-as-a-weapon-global-nationalism