On the Azov Battalion: An Open Letter to Lev Golinkin https://t.co/tHrmdfJGdr

— Francis Fukuyama (@FukuyamaFrancis) July 22, 2023

Vladislav Davidzon in Tablet

It was deeply exasperating and disappointing to read the latest screed published in The Forward regarding neo-Nazi influence within the now-infamous Ukrainian Azov battalion. The article, from Mr. Lev Golinkin, was necessarily both exasperating and disappointing to anyone who cares about these issues, and about Ukraine. It was, however, especially disappointing to me, a onetime contributor to The Forward, where I published my first reviews as a fledgling literary critic. The unceasing attacks on the heroic defenders of Ukraine in the midst of the Kremlin’s genocidal war are merely the latest indicator of its protracted decline into irrelevancy....

Ukrainian civic patriotism is fundamentally healthy and strong. It is, in fact, healthy in a way that makes lots of people integrated into the urban, post-historical professional and administrative classes in advanced democracies uncomfortable: a swaggering, self-assured liberal nationalism that unironically deploys the kinds of martial virtues lacking in many deracinated Westerners, and which make the latter feel inadequate and perhaps even emasculated. I understand full well why these virtues make a lot of American progressives (especially self-neutered progressive men) feel uncomfortable. The masculinity and virility exhibited daily by Ukrainian soldiers has not been seen in the West for half a century. After the end of history and time, nice, chummy, and decadent Westerners were not supposed to fear going to war ever again. They had “all-volunteer” armies of impoverished cannon fodder for that.

Fukuyama, and Azov, and Lev Golinkin, previously.

The Zionist Federation of Germany Addresses The New German State (1933) 

The emancipation of the Jews, begun at the end of the 18th, beginning of the 19th century, was based on the idea that the Jewish question could be solved by having the nation-state absorb the Jews living in its midst. This view, deriving from the ideas of the French Revolution, discerned only the individual, the single human being freely suspended in space, without regarding the ties of blood and history or spiritual distinctiveness. Accordingly, the liberal state demanded of the Jew, assimilation into the non-Jewish environment. Baptism and mixed marriage were encouraged in political and economic life. Thus it happened that innumerable persons of Jewish origin had the chance to occupy important positions and to come forward as representatives of German culture and German life, without having their belonging to Jewry become visible.

Thus arose a state of affairs which in political discussion today is termed "debasement of Germandom" or "Jewification."...

Zionism has no illusions about the difficulty of the Jewish condition, which consists above all in an abnormal occupational pattern and in the fault of an intellectual and moral posture not rooted in one's own tradition. Zionism recognized decades ago that as a result of the assimilationist trend. symptoms of deterioration were bound to appear, which it seeks to overcome by carrying out its challenge to transform Jewish life completely.

It is our opinion that an answer to the Jewish question truly satisfying to the national state can be brought about only with the collaboration of the Jewish movement that aims at a social, cultural, and moral renewal of Jewry—indeed, that such a national renewal must first create the decisive social and spiritual premises for all solutions.

Zionism believes that a rebirth of national life, such as is occurring in German life through adhesion to Christian and national values, must also take place in the Jewish national group. For the Jew, too, origin, religion. community of fate and group consciousness must be of decisive significance in the shaping of his life. This means that the egotistical individualism which arose in the liberal era must be overcome by public spiritedness and by willingness to accept responsibility. 

 So predictable, and so fucking boring.