After Auschwitz: Russia + David Duke + Internet = Marketing Racism: Africans, Asians, others high Risk including Death

In June 2004 Carolynne Wheeler reports in the Guardian (UK) the assassination of 64 year old (Russian) scholar and minority rights committee chair, Dr Nikolai Girenko, "shot at point-blank range when his granddaughter called him to speak to a stranger at the door."

Considering the code red state of racist violence in Russia today it's just a distant, particularly bitter memory that Russia's troops liberated survivors of Poland's WWII extermination camp Auschwitz.

My first visit to Warsaw impressed me by the extent to which - in my book - parts of its culture still seem to reflect its Jewish past. As we remember Auschwitz I really want to know if Russia's Duma (lower house of parliament) still promotes and sells David Duke's racist, anti-semitic book. (The Duma website is in Russian & kirilica - cyrillic alphabet.)

Nowadays around 20 April every year Russia becomes even more dangerous than it already is for Black people and other people of colour. April 20 - the anniversary of Adolf Hitler's birth - is also a deadly time for others perceived as racially/ethnically "different", and even just 'foreigners'.

After Hitler's birthday in 1998 "a group of youths broke the teeth of a black US Marine embassy guard." [April 2002 BBC news: "Moscow ups security for Hitler's birthday". The author writes Russia's interior ministry counts about "10,000 Russians" (allegedly mostly youth) as members of neo-nazi groups. In my book 10-thousand seems seriously underestimated.

"Xenophobic attacks occur regularly in Moscow and other large Russian cities, with Africans and people from the Caucasus region among those most often targeted." [From the same Apr 2002 BBC report.]

From Moscow in Jan 2001 Anna Bodkhen wrote in the Boston Globe:

"Twenty years after he resigned as the leader of the Ku Klux Klan, DAVID DUKE appears to have found a new audience for his racist views in Russia: members of the State Duma, the lower house of parliament. Duke's new book, an anti-Semitic tract called ''The Jewish Question Through the Eyes of an American'' has been on sale at the legislature since December [2000]. The sales staff says the glossy black volume is doing a brisk business at $1.70 a copy. ...

"... The book, Duke's first work to be published in Russian, asserts that Russia, being a ''white nation,'' can play a crucial role in saving the ''white race,'' which, he argues, is facing a ''genetic catastrophe.'' What needs to be done, Duke writes, is to recognize the Jewish tendency to strive toward ''supremacy.'' "

I'm looking for news accounts of the letter African embassies in Moscow drafted jointly in 2002/2003 to Russia's foreign ministry, asking for official Russian government action against increasingly violent racist attacks on diplomats, embassy staff and dozens of other Blacks [and others racially/ethnically different] in Russia.

"Even on the metro I'm scared. I can't even go out anymore. Russia is no longer safe for us blacks" - Nigerian student Jane; BBC article, 4 Sept 2001, "Moscow race hate 'on the rise'."

All this culminated in the November 2003 dorm fire in Moscow that killed more than 40 foreign students and injured scores of others.

Comments

[vickie Nailing]

I am a African American Peace Corps volunteer in Uzbekistan and just recently our African American diplomat was attacted by skin-heads in Kiev, Ukraine. I spoke with another African American volunteer who plans on vistiting Moscow and adamantly told her I was against it. I told her that I've been conducting research regarding racism in the former Soviet Union and told her to be very careful. Folks are getting killed! They hate blacks, people from the Caucauses, Asians, any brown-skinned people. In other words, if your not Anglo/Slavic white, they don't want you in their country. I commend the people of color for living in a trully racist country without legal representation or protection, because I won't.

[Henry Beecher]

David and pals are recruiting daily on the net, and we are the sand in his gears:

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