Joseph Stalin: The Soviet Dictator’s Fabricated Antisemitic Doctors’ Plot

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Joseph Stalin: The Soviet Dictator’s…

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From 1951 to 1953, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin launched an antisemitic campaign known as the Doctors’ Plot, which claimed that a cabal of physicians in Moscow — most of them Jews — were conspiring to kill the country’s leaders. The campaign came against a background of rampant antisemitism in the Soviet Union; it ended only with Stalin’s death in March 1953. Not long thereafter, the nation’s new leadership declared that the whole affair had been a fabrication.

Quote: “The anti-Jewish campaign was presumably set in motion by Stalin as a pretext to dismiss and replace Lavrenty Beria, prosecute other Soviet leaders, to launch a massive purge of the Communist Party, and, according to Edvard Radzinsky, even to consolidate the country for a future World War III.” — Wikipedia

Source: Wikipedia

Learn more about the Doctors’ Plot on Wikipedia. >>

Watch “Stalin’s Doctors’ Plot: The Paranoid Conspiracy against the Soviet Jews” [13:40]. Note: There’s a lengthy commercial toward the beginning — worth sitting through to see the rest of this interesting short documentary. >>

Image: history.howstuffworks.com

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Quotable

“[T]he foundations for extremism usually are held in check by various restraints. Societies are not liberal, moderate, progressive, and free because almost all their citizens – let alone their politicians — are liberal, moderate, progressive or committed to the freedoms of others.

“But societies consistently avoid extremism when the infrastructures of freedom are strong: when key institutions and norms encourage a more decent, rights-respective, lawful politics; when powerful social movements and independent media hold leaders to account, expose rather than reinforce political fantasies, and champion the rights of the vulnerable; and when information is produced and scrutinized by scholars, civil servants, and non-governmental organizations devoid of either government repression or vested interests.

“Yet no infrastructure is rigidly immovable, and once key components are eroded and weakened, once sections of the political and cultural elite attempt to mobilize the foundations of extremism, the system of restraints can swiftly collapse.

“While genocide on the scale of the Holocaust is historically exceptional, its central lesson is that the broader danger of extreme atrocities is not. In the words of the great historian Ian Kershaw, the Holocaust ‘lit a warning beacon that still burns brightly: it showed how a modern, advanced, cultured society can so rapidly sink into barbarity… It showed what we are capable of.’ Only by rejecting false narratives of conflict and polarization, and maintaining systems of rights and freedoms for all, can we hope to prevent that capability from once more becoming a reality.”

— Jonathan Leader Maynard in his incisive article “Could It Happen Here?: The Holocaust and Atrocities in the 21st Century” To read the entire article, click here.