Years ago I was looking up Tarim Basin mummies and one of the first things that showed up on google was an article that was pretty interesting. I clicked on it & read it and looked at the comments underneath. The commentators talked about different historical ethnicities, religions, migrations across Asia, Europe & the Middle East. They weren’t arguments or angry like you usually see on message boards. It was very informative the way people presented various historical events, wars, natural catastrophes, etc.
And then, about 10 posts in, someone was talking about Turks and how a group of them converted to Judaism. They continued on very logically and something was bothering me. Something about that group of Turks. I remember my history prof talking about it years ago and I remembered it was a negative type of remark he’d made. So I opened another window & searched. Turns out it’s a talking point for antisemites.
Remember this was years ago. I was on a computer & google wasn’t yet an international intelligence & data mining operation. It was geared towards users, not investors. When the article had popped up & I clicked it, I was taken straight to the article, which turned out to be in the middle of the page, because it turned out to be a forum and a member had posted the article. So I scrolled to the top of the page & it was called Stormfront. I’d never heard of it before. So I googled it and was surprised to see it was a white Neo Nazi supremacist site. It seemed like it was based in the US. But there were tons of people posting from all over the world. In addition to Americans & Germans, there were Russians, Ukrainians, Norwegians, Finns, Swedes, some Central European & some people from Argentina & Brazil. As I read more posts I saw there posts that were more angry & focused on the supremacy of European ideals.
But the best written posts came from Russians & Ukrainians. They were not written crazidly or angrily. They sounded like they were written by professors of ancient history. They probably were. Most of what they said, I learned by reading up on it (they focused on Central Asian groups, Caucasus groups like ossetians, Georgians, Armenians, Alans. Most of it was true when I later looked it up. But they differentiated groups form each other it with very subtle ways, making lighter skinned & European people the better, smarter, more deservedly victorious groups & the darker Asian Middle Eastern & North Africa groups deservedly defeated.
This was many years ago, like I said. These weren’t people screaming n words or being blatantly antisemitic. This was very will written historical propaganda to draw in educated people. They weren’t trying to preach to he choir. They were looking for new converts among high school & college kids who wrote for their school newspapers. Their audience was budding young republicans who might join their college GOP group & eventually take it over.
I heard them do that in the USSR. News from Moscow aimed at various language speaking tourists in hotels. If you didn’t speak Russian, these were the only thing on your radio. (TV was all in Russian so it was useless to us). Vladimir Pozner was the host of the English language broadcast aimed at Americans. He had a heavy, authentic brooklyn accent. There was no way any actor could’ve perfectly produced an accent if this kind. 90% of it was real news, but it was news that showed the US in a bad light.
