Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi state.

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SENECA (Lucius Annaeus Seneca). First century Roman philosopher. "The customs of that most criminal nation have gained such strength that they have now been received in all lands. The conquered have given laws to the conquerors." (De Superstitione)

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CICERO (Marcus Tullius Cicero). First century B.C. Roman statesman, writer.
Cicero wrote: "The Jews belong to a dark and repulsive force. One knows how numerous this clique is, how they stick together and what power they exercise through their unions. They are a nation of rascals and deceivers."

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Gravestones at a Jewish cemetery in New Brunswick, New Jersey, were vandalized in early January. In all 499 gravestones were broken or knocked over in this crime.
Four times in the past year the Holocaust Memorial in Belarus has been vandalized, most recently on Valentine’s Day, when the flowers around the memorial were set ablaze.
Political extremists in Russia attacked presidential contender and Putin-heir-apparent Dmitry Medvedev by claiming that his mother is Jewish, with one opposition leader stating, “It has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. I just think Russia’s president should be Russian.”
Such incidents only scratch the surface of a social problem which has been pervasive in character and global in scope for centuries. Today discussion of anti-Semitism can easily be lost in debates over Israel and the politics of the Middle East, but the simple fact is that a latent anti-Semitism continues to exist in Europe, North America, and elsewhere. While great strides have been made to eradicate it, the phenomenon has no intention of disappearing.

[I didn’t imagine nor could I believe that 60-plus years after the Shoah we would need to convene conferences – not to deal with anti-Semitism in a historic perspective as a lesson of the past – but as a current event, as a clear and present danger not in one geographic area but on a global scale.

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Интереснейшая статья про Ходорковского из следующего выпуска The New Yorker.

Since that day of release and exile, Khodorkovsky has been living outside Zurich and travelling to capitals throughout the West, making speeches, accepting awards, and hinting broadly at a return to Russia. He will tell anyone who asks that, after a decade in various prison camps, he would not mind displacing the man who sent him there—Vladimir Putin...

Still, Khodorkovsky is preparing for a revolution, convinced that Putin, despite his overwhelming popularity and his support inside the military and the security services, will soon fall from power...

One of his allies is busy working on a post-Putin constitution. Less than a year out of prison, Khodorkovsky has grandly declared that he would guarantee Putin’s safety if he left power peacefully...

After a long day in Paris spent talking to Russian activists and discussing his Presidential ambitions, Khodorkovsky and a few members of his team made their way to Brasserie Lipp, the French establishment’s old standby across town, on Boulevard-Saint-Germain. Khodorkovsky skipped the Bordeaux and foie gras, ordering instead a large glass of vodka and herring with potatoes. He was happy and relaxed. His thoughts were turning to an upcoming trip to New York and Washington. Since he’d already declared his desire to run Russia, someone at the table asked him a question posed to all contemporary politicians: how did he feel about gay marriage? “You know, people are like lemmings,” Khodorkovsky said, his eyes twinkling behind rimless glasses. “Whenever there get to be too many of them, they always find ways of limiting their reproduction.”

Khodorkovsky offered opinions on a number of issues that evening. He thought Obama was too much of a lawyer. He told a couple of salty stories from tyuryaga, “the clink.” He recalled with fondness an old acquaintance, the unfortunate Kenneth Lay, the late C.E.O. of Enron, who was, in Khodorkovsky’s estimation, a thumbs-up kind of guy. The whistle-blowers in that case outraged him: why did people glorify cowardly spies and traitors, and put them on magazine covers? Maria Logan, one of Khodorkovsky’s lawyers, who was in charge of dealing with foreign reporters, looked increasingly pained as her eyes darted from Khodorkovsky to me and back again. “Mikhail Borisovich,” she said, with a strained laugh, “we need to talk—especially before your trip to America!”...

Khodorkovsky told the journalist Chrystia Freeland that all he ever wanted was to become a “red director,” the manager of a large Soviet factory. His father is Jewish, so that career path was unrealistic, but Khodorkovsky learned how to exploit a loophole in the changing way that the Soviet Union financed itself, and that was how he made his fortune. The scheme was described by David Hoffman, then the Washington Post’s Moscow bureau chief, in his book “The Oligarchs.” In 1987, a year after graduating from the institute, Khodorkovsky used his Komsomol connections to get seed capital and open a small business. It took the largely useless virtual credits that the central planners issued to Soviet factories and converted them into highly valuable hard currency. By 1988, when the average salary in the Soviet Union was around a hundred rubles a month, Khodorkovsky’s firm was raking in millions. With two and a half million rubles, he founded Menatep Bank.

By 1989, he had opened an offshore bank account in Switzerland, one of the first of the Russian oligarchs to do so. (Khodorkovsky denies this, saying that he didn’t open his first personal account in the West until 1997.) Through Menatep, Freeland writes, in her book “Sale of the Century,” Khodorkovsky and his business partners bought computers abroad and sold them at home for many times their original value. He also began to import other goods—fake Napoleon cognac, stonewashed jeans—with which he laundered Soviet credits, transforming them into cash. He was exploiting the very system he had served as a Komsomol leader.

In 1992, just after the Soviet Union fell, Khodorkovsky and his partners published a manifesto called “Man with a Ruble,” which declared, “Our compass is profit. Our idol is the financial majesty, capital.”...

Boris Yeltsin’s post-Soviet government implemented radical market reforms but instituted almost no legal structure to control them. Khodorkovsky was perfectly positioned to take advantage. Menatep became an official bank for the Russian Ministry of Finance. Here, too, Khodorkovsky identified a lucrative loophole. One of his lieutenants at Menatep bragged about the scheme to Hoffman. The Ministry of Finance would deposit, say, six hundred million dollars in Menatep Bank, to be disbursed to pay salaries in the regions. Menatep would delay those payments and funnel the six hundred million into high-yield investments for three weeks. In that time, salaries in the regions went unpaid, but Menatep earned millions on the investment...

Khodorkovsky began to amass the bulk of his wealth in 1995, when the oligarchs devised a scheme by which their banks lent money to the Yeltsin government, which was desperate for cash. In exchange for the loan, the banks would hold shares of handpicked state enterprises as collateral. If the government defaulted on the loans, as everyone involved knew it would, the banks would be allowed to sell off the collateral in order to recover their money. Khodorkovsky, who had set his sights on the oil enterprises that were unified under the name Yukos, lent the government $159 million in exchange for forty-five per cent of Yukos. When the government inevitably defaulted, Menatep organized an auction to sell off the collateral––Yukos. With some maneuvering, Khodorkovsky was able to shut foreign investors out of an initial auction, and then disqualified a troika of domestic participants... two years later, Yukos, a company that Menatep had effectively sold to itself, was valued at nine billion dollars.[/color]

Then, according to an article published in Foreign Affairs, in 2000, by Lee Wolosky, who was at the time the deputy director of the Economic Task Force on Russia at the Council on Foreign Relations, Yukos began using a tactic called transfer pricing. Yukos would buy oil from the extraction companies at an artificially low price and sell it abroad at the much higher market price. In early 1999, Yukos bought two hundred and forty million barrels of oil from its subsidiaries for $1.70 a barrel. It sold the oil abroad for fifteen dollars a barrel. In the first half of that year alone, according to Wolosky, Yukos made eight hundred million dollars.Khodorkovsky says that this was not illegal under Russian law at the time...

Instead of paying taxes, which could have been used to repair the decaying Soviet infrastructure, Khodorkovsky and his colleagues were depositing the funds in an offshore network. “Whole regions of Russia are being impoverished” by such tactics...

Vladimir Petukhov, the mayor of Neftyugansk, where Yukos had its main production facility, appealed to the Kremlin to investigate Yukos’s practices. In May, 1998, he led a protest in Neftyugansk that disrupted a Yukos shareholders’ meeting. Several weeks later, he was shot to death on the street. Police labelled the murder a contract killing. Khodorkovsky has consistently denied any role in Petukhov’s death and has never been charged with the murder. His former chief of security, however, is serving a life sentence for it ...

When, in 1998, the Russian government defaulted on its debt, provoking a severe economic crisis, Yukos barely survived. According to Hoffman, Khodorkovsky was deeply in debt to Western banks, and he dodged his creditors. One of his tactics involved the transfer of almost all Yukos’s assets to obscure shell companies, which left his American shareholders and his Western creditors holding only the company’s debt. Another involved flooding the market with millions of new Yukos shares, diluting Western shareholders out of existence.

Despite the dubious business dealings and the less than altruistic push to democratize Russia, Khodorkovsky became Russia’s most famous political prisoner. For years, his lawyers smuggled to Russian and Western newspapers high-minded treatises that he had written. Khodorkovsky also funded an effective public-relations operation, with representatives all over the world. He exchanged letters with well-known liberal intellectuals such as the novelists Boris Akunin and Lyudmila Ulitskaya and the Polish dissident Adam Michnik. Whenever Khodorkovsky’s lawyers had a hearing in Moscow, crowds of supporters showed up to rally at the courthouse. Suddenly, the man who nearly everyone believed had fleeced the country of billions had become for Russian liberals a symbol of Kremlin persecution...

A couple of weeks later, in early October, Khodorkovsky went on a political tour of Washington and New York. He gave the keynote speech at a meeting of Freedom House, in Washington. He dined with Washington’s foreign-policy establishment and complained about what he saw as the Obama Administration’s weakness in the face of Putin’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy. In New York, at the Council on Foreign Relations, he appealed to the U.S. to return to a position of moral strength, recalling the simple verities of the Cold War...

What did he have in mind for Russia? He was looking for “points of consolidation.” He wanted to unite the ten or fifteen per cent of Russians who are Western “adaptants,”...

As for his sins, he said, “My answer is very simple: ‘Guys, I’ve done my time. And other people’s time. And done time for all your notions of morality.’ And, to those who say I should’ve done more time, you try doing ten years. But I have the kind of experience that a lot of people don’t. I have managerial experience, I have the experience of managing in a crisis, I have the experience of surviving in a complicated situation, and look: success, success, success, success. Yes, in the confrontation with the machine of state, I lost. I apologize for that.” He looked at me, pleased with his answer, and crushed the empty Red Bull can.

When I asked him about Putin, he replied, “There were a couple of instances in prison when I said, ‘It’s better for you to not do this, because if you do this, you’d better kill me.’ ” As he spoke, his voice diminished nearly to a whisper. Employees of Yukos used to say that, when you can barely hear Khodorkovsky, that’s when he is at his angriest. “I just don’t like games without rules. Either you play by the rules or you play without rules. There’s no middle ground.”

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/12/remote-control-2