Wikipedia is my go-to site for checking facts quickly, as it is for many. But I’ve seen enough wonky stuff on it that I wouldn’t trust it on controversial matters, and that’s the topic of this post. (I have long wanted to go through its “Evolution” page to check for accuracy, but I’ve never gotten around to it.)
Tablet is a pretty reliable source, and in this piece, Izabella Tabarovsky argues that Wikipedia has distorted facts and material about Judaism and Israel, all in a way hostile to Israel—and the truth. Even Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, claims that the site’s new leadership (yes, there are authorities above the editors) are “clowns” and that its vaunted neutrality is a sham.
Tabarovsky is identified this way:
Izabella Tabarovsky is a scholar of antizionism and contemporary left antisemitism. She is a Senior Fellow with the Z3 Institute for Jewish Priorities and a Research Fellow with the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and ISGAP.
Click the headline to read:
The thesis:
Wikipedia’s key principles are codified in “five pillars,” which include writing from a neutral point of view and using reliable sources to document key arguments. Another pillar urges editors to treat each other with respect and seek consensus on contentious topics. Disputes are resolved by volunteer administrators and can be escalated all the way to the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee (aka Wikipedia’s “Supreme Court”). Punishment can include bans varying in severity and length of time.
Today, Jewish people and the Jewish story are under an unprecedented global assault, and Wikipedia is being used as a weapon in this war.
. . .Wikipedia also prides itself on radical transparency: Every edit can be seen by everyone on a specially designated page.
Closer to home, what’s clear is that Wikipedia’s articles are now badly distorted, feeding billions of people—and large-language models that regularly train on the site, such as ChatGPT—with inaccurate research and dangerously skewed narratives about Jews, Jewish history, Israel, Zionism, and contemporary threats to Jewish lives.
The first sign of the problem to Tablet:
In June, a group of Wikipedia editors and administrators rated the Anti-Defamation League as “generally unreliable” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and “roughly reliable” on antisemitism “when Israel and Zionism are not concerned.” They also evaluated the ADL’s database of hate symbols, deeming it as “reliable for the existence of a symbol and for straightforward facts about it, but not reliable for more complex details, such as symbols’ history.”
The anonymous editors, with unknown backgrounds or academic credentials, accused the ADL of “conflating” anti-Zionism with antisemitism and relying on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which, they claimed, brands all criticism of Israel as antisemitic and stifles pro-Palestinian speech. They also accused the ADL of “smearing” Students for Justice in Palestine by calling on universities to investigate whether the group provided material support to Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.
You can read the linked articles, and also the Wikipedia article on the Anti-Defamation League, which beefs that the ADL conflates antisemitism with anti-Zionism, a claim that no longer carries much water for me. (It’s a pity that the Munk Debate on this issue, in which Douglas Murray and Natasha Hausdorff, taking the side of equivalence, trouncedtheir opponents, is no longer free online, though bits of it are; see here and here.)
Apparently the Wikipedia editors who are most persistent on matters Jewish in Wikipedia are those who are anti-Israel, and have simply worn down their opponents. Especially in foreign-language articles, which have some influence, the errors persist for years and years. For example:
In 2004, a spokesperson for the Polish branch of Wikimedia Foundation created an article in English describing an extermination camp in Warsaw, where the Nazis gassed 212,000 Poles. The story—a fiction—remained on the site for 15 years before the Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed the problem in 2019. By then, the article had been translated into multiple languages, and its claims incorporated into multiple other Wikipedia articles. An estimated half a million people got exposed to the lie.
Last year two historians published a bombshell paper demonstrating how a group of ideologically driven editors spent years systematically distorting Polish Jewish history across multiple Wikipedia articles to align it with far-right Polish nationalist preferences. [JAC: It is now against the law in Poland to argue that the Poles helped the Nazis experminate the Jews, even though that’s true.] Working in concert, the group falsified evidence, promoted marginal self-published sources, created fake references, and advanced antisemitic stereotypes. It whitewashed “the role of Polish society in the Holocaust,” “minimize[d] Polish antisemitism, exaggerate[d] the Poles’ role in saving Jews,” blamed Jews for the Holocaust, and generally steered “Wikipedia’s narrative on Holocaust history away from sound, evidence-driven research, toward a skewed version of events,” wrote the authors, Jan Grabowski and Shira Klein.
Wikipedia’s mechanisms proved entirely inadequate in the face of this motivated, organized assault. Working “as a monolith,” the group manipulated the procedures, coordinated edits, and rallied to each other’s support when challenged. Users seeking to correct the group’s edits found themselves outnumbered and outmaneuvered. “Challenging the distortionists takes a monumental amount of time, more than most people can invest in a voluntary hobby,” wrote Grabowski and Klein. The distortionists exhausted their opponents with endless debates, aggressive “battleground behavior,” rudeness, and “mass deletions,” leading some to simply give up on editing the topic. Volunteer administrators called upon to resolve conflicts were unqualified to adjudicate content issues and unwilling to invest the hours required to sort through sources.
. . . . The most incomprehensible part about this is that it took Wikimedia Foundation 14 years from the time the first complaints began to surface to do something about it.
Tabarovsky also argues that the “reliable” sources for matters Judaic on Wikipedia are liberal sources known for being anti-Israel, including the NYT, BBC, The New Yorker, and The Guardian. Those are in fact the very sources that I consider most dubious on Israel news. Conservative Sources like the New York Post and Fox News are rated unreliable, though often news that makes Israel looks bad (like the false claim that an Israeli strike demolished Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza) are loudly promoted by these organs of the MSM. More:
This ranking tells us what kind of slant we can expect in Wikipedia’s articles about Israel, Zionism, and anti-Zionist antisemitism. In the wake of Oct. 7, “generally reliable” sources have trafficked in disinformation, as when The New York Times splashed the Al Ahli hospital bombing hoax over its front page, helping spark violent anti-Jewish riots across the world; or when The New Yorker legitimized Holocaust inversion—a long-running staple of anti-Zionist propaganda originating in the 1960s USSR. Conservative outlets, on the other hand, have produced reporting that tells Israel’s side of the story and have looked far more critically at the anti-Israel campus protests. The “generally unreliable” Washington Free Beacon has arguably produced the most extensive reporting on the protests. Wikipedia editors, however, are warned against using the Beacon as a source, which is why of the 353 references accompanying Wikipedia’s article on the pro-Palestinian campus protests, the overwhelming majority is to liberal and far-left sources plus Al Jazeera.
Here’s how it works: as we know, among “progressive” Leftists, which are the most anti-Israel group in politics save groups like the Black Muslims, it is the loudest and most persistent group who triumphs. One example:
One-sided sources are just one among a host of problems in Wikipedia articles related to Oct. 7 and the war that followed. In a World Jewish Congress report released in March, Dr. Shlomit Aharoni Nir documents numerous ways in which relevant Wikipedia entries have become de facto anti-Israel propaganda. From biased framing to omissions of key facts to stressing anti-Israel examples while ignoring the Israeli side of the story, to promoting fringe academic perspectives on Zionism—Wikipedia’s editors and administrators have actively worked to subvert the site’s neutrality policy on this topic. As in other instances, conflicts and bullying behavior predominate, with Israeli editors describing uniquely “hostile and disrespectful” treatment. Israeli users, who are most knowledgeable about the Oct. 7 events, often found themselves locked out of editing key articles, which were open for editing only to users who’d made over 500 edits. Several editors told Aharoni Nir that there were a number of activists who operated anonymously and were “responsible for the anti-Israel tone.”
Among some of the most troubling instances Aharoni Nir documented were calls for deletions of crucial articles. These included articles describing individual massacres on Oct. 7, such as those at Netiv HaAsara, Nir Yitzhak, Yakhini, and other kibbutzim and moshavim, as well as articles describing Hamas beheadings. Some of the calls succeeded. So did the call to erase the article about Nazism in Palestinian society (a “documented historical and sociological phenomenon,” notes Aharoni Nir). By contrast, the article normalizing equations between Israel and Nazi Germany—a propagandistic concept that has been weaponized against Jews for decades––remains on the site. Meanwhile, Wikipedia’s Arabic site openly abandoned the principle of neutrality last December when it temporarily went dark in solidarity with the Palestinians, then added the Palestinian flag to its logo and posted a pro-Palestinian statement at the top. Israel’s Wikipedia community protested. Wikimedia Foundation—you guessed it—did nothing.
There are other subtle distortions in articles about Israel, including the one about the Six-Day War in 1967. As Malgorzata noted,
“There is not a word about the threats from both Egyptian and Syrian authorities and media about obliterating Israel. The falsification is very subtly done – as if Israel didn’t have a genuine reason to launch a preemptive strike.”
There’s a lot more to read and, in the end, Tabarovsky argues that one of the world’s most-consulted sources of information is biased to the extend that it’s turning itself “into the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.”
Maybe I should have a look at Wikipedia’s “evolution” article, though I’m pretty sure that it hasn’t been ideologically captured by creationists or IDers. There are enough pro-science editors out there to prevent any gross distortions from happening. But do be aware of Wikipedia’s coverage of things about Israel.
***********
UPDATE: Oops, I made the mistake of looking at the Evolution article in Wikipedia and found this right at the beginning:
Evolution by natural selection is established by observable facts about living organisms: (1) more offspring are often produced than can possibly survive; (2) traits vary among individuals with respect to their morphology, physiology, and behaviour; (3) different traits confer different rates of survival and reproduction (differential fitness); and (4) traits can be passed from generation to generation (heritability of fitness).[7] In successive generations, members of a population are therefore more likely to be replaced by the offspring of parents with favourable characteristics for that environment.
This is a hypothesis that doesn’t really establish the fact of natural selection, but suggests its likelihood. To establish natural selection’s existence, you must document it empirically. Also, the fact that “more oftfspring are often produced than can possibly survive” is, as pointed out by Ronald Fisher, more a result of natural selection than an observation that leads one to conclude that natural selection must occur. (You have a lot of kids because there are many things going after them.) I wouldn’t have begun that article using this as evidence for evolution by natural selection. Further, evolution can occur by means other than natural selection, including genetic drift (which they do mention) and meiotic drive (which they don’t). Overall, however, the article looks pretty good, and of course every evolutionist will have a beef that their favorite topics aren’t covered properly.
Wikipedia is indeed unreliable on any “woke” issue. This is simply because the woke put far more effort into controlling the narrative. They consider themselves to be on a mission to set the world to rights, and thus there are examples of woke editors making literally tens of thousands of edits.
A favourite tactic, as noted above, is to laud as “reliable” the sources that reflect their worldview, while deprecating as “unreliable” anything counter-woke, such that, under wikipedia policies, it cannot be cited as a source.
I just looked up the wiki on Transgender, a lengthy entry, but I only got as far as the first sentence: “assigned at birth”.
Yep. Wikipedia’s misogyny is appalling. Everything from removing articles about accomplished women (even a Nobel Laureate, but of course her male co-Laureates have entries) to transgender extremism runs rampant. Part of the problem is that extremists apparently have nothing better to do (IOW, paid employment) than to alter and try to remove any articles that they don’t like. So many pro-woman orgs are listed on Wikipedia as “hate groups.”
I guess, at the end of the day, I am not willing to rely on Wikipedia for anything important.
As long as it can tell us who won the 2016 World Series, then it has done its job.
Not if it distorts history to an ideological end. People use it for a lot more than looking up baseball facts.
Wikipedia has, unfortunately, been distorting contentious topics for a very long time. Pointing out the ideological skew of this—as with so much else you do—is always worthwhile, especially, as you note, because Wiki is so widely used. Wait until people start relying consistently on AI that was trained on biased and other dubious sources.
As to baseball facts, I stand by my nod to the home team.
DrBrydon: I think that that is a bit sweeping. I use Wikipedia extensively for physics and mathematics (especially statistics). Years ago I used to cross-check what I found there, but found it sufficiently reliable on those subjects that now I rarely bother.
Right. It’s fine on non-controversial subjects.
It seems the far right got in there in Poland though on an area that shouldn’t be controversial.
Wikipedia has always been abused, but it’s getting worse. I used to work with the ‘Guerilla Skeptics on Wikipedia’ [GSoW], a group run by Susan Gerbic to fix the woo on the science pages and to add profiles of renowned skeptics.
We always added facts and citations and had our updates checked and proofread by the group, but we were still challenged regularly by the anti science mob. We often had to go through the Wiki appeals process, but having the truth on our side helped. We used many of the techniques, you refer to, like backing each other up at appeals. But processes created and used by honest people can be used by the dishonest too.
There are some pages that are ‘guarded’ more than others, and it’s harder to do updates to them as they are controlled by subgroups. Israel/Palestine was one of them. Guarding pages is designed to stop random people from updating them with nonsense, but when the guardians themselves are bigoted, it all goes down hill very quickly.
I rarely use Wikipedia now and, when I do, I generally go straight to the citations list to look at the quality of them to see whether the page can even be trusted.
Years ago, sent Wiki two photo of People’s Party candidate Dr Benjamin Spock, and his running mate Gore Vidal. They used the one of Vidal, but not an equally nice one of Spock, taken a minute apart. Didn’t let me know why they didn’t use the other one, or acknowledge the receipt of the photos. Not that it made any difference, but I always wondered why.
Concerning the misuse of labeling sources as unreliable, I recommend this outstanding article: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin/comments
I suspect the concept of categorising sources as being either reliable or unreliable does more harm than good. The worth of news media varies a lot depending on the subject, and one should always expect many mistakes since journalists usually write about topics they know little about. But books and academic papers can also have massive shortcomings. An anonymous blogger may well be better informed than a respected expert. Better to judge on a case-by-case basis.
Yes. I’ve read several pieces about this, including a piece from the ADL describing how Wikipedia labeled it as “generally unreliable” regarding the current conflict. (I get frequent e-mails from the ADL.) The ADL takes positions that cast Israel in a favorable light, but does that make them “generally unreliable?” Being partisan (toward Israel) doesn’t make them unreliable, but some Wikipedia authors may equate the two.
While a particular organization’s status as a reliable source can be a matter of debate, the apparently systematic effort to cast Israel in a bad light is another matter entirely. In the tech world there is the concept of “denial of service.” This is where a bad actor uses technology (or just social engineering) to overwhelm a system so that it cannot reliably be used. An example might be to blast out millions of fake logins to a financial web site so as to slow the web site so much that people can’t make trades. It’s easy to imagine other examples, some of which have been real. It seems to me that Wikipedia is vulnerable to a form of “denial of service” whereby bad actors overwhelm the platform with distorted or fake narratives. Without an army of good guys paying attention and fixing every distortion, the distortions and falsehoods accumulate.
Wikipedia needs to do something to fix this phenomenon (and not only regarding Israel, but across the board) but I don’t know what.
As a micro-example, I’ve fixed the name of my hometown a couple of times (it’s Binghamton, *not* Binghampton), but the number of people out there correcting this common error are few, so the error gets resurrected and persists.
Comment by Greg Mayer
Re the Wikipedia Evolution article, the quoted paragraph is pretty much a direct adaptation of Ernst Mayr’s explication of Darwin’s argument for evolution by natural selection; see, for example, Figure 1, “Darwin’s Explanatory Model of Evolution through Natural Selection”, on p. 72 of One long Argument (Harvard University Press, 1991).
Item (1) in the paragraph is Mayr’s “Fact 1”, item (2) is “Fact 4”, item (3) is Mayr’s “Inference 2”, item (4) is “Fact 5”, and the final sentence is Mayr’s “Inference 3”. I use Mayr’s scheme, slightly modified, in my own evolution class when teaching about natural selection. The Wikipedia article leaves out some of Mayr, and the ordering is changed a bit, but there’s a strong resemblance. And, with Wikipedia, an endless number of edits by random people can change the force and direction of the argument form it’s original presentation.
I haven’t looked at the Evolution article myself for some time, but my impression was that there were enough people keeping tabs on it to prevent creationists getting hold of it, and that it was OK, which concurs with Jerry’s current look. In Wikipedia, the key to reliability is the attractiveness of the topic to axe-grinders: if it is attractive to one school of unopposed axe-grinders you get distortion; if it is attractive to two or more schools of axe-grinders, you get edit wars, instability of content, and victory of the most tenacious and numerous camp. For example, I’ve never trusted Wikipedia as a source for the history of the Balkans.
GCM
I’ve always been leary of Wikipedia. I think back to when it burst on the scene and was all the rage because it was “crowd sourced”. I wondered what was so great about *that*. Without some stringent checks and balances, which I was never sufficiently convinced existed, I never felt comfortable relying on it for fact checking. It’s always seemed ripe for manipulation to me.
It’s a fascinating time to be alive. Is that another old Chinese curse like “May you live in interesting times’? I now don’t trust anything I hear, see or read. My favourite saint is ‘doubting’ Thomas. It’s quite a transformation to suffer – with many others – a bizarre condition that might once have invited a diagnosis of marginal paranoia. I was well aware that Wikipedia rightly disclaimed primary sources from its founding, but it was a briilant idea and useful in getting started on a plethora of subjects. I now use Wiki with caution, checking its chequered record of ‘view history’ – edit-wars – regularly. Every podcast, newspaper (I still read them), broadcast, I now check for provenance, as I do for peer reviewed papers in every field. Of course this is not original. Doubting everything was not invented recently, e.g.”All I know is I know nothing” Socrates. I’m intrigued as to how in a world where AI is becoming ubiquitous in every sphere, able to create initially, and even enduringly, credible images, arguments and data, what extra sensibilities and procedures are required of a searcher for truth.
Malgorzata is right about 67. Further, there was a “circus atmosphere” in Cairo as the Egyptians were running up to their attempted war of annihilation. Oh the joys of expecting to throw the Jews into the sea!
I’d expect Wikipedia to fall into the pro-Pal-terrorism hole. There has been a lot of talk in right wing spaces about how irretrievably woke their new CEO is. Pro-terrorism (“b/c they’re mar-gin-al-ized id-en-tities”) is big in wokestan.
Speaking of which, good talk by Sam Harris on EconWatch. Econwatch is good most of the time anyway, better with Sam.
Sam Harris on Jew-Hatred, Radical Islam, and the West 7/29/24
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1obCy3iCZY&t=5714s
D.A.
NYC
https://democracychronicles.org/author/david-anderson/
This explains something a site I visit that has some sensible commenters but an increasing number of old-fashioned anti-Semites.
Suddenly they were saying how unreliable ADL was and citing Wikipedia. I didn’t know what to think.
D.A., I think you mean EconTalk with Russ Roberts. But yes, the episode with Sam Harris is superb, as are all of Russ’s interviews.
I also enjoy (maybe “enjoy” is not the quite word) his descriptions of life in Israel in these times as a former US resident who moved to Israel to become president of Shalem College.
Russ Roberts is a very good interviewer, giving his guests space to speak, asking for clarification or challenging points when needed, and overall doing so in a respectful and thoughtful manner. I like how he comes at things from an economics mindset, such as mentioning how incentives impact different aspects of life and conflict. I find him a nice complement to Tyler Cowen in my podcast rotation when it comes to interviewing interesting people.
Earlier this year, the World Economic Forum named online mis/disinformation the biggest short term risk to global security:
https://www.weforum.org/press/2024/01/global-risks-report-2024-press-release/
With a straight face?
This ongoing discussion might be of interest to you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence_(3rd_nomination)
As you might remember, Wikipedia’s “Ashkenazi Jewish Intelligence” article was deleted in 2020, and you discussed its deletion in one of your earlier posts. ( https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2022/07/25/more-ideological-distortions-of-biology-from-dawkins-and-from-an-article-on-pervasive-ideological-censorship-of-wikipedia-articles/ ) Someone tried to recreate that Wikipedia article in April of this year. More recently, someone else stripped out most of the article’s content and sources, and now is arguing to delete what remains. But even if the article is deleted again, at least it’s still preserved at Wikipedia’s competitor Justapedia.
Group differences in intelligence is one of the subjects where what one might call the Southern Poverty Law Center school of intelligence research (anything we don’t like is racialist pseudoscience and eugenics) is dominant. I deeply bow to James Flynn who publicly defended this line of research as legitimate.(https://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Flynn-2018.pdf)
The problem is part of the wider conformity and confirmation bias problems within science (especially in psychology and the like): Criticism of methodology will be deployed most sceptically and nitpickingly and discreditingly against research one doesn’t like for ideological reasons, but anything goes when the research fits ideological preconceptions.
Katherine Maher and Wikipedia/NPR:
Katherine Maher, a progressive fruitcake and the chief executive of National Public Radio (NPR), used to be Wikipedia’s chief. Maher was instrumental in influencing long time -award winning- reporter Ari Berliner’s resignation from NPR and subsequent alignment with the FP.
Maher infamously (or famously, depending on your tribe du jour) referred to Wiki as a “white male construct”. Wiki is good (meh) for questions that lead to deterministic answers (what is Fourier transform – for example), I would not trust it to deliver accurately on much else.
Quote:
“Maher said she sought to crack down on the “free and open” ethos at her previous job running Wikipedia because it was based on a “white male Westernized construct” that led to “exclusion of communities and languages.”
Maher, whose “woke” social media posts came to light following the damning essay written by former NPR journalist Uri Berliner about rampant liberal bias at the outlet, made the comments in a video unearthed by Christopher Rufo, an author and researcher at the Manhattan Institute.
Berliner, who penned a lengthy indictment of NPR last week in Bari Weiss’ online publication The Free Press, resigned from NPR on Wednesday after he accused Maher of having “disparaged” him while espousing “divisive” views that “confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my Free Press essay.”
https://nypost.com/2024/04/18/media/nprs-katherine-maher-opposed-free-and-open-approach-at-wikipedia/
The current version of progressivism (DEI and its precursors – the critical theories) has tainted a vast number of institutions once representative of science, meritocracy and reason – some irredeemably. When Americans say “democracy is at stake”, ask them to define what they mean.
I am left to wonder what represents the greater threat? A self-serving man-child, unable to relinquish power or the chronic and relentless dismantling of the foundational principles of meritocracy, free speech and (most of all) reality.
Why does the latter seem far more egregious to me? I believe it is because progressivism’s nucleus isn’t centered on the cultish adherence to the personality of one person (this variant of Trumpism will end). Progressivism is an insidious and contagious virus (it is disguised in the language of “the good” – people fall for it), its reach and consequences are sweeping, generational and (as we will find out) far more damaging.
PS: Also, think AI. Yesterday, a post I made on FB on the absurdity of gender-ideology was promptly removed. Next: Male elephants who are gender confused. in “Science”.
+1
The greater threat resides in the movement with more institutional and cultural power, but as many such people are our classmates, colleagues, neighbors, family, and friends, we tend not to fear them in the way we might fear boisterous men with whom we are uncomfortable or lack acquaintance.
History has primed our collective immunity, but how does one respond when a revolution primarily wears pumps rather than jackboots?
+1
I don’t know the answer to that question – not clearly.
Still, when children’s breasts and genitals are mutilated (yes, sadly, I am preoccupied with this topic because I still cannot quite believe it is happening) by the pump-wearing “do no harm” folk who tell us that their important work is based on science (it is not) and unless we vote for their tribe, we are buttressing the *end of democracy* maybe more of us will start saying… “wait a minute..”.
Mostly, I think it will take courage – possibly the least common of human traits and one that often comes at a cost. It will take far more us speaking up and speaking out and refusing to vote for the status quo to “save ourselves from the end of democracy”.
Consider this man for example, Alex Balekian, he’s a physician, is gay and has a private practice in CA; at some personal cost he’s running for office as a moderate republican (closer to a classical liberal in my book) in CA30 congressional district. He’s making some waves, and getting his voice out there; if I lived in his district, I would definitely vote for him.
If he can make his case and win that seat, well, that’s a small step in the right direction – not because he’s a republican, but because he’s sane; his work is evidence based and he’s not a card carrying member of a tribe, meaning, he’s capable of walking away from group think.
Yes, so I think courage. More people like Alex Balekian. More of us taking a risk. More of us having difficult and civil conversations with “classmates, colleagues, neighbors, family, and friends…”
Conversations with Peter Boghossian:
Alex Balekian, CA-30 Congressional Candidate
(entertaining and compelling conversation)
https://www.youtube.com/live/XlwbOoouRHs
Courage is so hard to come by because few people remember, viscerally, what lack of freedom means. No one who did not experience life behind the Iron Curtain other than as a tourist, knows this feeling. Balekian is likely Armenian like Bhogossian. They know.
War is never good. It also brings home (without question) what is important. What we most hold dear.
The Revolution usually wears sandals made from old rubber tires, or Birkenstocks. With grey rough-wool socks. The jackboots come after they take power and need a uniform for the bullies they attracted along the way. I haven’t figured out where the pumps come in. Maybe the discipline tribunal chairs wear them.
I have also run afoul of WP editors denying or embellishing 20th century Polish and Ukrainian antisemitism. Unfortunately, authors like Timothy Snyder or Anne Applebaum (clearly, reputable sources) help them out by making all kinds of excuses for Polish or Ukrainian ultra-right nationalism in their attempts to highten the contrast between evil Russia/the Soviet Union and the evil empire’s victims.