Codename: Raul - Karpov of the KGB

Cramer, not Kramer - a USCF vice president. Karpov's group in Italy in 1981 numbered about 50.

Being religiously Jewish is a choice, being ethnically Jewish is not. From your name I guess you're Armenian? If so, you can't just decide that you're really ethnically Korean. You aren't. But you are free to decide to be Christian, or Muslim, or atheist. Many ethnic Jews, like Fischer, do not actually practice Judaism. Fischer didn't just reject Judaism, he started denying his ethnic Jewish ancestry. Even that isn't really a big deal, as far as I'm concerned, but when he starts advocating "randomly killing Jews", maybe he's not insane, but he's certainly gone badly wrong somewhere.

I'm an ethnic Jew and don't practice Judaism although I respect people who do (so long as they don't try to preach to me at length that I must to as they do... unfortunately some practicing Jews have these tendencies, especially in Israel - but actually most don't). 

Anybody as vehemently antisemitic as Fischer professed to be, must have more than a streak of madness in them. This is not a matter of opinion but of definition. 

I use a definition of madness (insanity) which says that an insane person has destructive impulses which he cannot control, and which dominate their thinking, their talk and/or their actions. Such a person would advocate and perform destructive actions to achieve destruction in all areas of life. They are also dangerous in more than one respect. 

Sanity would be constructive actions to achieve constructive goals in all areas of life. 

The sane and the insane elements are alive in us in every given moment. It is largely a matter of choice. Which one we "feed". Which one we nurture in our lives and in our thinking. Which one we accentuate. 

A sane man will have moments of insanity. He gets mad. He gets overwhelmed. 

An insane man will have moments, or even areas of life, where he can work as a sane man. 

We can argue over this point for 32 more pages, easily.

The thing is, look around you - you will recognize the personality types I'm mentioning here. The person devoted to destruction will look, sound, smell, feel insane. 

The person devoted to construction will inspire respect and you'd want to be closer to such a person and learn and benefit. 

There are many many degrees in between. 

There are also cyclic types - people who are sane one day, insane the next... so you can't really count on them, but they're generally weaker. 

This is really common sense and pure observation. 

An insane person (in rare cases) can even sound "cool" or "rational" to some, where he advocates crazy, destructive ideas. 

It's the destructive intentions and acts that define his insanity, not how he sounds (although in the overwhelming majority of cases the two will coincide). 

In places and times were jews were or are persecuted, nobody asks them if they want to be jews or were just born that way. The are not given much 'choice'.

Even if they were, hate and violence directed at them isn't ok.

I read you now and learn that one can be sane and antisemitic at the same time. That's about as far as I care to carry this conversation.

If your story is true, then it shows that Karpov is even more brilliant than most people give him credit for.

Fischer is considered mentally ill because of his opinions. What about, say, Dostoevsky?

Fischer is considered mentally ill because his reasoning in certain areas follows the patterns of a borderline paranoid schizophrenic.

This is not a topic about Fischer.

"Insane" is a non-specific, non-diagnostic term. Actually, it is a legal term:

Insanity, n. mental illness of such a severe nature that a person cannot distinguish fantasy from reality, cannot conduct her/his affairs due to psychosis, or is subject to uncontrollable impulsive behavior. - Law.com

I don't think Fischer was ever "insane." I do believe he mental illness that falls within the "personality disorder" spectrum.

I suggest some start a "Was Fischer Clinically Ill" topic. Here we speak of the social ills of the old Soviet Union and her foot soldiers in the international chess world.

No one?

I believe it was politically-connected Soviet GM Alexander Kotov, who referred to such external manipulation as "sporting tactics."

Technically, I guess that is correct; even if you were in one of the Gulags, doing forced labor because of your art, poetry, writings, associations, religion, politics, or conscience.

Let's see.  Stalin died in 1953.  It is estimated that by way of purges and podgroms, he was resonsible for the non-war-related deaths of 20 million people.

The war-related deaths totaled another 20 million.

So let's not look at those.

In the 1960s and 1970s, a group of intellectuals emerged with a principled opposition to Soviet repression. This group, often called dissidents, built a small but thriving underground society in which they circulated information on the state of human rights in the Soviet Union. The former Stalinist labor camps in Perm would be turned into prisons to isolate and punish these activists....

Several camps in the Perm region were transformed into the harshest camps for political prisoners. The prisoners were repeat offenders who had continued to criticize the Soviet government even after being released from prison. During the last years of the Soviet regime, the most prominent leaders and opposition activists from all over the Soviet Union were kept in these camps. Some of them perished there.

Ivan Kovalev - human rights activist

Tatiana Osipova - wife to Kovalev and human rights activist. Served seven years in a labor camp on a five-year sentence

Sergeo Kovalev - father of Ivan, activist

Balis Gayauskis - advocated Lithuanian independence Spent 2 years in NAZI camps, and 35 years in the Gulags.  He was sentenced to 10 years for translating Solzhenitsyn's book, Gulag Archepelago, into Lithuanian.

Levko Lukjanenko - Ukrainian nationalist, spent 25 years in the gulags, from 1956.  He was initially sentenced to death for tryiing to organize a referendum on Ukrainian independence, despite the fact that activity was sanctioned in the Soviet constitution.

Leonid Borodin - writer who won foreign literary prizes - 15 years in the camps.

Vasyl Strus - poet.  Was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1985 and died later that year in the gulag.

Valery Senderov - mathmatician.  Some of his writings were published abroad in Russian-language journals.  He opposed state-sponsored anti-semitism (much like GM Gulko).  He received additional time for violating camp rules - insisting on keeping a bible in his cell.

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn - author.  Only one work, in 1962, was published in the USSR.  When other works appeared in the western press, he was watched by the KGB.  The KGB attempted to assassinate him in 1971, with ricin, but failed to kill him, though he was very ill.  Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974.

Nathan Sharansky - Jewish mathematician and chess prodigy, was denied and exist visa in 1973.  He was arrested in 1977 for compiling a list of 1300 fellow refuseniks, most of who were Jewish.  He receive the light sentence of 13 years at hard labor for high treason.

I could go on, with hundreds of examples.

Nathan Sharansky spied for American Defense Intelligence Agency

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn- asked NATO to nuke the Soviet Union.

Leonid Borodin - I know him well as a good serious writer. And he DID found a terrorist extreme-right organisation.

Ukrainian and other nationalists were bloody terrorists.

All these people deserved their punishment.

Well, Jamie.  I understand that you are a bloodthirsty neokon hawk very similar to Bolsheviks in your mindset and suffering from a deadly Forrestol syndrome but maybe other people can read and understand this: 

http://www.politico.eu/article/why-the-arabs-dont-want-us-in-syria-mideast-conflict-oil-intervention/

You have slayed one million people in Iraq and another million in Afganistan.

The Brezhnev (third Soviet) Constitution of 1977, as well as the earlier Stalin (second Soviet) Constitution of 1936, contained language which permitted the Socialist Republics to secede from the greater Union.

How then were "nationalists" commiting treason or terrorism by advocating their Republic's withdrawal from the CCCP?

The Soviet Union was a very oppressive and regressive dictatorship when it came to human and religious rights.

By way of comparison, the US Constitution does not allow unilateral  secession of the member States from Union; however, it does not punish those who advocate a lawful disunion.  Nor does US law punish those who express their ideas on the subject.

That is the difference between an open and closed society.

The United States forces, nor did any other Western forces, kill "millions" in Iraq.  Most of the deaths there since the 1990s were due to age-old violence between Shi'a and Sunni, and to a lesser entent, ethnic minorities.

You claims are wholly unsupported by fact.

>He killed an estimated 2.5–7.5 million Ukrainians with the Holodomor. 

It was a mass hunger caused by people's refusal to work collectively and not only Ukrainians were hit. It was also in all other parts of the country, everywhere from Caucasus to Siberia.

>Ask the Chechens (operation Lentil), ask the Crimean Tatars. Search for the Holodomor.

I am 1/4 Crimean Tartar myself, so I really feel what has happened,  but you can not say that Stalin and Hitler were the same. Hitler sent people to gas cameras with 100% death probability, while Stalin forced them to leave their homes and settle in some unhospitable land and the death rate was much lower. 

Of course they were both vile and unhuman, but the difference still exists.  

>Most of the deaths there since the 1990s 

Just stop lying. You opened the Pandora's box in 2003 and you have raised ISIS.

Also, when we ask "Who were Hitler's best teachers?", there can be no doubt.  Those were American WASP forefathers, genociding Indians and nearly exterminating them all.

Mass murder, concentration camps, forsed resettlement - all that was invented by Americans. Let us compare the two twins: Washington and Hitler. At least, Hitler was not a rapist.   

Where are the "millions of innocent people" ... "even now" ... being killed by America?

You need to provide some proof of that.

Since the end of world war two, it is estimated that the U.S. has killed between 6 million to 20 million people.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-do-we-ignore-the-civilians-killed-in-american-wars/2011/12/05/gIQALCO4eP_story.html

http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-has-killed-more-than-20-million-people-in-37-victim-nations-since-world-war-ii/5492051

Silliness.

By far and away, the greatest killer of Native Americans in North, Central, and South America were diseases introduced by the Europeans since 1492 (primarily Spanish, French, English, Dutch, and Russian).

Not a genocide, not a "purge," not a "pogrom."