Tag Archives: holocaust

“Inconvenient Truths” & Zionism

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From Inconvenient Truths About ‘Real Existing’ Zionism by Jacques Hersh at Monthly Review:

Coping with the Jewish question in general and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular has been and still is a dilemma for progressive opinion in the West. While it is acknowledged that Arab politics and political culture were affected by the intrusion of a Jewish state in the area and its alliance with the United States, the same consideration was not given to the transformation of Jewish political culture, both in Israel and in the Diaspora, as a result of the creation of the Zionist state and its patron-client relationship to the United States. Pro-Israel Jews of all political stripes have been duped by the ideological discourse of Zionism, which has hailed the existence of the Jewish state as the guarantor of the security of Jews everywhere.

Having captured the “commanding heights” of morality by usurping the mantle of the victimhood of European Jewry, the Zionist state, in a seldom-seen example of chutzpah, transformed the Holocaust experience into political capital. In this context it is interesting to note that the Holocaust did not become a universal point of reference in the Western worldview until after the decade of the 1960s. The reason for the time lag is related to the convergence of strategic and ideological currents in the postwar period. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, the antifascist coalition gave way to the Cold War between East and West. The German question played a central role in the establishment of the Western alliance system under the leadership of the United States. Under these conditions there was little interest on the part of the U.S. foreign policy establishment and indeed the U.S. government to alienate Germany by dwelling on the Nazi responsibility for the extermination of European Jews. In addition, looking closely at the Holocaust would have revealed the profiteering of U.S. industrialists in the arming of Hitler’s war machine. As far as the American Jewish elite is concerned, it acquiesced to the public silence on this monstrous crime and accepted the U.S. policy of rearming a barely de-Nazified Germany. Motivated perhaps by the concern of not reactivating American anti-Semitism and putting their improved situation in jeopardy, U.S. Jewry followed an opportunistic strategy.33

In the case of Israel, the Shoah question reflected the complex relationship of Zionist ideology toward non-Israeli Jews. The extermination of European Jews legitimized the cause of Zionism, to the extent that the Holocaust confirmed that Jews could not survive and prosper in the Diaspora and that integration and assimilation in these nations was an illusion. At the same time, there was a widespread feeling among Israelis following the Second World War that European Jews had themselves to blame for their fate, because they had not resorted to armed resistance. In contrast, Israelis saw themselves as rejecting the past and creating a new kind of Jew, capable of defending his or her people and the Jewish state.34 As the focus on the Holocaust evolved, it came to be seen as related to the transformation of the struggle for a secure Israel into one of an expanding and conquering state. The Shoah-paradigm became useful in reminding public opinion of the justification for the creation of the Jewish state and for the deflecting of criticism of Israeli policies, especially in the occupied territories of Palestine.

The Holocaust discourse, however, was more important in the Diaspora than in Israel itself and it introduced an element of confusion within the ranks of progressive politics. The sixties had been a decade of youth activism in the West that had included some leading Jewish participants. Many active anti-imperialist Jews in the Diaspora were caught off-balance by the realization that Israel, as the embodiment of the victimhood of the Jewish people, could be capable of victimizing another people and of following a pro-U.S. imperialism foreign policy. In Churchill’s terminology, the “bad Jews” (internationalist and anti-imperialist) had to be turned into the “good Jews” (pro-Zionist and well established in the West). Some of them became figureheads of neoconservatism!

The desperation with which the Holocaust paradigm is projected by modern Zionism and Western (especially U.S.) political establishments is not kosher. The attempt to pre-empt criticism of Israeli and U.S. policy and strategy in the Middle East will hardly be feasible in the longer run. Besides the dissidence toward the dominating ideology in Israel, the success of Zionism in the establishment of a modern Jewish capitalist state contains the seeds of its own societal “post-Zionism.” From an initial projection of pioneering social-nationalism, Israeli society in recent years seems to be affected by an identity and material crisis accentuated by the implementation of neoliberalism. From having been originally one of the most egalitarian Western societies, Israeli society has since the 1980s become one of the most unequal. The poverty rate in Israel is one of the highest of advanced capitalist countries with approximately 22 percent of the population living below the poverty line.35 The socio-economic prospects are bleak for a sizable number of Israelis and this seeping crisis translates into a crisis of identity for the Israeli-born generation who does not relate to Jewishness. “It is ideologically indifferent, secular, petit bourgeois in lifestyle and outlook, apathetic to world Jewry, and concerned with self-fulfillment only.”36

The Israeli dissident politician, Avraham Burg, a former speaker of the Knesset, fears that the Zionist experiment will lead to a tragedy for the Jewish state. Without having become anti-Zionist, he nevertheless feels that the original principles of Zionism and the values of the declaration of independence have been betrayed and that Israel has been transformed into a colonial state led by a corrupt clique of outlaws. In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot in 2003, he foresees a bleak future for the entire project of Zionism: “The end of Zionism is at our door…it is possible that a Jewish state will survive, but it will be another kind of state, ugly because of being foreign to our values.”37

The Gaza “Holocaust”?

Posted on by elizabeth
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From Roger Cohen at the NRRB:

I had a dream: Israeli Arab students, enraged by the war in Gaza, were protesting at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A counterdemonstration by Jewish students erupted. When the head of university security, a Holocaust survivor, tried to intervene, the Arab students called him a Nazi.

Actually, I didn’t dream this. Shlomo Avineri, a political scientist at the university, related the incident, which occurred in the first days after Israel began its Gaza war on December 27. But dreams cut to the quick. There’s no point denying that a line of sorts runs from the forty-three people killed by Israeli fire near a United Nations school in Gaza on January 6 back to the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948 and to Berlin, 1945.

History is relentless. Sometimes its destructive gyre gets overcome: France and Germany freed themselves after 1945 from war’s cycle. So, even more remarkably, did Poland and Germany. China and Japan scarcely love each other but do business. Only in the Middle East do the dead rule. As Yehuda Amichai, the Israeli poet, once observed, the dead vote in Jerusalem. Their demand for blood is, it seems, inexhaustible. Their graves will not be quieted. Since 1948 and Israel’s creation, retribution has reigned between the Jewish and Palestinian national movements.

I have never previously felt so despondent about Israel, so shamed by its actions, so despairing of any peace that might terminate the dominion of the dead in favor of opportunity for the living.

[…]

There are about 1.3 million Arab citizens of Israel, or a little less than 20 percent of the population. Their loyalties are divided, but never before have they protested so vigorously. That’s a fair guide to the virulence of Arab sentiment, stoked by graphic around-the-clock coverage of the Gaza carnage from the al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya networks. President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, resorting to the same loaded World War II lexicon, has called Gaza “a concentration camp,” a term also recently used by Cardinal Renato Martino, the head of the Vatican Council for Justice and Peace.

These jackboot allusions—which include Meshal’s reference to a Gaza “holocaust”—are untenable: a Jewish minority in any Arab state of the size of the Arab minority in Israel is unimaginable. Israel remains a small island of relatively liberal democracy in a repressive Arab sea. But it is ghettoizing itself, not least from the agonizing plight of the estimated 1.5 million Palestinians crammed into the narrow strip of land that is Gaza.

Read the whole thing here

Congo’s Holocaust

Posted on by elizabeth
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Yes, we’ve all been sitting on our butts here in the West while a holocaust rages in Congo.  5.8 million people dead; untold numbers of women raped, gang-raped, forced into pregnancy, infected with HIV and maimed for life.  When I read the history of WW II, I often come across the question, why did we do nothing to stop the mass killing of Jews?  We can ask the same question now:  why have we done nothing, why are we still doing nothing, to stop the holocaust in Congo?  I thought it was never supposed to happen again.

From Johann Hari at The Independent:

The deadliest war since Adolf Hitler marched across Europe is starting again – and you are almost certainly carrying a blood-soaked chunk of the slaughter in your pocket. When we glance at the holocaust in Congo, with 5.4 million dead, the clichés of Africa reporting tumble out: this is a “tribal conflict” in “the Heart of Darkness”. It isn’t. The United Nations investigation found it was a war led by “armies of business” to seize the metals that make our 21st-century society zing and bling. The war in Congo is a war about you.

 

Every day I think about the people I met in the war zones of eastern Congo when I reported from there. The wards were filled with women who had been gang-raped by the militias and shot in the vagina. The battalions of child soldiers – drugged, dazed 13-year-olds who had been made to kill members of their own families so they couldn’t try to escape and go home. But oddly, as I watch the war starting again on CNN, I find myself thinking about a woman I met who had, by Congolese standards, not suffered in extremis.

I was driving back to Goma from a diamond mine one day when my car got a puncture. As I waited for it to be fixed, I stood by the roadside and watched the great trails of women who stagger along every road in eastern Congo, carrying all their belongings on their backs in mighty crippling heaps. I stopped a 27 -year-old woman called Marie-Jean Bisimwa, who had four little children toddling along beside her. She told me she was lucky. Yes, her village had been burned out. Yes, she had lost her husband somewhere in the chaos. Yes, her sister had been raped and gone insane. But she and her kids were alive.

I gave her a lift, and it was only after a few hours of chat along on cratered roads that I noticed there was something strange about Marie-Jean’s children. They were slumped forward, their gazes fixed in front of them. They didn’t look around, or speak, or smile. “I haven’t ever been able to feed them,” she said. “Because of the war.”

Their brains hadn’t developed; they never would now. “Will they get better?” she asked. I left her in a village on the outskirts of Goma, and her kids stumbled after her, expressionless.

There are two stories about how this war began – the official story, and the true story. The official story is that after the Rwandan genocide, the Hutu mass murderers fled across the border into Congo. The Rwandan government chased after them. But it’s a lie. How do we know? The Rwandan government didn’t go to where the Hutu genocidaires were, at least not at first. They went to where Congo’s natural resources were – and began to pillage them. They even told their troops to work with any Hutus they came across. Congo is the richest country in the world for gold, diamonds, coltan, cassiterite, and more. Everybody wanted a slice – so six other countries invaded.

These resources were not being stolen to for use in Africa. They were seized so they could be sold on to us. The more we bought, the more the invaders stole – and slaughtered. The rise of mobile phones caused a surge in deaths, because the coltan they contain is found primarily in Congo. The UN named the international corporations it believed were involved: Anglo-America, Standard Chartered Bank, De Beers and more than 100 others. (They all deny the charges.) But instead of stopping these corporations, our governments demanded that the UN stop criticising them. [emphasis mine]

There were times when the fighting flagged. In 2003, a peace deal was finally brokered by the UN and the international armies withdrew. Many continued to work via proxy militias – but the carnage waned somewhat. Until now. As with the first war, there is a cover-story, and the truth. A Congolese militia leader called Laurent Nkunda – backed by Rwanda – claims he needs to protect the local Tutsi population from the same Hutu genocidaires who have been hiding out in the jungles of eastern Congo since 1994. That’s why he is seizing Congolese military bases and is poised to march on Goma.

It is a lie. François Grignon, Africa Director of the International Crisis Group, tells me the truth: “Nkunda is being funded by Rwandan businessmen so they can retain control of the mines in North Kivu. This is the absolute core of the conflict. What we are seeing now is beneficiaries of the illegal war economy fighting to maintain their right to exploit.”

See the whole thing here

And see Roxanne Stasyszyn at Dissident Voice:

Most every Congolese citizen will agree that the reason for the instability in Congo is the international influence within their borders. Some point their finger at mineral trafficking. Some point to tribal and historical ‘facts’. Others, like Vital Katembo, claim it is obvious that people are doing harm when they are not achieving what they claim to work for—speaking of the humanitarian aid and conservation sectors—especially when they have the needed resources to accomplish their missions.

No matter where you point your finger or for what reason, the DRC is an international playground filled with extremely dangerous toys and irresponsible playmates. Many times, knowing where to point is simply based on how dangerous it is to point that way.

Holocaust Witness

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After his “liberation” from the death camp at Auschwitz, Italian scientist Primo Levi wrote extensively about his experiences there.  From an essay on the central problems writing Holocaust memoir, “Primo Levi and the Language of Witness“, by Michael Tager:

Like many Holocaust survivors writing about their experiences, Primo Levi expresses both the urge to bear witness, and doubt about whether he can use language to communicate his experience adequately.(1) To enhance his memory, he began making notes while still in Auschwitz, even though he could not keep them because any writing by a prisoner was considered espionage. Recalling his life just after his return to Italy, Levi compares himself to Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner who waylaid guests on the way to the wedding feast to tell them of his misfortunes, because Levi behaved similarly, telling his story to everyone and anyone who would listen. Indeed, his last two books about Auschwitz, published thirty-five and forty years after his release, take the same verse from The Ancient Mariner as their epigraph:

Since then, at a uncertain hour, That agony returns, And till my ghastly tale is told, This heart within me burns.

Near the end of his life, his memory of his year in Auschwitz remained “much sharper and more detailed than anything before or since,”(2) and he could not bear to let remembered details fade away. Part of his compulsion to write about Auschwitz reflected an attempt to cope psychologically with the injury done to him, to somehow “become a man again … neither a martyr, nor debased, nor a saint.”(3) V

But upon his release in 1945 he sensed that “nothing could ever happen good and pure enough to rub out our past, and that the scars of the outrage would remain with us forever,”(4) and his repeated return to this subject matter supports his later conclusion that his injury “cannot be healed”(5) by the passage of time. Levi’s own suicide in 1987 more than forty years after his liberation perhaps shows the ongoing nature of the psychic wound inflicted upon him.(6) Surveying videotaped interviews of concentration camp survivors, Lawrence Langer argues that using words like “liberation” in connection with the Holocaust can be misleading because they “entice us into a kind of verbal enchantment that too easily dispels the miasma of the death camp ordeal and its residual malodors.”(7)

Misgivings accompany Levi’s continuing drive to remember and discuss: could he convincingly recount what happened? In Auschwitz, he had dreams in which he would tell his story and people would turn away, refusing to listen of believe him. He admits that words like “hunger,” “fear,” “pain,” “cold,” fail to convey the intensity of those feelings at Auschwitz, and that only a “new, harsh language” could describe them.8 Words developed in normal life did not seem applicable to Auschwitz; Langer describes how one survivor, who when first trying to tell others what had happened to her family in the camp, “remembers thinking that |My family were killed’ was totally inadequate, because |killed,’ she says, was a word used for |ordinary’ forms of dying.”(9) Neither did the word “gassed” seem satisfactory to communicate the enormity of the event, and she was driven toward silence despite her desire to speak. So much of what happened was incredible, and not comparable to anything Levi previously experienced or imagined, that he states simply in one passage, “no one can boast of understanding the Germans”(10) (SA 126). Entry into the death camp began with a journey of many days in a sealed boxcar that deposited him in an unknown location, leaving him spatially disoriented. His shock deepened upon arrival as he was further stripped of control over his destiny and even his basic bodily functions. Intense and unpredictable violence undermined his sense of connection between the present and the past and future. The problem of intelligibly describing such a profoundly disorienting experience, and finding language to bear witness to events he found incredible, and that many people did want to listen to, informs much of Levi’s work. In his survey of Holocaust literature, Alvin Rosenfeld finds this a common dilemma. He notes that camp inmates witnessed cruelty, deprivation, and terror on a scale that “so far surpassed anything previously known as to make writing about it a next-to-impossible task,” and that “all memoirists have known this sense of radical self-estrangement, which handicaps any thinking and writing about the Holocaust, but which their books themselves are written to break.”(11)

Because the overwhelming majority of Jews sent to Auschwitz perished, Levi also questions whether his exceptional status as a survivor qualifies him to discuss the true nature of the concentration camp. In his first memoir he uses the metaphor of “the drowned and the saved” to describe the prisoners, of whom the drowned “form the backbone of the camp … continually renewed and always identical” (SA, 82), whereas the paths to salvation were very few, difficult and improbable. In Levi’s own case an unlikely combination of factors helped him survive: he arrived relatively late in January of 1944, his knowledge of chemistry and German secured him a job inside a laboratory for several months, and a prisoner in another labor camp for non-Jewish Italian workers befriended him and smuggled him an extra ration of food every day for six months.

Do read the rest here

via wood s lot

Collected Poems of Primo Levi

The Survivor

Once more he sees his companions’ faces
Livid in the first faint light,
Gray with cement dust,
Nebulous in the mist,
Tinged with death in their uneasy sleep.
At night, under the heavy burden
Of their dreams, their jaws move,
Chewing a non-existant turnip.
‘Stand back, leave me alone, submerged people,
Go away. I haven’t dispossessed anyone,
Haven’t usurped anyone’s bread.
No one died in my place. No one.
Go back into your mist.
It’s not my fault if I live and breathe,
Eat, drink, sleep and put on clothes.’
America’s Black Holocaust Museum, the popular but financially struggling institution on Milwaukee’s north side, is closing Thursday because it can’t afford to keep its remaining staff.

The museum’s directors appealed to the public Tuesday for money and volunteer support to help the museum reopen. The museum also is negotiating with its creditors and city officials for assistance.

“We are working with our lenders to make sure that we don’t lose the building,” said Reggie Jackson, the museum’s board chairman. “We are in a position we hoped we’d never have to be in, but we believe this temporary closing will help us to get our financial house in order and get into a better position when we do reopen.”

Andrea Rowe Richards, speaking for the city’s Department of City Development, said:

“We’re hopeful that the community will step forward to work with all of us to retain this nationally significant museum.”

The 20-year-old museum was started in the basement of James Cameron, who survived a lynching in 1930 in Indiana. Cameron made it a lifelong mission to teach others about the historical struggles of blacks in America, from slavery to the present.

His museum is the first to commemorate and memorialize victims of lynching.

Nazi Persecution of Gays

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From BBC/UK:

Germany has inaugurated a 600,000 euro concrete memorial to honour the thousands of homosexuals persecuted by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. 

The four-metre high monument, which has a window showing a film of two men kissing, was unveiled in Berlin. 

The Nazis branded homosexuality an aberration threatening their perception of Germans as the master race, and 55,000 gay men were deemed criminals.

As many as 15,000 of those were killed in Nazi concentration camps. 

Very few who survived ever received compensation from post-war German governments for the persecution they suffered. 

The new memorial – which was inaugurated by Berlin’s gay mayor, Klaus Wowereit, and Germany’s Culture Minister, Bernd Neumann – is situated close to that for the six million victims of the Holocaust. 

Mr Wowereit said it was typical of post-war Germany that the victims had not been honoured until now. 

“This is symptomatic for a society… that did not abolish unjust verdicts, but partially continued to implement them; a society which did not acknowledge a group of people as victims, only because they chose another way of life,” he said. 

Ideas and Idealism

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This endless personal context of thought is what I want to insist on – even for the heaviest thoughts of the weightiest thinkers on the thorniest topics. Each idea arises in a context, a moment in the chain of associations and digressions that comprise a conscious life. You can strip it from its context and lend it a certain autonomy, disconnected from life, but that won’t change its provenance, which affects its content and authority. Most intellectual history takes account of the autobiographical setting of thought, but as lip service, the way biographies often deal with childhood: a quick chapter left behind, rarely treated as the decisive period in every life ever lived, its effects reverberating till the end. (Rosebud, Rosebud – always Rosebud.) We remain the kids we were, and our ideas stay rooted in our autobiographies, far more than is usually assumed. Those bios are not mere backdrop for the thoughts. The thoughts don’t exist apart from the lives in which they are embedded. They are warp and woof.  [more]

The Autobiography of an Idea: Rethinking the Holocaust in light of 9/11,my mentor and my dad”  Rick Salutin, The Walrus Magazine