Bulletin N° 954
Subversive 1992 BBC documentary film on the McCarthy Era in America, now censored on the Internet,
produced by Archie Baron
Part 1,”Five Minutes to Midnight” @ https://youtu.be/Zm6Em75Uhf4, and Part 3, “To Hell with the Truth” @ https://youtu.be/d0PfbuqfSVs
plus "Frank Wilkinson and FBI Surveillance" @ https://youtu.be/wMAE8iun_RU ]
Subject: "The first time is tragedy; the second time, farce."
January 26, 2021
Grenoble,
France
Dear
Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
Long before Dachau (1933), Auschwitz
(1940) and Treblinka (1942), concentration camps were developed by the Spanish
in Cuba during what became the Spanish-American War, “to inflict new cruelties
on civilians and fighters alike.” In 1895 the Spanish Governor-General of Cuba
wrote to the Spanish Prime Minister in Madrid advocating the isolation of rebels
from the peasants who sometimes fed or sheltered them, by relocating hundreds of thousands of rural
inhabitants into Spanish-held “cities behind barbed wire,” a strategy he
called reconcentración. For centuries, the Spanish had treated the Native American population
in a similar fashion as part of their “Mission-Presidio System” to quell
resistance. And again, the British used concentration camps during the Boer War
in South Africa (1899-1902) to demoralize mobilization and guerrilla warfare
against the British invasion of the Boer republics.
“The Gulag Archipelago,” a Soviet network of some 30,000 forced labor
camps set up by order of Vladimir Lenin, reaching its peak during Joseph
Stalin's rule from the 1930s to the early 1950s, was the modern extension of
the traditional prison camps that had been employed under the rule of Russian Tzars for centuries.
But, the genocidal strategy of concentration camps was perfected in
Fascist Germany, where Jews, Gypsies, Socialists, Communists, Gays and other “undesirables”
were systematically exterminated by the millions, as “a surplus population”, in
an industrial operation called “social cleansing.”
The history of concentration
camps and today’s global confinement share certain similarities: entire populations
are deemed “non-essential” and are reified and acted upon accordingly; this
concerted action which has been concocted by a small number of self-appointed
directors is orchestrated by a managerial strata of “Kapos,”
whose mission it is to subdue the population and “maintain order” at all costs.
In the third
chapter of his book, Overcoming Zionism,
entitled “The Spectre of Shoah,”
Joel Kovel discusses the role of self-professed Zionists at the moment of
catastrophe. He starts the chapter by describing the response of two prominent
international intellectuals who were familiar with the early Zionist ideology: Leo
Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi.
Zionism has never lacked detractors, among whose
ranks we can find some of the great moral leaders of the age. Tolstoy, although
an inspiration to the back-to-the-land pioneers, was harshly dismissive of
their project, telling them, as Lacqueur puts it,
‘that Zionism was not a progressive but basically a militarist movement; the
Jewish idea would not find its fulfillment in a territorially limited
fatherland. Did the Jews really want a state on the pattern of Serbia, Rumania,
or Montenegro?’ In 1938, Gandhi was even harsher in his assessment. Fully aware
of the ‘inhuman treatment meted out’ to these ‘untouchables of Christianity,’
and despite his ‘lifelong’ friendships with Jewish comrades from the days of struggle
in South Africa, Gandhi nevertheless wrote that such ‘sympathy does not blind
me to the requirements of justice. The cry for a national home for the Jews
does not make much appeal to me.’ For it is ‘wrong and inhumane to impose the
Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine cannot be justified by
any moral code of conduct … The nobler course would be to insist on a just
treatment of the Jews wherever they are born and bred.’ As for the Jews in
Palestine (at the time the Arabs were waging a fierce but losing battle against
what seemed to be an entente between the British forces and the Jewish
settlers),
‘I have no doubt that they are going about it in the
wrong way. I am not defending the Arab excesses. I wish they had chosen the way
of non-violence in resisting what they rightly regarded as an unwarrantable
encroachment upon their country. But according to the accepted canons of right
and wrong, nothing can be said against the Arab resistance in the face of
overwhelming odds.’
These
words are eerily continuous with the predicament of the Second Intifada and the
latest wars in the region. But Gandhi
was also writing just after Kristallnacht, the
most violent episode of a Nazi pogrom until the Holocaust, proper, and he was
obliged to call attention to the looming shadow of ‘the German persecution of
the Jews [which] seems to have no parallel in history. The tyrants of old never
went so mad as Hitler seems to have gone.’ How, then
are the Jews to resist this ‘organized and shameless persecution’? Gandhi, true
to himself, sees the clear path as one of spiritual affirmation and resistance.
‘No person who has faith in a living God
need feel helpless and forlorn … [such a God] is common to one and all … as the
Jews attribute personality to God and believe that He rules every action of
theirs, they ought not to feel helpless. If I were a Jew and were born in
Germany … I would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest gentile German
might, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon … [with]
confidence that in the end the rest were bound to follow my example.’
Similar advice is given to the Jews in
Palestine, once it is realized that the
‘Same God rules the Arab heart who rules the
Jewish heart. They can offer Satyagraha* in
front of the Arabs and offer themselves to be shot or thrown into the Dead Sea
without raising a little finger against them.’
Gandhi also wrote a letter to Hitler around
this time, a forlorn copy of which can be seen in the museum that was his home
in Mumbai, India, asking the Nazi dictator to desist from the warlike path. No
response is known, and the horror unfolded: a worst-case scenario that puts to
the test all powers of human comprehension, and still reverberates.
__________
*The Gandhian
practice on ‘insistence on truth’ – showing tolerance and goodwill coupled with
firmness in one’s cause through non-violent passive resistance and
non-cooperation. (pp.64-66)
Each genocide is unique in its own way,
whether that of the indigenous in the New World, the Africans in the Congo
under Leopold of Belgium, the Armenians under Turkish rule, and so on to
genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda. It is grotesque to compare genocides saying,
in effect, the mass slaughter of my people is worse than yours. However, they
all have their signatures, which in the case of Shoah drew itself into a
long-wrought narrative and concentrated the affect or unfathomabiliity, thus
rousing all the monsters set down over (three thousand years. This complex of
feeling still persists, an, turned into guilt, shadows the debate on Israel,
making even committed anti-imperialists and champions of justice into
crypto-Zionists, who despite themselves, end up following the Israeli line. The
complex has crippled a good deal of politics in Europe and the United States.
Those to
whom befell the task of sorting through the wreckage after the Second World War
had to contend with the agitated state of mind and the shock waves it
represented.(p.67)
. . .
The chief themes set forth by the discourse
surrounding the Holocaust were first, the essential victimhood of the Jews and
their essential innocence; second, and contradicting this in part, an endlessly
accusatory debate over collusion and resistance that fractured Israeli politics
for many years; third, the essential guilt of the Christian West for not
helping Jews in their hour of need and more deeply, for spawning such a monster
within its borders as Nazism – for the conclusion could not be avoided that
this was no fluke, nor a peculiarly German mutation, but rather expressed
something systemic that the Nazis exploited to the hilt. And finally, that the
trail ends in the ancient land of Palestine, from which the Jewish people had
been expelled and through the return to which they would be saved, at least
protected, by their state, form the beast that had hunted them down through
centuries of exile. The supreme corollary was that the magnitude of the Holocaust
trumped all competing moral claims, including certainly those of the displaced
Palestinians whose actual suffering could readily be seen as peripheral to the
great drama over the appropriation of the memory of Jewish suffering.
The Shoah did not determine the inner drive
and logic of Zionism, but it had the highly important result of allowing this
to be shown outwardly in a benign light that drew in vast degrees of support
for what had hitherto been considered a marginal and dubious idea. Both the Jewish
community and world opinion were greatly affected. In the outpouring and the
rescue, the considerations developed in the previous chapter, that Zionism had
developed a forward, terroristic strategy to achieve its goals, which in both
means and ends was inherently violative of the
ethical integrity of Judaism, became blurred and largely lost from view. The Shoah, in other words, allowed the perception of a highly
evolved Zionist aggression which dated from before the war, to become eclipsed,
turned around, and seen as defensive and therefore necessary. Once Israel had
been established as the sole guarantor of the survival of the Jewish people, it
was granted a blank check: anything it was to do could be automatically
justified by the immensity of what it stood against. In the same gesture, what
had been inflicted by the Nazis became seamlessly transferred to the threat
posed by the bloodthirsty Arab hordes surrounding little Israel and ever
threatening to drive its Jews into the Mediterranean Sea. All this was achieved
despite warning not to politicize the catastrophe, even though this had already
happened because the extremity of events had worked to suppress critical
thought.
Mindful of the tremendous moral weight this notion still enjoys, we are
yet obliged to question its foundations. For it must be asserted as a moral
axiom that the unfathomability of a collective trauma
by no means translates into a blank check to do whatever one presumes necessary
to prevent its recurrence. Because one is deeply injured does not, in effect,
make it all right to injure someone else in return – especially when that
someone had committed no injury beyond trying to shake off the invasion of his
land. Yes, Israel had provided a tremendous forum for those who had suffered
Nazi brutality, a place where the Holocaust could be brought into active
awareness. But this boon cannot provide more than the beginning of an
assessment. We need to go further and ask: what does the concurrence of the
formation of the State of Israel with its role in providing a haven for victims
of the Holocaust tell us about its fundamental legitimacy, popularly expressed
as its ‘right to exist’? If in fact the claim of Israel as the savior of
Holocaust victims and the defender against Holocaust recurrence is warranted,
this would tend to force the legitimacy of the Jewish state no matter what else
had transpired. For such to be the case, however’, all of the following claims
often made on behalf of Zionism need to be substantiated:
·
That
the Holocaust sprang from an immemorial and essential judaeophobia,
that could only be accounted for in this way, and that its recurrence is a
never-ending potentiality. If this was the case, then inasmuch as the key
detouring factor is Jewishness as such, only a Jewish
state, with its mobilization of Jewish force and perpetually on guard against
anti-Semitism, can suffice to guard against a recurrence ;
·
That
Israel, and before its founding, the Zionist movement, has proven its bona
fides as the provider of a haven, in other words, that protectiveness toward
Jews facing oppression was based on more than momentary or instrumental factors
but was inherent to Zionism itself ; and that
·
Israel
has made good on its promise to safeguard and liberate the Jewish people.(p.70)
Kovel begins by the examining the first claim made by Zionists, that judaeophobia is the universal cause for the creation of Israel.
One of the first problems with the idea that the Holocaust was
essentially an orgy of judaeophobia resides in the
fact that Jews shared victimhood with others such as homosexuals, leftists and
‘mental defectives.’ Nor were Jews the only ethnic group singled out for
genocidal extermination, given the inclusion of Romani in that category.
According to propagandists for Israel like Elie
Wiesel, Jews still are special, for even if not all the Holocaust’s victims
were Jews, all Jews were the victims of the Holocaust, from which the
conclusion must be drawn that Jews should use the experience for the purposes
of drawing together as a nation, under, it goes without saying, the aegis of a
Jewish state.
But if I stand in horror at what the Nazis did to Jews, why should this diminish the horror of what they did to Romani and the rest? And should I not grant an equal measure of horror to the other cases, especially if by doing so I will break with the tribalist tendencies that, corrupting the German mind, spurred the Holocaust itself? Does not the extension of an equivalent collective worth to all the victims break with the cycle of vengeance, and beyond that, enhance the worth of the real individuals sacrificed to this beast, Jews and non-Jews alike? Why should I not want each of three classes of victims –to experience the same fellow feeling toward the Jews who perished? But if I do so then I must ask the Jews to reciprocate, and not remain locked into a nationalism that, like all elements of the Zionist complex, has been generated for the occasion rather than form the complex of lived history.
. . .
The point may be further developed: if we want to eliminate phenomena
like the Holocaust, we should work to overcome those attitudes from which the
Holocaust was constructed – in particular, the national chauvinism of the sort
that split the Aryan Nazi from the non-Aryan subhumans.
These reside not in the immediate human ties, not in the universal, but in
artificially exploited intermediate formations such as the nation. Neither the
nourishment of directly caring for another person nor the affirmation of human
right that give dignity to each person before God and the Laws, the
intermediate formation relates the self to a fictive and potentially aggrandizable Other, for example, the Nazi construction of
the Volk.While both the direct and the
universal regard for others are necessary for the goodness of will upon which
justice stands, the intermediate strata, which affirms one social body for
denigrating another, is as dangerous as it is existentially powerful.
Ordinarily, it can be sublimated in a universal direction by diversions such as
sporting events. But under historical circumstances such as we are looking at
here, the attitude can harden and take on a life of its own, becoming tribal or
national chauvinistic. These fall between immediate and universal human
relations and undercut both of them: chauvinisms limit authentic human
relations to those within the tribe and constrain those relations by tribal
law, and they radically exclude the human rights of outlanders. The Nazis were
the greatest offender in this regard in the whole history of the human species.
But why should Jews follow in this path, splitting themselves from the rest of
humanity, instead of using their greatest tragedy as a lesson giving them the
chance to break through to new ethical ground by building on their ancient
heritage of justice?(pp.68-73)
Kovel then turns to the second claim and examines how Zionists actually behaved with respect to the Shoah.
Did their behavior merit the trust and
confidence the world placed in the State of Israel as guardian against supreme
evil? There are two questions to be differentiated here: How many Jews were
saved from the Holocaust itself? And How many
survivors of the Holocaust were able to end up in Israel? The second enterprise
was more successful than the first. Tom Segev has
written:
‘There had been about nine million Jews in
Europe on the eve of he war;
about six million were killed, leaving three million alive. Most of these were
saved by Germany’s defeat in the war. Some were spared thanks to help they
received from various governments and organizations such as the Joint
Distribution Committee and from thousands of good-hearted people in almost
every country – the ‘righteous gentiles.’ There were dramatic rescue operations
such as the flight across the Pyrenees from France to Spain and the convoys of
Jews that sailed from Denmark to Sweden. Only a few survivors owed their lives
to the efforts of the Zionist movement.’
In good measure this was due to the weak position of Zionism during this
period, beset as it was with problems concerning Great Britain and the Arabs.
But it would be foolish to ignore the following remark made in 1938 by the
ever-outspoken David Ben-Gurion:
If I knew that it was possible to save all
the children in Germany by transporting them to England, but only half by
transporting them to Palestine, I would choose the second – because we face not
only the reckoning of those children , but the historical reckoning of the
Jewish people.
. . .
There have been two aspects to the problems
faced by Zionism: the question of acquiring sufficienjt
people of the right sort – ‘good human material’ was the preferred Zionist
construction, with ominous overtones – to build that nation state upon the
land, and keep it Jewish. Chaim Arlosoroff,
in his letter to Weizmann, is explicitly aware of the dual nature of the
problem. And in the ruin disclosed by the downfall of Nazism Zionists found an
unprecedented opportunity for capitalizing upon Jewish grief.
But there is something else.
For the fact that no one would expect Ben-Gurion to actually sacrifice
Jewish children on the altar of Zionist nation-building does not mean that he
didn’t in fact set out to do just that on a smaller scale. Indeed, the
Zionist apparatus did exercise just such an option when the opportunity arose
to bring ‘good human material’ to Eretz Israel in the
wake of Nazi collapse.
An overture appeared toward
the close of the wr when FDR, mindful of the difficulties in opening the doors
of the United States to refugees from Nazi persecution, estimated that there
were some 500,000 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and conceived a bold scheme
to bring them to now homes around the world after the surrender of the Third
Reich. The plan had two components: to win commitments from a number of nations
to accept Jewish refugees; and to administer the program so that every refugee
had a free choice within the framework of quotas. These included a total of
200,000 from an assortment of nations, and 150,000 each from the bellwethers of
the Allies, England and the United States. The British agreed readily; but the
United States was another story. Knowing he would have his work cut out to
persuade his chronically isolationist and nativist
Congress to ratify his humanitarian idea, Roosevelt delegated the prominent Jew
(thought non-Zionist) lawyer, Morris Ernst, to travel about the country to help
build support for the plan among Jewish leaders. This Ernst set out to do, full
of enthusiasm because he knew that his cause was just and that the most popular
and charismatic president in modern American history was behind him. We may
follow the story in his own words.
‘It
did not work out,’ Ernst writes in his memoirs. The sticking point was not, as
anticipated, the gentile natvists and their
anti-Semitism, however, but the Jewish leadership. ‘I do not intend to quote
F.D.R. … But to me it seemed that the failure of the leading Jewish groups to
support with zeal this immigration program may have caused the President not to
push forward with it at the time.’ For despite the fact that ‘no Jews . . would be compelled to go anywhere and certainly not to any
assigned nation’ according to the plan, it received a cold shoulder. Worse, ‘I
was amazed and even felt insulted when active Jewish leaders decried, sneered
and then attacked me as if I were a traitor. At one dinner party I was openly
accused of furthering the plan for freer immigration in order to undermine
political Zionism. Those Jewish groups which favored opening our doors gave
little more than lip service to the Roosevelt program. Zionist friends of mine
opposed it.’
This odd reaction makes
perfect sense according to the logic of Zionism. The mass of Jewish refugees at
the end of the war constituted more than half the population of the Yishuv in Palestine. Getting all, or the great majority, of
these to emigrate to Israel would be an incalculable boon for the cause;
contrariwise, to see the refugees slip out of Zionist hands, especially if they
were to find their way to hated England, would have been a serious blow to both
ideology and demographics. And so a no-holds-barred campaign under Ben-Gurion’s
leadership was launched in the refugee camps to persuade, insist upon, organize
and even force refugees in the direction of Palestine. This encountered, yet also
overrode, two serious problems; first, conditions in the camps were by and
large dreadful, especially for a people who had gone through such an ordeal as
had the Jews; and second, that many of the survivors didn’t want to go to
Palestine. Some were not interested in Zionism, or even hostile; some gave
token support for the purposes of helping Israel, but had other plans in mind;
still others were too broken to choose. As individuals, they would have been
better served by going where they wanted or would have their survival needs
better met in the more developed countries willing to take them in – all the
more so, as there were ample Jewish agencies and rabbinical associations eager
to supervise the process and preserve Jewish identity in the doing.
These ordinary human concerns
were swallowed in the ‘historical reckoning’ of Zionism and its totalizing
logic. As one functionary said of the orphaned children whose fate hung in the
balance: ‘Only immigration to Palestine will guarantee their existence and
their future as Jews and human beings. . .’ In other words, there was only one
way of being a Jew and one way of being fully human – the Zionist way; all
others need not apply, and hence Jews who preferred a different way were no
longer Jewish or even human. This trope is usually associated with the radical
Orthodox but here becomes the province of Labor Zionists, another one of whom
said of the children that ‘Only this land can absorb them, heal them, turn them
into citizens and restore their national and human balance – no other place or
land will do so, except our Yishuv and
country.’ In this way, several thousand orphans recently rescued from the
extremity of judaeophobic evil were forbidden to
leave the camps after all arrangements had been made, and were thereby denied a
Jewish haven in England and France that many had expressly asked for.
Later, as the war that was to
launch the Jewish state loomed, another use was found for refugee ‘human
material.’ By 1947, Haganah operatives began working
in the camps, often clandestinely. Their presence signaled the coming to
fruition of a common assumption, one first articulated by Jabotinsky
and later installed within Labor Zionism by Arlosoroff
– that it would some day
come to armed warfare with the Arabs. There is no doubt that the Zionists had
long been preparing for this and that the die became cast with the UN Partition
of 1947, after which the only questions were the timing of combat and who would
win it. Nor is there any question that Zionists organization of the war was
brilliantly carried out, a wonder of boldness, foresight, detailed planning and
coordination.
One consideration was manpower
for the nascent Israel Defense Force. There was great anxiety lest Yishuv be unable to summon up enough troops for the
challenges ahead. Thoughts turned immediately toward the refugee camps in the
American Zone, swollen with suffering Jewish bodies brought over from the East.
A strenuous effort was made to recruit volunteers for the cause. And when this
failed, for easily understandable reasons – for how many Jews
, newly rescued from the horrors of the Holocaust? Would be enthusiastic
for military duty in a strange land? – the Zionist apparatus moved rapidly into
a higher gear, and proceeded to forcibly recruit some ten thousand soldiers and
ship them to fight for a country that none of them knew or belonged to. The
force was chiefly exerted through the administrative control Zionists has
gained over the camps, each of them a more or less total institution. Summary
loss of employment for recalcitrants, followed by
summary denial of food rations, usually did the trick,
thought quite often beatings and other forms of violence had to be used.
By treating its ‘human
material’ in this way Zionism revealed just how advanced its ‘identification
with the aggressor’ had become. As the Advisor on Jewish Affairs to the
American Supreme Commander in Europe wrote a week after the proclamation of the
new state, ‘the pressure exerted on the people [who had resisted the draft] was
crude, at times reflecting the techniques they had learned from their own
oppressors.’ Or as an editorial in the Paris-based Bundist
journal Unser Shtime (our voice) stated, it
was ‘unbelievable that Jews, the standard victims of Fascism and terrorism,
would be capable of the kinds of violence Zionists in the camps exercise toward
their Bundist and other non-Zionists political
rivals.’
Though it is beyond dispute
that many Jewish survivors of the Holocaust successfully ended up in Israel, it
is impossible to avoid the conclusion that taken as a whole, there are many
dubious features of the relationship between Zionism and the Shoah. Certainly, we cannot take as axiomatic the reflexive
claim that somehow the founding of the Jewish state was necessary for the
survival of the refugees. FDR’s plan of early 1945 estimated 500,000 refugees,
and that the US would take 150,000 of them. In the event, there proved to be
330,000 refugees and the US ended up with some 120,000. The remainder could
well have been worked into the provisions of the plan using countries other
than Israel, especially given unified cooperation from the Jewish community,
needless to say, a very big ‘if,’ but still a real possibility, and indeed a
certainty were Zionism not a factor.
In any event, though Zionism
was not necessary for recuperation from and prevention of, the Holocaust, the
Holocaust definitely became a necessity for Zionism, which has processed it
right through the present day as a kind of ur-event
to certify its inner absolutism. The forbidding of children’s immigration to
Europe, the forced recruitment of DP’s, the vilification and abuse of Jewish
refugees who failed to see the wisdom of the Zionist program – all this showed
how tragedy could become folded into aggression and used to legitimate the
Zionist way.(pp.77-83)
Chapter 3 concludes with an
examination of the third claim on behalf of Zionism, namely that “Israel
has made good on its promise to safeguard and liberate the Jewish people.”
How
has this state, he Jewish state, fared in fulfilling its promise to provide a
better, safer life for all Jews? We may summarize:
·
Today,
more than a half-century after its founding, Israel is by far the most
dangerous place on earth for Jews,
simply because it has been set up to be perpetually at war.
·
The
behavior of the Jewish state has provoked both a worldwide outpouring of
rational condemnation and a resurgence of judaeophobia.
Zionists tend to claim, first, that there is no such thing as rational condemnation
of Israel, hence that all criticism is antisemitic;
and second, that antisemitism, as ever, is a virus
that springs from the twisted heart of the goyim irrespective of what
Jews, or Israel, may do. We must reject this grossly ideological view once again,
which flies in the face of the elementary facts of human agency and
interconnectedness. If an imperial power invades, occupies, and destabilizes
another society, denying its people normal and autonomous means of
self-expression, then it can expect with the certitude of a law of nature that
the whole spectrum of human responses will be evoked, ranging from emancipatory and nonviolent expression to crude atavisms
including racist belief, and in the case when the invader is set up as Jewish state, antisemitism.
Needless to say, what begins in one place can readily spread around the world
if the conflict in question is of sufficient general interest. It is an
intellectual barbarism to remove such phenomena from their historical context,
to single out the less rational elements of the spectrum from the rest and to absolutize them under the rubric of antisemitsm.
This is to abstract from the various manifestations of hostility to Israel an
essence of judaeophobia that arose under vastly
different circumstances. It draws from a time when Jews were, if not blameless,
at least powerless, and were made to pay to debts
demanded by the anti-communism of the fascist state and by Christendom’s bad
conscience.
·
Despite
the enormous aid given to it by its American protector and the benefits of the
international Jewish community, Israel remains a society in grave social and
economic crisis, with rampant unemployment, pockets of outright hunger, and
many sighs of social disintegration; as we shall take up further in Chapter 5,
it now had the greatest gap between rich and poor in the whole industrialized
world. More than half of Israeli families cannot meet their monthly bills, and
14 percent cannot buy an adequate diet. In a 2004 Ha’aretz
op-ed, Michael Melchoir, a member of the Knesset,
observed that: ‘We live in a society in which a million and a quarter people –
40 percent of them working people – are below the poverty line. This is a
society that abandons 366,000 of it children-at-risk and throws them into the
street; a society that treats its foreign workers like animals; a society that
despises its elderly and sends them to rummage through the garbage. It is a
society, according to information given the Knesset Community for Children’s
Rights, where in the absence of standards, a social worker has to devote an
average of two minutes to a family in distress. It is a society among the
leaders in the world trafficking in women.’ The immediate cause is a fierce
neoliberal assault on the poor and public sector led by Finance Minister
Binyamin Netanyahu. This is no accident but the result of the drift to the
right inherent in the dynamics of the Zionist project.
·
Israel
provides the worst primary and lower secondary education in the Western world,
despite having budgeted adequate funds. It also scores below many poorer
countries, for example, Malaysia, Thailand and Romania, which provide it with
cheap textiles and labor.
·
All
this has left the original socialist ideal in ruins. Today, extreme right-wing
religious fundamentalism plays a far larger role in Israel than the enlightened
socialism that was to have been the emblem of the new Jewish society.
·
As
an immediate result of these woes, and comprising a tremendous threat to the
ever-precarious demographic question, a serious degree of outmigration of Jews
from Israel is taking place. As of mid 2004, some 760,000 Israeli Jews were
living abroad, an increase of 40 percent since the Second Intifada began in
2000. Those with a taste for irony may contemplate the following: the preferred
destination of Jews leaving the former Soviet Union is no longer Israel but . .
. Germany! This had prompted another round of Zionist attacks on the fiendish
Germans, now for ‘enticing’ Jews to settle there.
What
kind of state has Zionism wrought?(pp.83-85)
Joel
Kovel’s book is a rigorous examination of the inner contradictions
embodied in the ideology of Zionism as well as an examination of the primary
function of the state of Israel, on a pragmatic scale of “who benefits and who
loses….”
The 15 + items below reflect the material and ideological contradictions that are developing in the context of massive capital accumulation and new applied technologies for population control. Social class struggles remain the engine of historic change; despite the frequent political ploys and cultural distractions, the social inequalities, the leverage and the mechanisms of change have become abundantly apparent.
Sincerely,
Francis
Feeley
___
Professeur honoraire de l'Université Grenoble-Alpes
Ancien Directeur de
Researches
Université de Paris-Nanterre
Director of The Center for the Advanced Study
of American Institutions and Social Movements
(CEIMSA-in-Exile)
The University of California-San Diego
http://www.ceimsa.org
a.
“The Great Covid Class War”
https://www.thebellows.org/the-great-covid-class-war/
by Alex
Gutentag
The pandemic has created the perfect pretext for
enacting economically destructive policies.
+
The Economics Lesson Taught by the Pandemic
with
Richard Wolff
(29:40)
+
How Capitalism Exploits You
with
Richard Wolff
(5:26)
+
Class Solidarity
or ‘Deplorables’? -- The Left's
Failed Messaging
with
Jimmy Dore
(45:38)
===========
b.
“Populist Right & Left Joining Forces Against Establishment”
with
Jimmy Dore
(12:47)
+
“Need A Domestic Terrorist? Dial 9-1-1”
with
Michael Moore
(57:29)
+
Jan. 6 Was An Inside Job
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKDcsH2XXQI&feature=youtu.be
with Abby
Martin
(audio, 26:02)
+
The Capitol Hill
Riot: “Capitalism's Last Gasp?”
with
Richard Wolff
(video, 30:39)
+
The New Domestic War on Terror is Coming
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-new-domestic-war-on-terror-is
by Glenn
Greenwald
+
How Republicans, Democrats, and the Media Have Weakened
US Democracy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2jyzp09_g8
with Chris Hedges
(audio,
1:07:34)
Jan. 19, 2021
Renowned journalist and author Chris Hedges talks about
the many ways traditional media, digital media, and the two political parties
have worked to prevent progressive movements and give rise to the growth of the
extreme right
+
Biden’s inauguration takes place under tight
security & pandemic
with Chris Hedges and George Galloway
(8:50)
+
Kamala Harris’ History
https://www.blackagendareport.com/search?key=Kamala+harris
&
https://reason.com/2018/01/09/kamala-harris-went-to-bat-for-dirty-pros/
+
“Biden Economics, Teamsters Strike VICTORY,
FBI Spy Planes”
with
Richard Wolff
(2:31:56)
+
“REVEALED: Biden Wants To Overthrow Venezuela”
with
Jimmy Dore
(7:40)
===========
c.
“Farmer Gates, Biden Swamp, I Am Open” – New World Next
Week https://www.corbettreport.com/interview-1612-new-world-next-week-with-james-evan-pilato/
with James Corbett and
James Evan Pilato
(28:21)
+
“The Work
Continues”: Cornel West & Maria Hinojosa on the Promise
& Dangers of
the Biden Admin
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/1/21/dr_cornel_west_maria_hinojosa_biden
with Cornell West
and Maria Hinojosa
(24.02)
+
FAILED Biden
Advisor says $2000 Checks is Crazy Idea!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQCtBcgbHK4&feature=youtu.be
with
Jimmy Dore
(12:49)
+
Biden Admin - Redux Deep State, Empire & Censorship
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt9fSHBKhbM&feature=youtu.be
with
Chris Hedges and Glenn Greenwald
(26:09)
+
The Obama-fication of “The
Squad”
Strengthens the Right at the Expense of the Left
https://www.blackagendareport.com/obama-fication-squad-strengthens-right-expense-left
by
Danny Haiphong
+
Freedom Rider: Why the Left Don’t Protest
http://www.blackagendareport.com/freedom-rider-why-left-dont-protest
by Margaret
Kimberley
20 Jan 2021
+
The Crisis of White Squatters Rights
https://www.blackagendareport.com/crisis-white-squatters-rights
by Too Black
+
“America Has The Tinder To IGNITE Social Uprising”
with Jimmy Dore and Chris Hedges
(44:17)
+
“Entering the Biden Era”
with Thomas Frank
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFpw-ioM3dk
with
Matt Taibbi and Katie Halper
(1:07:48)
===========
d.
From:
H-PAD [mailto:h-pad-bounces@lists.historiansforpeace.org] On Behalf Of Jim O'Brien via H-PAD
Sent: Monday, January 18, 2021
Subject: [H-PAD] H-PAD Notes 1/18/21: Links to recent articles of interest
Links to Recent Articles of Interest
By Lawrence Wittner,
History News Network, posted January 17
A capsule history of nuclear-weapons
policies, with emphasis on the role of popular pressure in securing such steps
that have occasionally been taken to reduce the risk of catastrophic war. The
author is a professor emeritus of history at SUNY Albany.
"The Capitol Riot Revealed the Darkest
Nightmares of White Evangelical America"
By Matthew Avery Sutton, New
Republic, posted January 14
"How 150 years of apocalyptic
agitation culminated in an insurrection." The author is chair of the History
Department at Washington State University and author of American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism
(Harvard U. Press, 2017).
"Trump Is the Republican Party's Past
and Its Future"
By Lisa McGirr, New York Times, posted
January 13
"Donald Trump Is Not an Aberration But
a Blueprint." The author teaches history at Harvard University and is the
author of Suburban Warriors: The Origins of
the New American Right (updated edition Princeton U. Press, 2015).
"Disenfranchisement: An American
Tradition"
By Julilly
Kohler-Hausmann, Dissent, Winter 2021 issue
On the multiple tactics that have been
employed in the interest of voter suppression. The author teaches history at
Cornell University and is currently writing a history of US democracy since the
1965 Voting Rights Act focusing on nonvoters.
By Ray McGovern, Consortium News,
posted January 12
The author, who served in the CIA for 27
years under nine presidents, relates past history in considering
whether the longtime diplomat William Burns, appointed head of the agency, can
change its culture.
By David W. Blight, New York
Times, posted January 9
A warning from the "Lost
Cause" of the Confederacy after the Civil War. "All Lost Causes find their lifeblood in lies, big and
small, lies born of beliefs in search of a history that can be forged into a
story and mobilize masses of people to act politically, violently, and in the
name of ideology." The author teaches history at Yale University and has
written many books on the Civil War era.
"What Trump Shares with the 'Lost
Cause' of the Confederacy"
By Karen L. Cox, New York Times, posted
January 8
The author teaches history at the
University of North Carolina. Her book No Common
Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice is forthcoming from the U. of North Carolina Press.
"The Deep Origins of Latino Support for Trump"
By Geraldo Cadava,
The New Yorker, posted December 29
On the diverse reasons why a
larger-than-expected minority of Latino voters supported Donald Trump in the
2020 election. The author teaches history and
Latino Studies at Northwestern University.
"It's Almost Twenty Years Since 9/11: Can We Finally Stop
Marching to Disaster?"
By Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch.com,
posted December 17
An overview of the "war on
terror" in its ramifications. The
author is a longtime antiwar activist who teaches at the University of San
Francisco and is the author of American
Nuremburg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes (Simon
& Schustert. 2016).
"Immigration Cruelty Didn't Start with
Trump. Will It End with Biden?"
By Elliott Young, Washington
Post, posted December 10
"The president’s immigration regime is
the culmination of 140 years of harsh policies." The author teaches
history at Lewis & Clark College and is the author of
Forever Prisoners: How the United States Made the World’s Largest
Immigrant Detention System (Oxford U. Press. forthcoming in January).
Thanks to Rusti
Eisenberg and an anonymous reader for suggesting articles included in the above
list. Suggestions can be sent to jimobrien48@gmail.com.
===========
e.
The Making of
US Empire at the dawning of its end
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56227.htm
by Pepe Escobar
===========
f.
Biden’s ‘Unity’… By War?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56228.htm
by Finian Cunningham
+
BIDEN Ramps Up Troops Into SYRIA On First Day As President
with Jimmy Dore
(9:39)
+
Newly
installed senior counterintelligence official names China as top long-term
threat
https://news.yahoo.com/newly-installed-senior-counterintelligence-official-names-china-as-top-longterm-threat-220938665.html
by Jenna McLaughlin·National
Security and Investigations Reporter
+
Biden’s
secretary of state praises Trump’s achievements on Israel
https://mondoweiss.net/2021/01/bidens-secretary-of-state-praises-trumps-achievements-on-israel-2/
by Philip Weiss
+
A Large US
Military Convoy Rolled Into Syria On 1st Day Of Biden
Presidency
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/large-us-convoy-rolled-syria-1st-day-biden-presidency
by Tyler Durden
Two separate
reports from Middle East news sources at the end of this week strongly suggest
that both Russia and the United States
are building up their forces in war-torn Syria within the opening days of the Joe Biden
administration.
First, Syrian
state media is alleging a major US build-up and reinforcements sent to
"illegitimate bases in Hasakah
countryside". The
report in Syria's
SANA details:
"...that
a convoy consisted of 40 trucks loaded
with weapons and logistical materials, affiliated to the so-called
international coalition have entered in Hasaka
countryside via al-Walid illegitimate border crossing
with north of Iraq, to reinforce
illegitimate bases in the area."
===========
g.
The Separate
Regimes Delusion
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56224.htm
by Nathan Thrall
+
Palestine in
Pictures: December 2020
https://electronicintifada.net/content/palestine-pictures-december-2020/32031
===========
h.
From: Global Research Newsletter [mailto:newsletter@globalresearch.ca]
Sent: Wednesday, January 20, 2021
Subject: The New Domestic War on Terror Is Coming
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
+
The Great
Reset Conspiracy Smoothie
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56234.htm
by Naomi Klein
===========
i.
Big Tech is censoring Covid debate
with Glenn Greenwald
(36:18)
+
MLB legend Hank Aaron dies two weeks after getting COVID-19 vaccine
+
An Overview:
Covid-19 Vaccine Side Effects World Map - HPV-VACCINE-SIDE-EFFECTS
https://hpv-vaccine-side-effects.com/covid-19-vaccine-side-effects-world-map/
+
Fauci Now Says
COVID-19 Vaccine May Become Mandatory
https://www.globalresearch.ca/fauci-now-says-covid-19-vaccine-may-become-mandatory/5734992
by Dr. Joseph Mercola
While Moderna and Pfizer have been granted
emergency use authorization for their respective vaccine candidates, they still
haven’t even completed Stage 3 clinical trials yet.
+
Video: Senator Jensen Under Investigation For
Telling the Truth About COVID-19
https://www.globalresearch.ca/senator-jensen-under-investigation-again-covid-19-skepticism/5734093
with Senator Scott Jensen
(4:58)
“The cancel culture is happening, … but the fact
of the matter is COVID-19 has opened a door into a tremendously vicious
political non-discussion.”
+
“COVID-19 will likely be with us forever.”
-
Here's how we'll live with it.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2021/01/covid-19-will-likely-be-with-us-forever-heres-how-well-live-with-it/
by Michael Greshko
+
https://www.insee.fr/fr/accueil
(version française)
&
https://www.insee.fr/en/accueil
(English version)
===========
j.
Who was Jeff Bezos BEFORE Amazon?
with reallygraceful
===========
k.
Edward Snowden: How Your Cell Phone Spies on You
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFns39RXPrU
with Edward Snowden
(24:16)
+
“Red Pill Your
Friends: Hollywood”
with reallygraceful
(14:14)
Red Pill Your Friends Vol. 2 is about the inner-workings of Hollywood,
Disney, Netflix, and news media--particularly the blurred lines between
corporations, governments, and entertainment.
The videos in this series are a mixture of clips from old videos with a
few new segments thrown in to fit the overall theme. All claims made in this
video are sourced and pinned as the top comment under the original videos.
+
“How Capitalism Exploits You”
with Richard Wolff
(5:26)
At the very heart of capitalism is a system of exploitation. That is not
a pejorative label: it’s an objective definition of what work actually means.
In order for capitalists to make a profit, their workers have to earn less than
the value they produce, and that extra value has to go to their bosses. You’re
being robbed – and it’s the system called capitalism that’s doing it
===========
l.
Meet the Censored:
Mark Crispin Miller
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-mark-crispin-miller
with Matt Taibbi
and Katie Halper
(1:38:43)
+
NEWS FROM UNDERGROUND – Mark Crispin Miller
https://markcrispinmiller.com/
+
News Stream
Shut Down! Reporter SILENCED Covering
Right Wing
Rally
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZuLEvfLNyU
with Jimmy Dore
(27 :16)
===========
m.
"State
of American Empire"
with Chris Hedges and Noam Chomsky
(27:33)
+
Despair,
depression, and the inevitable rise of Trump 2.0
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56218.htm
by Chris Hedges and Glenn Greenwald
+
Why Donald
Trump Had to Go
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56231.htm
by Peter Koenig
===========
n.
Catherine
Austin Fitts on “The State of Our Currencies”
https://www.corbettreport.com/interview-1613-catherine-austin-fitts-on-the-state-of-our-currencies/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CorbettReportRSS+%28The+Corbett+Report%29
with James Corbett
(34:30)
With the
global technocrats taking the world through the “Going Direct” Reset into the
abyss of the End of Currency and the ultimate transhuman
slave state, things could not be more dire. But, as
Catherine Austin Fitts of Solari.com tells us, there
are options on the table for taking things in a completely different direction
and unlocking the incredible abundance of the planet. The choice is our, but
for how long? Don’t miss this important, solutions-focused discussion on The
State of Our Currencies.
+
Davos 2021: to achieve a ‘great reset’, we can’t count on the
same old globalists to lead the way
by Jonathan Michie
The 51st World Economic Forum starts on
January 25, but with a major difference. Whereas this is famously the annual
gathering at the Davos ski resort in Switzerland of
global leaders from business, government and civil society, this year’s event
will take place virtually because of the pandemic.
Inevitably, the event for the 1,200-plus delegates
from 60 countries aims to respond to the apocalyptic events of the past 12
months. “A crucial year to rebuild trust” is the theme, built around the “great
reset” that World Economic Forum (WEF) founder Klaus Schwab and Prince Charles launched
last year.
The event
will be accompanied by virtual events in 430 cities across the world, to emphasise the fact that we face global challenges that
require global solutions and action.
o.
Prof. Wolff
on Hatred of Government - and How to Fight It
with Richard Wolff
(42:02)