Remembrance, and the righteous among the nations

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. So, remember. On Passover, we're injoined to remember as if we had personally been there, and we should remember this as if it had happened to us personally.

Last night there was a documentary on PBS with a Ukranian survivor, Fanya Gottesfeld-Heller. As a teenager, she entered into a sexual relationship with a man much older than she. If it hadn't been necessary to survive --he was her protector-- it would have been remarkably creepy. Her father softly encouraged her, "Be nice to him." With her parents and brother, she hid in a ditch big enough only for 2 people, for 2 years. Without even the most basic sanitation. Without the freedom even to get out of the ditch. With barely any food. And when the Nazis left and they could get out, her father disappeared. She'll never know what happened to him, but she's sure it was her lover who murdered her father.

My grandmother, born in Kiev, left after the Revolution, but it's not hard to imagine it could have been my family. Actually, I imagine my grandmother left some family behind. Cousins or such. If they were so lucky to survive, they probably had similar stories.

Tonight, PBS airs a show, The Righteous Among the Nations, about Arabs who saved Jews. There are clips here.

ex-neo-nazi skinhead's memoirs

Ex neo-nazi skinhead, Frank Meeink. The excerpt, here, details his socialization into white supremacism. It's notable just how he had to be socialized. There's a break between the center-right racism we see all the time and the far-right racism that's less common, and it's important to understand that break.

Liberal authoritarians and radical liberals

I'm not a liberal reformist in my temperment. In my ideology, perhaps some might see me that way. I don't argue against radical change -I'm all for it- but I do think the means matter. Anyway, Alan Johnson has a piece at Dissent's blog in which one line particularly hits me:

“Revolutionary politics” he told us, “is not a matter of opinions but of the truth on behalf of which one often is compelled to disregard the ‘opinion of the majority’ and to impose the revolutionary will against it.”

That "he" in "he told us" is Slavoj Žižek, and what hits me is the incredible inadequacy of any revolution that requires authoritarianism to quell the masses it has failed to persuade. I'm going to go ahead and call Žižek a liberal reformist for his indifference to the radical project of convincing people. He's still attached to the view that it's only what the elites do that matters, but I don't think you can ever have real, meaningful change (especially on issues such as racism) merely by switching one set of elites for another.

Johnson links to an older piece he wrote for Workers' Liberty (some punctuation corrected here, for clarity):

[Noberto] Bobbio made many other contributions to socialist thinking. A leading figure in the peace movements of the 1980s, he had criticised the post-war pro-Soviet fake "peace movements". His words of 1952 should cause some - those waving the "victory to the Resistance" placards - to think about the kind of "anti-war movement" they are building today.

"Strange peacemakers, these 'partisans of peace'. They offer themselves as mediators to establish peace between the two contenders. But they announce from the outset and without any reticence that one of the contenders is right and one is wrong."

I'm definitely gonna use that! In that piece, he calls Bobbio "part of an Italian tradition of radical liberalism." Perhaps that's what I am, a radical liberal, but I'll probably just go on using the catch-all term, Leftist.

Sunday Times on Biases at HRW

Rebecca at Mystical Politics put up a link to this at the Sunday Times (of London). There's any number of interesting bits, and it's well worth reading her post and the whole article.

In June 2006, Garlasco had alleged that an explosion on a Gaza beach that killed seven people had been caused by Israeli shelling. However, after seeing the details of an Israeli army investigation that closely examined the relevant ballistics and blast patterns, he subsequently told the Jerusalem Post that he had been wrong and that the deaths were probably caused by an unexploded munition in the sand. But this went down badly at Human Rights Watch HQ in New York, and the admission was retracted by an HRW press release the next day.

Well, I suppose that makes Marc Garlasco, their Nazi-memorabilia-collecting expert, look just a little bit better. (Supposedly, though, Garlasco had a close look at the beach, so I wonder how he came to his initial conclusions when he already knew what Israel was saying publicly. He couldn't have waited to talk with Israel?) And HRW as a whole looks a lot worse. I remember just how much press this beach incident got. And leftists pushing the story as "ethnic cleansing." I didn't know Garlasco had challenged the initial story. As they say, a lie goes round the world before the truth has a chance to put on pants.

media in ME

Some interesting observations in here. (the audio should be available within a day.)

back from my long retreat

Hey, I'm back. What have I been doing for the past 3 months? Well, mostly staring at the floor in a Buddhist monastery. Good times. But I've had no access to news, so help me catch up. What are the vital stories I missed?

More on The Left at War

Within a few hours I'll fall silent for 3 months. I promise, the reason is time limited, so I'll be back without fail. For now, though, I have only a short time to write. This post won't include the substantiating links or extended quotes I'd like. But I do want to give a fuller account of Michael Bérubé's book, The Left at War.

Most of all, it is a clear and insightful account of one particular, devastating division on the Left. The loud and seemingly omnipresent Chomsky/Z/Counterpunch-Left versus those who are less iconoclastic, much more in touch with reality, and hopefully form a widespread 'silent majority.'

One downside I can't ignore: it's far less funny than Bérubé's other popular books. At one point, I blamed Chomsky for sucking the air out, but that's not quite the issue. The titles, including chapter titles like 'Nowhere Left to Go' (perhaps that's slightly inaccurate, but I'm not checking it, for time), introducing the absurdity of leftier-than-thou politics, or 'Is it Hegemonic, Yet?,' are often witty. However the few jokes sprinkling most chapters fall flat because they don't add up to a funny tone. It is only in the chapter 'What is this cultural in cultural studies' (again, the title is probably slightly off) where the jokes really flow. One of the best is aimed at one of Bérubé's heroes, Richard Rorty.

More seriously, is the issue of Israel and antisemitism. Very quickly, he quotes Moishe Postone and Ellen Willis. His view, generally, on Israel, is to be commended. He writes that, when he opposed Israel's invasion of Lebanon, he found a professor from DePaul (and this should probably be considered context for Norman Finkelstein's failure to get tenure there; the professor here is not Finkelstein) calling him a Nazi apologist for not doing so as rabidly as the other professor thought appropriate.

But he largely drops the matter. He quotes Postone arguing that Islamic antisemitism, like other antisemitism, is a fetishistic backlash in a world perceived as threatening, but he moves on to other issues. Perhaps that's because he views the discourse surrounding the issue as "toxic," and steers away from it.

He takes on James Petras, because it's easy to get agreement on Petras, but he doesn't really get to the more influential Alexander Cockburn (Counterpunch is mentioned twice, in general statements, but Cockburn only warrants a footnote where he's taken to task for his position on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan). The book was written too early for Bérubé to comment on the attempt at Counterpunch to rehabilitate the Medieval blood libel or Cockburn's most blatant attempt to reach out to the antisemitic/isolationist far right. But Cockburn had already published plenty of Gilad Atzmon and Paul Craig Roberts, the 'father of Reaganomics' who also writes for the white supremacist vdare.com. Bérubé doesn't mention the SWP (in Britain) which hosted Gilad Atzmon repeatedly at its Marxism festival.

I don't want to criticize Bérubé for not writing the book I would have written, because then I'd have learned nothing, but I think it would have served the book to detail why antisemitism is often a part of Manichean movements for change, whether on the right or left, and often leads to dangerous left/right alliances. In fact, antisemitism often seems to define a certain cutoff point (even better than the "we are living in The Matrix"/"Manufacturing Consent" view he criticizes) where violence (from Timothy McVeigh, al Qaeda, or the Red Army Fraktion) comes to be seen as reasonable.

And, of course, he could have done a lot to explain why so many Jews are worried about these trends on the Left. This might have served to make the topic less toxic. But then it might be a different book. The one he wrote is absolutely worth reading, and one reason is what he does include on antisemitism. The bigger reason, though, is the summary of Stuart Hall that every other review will mention.

See you all in April!!