The Socialism of Fools

Iran and the Jews

2008-06-08T15:07:00.004-04:00

My position on war with Iran has been the same for some time -- I am against it. An American, NATO or Western-coalition attack on Iran would be a humanitarian disaster; militarily useless; and a catastrophic signal to the large segment of Iranians who are pro-Western and anti-totalitarian that the mullahs were right all along.

This is not mitigated or refuted by acknowledging the genocidal nature of Iran's theocratic war party, which is stridently represented by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But where there is a war party, there is some kind of peace party, and Iran's is significant. Iran has never initiated a conventional assault on any state and appears to respond rationally to diplomatic and military pressure.

Still the threat posed by the mullahs' millenarian Islam to Middle East Jewry must be acknowledged. It is -- I state with stoical restraint -- of interest to people of liberal sentiment. Iran has long fought a war against the Jews and the state where they ingathered after the Holocaust. It does this through millenarian proxies such as Hezbollah and more recently Hamas. If Iran eventually manages to weaponize uranium meant for its sham civil energy program, its nuclear arsenal will either back traditional or comprise a new breed of attacks on the Jewish state.

These are key reasons to vigorously confront the efforts of putatively anti-war campaigners, armed with the pseudo-scholarship of Juan Cole, to minimize or falsify Ahmadinejad's call for Israel's destruction at the 2005 World Without Zionism conference in Tehran. These are lies of an illiberal segment of the Left that, for a complex set of ideological reasons, privileges the well-being of Muslims over Jews.

Sadly there are reverberations of this among the liberal elite. A week ago, the New York Times Sunday Book Review published a survey of working writers' book recommendations for the Presidential candidates. This was before Hillary Clinton bowed out. The writer Junot Diaz addressed this to her:

Hillary: What to recommend to a driven, brilliant, flawed woman who has no problem threatening to obliterate Iran, should they attack Israel? I recommend Peter Balakian’s “Black Dog of Fate,” in an attempt to cure her of her genocidal impulses. Armenians know all about being “obliterated,” and perhaps that nation’s suffering and miraculous survival will crack Pharaoh’s heart. But don’t bet on it.

An exquisite pomposity inhabits allegorical writing as tone-deaf as this. Hillary’s promise to "obliterate" Iran was made in narrow reply to the hypothetical of its launching a nuclear attack on Israel. I shouldn't have to point out that this would result in the destruction of almost as many Jews as were killed by Nazi Germany. Diaz is oblivious to this. Robotically he likens Hillary to a golem -- mindless and bloodthirsty -- who targets innocent Iranians with her "genocidal impulses", and he does this by invoking Pharoah, Biblical captor of the Jews!

This is not the usual argument, in which people claim that irrespective of its ideological commitments and arsenal, Iran would not commit suicide by directly attacking Israel. Instead Diaz accepts that Iran has destroyed Israel and responds only by adducing the Armenians to speak truth to American power.

The Jews also know something about being obliterated, Mr. Diaz. It is knowledge that electrifies the machinery of real humanitarianism.

The Anti-Totalitarian Future?

2008-06-02T15:06:00.006-04:00

In the New York Times, Stephen Farrell reports there are only a handful of known Jews left in Iraq. What was presumably the last operating synagogue closed in 2003 when the chaos became too dire. Matthew Yglesias derives the following from the story:

... the upshot of the factoid about the synagogue seems to be that the U.S. invasion actually turned Iraq into a less hospital [sic] place for Jews than was Saddam Hussein's rabidly anti-Zionist rapacious dictatorship.

That's precisely the upshot a "reality-based" liberal would take from it, but it's historically illiterate. To be fair Farrell's article encourages a hasty reader to make that interpretation, but in Yglesias' case this appears to be just anti-Bush snark. One is wrong, the other wrong-headed. In The Assassins' Gate, George Packer makes it clear that Saddam's "anti-Zionism" -- the euphemism used by both Yglesias and Farrell -- so thoroughly poisoned younger generations of Iraqis that Iraqi Jews had basically become cryptids by the time of the invasion. The synagogue that closed in 2003 must have been an outlier.

Gate also illuminates the quote at the end of Farrell's piece, in which the main interviewee's father laments that he "used to spend more time with Arabs than Jews". He, an octogenarian, is referring to comity with Iraqi Muslims of his generation, their children and their childrens' children. These are people who formed their opinions about Jews before the anti-Semitism of the Baathist regime corrupted the later generations.

Insofar as it's particular to them, the situation today for Jews in Iraq has only a little to do with the Gulf actions. Our invasion has inflamed the Baathist die-hards and Islamist conspirazoids, but those processes were well under way during the inter-war years. It's true the chaos resulting from the stupidity and incompetence of the occupation has accelerated and amplified all kinds of violence. But to fold up your Times, rest it beside your latte, tisk and tick this off as one more "upshot" of Bush's war is just dilettantism. It collapses the history of Iraqi anti-Semitism -- which replayed across the Arab and Muslim world -- and yokes it to a cheap, partisan point.

Neoconservatism is the mullet of American politics. If Obama becomes President, a "reality-based" liberalism will be in the ascendant. It's interesting to consider what these people choose to notice and when.

Postscript: An older, related post.

The Anti-War Conscience

2008-06-01T16:57:00.016-04:00

Manouchehr Mottaki, the foreign minister of Iran, has echoed his president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's call for Israel's destruction:

TEHRAN (AFP) — Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki called on the world's Muslims on Sunday to work to "erase" Israel, in the latest verbal attack by Tehran against the Jewish state.

"As the Imam Khomeini said, if each Muslim throws a bucket of water on Israel, Israel will be erased," Mottaki told a conference in Tehran, recalling a saying by Iran's late revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has sparked international outrage for his repeated attacks against Israel, which he has predicted is doomed to disappear and described as a "stinking corpse" and a "dead rat".

His most notorious attack was in 2005 when he repeated another saying from Khomeini calling for Israel to be "wiped from the map".

Mottaki added: "More than ever, the Zionist regime is disintegrating from within. Today, the Islamic resistance in this region has shattered the regime's legend of invincibility."

While Ahmadinejad and top military commanders reguarly predict the demise of Israel, such virulent attacks from the foreign ministry are relatively unusual.

This latter point is key. When Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be wiped off the map at the World Without Zionism conference in Tehran, Foreign Minister Mottaki was one of the Iranian government officials who came forward claiming that Ahmadinejad didn't really mean what he said. This fueled both the notions that the Iranian president was merely speaking metaphorically, and that no matter what he meant, Ahmadinejad is just a "puppet" whose opinions will not translate into government policy. Mottaki's defense was interpreted as a demurral to hard-line sabre-rattling by saner elements in the Iranian government.

Now, if we work within the framework set by Ahmadinejad's apologists in 2005, Iran's war party appears to have enlarged, but we need not do to be alarmed. Mottaki's foreign ministry also has been busy reassuring Hamas that a Syrian détente with Israel will not lessen Iran's support for its genocidal enterprise.

When Ahmadinejad trumpeted his desire to see Israel destroyed, a clutch of liars arose to retail the disinformation that he was mistranslated. They were led by Juan Cole and largely comprised left-wing foes of Israel. Minimizing or falsifying his words, they alternately claimed that he was expressing simple anti-Zionism, that he was calling for mere regime change, and, most risibly, in the words of Cole himself, that Ahmadinejad's statement was "in fact probably a reference to some phrase in a medieval Persian poem."

Insofar as Mottaki's echo of Ahmadinejad is noticed at all -- so far almost no one is reporting it -- it will be answered by the same apologists, who will do anything, even extenuate plainly genocidal decrees against Jews, to prevent a war against Iran. This is the "anti-war" conscience.

Illegal Wiretapping, Indeed

2008-05-27T20:04:00.017-04:00

Glenn Greenwald's trial conduct found "unethical"

Glenn Greenwald is a self-made blogging phenomenon, for which you have to respect him, even though he is probably the single most obnoxious writer on the Internet. His prose style is a groaning Frankenstein of juvenile syntax -- Tourettic scare quotes, volume-11 hyperbole -- bolted onto sentences that have the grace of nose-diving zeppelins. And his ego is galactic.

The worldly avatar of Greenwald's ego takes the shape of the Jew who will ostentatiously disregard his Jewishness to defend our country's founding principles. His public career began with him defending in a series of civil suits the First Amendment rights of the leader of the World Church of the Creator, a white-supremacist named Matthew Hale, who is presently serving a 40-year sentence for soliciting the murder of "Jew rat" Judge Joan Lefkow. Of the plaintiffs in two of these suits -- the Center for Constitutional Rights, William Kunstler's legal advocacy group that focuses on human rights litigation, and the Reverend Stacy William Anderson, a pastor who was shot by a rampaging follower of Hale's -- Greenwald observed, "I find that the people behind these lawsuits are truly so odious and repugnant, that creates its own motivation for me."

Now he's on a crusade to prevent war with Iran, and he's sounding the reveille that "neocons" -- ahem -- and "the Israelis... [are] as transparent as they are dishonest and bloodthirsty."

And there's a whole bunch more in between, such as praise for Walt and Mearsheimer (their book was "important, richly documented") and Israel-hating spook journalist James Bamford (he's "superb"), outrage over Israel's refusal to welcome Norman "Holocaust Industry" Finkelstein, a falsification of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's call for Israel's destruction, and a decree that the Israeli occupation is the primary cause of radical foment in the Muslim world. He offers the latter diagnosis prescriptively, of course, as he is a Paulite non-interventionist dressed up as a Left Democrat, seeking to disentangle us from that shitty, little country.

On the other side of the coin, Greenwald can be spot-on when he's taking down right-wing hypocrisy, such as here, and especially when mocking the office pantomime of masculinity performed by that doughy chorus of pundits led by Jonah Goldberg and James Taranto. He's also voluminous on the subject of Constitutional Law and its antagonist in the Bush Administration. I'm not able to judge these writings, but I trust them a lot more than his flatulent emanations on foreign policy, as Greenwald is a former Wachtell litigator. In particular, he's had a lot to say about the Bush Administration's extensive, illegal wiretapping.

Which is why I note with a sense of irony that during his defense of Matthew Hale, Greenwald was found in court to have illegally recorded conversations he had with various of Hale's associates. I have no clue how to properly cite cases, but the document is entitled:

REVEREND STEPHEN TRACY ANDERSON, Plaintiff, vs. MATTHEW F. HALE, THE WORLD CHURCH OF THE CREATOR, an unincorporated association, and THE ESTATE OF BENJAMIN NATHANIEL SMITH, Defendants.

No. 00 C 2021

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ILLINOIS, EASTERN DIVISION

159 F. Supp. 2d 1116; 2001 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 13001

and in it we find the following

I. Background

On October 13, 2000, Defendants' counsel's telephone rang. [**3] To Defendant's counsel's apparent pleasure, Kenneth Dippold, one of Plaintiff's witnesses, was on the line. Dippold voluntarily called Defendants' counsel in New York from a location in Illinois to answer any questions regarding Dippold's involvement in the underlying litigation. Dippold had received a subpoena from Defendants' counsel earlier that day.

Defendants' counsel served the subpoena on Dippold immediately upon discovering his identity on October 7, 2000. At that time, Plaintiff identified Dippold as the sole witness to support the allegation that Hale encouraged Smith to engage in the July 1999 shooting spree. Before that date, Plaintiff [*551] had not identified a witness to support this allegation.

Seizing the opportunity, Defendants' counsel hit the record button and commenced surreptitiously taping the conversation with Dippold. The conversation lasted for some time, covering in detail Dippold's contacts with Hale, the WCOTC, and various other parties having an interest in the underlying litigation. Dippold never asked if Defendants' counsel was taping the conversation. Nor did Defendants' counsel make any representations to Dippold suggesting that the conversation was or [**4] was not being taped.

The existence of the tape remained undiscovered by Dippold and Plaintiff until Dippold's deposition approximately two months later. After three hours of questioning, and allegedly a few too many inconsistent statements, Defendants' counsel revealed that the October telephone conversation was surreptitiously taped. Because Defendants' counsel proceeded to use a transcript of the tape to impeach Dippold, Defendants' counsel immediately provided Plaintiff's counsel with a copy of the tape. Any work-product protection no longer applied.

Approximately one month later, Plaintiff discovered the existence of another tape. This tape pertained to a conversation between Defendants' counsel and Ian Sigel, another witness in the case. Similar to the circumstances surrounding Dippold's tape, Sigel was in Illinois at the time of the telephone conversation, while Defendants' counsel was in New York. Sigel had also received a subpoena from Defendants' counsel.

In view of Defendants' counsel's tactics, Plaintiff served a Fourth Request for the Production of Documents and Things on Defendant. Among other things, Plaintiff requested "any and all audio tapes and/or written transcripts [**5] reflecting any conversation(s) between [Defendants] and/or [Defendants] attorney(s) and any third-party referring or relating to the [underlying lawsuit]." (Pl.'s Consolidated Mem. Supp. Mot. Compel & Protective Order at 4.) Days later Defendants responded, asserting the work product doctrine and refusing to produce any tapes.

...

As it turned out, Plaintiff quickly determined that it was necessary to brief the issue. More tapes, in fact, existed. Moreover, Defendants' counsel refused to discontinue making additional tapes...

Greenwald and Hale lost both motions relating to Greenwald's misconduct, and lost again on appeal.

Plaintiff moved to compel disclosure of these tapes, arguing that this conduct was unethical and therefore vitiated any attorney work-product privilege that may have attached to these recordings, and sought a protective order prohibiting any further recordings. The magistrate judge granted both motions, finding defense counsel's conduct unethical under two separate rules: Local Rule 83.58.4(a)(4), prohibiting "dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation;" and Local Rule 83.54.4, stating "a lawyer shall not … use methods of obtaining evidence that violate the legal rights of [another] person." [Emphasis mine]

After disclosure was eventually made, the elaborateness of Greenwald's deceit came to light:

A 52-page transcript of one conversation showed defendants' counsel steered the conversation by eliciting particular responses to detailed questions, leading to more detailed questions, to lure the witness into damning statements for later use.

This hardly raises to the level of a Constitutional violation of privacy by the Executive, but Greenwald is never so strident as he is when exposing what he perceives to be hypocrisy. I suppose, though, we wouldn't receive the bounty of our self-anointed protectors if they were encumbered by the lofty sense of ethics they bear down on others.

Obama, the Jews and Israel

2008-05-13T12:34:00.001-04:00

There's a persistent, nasty notion that Barack Obama is bad for the Jews. It crests and falls rhythmically in public discourse, and I hear it expressed by Jews I know. The sense is Obama places somewhere on a spectrum between a latte-drinking, liberal milquetoast and a black anti-Semite. Wherever the dart sticks, it will be bad for Israel.

As someone who has spent years writing about foes of Israel, subtle and overt, and specifically these two types that supposedly bookend Obama, I'd like to go on record saying this is top-shelf, triple-distilled horseshit.

Over the next months, we'll come to see the fullness of Obama's foreign policy vision. We already have a fairly good sense of what it will be like. Some of it strikes me as vaporous, some of it seems groan-inducingly soft. Some of it makes sense. Most of it -- even stuff I don't agree with -- is fair enough after seven years of calamity at home and abroad.

As a policy package, it may ultimately fail, but none of it will be inimical to the Jews or Israel. Understandably, a lot of Obama supporters wanted to brush aside the Jeremiah Wright kerfuffle, but I thought it was fair to ask why the hell he would associate himself with a half-crazy demagogue like that. However, I'm satisfied that Obama was simply trying to shore up his cred with African-Americans, understand their milieu better, and above all find his faith. I simply don't think he has the slightest time for the victimology, the street-scholarship or the Jew-baiting buffoonery of the incredibly selfish man who was his pastor.

Jeffrey Goldberg, the New Yorker staff writer, is one of the more interesting working journalists. He's got a new Atlantic blog that I'll be reading (link added, left). Here's Obama speaking to him about this issue.

Look, we don’t do nuance well in politics and especially don’t do it well on Middle East policy. We look at things as black and white, and not gray. It’s conceivable that there are those in the Arab world who say to themselves, “This is a guy who spent some time in the Muslim world, has a middle name of Hussein, and appears more worldly and has called for talks with people, and so he’s not going to be engaging in the same sort of cowboy diplomacy as George Bush,” and that’s something they’re hopeful about. I think that’s a perfectly legitimate perception as long as they’re not confused about my unyielding support for Israel’s security.

Obama also says some considerably heartening things about the complimentarity of the African-American and Zionist narratives. Think about that for a moment. This blog's abiding theme is that for a variety of reasons, utopian politics lead algorithmically to anti-Semitism. Victimology and identity politics are powered off that grid. This is the marrow of Jew-hatred among African-Americans, who can see themselves as domestic Palestinians, preyed upon by owner-Jews or upstaged by the moral legatees of the Holocaust. Obama, however, invokes a classic, American liberalism:

So when I became more politically conscious, my starting point when I think about the Middle East is this enormous emotional attachment and sympathy for Israel, mindful of its history, mindful of the hardship and pain and suffering that the Jewish people have undergone, but also mindful of the incredible opportunity that is presented when people finally return to a land and are able to try to excavate their best traditions and their best selves. And obviously it’s something that has great resonance with the African-American experience.

One of the things that is frustrating about the recent conversations on Israel is the loss of what I think is the natural affinity between the African-American community and the Jewish community, one that was deeply understood by Jewish and black leaders in the early civil-rights movement but has been estranged for a whole host of reasons that you and I don’t need to elaborate.

Obama, in his perspicacious and articulate way that is an elixir after 8 years of Bush's cud-chewing, rhetorical chyme, has turned this precisely on its head. This is no accident. If Obama becomes President, his foreign policy might fail, but he's no enemy of the Jews or Israel.

Israel Turns 60

2008-05-11T17:16:00.006-04:00

As you must expect, I could not be more gratified by Israel reaching its 60th anniversary, in spite of its bringing many unanswered questions and unresolved dangers to the celebration.

In contrast to the good will, an array of opposition masses in the middle distance. There is the soulful concern of the Tony Judt class of left-liberals, whose embarrassment by even the mildest Jewish particularism resounds in their rush to amplify Israeli Arabs' feelings of disenfranchisement. And there is the naked hatred of those who gleefully anticipate the destruction of the Jewish state, to borrow Oliver Kamm's apposite phrase.

Speaking of Kamm, here are two reactions to the anniversary, by him and the historian Marko Attila Hoare. Kamm's mostly communicates my own feelings (unlike him, I am concerned with the fortunes of Judaism, although this is unrelated to my concern for Israel). Hoare, who is no less celebratory than Kamm, shows concern about current Israeli nationalism, but with a view toward evolving the Jewish state rather than guiltily slouching toward its disintegration into a secular binational war zone.

Oliver Kamm:

My position on this is not complex. I have no interest in the fortunes of Judaism but a great interest in the resilience of persecuted peoples. There is no people more historically persecuted than the Jews, and a Jewish state is their guarantor. It also represents the intrusion of Western constitutional principles into a region where these are not widely observed. Though there are organised religious extremists in the Israeli political system, they have never attained power - unlike, say, their counterparts in Iran.

I am no uncritical supporter of Israeli government policies. Some - such as the attempt to implement regime change in Lebanon in the 1980s - I have strongly opposed. I hope for, without expecting any time soon, a pacific two-state territorial settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the fact and the independence -- not merely, in the demeaning phrase grudgingly advanced by her enemies, the "existence" -- of Israel, a Jewish state and a vibrant democracy, are causes for celebration.

Marko Attila Hoare:

So far as Israel is concerned, its record of democracy and human rights concerning its own citizens compares very favourably with most other Middle Eastern countries, but very badly with just about any West European country, because its stage of national development more closely resembles Turkey or Greece than France or the Netherlands. The two deformations resulting from the nature of Israel’s birth are, firstly, a failure to embrace the concept of a multi-ethnic citizenry and accord equal rights to all its citizens regardless of ethnicity, resulting in suffering and injustice for Israeli Arabs; and, secondly, a continued policy of colonisation in the West Bank, resulting in massive suffering for the occupied Palestinians. These deformations are, of course, linked to the behaviour of the Arab states and the refusal of most of them to recognise Israel, as well as to the Palestinians’ own behaviour - but this is not ultimately a question of apportioning blame. Like every nation-state, Israel needs to develop a post-nationalist national ideology if it is to complete its national and democratic development. This means becoming a genuinely Israeli nation-state, i.e. a state of the Israeli nation; a state of the citizens of Israel - rather than simply a Jewish state in which non-Jews are second-class citizens. Jews would still form a comfortable majority in Israel, thereby guaranteeing Jewish national self-determination. But a Jewish ethnic majority can comfortably exist with a concept of citizenship blind to ethnicity - as all concepts of citizenship should be, from the US and France to Israel and the Arab states. And as the American and French models show, a concept of citizenship blind to ethnicity rests upon identification with the state’s legal borders - hence no colonisation projects directed against neighbouring peoples.

Postscript: I wish neither to suggest that the Israeli Arab reaction is not newsworthy, nor to pass judgment on it. I am not an Israeli Arab living in Israel. It's just instructive what people choose to notice and when.

Teen Vermin Attack Lubavitcher

2008-03-29T16:55:00.008-04:00

Just a few blocks from where I live, petty criminals have proven once again they are the stupidest stratum of society, and therefore why the New Antisemitism appeals to so many of them.

Police are investigating what they called a possible bias attack in Brooklyn in which a Jewish man was robbed and beaten before one of his attackers was hit by a car.

Uria Ohana, 25, an assistant rabbi, said Thurday that he entered the Fourth Avenue-Ninth Street subway station in Park Slope on his way to a lecture in Manhattan on Tuesday evening when a young man, one of a group on the platform, grabbed his yarmulke from his head and ran for the exit.

Ohana said he chased the man to the street, where the man darted between two parked cars and was struck by a passing vehicle.

As a crowd formed around the injured man, two of his attackers' acquaintances ran up and confronted him, Ohana said.

"When they saw him injured, they started screaming, 'Look what you did' and they punched me in the head," he said.

The two men who attacked him and a handful of others then jumped into a sport utility vehicle and fled, he said.

Ohana, who grew up in Israel and lives in Wellesley, Mass., said he believes the men targeted him because he is Jewish. "They were yelling 'Allahu akbar' which literally means 'God is great.' But it was the symbolic meaning that frightened me," he said.

I've lived in Brooklyn for ten years. I started on Fourth Avenue a little ways down from that train station. It hasn't been terribly dangerous in that time, and it gets less and less so, but there has always been a surplus of teen vermin on that strip.

Nietzsche and Nazism

2008-03-29T14:42:00.010-04:00

On Times Online, Ben McIntyre seeks to cleanse Nietzsche of the posthumous stain of Nazism:

Two gravestones stand side by side in the churchyard of the little village of Röcken, south of Leipzig: one belongs to Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the greatest and most misunderstood philosophers; the other marks the grave of his sister Elisabeth, a lifelong anti-Semite who hijacked her brother's writings after his death and used them to serve the cause of Nazism, leaving a stain on his philosophy that has never been fully erased.

Today, bulldozers belonging to a power company are preparing to dig up the town where Nietzsche and his sister were born and buried, to get at the seam of coal that runs beneath. Nietzsche and his sister may have to move. His followers are enraged; villagers say exhuming their famous son would be sacrilege; environmentalists, quoting Nietzsche's epithet “Be true to the soil”, wonder why yet more coal is being excavated to poison the world's atmosphere. I would be delighted to see Nietzsche dug up, if only for the symbolic opportunity to rescue him from the clutches of his appalling sister.

Before insanity struck him down in 1889, at the age of 44, Nietzsche lived in fear of being misunderstood. “Above all,” he wrote in Ecce Homo, “do not mistake me for someone else.” He was a conservative elitist, an aphorist of brilliance championing individual greatness in the midst of mediocrity. His writing is explosive and apocalyptic, dense and complex, and often shocking in its violence.

But Nietzsche was no Nazi. He vigorously opposed German nationalism, as he rejected all mass movements; he had no time for ideologues, mocked the notion of a Teutonic master race and loathed anti-Semitism in all its forms.

This happens to coincide with a passage from a book I've just dipped into: Fascism: A History, by Roger Eatwell, one of the star historians of the various forms of that political movement. Eatwell acknowledges the Elisabeth Nietzsche/Bernard Forster problem, but doesn't think it's quite as simple as McIntyre makes it:

In adult life, Nietzsche journeyed from ivory tour academic to ailing grand tourist. It is highly doubtful whether he would have felt any affinity with the working-class, unintellectual side of "proletaryan" Nazism. Many have stressed that Nietzsche criticized German nationalism and biological theories of race, but this argument needs probing more carefully. Nietzsche's critique of German nationalism was essentially twofold. First, he believed that it was diverting attention from more general European problems, especially the rise of decadence. Second and related to this first point, he saw modern German culture as too materialist, too philistine. But this did not mean that there was nothing about Germany that Nietzsche admired. He had a great respect for Frederick the Great and celebrated a more ancestral, heroic German spirit. Nor was his thinking completely opposed to racism. Central to his beliefs was a desire to save Europe from decadence and from the threat of newer and more virile nations. Ultimately, it is impossible to be sure how Nietzsche would have reacted to the development of the main fascist regimes. On balance, the evidence points to the idea that he would have opposed them -- though some who shared many of Nietzsche's views, for instance the major philosopher Martin Heidegger, were to support the Nazis on the grounds that they offered the best vehicle for creating a new world.

The main difference between Nietzsche's philosophy and fascism was not so much nationalism or racism as his pessimistic view of the possibilities of imminent change.

Eatwell points out that Nietzsche's conservatism, as well as the inspiration in Nietzsche conservatives have historically found, underscore the silliness of measuring fascism on a right-left spectrum. It's most likely his elitism and pessimism about the prospects of revolutionary action that would have distanced Nietzsche from the Nazis. In turn, people like Jonah Goldberg are absurd (and cynical) to try to link fascism to liberalism, but its particular incompatibility with Nietzsche underscores the "progressive" nature of what the Nazis envisioned.

The Eatwell excerpt is found on page 12 of the 1995 Penguin softcover edition.

Me on Sirius Radio

2008-03-18T18:22:00.003-04:00

I just got done being interviewed by Joe Salzone for the Blog Bunker, a blog-centric talk radio show on Indie Talk, Sirius 110. Joe was great and I had a lot of fun. We discussed Ron Paul and his defunct campaign in light of my writings about the strange convergence of the antiwar Left with the isolationist Right, here and here. The program will rerun tomorrow morning at 8:00 AM and afternoon at 1:00 PM; I appear in the last twenty minutes of the hour-long show. Check it out if you're a subscriber.

Update: If you're coming by after having listened, feel free to leave some comments.

French Jew Kidnapped and Terrorized

2008-03-10T03:20:00.011-04:00

In a gratefully limited reprise of the gang murder of Ilan Halimi, French authorities have arrested six banlieue thugs in connection with the kidnapping and humiliation of Mathieu Roumi, a French Jewish teenager. Roumi was terrorized in the same suburb as Halimi by tormenters professing membership in the "Barbarians", the gang that did Halimi in.

For two hours the attackers tortured the young man. One shoved cigarette butts into his mouth, another took issue with Roumi's Jewish origin, grabbed correction fluid and scrawled "dirty Jew" on his forehead. The six men proceeded to scream at him and threaten that he would die the way Halimi did.

They identified themselves as members of the "Barbarians," the same gang that kidnapped Halimi from his store, demanded ransom for his release, and when that was not forthcoming, tortured the 23-year-old over the course of three weeks. Moments after he was dumped on the street, Halimi died.

Roumi told police investigators that throughout his ordeal, his assailants employed measures with sexual and sadistic connotations. When the issue of his sexual orientation arose, one of them placed a condom on the tip of a stick and shoved it in Roumi's mouth.

"We admire Youssouf Fofana!" they shouted at him, referring to the leader of the gang that murdered Halimi.

As is customary, Sammy Ghozlan has been commenting on the case. You can read about Ghozlan and the problem of Jewish persecution in the banlieues in Marie Brenner's France's Scarlet Letter, a Socialism of Fools bellwether essay.

Update: All of this said, 2007 was the quietest year for French anti-Semitism since the start of the second Palestinian Intifada in 2000.

The year 2007 was the quietest year the French Jewish community has known since 2000. In October 2000, after the second intifada broke out, French Jews were hit by a wave of anti-Semitic attacks the likes of which had not been seen since World War II. In 2007, fewer than 200 anti-Jewish incidents were recorded, a scale akin to the number of attacks recorded in just one month in 2001.

There was a drop across the board in attacks, curses, threats, bullying and harassment.

Knave's Gambit in the Jewish Press

2008-03-05T11:58:00.004-05:00

My apologies for the break in posting. I do have a good reason: besides my 9-to-5, I've been working on refining the original Knave's Gambit for publication in the Jewish Press. A 50%-condensed version appears on the front page of today's issue. Enjoy.

Jews Stoned on Holocaust Memorial Day

2008-02-06T12:33:00.000-05:00

Last week on Holocaust Memorial Day Bangladeshi yobs stoned Jews who were taking a walking tour of London's East End.

The Holocaust Memorial Day marking the genocides of the 20th century was marred on Sunday when a gang of youths stoned Jewish tourists on a guided tour of London's East End.

A group of 96 visitors looking at sites of Jewish interest were attacked by youths hiding behind a fence in a back street in Whitechapel.

Two were struck by the missiles, an American woman just starting a new post at London's Metropolitan University and a Canadian lecturer.

The woman had blood pouring from her head and needed hospital treatment.

...

An eye-witness said: "Stones started to come down on us and some in the group were scared and ducked.

"I looked over the fence and saw four Asian youths throwing stones. They were laughing, then ran away."

What's Cookin' in the "Global South"

2008-02-04T19:42:00.000-05:00

In Knave's Gambit, I excerpted bits of Bobby Fischer's 9/11 Bombo Radyo interview to explore the irony of his being considered crazy for making statements you often hear from far-Leftists, albeit usually in less profane form. One example was Fischer's belief that the Jews were leading the world to its destruction like a steer by its nose ring. He said:

That's the big danger, that the Jews, that this lunatic people, are gonna take us all with them. But I'm hoping, as I say, for a Seven Days in May scenario, where [unintelligible] sane people will take over the US now.

I chose Jose Saramago's 2002 El Pais piece about the warlike racism inherent in Judaism as the "sane" Leftist's echo of Fischer. I could have cited a closer and much more current example. On January 7, Arun Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma Ghandi and President and co-founder of the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, reminded readers of On Faith, a joint-venture blog between the Washington Post and Newsweek, that "Jewish Identity Can't Depend on Violence":

Jewish identity in the past has been locked into the holocaust experience -- a German burden that the Jews have not been able to shed. It is a very good example of a community can overplay a historic experience to the point that it begins to repulse friends. The holocaust was the result of the warped mind of an individual who was able to influence his followers into doing something dreadful. But, it seems to me the Jews today not only want the Germans to feel guilty but the whole world must regret what happened to the Jews. The world did feel sorry for the episode but when an individual or a nation refuses to forgive and move on the regret turns into anger.

The Jewish identity in the future appears bleak. Any nation that remains anchored to the past is unable to move ahead and, especially a nation that believes its survival can only be ensured by weapons and bombs...

Apparently, in the modern world, so determined to live by the bomb, this is an alien concept. You don't befriend anyone, you dominate them. We have created a culture of violence (Israel and the Jews are the biggest players) and that Culture of Violence is eventually going to destroy humanity.

Mostly I'll leave it at that, but I do want to say that Arun Gandhi's comments are drearily predictable, coming as they are from a herald of Third World liberation. Israel and Jew-hatred are a powerful engine of revolutionary politics in the "Global South", as they are everywhere. Desmond Tutu, for instance, has been saying stuff like this for years.

Branding Jew-Hatred

2008-02-04T00:13:00.000-05:00

Holocaust-denier David Irving's nemesis Deborah Lipstadt posts about some especially rancid Jew-hating kitsch. This was the design for a postcard sold by Boomerang, a Dutch T-shirt and postcard company.

Classy. This could well serve as New Antisemitism's brand icon.

The Constancy of Conspiracy

2008-02-03T00:00:00.000-05:00

In the course of gathering quotes by Left-wingers that mirrored the supposedly 'crazy' utterances of Bobby Fischer, I came across this gem from Arundhati Roy, speaking "in conversation" with Howard Zinn at the Lensic Performing Arts Center in Sante Fe, 18 September 2002. I didn't use it in Knave's Gambit, as it didn't have an immediate analog in Fischer's 9/11 radio interview. I'll reproduce it here:

As the War Against Terror casts its net wider and wider, America's corporate heart is hemorrhaging. For all the endless, empty chatter about democracy, today the world is run by three of the most secretive institutions in the world: The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, all three of which, in turn, are dominated by the U.S. Their decisions are made in secret. The people who head them are appointed behind closed doors. Nobody really knows anything about them, their politics, their beliefs, their intentions. Nobody elected them. Nobody said they could make decisions on our behalf. A world run by a handful of greedy bankers and CEOs whom nobody elected can't possibly last.

This is worth quoting in a separate post because it demonstrates a key intellectual feature of anti-globalization: so much of it rests on conspiracy theory. This is true of all the far-Left and far-Right movements, which are always utopian and thus empirically resistant. Facts threaten the party line, and when they do the propagandist patches tears in the ideological tapestry by blaming remote but all-powerful forces. Totalitarian states systematize this approach on a grand scale. The elements of conspiracy theory become the gears of the propaganda machine.

Although I can't have any readers obtuse enough to require it, I will note that Arundhati Roy appears here to have lifted a passage about Jewish financiers from Der Sturmer and rewritten it with reference to Americans. I don't mean this as a literal methodological claim, of course, but Roy's remarks about American "bankers and CEOs" are identical to conspiratorial blather about international Jewish finance and its war machine.

Anti-Semitism is itself a conspiracy theory, and in turn it is the prevailing conspiracy theory of two great totalitarian movements -- Nazism and radical Islam. It was also an increasingly luminous fixture in the constellation of Soviet Communism, but not its primary driver. Roy shows that anti-globalization, which borrows many Soviet tropes, exhibits a similar intellectual hygiene. While her target is Americans, and never so far as I know Jews, she shows why the far-Left naturally trends toward anti-Semitism, and why it sees an ally in radical Islam despite major ideological incompatibilities.

Mark Strauss explains this with greater depth in Antiglobalism's Jewish Problem, a Socialism of Fools bellwether essay.

Postscript: That Roy is considered one of anti-globalization's lodestars, and can utter such a cartoonish analysis in the promotion of its viewpoint, must be, even granting the intellectual infirmity of that movement, a pitiable product of the "soft bigotry of low expectations".

Knave's Gambit

2008-01-31T13:56:00.002-05:00

The Totalitarian Stupidity of Bobby Fischer

Recent history may offer no purer example of August Bebel's socialism of fools than Bobby Fischer. Arguably the best chess player ever, Fischer, who was born Jewish in Brooklyn, was an anti-Semite and anti-American whose passion for these hatreds was surpassed only by the straightforwardness with which he frequently expressed them. On September 11th, 2001, with bodies still smoldering in the rubble of the World Trade Center, Fischer called Bombo Radyo, a talk radio station in the Philippines, to say:

I applaud the act... The U.S. and Israel have been slaughtering the Palestinians, just slaughtering them for years. Robbing them and slaughtering them. Nobody gave a shit. Now it's coming back to the U.S. Fuck the U.S. I want to see the U.S. wiped out.

A lot of people saw this as yet more evidence of Fischer's storied lunacy, but most people refused to give him a pass. Perhaps that's because what he said was being echoed in ostensibly respectable quarters. Fischer's shout out to the Palestinians perfectly expressed the kind of "anti-globalization" that, for instance, drove Christopher Hitchens away from The Nation, a rightward trajectory toward basic morality and common sense that many of us followed. Fischer's bluntness and timing may have seemed 'crazy', but his statement is a catechism of a familiar Left-wing politics: the conflation of America and Israel, their demonic evil set in Manichean opposition to a celebrated victim group, and the vulgar calculus that such evil must rationally be answered by mass murder.

Now that Fischer is dead, people are again contemplating how such a brilliant person could have sunk so far. The obits, lamentations and celebrations persist: Fischer was nuts. Some people leave it at that; others try to answer how and why. A common theme is the intensity of Fischer's dedication to chess, and the fathomless complexity of the game, removed him from reality. Steven Zaillian, the screenwriter and director of Searching for Bobby Fischer, writes:

The film Searching for Bobby Fischer, despite its title, wasn't really about him, but rather what he represented to the chess world... and to us: the distance that is sometimes narrow between art and science, success and failure, genius and madness, and the great price one often has to pay for great talent.

There may be some truth to this -- I don't know any chess stars -- but the "narrow [distance] between... genius and madness" is a cliché. Fischer helps us reconceptualize intelligence and insanity in ways that aren't being considered in the public reactions to his death.

We tend to think of intelligence as monolithic -- either you're intelligent, or you're not; and we tend to think of it only in terms of raw, cognitive ability -- the ability, say, to memorize countless chess moves and deploy them in real time under pressure. In turn, we mostly view sanity (as opposed to "mental health") in binary terms -- either you're deranged or aware. Fischer is compelling because he showed so clearly why these conceptions are wrong. His singular persona comprised three unrecognized features: great genius and profound stupidity coexisted in him; his stupidity was emotional rather than cognitive; and the profundity of his emotional retardation lent Fischer a false air of psychosis.

Rene Chun published a definitive Fischer profile in The Atlantic in 2002. It contains clues to understanding the Yin and Yang of his intellect. Fischer wasn't born great; until the age of 13, "he was essentially a hotshot club player—a prodigy, to be sure, but not obviously world-championship material." Then he "made a colossal leap... [becoming] the youngest player ever to win the U.S. Junior Championship." Fischer spent more than a decade in chess monomania, inexorably razing the competition and establishing himself as the top U.S. player.

The other aspects of his life, social and scholastic, withered on the vine. Sensing this, and provoked by his arrogant challenge to their supremacy, his Soviet nemeses began calling him nyekulturni -- Russian for "without culture". Fischer knew he was just that: an urban rube, without any education to speak of. He reacted to this lack of nurture in a way that suggested a deeper problem: an impoverished nature.

The answer, Fischer thought, was to upgrade his wardrobe. So at sixteen, using his chess winnings, he traded in his uniform of sneakers, flannel shirt, and jeans for luxurious bespoke suits. He reveled in his new Beau Brummell image. When he traveled abroad for tournaments, he frequently visited local tailors and had suits cut for his gangly, broad-shouldered physique. He liked to brag that he owned seventeen such suits, which he rotated to ensure even wear. "I hate ready-made suits, button-down collars, and sports shirts," he once said. "I don't want to look like a bum. I get up in the morning, I put on a suit."

This boosted his self-esteem, but Fischer was entering more into a public world of wealth and refinement and he couldn't keep up.

Those close to Fischer knew that when it came to art, politics, or anything else the cosmopolitan set talked about, he was at a total loss. "If you were out to dinner with Bobby in the sixties, he wouldn't be able to follow the conversation," says Don Schultz, a former friend. "He would have his little pocket set out and he'd play chess at the table. He had a one-dimensional outlook on life."

Outside of chess, he had little to draw on. His mother, Regina, was a left-wing activist who was "cuckoo... an intelligent neurotic full of far-fetched ideas." Fischer dropped out of high school, which he was passing only on the indulgence of his teachers, in the middle of his junior year. He didn't maintain friendships or go near girls, adopting instead a "Spartan", 14-hour-a-day training schedule in which he would read chess literature and continually play multiple games against himself.

Fischer's game was top shelf, but his social acumen diminished commensurately. He became increasingly weird in public. The pressure of competitive chess, worsened by analytic tag-teams of unscrupulous Soviet tournament players, drove Fischer into several years of isolation in California. It is here where his brittle emotional intelligence germinated the public face of the later man.

Although he wasn't playing in many tournaments, his work ethic never wavered: he continued studying chess during most of his waking hours. But late at night, Arnold Denker recalls, Fischer began prowling parking lots, slipping white-supremacist pamphlets under windshield wipers. He began studying anti-Semitic classics such as Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He became obsessed with German history and the Third Reich, and collected Nazi memorabilia. It was rumored that he slept with a picture of Adolf Hitler hanging over his bed. Larry Evans says that Fischer's admiration for the Führer had less to do with anti-Semitism than with insatiable ego. "We once went to see a documentary on Hitler," Evans recalls. "When we came out of the theater, Bobby said that he admired Hitler. I asked him why, and he said, 'Because he imposed his will on the world.'" (Fischer has never made an effort to conceal his distaste for Jews. As early as 1962, in the Harper's interview, he expressed his prejudice, mentioning what he perceived to be a growing problem affecting the upper ranks of his profession. "Yeah, there are too many Jews in chess," he said. "They seem to have taken away the class of the game. They don't seem to dress so nicely. That's what I don't like.")

The contours of Fischer's degradation are revealing. He admired Hitler because he saw in him an exhilarating will to power, one that complimented his approach to chess.

He didn't just beat people—he humiliated them. The thing he relished most was watching his opponents squirm. "I like the moment when I break a man's ego," he once said...

Later in life, Fischer became a Hitlerian herald, but he came to the regenerative hatred of the Nazis for simple, personal reasons. Ultimately utopian movements are not about the belief systems they promote. They are first and foremost a means for aggrandizing the demagogues who ride them to power. This in turn is sensed by acolytes like Fischer, who hope to attain a similar apotheosis.

Utopian creeds are also less about what they say and who they hate than the way in which they are constructed. Classically, totalitarian mythology pits a chosen people against cosmic forces of evil that manifest themselves both within the state and without. The way to defeat these forces is through spectacular slaughter, of one's enemies and oneself, the courting of Armageddon. This sort of Manichean passion play fundamentally appeals to the emotionally retarded, the empirically resistant, the lazy seekers of nirvana.

And so often the antagonist is the Jews. Fischer presented much pseudo-intellectual justification for his new weltanschauung -- his pamphlets and his study of Mein Kampf and the Protocols in place of chess journals -- but of course little in the way of intellectual substance. Fischer denigrated Jews for succeeding in chess, and risibly for dressing poorly, a contravention of his own shallow contrivance of sophistication -- the bespoke suits. Emotional stupidity and an impoverishment of character are the greatest opportunities for recruitment available to totalitarians. That Fischer was Jewish himself is a testament to the desperation with which he was a seeker.

But none of this is evidence of insanity. Examining more of Fischer's interview with Bomba Radyo, of which I've made a partial transcript, makes this clear. His effusions represent the fullness of his totalitarian stupidity, but they aren't crazy. They are merely profane echoes of commentators on the far-Left who are often reviled, but never considered insane.

As quoted earlier, Fischer saw 9/11 as revenge on behalf of the Palestinians. Just before expressing that, he had this to say:

You know I heard on the BBC a few months ago a very profound but simple statement. And it really stunned me, I couldn't believe the guy was saying it. You know, talking about some of the crimes of the US, you know of the horrible behavior that the US is committing all over the world, and then the BBC guy just said it, I couldn't believe my ears, he said, "This just shows you that what goes around comes around, even for the United States". That is what has happened tonight. What goes around comes around, even for the United States.

This immediately puts one in mind of another celebration of "anti-imperialist" revenge, Ward Churchill's hideous essay, "Some People Push Back" On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, a few more chickens – along with some half-million dead Iraqi children – came home to roost in a very big way at the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center. Well, actually, a few of them seem to have nestled in at the Pentagon as well.

Churchill's disgusting relish exactly mirrors Fischer's. And the gleeful "fuck the US" bravado?

True enough, [the World Trade Center dead] were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire – the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved – and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to "ignorance" – a derivative, after all, of the word "ignore" – counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it.

Now Ward Churchill is a lot of things, but no one believes he's psychotic (though you could make a good case he's psychopathic, in the sense of sociopathic). There is no significant difference between Fischer's and Churchill's reactions to the fall of the Twin Towers.

Fischer's comments are also reminiscent of the Nicholas de Genova affair. Just before the Iraq invasion, the historian Eric Foner organized a "teach-in" at Columbia University meant to air and encourage anti-war perspectives. De Genova, an Assistant Professor in Anthropology and Latino Studies, was invited as a last-minute speaker. His performance was mortifying.

A Columbia University professor told an anti-war gathering that he would like to see "a million Mogadishus" -- referring to the 1993 ambush in Somalia that killed 18 American servicemen.

At Wednesday night's "teach-in" on the Columbia campus, Nicholas De Genova also called for the defeat of U.S. forces in Iraq and said, "The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military." And he asserted that Americans who call themselves "patriots" are white supremacists.

Indecent, to be sure, but no one questions de Genova's sanity. He still teaches at Columbia.

Fischer moves on to an arresting outburst, in which he calls for a new Jewish genocide.

Bobby: Well, you know what I'm really hoping for, Pablo? You... did you ever see that movie "Seven Days in May"?

Pablo: Yes, yes.

Bobby: Uh, that's a movie about a general who tries to take over the US. You remember that?

P: Yes, I do.

...

B: I was rooting for the generals, you know. But uh, in the end the President, you know the so-called Democracy won. But I'm hoping for some kind of a Seven Days eh... in May scenario, where the country will be taken over by the military, they'll close down all the synagogues, arrest all the Jews, execute hundreds of thousands of Jewish ringleaders, and uh you know, apologize to the Arabs, kill off all the Jews over there in the bandit state, you know, of Israel.

P: uh yeah, yeah

B: I'm hoping for a totally new world.

I don't wish to accuse the Left of advocating the violent genocide of Jews (the Velvet Genocide of the fantasy of the "secular bi-national state" is another story). Even the far-Left seems to have mostly or totally abandoned this aim since Ulrike Meinhof expired in a German prison. The notion of Jewish "ringleaders" steering America down a demonic path, however, is commonplace among both democratic and revolutionary Leftists. In April 2004, Kalle Lasn, founder of Adbusters, published an editorial in that magazine outing Jewish neocons and their pernicious influence on American foreign policy.

Deciding exactly who is a neocon is difficult since some neocons reject the term while others embrace it. Some shape policy from within the White House, while others are more peripheral, exacting influence indirectly as journalists, academics and think tank policy wonks. What they all share is the view that the US is a benevolent hyper power that must protect itself by reshaping the rest of the world into its morally superior image. And half of the them are Jewish.

As Fischer says, "Bush... he's told what to say of course by Cheney, and his father and the Jews..." Lasn's editorial was published alongside a roster of neocons with little marks (in place of yellow stars) ticking off the Jews among them. From the realization that Jewish "neocons" are helming the juggernaut of violent imperialism, the logic of purgation necessarily follows.

Later in the interview, Fischer laments that the U.S. response to 9/11 will not be contrite, as it should and must be, but stupidly and reflexively martial. He attributes this in part to the influence of the Jews.

The notion of congenitally crazy Jews leading the rest of us to destruction was echoed by Nobel Literature Prize winner Jose Saramago in 2002. Writing in El Pais, the international Spanish-language paper of record, Saramago sourced Israel's brutal oppression of the Palestinians in Judaism itself.

Intoxicated mentally by the messianic dream of a Greater Israel which will finally achieve the expansionist dreams of the most radical Zionism; contaminated by the monstrous and rooted 'certitude' that in this catastrophic and absurd world there exists a people chosen by God and that, consequently, all the actions of an obsessive, psychological and pathologically exclusivist racism are justified; educated and trained in the idea that any suffering that has been inflicted, or is being inflicted, or will be inflicted on everyone else, especially the Palestinians, will always be inferior to that which they themselves suffered in the Holocaust, the Jews endlessly scratch their own wound to keep it bleeding, to make it incurable, and they show it to the world as if it were a banner. Israel seizes hold of the terrible words of God in Deuteronomy: 'Vengeance is mine, and I will be repaid.' Israel wants all of us to feel guilty, directly or indirectly, for the horrors of the Holocaust; Israel wants us to renounce the most elemental critical judgment and for us to transform ourselves into a docile echo of its will.

Fischer next jumps to a harangue about the Japanese during World War II.

Nobody gave a shit about the Japanese... how many millions, how many hundreds of thousand of people did the United States kill with atom bombs, justifying it with the most ridiculous excuse that it saved a million American soldiers?

The gratuitousness of our destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is an old saw on the Left, originating among Soviet apologists who sought to morally equate America to the USSR (and sometimes even the Nazis). Howard Zinn is a foremost practitioner of this historical legerdemain. For example, in the Bombs of August, he writes:

The bombing of Hiroshima remains sacred to the American Establishment and to a very large part of the population in this country... as I explained why Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unforgivable atrocities, perpetrated on a Japan ready to surrender, the audience was silent.

... to see it as a wanton act of gargantuan cruelty rather than as an unavoidable necessity ("to end the war, to save lives") would be to raise disturbing questions about the essential goodness of the "good war."

Fischer next mentions a modern Hiroshima, which he alleges took place in the former Yugoslavia due to NATO's use of depleted uranium munitions against Milosevic's forces.

B: I mean look what the US did in Yugoslavia recently, in just 1999. Bombed the Kosovo and other parts of Yugoslavia with depleted uranium.

P: Mm-hmm

B: Now to me that is worse than atom bomb. You know why?

P: Why?

B: When you drop an atom bomb... you're dead, your suffering's over, right?

P: That's right.

B: This... this depleted uranium, you'll have a lingering death for the next ten, twenty, thirty, forty years. Or maybe just two or three years, depends on how much of it you get. But you are never gonna be the same, you see? You just have like a low-level sickness and your life is is a misery, you understand?

Far-Left polemicists, such as John Pilger and Robert Fisk, have taken concerns about the use of depleted uranium in munitions manufacture to the level of a blood-libel. They peddle the pseudo-science that depleted uranium has been proven to increase rates of cancer and birth defects, and has done so to vast extent among American servicemen and the victims of American bombing campaigns. Here's Pilger:

The truth is that the US and Britain are engaged in a form of nuclear warfare in the Balkans. In 1996, the United Nations Human Rights Tribunal called depleted uranium a WMD. Like the Agent Orange babies of Vietnam, the deformed and cancer-stricken children of southern Iraq, where depleted uranium was tested by British and American forces during the 1991 Gulf war, bear witness to the true nature of righteous Western crusades. Civilised people should speak out urgently before the latest noble cause claims more expendable victims and beckons a world war.

Next Fischer offers a quick summary of American history.

B: Take, kill. Then you rob -- they... they invaded the country, robbed the land of the American Indians -- killed almost all of them off. Brought over slaves to work the... the uh fields, to build up the country, from Africa, right? Now why didn't the white man come to America like in a civilzed manner, and say, 'We're being persecuted in Europe, we don't have freedom of religion, we'd like to come here, we'd like to assimilate, we'd like to marry your women', and... and... and so on, right?

P: Yeah

B: But errrr, but no, they come, they said we're coming in here to take your land and to kill you off. Right? That's the history of the United States.

P: Mm-hmm

B: A despicable country. You know, even as a boy, you know, I never had the slightest interest in American history. Never!

University of Texas journalism professor and white guilt gadfly Robert Jensen makes a similar interpretation.

How does a country deal with the fact that some of its most revered historical figures had certain moral values and political views virtually identical to Nazis? Here's how "respectable" politicians, pundits, and professors play the game: When invoking a grand and glorious aspect of our past, then history is all-important...

But when one brings into historical discussions any facts and interpretations that contest the celebratory story and make people uncomfortable -- such as the genocide of indigenous people as the foundational act in the creation of the United States -- suddenly the value of history drops precipitously and one is asked, "Why do you insist on dwelling on the past?"

Fischer counseled American contrition in response to 9/11, but instead he expected stupid retribution by the American behemoth.

But uh, well the US will hit back, of course... The US just will not do what they have to do. The US has to say, "We're sorry, our whole foreign policy has been wrong for the last several hundred years. We are going to uh pull back all our troops from all over the world. We're going... No we're going to stop supporting Israel," uh and so on, you see? And they're not going to admit that. No, they're going to say, 'These terrorists, these criminals, this cowardly act will be punished." You know, and I expect soon there's going to be a new President, after the White House is blown up, he'll be in the Colorado Mountains, you know, hundreds of feet underneath the... the Rocky Mounts there, saying, "This dastardly act of blowing up the White House will be punished!" you know, just be constantly talk about punishing these cowardly people until the United States is destroyed. The United States is not going to be reasonable, you know? It's not going to admit that it's the bad guy and it's always been the bad guy. It was the bad guy in World War II, it was the bad guy in World War I, it was the bad guy when it robbed [unintelligible] and invaded the Philippines from from Spain, it was the bad guy when it came eh... eh when... when the white man came and killed the American Indians, when it brought the black people to uh as slaves from Africa, it's always been the bad guy.

This was also foremost in the mind of Noam Chomsky, as well as Robert Fisk, whom Chomsky quoted in an essay written immediately after the attacks:

As to how to react, we have a choice. We can express justified horror; we can seek to understand what may have led to the crimes, which means making an effort to enter the minds of the likely perpetrators. If we choose the latter course, we can do no better, I think, than to listen to the words of Robert Fisk... Describing "The wickedness and awesome cruelty of a crushed and humiliated people," he writes that "this is not the war of democracy versus terror that the world will be asked to believe in the coming days. It is also about American missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and US helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and American shells crashing into a village called Qana and about a Lebanese militia paid and uniformed by America's Israeli ally hacking and raping and murdering their way through refugee camps." And much more. Again, we have a choice: we may try to understand, or refuse to do so, contributing to the likelihood that much worse lies ahead.

Three of Britain's major Left-wing political cartoonists, Dave Brown, Martin Rowson and Steve Bell, also took up the theme of dumb American vengeance within a week of the attacks (1, 2). Brown did so twice (1, 2), actually. (Unsurprisingly, he later went on to depict Ariel Sharon as a cannibal eating Palestinian babies.)

Fischer's Bomba Radyo interview is remarkable not for its supposed insanity, but rather for the fidelity with which it replays the views of far-Left pundits. Its contemporaneity with several of the examples I cite belies the notion that Fischer was just crazily parroting things he had heard in the past. Trawl through Fischer's other interviews, or his web site, and you'll see him rehearse these themes ceaselessly. Fischer was not mentally disorganized.

He was instead a base and, partly, stupid man. Cognitively, he was a genius. His intellectual deficit was emotional. Fischer was aware of and profoundly insecure about this, and in conjunction he developed what might have been a clinical paranoia. This, and the profundity of his stupidity, helped confuse the issue by giving him a false air of psychosis. Fischer's moonbat salvos about America and the Jews, his embrace of "counterknowledge", his attraction to totalitarian thinking, were a direct result of his emotional retardation. They were not symptoms of lunacy. If they were, a whole dimension of politics would become clinical.

Correction: Bobby Fischer was born in Chicago, and grew up in Brooklyn.

Regressive Progressives

2008-01-17T17:05:00.001-05:00

Kevin Drum nails it with respect to the Ron Paul racism controversy.

It's plain that Paul knew what was being published in his newsletters. It's plain that he was familiar with the well-developed strategy that inspired the early-90s turn to racist demagoguery. It's plain that he knew it was a key part of his fundraising appeal. Paul can weasel all he wants, but it's plain that he endorsed a strategy of overt appeals to racist sentiment in order to build support for his political career. If he's given all that up since then, it's only because he no longer needs it.

This whole affair highlights one of the reasons that I wish everyone would stop swooning over minor candidates who play the part of bold truthteller. When you have no chance of winning and therefore nothing to risk, it's cheap and easy to stick to your guns. But as Ron Paul has shown, back when it actually mattered he was willing to do whatever he needed to raise money and rekindle his political career. I don't doubt that he'd do it again if anything serious were on the line.

I wrote about this here, in light of the irony of so-called progressives flocking to Paul because of his "bold [truth telling]" about Iraq (and, inevitably in the penumbra of Iraq, our alliance with Israel). There have always been self-styled progressives who are really reactionaries, favoring isolationism, conspiratorial superstition and the scapegoating of Jews, among other intellectual pathologies. French socialist suspicion of Leon Blum and the Jews in the lead-up to war with Hitler is a good historical analogue. Cognate forces were at work prior to American involvement in World War II, and now the Iraq War has again separated regressive progressives from their comrades of better conscience and driven them into alliance with the far-Right fringe they mirror.

Letter to Pajamas Media

2008-01-13T23:53:00.000-05:00

I've sent the following letter to Pajamas Media in care of the editor:

To the Editor:

I note with concern your decision to hire Alyssa A. Lappen to write for Pajamas Media (Does Sharia Libel Law Now Apply in the U.S.? and Shari'a Finance: Cordless Bungee Jumping).

Lappen wrote a December 28, 2004 piece for FrontPage Magazine that should give any editor pause. Entitled The Israeli Crime That Wasn't(1), she described in it the October 2000 lynching of two IDF soldiers who had strayed beyond army checkpoints deep into Ramallah. Lappen wrote they had "their innards eaten by hysterical and frenzied [Palestinians] screaming Allah Akbar..."

As brutal as that lynching was, this is of course a fantastic claim. A Nexis search of all foreign and domestic English-language media between 2000 and 2004 produces nothing to corroborate cannibalism in Ramallah. A Google search, however, reveals a 2001(2) web page(3) by a break-away faction of the JDL (the Jewish Task Force), which may have been Lappen's source, although it only describes the lynching as "cannibalistic", stopping short of giving details. There are two possibilities: Lappen made the claim up out of whole cloth, or she embellished the JTF account without sourcing it.

Either way, Lappen's piece is a gross violation of journalistic ethics. The claim is a vicious lie meant to portray Palestinians as subhuman. The JDL, described by the FBI in Congressional testimony as a "violent extremist Jewish Organization"(4), was active in terrorism in the United States between 1968 and 2001(5). The Jewish Task Force broke away from the JDL additionally to oppose "emigration from the Third World" to America, which was "transforming this once great nation into a banana republic"(6).

Pajamas Media's "intention [is] to provide a significant alternative to mainstream media", partly by providing "exclusive news and opinion". If so, you might be alarmed to learn you have hired a writer who authored a blood libel whose likely inspiration was a propaganda site run by dormant terrorists.

Sincerely,

John-Paul Pagano
The Socialism of Fools
http://socfools.blogspot.com
guanubian@gmail.com

(1) Ref.
(2) Ref.
(3) Ref.
(4) Ref.
(5) Ref.
(6) Ref.