Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by American Dream » Tue Feb 10, 2015 5:52 pm
by jakell » Tue Feb 10, 2015 6:29 pm
by seemslikeadream » Tue Feb 10, 2015 6:37 pm
to verify the accusations
by slimmouse » Tue Feb 10, 2015 6:49 pm
by slimmouse » Tue Feb 10, 2015 7:00 pm
by Searcher08 » Tue Feb 10, 2015 7:02 pm
American Dream » Tue Feb 10, 2015 9:52 pm wrote:Didn't you previously identify is as a "white nationalist" kind of place?
by slimmouse » Tue Feb 10, 2015 7:06 pm
Searcher08 » 10 Feb 2015 23:02 wrote:American Dream » Tue Feb 10, 2015 9:52 pm wrote:Didn't you previously identify is as a "white nationalist" kind of place?
Part of AD's continuing series: Have you stopped beating your partner with a tyre iron?
Will your forum friend be coming along to call jakell "filthy sketchy white nationalist racist scum filthy virulent ant-semite virulent stinky butt features"
before getting banned again?
and the rest of RI might ask
"Did you agree with that piss-poor evidence-free ad hominem, American Dream?"
and your reply, I imagine will be
"Well, I never said those words that I recall, but I'm very busy so a citation would be useful and the language might be problematic for the more sensitive and I'm not saying I *would* say that and I'm not saying I wouldn't say that either and don't feel the need to re-visit this as I have made my position clear countless times about the dangers of the Far Right infiltration at RI
+ 10,000 words from LibCom to follow with LSD Revolving picture of Viva Zapata!
"
by jakell » Tue Feb 10, 2015 7:13 pm
Searcher08 » Tue Feb 10, 2015 11:02 pm wrote:American Dream » Tue Feb 10, 2015 9:52 pm wrote:Didn't you previously identify is as a "white nationalist" kind of place?
Part of AD's continuing series: Have you stopped beating your partner with a tyre iron?
Will your forum friend be coming along to call jakell "filthy sketchy white nationalist racist scum filthy virulent ant-semite virulent stinky butt features"
before getting banned again?
and the rest of RI might ask
"Did you agree with that piss-poor evidence-free ad hominem, American Dream?"
and your reply, I imagine will be
"Well, I never said those words that I recall, but I'm very busy so a citation would be useful and the language might be problematic for the more sensitive and I'm not saying I *would* say that and I'm not saying I wouldn't say that either and don't feel the need to re-visit this as I have made my position clear countless times about the dangers of the Far Right infiltration at RI
+ 10,000 words from LibCom to follow with LSD Revolving picture of Viva Zapata!
"
by Searcher08 » Tue Feb 10, 2015 7:14 pm
American Dream » Tue Feb 10, 2015 8:52 pm wrote:So aren't the third positionists and their crew (morally and politically) sketchy?
Who would support their cause?
by Searcher08 » Tue Feb 10, 2015 7:25 pm
jakell » Tue Feb 10, 2015 11:13 pm wrote:Searcher08 » Tue Feb 10, 2015 11:02 pm wrote:American Dream » Tue Feb 10, 2015 9:52 pm wrote:Didn't you previously identify is as a "white nationalist" kind of place?
Part of AD's continuing series: Have you stopped beating your partner with a tyre iron?
Will your forum friend be coming along to call jakell "filthy sketchy white nationalist racist scum filthy virulent ant-semite virulent stinky butt features"
before getting banned again?
and the rest of RI might ask
"Did you agree with that piss-poor evidence-free ad hominem, American Dream?"
and your reply, I imagine will be
"Well, I never said those words that I recall, but I'm very busy so a citation would be useful and the language might be problematic for the more sensitive and I'm not saying I *would* say that and I'm not saying I wouldn't say that either and don't feel the need to re-visit this as I have made my position clear countless times about the dangers of the Far Right infiltration at RI
+ 10,000 words from LibCom to follow with LSD Revolving picture of Viva Zapata!
"
TBH, Solace didn't follow in AD's footsteps in this matter, probably noticed how none of the shit really fitted, and was just making the originator look silly.
I think you guys have to take AD more seriously than me because he's messing up your board, which makes him sort of significant.. Because I never really took the plunge here I don't have that emotional hook.
by seemslikeadream » Tue Feb 10, 2015 7:27 pm
by American Dream » Wed Feb 11, 2015 9:13 pm
Islamophobia is a form of Racism
February 11, 2015 • Jessie Daniels •
On Tuesday, three Muslim Americans were murdered by a white assailant in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The victims, Deah Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, were shot in the head by Craig Stephen Hicks, 46, a white man.
ChapelHill Shooting Victims
Deah Shaddy Barakat, left, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha
A “dispute over parking,” was what led to the shooting according to some of the initial news reports. Ripley Rand, U.S. attorney for the Middle District of North Carolina, said at a news conference about the shootings: “We don’t have any evidence that this was part of an organized effort against Muslims. This appears, at this point, to have been an isolated incident.”
What the dominant news stories and Rand’s comments miss, are the connection between Islamophobia and systematic racism. As Professor Mohamad Elmasry points out, Muslims are consistently portrayed as “inherently dangerous” in western media.
As a response to what many saw as a denial of role of Islamophobia and racism in the murder, people took to Twitter to express their outrage, using the hashtag #MuslimLivesMatter, which was soon trending.
There is a fairly well-established, and yet still growing, body of research which documents the racialization of Muslim people and the rise of Islamophobia in the West as forms of racism. Just some of this research includes the following:
by American Dream » Wed Feb 11, 2015 11:24 pm
Keeping Antisemitism Simple
12/02/2015
By BaruchTrotsky
It’s all getting very complicated. The definition of anti-semitism has become an fine art, presided over by professors of antisemitism and fought over across the internet.
It shouldn’t be like this. The more complex the debate becomes the more people disengage from it, leaving antisemitism in the hands of neo-Nazis (who celebrate it) and extreme supporters of the Israeli government (who see antisemitism in all serious criticism of Israel). Instead we should keep it simple. Antisemitism is racism. It’s just a word for anti-jewish racism, hatred of Jews because they are Jews, equivalent to hating people because the are black, asian, Irish or whatever. (And don’t tell me Jews are a religion. There is a major ethnic component to Jewishness, so that many people define as Jewish purely because of their family background. So Jews can certainly be victims of racism).
So, back to basics, how do you avoid being racist? It’s easy. You treat people as individuals. If you meet a new person you don’t assume you know anything about them from a group that they may be connected to. When they do something, be it good or bad in your eyes, you don’t connect those actions with any group – the actions are purely the responsibility of the individual in question. You don’t generalise about groups of people – you allow individuals to define themselves in their own terms. Even if you’ve met more than one person from a ‘group’ that have a certain trait – don’t assume that the next person you meet from that group will be just the same.
Its usually the negative generalisation ones we tend to call racism: when a group is generalised as being mean, stupid, corrupt, evil, dominating, pathetic etc. But although people tend to worry less about positive generalisations (‘Italians are great lovers’ ) these are no less stupid and can easily hide a negative element inside a supposedly positive one (c.f. ‘Black people have such wonderful rhythm’). The surefire way to avoid racism is to cut out generalisations full stop. And the fact that people sometimes make generalisations about their own ‘group’? That’s stupid too, but they have a right to do it as a member of that group in a way that an outsider simply doesn’t. At this juncture we should clarify that of course any act that goes beyond generalisations to actually stirring up hatred against, discriminating against or committing violent acts against members of an ethnic group is utterly racist.
As antisemitism is simply racism, you avoid antisemitism in just the same way. If you hear about somebody Jewish who did something, good or bad, you draw conclusions only about that individual – not about any other Jewish people. That applies whether that person is a drunk guy on the street, an executive at a bank or the Prime Minister of Israel. People are only responsible for their own deeds. And if a person, group, or state, claims to speak for all Jews, take that with a massive dose of salt. Stick to your guns and don’t generalise. And obviously, do not, in a million years, discriminate against people because they are Jews or commit violence against them for the same reason. I hope that goes without saying
Is that all there is to it?
Yep, pretty much. You should be able to make pretty much any political point (other than a racist one) in a non racist way. You just need to show a little care in the way you say it, so that you avoid generalisations. So the statement ‘All meat killed in the UK should be pre-stunned – the alternative is excessively cruel to animals’ is evidently not a racist statement. The legality of shechitah (Jewish animal slaughter for kashrut purposes) is a matter for legitimate political debate. But ‘The Jews have got to stop their barbaric animal killing’ clearly is; it generalises about about all Jews regardless if they purchase kosher meat or not, and throws in an old stereotype about Jews being savage (like the ‘old testament’) for good measure.
But what about Israel? Doesn’t it get much more complex?
Not really. Israel is a state. You can’t really be racist against a state. There is no position on Israel that is per se antisemitic – although you can express views it in an racist way. Calling for the right of return for Palestinian refugees? Fine. Calling for Israel/Palestine to become a single state, with equality for all its citizens? No racism there. Calling for BDS? Lots of states are subject to some kind of sanctions, this is not normally described as racist. Calling Israel an apartheid state? People can debate whether or not the claim is fair but it’s hard to see how it can be antisemitic. But blaming policies of the Israel government on ‘The Jews’? Yep, that’s racist. Blaming them on ‘the Zionists’? I’m afraid that, most of the time, that’s racist too – ‘Zionist’ has long been a synonym for ‘Jew’ in much racist discourse.
Critiquing Israel policy by relying on negative stereotypes of Jews – ‘controlling the world’, ‘money obsessed’ etc.? That’s racist too. Hey, I know that people may not be aware of all stereotypes that have been used about Jews, so may find this difficult to avoid. But there’s an easy remedy, in line with what we laid out above. Don’t generalise at all. Be precise, if the Israeli Prime Minister has done something, blame it on them as an individual. Likewise, if the criticism is of the Israeli army, make that clear. Likewise, critique ‘the Israeli government’ or even ‘structural discrimination inherent in the the Israeli state’ – just don’t blame it on Jews or Zionists. They probably didn’t have any say in the matter. Precision removes any tinge of unwitting racist generalisation.
Hard Cases
Singling out
This one is a bit more complicated. Yes, someone (who is not Israeli or Palestinian) who shows no interest in any other international issue but yet campaigns loudly against Israel, using particularly aggressive language, may indeed have racist motivations. But so long as they do not cross the line laid out above (no generalisations about Jews or Zionists, no reliance on anti-Jewish stereotypes) I don’t think we should call this racist. There are too many non-racist reasons for having a focus solely on Israel/Palestine; its one of the most prominent international issues in the news, it fits neatly into an anti-imperialist/anti-American narrative common to many on the left, it’s an issue where Western governments are genuinely complicit, it’s an issue on which there is real disagreement in the west (unlike IS, North Korea etc.) To call excessive focus on Israel/Palestine racist is to dangerously muddy the waters and risk condemning legitimate political comment. But if you are in the position of being a campaigner focussed solely in this area it would be wise to take extra care in your choice of language to make sure you don’t accidentally slip into the language of stereotypes.
Political Violence
In line with our narrow definition of antisemitism, we should note that although violence against people that are Jews may well be antisemitic it need not necessarily be. An attack on a Jewish individual motivated by something the individual did or said cannot be assumed to be antisemitic – unless the language of the attacker makes it clear that Jewishness is the motivating factor. The same would be true if they were an MP in Britain or a MK in Israel – we would (in the absence of other information) have to assume they were being targeted as as individual, because of their views and actions. Attacks on Israeli soldiers should also not be seems as necessarily racist – they are acts of war, as recognised by international treaties. Soldiers are attacked every day across the world – it is widely accepted that these are political/military actions, targeting the state these soldiers represent. What about attacks on Israeli civilians, whether or not they are settlers? While these are odious acts – targeting innocent people rather than those who actually responsible for Israeli policy – we cannot assume these acts are racist. If they are not accompanied by antisemitic rhetoric (and thus are not targeting the individuals because they are Jews), they may well be acts of political violence, in the tradition of anti-colonial terrorism, violently targeting people perceived to be members of an oppressive ruling group, and who benefit from a system of oppressive rule. This is no way justifies these attacks. Simply because an act is not antisemitic doesn’t make it justifiable or acceptable.
Offensive Discourse
There are some acts which are massively offensive to many Jewish people but are not necessarily antisemitic. The first is denial of (or attempting to play down) the Nazi holocaust. This incredibly stupid practice is hugely offensive, especially to anyone who lost family to the Nazis, but isn’t per se a generalisation about Jews, its just an idiotic factual error. However, when accompanied by conspiracy (Jews made up the holocaust to get sympathy etc.) the racist generalisation is easily apparent. Either way – for God’s sake don’t engage in any form of holocaust denial – the holocaust was horrifically real – do a bit of reading if you’re in any doubt.
Secondly, in contradiction to the previous point (but often found bizarrely in tandem with it) is the claim that Israel is acting like the Nazis. This is again wildly offensive, and totally unjustifiable. When we say acting like Nazis we don’t mean ‘being a bit authoritarian’, we mean committing racial genocide against millions of people. In no way has the Israeli government done that, and is not doing so now. But despite the claim being ludicrous and offensive it’s not racist per se – its a stupid piece of rhetoric against Israel rather than a generalisation against all Jews or a incitement to violence against them. Granted – many who use this language may well have racist intent – of all comparisons they had to choose this one, specifically designed to offend. But there are many reasons to choose a Nazi comparison, not least because it looms so large in the UK history curriculum, leaving people with a dearth of other examples to use. The Nazi holocaust is considered in Britain as the paradigm example of moral evil – that people too often reach for it to condemn behaviour they find odious should, in most cases, be considered stupid hyperbole rather than racism.
In the end it comes down to this. There are many things which are unacceptable, even outrageous, but are not racist. Stealing people’s land and resources, impoverishing people, engaging in violence, taking away human rights and so many more. To subsume them all under the banner of racism demonstrates a lack of analytical precision and ends up bending the dictionary beyond recognition. And it risks confusing people – which will only have there effect of making them less concerned about racism. Racism should be simple and clear so we can all oppose it without reservation. Because racism has this absolute – black and white – status there will be many who will try and shoehorn their cause into a paradigm of racism. If you succeed in doing so you have already won, without having to do the hard work of arguing your political case. So let’s keep things simple. Antisemitism is racism. Don’t be a racist. Was it so hard after all?
by American Dream » Fri Feb 13, 2015 3:50 pm
Adolf Hitler and his top military advisors had gathered at the "Wolf's Lair," the Fuehrer's headquarters in East Prussia, for an early afternoon strategy session on July 20, 1944. They were listening to Lieutenant-General Adolf Heusinger, Chief of Operations of the Wehrmacht (German Army), deliver a bleak report about Germany's latest misfortunes on the eastern front. Suddenly a violent explosion hurled everyone onto the floor. Writhing and coughing amid thick smoke and dust, several German officers could hear Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel shout, "Wo ist der Fuehrer?" ("Where is the Fuehrer?")
Somehow unharmed, Keitel made his way through a tangle of dead and injured men, until he found a groggy Hitler, his uniform shredded and bloodstained. Helped to his feet, the Fuehrer stared at Keitel with a dazed expression before collapsing in the field marshall's arms. Hitler was carried to a hospital bed, where a doctor dressed his wounds. He had a punctured eardrum and a lacerated back, his legs were burned, his face and hair were charred, and his right arm temporarily paralyzed. A badly shaken Hitler had barely survived the only serious assassination attempt against him.
Meanwhile, confusion reigned in Berlin, where a handful of German officers who had organized the bomb plot sought to gain control of the city. But their efforts would soon be thwarted by the fateful intervention of Major Otto Ernst Remer, a relatively obscure, 32-year-old leader of the Grossdeutschland Guard Battalion, which was responsible for protecting government offices in the capital.
As rumors of Hitler's death swept through the barracks, Remer was told by his commanding officer to arrest Joseph Goebbels, the top Nazi official in Berlin that day. With pistols drawn, Remer led a twenty-man contingent into the Propaganda Ministry, where Goebbels held sway. At that moment, Remer was probably the single most important military officer in Germany.
Encircled by gun-pointing soldiers, a quick-thinking Goebbels told Remer that the conspiracy had failed: Hitler was still alive. To prove his point, he picked up the phone, called the Wolf's Lair, and handed the receiver to Remer. The tall, strapping young officer breathed a sigh of relief when he heard the Fuehrer's voice. Hitler put Remer in charge of all troops in Berlin and ordered him to crush the putsch. Anyone who resisted was to be shot immediately.
It was a heady assignment for Remer, who immediately took control and instructed his troops to establish roadblocks and patrols. They sealed off the city command center and surrounded the army buildings where some of the coup ringleaders were ensconced. Remer was posted at the entrance of the War Office, when SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny, a fierce Hitler loyalist, arrived on the scene with a band of armed men.
Remer introduced himself to Skorzeny and apprised him of the crisis situation. They agreed that no one, regardless of how high in rank, would be allowed to enter or leave until they finished searching the premises. Skorzeny and his SS squadron encountered a mayhem of murder and suicide inside the building. The can-do colonel quickly put a halt to a wave of executions so that suspects could be tortured into naming others and exposing the extent of the plot before they were sent to the gallows.
With Skorzeny in charge of the War Ministry, it didn't take long before the revolt was smashed and the affairs of the High Command were once again in smooth working order. During the weeks that followed, he helped track down the remaining suspects in one of history's most gruesome manhunts. It was an occasion to settle old scores, as two thousand people, including dozens of high-ranking German of ficers, were killed in a paroxysm of military fratricide. Some of the leading plotters were garroted with piano wire and impaled on meathooks, while Nazi cameramen recorded the victims' death throes so that Hitler could view the film in his personal cinema.
For the colonel's invaluable support during the aftermath of the coup attempt, the Fuehrer gratefully declared: "You, Skorzeny, saved the Third Reich." But it was Remer who stole the limelight. His decisive actions were crucial in restoring order in Berlin. Hitler showed his appreciation by promoting Remer to the rank of major general, a distinction that instantly propelled him into Nazi superstardom. Henceforth, Remer would serve as Hitler's bodyguard.
The Twentieth of July would prove to be more than just the date when an ill-prepared coup attempt, led by the one-armed Count Claus von Stauffenberg, failed to topple a mad dictator. The events that transpired that afternoon were destined to become a hot-button issue that deeply divided the German people in the years ahead. Nazi diehards and their sympathizers saw the putsch as yet another stab-in-the-back that deprived Germany of its rightful empire. They embraced Otto Ernst Remer as the epitome of the loyal soldier, a symbol of unflinching resistance to "the traitors" who betrayed the Fatherland from within and caused Germany's defeat. But for many others, the Twentieth of July became a legend of exoneration and redemption, offering a moral basis for expunging the sins of the Nazi past and beginning anew. After the war, West Germany's leaders would seize upon the anti-Hitler insurrectionists as a source of historical legitimacy. The coup plotters were touted as a shining example of the "other Germany" that had valiantly opposed the Third Reich.
Far from being a national reaction against Hitler, the July 20 conspiracy was actually the work of a relatively small number of individuals who were not necessarily inspired by lofty ideals. Evidence produced during the Nuremberg Tribunal showed that one of the army officers involved in the coup plot had been the commander of an Einsatgruppen mobile killing squad, which perpetrated some of the first large-scale murders of Jews on the eastern front.
Some of those who belatedly turned against Hitler were motivated not by moral outrage but by fears that they were losing the war. Theirs was a desperate attempt to restore an authoritarian order stripped of Nazi trappings, rather than a first step toward political liberalism and democracy. The complete disintegration of Germany could be prevented only, they surmised, if Hitler was overthrown. Toward this end, the conspirators were encouraged by American spymaster Allen Dulles, who intimated from his intelligence headquarters in Switzerland that a non-Nazi government might be spared the harsh terms of an unconditional surrender. Ignoring the Nuremberg data, Dulles later offered unequivocal praise for the coup plotters' efforts "to rid Germany of Hitler and his gang and establish a decent regime."
The myth of the "other Germany" that was fostered by the Twentieth of July provided a convenient alibi not only for the West German government but also for various Western espionage agencies, which recruited Third Reich veterans en masse during the early years of the Cold War. As far as America's intelligence chiefs were concerned, it didn't really matter where these ex-Nazis stood with respect to the July 20 debacle as long as they were steadfastly anti-Communist. Among those who later worked with the Central Intelligence Agency, under the directorship of Allen Dulles, was Colonel Otto Skorzeny.
The Americans also tried to recruit Skorzeny's partner from the July 20 affair, Major General Otto Ernst Remer. But Remer spurned their offers, opting instead to collaborate with the Soviets during the Cold War. Those who looked to the East after the Third Reich fell took their historical cue from Bismarck, the Prussian realpolitiker who unified Germany "by blood and iron" in 1871. Bismarck insisted that Germany must align with Russia, its proximate and mineral-rich neighbor. This was also Remer's wholehearted belief.
Yet, even as they gravitated toward rival superpowers, Skorzeny and Remer remained friends and stayed in contact over the years. Both men continued to move in the same neo-Nazi circles while trafficking in military hardware and expertise. Their shady business ventures embroiled them in high-stakes, international intrigue. Having crossed paths for the first time on the Twentieth of July, their overlapping stories embody the dual-pronged nature of postwar Nazi subterfuge. Together they helped lay the groundwork for a multifaceted neofascist revival that gained alarming momentum in the post-Cold War era.
The speed and ferocity with which the extreme Right asserted itself after the Berlin Wall crumbled--not only in Germany, but across Europe and North America--caught nearly everyone by surprise. The growing clout of far Right political parties in Europe; the emergence of a "Red-Brown" alliance in Russia; the rise of the U.S. militia movement; the mounting pattern of violence against refugees, immigrants, guest workers, asylum-seekers, and racial minorities throughout much of the Northern Hemisphere--all are manifestations of a widespread neofascist resurgence. Accentuated by the reunification of Germany, the collapse of Soviet bloc Communism, and major changes in the global economy, the sharp escalation of neofascist activity constitutes one of the most dangerous trends in international politics.
Focusing primarily on Germany, and to a lesser extent on the United States, Russia, and other countries, this book examines how and why fascism-utterly vanquished and discredited fifty years ago--has once again become a force to be reckoned with. In the ensuing pages, I attempt several extended treatments of major personalities in the postwar fascist scene. These political malefactors have demonstrated remarkable tenacity and resourcefulness as they grappled to fashion an effective strategy in an era when fascism seemed defunct as a legitimate political alternative.
During the immediate postwar years, fascists had no choice but to maintain a low profile. This was the "catacombs" period for Third Reich veterans. They were placed on the defensive by the unique scope of the Nazi horror, now indelibly associated with state terror, genocide, and mass destruction on an unprecedented scale in human history. Between 50 million and 60 million died as a direct result of World War II, which Hitler started. Many millions more suffered unfathomable cruelty and hardship. The face of global politics was irretrievably altered. With the Axis armies smashed, the Western European allies exhausted, and their colonies on the verge of rebellion, a huge vacuum appeared in the world power structure. The United States and the Soviet Union were the only countries with sufficient military strength and political resolve to fill this lacuna.
The onset of the Cold War was triggered in part by the superpowers' struggle over how to integrate Germany into the new world order. Although it had been conquered on the battlefield and stripped of its political sovereignty, Germany remained a potentially important player in Europe. Even when divided between East and West, the two Germanys were not merely client states under someone else's thumb. "The theory of the Cold War as a Soviet-American duopoly is sometimes defended on the grounds that, after all, the United States and the Soviet Union were in full command of their respective alliances," Arthur Schlesinger notes. "But nationalism, the most potent political emotion of the age, challenged the reign of the superpowers almost from the start." De Gaulle's quarrel with NATO, Tito's break from Moscow, and the bitter Sino-Soviet conflict were among the examples cited by Schlesinger, who concludes: "The impact of clients on principals is another part of the unwritten history of the Cold War."
In a different way, German nationalists also brought their influence to bear on the U.S.-Soviet conflict. A coterie of Third Reich veterans quickly reconstituted a covert network of neofascist groups, which tried to exploit the deepening rift between the two superpowers. The Cold War became a walking stick for Nazi spies who sought to parlay their overwhelming military defeat into a partial but significant victory once the guns had been silenced. Nazi espionage agents skillfully plied their trade on both sides of the East-West divide, playing one superpower off the other, proffering services to both American and Soviet intelligence. Instead of truly denazifying the German menace, the United States and Soviet Union plunged into the deep freeze of the Cold War, thereby allowing the fascist beast to acquire a new lease on life.
Many Nazi operatives, including Otto Skorzeny, curried the favor with Western secret-service agencies by touting themselves as rock-solid anti-Communists. At the same time, other Third Reich veterans, such as Otto Ernst Remer, were careful not to burn bridges to the Soviet Union in accordance with the centuries-old geopolitical imperative that beckoned for a German-Russian alliance. Whether opting for expedient relations with East or West, they never ceased dreaming about a fascist comeback. The clandestine milieu they inhabited was awash in intrigue, shifting alliances, internecine disputes, and unexpected linkages that defied standard interpretations. It was a strange world in which the political categories of "Right" and "lLeft" at times seemed to blur beyond recognition.
While the Cold War raged, several academics who wrote about fascism provided intellectual fodder for the East-West propaganda contest. But mass-based fascist organizations were never just pawns of big business, as Marxist historians have asserted; nor were they the totalitarian soul mates of Stalinism, as anti-Communist polemicists have argued. In addition to avoiding avoided awkward truths about the indigenous appeal of fascism, both theories cannot account for the recrudescence of fascism in the 1990s.
Over the years, academics have engaged in much debate and semantic hair-splitting without arriving at a universally accepted definition of fascism. The lack of agreement as to what constitutes the "fascist minimum" (the lowest common denominator of features found in all examples of fascism) stems in part from the protean nature of the fascist experience. Fascism during the 1920s and 1930s was an ideologically ambiguous movement that metamorphosed through several phases or sequences. Fascist parties initially attracted support among the hoi polloi by campaigning as social revolutionaries against the inequities of the free market; later, as serious contenders for power, they won over conservative elites in Italy and Germany by promising to thwart the Red Menace. In places where fascists governed, they inevitably violated their early platforms, especially their anticapitalist pretensions. Ultimately, their main political enemy was the worker Left, which placed fascism in the right-wing extremist camp.
Several fascist leaders, including Benito Mussolini, started out as socialists but eventually lost faith in the revolutionary capacity of the working class. In order to mobilize an inert proletariat, they embraced nationalism. The mythos of national rebirth was germane to fascism, which assumed widely diverging forms based on a constellation of historical and social factors that differed from one country to the next.
The National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), led by Hitler, emphasized Nordic mysticism, biological racialism, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and aggressive militarism. In its formative period, the NSDAP shared the ultranationalist stage with several non-Nazi variants of fascism that flourished during the so-called Conservative Revolution of the 1920s. A plethora of German fascisms embraced Volk-ish and anti-Semitic assumptions-unlike Italian fascism (sometimes referred as "corporatism"), which was not inherently racialist. Mussolini's followers may have been racist in the general sense of viewing nonwhites or non-Europeans as culturally inferior, but they did not inflate their racism into an obsessive, all-encompassing ideology. Nor did Franco's hyper-authoritarian Catholics in Spain, who had little sympathy for the pagan and anti-Christian motifs that Nazis often espoused.
Unfortunately, the blanket usage of the terms fascist and neo-fascist belies the diverse and sometimes conflicting tendencies that these labels encompass. Umberto Eco describes fascism as "a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas," which "had no quintessence." The word itself derives from fasces, a cluster of sticks with protruding axheads that symbolize the power and the glory of ancient Rome. In Latin, fasces is related to fascinum, to fascinate or charm.
The abracadabra of fascism casts a spell over people by diverting economic and social resentments toward national and racial preoccupations. Proclaiming the need for a new spirit and a new man, fascist demagogues have extolled action for its own sake and romanticized violence as regenerative and therapeutic. Although many of their ideas are a by-product of the Enlightenment, they vehemently reject egalitarian social theories that formed the basis of the French Revolution in 1789. The "anti" dimensions of fascism are manifold and well-known: anti-democratic, anti-Marxist, anticapitalist, antimaterialist, anti-cosmopolitan, antibourgeois, antiliberal, antifeminist, and so on.
But fascism was always more than just a negative crusade. Its eclectic style incorporated elements of competing ideologies that fascist rhetoric ostensibly repudiated. Herein lay the essential paradox of fascism: its ability to embody social and political opposites, to be at once elitist and populist, traditionalist and avant-garde. ("I am a reactionary and a revolutionary," Mussolini boasted.) Within the fascist milieu, there has always been a nostalgia for preindustrial societies and an attraction to modern technology, a pathos for uncontrolled brutality and a fetish for obedience and order. Promising the remedy the malaise and anomie of modern life, fascist leaders manipulated seep-seated longings for a better society. The skewed utopian impulse of fascism was the basis for part of its magnetism as a political movement, which appealed to all social strata--urban and rural, young and old, poor and wealthy, the intelligentsia and the uneducated.
The massive defeat they suffered during World War II did not refute the innermost convictions of many fascists, who kept pining for the day when they might again inflict their twisted dream of a new order on much of the world. Within the neofascist scene, there has always been a residual subculture of nostalgics who clung to the heritage of the Third Reich and the Mussolini regime. Holocaust-denial literature and other racialist screeds have circulated like political pornography among the deeply devoted who cluster in small marginalized groups and clandestine cells. Others showed more resiliency as they tried to adapt to the changing realities of the postwar era. But the East-West conflict, which initially afforded a means of survival for these ideological miscreants, also stranded many of them on the farther shores of politics. They realized that sooner or later the binary logjam of the Cold War would have to be broken for revisionist forms of fascism to take hold.
The more sophisticated tacticians understood that the fascist game could be played in many ways. Some deemed it best not to advertise their allegiance to the creed. Discarding the fascist appellation was an initial step toward articulating a political discourse more in tune with modern times, one that spoke of preserving identity and cultural uniqueness instead of white supremacy. Pragmatic and opportunistic, neofascist leaders reinvented themselves and crafted euphemisms into electoral platforms that concealed an abiding hatred of the democratic process. Campaigning as national populists, they managed to rack up significant vote totals in several countries and redefine the post-cold-war political landscape.
This is the saga of an underground political movement that has reawakened after a half century of hibernation. It is the history of something long hidden reappearing in a new form, a thing once forbidden that is gradually gaining influence and respectability. Most of all, it is a story about a cadre of old-guard fascists who kept the torch burning and bequeathed it to a new generation of extremists who are carrying on the struggle today.
by American Dream » Fri Feb 13, 2015 9:11 pm
American Dream » Wed Feb 11, 2015 10:24 pm wrote:
http://jewdas.org/keeping-antisemitism-simple/
Keeping Antisemitism Simple
But what about Israel? Doesn’t it get much more complex?
Not really. Israel is a state. You can’t really be racist against a state. There is no position on Israel that is per se antisemitic – although you can express views it in an racist way. Calling for the right of return for Palestinian refugees? Fine. Calling for Israel/Palestine to become a single state, with equality for all its citizens? No racism there. Calling for BDS? Lots of states are subject to some kind of sanctions, this is not normally described as racist. Calling Israel an apartheid state? People can debate whether or not the claim is fair but it’s hard to see how it can be antisemitic. But blaming policies of the Israel government on ‘The Jews’? Yep, that’s racist. Blaming them on ‘the Zionists’? I’m afraid that, most of the time, that’s racist too – ‘Zionist’ has long been a synonym for ‘Jew’ in much racist discourse.
Critiquing Israel policy by relying on negative stereotypes of Jews – ‘controlling the world’, ‘money obsessed’ etc.? That’s racist too. Hey, I know that people may not be aware of all stereotypes that have been used about Jews, so may find this difficult to avoid. But there’s an easy remedy, in line with what we laid out above. Don’t generalise at all. Be precise, if the Israeli Prime Minister has done something, blame it on them as an individual. Likewise, if the criticism is of the Israeli army, make that clear. Likewise, critique ‘the Israeli government’ or even ‘structural discrimination inherent in the the Israeli state’ – just don’t blame it on Jews or Zionists. They probably didn’t have any say in the matter. Precision removes any tinge of unwitting racist generalisation.
The Nazi ideologue Rosenberg (1938) formulated the modern essence of antisemitism succinctly when he portrayed it as an attack on Communism, Bolshevism, and Jewish capitalism, a capitalism not of productive labour and industry, but of parasites - money and finance, speculators and bankers.
There is of course a difference between the antisemitism that culminated in Auschwitz and the antisemitism of the post-1945 world. However, whether antisemitism persists because or despite of Auschwitz is, ultimately, an idle question. The notions ‘despite’ and ‘because’ give credence to Auschwitz as a factory of death that is assumed to have destroyed antisemitism. Furthermore, and connected, antisemitism is viewed as a phenomenon of the past, that merely casts its shadow on the present but has itself no real existence. In this way, overt expressions of antisemitism are deemed ugly merely as pathological aberrations of an otherwise civilized world. In this context the critique of antisemitism is either belittled as an expression of ‘European guilt’ or rejected as an expression of bad faith: a camouflage for insulating Israel from criticism (Keaney, 2007).
The paper argues that modern antisemitism is the ‘rumour about Jews’ as personification of hated forms of capitalism.
...The projection of the Jew as the external enemy within, as communist, financier, speculator, and banker remains potent to this day. For example, the former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad, assessed the root causes of Malaysia’s financial collapse in 1997 by stating: ‘I say openly, these people are racists. They are not happy to see us prosper. They say we grow too fast, they plan to make us poor. We are not making enemies with other people but others are making enemies with us’.1 What is meant by ‘we’ and who are ‘they’? Mahathir Mohamad’s denunciation of capitalism as ‘Jewish capitalism’ does indeed appear, as the Financial Times (October 23 2003) suggested, to have taken its cue from The International Jew, a book commissioned by Henry Ford in the 1920s. In its structure, the conception of ‘speculators’ as the external enemy within bent on destroying relations of the national harmony of interest, belongs to modern anti-Semitism. It summons the idea of finance and speculators as merchants of greed and, counterposed to this, espouses the idea of an otherwise ‘healthy’, ‘industrious’ and peaceful national community that arises from the ‘soil’, furnishes the homeland with indestructible force and permanence, and is united by characteristics of race and the bond of blood.
Then there is Pat Buchanan’s (2002) defence of supposed American values and virtues that he sees to be in crisis because of the nefarious effects of ‘critical theory’ for which he holds ‘those trouble making Communist Jews’ responsible.2 Intelligence based on reason and critical judgment appears here as a powerfully destructive force that is ascribed to the intelligence of ‘Jews’. Lyotard (1993, p. 159) portrays this rumour about Jews well: for the antisemites ‘[t]he Jews … have no roots in a nature...They claim to have their roots in a book’. Antisemitism projects the Other as rootless. Instead of being rooted in the supposed values of the nation, its soil and tradition, the Jew is possessed of an intelligence cunning that is destructive of tradition and organic social matter. The Jew seems to come from no-where. ‘Anti-Semitism is the rumour about Jews’ (Adorno, 1951, p.141). They are seen to stand behind phenomena. The power ascribed to this rootless Other, is of an immensely powerful, intangible, international conspiracy (cf. Postone, 1986). It cannot be defined concretely; it is an abstract, invisible power, which hides in such contradictory phenomena as communism and capitalism.
Then there is the anti-imperialist left. As one of its more critical and distinctive thinkers, Perry Anderson (2001, p. 15) argued: ‘entrenched in business, government and media, American Zionism has since the sixties acquired a firm grip on the levers of public opinion and official policy towards Israel, that has weakened only on the rarest of occasions’. The Jews, then, have not only conquered Palestine but they have also taken control of America, or as James Petras (2004, p. 210) sees it, the current effort of ‘US empire building’ is shaped by ‘Zionist empire builders’. For Anderson, Israel is a Jewish state, its nationalist triumphs are Jewish triumphs, and its economy is a Jewish economy – and its state a ‘rentier state’ that is kept by the US as its imperialist bridgehead in the Middle East.
...Islamic fundamentalism can be seen as a reaction against the ‘heavy artillery’ of global capital to create a world after its own image. Against this, it espouses the quest for authenticity, seeking to preserve through the purification of imagined ancestral conditions and traditions existing social structures, repeating with deadly and deafening force the ‘paradigmatic Fascist gesture, [the Arab fundamentalists] want ‘capitalism without capitalism’ (Zizek, 2002, p. 131). The fight against ‘westoxication’, as Khomeini called the ideas of liberalism, democracy and socialism, indicates that Islamist antisemitism is unlikely to be assuaged by an Israeli-Palestinian settlement. It is more likely to be inflamed. At base, it is the depiction of Israel as an imperialist bridgehead of ‘Jewish’ capitalist counterinsurgency that fuels the hatred of Israel as a ‘Jewish’ state. The attribute ‘Jewish’ does not refer to concrete human beings, be it Ariel Sharon or Karl Marx, Albert Einstein or Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxemburg or Leon Trotsky, Michael Neumann or Esther Rosenberg. It disregards social distinctions, be they of class, gender, ethnicity, etc., and instead assumes everybody to be of the same national issue, whether they are anarchists, communists, refusniks, capitalists or workers, conservatives, religious fanatics, war mongers, peace-lovers, beggars, or just plain and boring. Instead of recognising contradictions, distinctions, antagonisms, struggles and conflicts, it projects those abstract, reason-defying, imagined ‘qualities’ upon which antisemitism rests onto a nationalised people, displacing the critique of existing social relations to totalitarian conceptions of the national friend and national foe. Within this relationship, reason is suspended and thought is led to the equally irrational belief that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
...What is the relationship between Nazism’s anti-capitalist ideological projection and the rational calculation of economic resources that proposes mass murder as a ‘solution’ to capitalist profitability? Nazi anti-Semitism is different from the anti-Semitism of the old Christian world. This does not mean that it did not exploit Christian anti-Semitism. Christian anti-Semitism constructed the ‘Jew’ as an abstract social power: The ‘Jew’ stands accused as the assassin of Jesus and is thus persecuted as the son of a murderer. In modern anti-Semitism, the Jew was chosen because of the ‘religious horror the latter has always inspired’ (Sartre, 1976, p.68). In the Christian world, the projected category of the ‘Jew’ was also a social-economic construct by virtue of being forced to fill the vital economic function of trafficking in money. Thus, the economic curse that this social role entailed, reinforced the religious curse.
Modern anti-Semitism uses and exploits these historical constructions and transforms them: The Jew stands accused and is persecuted for following unproductive activities. His image is that of an intellectual and banker. ‘Bankers and intellectuals, money and mind, the exponents of circulation, form the impossible ideal of those who have been maimed by domination, an image used by domination to perpetuate itself’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1989, p.172). The biologically defined possession of land and tradition is counterposed to the possession of universal, abstract phenomena. The terms ‘abstract, rationalist, intellectual...take a pejorative sense; it could not be otherwise, since the anti-Semite lays claim to a concrete and irrational possession of the values of the nation’ (Sartre, 1976, p.109). The abstract values themselves are biologized, the abstract is identified as ‘Jew’. Both, thus, the ‘concrete’ and the ‘abstract’ are biologized: one through the possession of land (the concrete as rooted in nature, blood and tradition) and the other through the possession of ‘poison’ (the abstract as the rootless power of intelligence and money). The myth of national unity is counterposed to the myth of the Jew. Jewry is seen to stand behind the urban world of crime, prostitution, and vulgar, materialist culture. Tradition is counterposed to reasoning, intelligence, and self-reflection; and the nationalist conception of community, economy and labour is counterposed to the abstract forces of international finance and communism (cf. Postone, 1986). The Volksgenossen [Race/National Comrades] are thus equal in blindness. ‘Anti-Semitic behaviour is generated in situations where blinded men robbed of their subjectivity are set loose as subjects’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1989, p.171). While reason subsists in and through the critique of social relations, the Volksgenosse has only faith in the efficiently unleashed terror that robs the alleged personifications of capitalism of everything they have, cloth, shoes, teeth, hair, skin, life. The collection of gold-teeth from those murdered, the collection of hair from those to be killed, and the overseeing of the slave labour of those allowed to walk on their knees for no more than another day, only requires effective organization.
Nazism’s denunciation of capitalism as ‘Jewish capitalism’ allowed thus the relentless development capitalist enterprise while seemingly rejecting capitalism as a system of finance, money-grabbing speculation, accumulation of parasitic wealth, as a rootless, mobile, intangible annihilator of space through time, undermining concrete enterprise on the altar of money, etc. The critique of capitalism as ‘Jewish capitalism’ argues that capitalism is in fact nothing more than an unproductive money-making system – a rentier economy that lives off and in doing so, undermines the presumed national community of creative, industrious individuals, subordinating them to the rootless and therefore ruthless forces of global money, or as Mahathir Mohamad had it, ‘they are not happy to see us prosper’.
For the antisemites, then, the world appears to be divided between money capital and concrete nature. The concrete is conceived as immediate, direct, matter for use, and rooted in industry and productive activity. Money, on the other hand, is not only conceived as the root of all evil, it is also judged as rootless and of existing not only independently from industrial capital but, also, over and against the industrial endeavour of the nation: all enterprise is seen to be perverted in the name of money’s continued destructive quest for self-expansion. In this way, money and financial capital are identified with capitalism while industry is perceived as constituting the concrete and creative enterprise of a national community. Between capitalism as monetary accumulation and national community as industrial enterprise, it is money that calls the shots. In this view, industry and enterprise are ‘made’ capitalist by money: money penetrates all expressions of industry and thus perverts and disintegrates community in the name of finance capital’s abstract values. This destructive force puts claim on and so perverts: the individual as entrepreneur; the creative in terms of a paternalist direction of use-value production; the rooted in terms of Volk; the community in terms of a natural community. Instead of community’s natural order of hierarchy and position, money’s allegedly artificial and rootless force is judged to make the world go round by uprooting the natural order of the Volksgenossen. In this way, then, it is possible for the Volksgenossen not only to embrace capitalism but, also, to declare that the forced labour creates freedom: Arbeit macht frei. ‘They declared that work was not degrading, so as to control the others more rationally. They claimed to be creative workers, but in reality they were still the grasping overlords of former times’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1989, p.173). By separating what fundamentally belongs together, that is production and money, the differentiation between money on the one hand, and industry and enterprise, on the other, amounts to a fetish critique of capital that, by attacking the projected personification of capital, seeks its unfettered expansion through means of terror.
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