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"But what can we do?"
By William Blum
10/02/07 "ICH"
-- -- I used to give thought to what historical time and
place I would like to have lived in. Europe in the 1930s was
usually my first choice. As the war clouds darkened, I'd be
surrounded by intrigue, spies omnipresent, matters of life and
death pressing down, the opportunity to be courageous and
principled. I pictured myself helping desperate people escape to
America. It was real Hollywood stuff; think "Casablanca". And
when the Spanish Republic fell to Franco and his fascist forces,
aided by the German and Italian fascists (while the United
States and Britain stood aside, when not actually aiding the
fascists), everything in my imaginary scenario would have
heightened -- the fate of Europe hung in the balance. Then the
Nazis marched into Austria, then Czechoslovakia, then Poland ...
one could have devoted one's life to working against all this,
trying to hold back the fascist tide; what could be more
thrilling, more noble?
Miracle of miracles, miracle of
time machines, I'm actually living in this imagined period,
watching as the Bush fascists march into Afghanistan, bombing it
into a "failed state"; then Iraq: death, destruction, and
utterly ruined lives for 24 million human beings; threatening
more of the same endless night of hell for the people of Iran;
overthrowing Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti; bombing helpless
refugees in Somalia; relentless attempts to destabilize and
punish Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Gaza, and other
non-believers in the empire's god-given mission. Sadly, my most
common reaction to this real-life scenario, daily in fact, is
less heroic and more feeling scared or depressed; not for myself
personally but for our one and only world. The news every day,
which I consume in large portions, slashes away at my joie de
vivre; it's not just the horror stories of American military
power run amok abroad and the injustices of the ever-expanding
police state at home, but all the lies and stupidity which drive
me up the wall. I'm constantly changing stations, turning the TV
or radio off, turning the newspaper page, to escape the words of
the King of Lies and the King of Stupidity -- those two twisted
creatures who happen to occupy the same humanoid body -- and a
hundred minions.
Nonetheless, I must tell you,
comrades, that at the same time, our contemporary period also
brings out in me a measure of what I imagined for my 1930s life.
Our present world is in just as great peril, even more so when
one considers the impending environmental catastrophe (which the
King of Capitalism refuses to confront lest it harm the profits
of those who lavish him with royal bribes). The Bush fascist
tide must be stopped.
Usually when I'm asked "But what
can we do?", my reply is something along the lines of: Inasmuch
as I can not see violent revolution succeeding in the United
States (something deep inside tells me that we couldn't quite
match the government's firepower, not to mention their
viciousness), I can offer no solution to stopping the imperial
beast other than: Educate yourself and as many others as you
can, increasing the number of those in the opposition until it
reaches a critical mass, at which point ... I can't predict the
form the explosion will take.
I'm afraid that this advice,
whatever historical correctness it may embody, is not terribly
inspiring. However, I've assembled four wise men to add their
thoughts, hopefully raising the inspiration level. Let's call
them the "patron saints of lost causes".
I.F. Stone: "The only
kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose
because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose
until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order
for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a
lot of other people have got to be willing -- for the sheer fun
and joy of it -- to go right ahead and fight, knowing you're
going to lose. You mustn't feel like a martyr. You've got to
enjoy it."
Howard Zinn: "People
think there must be some magical tactic, beyond the traditional
ones -- protests, demonstrations, vigils, civil disobedience --
but there is no magical panacea, only persistence."
Noam Chomsky: "There are
no magic answers, no miraculous methods to overcome the problems
we face, just the familiar ones: honest search for
understanding, education, organization, action that raises the
cost of state violence for its perpetrators or that lays the
basis for institutional change -- and the kind of commitment
that will persist despite the temptations of disillusionment,
despite many failures and only limited successes, inspired by
the hope of a brighter future."
Sam Smith: "Those who
think history has left us helpless should recall the
abolitionist of 1830, the feminist of 1870, the labor organizer
of 1890, and the gay or lesbian writer of 1910. They, like us,
did not get to choose their time in history but they, like us,
did get to choose what they did with it. Knowing what we know
now about how these things turned out, but also knowing how long
it took, would we have been abolitionists in 1830, or feminists
in 1870, and so on?"
Anti-Semitism. Don't settle for imitations.
"The cleanliness of this people, moral and otherwise, I must
say, is a point in itself. By their very exterior you could tell
that these were no lovers of water, and, to your distress, you
often knew it with your eyes closed. ... Added to this, there
was their unclean dress and their generally unheroic appearance.
... Was there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in
cultural life, without at least one Jew involved in it? ... nine
tenths of all literary filth, artistic trash, and theatrical
idiocy can be set to the account of a people ... a people under
whose parasitism the whole of honest humanity is suffering,
today more than ever: the Jews."
Now who can be the author of
such abominable anti-semitism? a)Hasan Nasrallah, leader of
Hezbollah in Lebanon;
b)John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of "The Israel
Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy"; c)Osama bin Laden; d)Jimmy
Carter; e)Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of Iran; f)Norman
Finkelstein, author of "The Holocaust Industry".
Each one has been condemned as
anti-Semitic. Are you having a problem deciding?
Oh, excuse me, I forgot one -- g)Adolf Hitler.[1] Does that
make it easier? I'll bet some of you were thinking it must have
been Ahmadinejad.
The Webster's Dictionary defines
"anti-Semite" as "One who discriminates against or is hostile to
or prejudiced against Jews." Notice that the state of Israel is
not mentioned.
The next time a critic of
Israeli policies is labeled "anti-semitic" think of this
definition, think of Adolf's charming way of putting it, then
closely examine what the accused has actually said or written.
It may, however, be past the
time for such a rational, intellectual pursuit; ultra-heated
polarization reigns supreme with anything concerning the Middle
East, particularly Israel.
In March, at a conference of the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in Washington,
one of the speakers, an American "Christian Zionist", asserted:
"It is 1938, Iran is Germany and Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler."
The audience responded with a standing ovation, one of seven for
his talk.[2]
Then, in May, former Israeli
Prime-Minister and current Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu
declared that "It's 1938 and Iran is Germany. And Iran is racing
to arm itself with atomic bombs. ... [While Ahmadinejad] denies
the Holocaust he is preparing another Holocaust for the Jewish
state."[3]
Not to be outdone in
semi-hysterical propaganda, Israel's president, Shimon Peres,
has compared an Iranian nuclear bomb to a "flying concentration
camp".[4]
So why hasn't Iran at least
started its holocaust by killing or throwing into concentration
camps its own Jews, an estimated 30,000 in number? These are
Iranian Jews who have representation in Parliament and who have
been free for many years to emigrate to Israel but have chosen
not to do so.
For your further apocalyptic enjoyment here are a couple more of
Zionism's finest envoys speaking about Iran. Former Speaker of
the House in the US Congress, Newt Gingrich: "Three nuclear
weapons is a second Holocaust. We have enemies who are quite
explicit in their desire to destroy us. They say it publicly, on
television, on Web sites. [They are] fully as determined as Nazi
Germany, more determined than the Soviet Union, and these
enemies will kill us the first chance they get."[5]
And Norman Podhoretz, leading neo-conservative editor of
Commentary magazine, in an article entitled "The Case for
Bombing Iran": "Like Hitler, [Ahmadinejad] is a revolutionary
whose objective is to overturn the going international system
and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order
dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of
Islamofascism. ... The plain and brutal truth is that if Iran is
to be prevented from developing a nuclear arsenal, there is no
alternative to the actual use of military force -- any more than
there was an alternative to force if Hitler was to be stopped in
1938."[6]
Though so often condemned, Hitler actually arrived at a number
of very perceptive insights into how the world worked. One of
them was this:
"The great masses of the people in the very bottom of their
hearts tend to be corrupted rather than consciously and
purposely evil ... therefore, in view of the primitive
simplicity of their minds, they more easily fall a victim to a
big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in
little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too
big."[7]
Ahmadinejad arrived in New York
September 24 to address the United Nations. At Columbia
University he was introduced by the school's president as a man
who appeared to lack "intellectual courage", had a "fanatical
mindset", and may be "astonishingly undereducated".[8] How many
people in the audience, I wonder, looked around to see where
George W. was sitting.
"If I were the president of a
university, I would not have invited him. He's a holocaust
denier," said Hillary Clinton, once again fearlessly challenging
the Bush administration's propaganda.[9]
The above is but a small sample
of the hatred and anger spewed forth against Ahmadinejad for
several years now. A number of people on the American left, who
should know better, have joined this chorus. I therefore would
like to repeat, and update, part of something I wrote in this
report last December, which was entitled "Designer Monsters".
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a man
seemingly custom-made for the White House in its endless quest
for enemies with whom to scare Congress, the American people,
and the world, in order to justify the unseemly behavior of the
empire. The Iranian president, we are told, has declared that he
wants to "wipe Israel off the map". He has said that "the
Holocaust is a myth". He held a conference in Iran for
"Holocaust deniers". And his government passed a new law
requiring Jews to wear a yellow insignia, à la the Nazis. On top
of all that, he's aiming to build nuclear bombs, one of which
would surely be aimed at Israel. What right-thinking person
would not be scared by such a man?
However, like with all such
designer monsters made bigger than life during the Cold War and
since by Washington, the truth about Ahmadinejad is a bit more
complicated. According to people who know Farsi, the Iranian
leader has never said anything about "wiping Israel off the
map". In his October 29, 2005 speech, when he reportedly first
made the remark, the word "map" does not even appear. According
to the translation of Juan Cole, American professor of Modern
Middle East and South Asian History, Ahmadinejad said that "the
regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time."
His remark, said Cole, "does not imply military action or
killing anyone at all"[10], which of course is what would make
the remark sound threatening.
At the December 2006 conference
in Teheran ("Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision"), the
Iranian president said: "The Zionist regime will be wiped out
soon, the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will
achieve freedom."[11] Obviously, the man is not calling for any
kind of violent attack upon Israel, for the dissolution of the
Soviet Union took place peacefully.
Moreover, in June 2006,
subsequent to Ahmadinejad's controversial speech, Iran's supreme
leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, stated: "We have no problem with
the world. We are not a threat whatsoever to the world, and the
world knows it. We will never start a war. We have no intention
of going to war with any state."[12]
As for the Holocaust myth, I
have yet to read or hear words from Ahmadinejad saying simply,
clearly, unambiguously, and unequivocally that he thinks that
what we know as the Holocaust never happened. He has instead
commented about the peculiarity and injustice of a Holocaust
which took place in Europe resulting in a state for the Jews in
the Middle East instead of in Europe. Why are the Palestinians
paying a price for a German crime? he asks. He argues that
Israel and the United States have exploited the memory of the
Holocaust for their own purposes. And he wonders about the
accuracy of the number of Jews -- six million -- allegedly
killed in the Holocaust, as have many other people of all
political stripes, including Holocaust survivors like Italian
author Primo Levi. (The much publicized World War One atrocities
which turned out to be false made the public very skeptical of
the Holocaust claims for a long time after World War Two.)
Ahmadinejad further asks why European researchers have been
imprisoned for questioning certain details about the Holocaust.
Which of this deserves to be labeled "Holocaust denial"?
The conference gave a platform
to various points of view, including six members of Jews United
Against Zionism, at least two of whom were rabbis. One was Ahron
Cohen, from London, who declared: "There is no doubt whatsoever,
that during World War 2 there developed a terrible and
catastrophic policy and action of genocide perpetrated by Nazi
Germany against the Jewish People." He also said that "the
Zionists make a great issue of the Holocaust in order to further
their illegitimate philosophy and aims," indicating as well that
the figure of six million Jewish victims is debatable. The other
rabbi was Moshe David Weiss, who told the delegates: "We don't
want to deny the killing of Jews in World War II, but Zionists
have given much higher figures for how many people were killed.
They have used the Holocaust as a device to justify their
oppression." His group rejects the creation of Israel on the
grounds that it violates Jewish religious law in that a Jewish
state can't exist until the return of the Messiah .[13]
Another speaker was Shiraz
Dossa, professor of political science at St. Francis Xavier
University in Canada. In an interview after the conference, he
described himself as an anti-imperialist and an admirer of Noam
Chomsky, and said that he "was invited because of my expertise
as a scholar in the German-Jewish area, as well as my studies in
the Holocaust. ... I have nothing to do with Holocaust denial,
not at all." His talk, he said, was "about the war on terrorism,
and how the Holocaust plays into it. ... There was no pressure
at all to say anything, and people there had different
views."[14]
Clearly, the conference -- which
the White House called "an affront to the entire civilized
world"[15] -- was not set up to be a forum for people to deny
that the Holocaust literally never took place at all.
As to the yellow star story of
May 2006 -- that was a complete fabrication by a prominent
Iranian-American neo-conservative author, Amir Taheri.
Ahmadinejad, however, is partly
to blame for his predicament. When asked directly about the
Holocaust and other controversial matters he usually declines to
give explicit answers of "yes" or "no". I interpret this as his
prideful refusal to accede to the wishes of what he regards as a
hostile Western interviewer asking hostile questions. The
Iranian president is also in the habit of prefacing certain
remarks with "Even if the Holocaust happened ... ", a rhetorical
device we all use in argument and discussion, but one which can
not help but reinforce the doubts people have about his views.
However, when Ahmadinejad himself asks, as he often has, "Why
should the Palestinians have to pay for something that happened
in Europe?" he does not get a clear answer.
In any event, in the question
and answer session following his talk at Columbia, the Iranian
president said: "I'm not saying that it [the Holocaust] didn't
happen at all. This is not the judgment that I'm passing here."
That should put the matter to
rest. But of course it won't. Two days later, September 26, a
bill (H. R. 3675) was introduced in Congress "To prohibit
Federal grants to or contracts with Columbia University", to
punish the school for inviting Ahmadinejad to speak. The bill's
first "finding" states that "Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad has called for the destruction of the State of
Israel, a critical ally of the United States."
That same day, comedian Jay Leno
had great fun ridiculing Ahmadinejad for denying that the
Holocaust ever happened "despite all the eye-witness accounts".
How long before the first
linking of Iran with 9-11? Or has that already happened? How
long before democracy and freedom bombs begin to fall upon the
heads of the Iranian people? All the charges of anti-Semitism
and Holocaust denial, along with other disinformation, are of
course designed to culminate in this new crime against humanity.
I wonder, in discussing these
matters, if I'm running the risk of once again being called
"anti-Semitic" by some Internet readers. No one is safe from
such charges these days. It should be noted that Hugo Chavez,
president of Venezuela, was accused last year of anti-semitic
behavior by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency of New York and the
Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, important members of the
Israel lobby. The accusation was based on a highly egregious
out-of-context reading of some remarks by Chavez.[16] One
doesn't have to be particularly conspiracy minded to think that
this was done in collusion with Bush administration officials.
As the Reagan administration in 1983 flung charges of
anti-Semitism against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua,
led by Daniel Ortega, who heads it again today.[17] Stay tuned.
Daniel, watch out.
One final thought. On the
Democratic Party's failure to stand up to the Bush fascist tide.
Here, from the first-person account of a German living under
Hitler in the 1930s, his observation about the leading German
political party, the Social Democrats, the Democratic Party of
its time: The Social Democrats, he wrote, "had fought the
election campaign of 1933 in a dreadfully humiliating way,
chasing after the Nazi slogans and emphasizing that they were
'also nationalist'. ... In May, a month before they were finally
dissolved, the Social Democratic faction in the Reichstag had
unanimously expressed their confidence in Hitler and joined in
the singing of the 'Horst Wessel Song,' the Nazi anthem. (The
official parliamentary report noted: 'Unending applause and
cheers, in the house and the galleries. The Reichschancellor
[Hitler] turns to the Social Democratic faction and
applauds.')"[18]
Burma
It's not that I can't give United States foreign policy any
credit when credit is due (please send me examples of the good
deeds I've overlooked), but the raison d'être of this
report is to try to help readers understand how US foreign
policy works, waking people up and making them smell the
garbage. American officials are now saying all the right things
in support of the protesting Burmese monks. They condemn the
Burmese leaders. They have announced new sanctions against the
military regime and have called upon the Security Council to
consider further steps. "Americans are outraged by the
situation," said Bush at the UN last week. But we must remember
that all this costs the United States nothing. There's no oil
involved. Israel has not yet accused the monks of anti-semitism.
There's no issue of terrorism involved, though the government
has tried to raise the issue of "terrorism" to win Washington's
support. The monks have not made any socialist or
anti-imperialist demands. There are no American bases whose
removal they've called for. No Burmese troops have been helping
the US in Iraq or Afghanistan. Neither Halliburton nor
Blackwater has a presence in Burma. In short, nothing that would
oblige Washington to compromise, once again, on its alleged
principles.
William Blum is the author
of: Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World
War 2. Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower.
West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir. Freeing the World to
Death: Essays on the American Empire. Portions of the books can
be read, and signed copies purchased, at
www.killinghope.org
NOTES
[1] Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf" (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston,
1971, original version 1925), Vol. 1, chapter 2, pp 57-8;
chapter 4, p.150
[2] The Forward (Jewish
newspaper in New York), March 16, 2007
http://www.forward.com/articles/pastor-hailed-bibi-dissed-pollard-rejected-whil/
[3] Haaretz.com (Israeli
newspaper),
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/787766.html
[4] Ibid.
[5] The Jerusalem Post, January
23, 2007
[6] Commentary Magazine (New
York), June 2007
[7] "Mein Kampf", op. cit., Vol.
1, chapter 10, p.231
[8] Washington Post, September
25, 2007, p.1
[9] Washington Post, September
25, 2007, p.6
[10] Informed Comment, Cole's
blog, May 3, 2006
www.juancole.com/2006/05/hitchens-hacker-and-hitchens.html
For a word-by-word breakdown of Ahmadinejad's remark, in Farsi
and English, see: Global Research, January 20, 2007,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=NOR20070120&articleId=4527
[11] Associated Press, December
12, 2006
[12] Letter to Washington Post
from M.A. Mohammadi, Press Officer, Iranian Mission to the
United Nations, June 12, 2006
[13] nkusa.org/activities/Speeches/2006Iran-ACohen.cfm;
Telegraph.co.uk, article by Alex Spillius, December 13, 2006;
Associated Press, December 12, 2006
[14] Globe and Mail (Toronto),
December 13, 2006
[15] Associated Press, December
12, 2006
[16] Fairness & Accuracy in
Reporting, www.fair.org/index.php?page=2805
[17] Holly Sklar, "Washington's
War On Nicaragua" (1988), p.243
[18] Sebastian Haffner, "Defying
Hitler" (English edition, New York, 2000), pp.130-1
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