A response to the post: http://socialistworkerspartyengland.blogspot.com/2018/08/zionism-is-anti-semitic-zionism-is-pure.html
Some historical comments
1. “Our Party is opposed to the racism which targets people because of their origins or origins of their forebears.” An important and necessary statement which I entirely agree with.
2. “We identify Global Zionism as an ideology of terror, built on a sickening appropriation of a religious system which is ardently ethno-nationalist, turning it into a dogma of supremacist hatred.”
To talk about Zionists “turning” Judaism into a “dogma of supremacist hatred” is historically incorrect. Jewish holy books, the Talmud and Torah both contain “a dogma of supremacist hatred”. Hence not only demanding interest on loans (...but only on loans to Gentiles) but also killing, robbing and even committing acts of genocide and paedophilia against Gentile “cattle” are NOT considered to be against Jewish Law. It is also clearly stated in the Jewish scriptures stated that Jews are destined by God to rule over all non-Jewish peoples, who will serve as their slaves. Judaism provided the very model of Hitler’s supremacist biological racism.
3. Long before Zionism became a powerful movement, Jews played a central role in the development of modern capitalism - arguably even more so that Lutheranism or Calvinism. For a thorough account and analysis of this role (which contains not one iota of racism) see Werner Sombart’s classic work entitled The Jews and Modern Capitalism.
NB Friedrich Engels himself stated that Sombart was the only economist who had fully understood Marx’s Capital. Sombart’s book should absolutely be a part of the SMPBI literature page.
4. Why no reference to Marx’s own essay “On the Jewish Question” - which makes no reference to Zionism at all? Or to the views of Disraeli - who believed in both a Jewish and an Aryan ‘master race’.
5. “Would the Zionist elite take a natural hostility of Europeans to usury and turn it into a vehicle of repression and discrimination against the Working Class Jews of Europe, in order to achieve their long sought after goal of the creation of Israel as a base to gain mastery of the world?”
Question: just how many “Working Class Jews” were there - if by this is meant proletarians? Not that many. Their preferred trades were petit-bourgeois mercantilism, tax collection for rich landowners, wholesaling and retailing, banking and the professions. But the Zionists explicitly encouraged Hitler to increase repression of the Jewish population of a whole, following Herzl’s maxim that “Our best friends are the anti-Semites” (i.e. they serve our purposes best).
6. “German Socialism under leaders such as the Strassers, was the ideology of a radical republican workers movement.” I suggest doing a bit more research about the Strasser brothers - both of whom were members of the Freikorps - which fought to bring down Germany’s first workers’ republic (the Munich Council Republic). They were also both anti-semitic, albeit for anti-capitalist rather than racist reasons. But their opposition to usury and Jewish finance capitalism was completely shared with Hitler - who was the first leader in modern history to nationalise the country’s central bank and pay workers with labour certificates - an idea supported by Marx. Nevertheless, it is of course true that there were those in the NSDAP who wanted to go further in a socialist direction and nationalise the big industrial concerns.
7. Reference is made to the Hitler’s “National Capitalist NSDAP war machine”. A ‘war machine’ that was massively outnumbered by Germany’s neighbours, and even more so by its combined war enemies (...by a factor or 97 to 1) can hardly have been intended for aggressive purposes. See the important video by Gerd Schultze Rhonhof based on his book: 1939 - The War That Had Many Fathers Gerd Schultze-Rhonhof
8. “After the 1934 murders of the Socialist leaders, the NSDAP moved from a movement for the social well-being of the people into a military formation.” In fact Hitler accomplished, in just 4 years, the most massive and rapid improvement in the “social well-being of the people” in history. But faced with an army whose loyalty could not be relied upon, an SA that wanted to replace it with street fighters who picked on Reds and Jews - but were seen as wholly ill-equipped to fill important military functions, Hitler saw no alternative but to create a high-quality “military formation” - the SS. The SS were regarded with absolute contempt by both the army and SA alike - but proved to have such necessary loyalty and soldierly qualities to defeat vastly superior enemy forces, saved the German army from numerous defeats - and whose officers always went first in battle. Yet since the SA were three times bigger than the standing army and more politically conscious, it can be hypothertically argued that Hitler was wrong to block Röhm’s attempt to take it over - and also to reject Strasserist demands for a ‘second revolution’ of a more socialist nature. But all this would have been difficult in practice and is a bit to easy to say in retrospect - given that the economic blockade of Germany had already begun and war preparations against it were already in motion. In this sense Germany at that time can in this sense be compared to Russia today - simply resisting Imperialism. And World Jewry had already declared war on and imposed trade boycotts on Germany good and shops in 1933 - resulting in counter-boycotts of Jewish businesses.
9. Ernst Jünger was neither a socialist, National Bolshevik or a Nazi, but a uniquely original thinker and writer whose main value - despite his anti-liberalism, but like that of Marx - was “free individuality”. He also had a close relationship with Martin Heidegger. I recommend also his novel Eumeswil for the literary section of the SMPBI site.
10. “Corbyn has spoken about the machinations of Zionism. Now the Zionists are coming for him. They are liars who are scared of a Labour Leader who is willing to discuss the Zionist deals with the Hitlerist Nazis.”
Note: Hitler ended up seeing exactly where Zionism would lead, broke his ‘deal’ with the Zionists - and instead enlisted Arabs into the SS.
“The Zionists WILL destroy Corbyn. His weakness will see to that. When he is gone, a neo-Blairite will be put in charge and Zionist rule will be back with a vengeance.”
Agreed.
My main point. I believe it is just as important - if not more important - to distinguish individual Jews from Judaism as it is to distinguish anti-Semitism from anti-Zionism. For without the total assimilation of Jews, which Marx argued for (and which many German Jews wanted in opposition to the Zionists) Zionism is a natural outgrowth of Judaism - and correctly understands itself as such (a tiny and irrelevant minority of eccentric rabbis notwithstanding).
Marx himself was the very epitome of a decidedly anti-Judaic ‘Jew’ - and was also not innocent of making ‘anti-Semitic’ remarks of such a ‘politically incorrect’ nature that today they would have him hauled before a court. And anti-Judaism - like anti-Zionism - is no more a form of ‘racism’ than being anti-Islamic or anti-Christian. Judaism, like Islam or Christianity, is not a race but a religion, albeit one whose secular form - as Marx pointed out - is capitalism itself.
First Comment:
Thank you Peter. This raises a lot of good points. The idea that it is 'racist' to oppose the RELIGION of Judaism, is of the same level of lunacy as the argument that it is 'racist' to oppose Islam. One might as well throw in the other Desert Superstition, Christianity, and call criticism of that RELIGION, 'racist' (although, for some reason that one doesn't fit the pattern!) According to political correctness, anything which goes against globalism, is racist, and anything which supports nature is inherently evil - eugenics (not wanting to create life which suffers when gene theraphy can cure the ailment before it takes effect); the fact that having a Penis is a pretty strong indiction you are a Man, no mater how much make-up you put on; the extended family etc. We fall into their traps at our peril....
My main point. I believe it is just as important - if not more important - to distinguish individual Jews from Judaism as it is to distinguish anti-Semitism from anti-Zionism. For without the total assimilation of Jews, which Marx argued for (and which many German Jews wanted in opposition to the Zionists) Zionism is a natural outgrowth of Judaism - and correctly understands itself as such (a tiny and irrelevant minority of eccentric rabbis notwithstanding).
Marx himself was the very epitome of a decidedly anti-Judaic ‘Jew’ - and was also not innocent of making ‘anti-Semitic’ remarks of such a ‘politically incorrect’ nature that today they would have him hauled before a court. And anti-Judaism - like anti-Zionism - is no more a form of ‘racism’ than being anti-Islamic or anti-Christian. Judaism, like Islam or Christianity, is not a race but a religion, albeit one whose secular form - as Marx pointed out - is capitalism itself.
First Comment:
Thank you Peter. This raises a lot of good points. The idea that it is 'racist' to oppose the RELIGION of Judaism, is of the same level of lunacy as the argument that it is 'racist' to oppose Islam. One might as well throw in the other Desert Superstition, Christianity, and call criticism of that RELIGION, 'racist' (although, for some reason that one doesn't fit the pattern!) According to political correctness, anything which goes against globalism, is racist, and anything which supports nature is inherently evil - eugenics (not wanting to create life which suffers when gene theraphy can cure the ailment before it takes effect); the fact that having a Penis is a pretty strong indiction you are a Man, no mater how much make-up you put on; the extended family etc. We fall into their traps at our peril....
Marx on Judaism and Christianity (from 'On the Jewish Question')
ReplyDeletehttps://docs.google.com/document/d/1RxCk5waI_wvCBO3hOajEp-X7P0IiDpr8EtC6Lze6F2s/edit?usp=sharing
Kathleen Christisen, writing in Counterpunch:
ReplyDelete"Words fail; ordinary terms are inadequate to describe the horrors Israel daily perpetrates, and has perpetrated for years, against the Palestinians. The tragedy of Gaza has been described a hundred times over, as have the tragedies of 1948, of Qibya, of Sabra and Shatila, of Jenin — 60 years of atrocity perpetrated in the name of Judaism. But the horror generally falls on deaf ears ... Those who are horrified — and there are many — cannot penetrate the shield of impassivity that protects the political and media elite in Israel, even more so in the U.S., and increasingly now in Canada and Europe, from seeing, from caring.
As it seeks to protect itself against phantom threats, the racist state becomes increasingly paranoid, its society closed and insular, intellectually limited. Setbacks enrage it; humiliations madden it. The state lashes out in a crazed effort, lacking any sense of proportion, to reassure itself of its strength.
“This society no longer recognizes any boundaries, geographical or moral,” wrote Israeli intellectual and anti-Zionist activist Michel Warschawski in his 2004 book Towards an Open Tomb: The Crisis of Israeli Society. Israel knows no limits and is lashing out as it finds that its attempt to beat the Palestinians into submission and swallow Palestine whole is being thwarted by a resilient, dignified Palestinian people who refuse to submit quietly and give up resisting Israel’s arrogance.
A military establishment that drops a 500-pound bomb on a residential apartment building in the middle of the night and kills 14 sleeping civilians, as happened in Gaza four years ago, is not a military that operates by civilized rules.
A military establishment that drops a 500-pound bomb on a house in the middle of the night and kills a man and his wife and seven of their children, as happened in Gaza four days ago, is not the military of a moral country.
A society that can brush off as unimportant an army officer’s brutal murder of a 13-year-old girl on the claim that she threatened soldiers at a military post — one of nearly 700 Palestinian children murdered by Israelis since the intifada began — is not a society with a conscience.
A government that imprisons a 15-year-old girl — one of several hundred children in Israeli detention — for the crime of pushing and running away from a male soldier trying to do a body search as she entered a mosque is not a government with any moral bearings. (This story, not the kind that ever appears in the U.S. media, was reported in the London Sunday Times. The girl was shot three times as she ran away and was convicted to 18 months in prison after she came out of a coma.)
Michel Warschawski writes of an “Israeli madness” and “insane brutality,” a “putrefaction” of civilized society, that have set Israel on a suicidal course. He foresees the end of the Zionist enterprise; Israel is a “gang of hoodlums,” he says, a state “that makes a mockery of legality and of civil morality. A state run in contempt of justice loses the strength to survive.”
As Warschawski notes bitterly, Israel no longer knows any moral boundaries — if it ever did. Those who continue to support Israel, who make excuses for it as it descends into corruption, have lost their moral compass.