Arthur Sauerhaft wrote:
>>I must admit, I've never heard of Godwin's Law, and I've lost by
>>that standard, but when if not in this case is it appropriate to
>>mention the Nazi's or Hitler?
>
>I'll tell you that tomorrow, never fear, but right now it's late and
>I'm going to sleep.
>
>>Is is that these things should never be spoken of, or better yet forgotten?
>
>:-)
>
>Perhaps you'd care to tell me just what you've based that assumption
>on, as there's nothing at all here to support it.
Nazis, eh, Arthur? Ever met one? You think you guys have got some
sort of franchise on all this stuff? I'll tell you a story. It's a
true story.
I'm a journalist. I used to be a South African. I worked mostly for
the black press there, not a very common pursuit during the dark days
of the white racist apartheid era in the 60s and 70s. I was deeply
involved in black issues and kept getting into trouble as a result.
Eventually I got arrested and fled, left the country for a while to
let things cool down. I went to London, got a job in Fleet Street and
rented a studio flat belonging to an old couple in Hampstead. They
both met me at the door when I arrived there, a small woman and a
tall man. They stared at me, then looked quickly at each other, and
asked me in. I seemed to make an instant hit - they couldn't do
enough to make me feel welcome. There was something intensely warm
and human about them, and we quickly became friends. They were really
in love - they'd been together for 25 years, and doted on each other
like a young couple. One evening we were sitting together in their
kitchen drinking coffee, and they told me their story.
They were German Jews, and they'd met in a Nazi death camp during
World War 2. They'd been interned with their whole families, and each
had watched all their loved ones taken off to die, one by one,
spouses, children, parents, until each was the only one left alive.
That was when they'd found each other, and somehow survived the
insane daily horror together to be liberated by the Allies in 1945.
Eventually they'd made their way to London, and started life again.
The old woman told me: "You are our fourth tenant. By pure chance,
the other three were all young German men." Her smile twinkled at me:
"And you too are tall and fair - you look like a German. Our English
friends were amazed that we could have Germans staying here - 'How
can you bear it after what they did to you?' they asked." She was
silent for a few moments.
"But it was not these young men who did it. If we'd blamed them, if
we'd turned them away, we would have learnt nothing from our
suffering, it would have been wasted. So we welcomed them, and we did
not regret it."
I couldn't say anything, something caught at my throat. I've seldom
seen anyone so beautiful as the old woman looked to me just then.
Jews were nothing new to me, there's quite a big Jewish community in
South Africa. I'd had them around all my life, neighbours, friends,
schoolmates, workmates. When I started a rock band there were a
couple of Jewish members, I spent a lot of time with the Jewish
drummer and his family, also warm, human people, kind and generous.
Virtually the whole Jewish community was dead set against the
apartheid system and its evils. Maybe there were some who supported
it but I don't think I ever met one. Many of them actively opposed
it, many were jailed for it.
One didn't hear much about Israel then, nor Zionism, until 1967 and
the Six-Day War, and then all my Jewish friends were wrestling with
issues I didn't understand. It wasn't too long after that that I met
some Israelis for the first time. They weren't supposed to have been
there and I shouldn't have met them. But defence was my beat at the
time, and they were military people, IDF and so on, involved in
military support and collaboration with the apartheid government, in
breach of the UN arms embargo against South Africa. This
collaboration extended to the development of nuclear weapons, from
about 1967 through the 70s and 80s. Israeli nuclear scientists
visited South Africa in 1967 and later. South Africa provided Israel
with 550 tons of uranium for its weapons program, Israel supplied
South Africa with tritium and with technical information. In 1979
they tested a bomb together in the South Atlantic. Israel was
involved with the apartheid regime in other ways. There was
intelligence collaboration, military training IIRC, also IIRC
involvement in training and arming black militias during the "civil
war" phase of the 80s. And so on. Good friends, Israel and white
racist South Africa during its most oppressive stage.
So what has all this got to do with anything? This: John Vorster,
South Africa's arch-racist Prime Minister from 1966 to 1978, was a
Nazi. Let's get this straight: Vorster was not a Nazi sympathiser, he
was a Nazi, by word and by deed, and there was nothing particularly
unusual about it. In the mid-1970s at the height of the Israeli-South
African military collaboration, more than half of Vorster's Cabinet
were Nazis. It was no secret, the Israelis certainly knew it and it
didn't deter them or apparently bother them at all.
These South African Nazis had belonged to a paramilitary organisation
called the Ossewa Brandwag (the "Ox-wagon Guard") during WW2. It was
a Nazi movement, its leader, Hans van Rensburg, was a fervent admirer
of Hitler. The OB attempted to disrupt South Africa's war effort
through intimidation, sabotage and assassination. In 1940 and 1941
they were responsible for 25 bombings in the Witwatersrand area
alone, targeting newspaper offices, cinemas, shops and railway lines.
Terrorists. Sounds like the Stern Gang and Irgun, eh? Deir Yassin and
so on. Well, not as bad as Deir Yassin. Anyway, in 1942 Vorster was
arrested for his involvement and spent the rest of the war in
internment.
The OB was not a fringe movement. It had almost half a million
members at its peak. When Germany's defeat appeared inevitable, its
popularity began to wane and many of its members transferred their
loyalty to the National Party, which became the ruling party in 1948,
the party of apartheid and Prime Minister John Vorster. (Shamir,
Begin?)
There's some interesting history here. The Ossewa Brandwag was
founded in October 1938 to embody and perpetuate the Afrikaner
nationalist idealism to which that year's Voortrekker Centenary
celebrations had given rise.
Some definitions. "Afrikaners" are white South Africans, descendants
of the 17th century Dutch settlers, and, later, French Protestant
Hugeonot refugees. Their language is Afrikaans, a sort of archaic
form of Dutch. Britain took the colony from the Dutch at the
beginning of the 19th century and instituted an oppressive rule from
which large numbers of Afrikaner farmers ("Boers") eventually fled,
travelling north into the hinterland in their oxwagons, facing great
difficulties and perils, eventually to found the two independent Boer
Republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. These were the
Voortrekkers, their epic journey the "Great Trek". The oxwagon was
and still is a major motivating symbol for the Afrikaners.
Their freedom was shortlived, however. Following the discovery of
large deposits of gold in the Transvaal Republic, Britain attacked
the Boer Republics and the Boer War ensued (1899-1902). Contrary to
all predictions, it didn't go well for the Brits. There were only
about 60,000 Boer commandoes pitted against the full might of the
British Empire, with 350,000 soldiers in the field and endless
resources. But the Brits were no match for them. The Boers were
guerrilla fighters, which they'd learnt from the black tribes in 150
years of skirmishing over land and cattle, and the British couldn't
beat them.
Eventually Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, fresh from defeating the
Dervish armies of the Mahdi in Sudan, hit upon the final solution. In
a brutal campaign, the British destroyed the Boer farms, built chains
of blockhouses criss-crossing the land, and brought a new term to
darken the dawn of the 20th century - concentration camps. They
herded the Boer women and children into concentration camps, where up
to 30,000 of them died of disease and starvation. Meanwhile dragnets
of troops went through the guerrilla country section by section, and
by 1902 the remaining Boers surrendered, starved and crushed.
The rest of the world was outraged. Britain became the "dirty dog" of
Europe for the way it had "won" the war. So at the Union negotiations
that followed, to make the two British colonies of the Cape and Natal
and the two defeated Boer republics one country, the British team
held the low moral ground, and made concession after concession to
the Boer negotiators, especially of Black rights, the Boers' old
enemies: the Black franchise, voting rights, land rights, all were
lost. This was when the ANC was formed, Nelson Mandela's party which
now governs the new South Africa since it emerged from the long
nightmare. But the concentration camps still echo down through the
years to today, and who's to say it's over yet.
The Boers were left in poor shape after Union, despite the
concessions. British and English-speaking white South African
interests were in control of commerce, finance, mining, everything,
the Boers were poverty-stricken farmers in the outlying areas,
effectively shut out of their own country. This has actually been
referred to as "the years of wandering in the wilderness".
This was the setting for the Voortrekker Centenary celebrations of
1938. It was planned and organised by the Afrikaner Broederbond
(Brotherhood), an elite underground secret society formed in 1918
composed of far rightwing clergymen, teachers, public servants and
members of parliament. In the early 1930s the Broederbond was
reorganised on the pattern of Hitler's Nazi state, complete with
fuehrer, gauleiters, group and cell leaders, spread in a sinister
network over the whole of South Africa. This was initiated by
Broederbond members who were sent to Germany, at Nazi expense, to
study the Nazi cell system. It was planned by a delegate from Nazi
Germany in consultation with the leader of the National Party, Dr
D.F. Malan.
As was subsequently discovered from captured German documents, the
Nazis had sent their delegate, Graf von Durckheim Montmartin, to
South Africa in 1934 for secret consultations with Broederbond
leaders, to try to ensure that South Africa would side with Germany
in the world war Hitler was already planning. The breakaway National
Party was more or less a Nazi-Broederbond project.
The Voortrekker centenary celebrations of 1938 gave the whole
Nationalist movement a massive boost. It took the form of an
ox-wagon procession from Cape Town along the original routes used by
the Voortrekkers and culminated in a huge celebration at Pretoria. It
was a major event in every village and town on the way, with
countless appeals to the glories of the past and calls for the
renaissance of the Afrikaner volk (people), now scattered and
disunited in the land of its birth and creation. Appeals were made to
all Afrikaners to join together to achieve their national salvation.
It resulted in a tremendous upsurge of national feeling among the
Afrikaner people and shifted the balance of power substantially in
the direction of the National Party.
It was in this atmosphere that the Ossewa Brandwag was born. South
African Nazism was much wider than the OB, however: the OB was just
the paramilitary wing. Nazis and Nazi influence were widespread
throughout the Afrikaner Nationalist movement, at the highest levels.
The National Party adopted anti-Semitism as an official plank in its
platform. It forced an "Immigration Quota Act" through Parliament
which deliberately clamped down on Jewish immigrants. An Afrikaner
Nazi organisation, the Greyshirts, started a disgusting racist smear
and propaganda campaign against Jews and Jewish immigrants that
resounded throughout the Nationalist movement. A quota system for
Jews in all occupations was proposed, pressing for Jews to be refused
trading licences. The Nationalists pushed for laws prohibiting Jewish
immigration, for the deletion of Yiddish as a recognized European
language for immigration purposes, for the closing of certain
professions to Jews and other "non-assimilable races". South Africa
had a "Jewish problem", they said - when Jews comprised more than 4%
of a population there was trouble, and the Jews in South Africa
totalled 6-7%.
"Many German Jews who might have found safety in South Africa were to
perish in Hitler's death camps as a direct consequence of the
agitation by the Nationalist Party and the cowardice of the Hertzog
government," according to one scholar.
Another Nationalist Nazi organization was the South African Gentile
National Socialist Movement, devoted to destroying the "perversive
influence of the Jews in economics, culture, religion, ethics, and
statecraft and to re-establish European Aryan control in South Africa
for the welfare of the Christian peoples of South Africa".
You get the gist of it. South Africa went to war on the British side
on a majority of one in the vote in Parliament.
After the war both the Nazism and the anti-Semitism became
"unfashionable" and subsided - or at least disappeared from view,
mostly. But such things, once implanted, are very difficult to
uproot. Each of them would rear their ugly heads now and again.
I don't suppose many people know about all this, but it's true enough
- there's a lot more of it, all well-established. I don't think it's
controversial. There's at least one book about it, The Rise of the
South African Reich, written in the 60s. I just checked some of the
names and figures there, but I know the story well. In essence, South
Africa's murderous white racist regime was a Nazi plot.
Despite the eerie echoes, I don't make much of a comparison between
the Boer War concentration camps on the one hand and Israel and the
Holocaust on the other, excepting to note that in both cases it's
resulted in the victims wreaking victimisation on others. But there
are comparisons. It's often said the Palestinians have been forced
into virtual Bantustans. Israelis and Palestinians have visited the
new South Africa together to try to build bridges of peace that might
help Israel to follow the same path of reconciliation.
Anyway, Zionist Israel doesn't seem to mind collaborating with Nazis
if it wants to. If they don't mind, why should you, Arthur? Where
does that leave your knee-jerk labelling of anyone who criticises
them a hate-filled anti-Semite and a Nazi? What's the Holocaust got
to do with it? Would my London landlords have done that? No way in
the world. No real Jew would, except maybe a confused one.
I think such confused Jews are to be found mainly in two places,
Israel and the US. In Israel there are more and more dissidents all
the time, in all walks of life, adamantly opposed to the state's
murderous, counter-productive, and in the end futile suppression of
the Palestinians. Twenty years ago or so there was a strong
pro-Israel bias in all the Western countries, in the media, in
politics and just about everywhere else. That has changed radically,
and now only in the US is that still the case. For instance, the
Financial Times reported that a recent poll had found that
anti-Semitism had fallen in Europe but hostility to Israel had grown.
"The poll's findings could also undermine the argument, supported by
some civil rights movements including the ADL itself and think-tanks
in Israel and the US, that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism."
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullS
tory&c=StoryFT&cid=1079420630825
An "argument supported by some civil rights movements" is not how it
could be described in the US - a whole clutch of current reports show
that everywhere that it matters, in the media, the professions,
throughout politics, in the US anti-Zionism IS anti-Semitism. As we
can see, right here this week.
After all, it's the US that the money comes from, the weaponry, the
blind eye turned always where it's needed, the UN vetoes. It's there
that the Israeli Zionists have made a truly Faustian pact with the
so-called Christian Zionist nutters who now have such great influence
there, at the top level, and see the State of Israel as essential to
their own plans for a future Holocaust in the form of Armageddon. "We
will always support Israel, no matter what." It's at the US that the
full weight of the Zionist propaganda Rabbi Weiss talks of is aimed,
with good effect, which is why the monstrous Sharon can boast that
the US will do what he tells it to, and proves it.
Would my London landlords ever have condoned the ongoing daily
crushing of the Palestinians, hiding the inhuman brutality of it
behind the mindless mantra you and Matt and so many other American
Jews trot out so facilely that "Israel as a Jewish state has the
right to exist"? Again, no way, nor millions of other Jews like them.
Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism? I don't much care what some old book
says about it. What happens on the ground is quite sufficient, and
that says that being Jewish and Judaism is one thing, and Zionist
Israel is another, a view shared by very many people I have reason to
respect. True Judaism no more condones such actions as Irgun's Deir
Yassin massacre, Sabra and Shatila, Jenin, and the countless other
ongoing Israeli atrocities than true Islam condones mutilating dead
mercenaries and hanging their corpses from bridges or flying
airliners into civilian tower blocks.
This is Judaism? "In 1937, Winston Churchill said of the
Palestinians, I quote, "I do not agree that the dog in a manger has
the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for
a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for
instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of
America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong
has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a
higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has
come in and taken their place." That set the trend for the Israeli
State's attitude towards the Palestinians. In 1969, Israeli Prime
Minister Golda Meir said, "Palestinians do not exist." Her successor,
Prime Minister Levi Eschol said, "What are Palestinians? When I came
here (to Palestine), there were 250,000 non-Jews, mainly Arabs and
Bedouins. It was a desert, more than underdeveloped. Nothing." Prime
Minister Menachem Begin called Palestinians "two-legged beasts."
Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir called them "grasshoppers" who could be
crushed. This is the language of Heads of State, not the words of
ordinary people." - Come September by Arundhati Roy (an excellent
read!)
http://www.lannan.org/_authors/roy/transcript.htm
More and more American Jews are saying it's not Judaism: "In short,
Zionism was based on a faulty, colonialist world view that the rights
of the indigenous inhabitants didn't matter. The Arabs' opposition to
Zionism wasn't based on anti-Semitism but rather on a totally
reasonable fear of the dispossession of their people. One further
point: being Jewish ourselves, the position we present here is
critical of Zionism but is in no way anti-Semitic." (Jews for Justice
in the Middle East) There are plenty of similar groups saying similar
things.
This is how to treat the notion that criticism of Israel is
anti-Semitic, with the Nazi-Hitler card and the Holocaust handy as
moral clubs: IT'S BULLSHIT.
Israel is a rogue state, way out of control, bent on genocide and
sowing the seeds of its own destruction with it - worse, it's a
nuclear rogue state, with an estimated 200 warheads, run by maniacs
in the most dangerous place in the world. Israel as a Jewish state
has the right to exist? You'd better take it away from these thugs
then, maybe it's not too late yet.
So go ahead, tell me I'm a hate-filled anti-Semitic Nazi who spreads
hatred and kills more people than wars. I won't mind, I'll just laugh
at you for a fool and take no further notice. And, at long, long
last, get on with business. This thread is called "Oil and Israel",
it started with a commentary at TomPaine.com:
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/oil_and_israel.php
"The two unmentionables about Iraq are suddenly getting mentioned.
The real reasons for the attack on Iraq had nothing to do with WMDs,
that ultimate red herring. The real reasons: oil and Israel."
One reason cited for it's being unmentionable: you get attacked and
accused of being an anti-Semite.
Well, so what. So it prevents rational discussion on an essential
aspect of oil politics - Israel's role - and thus of biofuels
politics. In another thread, an American said this:
"I am confident about one thing! When I go to the pump and fill up
my car... I still can't help but feel that I am funding a terrorist
organization." So use biodiesel instead. They're always saying it:
"I simply don't want my driving habit to support Islamist terrorism."
That is a warped view of the good reasons for using biodiesel, it
will simply help to cause yet more problems in the world, including
the US. Yet millions of Americans think that. But, try to fill in the
missing context to identify the real reasons for using biodiesel, and
it runs into this nest of snakes of Zionism and criticising Israel.
Not any more it doesn't, not here anyway. By order. Signed: List
owner. For which move there's rather wide support among the
membership. This post will go into the archives, and in future
anybody who makes that objection can be countered with one url and
simply told to stop, no arguments, or else.
Keith Addison
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