Laqueur on Snyder

An epub of Black Earth is here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7trXEFcZimVaWt1SndGd3I0Szg/view?usp=docslist_api

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Timothy Snyder: The Newton of the Holocaust?
The Yale historian’s much-lauded new book promises a revolutionary view of the Holocaust. But it misleads more than it enlightens.

From the cover of Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, by Timothy Snyder.

From the cover of Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, by Timothy Snyder.

OBSERVATION
WALTER LAQUEUR
NOV. 4 2015

Walter Laqueur is the author of, among other books, Weimar, A History of Terrorism, Fascism: Past, Present, Future, and The Dream that Failed: Reflections on the Soviet Union. His newest book, Putinism: Russia and Its Future with the West, has just been released by Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s.

No author of books on Eastern Europe during the period of World War II and the Holocaust has been more widely reviewed and discussed in recent years than Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale. In Bloodlands (2010), Snyder presented what might be termed a Polish-Ukrainian version of the Holocaust, highlighting the brutality of Nazi rule over the countries of Eastern Europe—the “bloodlands” between Germany and Soviet Russia—and the horrific toll in lives, especially Polish lives, taken by the two battling powers.

Now, in Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, Snyder deals mostly with the mass murder of Jews, ascribing greater responsibility than have other historians to the early work of the Nazi SS killing squads (Einsatzgruppen) operating in occupied Eastern Europe, but also memorializing those who helped to save Jewish lives in Poland after the 1939 invasion and partition of that country by the twin forces of Nazi Germany and the USSR. Indeed, the book, which is based to a considerable extent on the stories of individual survivors, centers like the previous one mainly on Poland, and to a lesser extent on the three Baltic states. There is little here on the fate of Jewish communities in other European countries, most of whom were transported to their deaths in Poland. Nor, despite its subtitle—“The Holocaust as History and Warning”—is Black Earth properly seen as another history of the Holocaust. It is instead a new interpretation, and one with some startling arguments to advance.

The reception given to both of Snyder’s books has generally been rapturous, if more so in the United States than in Europe, and more so in some circles than in others. They have been called epic, haunting, brilliant, profoundly original, groundbreaking, provocative, erudite, challenging, unforgettable—exhausting the thesaurus. Most of those cheering, however, are not historians who have specialized in the study of Nazism, Eastern Europe, or the Holocaust. Within that more select group, a number have entered serious reservations and criticisms of Snyder’s work, and some have voiced harsher and more heated judgments; a harvest can be found at the website Defending History.

Some of the negative comments on Snyder are highly emotional and even personal to a degree unusual in historical debate. He has been accused of prevarication, of consorting with shady characters in the present-day Baltic republics, of deliberately downplaying anti-Semitism and the unique character of the Final Solution, of anti-Russian and pro-Polish bias, and more. Skeptical reviewers in Europe have focused on his alleged espousal of the “double- genocide” theme—that is, equating the scale and seriousness of the atrocities committed respectively by Hitler and Stalin.

In addition to these criticisms, of which some are at least partially justified, even experts otherwise disposed to Snyder are understandably irked by his frequent statements, easily disproved, that much of his work is based on material hitherto unknown or neglected or inaccessible. When writing in this vein, he is capable of such breathless confidences as that most of the killing of Jews took place outside Germany and that many and possibly a majority of the killers were not themselves German: all basic facts, long and solidly established. More broadly, Snyder insists that the “conventional” understanding of the Holocaust has been so thoroughly misguided that only now, with the publication of Bloodlands and Black Earth, is it possible to see things as they really were and to rethink the subject afresh. Such asseverations cannot but create the impression that our author sees himself in the role of Isaac Newton as imagined by Alexander Pope:

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night
God said: Let Newton be! and all was light.

What, then, are the findings that in Snyder’s view have made such a radical reexamination imperative? Historians have traditionally been concerned with the character of Nazism, its real aims and doctrines, and with Hitler’s mental makeup; few stones in this field remain unturned. Snyder, for his part, seems sincerely to believe that Hitler was neither a German nationalist nor even an anti-Semite in the traditional sense. So what was he?

Instead of explaining the dictator in terms of his ideological beliefs or the doctrines of the Nazi party, Snyder instead invokes considerations of agricultural science, the hybridization of grains, the storage and preservation of foods, and similar topics. When the German dictator came to power, Snyder writes, he was brought face to face with what he took to be a looming ecological crisis and the prospect of national starvation; here lies the key to his thinking and to his policies with regard to the nations of Eastern Europe with their fertile croplands and, in the end, to their millions of Jews.

A related discovery, to which Snyder returns time and again, concerns the crucial importance of so-called “stateless zones” in facilitating the Holocaust. One of Hitler’s main aims, he writes, was to destroy existing government institutions and bureaucracies in Eastern Europe as a necessary prelude to Germany’s successful takeover and, later, its implementation of the Final Solution. For this reason, the chances of Jewish survival were infinitely greater in countries where something like a state apparatus remained intact than in places where chaos prevailed. In particular, according to Snyder, the chances of survival for Jews in Germany were as high as one in two; in countries where the state apparatus had been destroyed, the chances of Jewish survival were only one in twenty.

The belief in the need for German expansion—Lebensraum—did indeed exist and had an impact on Nazi policy, as seen in Hitler’s invasion and seizure of the breadbasket regions of Eastern Europe. But as far as the Holocaust is concerned, it was hardly a decisive factor. Besides, if Hitler really did experience “ecological panic” (Snyder’s term), he would not have kept it a secret. It would have prominently figured in his Table Talk, in the writings of those closest to him (see Joseph Goebbels’ multi-volume diaries), in orders passed on to his ministers, and so on. It does not. By the same token, the central role in Germany’s economy would have been played by Walther Darré and Herbert Backe, the two key operatives in the regime’s agricultural policies, and not, as was really the case, by the banker Hjalmar Schacht in the 1930s and by Albert Speer in the 1940s.

The theory that the Holocaust was decisively motivated by German domestic needs does appear in the writings of a few “unorthodox” researchers. But those writings mainly date back a quarter-century or so, when environmental concerns figured less prominently on the agenda of intellectual and academic politics; instead of ecological panic, they tend to ascribe Hitler’s decision to plunder the Jews on the need to finance his “social state,” that is, the various social services that added much to the popularity of the regime. In any event, I suspect it is to this general source that one should look for Snyder’s misplaced inspiration.

As for the instrumental utility of “stateless zones” in Nazi plans for political control and mass murder, this was evident enough in some places (like Poland and the Czech protectorate), but not in all (Slovakia, among others). And as for the odds-on advantage of living in Germany as opposed to a “stateless zone” in Eastern Europe, even those only vaguely familiar with the European situation in the 1930s and 40s know otherwise. In 1938, Snyder writes portentously, “some Nazis discovered that the most effective way to separate Jews from the protection of the state was to destroy the state”—as if the German state had protected the German Jews in 1937. Once the war broke out, the situation of German Jews was virtually hopeless, and only a few hundred survived underground. In the stateless zones, by contrast, there were many opportunities to hide, to assume new (non-Jewish) identities, and even to escape to neutral countries.

There is a great deal more in this very crowded volume, including its bizarre and much commented-upon concluding chapter with the “warning” promised in the book’s subtitle. Here are the supposed lessons for today that lie hidden within the calamitous and genocidal events of yesterday—lessons about all the terrible and mistaken ways that people react in the face of impending dangers, real and perceived. And here the narrative shifts from the barbarism of the Nazis to global warming, from Auschwitz to Rwanda, from the gas chambers in Eastern Europe to greenhouse gases in the upper atmosphere, from the Holocaust, which took place, to all kinds of ecological horrors that may or may not take place. I need not dilate further.

In general, despite the range of his research and his touted command of many languages, Snyder is more reliable when writing about Eastern Europe (though not necessarily about Russia) than about Germany and the West. Little slips give much away. Thus, discussing Rosa Luxemburg, the famous Marxist revolutionary and propagandist of the early 20th century, he refers to the “immensely influential” German journal Die Neue Zeit. In fact, Die Neue Zeit was a close runner-up for the period’s most boring publication; one doubts Snyder ever had an opportunity to consult it. And was it ever influential at all, let alone “immensely influential”? Hardly.

Or take the treatment of Carl Schmitt, Germany’s best known political philosopher of the 20th century, frequently quoted by Snyder as the man who gave Hitler many of his anti-state ideas: “Throughout Hitler’s career, Schmitt had provided elegant theoretical support for the Führer’s actions.” Here, too, reality is otherwise. Schmitt was indeed a member of the Nazi party—which, however, he joined only after Hitler came to power—and he wanted to be the new rulers’ supreme legal authority. But beginning in 1936 he ran into serious trouble, was charged with many ideological sins, and had to resign from all but two of his official positions.

Then there is the matter of the book’s approach and its tone. I’ve already referred to Snyder’s oft-proclaimed confidence in his originality and Newton-like authority. Another nettlesome quality is his tendency to senationalize minor or inconsequential details and magnify them out of all proportion to their historical significance.

One example: the Jewish personality most frequently and copiously quoted in Black Earth is not the eminent British Zionist Chaim Weizmann (who rates a single mention) or David Ben-Gurion (none at all); neither is it a communal leader in prewar Poland, a commander of the Jewish underground, a prominent East European Zionist, Bundist, or Jewish Communist, or one of the heads of the ghettoes appointed by the Germans. Instead, Snyder’s top Jewish witness is a young man in his late twenties named Avraham Stern (codename “Yair”), the head of the Zionist right-wing paramilitary group in Palestine known as Leḥi or the Stern Gang, which split off from the Irgun in 1940.

Stern, who was shot and killed by a British policeman in Tel Aviv in February 1942, is a tragic figure: a poet, a man of great bravery, and unfortunately, when it came to political judgment, something of a hopeless naif if not a fool. Before the war, he and his followers were involved in talks with Polish officials aimed at expediting the emigration of Jews from Poland to either Palestine or Madagascar. Later on, emissaries of his little group were sent to Beirut to talk to German diplomats there, evidently in the quixotic hope of establishing a common front against the British, then the Mandatory power in Palestine. All of these initiatives went nowhere.

Since nothing Stern did or failed to do was of genuine consequence, why has he been singled out for such extended treatment in Black Earth? What point is Snyder striving toward? That not all Jews were political geniuses? This is not exactly news. Was our author ignorant of the fact that Stern’s poignant story has already been thoroughly covered by historians of the period? Was he personally just so captivated as to conclude it therefore warranted greater publicity? Or was it the opportunity to bring into the picture Menachem Begin, a successor head of Irgun/Leḥi and a former member of the Polish anti-Nazi fighting force known as Anders Army, that he found irresistible? Whatever the motive, his elaborate treatment of this one figure is characteristic of an approach that tends repeatedly to favor the striking or outré at the expense of the relevant and important.

Finally, weaving in and out of the narrative are short and presumably snappy statements of a type that Snyder is exceedingly fond of: apothegms that are intended to convey summary pearls of wisdom, that are indeed sometimes clever, but that all too often are either platitudinous or meaningless—or worse. Two unfortunate examples: “Both the victims and the perpetrators of the Holocaust were human beings” (at once maudlin and trite); “Jews were killed because they were rendered stateless” (false, as we have seen). In the concluding chapter on the coming global environmental disaster, such ex-cathedra pronouncements rain down hard and fast: “Hitler was a child of the first globalization”; “people have no choice but to think on a planetary scale, as Hitler and Carl Schmitt never tired of emphasizing”; “a psychic resolve for a relief from a sense of crisis [can overwhelm] the practical resolve to think about the future.” And so forth and so on.

A reasonable case can be made in favor of historical revisionism. Debate continues on a variety of issues and developments in modern history, for instance with regard to the main responsibility for the outbreak of World War I. Every few years, a new publication will appear that can offer an interesting reinterpretation even though few new facts of any importance have emerged or are likely to emerge.

In the field of Holocaust studies, a longstanding debate of this kind has pitted “intentionalists” against “functionalists.” The former believe that it was Hitler’s single-minded aim from the beginning to rid Europe of the Jews. The functionalists—the camp into which, roughly speaking, Snyder falls—are convinced that the aim was less clear-cut and the decision process more complicated, more chaotic, and more driven by unfolding events.

One point of dispute relevant to this debate and to Snyder’s work concerns the date of Hitler’s decision to destroy European Jewry physically. Christian Gerlach, a German historian teaching in Switzerland, is the most recent to argue that the decisive date fell in December 1941 (by which time, however, about a million Jews had already been murdered). Others, most prominently Christopher Browning, believe that the decision goes back to an earlier date that same year, perhaps as early as July.

This is not a purely pedantic exercise. Establishing the date beyond a reasonable doubt—it seems clear, after decades of digging, that no written order exists—would help to explain whether the decision was made because the war in the East was not going well for Germany (as seemed to be the case by December 1941) or, to the contrary, because a German victory appeared close at hand (as was the case in the initial weeks after the June 1941 invasion of Russia in Operation Barbarossa) and the Nazis were riding a wave of triumphalism.

Gerlach’s English-language magnum opus, The Extermination of the European Jews, will be published next year, and it, too, is already being hailed as a major revision in our understanding of the Holocaust. But Gerlach, like Snyder, has his detractors, some of whom have severely criticized his past work on the conservative opposition to Hitler. What also makes Gerlach’s date a little suspect is that, according to him, Hitler announced the decision on December 12 at a meeting of 50 Nazi leaders. If true, this would mark the first time in history that a secret shared by 50 people was solemnly kept for the ensuing 74 years.

It is not easy to do justice to Snyder. When he is not operating under the compulsion to play the role of a Newton, or to present versions of history radically different from those of his predecessors, or to indulge his mania for exaggeration and sensationalism, or to waste his own and his readers’ time encapsulating serious and complicated topics in shorthand, he deserves attention, respect, and some of the epithets bestowed on him by his admirers. On certain topics and on certain issues, especially concerning Eastern Europe, his work can be valuable and even innovative. If I have dwelled more on his shortcomings and misjudgments than on his merits, it is because seldom if ever can I remember having encountered so maddening a combination of right and wrong, imagination and fantasy, good sense and absurdity located together in such close vicinity.

In the end, one can say this: Snyder’s obfuscating and half-baked “discoveries” about the Holocaust do further harm to a field of study already disfigured by the work of emissaries of one school or another, not to mention outright deniers. His book will not be the last such venture in misguided interpretation—the varieties are unlimited—but it will lengthen the time needed to repair the damage.

http://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2015/11/timothy-snyder-the-newton-of-the-holocaust/

Palestine – Pogrom or Revolution?

Palestine – Pogrom or Revolution?
From The Militant, Vol. II No. 15, 1 October 1929, p. 5.

Excerpt:

….Is the Arab attack upon the Jews a pogrom? That the action of the Arabs had anti-Semitic features is quite clear, and is implicitly admitted even by the Communist Party Thesis (Daily Worker, September 3, 1929) when it says that “the action of the Arabs transformed itself rapidly (but from what? – M.S.) into a national revolutionary uprising.” That it was not a pogrom on the Jews, however, is eloquently evidenced by the fairly reliable figures of the Literary Digest, which reports that the first two weeks of the upheaval brought the following fatalities: Moslems killed, 870; Christians, 4; Jews, 175. That the main responsibility lies up British imperialism and its Zionist salesmen, and only in an entirely secondary sense upon the Arabs, is attested by no less an “unbiased” authority than the editor of the American Hebrew:

“The arrogance of the so-called Zionist revolutionists is doubtless a causative factor behind the unhappy Moslem outbreaks against the Jews. The bravado with which they claim Jewish Palestine against the Arabs, the aggressive zeal with which they demand an exclusive Jewish nationhood in Palestine, the inflammatory political harangues with which they demonstrate their foolhardy assertiveness are in no little measure to blame for the ill-will and recurrent clashes between Moslem and Jew in the Holy Land.”

No, it is not a pogrom. It is an uprising of the down-trodden Arabian masses, seeking expression for their hatred of the British oppressor, but still strangled and retarded by their corrupt feudal and bourgeois leaders, sold out at every opportunity, and often dragged off into reactionary by-paths.


The Role of the Forward

It is, therefore, the lowest kind of reactionary nationalism, jingoist incitement of backward sentiment, and contemptible insult to an “inferior race”, when the “socialist” Forward writes in its leading editorial (August 31, 1929): “The main motive (so!) of the pogromists, the force that drove them to their bloody work, was ‘Gold and women’. ‘In the Jewish houses you will find hordes of gold and lovely women.’ That was the cry, that was the fire that excited the blood of the mob and drove it to carry out its diabolical work.” The Southern Bourbon reaction always uses precisely the same “reasoning” when it proceeds to lynch Negroes. And every worker to whom the cause of Labor is dear, will condemn unmeasuredly the scandalous lynching campaign of the Forward and its Zionist allies against the Communist Party, and its Jewish Organ, the Freiheit, in particular. The daily incitement of the Forward and the Jewish Day, aided, as in Chicago, by the American Legion, has resulted in hooligan attacks upon the Freiheit office in Chicago, intimidating newsstand dealers from selling the papers, pressing advertisers to withdraw their contracts, and breaking up Communist street meetings. These are the same despicable methods used by Burleson and Palmer against the socialist and the labor press during and after the war, and they have nothing in common with the working class. We protested against these actions when Stalinists sought to break up our Opposition meetings and tear up our press. We will fight with the party against the present methods of the yellow Forward.


The Arab Leaders

Now, is the Arab uprising a national revolutionary movement, as the official Party press declares? No.

Not every movement led by spokesmen of an oppressed nationality is a revolutionary movement. It is a lamentable fact that at the present time the Arab movement is directed by unconcealed reactionaries, with no substantial Left wing or revolutionary force to challenge their leadership, outside of the Communist Party of Palestine which has virtually no influence upon the recent events and which these same reactionaries helped to drive into illegality and imprisonment. The Arab leaders have curbed the genuine movement of the masses, they have stunted its growth and prevented the development of its natural course of struggle, they have repeatedly misled and devitalized it.

They are still the only spokesmen of the movement, and they speak for reactionary aims. They fight for an “Arab Empire”. They have compromised with imperialism and are willing to do it again. They are against all Jews as Jews. They set up the reactionary demand for the “restriction of the Jewish immigration into Palestine”.

They do not even pretend to a program one-tenth as advanced as that of the Kuo-Min-Tang three years ago. They promise the peasant no land and the worker no social improvement. They are vehment enemies not only of Bolshevism, but of the mildest kind of labor movement. In this respect, they far “excel” their Zionist competitors.

But all of this means to the Stalinist high priests of the “Third Period”. They have their idiotic and empty formula, and feel compelled to make every event, occurring anywhere in the world, fit into the cherished blueprint. The confused and misdirected action of the Arabs is therefore touched with the magic wand of the “Third Period”, and presto! it has become a “national revolutionary uprising against British imperialism.” And endless as the Arabian deserts are the theses written to “prove” this contention. But who is leading this movement along national revolutionary lines? We are not told, because discretion is the better part of the New Line. Were an answer given, it would have to be: the Grand Mufti, the rabid Pan-Islamists, the Effendis, the feudal lords are the as yet unchallenged leaders of the movement that has been generated.

But, you say, thereby the contention falls to the ground? Yes, that is precisely why we have the astounding picture of three theses of the Political Committee and its Agit-Prop department (August 30th, September 3rd, and September 7th issues of Daily Worker) that do not say a word about these reactionary leaders of the Arab masses, much less condemn them. The September 3rd thesis has 9 slogans at its conclusion, without a single one of them implying the need of struggle against these elements who will never lead a national revolutionary movement or allow one to develop. The September 7th thesis says: “We must point out the distinction between the Jewish bourgeoisie and the exploited and misled Jewish working masses in Palestine.” Excellent! But why is there not a whisper about the “distinction” between the Arab fellahin and their oppressive Effendis and Mukhtars? Are we perhaps to understand that the Grand Mufti has become the leader of an Arabian “Bloc of Four Classes” as was Chiang Kai-Shek before him? Has the green banner of Islam replaced the blue of the Kuo-Min-Tang? Are we to witness another period of exaggeration of the essence of the movement, of praises sung to the “national revolutionary anti-imperialist bourgeoisie” until they again decimate a whole generation of workers and peasants?

Behind all the “revolutionary” blabber of the Stalinists on the Palestine uprising is concealed an abysmally opportunist appraisal of the movement and its leaders.


The Freiheit’s Zig-zag

Does this mean that we have the same viewpoint as that of the Freiheit before it was condemned by the Party Political Bureau? By no means. The viewpoint of the Freiheit was quite indistinguishable from that of a Reformed rabbi with leanings towards the labor movement. “The Arabian attacks bear all the signs of the czarist pogroms,” it said (August 26). “Protest against the British government which permits the pogroms upon innocent people!” (Ah, cold-hearted MacDonald, why don’t you send some warships and troops to shoot down these confounded Arab pogromists!)

What happened was that when the incurable Menshevik Olgin, and the Zionist-trained Epstein, were scratched by a struggle, their thin coat of Bolshevik veneer was scraped off to reveal the Bundist underneath. The fact that the Olgins and Epsteins (there are many of them, all specialists in slaughtering Trotskyists, by the way) covered their scratches inside of an hour with some more varnish as soon as they found they were ordered to by the Political Committee, changes nothing about them. It merely made them throw away the speeches prepared for the Plaza Hall meeting, and rewrite them, using the same facts, but adding on new slogans furnished them by the Agit-Prop department. But you will never make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, or a Bolshevik out of Olgin.

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British imperialism, with the help of God and “comrade” MacDonald and Webb, – not to speak of the anointed Zionists – will suppress the present uprising, but since its causes remain, the situation will continue to cast up new and greater insurrections. But the Arabian masses will win their liberation only under the banner of Bolshevism.

Max Shachtman

When Stalinists promoted terror against Jews in Palestine

Socialist Appeal 6 June 1939: The anti-Jewish terrorism of the CP of Palestine

Source: http://www.workersliberty.org/node/8916

Read the issue here: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1939/v3n39-jun-06-1939.pdf

[In 1936 the Communist Party of the USA sent the editor, Malech Epstein, of its Yiddish language paper, Freiheit, to Palestine to report on the Arab-Jewish conflict there. When Epstein broke with the Communist Party a couple of years later, he published an account of his experience in Palestine. He found that the Communist Party of Palestine supported, and sent some of it's members, Jewish as well as Arab, to participate in terrorist attacks on Jews. This summary of his report appeared in the paper of the SWP USA, Socialist Appeal, in june 1939. It was unsigned, but was most likely written by either the editor of the Appeal, Max Shachtman or Felix Morrow. SM]

The 1939 article:

When Epstein arrived in Palestine in the spring of 1936, a prominent figure in the Communist movement, he found himself greeted with open hostility by the Arab secretary of the Palestinian party. "Who sent for you, who needs your advice?" this man said to Epstein, "We get our advice from Moscow, and you stop interfering."

As a result of his encounters with this man and his investigation of the actual conduct of the Stalinists in Palestine, Epstein was driven to the conclusion that "the general secretary of the Communist Party of Palestine is a bitter enemy of the Jews."

Moscow's appointee as chieftain of the Palestinian Stalinists worked on the basis of the outlook which he expressed to Epstein, that all Jewish Communists were actually secret sympathisers of the Zionist movement. As a result he took measures to drive most of the Jewish Communists out of the organisation.

In accordance with Moscow's line of refusing to distinguish between the genuine aspirations of the Arab masses and the corrupt and unprincipled games played by the Mufti and his terrorists, the Palestinian Stalinist organisation not only defended the bombings and assassinations carried on by the Mufti's gangsters, but actually itself engaged in such bombings, Epstein discovered.

Jewish Communists were singled out for the horrible task of throwing these bombs. In cases where Arabs were assigned, the Jews were required to manufacture the bombs.

Epstein had a meeting with a group of Jewish Communists who had been driven out of the organisation, and learned further corroborating details along the same line. Since then, these dissidents have organised around the paper published in both Arabic and Hebrew, Haor-El Nour, on a programme of Arab-Jewish workers' and peasants' unity. Epstein learned of the assignment of two young Jewish Communists to throw a bomb at a Jewish meeting in Tel Aviv. He sought out those assigned and prevailed upon them to abandon the project.

Horrified by what he had seen in Palestine, Epstein went to Spain and there saw the chieftain of the colonial department of the Communist International. The latter, when appealed to by Epstein, told him that his only recourse was to secure the aid of the Central Committee of the American party.

The foregoing facts were reported by Epstein to a select meeting of members of the Jewish Buro of the CP and editorial associates on the Freiheit. Weber was at this meeting, and the terrible facts reported by Epstein and the failure of the Stalinist leadership to do anything about them led him finally to break with Stalinism.

Epstein never succeeded in bringing the matter to the point of discussion in the Central Committee. He was merely called before a sub-committee and confronted with a ready made resolution supporting the policy of the Comintern in Palestine. A bureaucrat without much courage, Epstein soon enough capitulated. His sole act of resistance was to refuse to write an article at the time defending the line of the Central Committee's resolution.

The jackals around him took advantage of the weakening of Epstein's position as the result of his raising the Palestine question, and after a period of defending himself, Epstein was finally forced to resign his post as editor, and go into exile for two years at the other end of the country.

Weber's story provides a minor link in the broader story which requires no revelations at all, but is known to the Jewish workers and Arab workers and peasants of Palestine. The Stalinists have sought to win the good will of the Arab landowners and bourgeoisie in preference to the Palestinian masses. Having no faith in the colonial revolution which is indicated for the Near East, the Stalinists prefer to link themselves with the Arab exploiters and to use them as a form of pressure upon Britain on behalf of Stalin's diplomatic moves. The Stalinists never criticise the Arab exploiters, and have discouraged all moves to organise the Arab workers as an independent force. This is the basic policy lying behind the anti-Jewish orientation of the Palestinian Stalinist organisation.

Source:

http://www.workersliberty.org/node/8916

What is left anti-semitism?

For information purposes only. I found this article useful:

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What is left anti-semitism?

Submitted by Simon B on 21 March, 2007

http://www.workersliberty.org/node/5041

We have opened a discussion in Solidarity about the important issue of “left-wing anti-semitism” or judeophobia. It is worthwhile here to make it clear what we are, and are not, talking about.

What is “left-wing anti-semitism”? Where is it manifested? What is to be done about it?

There are three difficulties, three confusions and obfuscations, that stand in the way of rational discussion of what we mean by “left-wing anti-semitism”.

The first is that left-wing anti-semitism knows itself by another and more self-righteous name, “anti-Zionism”. Often, your left-wing anti-semite sincerely believes that he or she is only an anti-Zionist, only a just if severe critic of Israel.

The second is that talk of left-wing anti-semitism to a left-wing anti-semite normally evokes indignant, sincere, and just denial - of something else! “No, I'm not a racist! How dare you call me a racist?”

No, indeed, apart from a nut here and there, left-wing anti-semites are not racist. But there was anti-semitism before there was 20th-century anti-Jewish racism. And there is still anti-semitism of different sorts, long after disgust with Hitler-style racism, and overt racism of any sort, became part of the mental and emotional furniture of all half-way decent people, and perhaps especially of left-wing people.

Left-wingers are people who by instinct and conviction side with the oppressed, the outcasts, those deprived of human rights, the working class, the labour movement; who naturally side against the police, the military, and the powerful capitalist states, including their “own”; who are socially tolerant; who, in contrast to the “hang ‘em, flog ‘em, build more jails” types, look to changing social conditions rather than to punishment to deal with crime — people who want to be Marxists and socialists, or try to be consistent democrats. Confused such people may be, racists they are not. We are not saying that left-wing anti-semites are racists.

The third source of confusion and obfuscation is the objection: “You say I’m an anti-semite because I denounce Israel. I’m not anti-Jewish when I denounce Israel, but anti-Zionist”. And sometimes, at this point, you get the addition: “By the way, I am myself Jewish”.

The objector continues: Israel deserves criticism. Even the harshest criticism of Sharon’s policies in the West Bank and Gaza, and of Israel’s long-term treatment of the Palestinians, is pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist, not anti-semitic. To equate criticism of Israel with anti-semitism is just crude and hysterical Zionist apologetics.

No, by “left-wing anti-semitism” we emphatically do not mean political, military, or social criticism of Israel and of the policy of Israeli governments. Certainly, not all left-wing critics of Israel or Zionism are anti-semites, even though these days all anti-semites, including the right-wing, old-fashioned, and racist anti-semites, are paid-up “anti-Zionists”.

Israel frequently deserves criticism. Israel’s policy in the Occupied Territories and its general treatment of the Palestinians deserve outright condemnation. The oppressed Palestinians need to be politically defended against Israeli governments and the Israeli military. The only halfway equitable solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, a viable, independent Palestinian state in contiguous territory, side by side with Israel, needs to be argued for and upheld against Israeli power.

Solidarity condemns Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. We defend the Palestinians and champion an independent Palestinian state side by side with Israel.

The difference here between left-wing anti-semites and honest critics of Israel — a category which includes a very large number of Israeli Jews as well as Israeli Arabs — is a straightforward one of politics, of policy.

The left-wing anti-semites do not only criticise Israel. They condemn it outright and deny its right to exist. They use legitimate criticisms, and utilise our natural sympathy with the Palestinians, not to seek redress, not as arguments against an Israeli government, an Israeli policy, or anything specifically wrong in Israel, but as arguments against the right of Israel to exist at all. Any Israel. Any Jewish state in the area. Any Israel, with any policy, even one in which all the specific causes for justly criticising present-day Israel and for supporting the Palestinians against it have been entirely eliminated.

The root problem, say the left-wing anti-semites, is that Israel exists. The root “crime of Zionism” is that it advocated and brought into existence “the Zionist state of Israel”.

Bitterly, and often justly, criticising specific Israeli policies, actions, and governments, seemingly championing the Palestinians, your left-wing anti-semites seek no specific redress in Israel or from Israel, demanding only that Israel should cease to exist or be put out of existence.

They often oppose measures to alleviate the condition of the Palestinians short of the destruction of Israel. Thus the petitions and chants on demonstrations: “Two states solution, no solution!”

A neat illustration of this was provided three years ago when, at a meeting of the council of the SWP-dominated Socialist Alliance, a supporter of this newspaper proposed the slogan “Israel out of the Occupied Territories”. It was voted down, and much vaguer ones, “Free Palestine”, “Victory to the intifada”, voted in.

Why? “Free Palestine” can be understood in different ways, depending on your definition of “Palestine”. Therefore it can accommodate those who, without having studied the complexities or the history of the Jewish-Arab conflict, instinctively side with the oppressed and outmatched Palestinians, and for whom “Free Palestine” means simply that Israel should get out of the Occupied Territories. And it can also accommodate those, like the proponents of the slogan, the political Islamists of the Muslim Association of Britain/ Muslim Brotherhood and others, who define “Palestine” as pre-Israel, pre-1948 Palestine, and by “Free Palestine” mean the destruction and abolition of Israel, and the elimination in one way or another of the Jewish population of Israel, or most of them.

The political differences spelled out here are easily understood. But why is the drive and the commitment to destroy Israel anti-semitism, and not just anti-Zionism?

Because the attitude to the Jewish nation in Israel is unique, different from the left’s attitude to all other nations; and because of the ramifications for attitudes to Jews outside Israel. Apart from a few religious Jews who think the establishment of Israel was a revolt against God, and some Jews who share the views of the leftists whom we are discussing here, those Jews outside Israel instinctively identify with and support Israel, however critically. For the left-wing anti-semite they are therefore “Zionists”, and proper and natural targets of the drive to “smash Zionism”.

The attitude of the “anti-Zionist” left to Israel brings with it a comprehensive hostility to most Jews everywhere - those who identify with Israel and who defend its right to exist. They are not just people with mistaken ideas. They are “Zionists”.

In colleges, for example, where the anti-Zionist left exists side by side with Jewish students, this attitude often means a special antagonism to the “Zionist” Jews. They are identified with Israel. They, especially, are pressured either to denounce Israel, to agree that it is “racist” and “imperialist” and that its existence is a crime against the Arabs — or else be held directly and personally responsible for everything Israel does, has done, or is said to have done.

In such places, where the left “interfaces” with Jews, the logic of the unique attitude to Israel takes on a nasty persecuting quality. In the past, in the mid 1980s for example, that has taken the form of attempting to ban Jewish student societies. Non-Jews who defend Israel’s right to exist are not classified in the same category.

But is the attitude of the “absolute anti-Zionists” to Israel really unique? There are seeming similarities with left attitudes to one or two other states — Protestant Northern Ireland, apartheid South Africa, or pre-1980 white-ruled Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) — but the attitude to Israel is unique, because the reality of Israel cannot properly be identified with Northern Ireland, apartheid South Africa, or white Rhodesia.

In apartheid South Africa and white Rhodesia a minority lorded it over the big majority of the population, exploiting them. Israel is a predominantly Jewish state consisting of all classes. The Jewish nation does not subsist, and never has subsisted, on the exploitation of Arab labour, or depended in any essential way on such exploitation.

The general left hostility to the Northern Ireland Protestants — who are not exploiters of Catholic labour, and who are the compact majority, if not of the Six Counties, then of the north-east half of the Six Counties — is the closest to the attitude to Israel.

But it is not widely believed on the left that the Northern Ireland Protestant-Unionists simply have no right to be there. The right of the Jews to “be there” is denied in those sections of the left that we are discussing. The organisation of Jewish migration to Palestine — that was the root “crime” of Zionism, of which the “crime” of establishing Israel was only a further development. The “solution” is not only to undo and abolish Israel, but to reverse Jewish “migration” — which now includes people born there, to parents born there — and to roll the film of Middle-Eastern history backwards.

The prerequisite for left-wing anti-semitism is the catastrophic decline in the culture of the left over the last decades, a decline which allows people who want to be socialists to chant “Sharon is Hitler, Israel is Nazi” and similar nonsense without checking on the words. The specific framework within which what we have been describing exists, and without which it probably couldn’t exist in these “left-wing” forms, is the poisonous and systematic misrepresentation and falsification of the history of the Jewish-Arab conflict and of the Jewish people in the 20th century. We can only touch on that here.

In real history, Jews fled to Palestine, where a small Zionist colony and a small pre-Zionist Jewish community already existed, from persecution in Europe in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. In the 1930s and 40s they fled for their lives from Nazism, which killed two out of every three Jews alive in Europe in 1939, in a world in which no non-persecuting state would let them, or enough of them, in.

They fled to the existing Jewish national minority in Palestine (a long-established minority which, though small, was for example the majority in Jerusalem in 1900).

While Hitler was organising mass slaughter, Britain shut out Jews from Palestine, interning those who tried to enter. Overloaded, unseaworthy boats carrying illegal cargoes of Jews sank in the Mediterranean trying to get to Palestine (for example, the Struma, in which over 700 people died).

Israel was set up by those Jews on licence from the UN, which stipulated two states in Palestine, one Jewish and one Arab. When the state of Israel was declared in May 1948, the surrounded Arab states invaded. States like Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt were then British-dominated, and some of the armies were staffed by British officers.

The Israelis defended themselves and won. In the war three quarters of a million Palestinian Arabs were driven out or fled; in the same period and afterwards, about 600,000 Jews were expelled from or fled Arab countries.

In the Arab invasion of 1948, the Arab-Palestinian state was eliminated. Most of its territory went to Jordan, and fell under Israeli control in the war of 1967. That was a tremendous tragedy that will only be redressed when an independent Palestinian state takes its place alongside Israel.

This complex and tragic history is presented by the “absolute anti-Zionist” left as a conspiracy of Zionism, conceived of as a demonic force outside history. It is not rare to find “left anti-Zionists” arguing that this Jewish-Zionist conspiracy was so all-powerful that it was able even to manipulate Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust in which six million Jews died (see the play by the veteran Trotskyist Jim Allen, Perdition, of which Ken Loach planned a performance at a London theatre in 1987).

The core idea, the root of modern left-wing anti-semitism, is that Israel, in one way or another, is an illegitimate state; and that therefore, in one way or another, it should be done away with. If its citizens will not be the first in history to voluntarily dismantle their nation-state and make themselves a minority in a state run by those whom they have had to fight for national existence; if they will not agree to voluntarily dismantle Israel and create a “secular democratic Arab state”, in which Israeli Jews can have religious but not national rights - then they must be overwhelmed and compelled to submit or flee by the Arab states, now or when they are strong enough.

Usually beginning with the benign-seeming proposal to sink Israel into a broader Arab-majority entity in which “everyone could live in peace”, the chain of logic rooted in the idea that Israel should not have come into existence, that it is an illegitimate state, leads directly — since Israel will not agree to abolish itself — to support for compulsion, conquest, and all that goes with it. Israel must be conquered.

Even the work of a writer like Hal Draper can feed into this poisoned stream. While Draper made valid and just criticisms of Israel, he accepted that it had a right to exist and a right to defend itself. He denounced those who wanted to destroy it. But he made his criticisms in the tone and manner of a prophet denouncing sin and iniquity. He too thought that Israel was an illegitimate state, that it should never have come into existence and should go out of existence as soon as possible.

By agreement, and only by agreement, he believed; but the subtleties got lost. There is nothing to stop someone swayed by Draper’s denunciations of Israel, and accepting his idea that Israel is an illegitimate state, then impatiently insisting: if not by agreement, then by conquest.

And so an increasingly-disoriented SWP-UK could look to a Saddam Hussein to “free Palestine”, that is, conquer Israel.

The point here is that states and nations are the products of history. There is no such thing as an illegitimate nation or a “bad people” which does not deserve the rights conceded to other peoples.

The German socialist leader August Bebel, confronted by raucous denunciation of "the Jews" ludicrously depicting them as the epitome and embodiment of capitalism said of anti-semitism that it was “the socialism of the fools”.

The anti-semitic left today, which depicts Israel as the hyper-imperialist power — either controlling US policy, or acting as its chief instrument, the story varies — is in the grip of an “anti-imperialism of the fools”. And that in practice leads to a comprehensive hostility to Jews not far from what Bebel called the socialism of fools.

One of the great tragedies of today is that many young people, whose initial instincts to oppose Bush and Blair in Iraq and to support the Palestinians are healthy, are being poisoned with “left-wing” anti-semitism through the “anti-war movement”.

“Left-wing anti-semitism” is, in short, a comprehensive hostility to most Jews alive, branding them as “Zionists” and seeing that description as akin to “racist" or “imperialist”. It excepts only those Jews who agree that Israel is racist imperialism in its most concentrated essence, and oppose its continued existence.

The general antidote to this anti-imperialism of fools is the propagation of rational democratic and socialist politics. Such politics focus on a political solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. They measure and criticise Israel — and the Arab states — according to their stand in relation to that just solution — the establishment of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.

There is an immediate “antidote” to left-wing anti-semitism too, and it is a very important task for Marxist socialists like those who publish Solidarity: relentless exposure and criticism of their politics and antics — without fear of isolation, ridicule, or the venomous hostility of the vocal and self-righteous left-wing anti-semites.

Source: http://www.workersliberty.org/node/5041

Former Workers World Party leader ranks Khomeni with Debs and Malcolm X

Caleb Maupin's long political trajectory from Bob Avakian to Sam Marcy has ended in the practical embrace of Assad, Khomeni, Hamas, and Hezbollah.  He has become a mere anti-U.S. publicist.  It is not an unusual devolution in the U.S. left today.

A new verification of this came via email.  (He includes me in his mass emails still).

He presents, in his "Struggle against Racism, Zionism, and Imperialism within US Borders:  Remarks by journalist and political analyst Caleb T. Maupin at the Third International New Horizon Conference in Tehran on October 29, 2015" a caricature of Marxism and the U.S. working class.

Example:

"....the white people of the United States have made a deal with Satan. As the big bankers have plundered the world, and used bombs, sanctions, and cruise missiles to beat down those who would assert their independence, we went along with it, we waved the flag. We were loyal and obedient, and in exchange we got houses, cars, and TV sets. We were taught to identify with Wall Street, and look down on the people of the world -- and the Black and Brown people within the United States.

"But the devil does not keep his promises. The “middle class” -- the bribe given to white Americans to buy their obedience -- is being gradually eliminated. The standard of living in the United States is rapidly dropping. The civil liberties so often bragged about by US leaders are being stripped away. The US is rapidly transitioning to a low-wage police state...."

I append the complete document FOR INFORMATION PURPOSES ONLY.

Full email text here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/12GpRBORYc8pWm2vvhURZYzbaHFA18C-AtebO7_Ba1Ec/edit?usp=docslist_api


The Struggle against Racism, Zionism, and Imperialism within US Borders

Remarks by journalist and political analyst Caleb T. Maupin at the Third International New Horizon Conference in Tehran on October 29, 2015.

It is not enough to be against racism, or to say you are against racism. Token anti-racist statements are everywhere in US society. Though Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot down and killed for his brave and dedicated work, after his death he has been reduced to a harmless patriotic icon. Even though the FBI worked to destroy him, schoolchildren across the US are taught that King’s life is proof that the United States is “the greatest nation on earth.”

The truth, and most people here are already aware, is that the United States is not a nation. The US is a country and within its borders are both oppressed and oppressor nations. African Americans, brought to the country as slaves, constitute an oppressed nation within US borders.

A lot of people in the United States say they are revolutionaries these days. Figures like Bernie Sanders show that radical-sounding words have become rather trendy. I say that you are not a revolutionary unless you recognize that Black people constitute a nation, and as a nation, have the right to self-determination, to choose separation or integration for themselves.

Trouble in “The Real America”

Every time I come to this part of the world, I meet so many young people who have a completely delusional portrait of the United States. What young Iranians see on satellite television -- this portrait of the United States as a kind of rich paradise -- this image is not real. If you watch US media, 90 percent of the time you are seeing southern California or New York City. The United States is far bigger than that.

In the heartland of the United States, what Sarah Palin demagogically called “the real America,” there are millions of young people who are very unhappy. The US economy has been wrecked by deindustrialization. The steel mills, auto plants, and good-paying industrial jobs have been eliminated. The public sector jobs in teaching, libraries, and post offices have also been eliminated. Millions of young Americans are stuck in low-wage, short-term service-sector jobs, making a mere fraction of what their parents had in the much heralded “American middle class.”

Young Americans watch the same garbage propaganda as is broadcast into Iran. They see how Kim Kardashian, the Real Housewives of New Jersey, and other wealthy people on American television live, and they contrast it to their own lives. The rates of suicide, mental illness, and drug addiction among young Americans are rising. They have been told all their lives that “you are worthless unless you are rich,” and they now look into the future, realizing that they are likely to spend their lives far poorer than previous generations.

US society, born in racism, slavery, and the slaughter of indigenous people, is now entering a deep political and economic crisis. What’s true is not always obvious -- but in some cases it is. The US, in which there is another mass shooting every time you turn around, is not a healthy, moral society. It is not a model that any country should aspire to be like.

The Unfinished Revolution

The most hopeful period in the history of the United States was the direct aftermath of the Civil War. The Civil War was really the Second American Revolution. Abraham Lincoln led a beautiful coalition. It included Christian abolitionists, labor unionists, industrial capitalists, and most importantly, the enslaved African people.

When the war broke out, slaves throughout the south stopped working, in what constituted a mass general strike. Harriet Tubman became the first woman to lead US soldiers into battle, and she organized guerrilla bands, freeing slaves along the Combahee River in South Carolina.

The slaveocracy, aligned with the British Empire, was also supported by the Wall Street financial elite. They saw cotton exports from slave plantations as a way to make profits. But Wall Street, the British Empire, and the slave-owning aristocracy was defeated. They were defeated by an amazing alliance.

The Republican Party of the 1860s, far different than today, was a revolutionary party. It took its name from the French Revolution. It represented the small farmers, the African Americans, and the labor unions. For a brief period after the war, there was even talk of redistributing the land of slave owners.

Calling themselves the “Populists,” the small farmers and free Blacks called for public control of railroads and guaranteed education for all, along with the overthrow of those they called “the monopolists”: the wealthy bankers that had so much power.

The progressive coalition that came out of the Civil War was broken apart by Wall Street. What did they use to destroy this progressive, anti-capitalist mass movement? Racism.

The Ku Klux Klan began to use terrorist tactics, very similar to those currently used by the Israeli settlers, to violently force free Blacks out of the political process. US troops were pulled out of the south and handed it back to the racists.

The Low-Wage Police State

Since that time, the white people of the United States have made a deal with Satan. As the big bankers have plundered the world, and used bombs, sanctions, and cruise missiles to beat down those who would assert their independence, we went along with it, we waved the flag. We were loyal and obedient, and in exchange we got houses, cars, and TV sets. We were taught to identify with Wall Street, and look down on the people of the world -- and the Black and Brown people within the United States.

But the devil does not keep his promises. The “middle class” -- the bribe given to white Americans to buy their obedience -- is being gradually eliminated. The standard of living in the United States is rapidly dropping. The civil liberties so often bragged about by US leaders are being stripped away. The US is rapidly transitioning to a low-wage police state.

The US economy has become centered on destruction. Prisons for profit, police on every corner, empty foreclosed homes, gentrification, rampant military aggression — war, war, war across the world.

As we face the ruins of US society, now it is time for white people to change the way we see ourselves. The satanic cabal of wealthy billionaires that has committed so many crimes around the world is our enemy. We must become friends with the people of Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, China, Palestine, and Yemen.

A new revolutionary coalition must be forged. An alliance of those within US borders who reject the rule of the globalist bankers can function as the US division of the emerging worldwide axis of resistance.

Every day the US government provides $18 million to the Israelis, as they escalate their genocidal crimes and provocations. A mass people’s movement could demand that this money instead be spent on providing healthcare, jobs, and education to the next generation of people in the United States.

Thousands of US troops are stationed in military bases throughout this region. A mass peoples’ movement could demand that these troops be brought home, and put to work restoring the crumbling roads and bridges throughout the United States.

The Task of Revolutionaries in the United States

The United States is currently facing very hard times, but as has often been said, “hard times are fighting times.” The moment is approaching when a real people’s movement against the racist Wall Street financial elites -- their wars, their racism, their police state, and their global system of usury and poverty -- can broadly expand within US society.

Such a people’s movement will require solid unity of diverse political forces, concrete practical demands, and a clear vision of an entirely new society in North America.

Often in the United States, we are told that people who fight for their independence around the world are terrorists. If you want to know what terrorism is really about, go see the next Hollywood superhero movie. In this most American genre of films, we see a young white man who thinks the police aren’t doing enough, so he puts on a cap and mask, and engages in isolated acts of violence. This is the Ku Klux Klan.

When Supreme Leader Khamenei says that ISIS and the police of the United States are the same, he is pointing to the fact that they utilized isolated acts of very publicized brutal violence in order to terrify a population. The Israeli settlers are doing the same thing.

Revolutionaries are not terrorists. They don’t seek to terrify people and make them feel powerless. Great revolutionary leaders like Imam Khomeni, Malcolm X, and Eugene Debs are great not because of isolated acts they do themselves, but because they empower other people, pushing them ahead to achieve things they never even thought they were capable of doing.

We are entering a period of great potential for those in the US who are willing to fight for justice and equality. This conference is part of strategizing and building for the important struggles ahead.