Melanie Phillips wrote about The poison at the heart of the left
[..]This (competition for victimhood) in turn played into the personality of leftists
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– who are strongly anti-American and therefore hate the Jews who they believe control America;
– who are anti-globalisation and therefore hate the Jews because they think they control the world’s finances;
– who are anti-colonialist and therefore hate the Jews because in their total ignorance of the Middle East and Jewish history they think Israel is a colonialist project;
– who are anti the notion of racial particularity and therefore hate Israel because it is a Jewish state;
– who are anti-war and therefore hate Israel because it uses military means to defend itself against annihilation.
In short, at the very heart of everything it most hates, the left perceives Israel and the Jews — which thus become interchangeable.
And so if Jews defend Israel the left claim they are seeking to appropriate the role of ultimate victim and manipulate public debate to achieve that image at the expense of the universal brotherhood of victims across the globe. They are said to be waving the shroud of the Holocaust to sanitise the crimes of Israel (even though the belief that Israel was only created because of the Holocaust is a canard put about by Jew-haters such as Ahmadinejad; the proposal to recreate the Jewish national home in Israel was originally made because the world recognised the Jews’ unique historic claim to the land where they alone had been a nation state until they were driven out). And if Jews call attention to antisemitism they merely create it all over again, because this reinforces the belief that the Jews use this claim as a manipulative weapon for their own advantage. So Jews are never to be allowed to tell the truth about their own persecution; the more they tell this truth, the more they are to be cast out as pariahs for manipulating public debate.[..]
Felix you are behind the times: in America, there are virtually no working classes. Is a worker in NYSE salaried but making a lot of money considered by you working class worker? In America most of the factory and farm workers have given way either to Hi Tech or have moved to China or have just closed shop. Most of Americas economy is based on services not outright production and where this still exists most are modern computerized and robotic enterprises. The lowest rung on the American economic scale makes more than 80% of the rest of the world. So please update yourself and try to get over your obsession with Trotsky.No ideologue has ever carried a following for more than a generation or 2 in all of human history. In almost all cases, they get replaced by other ideologies who then get replaced by more ideologies. Ideologies are in the main transcendental.Almost no ideology stands alone without some charismatic leader or proponent. Pls. Read Moses Hess:
http://users.cyberone.com.au/meyers/rome-and-jerusalem.html
Ted
No problem. I see it as an honour to be associated with your people, no doubt about that at all.
I am patient. Trotsky comes out of that tradition which was good and bad as far as the Jews were concerned.
Dogma was the real problem for the Marxists. Even with Marx. Part of the Communist Manifesto reads like poetry…pure creative thinking. Then he moves on and there is a suggestion of socialism being inevitable.
He later corrected this and was so disgusted with followers that he famously said “I am not a Marxist”. Perhaps in private it was “I am not a bloody Marxist”. Weaker people were using him.
The hiding of these two things , ie Trotsky and the Mufti, is of great moment.
Leon Trotsky was faced in the 1930s with a new phenomenon. that is Fascism.
He also was faced with something unseen before as well, that was stalinism.
Looking back he seems to have been mentally very courageous. He did not flinch no matter what was thrown at him and at the world. All the time there was this searing intelligence trying to make sense of it all.
Now something similar is building up in front of us.
I have a mental reservation about something you said, that America is trying to shrink Israel.
True. But in doing so I feel that THEY KNOW Ted that they could finish Israel, and Rice basically does not care. That makes Rice and Bush and that crowd into antisemites.
I see Civil War now in Israel. It has to come to this. Israel was founded by these people around Ben Gurion but they were already putting down the Ruth Matars of their time. South being so right on the Atalena affair.
I think we have to go back into history. HG Wells says that on their return from Babylon the Jews were the finished article. They had their national consciousness all sewed up. They had their written history and wisdoms written down all tied up in this concept of a God being which was outside of them.
I am always interested in what Yamit says because he is THERE!
Felix, thanks for your hard work.
South
Good comments.
Although 1933 was the critical year because the Jews fell with the German Labour Movement. Hitler took power as his support in election terms was declining in that year. It was the wrong policies of 1. Stalinism 2 social democracy that handed power to Hitler on a plate. This happened in 1933. After that it was all over for anybody who opposed the Nazis and with them for the Jews.
The critical thing that I have done on Israpundit over the past 2 years is that I have showed through stated research, not all by me since I have piggy backed on others, that Leon Trotsky was different, very different to what you as a Jew would have been told.
From this something which is very important.
2 things have been carefully hidden by the WRPer and SWPers etc etc
No 1 hiding role of el Husseini, the Mufti Nazi
The above covered well by JI and FGW
What they did not cover is NO 2
That Leon Trotsky from 1933 to 1940 was rewriting the Marxist tradition from when it would never ever be the same. I proved that Trotsky had become a Zionist. Now that is some statement but I back it up and NOBODY could challenge it, I mean nobody anywhere.
That has huge significance.
For example Jerry introduced a guy as a Trotskyist who he had met and I answered:
https://www.israpundit.org/2006/?p=4925
There is a great weapon at our disposal and there are great changes afoot.
Trotsky was expelled in 1929 you are correct. But one question to ask…why did Stalin not kill him there and then. Basically he could not do that because there were social forces involved.
But the great years of Trotsky were ahead. This was when he was swimming against the tide of history.
It is easy to go with the tide of history but when the tide turns that is the test of a person.
Jews have got to take this man on board. This has been hidden and falsified for too long.
Return to Zion started at least with the return from Babylon. The oldest and proudest national revolutionary movement ever. What wretches these WRPers like Redgrove etc really are, and I can prove that they are frauds.
Why not prove it.
I believe that with or without the holocaust the State of Israel would have come into being but that a reserve of several million Jews would have ensured that this was so. The vanguard was in place many of the institutions of State existed and European jews would have created then a very different Israel that came into being in 1948.I believe there is such a thing as Historical imperative. The British did not give up the mandate willingly they were driven to that because the cost of keeping it for a Bankrupt England after the war was prohibitive.
For most of us we use the terms left and right based on a more or less if not totally accurate consensus.I might be regarded in my support for Israel as right wing but my economic outlook is Pure Milton Friedman. I may see the world in very narrow terms of are they for us or against us. I may be liberal when it comes to advocating basic human rights for others in the world but advocate totally destroying the Muslim faith and all that implies. The liberal and conservative debate or conflict in America leave me cold, except for its relevance to Israel and the Jews I could not care a wit.But it is an apparent fact that so called Liberal and human rights advocates in America and Europe have placed my country on the other side ( THE DARK SIDE ) in the political and social debate. The Dark Side is neither supported by radical liberals nor radical conservatives. We cannot I believe ever bridge this gap of combination of ignorance and blind hate from both these extremes.
For people like me and I suppose there are some, the way we view the world and act is based on one simple question and concept
Melanie Phillips does not define her terms nor give examples.
“anti-American” is meaningless in a domestic US context.
What group is “anti-war” ? Name the group and tell me if they support “wars of national liberation”. Any trecks to the annual Cuban sugar cane harvest ?
Israel is a “Jewish state” ? Meir Vilner signed the Israeli Declaration of Independence. He was the leader of the Israel Communist Party. This should serve as an indicator that Israel did not start out as a “Jewish” state. How Israel evolved needs no comment other than saying that Altalena has NEVER been philosophically resolved.
Shalom Felix,
I only use “left” and “right” when discussing the Cordeliers and Jacobians. Much as changed since. Many American Jewish labor leaders were socialists but not Communists. They didn’t attend the Communist Party meetings with the formal criticism/self-criticism psychological techniques. Lenen wrote a book LEFT-WING COMMUNISM. A tautology ?
I’d mark the sealed fate of European Jewry to 1922 when Weimar Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau was assasinated. After his death, inflation became hyperinflation and concurrent with the unemployment suffering, the national resentments easily got focused to the Jews. Hitler was a beneficiary of this plus the inherent Lutheran social foundation that was already embedded in the national psych.
I believe Trotsky was in exile since 1929.
Some Jews did leave Europe in time. Part of the problem was the rabbis. Can’t write more….at least for now.
Kol tuv,
Felix when I posted that article I thought about the “left” usage.
I turned it around. Anyone who embraces those points are the “left”. That’s how I now define it.
Unlike Jared Israel and Francisco Gil White I do not dismiss the terms left and right, but I maintain they need to be used with great wisdom and much learning on the matter. That Melanie does not have.
Not to say that many of the bullet points above do not have truth.
However…appeal to folk on Israpundit…please keep your options open on this. We are dealing here with the existential question of the Jewish people.Keep your nerve on this one.
For a start most youth have an attraction to socialism. They are self sacrificing and rebel against their parents. Not stupid and the youth own the future.
Second the term the left has to be understood historically. I mean there is the First International of Marx. There are the basic historical notes of the Communist manifesto of Marx and Engels, which reads to me in a large part like poetry.
The Second International which led the charge into World War 1 and the misery of the trenches of the Somme.
The Third International incorporating the First Workers Power in 1917
The Fourth International founded by Leon Trotsky, great opponent of Joseph Stalin.
And here for any who choose to take up the continuity of life and its affairs things really start to hot up.
Accept that FGW is wrong on this. By the end of 1933 the fate of the Jews was sealed. That is because the policies of the working class movements allowed Hitler to come to power.
He could have been stopped and would have been stopped if the policies of Trotsky were followed in that fateful 1933 year. Think that through please and what it means to the Jewish people.
Individualize it…what would it have meant to Anne Frank and her sister.
I have written at length then on the great creative development that Trotsky made from 1933 until his death. Most of the bases above are covered actually. Mostly that is unknown, well hidden, but…
Especially this:
Trotsky was adament…the Jews must get out of Europe, get to Palestine, and create a state there, he was specific…a Jewish state.
For the first time a socialist, ie Trotsky raised the idea of moving peoples forcefully. And he suggested the necessity to move antisemitic Arabs away from the Jews, because he was absoolutely determined the Jews must have a place of their own on earth, and they must be unmolested.
But that is not all or even the main thing.
He also recognized the Jews as a nation and this was a deep general law because at about the same time he said the Ukrainians must have an independent nation.
Trotsky did not place any conditions on his support for this Jewish nation. He recognized it would be a capitalist nation. That did not matter. It was their nation.
It is a bit more complicated but that is the gist of it.
Trotsky never for a moment gave up one socialist revolutionary principle. And he did not have to.
So what happened then. This development was cut short by Stalin´s murderer Ramon Mercader who on his release from prison in Mexico made his way VIA CUBA to the Soviet Union where the killer was awarded the highest medal possible.
The “Trotskyists” very soon became just as bad as the Stalinists and they became antisemitic on the Israeli issue.
But why blame Trotsky for that. Why not celebrate his work. Why not blame the Stalinist assasin. I mean it was recognized as the murder of the century not for nothing.
My question is…why allow the present so called Trotskyists of The Nation, of the WSWS, ot the WRP, of the SWP etc to claim his title when they stand in the opposite trench.
I believe that the focus on the American Christians has a weakness. The focus must be on the American working class of which the American Christians are a part. That is a crucial difference in tactics.
There needs to be, and can be, a great coalition to save the Jews and the American religious folk will definitely be part of it. Why be sectarian if you really feel for the horrible historical persecution of the Jews.
The future of the Jews will be decided outside of them as it was in 1933. To recognize that is a mark of maturity not weakness.
I do not dismiss Melanie. I welcome her. But she is deficient in understanding.