Wis[s]e Words – Page 575 – Ceci N'est pas Un Blog

Israeli defence minister threatens Holocaust

Published on March 6, 2008

No kidding. That’s what deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai said last week:

Israel’s deputy defence minister has said Israel will have “no choice” but to invade Gaza if Palestinian militants step up rocket attacks.

Matan Vilnai said Palestinians risked a “shoah”, the Hebrew word for a big disaster – and for the Nazi Holocaust.

Mr Vilnai made the comments after rockets hit the city of Ashkelon, 10km (six miles) from Gaza. His colleagues insisted he had not meant “genocide”.

This was immediately followed by a weekend of increased attacks on Gaza, which left over a hundred Palestinians dead, at least half of which were civilians:

According to B’Tselem figures, from 27 February to the afternoon of 3 March, 106 Palestinians were killed in the Gaza Strip. Contrary to the Chief of Staff’s contention that ninety percent were armed, at least fifty-four of the dead (twenty-five of them minors) did not take part in the hostilities. In addition, at least forty-six minors were wounded.

Of course, according to Israel this was all just a response to the rocket attacks launched by Hamas earlier, omitting that these in turn were a response to an earlier Israeli attack that left six Palestinians dead. And so on, ad infinitum, because Israel persists in attempting to create peace exclusively on their terms. Over the decades successive Israeli governments would rather tolerate continuing terror campaigns against their population than deal with the Palestinians on equal terms, refusing to deal with those organisations created by Palestinians to fight for their cause. It used to be Yassir Arafat’s PLO/Fatah that the Israelis considered beyond the pale, until the first Intifada made Arafat the lesser of two evils. Now it’s Hamas that cannot be reasoned with, even though it won the support of a majority of the Palestinians in elections two years ago and even though any “peace” negotiated without Hamas is a farce. Instead Hamas needs to be eliminated, as David Rose made clear.

Why this is? Because Israel want to dictate a peace on the Palestinian people and to be able to do this an ability of the Palestinians to resist needs to be broken. So far this has not yet happened, even with the massive advantages Israel enjoys in money, support and weapons. Which is why we now hear government ministers threatening Holocausts. So far this is just rhetoric.

So far.

Orientalism – Edward Said

Published on March 5, 2008

Cover of Orientalism

Orientalism
Edward Said
396 pages including index
published in 1978

There are some books that I’m sort of ashamed to review, not because the books themselves are so bad but just because I should’ve read them years ago. Orientalism is one such book. Both it and its author are so often namechecked by leftwing bloggers that I felt a slight twinge of embarassement for only reading it now. Also, I don’t know how it is with you, but I’m often wary to read such widely acclaimed books anyway, as there’s something so “Rik the people’s poet” about reading Said, or Chomsky for that matter. It can look poseurish and nobody wants to come over as that.

Nevertheless, Orientalism is a genuinely important book, even now, thirty years after its first publication. It’s main argument — that Asia in general and the Middle East in particular have long been misrepresented in the west as “the Orient”, an exotic world filled with prejudices and cliches in order to serve imperialist goals in the region — may look a bit obvious now, not as radical as it was at first publication, but this is in great part because Orientalism laid out this argument so convincingly first. In fact it had such an impact, that even thirty years onwards there are still people trying to cut it down to size, as a quick Google search shows. It touched a nerve, perhaps not in the least because Said was an outsider to the academic orientalist tradition he was criticising.

BBC2’s White season: the trailer

Published on March 5, 2008

Below’s the trailer I described earlier. Now am I right or wrong to see this as something that could’ve ended with the words “I’m Nick Griffin and I approve this message” as new to me blog The Soul of Man under Capitalism puts it.

Chris Bertram over at Crooked Timber meanwhile looks at the Decentist response to this series:

Given their leftist background, most “decents” have promoted either a class-based solidarity or an abstract universalism of citizenship in opposition to multiculturalism (which their blogs incessantly attack). But these pieces suggest something new. One possibility is that they are being drawn to the promotion of “my culture too!”, a resentment-driven demand for recognition within a multicultural system; another is that they are pushing the ethnos in the demos. Maybe they haven’t worked it out themselves yet. Either way, it gives me the creeps.

Wehrmacht – Wolfram Wette

Published on March 4, 2008

Cover of Wehrmacht

Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality
Wolfram Wette
372 pages including index
published in 2002

One of the enduring myths of World War 2 is the idea that the crimes committed by nazi Germany were the work of a relatively small number of villains with the vast majority of the German population either being their victims or just trying to make the best of a bad situation or to do their duty to their country. More specially this myth lives on in the idea that while the Waffen SS was a criminal organisation responsible for uncounted numbers of warcrimes, the Wehrmacht, Germany’s most important military organisation, had relatively clean hands. With tens of millions of German men having served in the Wehrmacht during World War 2 it is no surprise that this myth came into being. Far easier to believe you were the innocent dupe of Hitler than to acknowledge that you may just be a fellow criminal. What’s strange is that this idea is believed not just in Germany, but throughout Western Europe and America. If like me you’re interested in military history, you sooner or later come across military enthusiasts extolling the martial virtues of the Wehrmacht, without much consideration of the context in which they fought.

Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality was written to explode this myth and explain how and why it came into being. Its author, Wolfram Wette, is a German historian who’s made his speciality in researching Germany’s history of militarism. Until 1995 he worked for the official German institute for military history research, where he worked on Germany’s official history of World War 2, which should lend considerable weight to this book. This is no firebrand outsider courting controversy with a perhaps overstated sensationalist thesis (as with Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners), but a distinguished senior historian attempting to put an generally accepted truth before the general
public.

Why did the anti-war movement fail?

Published on March 4, 2008

With the disgraceful fifth anniversary of the War on Iraq rapidly approaching, it is a good time to examine why we all failed to stop this war when the vast majority of people in the UK, Europe and even the US was dead set against it. What happened that two million people could march in London on February 15th and yet the war started the very next month?

Which is why I set up an open thread over at Prog Gold, to discuss this question. If y’all would like to hop on over and give your opinion on this matter?