The Warsaw ghetto uprising, 70 years on
“I cannot continue to live and to be silent while the remnants of Polish Jewry, whose representative I am, are being murdered. My comrades in the Warsaw ghetto fell with arms in their hands in the last heroic battle. I was not permitted to fall like them, together with them, but I belong with them, to their mass grave. By my death, I wish to give expression to my most profound protest against the inaction in which the world watches and permits the destruction of the Jewish people” - “The Last Letter from the Bund Representative with the Polish National Council in Exile”.
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From the Economist blog:
By GG, Jerusalem, Warsaw
THE 19th of April 1943, exactly 70 years ago, saw the first insurrection against the Nazis in occupied Europe: the Warsaw ghetto uprising. The event symbolises both Jewish courage and Jewish suffering. For Poland, its anniversary is also a resonant event in the country’s ongoing reconnection with its Jewish heritage and fight against anti-Semitism.
Last week, more than a hundred volunteers showed up to work on cleaning and restoring the dilapidated Jewish cemetery, perhaps the strongest visual testament to the fact that this city was once one of the largest Jewish centres in the world – and is no more. Almost none of them were Jewish. They told me they had come out of a sense of duty.
The event had been listed on a website devoted to the anniversary commemorations, which are extensive. From now until the May 16th when the Great Synagogue on Tłomackie Street was destroyed, marking the end of the uprising and effectively of all Jewish life in Warsaw, the city hosts ceremonies, exhibitions, concerts and lectures devoted to Poland’s Jewish heritage.
The new Museum of the History of Polish Jews is co-ordinating much of the proceedings. It has used the occasion to officially open as an educational centre even though its permanent exhibition is a year away from being ready evidently hoping its impressive architecture and cultural programme will trump the dubious symbolism of its emptiness.
The guest of honour is Simcha Rotem (Wikipedia entry here), nom de guerre ‘Kazik’. At 89, he is the only former member of the Jewish Combat Organisation (ŻOB) still in good enough health to make the trip. I met him in Israel, where he has lived since shortly after the war, last month. Though tired and in low spirits, he told our correspondent he had decided long ago that if he could possibly make it to this anniversary, he would, regardless of what kind of commemoration was planned for the sake of the memory of his comrades who are no longer alive.
Some of those comrades did live for years after the war though—thanks to Kazik. His is an astonishing story of courage and luck in hellish circumstances. As a 19-year-old, fair-haired ruffian from the Warsaw district of Czerniaków, Kazik did not look Jewish. For that reason the insurgent leader, Marek Edelman, chose him to go to the Aryan side and try to organise a rescue operation for the Jews trapped in the ghetto, already in flames.
After a week on the Aryan side, Kazik finally found two sewer workers who thanks to much goading with vodka in one hand and a pistol in the other, showed him an underground route back into the ghetto. Emerging on Zamenhofa street, he found nothing but smouldering ruins.
It’s at that point that Simcha Rotem’s testimony ends Claude Lanzmann’s epic documentary, Shoah: he believes he is the “last Jew” and has nothing left to do but wait for the Germans. But that is not what he did.
Returning to the sewers, he hears voices: a dozen or so fighters. They say there are more hiding elsewhere, and he tells them to gather and make their way through the sewers to a manhole under Prosta Street, just outside the ghetto.
Simcha Rotem to this day does not know exactly people he saved: “A few dozen. Do you think I had time to count them?” he exclaims. After meeting the group in the sewer, he had returned to the Aryan side and organised for two vans to pick up the survivors at dawn. Only one van arrived, at 10am, and its driver had to be held at gunpoint to prevent him from driving off while the Jews were coming out of the manhole.
After it seemed that no-one else was emerging from the manhole, Kazik told the van to move off. Against all the odds, the few dozen made it to safety the forests north of Warsaw. Yet some had remained underground. Simcha Rotem has had to live with the idea that perhaps he could have done better. But today he says he feels it was the only decision he could make in the circumstances: “The Germans were 100 metres away. It was broad daylight. It was now or never.”
Asked whether his memory of that moment is still vivid today, Simcha Rotem is almost offended: “It is not the sort of thing a person could forget”. His anger at the Nazis is still very much alive, too: “I regret in a way that we didn’t get revenge on the SS. Because they were not conscripts, they chose to do what they did. So they were murderers. And murderers should be hanged. They were not people, but animals walking upright.”
Fear that the world could forget the horror of the Holocaust, or that it could happen again, animates those who do remember it ever more as their numbers dwindle. Irena Boldok, who escaped from the Warsaw ghetto aged eight or nine, gives talks in schools and elsewhere as a member of the Children of the Holocaust association. She speaks gloomily about the experience: “some of them understand, not many. It’s hard to talk to fourteen-year-old kids. It is like a history lesson for them.”
According to the Polish psychologist Barbara Engelking, one reason the ghetto uprising did not happen sooner is that Jews in the Warsaw ghetto maintained the illusion that they might live: the death camps were simply beyond human imagination. With fewer and fewer survivors around to remind us of the horrors of the Holocaust, marking the anniversaries of its key events becomes an ever more important way of ensuring that we don’t forget something that was so unthinkable at the time.
On Holocaust Memorial Day: remember, as well, the Roma and Sinti
Guest post by Pink Prosecco
Estimates for the number of Roma and Sinti victims of the Holocaust vary widely. Some put the figure as ‘low’ as 220,000 (roughly the population of Norwich) whereas others believe over a million were killed. This online exhibition focuses on some of the Roma and Sinti children who became victims, or survivors, of the Holocaust.
Recently a memorial to the Roma, designed by the Israeli sculptor Dani Karavan, has been unveiled in Berlin. This project has been subject to many delays, and involved several complex and sensitive decisions:
‘Another of Karavan’s proposals – to use Avraham Shlonsky’s poem “The Vow” – was also rejected, to Karavan’s disgruntlement. “This is a poem that vows to remember – and to forget nothing,” he says. He relates that when Romani Rose heard it for the first time, “His hair stood on edge.” However, when he discovered, two weeks after that, that the poem was already quoted at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the idea was abandoned.
The alternative proposed by the gypsies was a poem by a young poet from the community, Santino Spinelli. However, the poem was about Auschwitz specifically, and Karavan was concerned the memorial would become identified with the death camp and not with the gypsy genocide. The compromise was that the poem would be inscribed on a the floor of the pool, without the word Auschwitz, and with the remark: “Dedicated to [remembering] all the camps where gypsies were murdered.”’
Given the rhetoric and violence against the Roma in some European countries, one would hope that greater awareness of their experiences in the Holocaust – or ‘Porrajmos’ – might encourage people to think twice before demonizing a whole group. But the example of David Ward – who seems to think it’s ‘the Jews’ who needed to take lessons from the Holocaust – demonstrates that a fluent knowledge of historical facts doesn’t always go hand in hand with self-reflection.
How Chomsky’s mind works
I’ve just used a Christmas book token to purchase the latest Noam Chomsky. Well, I say “latest” but in fact the modestly entitled ‘How The World Works’ is, in fact, a collection of “intensively edited speeches and interviews” (writes editor Arthur Naiman) from the 1990s and (in some cases) the late 1980s.
Above: the old genocide-denier himself
Both Naiman and David Barsamian, who conducted the interviews that make up most of the book, are clearly uncritical Chomsky fans, almost breathless in their hero-worship. Naiman writes “I think you’ll find Chomsky’s take on things more insightful than anything you hear on the airwaves or read in the papers today. His analyses are so deep and farsighted that they only seem to get more timely — and startling — with age. Read a few pages and see if you don’t agree.”
Not to be outdone, Barsamian writes “Chomsky is an electrifying speaker, and that’s due solely to what he says, not to the unpretentious, straightforward way in which he says it (he consciously avoids rhetorical flourishes). Sharp as a razer in debate but warm and amiable in convesation, he’s both the most moral and most knowledgable person I’ve ever met.
“I hope he lives to be 100. You should too. The world will be an emptier, lonlier and less just place without him.”
Given the period in which most of the speeches and interviews took place, and also some previous criticisms that I’ve made of Chomsky, I first checked the contents and index to see what the book contained about former Yugoslavia and the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo; I was surprised to find just one piece on the subject, an interview that seems to be from the early 1990′s. Even more surprising, in the light of some of what Chomsky has written and said on the subject since, is the anodyne nature of what he has to say. In answer to the question “Would you comment on the events in the former Yugoslavia, which constitute the greatest outburst of violence in Europe in fifty years — tens of thousands killed, hundreds of thousands of refugees. This isn’t some remote place like East Timor we’re talking about — this is Europe –and it’s on the news every night”, Chomsky replies:
In a certain sense, what’s happening is that the British and American right wings are getting what they asked for. Since the 1940s they’ve been quite bitter about the fact that Western support turned to Tito and the partisans, and against Mikailhovich and his Chetniks, and the Croatian anti-Communists, including the Ustasha, who were outright Nazis. The Chetniks were also playing with the Nazis and were trying to overcome the partisans.
The partisan victory imposed a communist dictatorship, but it also federated the country. It suppressed the ethnic violence that had accompanied the hatreds and created the basis of some sort of functioning society in which the parts had their role. We’re now essentially back in the 1940s, but without the partisans.
Serbia is the inheritor of the Chetniks and their ideology. Croatia is the inheritor of the Ustasha and its ideology (less ferocious than the Nazi original, but similar). It’s possible that they’re now carrying out pretty much what they would’ve done if the partisans hadn’t won.
Of course, the leadership of these elements comes from the Communist party, but that’s because every thug in the region went into the ruling apparatus. (Yeltsin, for example, was a Communist party boss.)
It’s interesting that the right wing in the West — at least its more honest elements — defend much of what’s happening. For example, Nora Beloff, a right-wing British commentator on Yugoslavia, wrote a letter to the London Economist condemning those who denounce the Serbs in Bosnia. She’s saying it’s the fault of the Muslims. They’re refusing to accommodate the Serbs, who are just defending themselves.
She’s been a supporter of the Chetniks from way back, so there’s no reason why she shouldn’t continue to support Chetnik violence (which is what this amounts to). Of course there may be another factor. She’s an extremist Zionist, and the fact that the Muslims are involved already makes them guilty.
Some say that, just as the Allies should have bombed the rail lines to Auschwitz to prevent the deaths of many people in concentration camps, so we should now bomb the Serbian gun positions surrounding Sarajevo that have kept that city under siege. Would you advocate the use of force?
First of all, there’s a good deal of debate about how much effect bombing the rail lines to Auschwitz would have had. Putting that aside, it seems to me that a judicious threat and use of force, not by the Western powers but by some international or multinational group, might, at an earlier stage, have suppressed a good deal of the violence and maybe blocked it. I don’t know if it would help now.
If it were possible to stop the bombardment of Sarajevo by threatening to bomb some emplacements (and perhaps even carrying the threat out), I think you could give an argument for it. But that’s a very big if. It’s not only a moral issue — you have to ask about the consequences, and they could be quite complex.
What if a Balkan war were set off? One consequence is that conservative military forces within Russia could move in. They’re already there, in fact, to support their Slavic brothers in Serbia. They might move in en masse. (That’s traditional, incidentally. Go back to Tolstoy’s novels and read about how Russians were going to the south to save their Slavic brothers from attacks. It’s now being reenacted.)
At that point you’re getting fingers on nuclear weapons involved. It’s also entirely possible that an attack on the Serbs, who feel that they’re the aggrieved party, could inspire them to move more aggressively in Kosovo, the Albanian area. That could set off a large-scale war, with Greece and Turkey involved. So it’s not so simple.
Or what if the Bosnian Serbs, with the backing of both the Serbian and maybe even other Slavic regions, started a guerrilla war? Western military “experts” have suggested it could take a hundred thousand troops just to more or less hold the area. Maybe so.
So one has to ask a lot of questions about consequences. Bombing Serbian gun emplacements sounds simple, but you have to ask how many people are going to end up being killed. That’s not so simple.
Zeljko Raznjatovic, known as Arkan, a fugitive wanted for bank robbery in Sweden, was elected to the Serb Parliament in December 1992. His Tigers’ Militia is accused of killing civilians in Bosnia. He’s among ten people listed by the US State Department as a possible war criminal. Arkan dismissed the charges and said, “There are a lot of people in the United States I could list as war criminals.”
That’s quite correct. By the standards of Nuremberg, there are plenty of people who could be listed as war criminals in the West. It doesn’t absolve him in any respect, of course.
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Now that is pretty inoffensive and uncontentious stuff, especially when compared with what Chomsky was writing and saying just a few years later. Take this commentary on Milošević and the Srebrenica genocide, published in Chomsky’s 2006 book ‘Failed States’:
Let us return to the Yugoslavia Tribunal, where Milošević was charged with genocide. The indictment was restricted to crimes in Kosovo. It kept almost entirely to crimes subsequent to the NATO bombing, which, as anticipated by the NATO command and the Clinton administration, elicited serious atrocities in reaction. Presumably because the Kosovo charges were so ambigious, Bosnia was later added, specifically the charge of genocide at Srebrenica. That too raises a few questions, if only because after these events, Milošević was accepted by the United States and its allies as a partner for diplomatic settlement. A further problem is that the most detailed enquiry into the Srebrenica massacre, by the Dutch government * concluded that Milošević had no connection to it, and that he “was very upset when he heard about the massacres,” the Dutch scholar who headed the team of intelligence specialists reported. The study describes the “incredulity” in the Belgrade government, including Milošević, when they learned of the executions.
Suppose we adopt prevailing Western opinion that such unwelcome facts are irrelevant. Even so, the prosecution has had considerable difficulty in establishing the charge of genocide. Suppose, however, that someone were to unearth a document in which Milošević orders the Serbian airforce to reduce Bosnia or Kosovo to rubble, with the words “Anything that flies on anything that moves” [Nixon's instructions to Kissinger to order bombing in Cambodia - JD]. The prosecutors would be overjoyed, the trial would be over, and Milošević would be sent off to many successive life sentences for the crime of genocide – a death sentence, if the tribunal followed US conventions. But as always, the principled exemption from moral truism prevails.
* Chomsky conveniently ignores the July 1999 findings of the International Criminal Tribunal which attributed the atrocities at Sebrenica to a “direct chain of military command” from Belgrade and, specifically, Milošević. He also ignores the fact that one of the two Serb generals who ordered the killings, Radislav Krstic (the other being Ratko Mladic), was promoted to general within a few days of the atrocity.
George Monbiot on the genocide denial of his former “hero” Chomsky (and others on the “left”), here
Morning Star: Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites welcome
By Andrew Coates. Cross-posted from Tendance Coatsey
The Morning Star, Britain’s ‘Communist’ paper publishes in its print-edition today a page written by Holocaust denier, Israel Shamir.
It begins,
“Who’s behind Pussy Riot? An unholy alliance of big business and media barons…” Shamir observes,
Pussy Riot’s two-year sentence is quite in line with prevailing European practice. For much milder anti-Jewish hate talk, European countries customarily sentence offenders to two to five years of prison for a first offence.
We have already blogged on this.
Isreal Shamir’s concern about sentencing for anti-Jewish actions is far from a co-incidence.
In his many articles on the Holocaust ‘revisionist’ site Entre la plume et l’enclume he has shown great interest in the ‘Jewish question’. Recently Shamir cast doubt on the innocence of Captain Dreyfus.
This is a sample of his opinions (Wikipedia):
“In an essay published on his website discussing Holocaust denier David Irving, Shamir wrote that “the Jews” now “rule over the minds and souls of Europeans””
David Irving was sentenced for denial of Jewish superiority. His doom seals the reign of (albeit limited) freedom that began with the fall of Bastille. European history went full circle: from rejecting the rule of Church and embracing free thought, to the new Jewish mind-control on a world scale. Not only is Western Christian civilisation dead, but even its successor, secular European civilisation, has met its demise only a few days after its proud and last celebration by the Danish scribes. It was short-lived: about two hundred years from beginning to the end, the Europeans may once have had the illusion that they can live without an ideological supremacy. Now this illusion is over; and the Jews came in the stead of the old and tired See of St Peter to rule over the minds and souls of Europeans.[34]
Shamir claims his concern with the Holocaust is with the use of the narrative of the Holocaust by Jews to promote Jewish “superiority and exclusivity”,
It has everything to do with the Jewish claim of superiority and exclusivity. There is a Jewish prayer saying: “Bless you, Lord, that you created me a Jew, that you separated between Jews and the earth folks, like you separated between the Holy and Profane, that our fate is not like their fate”. The Holocaust concept is just another form of this prayer. They say that even their death is not like the death of anybody else.[42]
This is how the Guardian described Shamir last year,
an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier
And,
His latest book, in Russian, is called is called How to Break the Conspiracy of the Elders of Zion.
The Morning Star, a place where Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites are welcome.
Monbiot takes on “left” genocide deniers
”[T]he movement to which I thought I belonged has closed ranks: against attempts to challenge this revisionism, against the facts, in effect against the victims of these genocides. My attempts to pursue this question number among the most dispiriting experiences of my working life.”
In today’s Graun, George Monbiot notes that recent attempts to deny or downplay genocide (especially the massacre of Bosniaks at Srebrenica and of Tutsis by Hutu militias in Rwnada) have all too often come from the “left.” He’s obviously shocked and upset, especially at the reaction of his hero, Noam Chomsky who (typically) when challenged resorted to his usual trick of avoiding the question and accusing his questioner of being an agent of Washington. Also in Monbiot’s sights: the wretched, deranged Pilger and the antisemitic Counterpunch magazine.
This is an important piece, not because what it states is new (others, including us at Shiraz and indeed, Monbiot himself, have made the same points many times before), but because it marks a partial political coming-of-age for this Chomsky fan (only partial: in the comments below the article Monbiot says he’s still an admirer of the slippery old charlatan), and he’s honest enough to admit how depressed it has made him. It’s also significant that it should appear in the Graun, several of whose leading figures (eg Milne and Steele) regularly sing from the Chomsky hymn-sheet.
Above: slippery old charlatan
If you don’t read anything else today, read this:
The term genocide conjures up attempts to kill an entire people: the German slaughter of the Jews or the Herero; the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians; the near-extermination of the Native Americans. But the identity of the crime does not depend on its scale or success: genocide means “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”.
Though, in 1995, the women and children of Srebrenica were first removed from the killing grounds by Bosnian Serb troops, though the 8,000 men and boys they killed were a small proportion of the Bosnian Muslim population, it meets the definition. So the trial of Ratko Mladic, the troops’ commander, which began last week, matters. Whatever one thinks of the even-handedness of international law, and though it remains true that men who commissioned or caused the killing of greater numbers of people (George Bush and Tony Blair, for instance) have not been brought to justice and are unlikely to be, every prosecution of this kind makes the world a better place.
So attempts to downplay or dismiss this crime matter too – especially when they emerge from the unlikely setting of the internationalist left. I’m using this column to pursue a battle which might be hopeless, and which many of you might regard as obscure. Perhaps I have become obsessed, but it seems to me to be necessary. Tacitly on trial beside Mladic in The Hague is a set of ideas: in my view the left’s most disturbing case of denial and doublethink since the widespread refusal to accept that Stalin had engineered a famine in the Ukraine….
Read the rest here
All Monbiot’s references, and his correspondence with Chomsky, here
Twenty years since the Bosnian war.
Two decades on from the start of the Bosnian war, in which Bosnian Serb forces led by Radovan Karadzic (behind whom stood Slobodan Milosevic, the Serb leader in Belgrade), used mass rape and genocide against Muslims, it’s worth remembering the shameful role of sections of the left – notably the SWP who then ran ‘Stop The War’. What Socialist Organiser (forerunner of the present AWL) wrote in July 1992 follows these harrowing pictures:
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| Srebrenica massacre: Budak mass grave, Kamenica 9, where some of 8,372 Srebrenica genocide victims had been dumped after systematic killings in July 1995. Photo exhibit courtesy: The Hague Tribunal (ICTY). |
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| Emaciated prisoner in the Serb-run Trnopolje concentration camp near Prijedor, Bosnia, in August of 1992. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslms), were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Pascal Le Segretain |
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| Manjaca concentration camp near Prijedor, north-west Bosnia in August 1992. Thousands of civilians, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were tortured and killed there. Photographer: Patrick Robert |
At the heart of the chaos into which Yugoslavia has now dissolved is the predatory expansion of the Serbian state, led by neo-Stalinists whose regime has a great deal of popular support. They utilise people such as the Serbs in the territory claimed by Croatia to serve a drive which is essentially a drive to create the largest possible “Greater Serbia”. It is a primitive form of imperialism, whose real content is summed up in the phrase which expresses their policy for non-Serbs: “ethnic cleansing”.
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As we were saying: Socialist Organiser 529, July 1992
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The old Yugoslav state broke down because, over the last decade, aggressive Serb chauvinism provoked and alarmed the smaller peoples, Croats and others, of the Yugoslav Federation.
Nationalism and chauvinism inevitably breeds… nationalism and chauvinism. The Croats were pushed and provoked by the Serbs. But when Croatia seceded from Yugoslavia, large numbers of Serbs – substantial majorities in some parts of the territory of historic Croatia – were cut off from other Serbs and trapped as a helpless minority in an alien state.
In the Croatian state set up under German patronage during World War Two, as many as half of the Serbs in Croatia – perhaps 3/4 of a million men, women and children – were massacred by Croat chauvinists, the Ustashe.1
While Serb state leaders such as Slobodan Milosevic whose policies through the ’80s led finally to the destruction of Yugoslavia, were chauvinists, people motivated by the desire to aggrandise Serbia, the Serbs in independent Croatia did not have to be chauvinists to resolve to fight rather than submit to outright Croatian rule. They needed only to remember the not too distant past and look around them at the efforts being made to revive Ustashe banners, uniforms and catchcries in the new Croatia.
Thus while millions in Croatia – to stick to the one example – felt the understandable need for separation, they could not achieve independence without oppressing and threatening others. And not only in Yugoslavia. The whole of the Balkans is a crazy pavement of peoples and fragments of peoples interlocked and overlapping, and standing in the way of each others’ full autonomy.
From this it followed that maintenance of a broad federal structure was the best possible way for the peoples of Yugoslavia to arrange their affairs. But the structures broke down; the central state apparatus became increasingly a tool of Serb domination, serving Serb expansion. Everything dissolved into the bloody chaos of ethnic and national wars which is now raging.
Despite all the crimes of the Croatian chauvinists, the Croats’ right to self-determination became the major issue between Croatia and Serbia; socialists have to uphold that right, championing the minority rights of the Serbs within Croatia but denying to Serbia any right to use those minorities as a pretext for trying to conquer as much of Croatia as they can.
The Serb chauvinists were as aggressive against Kosovo and Slovenia where there were no big problems of an oppressed Serbian minority as against Croatia.
Yugoslavia today may offer a picture of their own future to many other ethnically interlaced groups of people, including the occupants of large parts of the former Soviet Union.
Within this situation there is a growing demand for Western – UN, NATO -intervention to bring an end to the fighting. It is by no means certain that there will be Western military intervention. If there is, it is unlikely to bring peace or create a political framework within which the peoples of the former Yugoslavia can coexist. What military intervention would most likely amount to is action to stop Serbia expanding further, and to “freeze” the current carve-up of Bosnia. Already, anti-Serb sanctions are being mounted.
Is the conflict turning into something like the build-up to another edition of last year’s war against Iraq? The Iraqi occupation of Kuwait quickly became the occasion for a savage Western war against Iraq.
Should socialists “Defend Serbia” from “Imperialist Aggression”? If there is Western military intervention it will be a police action to avert chaos on the borders of the immensely powerful European community: it will be a limited police action. If the cluster of wars now going on are allowed to burn themselves out, they will go on for a long time, many thousands will die, hundreds of thousands and maybe millions will be “ethnically cleansed” into refugee camps, and “Greater Serbia” may become a lot greater than it is now.
As socialists and anti-imperialists, we have no confidence in the Western capitalist powers: we warn against relying on NATO or UN intervention; we advocate working-class independence. But in the name of what alternative would we denounce and condemn, and demand an immediate end, to a limited police action by the big powers?
On the ground that everything that “imperialist” Western European states do is ipso facto “imperialist” and wrong, even if it has desirable results? This is not Marxist or working class politics but absurd “oppositionism”, nihilism.
On the ground that ‘outside’ intervention is always wrong? What meaning can such a ‘principle’ have in face of the bloody ethnic melée which is engulfing the peoples of Yugoslavia? Why has Serbia more ‘right’ in Bosnia than a UN army acceptable to the majority of Bosnians would have? That reasoning is absurd.
On the ground that neo-Stalinist Serbia is a ‘socialist’ or ‘workers” state? It is nothing of the sort, but even if it were, then that would not require of socialists that we back Serbian imperialism, with all its inevitable slaughters and “ethnic cleansings”. Such a position would be a reductio ad absurdum of a decades-old ‘tradition’ of kitsch Trotskyist “defencist” policies for the Stalinist states. It is sheer nonsense, on every level.
Or should we oppose a big power police action because we believe the destruction of Serb power, the prevention of the consolidation of the Greater Serb state is the real goal of Western “imperialist” intervention? For certain, the Western powers will only intervene militarily, with all the accompanying costs, dangers and precedents, to serve their own interests.
There are powers with imperialist ambitions to gain semi-colonies and spheres of influence in Yugoslavia and the whole area round the Black Sea. The UN, the EC, and NATO will not, however, lend their banners to Greek or Turkish ambitions! Germany will not vote for a UN operation which is a cover for neo-colonial action by the US – as the Gulf war against Iraq was, to a large extent – and no other power is strong enough to be able to use the UN and NATO banners as its own. Indeed that is the reason why there has been no military intervention, and may well yet be none: the intervention will not give any big power a colony, or a sphere of influence, that it did not have before. From a capitalist point of view, it will have no advantage beyond stabilising the region for normal business, and they may have great difficulties even doing that.
That is why the governments so eager to send troops and weapons to the aid of “poor little Kuwait” are so cautious about Bosnia.
To be sure, the Western powers would probably be happy to kick Slobodan Milosevic and the Serbian neo-Stalinists into history’s abyss, and that might give some of them an added reason to intervene. But even a big war on Serbia might not do that, as Saddam Hussein could tell them.
Their main interest if they intervene will be to secure peace on the European Community’s borders and ‘stability’ in Europe.
Absurd too is the idea that Western capital – in the first place German capital – needs military occupation to secure its domination in the former Eastern European Stalinist states. It has no such need.
The normal workings of the market – the sheer economic power of the West Europeans – make their domination in the East a certainty in the years to come – unless the working class should take power there. Right now the working class is in no condition to take power. Military intervention will just add to their costs, not facilitate West European capitalist penetration of the former Russian Empire.
If US and West European capital tries to play the international policeman on the EC’s borders, we should counterpose to it something better. What exists in Yugoslavia now is worse. We are against the existing capitalist states, but we do not want to replace them with something worse: chaos is a lot worse.
The best outcome from the Yugoslav chaos would be for the working class in the various conflicting peoples to come together, settle accounts with their own chauvinists and tin-pot imperialists and restore a federation, this time under the control of the workers.
Short of that, socialists should want an end to the bloodshed and chaos. We have no confidence in the big capitalist powers and do not call on them to intervene: but if the West does intervene socialists can not side with Serbia and become “defencists” for Greater Serb imperialism.
Socialists should not declare, explicitly or implicitly, that the best thing is for the Yugoslav conflict to take its course with the strongest coming out at the end on top of the bloody pile.
Those socialists who adopt this posture because they want to be “anti-imperialists” will prove in their own way the basic truth that there is no consistently revolutionary politics without thought, clarity and Marxist theory. It will unfortunately, be a negative proof. This “anti-imperialism” is not anti-imperialism at all but support for the weaker and more primitive imperialism – Serbian imperialism!
Footnote, 1999
1. It was, in fact, probably considerably less than that.
Steve Crawshaw in today’s Independent, here.
Bradford TUC call on music festival to withdraw invitation to Gilad Atzmon
Engage reports:
Hope Not Hate and Bradford TUC have now called for the organisers of Raise Your Banners to withdraw the invitation to Gilad Atzmon.
Nick Lowles writes :
Bradford TUC is joining up with the HOPE not hate campaign in calling on the Bradford-based Raise Your Banners organisation to withdraw its invitation to Gilad Atzmon who is due to perform at one of its events on 25 November.
Gilad Atzmon is an antisemite and flirts with Holocaust Denial and Holocaust Deniers. He was born in Israel but now lives in the UK and is a jazz musician.
This is just one of his many offensive comments about the Holocaust.
“When I was young and naïve I was also convinced that what they told us about our ‘collective’ Jewish past really happened. I believed it all, the Kingdom of David, Massada, and then the Holocaust: the soap, the lampshade, the death march, the six million.
As it happened, it took me many years to understand that the Holocaust, the core belief of the contemporary Jewish faith, was not at all an historical narrative for historical narratives do not need the protection of the law and politicians.”
“It took me many years to accept that the Holocaust narrative, in its current form, doesn’t make any historical sense. Here is just one little anecdote to elaborate on:
“If, for instance, the Nazis wanted the Jews out of their Reich (Judenrein – free of Jews), or even dead, as the Zionist narrative insists, how come they marched hundreds of thousands of them back into the Reich at the end of the war?”
“I am left puzzled here; if the Nazis ran a death factory in Auschwitz-Birkenau, why would the Jewish prisoners join them at the end of the war? Why didn’t the Jews wait for their Red liberators?”
Atzmon is also implicated in the distribution of the Holocaust denier Paul Eisner’s book ‘The Holocaust Wars which he has described as a ‘great text’. This great text is notorious for its defence and espousal of amongst others Ernst Zundel, the convicted Holocaust denier. He has also been linked with Israel Shamir, another Holocaust denier, who has links to many white supremacist and Nazi groups. Indeed when Eisner’s document was originally posted it was on Shamir’s website, Atzmon described Shamir as a ‘unique and advanced thinker’.
We believe that Atzmon should be shunned by all decent people – just as we would shun David Irving and Nick Griffin. Just because Atzmon is Jewish does not mean that he cannot be either antisemitic or deny the Holocaust.
Bradford TUC voted unanimously to denounce Atzmon and his invitation to perform at the Raise Your Banners event. The TUC has written to the organisers in the hope that they will withdraw the invitation. Paul Meszaros, of Bradford TUC and HOPE not hate Yorkshire, said: “There is no way that Atzmon should play. The evidence against him is overwhelming.
“We are appalled at this decision and believe that this is a serious point of principle. Bradford TUC has long been at the fore of the anti-fascist movement in the area and it is in this tradition that we demand the withdrawal of Atzmon’s invitation.”
A call to action from Bob From Brockley.
Above: a sick man promotes his sick book
Monbiot nails the genocide deniers
George Monbiot had an important article in yesterday’s Graun: important, not so much because of what it said (which is not new), but because of who was saying it and where he was saying it. Monbiot is a respected figure in what can broadly be described as Chomskyite/ Gallowayite/Grauniad (CGG) circles. He’s not a Trot or any kind of Marxist, which (regretably) adds to his credibility in such circles. He was even a supporter of ‘Respect’ for a while, before seeing through Galloway.
So when Monbiot makes a pronouncement, particlarly on a subject close to the collective heart of the CGG crowd, it carries weight. When he challenges one of their shibboleths (as he did a while back over nuclear energy), it gets them thinking in the way that a piece, however well argued, from a source (like us at Shiraz) they don’t like, wouldn’t. Now I’m not for a moment arguing that all the CGG crowd are consistent genocide deniers. Denial of the Rwanadan genocide of up to a million Tutsis by Hutu forces is relatively rare, at least amongst apparently sane people. Not so, though, denial (or semi-denial) of the Bosnian genocide and, in particular, the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica where reliable research suggests over 8,000 Muslim men and boys were murdered by Serb sorces; denial of this intended genocide (and actual mass-murder) is commonplace on sections of the CGG “left”, in part because of the fact that the Stalinists, the SWP and the anti-war movement at the time deliberately played down the criminality of the Serb leadership and/or tried to shift the blame onto the ‘West.’ But even more important is the fact that Noam Chomsky – a revered figure in CGG circles – has effectively endorsed this revisionism.
So Monbiot’s article taking the big stick to Chomsky and his co-thinkers Edward Herman, David Peterson, John Pilger and the Media Lens crowd, is to be welcomed. The earlier part of the article concentrates on Monbiot’s old betes noir, the Living Marxism/ LM/ Spiked Online axis , but they are much less influential on the left, being widely recognised as a bunch of right ring ‘libertarian’ loons. So it’s the attack on Chomsky and his chums that is most important here, and Monbiot does a first class demolition job:
…But genocide denial is just as embarrassing to the
left as it is to the libertarian right. Last week Edward Herman, an American
professor of finance best known for co-authoring Manufacturing Consent with Noam
Chomsky, published a new book called The Srebrenica
Massacre. It claims that the 8,000 deaths at Srebrenica are “an
unsupportable exaggeration. The true figure may be closer to 800.”
Like Karadzic, the book claims that the market massacres in Sarajevo were
carried out by Bosnian Muslim provocateurs. It maintains that the Serb forces’
reburial of Bosnian corpses is “implausible and lack[s] any evidential support”
(an astonishing statement in view of the ICMP’s findings). It insists that the
witnesses to the killings are “not credible” and suggests that the Bosnian
Muslim soldiers retreated from Srebrenica to ensure that more Bosnians were
killed, in order to provoke US intervention.
These are not the first such claims that Herman has made. Last year, with
David Peterson, he published a book called The Politics of Genocide. Mis-citing
a tribunal judgment, he maintains that the Serb forces “incontestably had not
killed any but ‘Bosnian Muslim men of military age’.” Worse still, he places the
Rwandan genocide in inverted commas throughout the text and maintains that “the
great majority of deaths were Hutu, with some estimates as high as two million”,
and that the story of 800,000 “largely Tutsi deaths” caused by genocide “appears
to have no basis in any facts”. It’s as straightforward an instance of
revisionism as I’ve ever seen, comparable in this case only to the claims of the
genocidaires themselves.
But here’s where it gets really weird. The cover
carries the following endorsement by John Pilger. “In this brilliant exposé of
great power’s lethal industry of lies, Edward Herman and David Peterson defend
the right of us all to a truthful historical memory.” The foreword was written
by Noam Chomsky. He doesn’t mention the specific claims the book makes, but the
fact that he wrote it surely looks like an endorsement of the contents. The
leftwing website Media Lens maintained that Herman and Peterson were “perfectly
entitled” to talk down the numbers killed at Srebrenica. What makes this all the
more remarkable is that Media Lens has
waged a long and fierce campaign against Iraq Body Count for underestimating
the number killed in that country.
Why is this happening? Both the LM network and Herman’s supporters oppose
western intervention in the affairs of other nations. Herman rightly maintains
that far more attention is paid to atrocities committed by US enemies than to
those committed by the US and its allies. But both groups then take the
unwarranted step of belittling the acts of genocide committed by opponents of
the western powers.
The rest of us should stand up for the victims, whoever they are, and
confront those trying to make them disappear.
The complete article, fully referenced, can be read here
The same article, as published by the Graun / CIF is here, and worth looking at if only for some of the hysterical comments that follow.
An even better article: Michael Deibert says Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Arundhati Roy and other revisionists should apologise.
