Press Action ::: Fighting Fascism with Honesty

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Fighting Fascism with Honesty

By Jordy Cummings

My brother Daniel does this fantastic imitation of CNN anchor Aaron Brown, applying the specific joke, as such, to a variety of situations. Let us say, the two of us are stuck in traffic on some obscure highway, as we have been at not a few times.

“Would this bumper to bumper bouillabaisse BE the same …… if the terrorists did not strike us on nine eleven?” Or we are having a beer. “Would this glass of beer’s subtle yet not bitter flavor be the same...” and so forth. The other Aaron Brown cliché that he picks up is the trope of “I know I’m doing my job if I’m getting the same complaints from both sides.”

I have suggested that the American people could identify with this, because they do their jobs, and if they’re sharp, have the same complaint for both sides.

The first time I published on the “information superhighway” as an advocacy journalist was something I had written for a Pro-Palestinian list-serv. “Not in My Name Anymore” was a passionate and distinctly Jewish and anti-racist plea for solidarity with the Palestinians being murdered and ethnically cleansed by Likud-run Israel. Soon I saw it picked up on Counterpunch, Fellowship of Reconciliation and other sites to which I don’t approve at all. I will pick up on this point. I have always been inclusive to the point of parody in terms of asserting a Jewish identity in my writing, the reasons being three-fold.

The first is that I genuinely believe I developed my passionate and innate solidarity with Palestinians through the typically secular Jewish sense of siding with “the underdog.” There are multiple theological variations on this point, all leading many people of disconnected origin to intuit that the Anti-Imperial struggle of today is focused on Palestine. This is a deeply Jewish humanist point of view, indicating that the battle for the redemption of humanity is between those many who would hold exclusively knowledge, land or capital and those who would, as Rabbinic Judaism teaches though does not often practice, transform the world. These battles rage inside every system of belief, perhaps every human. I was transfixed when I later found that these points I had come to independently were intuited by Walter Benjamin nearly a century ago.

The second is that I believe that beyond having left wing writers who are known by last name or public knowledge as Jews, that is to say, Chomsky et. al, there is a need, just as we see Islam, Judaism and Christianity used in the name of reactionary politics, I believe there is a need to theologize left wing Judaism, as Zizek has recently done with Christianity, like the liberation theologians of Latin America, the Algerian revolutionaries of the 1950s, or for that matter, much of the Yiddishe Socialist Bunde of Jewish workers in Europe, pre-holocaust. I felt, thus that to identify not only with Judaism in passing but to centrally base my theory and argument—as I continue to do—on Jewish ethics. It has a powerful effect on fellow Jews, particularly those not normally inclined to adopt Pro-Palestinian beliefs.

Finally, it was to inoculate against my use by those actual Anti-Semites, Nazis and others who are piggy-backing the Palestinian issue into far-greater visibility and even sympathy and permissibility than in quite some time. Yet despite my status as a subhuman elder of Zion and adherent of a Satanic cult with family members that didn’t really exist, these folks have linked my work. It has been often on tiny websites, and there have been some in which I wrote to the hosts and explained that the holocaust did indeed happen, that they should stop relying on the Institute for Historical Review and other disgusting “Revisionists,” they understand my point, and even apologize to me.

Let me be clear. If you are sure that the holocaust didn’t happen, then you are either absolutely deluded, nuts or very susceptible to suggestion. What worries me, however, and I am not trying to sound like Chip Berlet, is with Israel being the central focus, to people, even in left communities in which there aren’t many Jews and Arabs (who have always warned against using Anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, reasoning rightly that it discredits the message,) that they actually, if not believe the stuff, believe that the people who espouse these views deserve to be “heard out.” After all, if everything we have been taught about our own history, capitalism and imperialism could be a lie, then couldn’t the holocaust?

So as much as I don’t worry about the single pimpled Nazi, I worry that, while the holocaust has been misused by Zionists and their neoconservative offshoots, that the North American left—paradoxically unlike the allegedly Anti-Semitic European left—has stopped talking about the fight against fascism. For me at least, the holocaust as much as everything else about the rise of Mussolini, Franco and Hitler, are historical benchmarks for which to understand “The most and least bloody century in history.” While true leftists will come across the holocaust, the Spanish Civil War and other episodes in left literature, and the comparison between Bush and Hitler is implicitly acknowledging the evils of Naziism, I actually am surprised at how many North American leftists have at least tacitly supported, by working with them, holocaust deniers.

One could say that you have nothing but abhorrence for their beliefs, but there are many people you disagree with, and these are the ones you agree with on other issues. That may be true. The entire mass media, in fact mass society, are “holocaust deniers” if they deny, even, the connection between modern capitalism and the spate of hurricanes, not to mention how the State Department is to the weather what Kissinger was to Suharto in the case of Haiti ... think about it.

But holocaust denial, at its core then, should be properly seen as the fulcrum AND, as Arrendt put it vis-à-vis Eichman, the “Banality” of our enemy, fascism and corporate capitalism. To deny the holocaust, to deny the North American holocaust of natives is all the same thing. One can complain—one should complain—that the Jewish holocaust is spoken of more often than other holocausts, but one cannot allow this sentiment to manifest itself further, even as Uncle Sam wastes its money on a state that claims to be acting for (but is repudiated by polls) Jews.

Back to the Aaron Brown motif. I recently wrote a piece for Press Action, regarding Zionist Authoritarianism. As always, I use a differentiation between mainstream Labor Zionists who hate Sharon and worry more about Hashomer Hatzair membership and factory conditions than they do Israel (though they sure are mute about it) and the “neo-zionist” right wingers who have attacked me, mimicked Kurt Nimmo, and other antics that may or may not have tacit approval from the state of Israel.

I was asked permission to use the piece by what looked like on its homepage some sort of New Age/Native American hippy/spiritualist website. Though I am a strong critic of the opium of New Age and Occult thinking, I made the mistake of allowing this site to pick up my piece. After all, it didn’t seem like an explicitly Nazi website that re-wrote my piece with “Jewish” replacing Zionism, and mail-bombed me at my request to take it down. So there I was like Aaron Brown, recently threatened by Zionist yahoos, and now threatened by Nazis. I must be doing something right if I am threatened by both sides.

A day or so later, I noticed that the link to my piece had on its right-hand side a bunch of holocaust denier as well as other “elders of zion” as well as anti-Masonic conspiracy theories. I wrote the webhost, Allen White Eagle, telling him that he could freely continue featuring my writing if he removed any links to these websites. If he wanted to help Palestinians, and truly bring “peace on earth” as he advertised, he would understand the truth. Like with many “on the fence” holocaust deniers, I encouraged him to read the works of Primo Levi and Theodor Adorno, specifically Adorno’s work on the theology of prejudice. And that is exactly what I got in return.

Part of me genuinely wanted to laugh at this guy’s response. It was sincere to the point of irony. He was simultaneously stating that he wasn’t AntiSemitic, but that if I didn’t believe his “facts” about the Illuminist Zionist Bolsheviks than I was an adherent of a Satanic Death Cult. It was mixing facts (Eichman did meet with Zionists; Jews were often communists) with absurd conclusions (only 200,000 Jews died, mostly communists—of course that’s a horrible thing, one death is horrible but the 6 million number has you duped.) So there you have it, I laughed, the multicultural, tolerant Nazi telling me he is not an AntiSemite. The irony of this phenomenon, the novelty of it should not overshadow, however, its danger.

The local left/anarchist movement recently disrupted and totally destroyed a meeting of Neo Nazis. Jews, Palestinians and others arm and arm, fight both Netanyahu and Nazis. That is the way it should be. In communities not so “really existing” multicultural, in which others are reified and tolerated at a distance, things are different and that worries me a great deal. As Naomi Klein put it a few years back, it is Sharon’s best weapon.

Jordy Cummings, editor of Pure Polemics, lives in Toronto and can be reached at yorgos33ca@yahoo.ca.

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