History is Made at Night noted someone who tweeted that the Wikileaks revelations would prove that geopolitics is not in fact determined by the Bilderberg Group, Masonic conspiracies or the Israel lobby, but in fact confirms the boring old Marxist materialist theory of history (except it was said wittily in 140 characters). For example, Wikileaks shows that it is the Arab oil lobby, not the neocon/Israel axis, pushing military aggression against Iran – small-imperialist power politics, not Jewish conspiracy.
(Doug Henwood made a similar points here: “revelations like these are further proof that the conspiracist view of history, in which a secret cabal plans everything and everyone else is just an ignorant dupe, is wrong.”)
Then almost immediately, History is Made… told me, he turned to Indymedia to find it full of claims that Wikileaks is a Mossad/CIA false flag operation to deflect us away from the real conspiracies…
As far as I can tell, the meme has been promoted by the Wayne Madsden Report, and then taken up by Pakistan Daily:
WMR has learned from Asian intelligence sources that there is a strong belief in some Asian countries, particularly China and Thailand, that the website Wikileaks, which purports to publish classified and sensitive documents while guaranteeing anonymity to the providers, is linked to U.S. cyber-warfare and computer espionage operations, as well as to Mossad’s own cyber-warfare activities…
In China, Wikileaks is suspected of having Mossad connections. It is pointed out that its first “leak” was from an Al Shabbab “insider” in Somalia. Al Shabbab is the Muslim insurgent group that the neocons have linked to “Al Qaeda.”… Our sources in Asia believe that Wikileaks ran afoul of their CIA paymasters after it was discovered that some of Wikileaks’s “take” was being diverted to Mossad instead of to their benefactors at Langley.
There are strong suspicions that Wikileaks is yet another Soros-funded “false flag” operation on the left side of the political spectrum. WMR has learned that after former Senator Norm Coleman (R-MN) decided to oppose Soros’s choice of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s deputy Mark Malloch Brown as President of the World Bank, succedding the disgraced Paul Wolfowitz, Soros put the Wikileaks operation into high gear. “Daniel Schmitt” hacked into Coleman’s supporters list, stealing credit card info, addresses, and publishing the “take” on Wikileaks. Democrat Al Franken, who was strongly backed by Soros, defeated Coleman in a legally-contested and very close election…
It is also believed by informed sources that Soros is behind the operation to move Wikileaks to Iceland… Iceland is classic prey for Soros. The Icelandic krona has been decimated as a currency and has no where to go but up in value, especially if the British pound and the euro depreciate. Soros is currently talking down the euro, planning its fall and shorting it, just like he did versus the pound in London in the 1980s. After the UK’s and Europe’s currencies are devalued, Soros will buy every euro note in sight, thus making trillions.
Soros and his Wikileaks friends have in Iceland a practically unregulated banking system desperate for an influx of capital — money that will come from the exiled Russian tycoons in Israel, London and the United States. Israeli investors like Bank Leumi, and awash in siphoned-off Bernard Madoff cash, will do their bit for this smash-and-grab operation by Soros’s Quantum-linked hedge funds.
This text, full of postmodern re-workings of images drawn from the deep well of antisemitic stereotype, has circulated widely on Indymedia, e.g. on Indymedia UK here and here, Indymedia NL here, Indymedia Ottawa here, and so on. Mossad as the personification of secret Jewish power; Soros and Madoff and shadowy “Israeli investors” as the personification of evil finance cpaital; the healthy real European economies preyed on by unnatural financiers; and “the neocons” as a malevolent cabal of Jewish string-pullers. Why, Doug Henwood asks, “are the evil financiers almost always Jews?”
Once again, as Shift noted some time ago, “Sadly, Indymedia offers a platform to invent caricatures of the Israeli state and of its policies. Instead of recognising the political context, it helps to perpetuate an image of Israel, and of Jews, as sinister conspirators with a secret plan to turn the world into one massive settlement.”
Also see: Digital Journal: 9/11 skeptics on Julian Assage; Media Matters: Glenn Beck, Soros and the economic meltdown; Chip Berlet’s guide to anti-Jewish conspiracy theories; Datacide on crisis and continuity in the 9/11 denial movement.
Two things to read:
Kellie Strom on “anti-imperialism”, taking as a point of departure Judith Butler on the Berlin Christopher Street Day Parade, but moving on to “anti-imperialism” in general. Continue Reading »
AWL. The identification of global capitalist power with the Jews and Britain goes back before the Nazis to sections of the British left at the time of the Boer war — when they condemned as a “Jewish war” — and to the Populist movement in the USA in the late 19th century.
Moishe Postone: Yes, and it’s coming back in the United States now. The so-called “tea parties”, the so-called right-wing grass-roots fury about the financial crisis, have definite anti-semitic overtones.
Source: Postone interviewed by Martin Thomas of the Alliance for Workers Liberty (linked to here)
Back in 2004, Anne Summers writing at Engage noted that
Connoisseurs of déjà vu will be impressed by Claire Hirshfield’s article ‘The Anglo-Boer War and the Issue of Jewish Culpability’, published in the Journal of Contemporary History as long ago as 1980.
That war, which saw the first concentration camps set up by the British military to keep Boer villagers, mainly women and children, from supporting their own soldiers and guerillas between 1899 and 1902, was widely opposed within left and liberal circles in Britain. There was justified suspicion that a specious pretext had been found for invading the Boer republics, in which the British government, Transvaal mineowners, Cecil Rhodes and others were implicated.
However, the ugly side of ‘pro-Boer’ agitation was its stress on the involvement of Jewish settlers in South Africa.
I recalled this when noting Judeosphere’s post, which contains a large extract from another Hirshfeld article and is well worth reading for that extract.
Here are some extracts from the Journal of Contemporary History article:
Continue Reading »
An interview with Postone by the Alliance for Workers Liberty.
(More related material from the AWL here. Links to more Postone resources here.)
Some of these are more scholarly than others:
- Bernd Sommer “Anti-capitalism in the name of ethno-nationalism: ideological shifts on the German extreme right” Patterns of Prejudice, Volume 42, Number 3, July 2008 , pp. 305-316(12). Abstract: “Sommer examines the (re-)emergence of anti-capitalist and anti-globalization themes within the ideology and discourses of the German extreme right. He argues that it would be short-sighted to interpret this development simply as another opportunistic attempt by the extreme right to incorporate Zeitgeist issues into its political agenda in order to appeal to a broader spectrum of supporters. An analysis of the latest campaigns of the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD)—the most successful extreme-right party in recent years—as well as the activities of groups that exist within the larger German extreme-right milieu, the so-called freie Kameradschaften, reveals that the taking up of social questions as well as anti-capitalist and anti-globalization themes marks a deeper shift within the political agenda of the extreme right in Germany. However, the analysis shows that racist and antisemitic issues do not disappear with this shift, but are linked with and incorporated into anti-capitalist and anti-globalization discourses.”
- Werner Bonefeld, Kosmas Psychopedis Human dignity: social autonomy and the critique of capitalism (Chapter by Bonefeld: “Nationalism and AntiSemitism in Anti-Globalization Perspective” – a Marxist analysis of the issue). See also Werner Bonefeld and Sergio Tischler “What is to be Done? Leninism, anti-Leninist Marxism and the Question of Revolution today“. See also Bonefeld, W. (1997), ‘Notes on Anti-Semitism’, Common Sense, no.21, pp. 60–76. Bonefeld, W. (2000), ‘The Spectre of Globalization’, in Bonefeld, W. and K. Psychopedis (eds), The Politics of Change, Palgrave, London. Bonefeld, W. and J. Holloway (1996), ‘Conclusion: Money and Class Struggle’, in Bonefeld, W. and J. Holloway (eds), Global Capital, National State and the Politics of Money, Palgrave, London.
- Andrei S. Markovits “European Anti-Americanism (and Anti-Semitism): Ever Present Though Always Denied“. Extract: “It is by dint of America’s proximity to Israel that the latter has become such a bogeyman to the anti-globalization movement. We were all witnesses to that ugly – but telling – political theater by demonstrators at the Davos meeting in 2003 when one person sported a Donald Rumsfeld mask and a yellow Jewish star of David (the kind the Nazis made the Jews wear everywhere in German-occupied Europe) with the word “sheriff” on it. His companion was dressed like a cudgel-wielding Ariel Sharon. They and their colleagues danced around a golden calf embodying money and wealth. And surely most, if not all, of the anti-globalist protesters in that scene viewed themselves as leftists, not as rightist. Similar openly anti-Semitic iconography was commonplace at anti-globalist meetings in Porto Alegre and Durban among others.”
- Josef Joffe “Nations We Love to Hate: Israel, America and the New Antisemitism” The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism. Extract: On Jose Bove: “So here was a spokesman of the anti-globalization movement who was conflating globalization with Americanization and extending his loathing of both to Israel.”
- Antiglobalism’s Jewish Problem, by Mark Strauss Foreign Policy 2003. Abstract: “Anti-Semitism is again on the rise. Why now? Blame the backlash against globalization. As public fears grow over lost jobs, shaky economies, and political and social upheaval, the far right and extreme left are seeking solace in conspiracy theories. Modern anxieties are merging with old hatreds and the myths on which they rest.”
- Mark Weitzman “MAGICAL LOGIC: GLOBALIZATION, CONSPIRACY THEORY, AND THE SHOAH” Simon Wiesenthal Center. Extract: “I have used Duke’s writings to sketch out some of the newer themes that have become part of the current far-right discourse. These motifs, such as the emergence of anti-globalization or ecology were often seen as part of the left or liberal agenda. They have been reworked to fit into right wing extremist discourse, retooled by giving them an antisemitic cast.” (p.1)
- Robert Wistrich European Antisemitism Reinvents Itself, American Jewish Committee 2005. Extract: “[In Germany,] Israel-bashing emerged as a highly popular mass spectator sport and as a point of convergence between far-right and left-wing anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. It enabled “pacifist” antiglobalists from the far right and left to embrace Osama bin Laden and the radical Islamists as part of a coming “anti-Zionist” and anti-American revolution.” (p.25)
Event in London, UK, on Sunday 24 January, connecting the struggles of refugees and asylum-seekers in the UK, Israel, Palestine and elsewhere. Details here.
Over the years, there have been a series of scandals and controversies over the relationship between the French “ultra-left” and what is in France known as “negationism”. The “ultra-gauche” in France, defined by Wikipedia as “a branch of left communism descending from people such as Amadeo Bordiga, Otto Rühle, Anton Pannekoek, Herman Gorter, and Paul Mattick, and continuing to present day writers such as Jacques Camatte and Gilles Dauvé (also known as Jean Barrot)”, is a heterogeneous and contentious movement.
Some of its grouplets, such as La Vielle Taupe (The Old Mole, led by Pierre Guillaume) and La Guerre Sociale (led by Dominique Blanc), were closely involved in Holocaust revisionism or negationism in the 1970s and 1980s. Their activities included the publication of some of the works of now notorious Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson. (Noam Chomsky’s involvement in this affair, documented here and here, has been another source of controversy, but that’s another story…)
This scandal has recently flaired up again in one of the corners of the libertarian communist and anarchist web, with the publication of an English translation of a 2001 article by Didier Daeninckx amplifying some of the allegations, specifically against Gilles Dauvé. AGT has details of this, and a large amount of background material for those interested in the intersection between the ultra-left and negationism.
AGT also notes some problematic texts written by Dauvé (including under the pseudonym Jean Barrot), such as “Fascism/Anti-Fascism” and “The perplexities of the Middle Eastern conflict” (the latter just added to the Libcom archive), as well as Amadeo Bordiga’s “Auschwitz ou le grand alibi” (“Auschwitz or the great alibi”, 1960), published by French ultra-leftists. These texts cannot be described, in Deborah Lipstadt’s terms, as “hardcore” Holocaust revisionism. However, they arguably do constitute a form of “softcore” denialism. Crucially, the “critique” of anti-fascism developed by Dauvé and Bordiga has been taken up by a number of small far right groups who fish in the murky waters of anti-authoritarian “anti-Zionism”, such as those around Pacifica Forum and Palestine Think Tank.
Two posts from the blog The Deliverators relevant to our subject:
Extract:
So what is needed then is a new style of opposition to the status quo in Israel and the Palestinian Occupied Territories. I think that Zizek handles this issue well, pointing out that a revolutionary project must ultimately be about busting through the boundaries of the possible and making the impossible a reality. For this reason I believe that the only revolutionary policy would be a single state policy. Well, in honesty I believe that the only solution is a No State Solution, but we’re talking turkey here: the only hope for a broad, radical/revolutionary alternative to the brutality of both Israel and its enemies (and I am happy to draw moral equivalence between them all), and the only meaningful vision to oppose the various two-state stumbling blocks is a One State Solution. Imagine a single multiethnic, secular, socialist republic, Israel-Palestine, built on the common ground shared by Jews and Palestinians: the fact that nobody else wants them. This has been done at least once before, in North America, and its result was profoundly revolutionary. Now that the American experiment has run well past its sell-by date, Israel-Palestine would offer a place to launch a new project in human liberty, an opportunity for a realignment of the values of the world.
Extract:
Being called a racist or an anti-Semite can come as a bit of a shock, because we’ve learned never to associate it with ourselves, but only to those we can clearly define as racists (i.e. the Klan, or the Third Reich, and so on and so on). If you’re a revolutionary communist, say, who is ostensibly at war with capitalism and racism and so on, you can’t, in your own mind, possibly be a racist. And then, if you view anyone outside your political system as racist, “everyone who is not a revolutionary communist is a racist,” well…
You’re saying this zone of self-critique is basically over. The response is never (Coates sort of put it like this) “well, maybe you have a point, my bad.” It’s “how dare you call me a racist” or “maybe you’re the racist.” The second part is this weasel justification, “we’re not homophobic, we’re just defending ourselves against the gay agenda.” It’s not “we dislike the Jews,” when the synagogue gets smashed up, it’s about Zionism, it’s about the injustice that justifies the dislike.
The blog Anti-German Translation has a strand called “critique and theory“. Here are some of the links in it, which might help towards the “new style of opposition” called for in the extract above: New from Anarchist Federation: Against Nationalism. Postone v Debord. Zizek quotes Postone [via PD]. Claussen on Adorno. On Karl Korsch. Noam Chomsky and genocidal causality. ‘Productive’ and ‘unproductive’ labour. New Moishe Postone. Why anarchists should not attack banks. In Praise of Usura.
