October 20th, 2010 | admin
Nov. 11, 2010. London.
By the Wine and Cheese Appreciation Society.
The worker’s movement usually considered antisemitism to be the socialism of the fool or a shortened critique of capitalism. On the contrary, we hold that antisemitism is a critique from a nationalist point of view. Antisemitism therefore is not “too short”, but is at odds with a reasonable critique of capitalist social relations.
Antisemites blame Jews for phenomena they consider to be destructive. For instance, they hold that national policies were not made in the service of the citizens, but bent according to “the Jewish will”. With respect to the economy, especially in finance, Jews are denounced with profiteering more than others and doing so without “honest labour” – again to the detriment of everyone else. Furthermore, Jews are accused of dominating culture with “their money” and seducing people into disregarding proper art in favour of “superficial art”.
We want to discuss how these accusations relate to the capitalist world organised in nation states. We want to show that antisemitism is not half a critique, but an ideology hostile towards the abolition of exploitation and domination.
October 11th, 2010 | admin
From The Platypus Review, No. 28, October 2010.
This text was written collaboratively and originally published by the anti-Deutsch group, Initiative Sozialistisches Forum (Socialist Initiative Forum) as “Der Kommunismus und Israel” in the collection Furchtbare Antisemiten, ehrbare Antizionisten. Über Israel und die linksdeutsche Ideologie, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, 2002. Translated and reprinted with permission of the authors.
COMMUNISM, ACCORDING TO MARX, is the “riddle of history solved.” The riddle consists in the fact that the division of the human race into those who dominate and those being dominated, exploiters and exploited, has been exacerbated to such an extent that, caught between complete reification, on the one hand, and the transition to the “association of free individuals,” on the other, revolution seems imminent even as it recedes ever farther into the distance. Marxists of all persuasions, instead of denouncing the riddle in its tragedy, instead of submitting it to critique, persist in rationalizing it and as such are complicit in its ideological distortion.
Israel is the Schibboleth of the yet-so-close revolution, the uncomprehended shadow of its failure. It is the Menetekel that involuntarily both illustrates the minimal categorical conditions of communism while simultaneously demonstrating the beastliness of which the bourgeois national state is capable. Those who have failed to grasp the hatred against this state—embodied in anti-Zionism and antisemitism, both of which harbor a will to eliminate those who live there as well as the Jews who live in scattered cosmopolitanism around the world—have not understood the essence of antisemitism: the unconditional hatred of the idea of mankind living in free association. They fail to grasp communism as the riddle of history solved.
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[See all the Resources on anti-German tendency here]
October 2nd, 2010 | admin
“I’m telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart, and to imply that somehow they, the people in this country who are Jewish, are an oppressed minority? Yeah,” Sanchez responded. ["CNN fires host Rick Sanchez over controversial remarks"]
Listen to the interview here: http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20101001/bs_yblog_upshot/cnn-fires-host-rick-sanchez-over-controverial-remarks
September 13th, 2010 | admin
Below is the “Editorial Retraction and Self-Criticism” of Turning the Tide, the newspaper of Anti-Racist Action, and the statement by the Rose City Antifa, “Anti‐Semitic Sources in Turning the Tide.”
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September 2nd, 2010 | admin
Moishe Postone’s essay “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism” is now available as a pamphlet.
Hi, here are the relevant links:
http://www.principiadialectica.co.uk/blog/?p=1099
http://www.radicalbooks.co.uk/product/anti-semitism-and-national-socialism
National Socialism and Anti-Semitism in the Arab World
By Matthias Küntzel
Jewish Political Studies Review 17:1-2 (Spring 2005)
Anti-Semitism based on the notion of a Jewish world conspiracy is not rooted in Islamic tradition but, rather, in European ideological models. The decisive transfer of this ideology to the Muslim world took place between 1937 and 1945 under the impact of Nazi propaganda. Important to this process were the Arabic-language service broadcast by the German shortwave transmitter in Zeesen between 1939 and 1945, and the role of Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, who was the first to translate European anti-Semitism into an Islamic context. Although Islamism is an independent, anti-Semitic, antimodern mass movement, its main early promoters – the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Mufti and the Qassamites in Palestine – were supported financially and ideologically by agencies of the German National Socialist government.
Continue Reading Here…
From the Introduction:
These notes suggest that anti-Semitism is different from racism and that it has a direct relationship with ‘modernity’s’ attempt at reconciling it’s constituting contradiciton, that is the class antagonism between capital and labour. These notes go thus beyond a mere commentary on anti-Semitism: the issue is not just ‘anti-Semitism’ but, rather, the negative dialectic of enlightenment. in this way, the notes provide a critique of the ‘Enlightenment’ through the lens of ‘anti-Semitism.’ The argument, in short, is that anti-Semitism has to be seen as subsisting in and through the negative dialectic of Enlightenment. Without a critique of the Enlightenment, a study of anti-Semitism would merely allow a historical-sociological argument that already presupposes what it wants to show. It presupposes the ‘eternity’ of anti-Semitism regardless of historical circumstances and thus the changing mode of existence of anti-Semitism. In this way, anti-Semitism becomes to be seen as a fate to which one has to resign oneself, a fate that cannot be put into the museum of history.
Download the text here: “Notes on Antisemitism”. Bonefeld, Werner. Common Sense. 1997.
Guest post by Watching the Detectives
One of the more interesting aspects of Anti-semitism is how it often tries to hide itself. For example, some writers like to proclaim things taken directly from the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ while, at the same time, denying that they are Anti-semitic.
Infoshop.org, one of the most popular anarchist websites, has a different take on things: when comments by its registered readers argue that an article is Anti-semitic and it should be removed, the site instead deletes the ability to comment from the article altogether.
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From NY Times:
A senior Vatican priest, speaking before Pope Benedict XVI at a Good Friday service, compared the world’s outrage at sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church to the persecution of the Jews…
….
Last week, the center-left daily newspaper La Repubblica wrote , without attribution, that “certain Catholic circles” believed the criticism of the church stemmed from “a New York ‘Jewish lobby.”
An interview with Postone by the Alliance for Workers Liberty.
(More related material from the AWL here. Links to more Postone resources here.)
