I currently blog politically/policywise at Obsidian Wings.
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Amygdala will move to an entirely new and far better blog template ASAP, aka RSN, aka incrementally/badly punctuated evolution.
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Above email address currently deprecated! Use gary underscore farber at yahoodotcom, pliz! Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a traitor since 2001!
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I've a long record in editorial work in book and magazine publishing, starting 1974, a variety of other work experience, but have been, since 2001, recurringly housebound with insanely painful sporadic and unpredictably variable gout and edema, and in the past, other ailments; the future? The Great Unknown: isn't it for all of us?
I'm currently house/cat-sitting, not on any government aid yet (or mostly ever), often in major chronic pain from gout and edema, which variably can leave me unable to walk, including just standing, but sometimes is better, and is freaking unpredictable at present; I also have major chronic depression and anxiety disorders; I'm currently supported mostly by your blog donations/subscriptions; you can help me. I prefer to spread out the load, and lessen it from the few who have been doing more than their fair share for too long.
Thanks for any understanding and support. I know it's difficult to understand. And things will change. They always change.
I'm sometimes available to some degree as a paid writer, editor, researcher, or proofreader. I'm sometimes available as a fill-in Guest Blogger at mid-to-high-traffic blogs that fit my knowledge set.
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"The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include With ease, and you beside"
-- Emily Dickinson
"We will pursue peace as if there is no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there is no peace."
-- Yitzhak Rabin
"I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be."
-- Alexander Hamilton
"The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport."
-- Barbara Jordan
"Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to
trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule --
and both commonly succeed, and are right."
-- H. L. Mencken
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt
"The only completely consistent people are the dead."
-- Aldous Huxley
"I have had my solutions for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."
-- Karl F. Gauss
"Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire,
the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind;
and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise
the improvements of social life."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his
expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were
respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom."
-- Edward Gibbon
"There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify
the evils, of the present times."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Our youth now loves luxuries. They have bad manners, contempt for authority.
They show disrespect for elders and they
love to chatter instead of exercise.
Children are now tyrants, not the servants, of their households. They
no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up their food, and tyrannize
their teachers."
-- Socrates
"Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments."
-- Sidney Hook
"Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness."
-- Sidney Hook
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.
We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect
disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest
and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized."
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
"Faced with the choice of all the land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without all the
land, we chose a Jewish state without all the land."
-- David Ben-Gurion
"...the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him
an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this
or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages
to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also
to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing,
with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess
and conform to it;[...] that the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion
and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty....
-- Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson
"We don't live just by ideas. Ideas are part of the mixture of customs and practices,
intuitions and instincts that make human life a conscious activity susceptible to
improvement or debasement. A radical idea may be healthy as a provocation;
a temperate idea may be stultifying. It depends on the circumstances. One of the most
tiresome arguments against ideas is that their 'tendency' is to some dire condition --
to totalitarianism, or to moral relativism, or to a war of all against all."
-- Louis Menand
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
-- Dante Alighieri
"He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers."
-- Henry B. Adams
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the
poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge."
-- Anatole France
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
-- Edmund Burke
"Education does not mean that we have become certified experts in business or mining or botany or journalism or epistemology;
it means that through the absorption of the moral, intellectual, and esthetic inheritance of the race we have come to
understand and control ourselves as well as the external world; that we have chosen the best as our associates both in spirit
and the flesh; that we have learned to add courtesy to culture, wisdom to knowledge, and forgiveness to understanding."
-- Will Durant
"Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is
but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest
winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?"
-- Herman Melville
"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"It is an error to suppose that books have no influence; it is a slow influence, like flowing water carving out a canyon,
but it tells more and more with every year; and no one can pass an hour a day in the society of sages and heroes without
being lifted up a notch or two by the company he has kept."
-- Will Durant
"When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music."
-- Louis Menand
"Sex is a continuum."
-- Gore Vidal
"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802.
"The sum of our religion is peace and unanimity, but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible,
and in many things leave one free to follow his own judgment, because there is great obscurity in many matters, and
man suffers from this almost congenital disease that he will not give in when once a controversy is started, and
after he is heated he regards as absolutely true that which he began to sponsor quite casually...."
-- Desiderius Erasmus
"Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule of what we are to read, and what we must disbelieve?"
-- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to N. G. Dufief, Philadelphia bookseller, 1814
"We are told that it is only people's objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort,
are 'objectively' aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true,
the 'objectively' line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore 'Trotskyism is Fascism'. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.
This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people's motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions."
-- George Orwell, "As I Please," Tribune, 8 December 1944
"Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? If 'needy' were a turn-on?"
-- "Aaron Altman," Broadcast News
"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
-- Lewis Thomas
"To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?"
-- Cicero
"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."
-- Samuel Johnson, Life Of Johnson
"Very well, what did my critics say in attacking my character? I must read out their affidavit, so to speak, as though they were my legal accusers: Socrates is guilty of criminal meddling, in that he inquires into things below the earth and in the sky, and makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger, and teaches others to follow his example."
-- Socrates, via Plato, The Republic
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"The term, then, is obviously a relative one; my pedantry is your scholarship, his reasonable accuracy, her irreducible minimum of education, & someone else's ignorance."
-- H. W. Fowler
"Rules exist for good reasons, and in any art form the beginner must learn them and understand what they are for, then follow them for quite a while. A visual artist, pianist, dancer, fiction writer, all beginning artists are in the same boat here: learn the rules, understand them, follow them. It's called an apprenticeship. A mediocre artist never stops following the rules, slavishly follows guidelines, and seldom rises above mediocrity. An accomplished artist internalizes the rules to the point where they don't have to be consciously considered. After you've put in the time it takes to learn to swim, you never stop to think: now I move my arm, kick, raise my head, breathe. You just do it. The accomplished artist knows what the rules mean, how to use them, dodge them, ignore them altogether, or break them. This may be a wholly unconscious process of assimilation, one never articulated, but it has taken place."
-- Kate Wilhelm
"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed."
-- Albert Einstein
"The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual."
-- Franz Kafka, Aphorisms
"All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
-- Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho
"First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you."
-- Nicholas Klein, May, 1919, to the Third Biennial Convention of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (misattributed to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 1914 & variants).
"Nothing would be done at all, if a man waited till he could do it so well, that no one could find fault with it."
-- Lecture IX, John Henry Cardinal Newman
“Nothing is more common than for men to think that because they are familiar with words they understand the ideas they stand for.”
-- John Henry Cardinal Newman
"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
-- James Madison
"Our credulity is a part of the imperfection of our natures. It is inherent in us to desire to generalize, when we ought, on the contrary, to guard ourselves very carefully from this tendency."
-- Napoleon I of France.
"The truth is, men are very hard to know, and yet, not to be deceived, we must judge them by their present actions, but for the present only."
-- Napoleon I of France.
"The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know."
-- On the subject of torture, in a letter to Louis Alexandre Berthier (11 November 1798), published in Correspondance Napoleon edited by Henri Plon (1861), Vol. V, No. 3606, p. 128
"All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible."
-- George Santayana, Dialogues in Limbo (1926)
"American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism."
-- George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States, (1920)
"If you should put even a little on a little, and should do this often, soon this too would become big."
-- Hesiod, Work And Days
"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
-- Eugene V. Debs
"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."
-- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
"All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written "al-Qaida," in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies."
-- Osama bin Laden
"Remember, Robin: evil is a pretty bad thing."
-- Batman
Gary Farber is now a licensed Quintuple Super-Sekrit Multi-dimensional Master Pundit.
He does not always refer to himself in the third person.
He is presently single.
The gefilte fish is dead. Donate via the donation button on the top left or I'll shoot this cutepanda. Don't you lovepandas?
Current Total # of Donations Since 2002: 1181
Subscribers to date at $5/month: 100 sign-ups; 91 cancellations; Total= 9
Supporter subscribers to date at $25/month: 16 sign-ups; 10 cancellation; Total= 6
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...writer[s] I find myself checking out repeatedly when I'm in the mood to play follow-the-links. They're not all people I agree with all the time, or even most of the time, but I've found them all to be thoughtful writers, and that's the important thing, or should be.
-- Tom Tomorrow
"Gary Farber is a gentleman, a scholar and one of the gems of the blogosphere."
-- Steve Hynd, Newshoggers.com
"Well argued, Gary. I hadn't seen anything that went into as much detail as I found in your blog."
-- Gareth Porter
Gary Farber is your one-man internet as always, with posts on every article there is.
-- Fafnir
Guessing that Gary is ignorant of anything that has ever been written down is, in my experience, unwise.
Just saying.
-- Hilzoy
I read Amygdala...with regularity, as do all sensible websurfers.
-- Jim Henley, Unqualified Offerings
Okay, he is annoying, but he still posts a lot of good stuff.
-- Avedon Carol, The Sideshow
Amygdala - So much stuff it reminds Unqualified Offerings that UO sometimes thinks of Gary Farber as "the liberal Instapundit." -- Jim Henley
...the thoughtful and highly intelligent Gary Farber... My first reaction was that I definitely need to appease Gary Farber of Amygdala, one of the geniuses of our age.
-- Brad deLong
Gary is a perceptive, intelligent, nice guy. Some of the stuff he comes up with is insightful, witty, and stimulating. And sometimes he manages to make me groan.
-- Charlie Stross
I bow before the shrillitudinousness of Gary Farber, who has been blogging like a fiend.
-- Ted Barlow, Crooked Timber
Favorite.... [...] ...all great stuff. [...] Gary Farber should never be without readers.
-- Ogged
I usually read you and Patrick several times a day, and I always get something from them. You've got great links, intellectually honest commentary, and a sense of humor. What's not to like?
-- Ted Barlow
One of my issues with many poli-blogs is the dickhead tone so many bloggers affect to express their sense of righteous indignation. Gary Farber's thoughtful leftie takes on the world stand in sharp contrast with the usual rhetorical bullying. Plus, he likes "Pogo," which clearly attests to his unassaultable good taste.
-- oakhaus.com
The only trouble with reading Amygdala is that it makes me feel like such a slacker. That Man Farber's a linking, posting, commenting machine, I tell you!
-- John Robinson, Sore Eyes
Jaysus. I saw him do something like this before, on a thread about Israel. It was pretty brutal. It's like watching one of those old WWF wrestlers grab an opponent's
face and grind away until the guy starts crying. I mean that in a nice & admiring way, you know.
-- Fontana Labs, Unfogged
We read you Gary Farber! We read you all the time! Its just that we are lazy with our blogroll. We are so very very lazy. We are always the last ones to the party but we always have snazzy bow ties.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber you are a genius of mad scientist proportions. I will bet there are like huge brains growin in jars all over your house.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber is the hardest working man in show blog business. He's like a young Gene Hackman blogging with his hair on fire, or something.
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Gary Farber only has two blogging modes: not at all, and 20 billion interesting posts a day [...] someone on the interweb whose opinions I can trust....
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Isn't Gary a cracking blogger, apropos of nothing in particular?
-- Alison Scott
Gary Farber takes me to task, in a way befitting the gentleman he is.
-- Stephen Green, Vodkapundit
My friend Gary Farber at Amygdala is the sort of liberal for whom I happily give three cheers. [...] Damned incisive blogging....
-- Midwest Conservative Journal
If I ever start a paper, Clueless writes the foreign affairs column, Layne handles the city beat, Welch has the roving-reporter job, Tom Tomorrow runs the comic section (which carries Treacher, of course). MediaMinded runs the slots - that's the type of editor I want as the last line of defense. InstantMan runs the edit page - and you can forget about your Ivins and Wills and Friedmans and Teepens on the edit page - it's all Blair, VodkaP, C. Johnson, Aspara, Farber, Galt, and a dozen other worthies, with Justin 'I am smoking in such a provocative fashion' Raimondo tossed in for balance and comic relief.
Who wouldn't buy that paper? Who wouldn't want to read it? Who wouldn't climb over their mother to be in it?
-- James Lileks
I do appreciate your role and the role of Amygdala as a pioneering effort in the integration of fanwriters with social conscience into the larger blogosphere of social conscience.
-- Lenny Bailes
Every single post in that part of Amygdala visible on my screen is either funny or bracing or important. Is it always like this? -- Natalie Solent
People I've known and still miss include Isaac Asimov, rich brown, Charles Burbee, F. M. "Buzz" Busby, Terry Carr, A. Vincent Clarke, Bob Doyle, George Alec Effinger, Abi Frost,
Bill & Sherry Fesselmeyer, George Flynn, John Milo "Mike" Ford. John Foyster, Mike Glicksohn, Jay Haldeman, Neith Hammond (Asenath Katrina Hammond)/DominEditrix , Chuch Harris, Mike Hinge, Lee Hoffman, Terry Hughes, Damon Knight, Ross Pavlac, Bruce Pelz, Elmer Perdue, Tom Perry,
Larry Propp, Bill Rotsler, Art Saha, Bob Shaw, Martin Smith, Harry Stubbs, Bob Tucker, Harry Warner, Jr., Jack Williamson, Walter A. Willis, Susan Wood, Kate Worley, and Roger Zelazny.
It's just a start, it only gets longer, many are unintentionally left out.
And She of whom I must write someday.
Figures released this month show that anti-Jewish attacks in Britain rose by 40 per cent last year, with teenagers beaten for wearing yarkmulkas, and swastikas carved into the side of synagogues. Some 24 per cent of British people, in a recent poll, agreed with statements like "Jews only care about their own kind" and "Jews have too much power in this country" - up from 18 per cent in 2002.
[...]
There is no other form of racism that would make decent progressive people equivocate. But how many of us hesitate before we call this hatred by its proper name? How many of us wonder - just for a moment - if perhaps this wave of hate is a legitimate response to the crimes committed by Ariel Sharon in the Occupied Territories? But wait. Does anybody think the global wave of hostility towards Muslims was a legitimate response to Bin Laden's crimes?
[...]
Why is this happening, and should we be worried? A few months ago I was talking to an old woman who survived Auschwitz. She said: "Growing up in Weimar Berlin, I used to laugh when I heard my grandparents ranting about anti-Semitism. I told them they were paranoid. Well, I wasn't laughing in the cattle trucks. I obviously don't think Britain is about to turn Nazi. But in Jewish terms, sixty years is nothing. Nothing. Sure, we're on top today - but how many times in history have the Jews been on top and thought we were safe, only to see it disappear in the blink of a gentile eye?" I must have looked sceptical because she quickly added: "Sure, we have the support of most Americans today. But power passes. The Pharoah looked very powerful once upon a time. American power will ebb away, and then what will my grandchildren be left with? At this rate, it will be a world that hates us more than ever."
And, yes, the debate about Israel is being infected with anti-Semitism. I passionately support the creation of a Palestinian state - and a real Palestinian state, not the string of Bantustans offered to Yasser Arafat in the summer of 2000. But why the constant rhetorical inflation of Israel's crimes to put them on a par with Nazi Germany? A recent poll found that 51 per cent of Germans believe "there is not much difference between what Israel is doing to the Palestinians and what the Nazis did to the Jews". In truth, more people died in one afternoon in Bergen-Belsen than have been killed in twenty years of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. That doesn't make the murder of single Palestinian justifiable - but it does make me question the motives of those who would draw the comparison. Is it suppressed guilt? Is the old Jewish saying - the gentiles will never forgive us for what we revealed about them in Auschwitz - true?
Israel is committing real and terrible crimes in the Occupied Territories - but it does seem that human rights abuses committed by Jews provoke far more rage across the world than human rights abuses committed by any other group. Over the past 15 years, Russia has slaughtered at least 300,000 people in Chechnya - 40,000 of them children. This is more than ten times the number of Muslims who have (unforgivably) been killed by Israel. Western governments mostly supported and excused the killing in Chechnya, and Russia is - like Israel - a semi-democracy. So where's the comparable outrage? Does anybody constantly demand that Russians condemn Vladimir Putin before they have a right to be protected from racism?
I am angry about both Chechnya and Palestine - but why do so many people get furious about one and ignore the other? Some of my friends in pro-Palestinian campaigns say it's because our government is intermeshed with Israel when it comes to diplomacy, geopolitics and arms sales, so we have more responsibility for what happens there - but is that enough to explain the disparity? Aren't those things also true of Russia?
[...]
In case you still doubt the rise of anti-Semitism, let me offer you a small anecdote that opened even my flabby eyelids. At a recent debate about Iraq, one person in the audience came up to me afterwards and said: "Your skullcap is slipping, Mr Hari." Now, as it happens, I'm not Jewish (although a few of my relatives are). I asked him is he realised he was an anti-Semite, and he replied indignantly: "Criticising Israel isn't anti-Semitic!" I replied: "I agree. I criticise Israel all the time. But how are you criticising Israel by talking about my non-existent skullcap? You didn't mention Israel once, and nor did the debate." He scowled:. "You Jews are so paranoid!" he declared, before storming off. Jews across Britain are experiencing moments like all the time now.
[...]
So let’s get this straight: Zionism was created by a desperate people – many of them still emaciated from the camps – fleeing genocide. It was not, of course, morally simple. The cruel reality is that there was not – as many diaspora Jews had dreamed – "a land without people for a people without land". There was only historical Palestine, which had many Arab inhabitants who loved their land and their homes. 700,000 of these totally innocent people were ethnically cleansed to create the new state, as Israel’s new historians like Benny Morris and Tom Segev have shown.
This was a bitter tragedy, and an injustice against the Palestinians that should have been put right by Israel in 1967 with the creation of a heavily-compensated Palestinian state on all of Gaza and the West Bank. Every day of occupation since then has been unforgiveable. But I fear that only somebody with a prejudice against Jews would act as though – in the circumstances of 1948, fleeing the most psychopathically murderous anti-Semitism – they were acting in a purely evil way, even though the impact on the Palestinians was horrible and undeserved. We need to constantly remember that the Jews are not in the Middle East out of malice or as part of a “colonial project”, but because they were driven there; too often, in our desire to rightly criticise contemporary Israeli crimes, we forget this, and we forget to show that there have always been consistent Israeli advocates of Palestinian self-determination free to operate and campaign within Israeli society.
The great leftist historian Isaac Deutscher described the Israel-Palestine situation with an analogy. He said a Jewish man had jumped from a burning building, and he landed on an Arab man, breaking his arms and legs. The natural response of the Arab is to blame the Jew – but in truth he should blame the arsonist and try, slowly, to physically recover alongside the Jew.
The Palestinians themselves can hardly be blamed for failing to see the situation this way. Is there anybody in the world who would happily surrender half their land to a dispossessed and stateless group? In this country, we begrudge even giving the most paltry benefits and a few run-down council houses to asylum seekers. Imagine how we would react if the Kurds claimed Cornwall for a free Kurdistan, or the Roma violently seized Devon, ethnically cleansed the inhabitants and tried to establish a state there.
But – although it is understandable for the Palestinians to respond with rage and incomprehension – what excuse do the rest of us have? Is it really just that we are angry on behalf of the Palestinians? I would like to think so – but why the myopia about other victim groups? I fear that our reaction to Jewish crimes shows a latent anti-Semitism, because it is so disproportionate to our response to other, even larger horrors. Yes, be angry about Israel - very angry - but in the context of objecting to all human rights abuses. To single out Israel for unique condemnation - rather than the simple, shared condemnation it deserves - is a worrying sign that Israel has inherited the pariah status once applied simply to the Jews as a people.
The problem with anti-Semitism isn't with Ken Livingstone, folks. It is all around us.
I've said everything said here many times, in various places, so it's pleasantly lazy of me to simply quote someone else making the same points.
(Let me cautiously say that it's a great pleasure to at least see some hope, again, at present, in Israel/Palestine.)
Read The Rest Scale: 2.5 out of 5.
But while I'm touching the area, let's look at this:
DRESDEN, Germany, Feb. 13 -- Several thousand neo-Nazis and skinheads marched through the heart of this meticulously restored city Sunday to protest its incendiary destruction by Allied forces 60 years ago, the biggest effort yet by fringe groups to portray Germans as equal victims of World War II.
The demonstration was among the largest gatherings of Nazi sympathizers in Germany since the end of the war and overshadowed Dresden's official commemoration of the city's virtual annihilation by British and U.S. bombers on Feb. 13 and 14, 1945.
[...]
Police estimated that 5,000 neo-Nazis and other extremists attended their rally, which began outside the parliament building for the east German state of Saxony and continued past the renovated Semper Opera building and over the Elbe River, which bisects Dresden. Most of the marchers wore black clothes and carried black balloons and banners as dark-sounding classical music blared over loudspeakers.
"Here in Dresden, genocide took place in 1945, just like it did in Hiroshima," said Franz Schoenhuber, a former Nazi SS officer from Munich and a longtime far-right politician. "We're not afraid to call them war crimes."
[...]
German officials are considering new restrictions on public protests by neo-Nazi groups, which are planning an even bigger turnout in Berlin in May to mark the 60th anniversary of the surrender of the Nazi government. In Berlin, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder issued a statement criticizing extremists for trying to minimize the Third Reich's responsibility for the war and for the Holocaust, during which an estimated 6 million Jews and several million others were killed.
"Today we grieve for the victims of war and the Nazi reign of terror in Dresden, in Germany and in Europe," Schroeder said. "We will oppose in every way these attempts to reinterpret history. We will not allow cause and effect to be reversed."
Nazi symbols and public denial of the Holocaust are prohibited by law in Germany. But the government has reported a substantial increase in the past two years in the number of hard-core Nazis and their sympathizers. The trend has been fueled partly by the highest unemployment rates in Germany since the 1940s, anti-foreigner sentiment and a general dissatisfaction with mainstream politics.
It's still the same old story, a fight with no love nor glory, a case of do or die; will the world ever welcome Jews, as time goes by?
Last September, the National Democrats, a far-right political party that attracts support from neo-Nazis, won more than 9 percent of the vote in Saxony, the eastern German state of which Dresden is the capital. Since then, they have forged an alliance with other groups in a bid to win representation in the federal parliament.
Emboldened by their electoral success, the National Democrats have courted controversy in recent weeks by arguing that the degree of German suffering during the end of World War II has been unfairly repressed or minimized. Last month, party leaders walked out of a ceremony marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, complaining that the Holocaust was being overemphasized at the expense of the bombing victims in Dresden.
What, me (us) worry?
Incidentally:
"There is a myth, the myth of the innocent Dresden," said Gerhard Besier, director of the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarian Research, a political think tank in Dresden that studies extremist groups. "People don't realize that the Nazis had been very strong in Dresden and in Saxony. They insist that the population of Dresden was innocent and was murdered, and that this bombing didn't make any sense."
That idea was emphasized for 40 years after the war by the East German government, which blamed Britain and the United States for attacking Dresden as part of a capitalist conspiracy to destroy parts of Germany that the Allies knew would fall under Soviet control. Besier noted that East Germany adopted terminology first used by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, who referred to the Dresden attacks as the "Anglo-American terror bombing."
Oliver Reinhard, a Dresden journalist who co-authored a history of the firebombings titled "The Red Glow," said such sentiments remain commonplace in Saxony.
"For a long time it was attractive to say that Dresden and its people were only victims," he said. "People still stand up and say, 'Let's face it: The Americans didn't bomb Dresden to hurt Hitler. They did it to hit and destroy all the big cities in the Soviet zone.' "
Certainly Hari is a good deal fairer-minded than most writers on the topic. And his anecdotal interlocutor is nasty indeed.
He still, however, neglects to consider what I think is a pretty compelling alternative explanation for the Israel-vs-everyone else double standard. Namely: nations in general are judged not against absolute standards of behavior but against the expectations they set for themselves. Israel not only claims to be a full-on liberal democracy (which Russia really does not), it claims to be the carrier of a special, noble, uplifting historical mission-- a "light unto the nations". The cruel irony of a nation founded as a refuge for wretched and oppressed people reducing another people to oppression and wretchedness arouses anger more than an old cynical despotism like Russia getting up to its usual tricks.
One argument for this alternative explanation is that America, like Israel, sets unusually high expectations for itself, and like Israel it is held to a much higher standard than everybody else.
recent conversation I had with someone who lives in my co-op in NYC: She's Jewish, while not particularly right-wing she would never march in a protest march (I know, because I asked her -- I was marching), and she said to me that she could never visit Germany. I asked why not, seeing as how everyone who actually made any decisions during that time is basically dead by now. She said that even the old people would have given her the willies, because they would have been alive when the Holocaust happened, and "they knew and did nothing."
I then asked her how she felt about Abu Graib. Boy did she change the subject quickly.
my view is you should clean your own house first before your complain about other people's.
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