Holocaust Hegemony
. . . and its moral pitfalls.
Sam Schulman
Last month, the Canadian journalist Richard Klagsbrun drew attention to a newly submitted Master's thesis at the University of Toronto's ed school: "The Victimhood of the Powerful: White Jews, Zionism and the Racism of Hegemonic Holocaust Education." Proud author Jennifer Peto told a reporter for the Canadian Jewish News that Canada's Jews push the Holocaust narrative because only "a victimized Jewish identity can produce certain effects that are beneficial to the organized Jewish community and the Israeli nation-state."
Of course there is nothing novel about Peto's view that Jews exploit the Holocaust, as can be seen in a casual rifle through past issues of the London Review of Books or the writings of left-wing scholars like Norman Finkelstein. The beauty of Peto's formulation is that it can be used without alteration both by Holocaust-affirmers (like Peto) and Holocaust-deniers: The Jewish Lobby has been deploying Holocaust history (whether faked or real matters not) only to obscure the Gestapo-style tactics used to oppress Palestinians. But the real genius of Peto's attack on Canadian Holocaust-educators is that it can produce the same effects as Holocaust-denial. The many admirers of the immediate object of her study — a long-established Holocaust-education tour of concentration camp sites in Europe — were hurt, shocked, and enraged.
Peto and her comrades in the anti-Zionist Israel-Apartheid movement don't really care whether Holocaust education is disinterested or not. Their aims are bolder: the bloody dissolution of the state of Israel, among all the countries of the world. Distracted by Peto's cruelty, the outraged defenders of the March of Remembrance and Hope pleaded (accurately) that their tour teaches "universal lessons of tolerance and empathy." But they neglected to refute the underlying claim of the anti-Zionist movement: that Israel as a state deserves to be annihilated and its citizens dispersed; that Jewish citizens of Western democracies are bad Jews and disloyal citizens (of America, or Canada, or Sweden) if they believe Israel ought to exist; and that they are good Jews and good citizens only as long as they regard Israel as malign and unconnected to themselves (I cannot claim credit for the elegant terms "good Jew" and "bad Jew" — I borrow them from Professor John Mearsheimer).
The sad truth is that a real "hegemon" needs followers — and, measured by its effects, Holocaust education has none. Jennifer Peto is dead wrong: Far from being the creation of sinister Jews who wanted to be regarded as victims rather than "white," Holocaust education was to be a gift from the Jewish community to the world at large. European Jewry was destroyed, but its legacy would be a redemptive technique that was intended to prevent future genocides of others. Kofi Annan described the ideal of Holocaust education perfectly last year in an op-ed: "a vital mechanism for teaching students to value democracy and human rights, and encouraging them to oppose racism and promote tolerance in their own societies." The former U.N. secretary-general confesses that he thought Holocaust education should have helped "to prevent future acts of genocide," but it has not: The op-ed murmurs the words Cambodia, the Congo, Bosnia, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, and Sudan. Annan proposes to look into "better teacher training."
The idea of Holocaust education really took off in 1993 with the opening of the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington. The notion is simple, and there is something ineffably '90s about the enterprise. Vice President Al Gore — an iconic '90s figure — explained how it was to work in a speech on the first anniversary of the museum's opening: "In order to prevent such an atrocity from ever happening again, those who care must tell the story." And that would be it. Give me a child, the Holocaust education movement said to the world, and after passing through my exhibits and taking one of my courses, I will give you back a woman like Samantha Power or a man like Warren Christopher or even Kofi Annan — a warrior against future genocides, or at least a person immunized forever against racism and the desire to murder thousands of civilians with a stroke of the pen.
The aim was lofty, and like so many ideas that germinated after the end of the Cold War, it seemed attractive because it didn't demand much effort or expense. In Britain, Tony Blair's government enthusiastically instituted a Holocaust Memorial Day in 2001. Remembering the Holocaust as a nation would, he said, "reaffirm the triumph of good" over evil. Home Secretary Jack Straw was confident that remembering the Holocaust suffered by the Jews would benefit all: "The universal lessons of the Holocaust make this commemoration day relevant to everyone in our society. We all have a shared responsibility to fight against discrimination and to help foster a truly multicultural Britain." Starting in the '90s, many European nations (France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and a dozen others) unhampered by common-law traditions of free speech began to do their bit on the punitive side, initiating laws that forbade Holocaust-denial.
Holocaust remembrance and education is one of those ideas which really has been tried. If students learn any history at all, it is the history of the Holocaust. Genocide Studies has become an academic specialty and a fundraising bonanza, with professional organizations and prizes. Great books have been written and beautiful museums have been built — all in the conviction that they will prevent the production of future mass murderers and their willing executioners. Of course, people are only human and thus have produced versions of Holocaust study that are vulgar, distorted, oversimplified, inhumane, and unintentionally comic and undignified. But even shallow and trashy expressions of "Holocaust awareness" are not lacking in genuine piety and concern, and share the belief that they are engaged in a virtuous struggle against hate.
The Jews and the state of Israel were not much of a concern for the movement's founders. It did not occur to anyone that anti-Semitism would reemerge, except among a few Holocaust-deniers. And as for Israel, its future was to be secured by the Oslo peace process, which was put on track by the same president who opened the U.S. Holocaust Museum in the same year of 1993, and shared some of the easy confidence of that decade.
The theory of Holocaust education, I think all except Jennifer Peto will agree, has been one of the great failures of our time. But it's important to know how it has failed — and even more, to understand that our sentimental attachment to Holocaust memorialization can fail us with greater consequence in the future, as can our sentimental horror at those villains who deny the reality of the Holocaust. What happened as we learned about the Holocaust? Generally, nothing at all. Those politicians who speechified at the Holocaust Museum in the '90s looked the other way, just as their predecessors in the 1930s did, as mass murders continued to take place. On the anti-Semitism front, the Maginot line of Holocaust education, human nature has not only refused to improve, but seems to have gotten worse. In one European country after another, observers — non-Jewish observers — remark levels of anti-Semitism unprecedented since 1945, despite Europe's generous application of the Holocaust-memorial carrots and Holocaust-denial sticks. Jewish populations in Sweden are leaving entire cities; the retired chief of Holland's major conservative party last month advised Jews who are "identifiably Jewish" to leave the country, because the Dutch state cannot protect them from anti-Semitic violence. It's not Holocaust-deniers who commit attacks on individual Jews in Dutch cities; far from it. The Amsterdammers who jostle and taunt Rabbi Raphael Evers on streetcars are well informed, shouting "Joden aan het gas" — Jews to the gas chambers.
Holocaust education may have done more than fail. It might also have produced an unintended, but measurable effect that is even worse. One thinks of the little girl who objected to being taught the Ten Commandments in Sunday School: "They don't tell me what I should do and they just give me ideas." The current generation of university students — Holocaust-educated from the nursery on — have been given ideas. And on campuses around the world, not just in Protestant Europe, it is fair to say that the more the current student generation have been taught about the evil of the Holocaust, the more Israel seems to them to resemble Nazi Germany rather than itself. Even if we resist the false suggestion that Israel is conducting a genocide of Palestinians, our Holocaust-instruction has left us all with an equally false notion: that Israel was created by Europeans in the Middle East in order to make amends to European Jews for a European Holocaust.
The falseness of this idea is not merely a matter of historical interest; it is false in a brilliantly focused way. Because in fact, quite apart from the unbroken continuity of Jewish life in Palestine since antiquity, and the recurring affirmation of the connection of the Diaspora to the land of Israel, the creation of Israel was an event that coincided with the creation of most of the modern states of the Middle East and Eastern Europe. The Jewish state in Palestine was created by those who fought and won the First World War, not the Second; and its raw material was the same as the raw material of the majority of the members of the EU and the Arab League: the broken territories of the great colonial powers, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. The beneficiaries of this impulse were to create new states for Arabs and Arabic speakers throughout the Ottoman empire, for South Slavs, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Lithuanians, Jews, Armenians, Kurds, Estonians, Latvians, Ukrainians. Israel's origin, then, is postcolonial, not imperialist. And those concerned with Israel's survival should properly be concerned with the survival as free democracies of other postcolonial states on the periphery of tyranny elsewhere, such as Lebanon, Georgia, Ukraine, and even Lithuania and Poland.
It is fun to make sport of the naïveté of Gore, Blair, and Annan. But we need to be just as hard on ourselves now when we think about our own proud but sentimental attachment to the idea of the Holocaust and its lessons for humanity. We need to be smarter than they were about the political and moral costs to our own interests as Americans and sustainers of liberal democracy. We're not.
Determined and skillful enemies of human freedom (and even Jewish existence) in Israel, in Eastern Europe, and elsewhere are making clever use of our fondness for clichés about the Holocaust and memory. Nor are these enemies of human freedom necessarily Holocaust-deniers or historical fabricators. They are simply playing on the historical anxieties of the Jews and other peoples who have emerged from a long history of religious or colonial domination.
Consider the postcolonial relations between Poland and its former Russian masters. Last month, the Russian Duma finally acknowledged Stalin's responsibility for the 1940 Katyn massacre, in which 22,000 Polish officers, priests, professors, and other notables were murdered by the secret police, the NKVD. That Katyn was a Communist party crime has never been in doubt. So why should the Poles care about what the Duma says now? The Duma passed the resolution out of a desire to get the better of Poland. A leading deputy told the Moscow Times: "We have said this many times before, and now [the Poles] wanted to hear it again from us." "In return," he added, "Polish public opinion about Russia should improve." And among modern Polish notables, so it did. Poland's leaders are now more willing to pay high prices to Russia's Gazprom for natural gas they could extract from their own shale reserves. Whether Polish conciliation of Russia's ambitions is a good thing or not is for the Poles to judge — but clearly Russia can manipulate Polish opinion by a trivial gesture about a great and grave crime. Putin — an alumnus of the KGB with institutional descent from the NKVD mass murderers — could see how eager the Poles were for this acknowledgment, and how little it would cost him to satisfy them. A great deal for Gazprom is worth a meaningless concession to "history."
Here is the plot: A tyrant with blood on his hands, interested in extending his power, makes an "okay" statement to an innocent about historical mass murder; innocent collapses in gratitude. Readers of Atlantic.com this summer saw such a mise-en-scène live-blogged from Havana. Our hero, the ingenuous Jeffrey Goldberg; the villain, unsportingly overmatching him, was Fidel Castro. Castro confessed, one gentleman to another, that the crude anti-Semitism of Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and the flamboyant Holocaust-denial of Iran's Ahmadinejad were rather embarrassing to a man of the world like himself. This was enough to win the heart of Goldberg, who quickly dialed Haaretz to tell them how impressed he was that Castro felt "genuinely offended" by Holocaust-denial (a generation after Castro had removed the burden of their businesses and other property from Cuba's own Jewish community).
Giddy with his discovery that Castro was salonfähig, Goldberg was willing to overlook a number of character faults far more consequential than Holocaust-denial to current Cuban dissidents, political prisoners, nonwhites, gays, and the rest of the long-suffering Cuban people. Castro's fellow dictators, however, could take the hint. The Boston Globe reported the results: "Chávez has tolerated and even promoted virulent anti-Semitism in Venezuela. But a day after Castro's condemnation of Ahmadinejad's anti-Semitism, Chávez said he would meet with Jewish community leaders and declared: 'We respect and love the Jewish people.' '' A couple of years ago, Chávez called Jews "Christ-killers"; a couple of months ago Chávez issued the threat that if he were to lose the next election, he would call out the army to keep himself in power. Can he really think that by making the proper noises to American journalists, he can count on many happy years of dictatorship? Alas, Chávez is not as stupid as he looks. He has found that affirming the historic truth of the Holocaust to the right naïf may be the price of sustaining a present-day dictator in power. And Goldberg is no more naïve than any number of supporters of liberal democracy.
How far can Holocaust attachment take us into the moral swamp? If Holocaust-consciousness can ever be described as a fetish, then we must nominate Rabbi Abraham Cooper as its Sacher-Masoch. In January 2010 the good rabbi issued this thundering press release from his office at the Simon Wiesenthal Center: "Dropping International Holocaust Memorial Day Would Be World's Final Insult to Survivors; Would Spur New Wave of Anti-Semitism." The idea that the Holocaust-denial barnacle controls the anti-Semitic aircraft carrier is absurd — but it's merely an extreme version of our attachment to the truth-value of the Holocaust. The result is that well-meaning liberals in the West have unintentionally given more power, not less, to Holocaust-deniers, sincere or cynical.
Of course Holocaust-denial is repellent. But how often is it sincere? Authentic Holocaust denial no doubt exists — and it is an excellent marker for anti-Semitism, madness, and really impressive bores. But consider a dangerous genocidaire-manqué like Ahmadinejad. His Holocaust-denial is too smart to be authentic. He understand that staging fetes for Western Holocaust deniers drives his enemies wild — and when his enemies are worrying about David Irving they are not thinking about how best to support Iranian student dissidents or to delay the deployment of his nuclear missiles.
The truth about the Holocaust and anti-Semitism is this: Most anti-Semites are perfectly well-informed about the actuality of the Holocaust; so are most people who believe that the time has come for the state of Israel to be eliminated. Most anti-Semites authentically regret the destruction of European Jewry; they are also likely to openly regret that those European Jews who escaped the Nazis by fleeing to Palestine were not murdered as well. Tell them that their loathing of Zionism is a symptom of true Jew-hatred, and they will be shocked and hurt but they will happily explain to you the likeness between the IDF and the Einsatzgruppen. Holocaust education, however well its teachers are trained, will never pry such people loose from their defects of character and judgment — or from their underlying feelings about Jews as individuals and fellow-citizens.
A last example of the unintentional destructiveness of Holocaust education hegemony. This fall, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder published a well-regarded and beautifully written book called Bloodlands, telling the story of the Hitler-Stalin collaboration in the destruction of Poland and a good many of its citizens, Jewish, Polish, Ukrainian, and other minorities. Most reviewers praised it — for revealing a new dimension of the Good War: that Stalin and Hitler worked together on many ghastly projects and their collaboration in barbarism was synergistic (I think informed readers will learn far more from a disregarded book published this year, Alexander V. Prusin's The Lands Between). Reviewers like Anne Applebaum foresaw the danger Snyder was tempting, and spent a lot of time explaining that Snyder was not equating the crimes of Stalin with the crimes of Hitler. But his reviewers didn't save him, and the poor fellow had to defend himself in Britain's Guardian on the charge of moral equivalence.
In the eyes of the Guardian leftists, Snyder is an unwitting abetter of the "double genocide"—the notion that Hitler's crimes were one genocide, and the crimes of Stalin, though different in many respects, were another. Communists and fellow travelers are passionate adherents of the notion that the Jewish Holocaust is nonpareil. So is Efraim Zuroff, an admirable Nazi-hunter in the Israeli branch of the Wiesenthal Center, who says that the notion that the "Communist crimes were just as terrible as those of the Nazis" would "unjustly rob the Shoah of its universally accepted uniqueness and historical significance." And so is Dovid Katz of the Litvak Studies Institute in Vilnius, who in the Tablet accuses those who call for a memorial of the European victims of communism, led by Vaclav Havel, of wanting to whitewash Nazi crimes and "delete the Holocaust." Katz, Zuroff, and other well-meaning Jews who are familiar with the sometimes unpleasant politics of present-day Lithuania, are enthusiastic warriors, along with the Russians, the Communists, and various Trotskyist factions, in the struggle against the two-genocide theory. The leader of the British Communist party, for one, is outraged that Havel's group asserts that "Lenin's definition of revolution meant that it must take power through armed violence, deny democratic principles, and commit crimes against fellow citizens." Think of it!
Consider again the former colonial power of Eastern Europe, Russia. Russia is now threatening a number of the small countries the USSR ruled by right of inheritance from the czar. It has waged hot war against Georgia, wars of assassination and intimidation against Ukraine, and threatens the internal politics of Poland, the Czech Republic, and the three Baltic states. All of them have dreadful historic memories of conquest and mass murder by successive waves of Russian and German imperial enterprises, first Czarist, then Wilhelmine, then Bolshevik, then Nazi. But the Russians are still around, and the left is renascent, in its latest postcolonial and postnationalist garb. Those who hold on to the uniqueness of the Holocaust and the Nazi "gold standard" of evil are unwittingly allying themselves with the hard-left activists who are leading the ideological war against Israel's existence and against the ability of democratic states to maintain their identity and protect their citizens. Nazis no longer threaten western democracy or Jewish existence — the danger lies elsewhere.
The left (which encompasses young Jennifer Peto and aging Communists) is entitled to its obsession with the Holocaust. As proud and programmatic minimizers of Communist mass murder, they should feign, if not feel, indignation at any attempt to compare the two savageries. This is not because they care about the Holocaust but because they want to put Socialism on the offensive again — in alliance with anti-Zionism when possible, with anti-Semitism if necessary, and, fervently, with any kind of anti-Americanism whatsoever, even to the extent of apologizing for terrorism. On the other hand, here are the rest of us, whose Holocaust education seems to have made so many uniquely gullible about the real enemies faced by Jews and liberal democracies today.
Sam Schulman wrote about the prosecution of Geert Wilders in our November 22 issue.
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Robert FAURISSON January 4, 2011
On Fred Leuchter
Michael Hoffman has recently sent me the new, enriched edition of the book he devoted in 1985 to Ernst Zündel's first big trial in Toronto that year. (The second big trial was to take place in 1988.) The present book bears the title The Great Holocaust Trial and the author dubs it the "twenty-fifth anniversary edition."
A few days ago, leafing through it to get an initial idea of the contents, I stopped short upon noticing, at pages 147-158, a text from 1992 by Fred Leuchter (the author of the famous "Leuchter Report" of 1988 on the alleged gas chambers of Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek, and author as well of other reports, published in 1989, on the alleged gas chambers of Dachau, Mauthausen, and Hartheim castle).
I retained a vivid memory of this piece which at the time I had found deeply moving and which in 2010, that is, eighteen years after its writing, appeared to me, in light of the many other trying episodes that were to overwhelm F. Leuchter in the interval, more moving still. Its title was "Is There Life After Persecution?", with the subtitle "The Botched Execution of Fred Leuchter" (http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v12/v12p429_Leuchter.html). It was his paper for the eleventh conference of the Institute for Historical Review in the U.S. in October 1992, published inThe Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1992-1993, p. 429-444.
I hope that F. Leuchter, despite the condition in which he now finds himself, will somehow have the time and strength to add to that heart-rending story the epilogue that may rightly be expected of him, which would deal with its author's life from 1993 to today. The whole, that is, the 1992 piece and the follow-up that remains to be written, would not fail to be translated into at least French and German.
F. Leuchter is one of the most endearing men I have ever met: his intelligence, his probity, his kindness and his courage are striking. His tribulations have gone well beyond what he has been able to tell us up to now. The Klarsfelds, Sabina Citron and the entire band of holocaustic shock troops, singling him out, ruined his life and reputation. Once down on the ground, he saw even some revisionists or semi-revisionists treat him with contempt or condescendence. In London in November 1991, when his hardships and humiliations had barely begun, David Irving dishonourably left him to his fate, before ending up calling him a "simpleton". As for Carlo Mattogno, he maligned the "Leuchter Report" not without taking up the moronic arguments of Jean-Claude Pressac who, however, some years later, was to realise that he himself had defended, with the help and money of the Klarsfelds, a dossier that was "rotten" and good only for "the rubbish bins of history" (sic). I could name the names of a few other persons who have behaved hardly better, but shall refrain from doing so.
To end, I prefer to yield to Fred Leuchter himself. Let's hear how he held forth to his audience in 1992. Today, eighteen years afterwards, his declaration, whose substance has been confirmed by time, takes on an arresting significance:
Much to the dismay of my executioners, the execution was so badly botched that I am able to stand here before you to speak the truth, and to tell the world that it is not myself, but the Holocaust story that is dead. I repeat for the record: I was condemned for maintaining that there were no execution gas chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau, Majdanek, Dachau, Mauthausen, or Hartheim Castle. There's no proof for the charge, only innuendo, lies, and half-truths. Robert Faurisson, Ernst Zündel and others said this first. They, too, live as victims of botched executions, but nevertheless free to speak the truth in a strong and growing voice that repeats: No gas chambers, no gas chambers, no damn gas chambers!
Today, there is no longer a single person to come and assure us that he or she has, finally, found proof of the existence of those "damn gas chambers." Spread the word! The magical gas chamber, like the whole "Holocaust", is no longer anything but a tainted product of the industry, business and religion of the "Shoah", even if certain historians, out of conformism or fear, persist in ritually mentioning its existence but without bringing forth any proof.
At the dawn of the year 2011 we can say it with even more certainty than in the past: on the strict level of science and history, the alleged Holocaust of the Jews with its millions of survivors – amongst whom numerous miraculous ones – and its magical Nazi gas chambers is indeed quite dead. The survival in the mass-media of the vile wartime canard and most phenomenal bunkum of modern times has no more sense to it than the artificial survival of Ariel Sharon, kept by his doctors in an artificial coma since January 4, 2006, that is, for the past five years to the day, without any hope of coming back to life. The last of the Jewish Mohicans to venture to find proof of "the Holocaust" at Auschwitz publicly relinquished his search on December 27, 2009: he was Professor Robert Jan van Pelt. Of the historians who showered us with purported testimony or confessions, I had requested "one proof, just one proof" of the reality of a physical extermination of Jews by Hitler or his associates. Then, going for better precision, I let fly with "Show me or draw me a Nazi gas chamber!" Finally, going to still greater lengths for precision, I invited, so to speak, "Holocaust" researchers to go and visit the capital of "the Holocaust", that is, Auschwitz, and then, at the very heart of the camp, stand before the ruins of the big crematorium II, which tell so much; I challenged them to find us the least trace, on or beneath the roof of the alleged gas chamber, of what they called holes and ducts for the pouring in of Zyklon B pellets. For my part, I summed up my observation and its consequences in four words: "No holes, no Holocaust!". Well before that, I had, moreover, published the building plans of that crematorium, plans which, along with a good number of other documents, I had discovered on March 19, 1976 in the archives of the Auschwitz State Museum and which had been kept hidden since the war. Those plans showed that the place which, according to what we are told, housed a homicidal gas chamber contained instead a simple depository, with the characteristic dimensions and layout for the keeping of corpses awaiting cremation.
Towards the end of this year, a book to be published in France will amount to a "laying of flowers and wreaths" on the grave of what the American Robert Arthur Butz, in a masterly work published in 1976, already called The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. And justice will thus be done to the memory of Maurice Bardèche, Paul Rassinier, Louis-Ferdinand Céline and a cohort of men and women who, the world over, have preferred accuracy to lies. In the first line I see Ernst Zündel and Fred Leuchter. A hundred other real revisionists stand with them.
Attachment(s) from ReporterNotebook
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By ISRAEL SHAMIR
In Part One of my report last weekend here on the CounterPunch site I showed that the US was secretly funnelling money into Belarus to fund the unelected opposition. Previously, the claim had been routinely denied. Now we have sterling proof. It is engraved in a confidential cable from a US Embassy to the State Department. It is undeniable.
That is, if you found the cable and were able to understand it.
And you happened to understand the political background of the cable.
The cables are raw data. Not as raw as Afghan Diaries, the previous coup of Wikileaks, but still quite raw. They are written in obscure state department lingo; much of the story is implied, as the cables were composed for colleagues and definitely not for strangers. They simply have to be explained, interpreted, annotated and then finally delivered to the reader. Dumping raw cables onto the web would not do: you'd never find the relevant cables and probably you wouldn't be able to understand its significance even if you did find it.
The main job of a newspaper or news website is to process raw data and transmit it to a reader. This work requires an experienced and highly qualified staff. Not every newspaper or website has such resources, and none of the independent sites can compete with the mainstream outlets for readership. If all the cables were published in a local newspaper in Oklahoma or Damascus, who would read them? In order to get our news to you, our reader, we are forced to make use of the dreaded mainstream media.
That is why Julian Assange chose to partner with a few important Western liberal newspapers of the mainstream media. Let us make it perfectly clear that we understand that all mainstream media are at their heart embedded; in bed with the Pentagon, the CIA, with Wall Street and all its counterparts. Let us also make it clear that we understand that not every journalist on the staff of The Guardian, Le Monde or The NY Times is a crooked enforcer of imperialist ideology; no, not even every editor. We do understand that not everyone is willing to sacrifice their career to field a story that will attract storms of protest. From this point of view, the difference between the soft liberal and the hardline imperialist media is one of style only.
For instance, if they plan to attack Afghanistan, the hardline Fox News would simply demand a high-profile strike against the sand rats, while the liberal Guardian would publish a Polly Toynbee piece bewailing the bitter fate of Afghani women. The bottom line is the same: war.
Modern embedded media constitute the most powerful weapon of our rulers. The modern Russian writer Victor Pelevin succinctly explained their modus operandi: "The embedded media does not care about the content and does not attempt to control it; they just add a drop of poison to the stream in the right moment."
Furthermore, they skilfully arrange the information in order to mislead us. The headline might scream MURDER MOST FOUL but the article describes an unavoidable accident. We do not look beyond the headline, but the headline has been written by the editor and not the journalist who penned the article. Twitter is nothing but a mess of headlines; we are being trained to think in terms of slogans.
In the case of Belarus, the Guardian published three cables the day before elections in order to maximize the exposure and to influence the results of the election. One of the headlines, published on December 18, 2010 said: "WikiLeaks: Lukashenka's [sic] fortune estimated at 9 billion USD". It was a very misleading headline. Wikileaks made no claims about Lukashenko's wealth. Read the entire article, and you will find that it was nothing more than a US embassy employee who had heard a rumor and transmitted it to the State Department. Only in the second to last sentence of the article do they mention that the cable admits: "the embassy employee couldn't verify the sources [sic!] or accuracy of the information".
So a corrected headline would read: "Wikileaks reveals: US diplomats spread unverifiable rumors about Lukashenko's personal wealth." But the Guardian made it appear as if it was Wikileaks itself that made the claim.
Let us suppose that one day Wikileaks will publish cables from the Russian Embassy in Washington to Moscow Centre. Shall we expect to see in the Guardian a screaming headline like: "WikiLeaks: The Mossad behind 9/11!!"
Isn't it more likely we would be soberly told: "Wikileaks reveals that Russian diplomats in Washington report the persistent rumors on Israeli involvement in 9/11"?
Another cable on Belarus published on the same day was headlined: "US embassy cables: Belarus president justifies violence against opponents". Again, a misleading headline, and again the majority will never read beyond it. In reality, this very interesting report contains the debriefing of the Estonian Foreign Minister after his long chat with President Lukashenko. The most interesting factoid was deliberately not highlighted in the article: Lukashenko told the Estonian visitor that the opposition in Belarus would never unite, and only existed "to live off western grants." When you read the article, your eye gravitates to the highlighted section, skipping the valuable information just above. In fact, the highlighted section itself says nothing about justifying violence against opponents. The text says something completely different: "Lukashenko stated the opposition should expect to get hurt when they attack the riot police". Again, it is sterling truth: in every country, people who attack riot police end up getting hurt. In Israel they also get shot, but that's another story.
Thus the Guardian made use of Wikileaks in order to influence Belarus voters and Western audiences, and prepare them for an Election Day riot.
So here we are: in order to get valuable data to the people, Julian Assange had to make a deal with the devil: the mainstream media. It was most natural for him to deal with the liberal flank of the mainstream, for the hardliners would not even touch it. But since the liberal papers are also embedded, they freely distort the cables by attaching misleading headlines and misquoting from the text.
For me, a Guardian reader since I worked at the BBC in the mid-1970s, it is painful to say that the Guardian has become an impostor. This paper pretends to provide the thinking liberal and socialist people of England with true information; but at the moment of truth, the Guardian, like a good Blairite, will switch sides.
Next, the Guardian apparently decided to destroy Wikileaks after using it. The Moor did his job, the Moor may go. The Guardian's embedded editors, understanding full well that the Wikileaks crew won't be tamed or subverted, are preparing a book called The Rise and Fall of Wikileaks. It's not quite released yet; they have still to arrange for the fall.
This will be done in two ways.
First, by slandering the Wikileaks chief Julian Assange. Destroy the head, and the body will wither and die. This is not the place to deal with allegations in detail, but I've never seen an article more crooked and lying than the one the Guardian published recently on Assange - and I've seen some beauties. It is trial by media in the best tradition of Pravda 1937. Its author Nick Davies ingratiated himself into the vicinity of the trustful Julian and then bit him in the best scorpion's manner. Davies wrote years ago in his Flat Earth News that the practice of journalism in the UK is "bent"; now he proven it beyond a doubt by his own writing.
There is no doubt: Assange never raped. The day after the alleged rape, the alleged victim boasted to her friends in a twitter that she had a wonderful time with the alleged rapist. It was all published.
Moreover, if Swedish authorities are primarily concerned about prosecuting Julian for rape, why do they attach a special condition to their demands of extradition, specifically reserving the right to pass him on to US authorities?
Nick Davies clearly performed a cruel hatchet job. But was publishing the article a simple case of bad judgement by the Guardian, or the beginning of a smear campaign? "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action", as James Bond in Goldfinger put it neatly. Here is the second attack. The third piece was surprisingly an attempt to smear Assange by association with me.
This last attack was written by Andrew Brown has been described as "The Guardian's resident moron", and with good reason. I always enjoy discussing my views, though Brown completely missed the subtleties and nuances of my writings. Andrew Brown is a man who understands the public's need for screaming headlines. Now we are left with a lot of crazy bloggers who claim I am the Mossad's liaison to Wikileaks and that Wikileaks is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mossad.
I do not for a moment think that anybody sane takes these ridiculous accusations seriously – they are just more things to throw at Julian. I am not a member of Wikileaks, not even a spokesman, just a friend. But even without me, Brown will still be able to attack Assange for quoting Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize winner and "notorious antisemite whose works are being published by a racist site." Quoting a popular blog, Brown "is beneath contempt, and, from now on, beneath notice". Still, the Guardian editors let him off his leash from time to time, to their eternal disgrace.
The second mode of attack on Wikileaks is to use it as a source of misinformation. These US State Department cables are double-edged swords. They are full of rumors, trial balloons, and hopeful thinking. Worse, the newspaper headlines often declare that Wikileaks is the source of the rumor, and leave it to the discerning reader to discover that an embassy staffer was the real source of the story. Readers often do not understand that headlines are little more than come-ons, and reflect a very loose interpretation of the article content. They tend to believe the misleading headline that says, "Wikileaks: Iran prepares nuclear weapons" or, "Wikileaks: all Arabs want the US to destroy Iran". Wikileaks never said it! It was the Guardian and the NY Times that said it, and loudly. A corrected headline would look like this:
Wikileaks reveals that US diplomats spread unsubstantiated rumours on the Iran nuclear program in order to ingratiate themselves with the State Department
But you will not live long enough to see this headline. Such is the price for using mainstream media: they will eventually poison the purest source.
However, I would rather place my bet on Assange. He is smart, and he has a mind of a first-class chess player. He has many surprises up his sleeve. It is possible that the Guardian will have to rename their book The Rise and Rise of Wikileaks.
The Israeli Angle
Now you can understand the mystery of Israeli satisfaction with Wikileaks. While the US officials were furious at the disclosure, Israelis were rather smug and complacent. Haaretz has this headline: "Netanyahu: WikiLeaks revelations were good for Israel."
Simple-minded conspiracy junkies immediately concluded that Wikileaks is an Israeli device, or, in the words of a particularly single-minded man: a "Zionist poison".
The truth is less fantastic, but much more depressing. The Guardian and the New York Times, Le Monde and Spiegel are quite unable to publish a story unacceptable to Israel. They may pen a moderately embarrassing piece of fluff, or a slightly critical technical analysis in order to convince discerning readers of their objectivity. They may even let an opponent air his or her views every once in a blue moon. But they could never publish a story really damaging to Israel. This is true for all mainstream media.
Furthermore, no American ambassador would ever send a cable really unacceptable to Israel – unless he intended to retire the next month. Yet even supposing this kamikaze ambassador would send the cable, the newspapers would overlook it.
Even with thousands of secret cables about Israel in their hands, the mainstream media delays and prevaricates. They don't want anyone to yell at them. That is why they have postponed publishing the articles. Once forced by circumstance or competition to publish the contents of the cables, you can bet they'll twist the revelations into toady headlines and bury the truth in the final paragraph.
Always kind, Julian Assange attributes this behavior to the "sensitivity of the English, German and French audience". I am not that kind; I call it cowardice, or if you insist, prudence. Any journalist who confronts the Jewish state will be made to suffer.
In such a situation, the mainstream media just can't help us. Professional journalists have families and careers to protect. We can't count on them when the rubber meets the road. We shall never know and will never fully understand the truth behind any Israel-connected event as long as the cables remain only in the hands of the mainstream media.
Edited by Paul Bennett
Israel Shamir can be reached at adam@israelshamir.net
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