Arthur Sauerhaft wrote: >>I must admit, I've never heard of Godwin's Law, and I've lost by >>that standard, but when if not in this case is it appropriate to >>mention the Nazi's or Hitler? > >I'll tell you that tomorrow, never fear, but right now it's late and >I'm going to sleep. > >>Is is that these things should never be spoken of, or better yet forgotten? > >:-) > >Perhaps you'd care to tell me just what you've based that assumption >on, as there's nothing at all here to support it.
Nazis, eh, Arthur? Ever met one? You think you guys have got some sort of franchise on all this stuff? I'll tell you a story. It's a true story. I'm a journalist. I used to be a South African. I worked mostly for the black press there, not a very common pursuit during the dark days of the white racist apartheid era in the 60s and 70s. I was deeply involved in black issues and kept getting into trouble as a result. Eventually I got arrested and fled, left the country for a while to let things cool down. I went to London, got a job in Fleet Street and rented a studio flat belonging to an old couple in Hampstead. They both met me at the door when I arrived there, a small woman and a tall man. They stared at me, then looked quickly at each other, and asked me in. I seemed to make an instant hit - they couldn't do enough to make me feel welcome. There was something intensely warm and human about them, and we quickly became friends. They were really in love - they'd been together for 25 years, and doted on each other like a young couple. One evening we were sitting together in their kitchen drinking coffee, and they told me their story. They were German Jews, and they'd met in a Nazi death camp during World War 2. They'd been interned with their whole families, and each had watched all their loved ones taken off to die, one by one, spouses, children, parents, until each was the only one left alive. That was when they'd found each other, and somehow survived the insane daily horror together to be liberated by the Allies in 1945. Eventually they'd made their way to London, and started life again. The old woman told me: "You are our fourth tenant. By pure chance, the other three were all young German men." Her smile twinkled at me: "And you too are tall and fair - you look like a German. Our English friends were amazed that we could have Germans staying here - 'How can you bear it after what they did to you?' they asked." She was silent for a few moments. "But it was not these young men who did it. If we'd blamed them, if we'd turned them away, we would have learnt nothing from our suffering, it would have been wasted. So we welcomed them, and we did not regret it." I couldn't say anything, something caught at my throat. I've seldom seen anyone so beautiful as the old woman looked to me just then. Jews were nothing new to me, there's quite a big Jewish community in South Africa. I'd had them around all my life, neighbours, friends, schoolmates, workmates. When I started a rock band there were a couple of Jewish members, I spent a lot of time with the Jewish drummer and his family, also warm, human people, kind and generous. Virtually the whole Jewish community was dead set against the apartheid system and its evils. Maybe there were some who supported it but I don't think I ever met one. Many of them actively opposed it, many were jailed for it. One didn't hear much about Israel then, nor Zionism, until 1967 and the Six-Day War, and then all my Jewish friends were wrestling with issues I didn't understand. It wasn't too long after that that I met some Israelis for the first time. They weren't supposed to have been there and I shouldn't have met them. But defence was my beat at the time, and they were military people, IDF and so on, involved in military support and collaboration with the apartheid government, in breach of the UN arms embargo against South Africa. This collaboration extended to the development of nuclear weapons, from about 1967 through the 70s and 80s. Israeli nuclear scientists visited South Africa in 1967 and later. South Africa provided Israel with 550 tons of uranium for its weapons program, Israel supplied South Africa with tritium and with technical information. In 1979 they tested a bomb together in the South Atlantic. Israel was involved with the apartheid regime in other ways. There was intelligence collaboration, military training IIRC, also IIRC involvement in training and arming black militias during the "civil war" phase of the 80s. And so on. Good friends, Israel and white racist South Africa during its most oppressive stage. So what has all this got to do with anything? This: John Vorster, South Africa's arch-racist Prime Minister from 1966 to 1978, was a Nazi. Let's get this straight: Vorster was not a Nazi sympathiser, he was a Nazi, by word and by deed, and there was nothing particularly unusual about it. In the mid-1970s at the height of the Israeli-South African military collaboration, more than half of Vorster's Cabinet were Nazis. It was no secret, the Israelis certainly knew it and it didn't deter them or apparently bother them at all. These South African Nazis had belonged to a paramilitary organisation called the Ossewa Brandwag (the "Ox-wagon Guard") during WW2. It was a Nazi movement, its leader, Hans van Rensburg, was a fervent admirer of Hitler. The OB attempted to disrupt South Africa's war effort through intimidation, sabotage and assassination. In 1940 and 1941 they were responsible for 25 bombings in the Witwatersrand area alone, targeting newspaper offices, cinemas, shops and railway lines. Terrorists. Sounds like the Stern Gang and Irgun, eh? Deir Yassin and so on. Well, not as bad as Deir Yassin. Anyway, in 1942 Vorster was arrested for his involvement and spent the rest of the war in internment. The OB was not a fringe movement. It had almost half a million members at its peak. When Germany's defeat appeared inevitable, its popularity began to wane and many of its members transferred their loyalty to the National Party, which became the ruling party in 1948, the party of apartheid and Prime Minister John Vorster. (Shamir, Begin?) There's some interesting history here. The Ossewa Brandwag was founded in October 1938 to embody and perpetuate the Afrikaner nationalist idealism to which that year's Voortrekker Centenary celebrations had given rise. Some definitions. "Afrikaners" are white South Africans, descendants of the 17th century Dutch settlers, and, later, French Protestant Hugeonot refugees. Their language is Afrikaans, a sort of archaic form of Dutch. Britain took the colony from the Dutch at the beginning of the 19th century and instituted an oppressive rule from which large numbers of Afrikaner farmers ("Boers") eventually fled, travelling north into the hinterland in their oxwagons, facing great difficulties and perils, eventually to found the two independent Boer Republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. These were the Voortrekkers, their epic journey the "Great Trek". The oxwagon was and still is a major motivating symbol for the Afrikaners. Their freedom was shortlived, however. Following the discovery of large deposits of gold in the Transvaal Republic, Britain attacked the Boer Republics and the Boer War ensued (1899-1902). Contrary to all predictions, it didn't go well for the Brits. There were only about 60,000 Boer commandoes pitted against the full might of the British Empire, with 350,000 soldiers in the field and endless resources. But the Brits were no match for them. The Boers were guerrilla fighters, which they'd learnt from the black tribes in 150 years of skirmishing over land and cattle, and the British couldn't beat them. Eventually Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, fresh from defeating the Dervish armies of the Mahdi in Sudan, hit upon the final solution. In a brutal campaign, the British destroyed the Boer farms, built chains of blockhouses criss-crossing the land, and brought a new term to darken the dawn of the 20th century - concentration camps. They herded the Boer women and children into concentration camps, where up to 30,000 of them died of disease and starvation. Meanwhile dragnets of troops went through the guerrilla country section by section, and by 1902 the remaining Boers surrendered, starved and crushed. The rest of the world was outraged. Britain became the "dirty dog" of Europe for the way it had "won" the war. So at the Union negotiations that followed, to make the two British colonies of the Cape and Natal and the two defeated Boer republics one country, the British team held the low moral ground, and made concession after concession to the Boer negotiators, especially of Black rights, the Boers' old enemies: the Black franchise, voting rights, land rights, all were lost. This was when the ANC was formed, Nelson Mandela's party which now governs the new South Africa since it emerged from the long nightmare. But the concentration camps still echo down through the years to today, and who's to say it's over yet. The Boers were left in poor shape after Union, despite the concessions. British and English-speaking white South African interests were in control of commerce, finance, mining, everything, the Boers were poverty-stricken farmers in the outlying areas, effectively shut out of their own country. This has actually been referred to as "the years of wandering in the wilderness". This was the setting for the Voortrekker Centenary celebrations of 1938. It was planned and organised by the Afrikaner Broederbond (Brotherhood), an elite underground secret society formed in 1918 composed of far rightwing clergymen, teachers, public servants and members of parliament. In the early 1930s the Broederbond was reorganised on the pattern of Hitler's Nazi state, complete with fuehrer, gauleiters, group and cell leaders, spread in a sinister network over the whole of South Africa. This was initiated by Broederbond members who were sent to Germany, at Nazi expense, to study the Nazi cell system. It was planned by a delegate from Nazi Germany in consultation with the leader of the National Party, Dr D.F. Malan. As was subsequently discovered from captured German documents, the Nazis had sent their delegate, Graf von Durckheim Montmartin, to South Africa in 1934 for secret consultations with Broederbond leaders, to try to ensure that South Africa would side with Germany in the world war Hitler was already planning. The breakaway National Party was more or less a Nazi-Broederbond project. The Voortrekker centenary celebrations of 1938 gave the whole Nationalist movement a massive boost. It took the form of an ox-wagon procession from Cape Town along the original routes used by the Voortrekkers and culminated in a huge celebration at Pretoria. It was a major event in every village and town on the way, with countless appeals to the glories of the past and calls for the renaissance of the Afrikaner volk (people), now scattered and disunited in the land of its birth and creation. Appeals were made to all Afrikaners to join together to achieve their national salvation. It resulted in a tremendous upsurge of national feeling among the Afrikaner people and shifted the balance of power substantially in the direction of the National Party. It was in this atmosphere that the Ossewa Brandwag was born. South African Nazism was much wider than the OB, however: the OB was just the paramilitary wing. Nazis and Nazi influence were widespread throughout the Afrikaner Nationalist movement, at the highest levels. The National Party adopted anti-Semitism as an official plank in its platform. It forced an "Immigration Quota Act" through Parliament which deliberately clamped down on Jewish immigrants. An Afrikaner Nazi organisation, the Greyshirts, started a disgusting racist smear and propaganda campaign against Jews and Jewish immigrants that resounded throughout the Nationalist movement. A quota system for Jews in all occupations was proposed, pressing for Jews to be refused trading licences. The Nationalists pushed for laws prohibiting Jewish immigration, for the deletion of Yiddish as a recognized European language for immigration purposes, for the closing of certain professions to Jews and other "non-assimilable races". South Africa had a "Jewish problem", they said - when Jews comprised more than 4% of a population there was trouble, and the Jews in South Africa totalled 6-7%. "Many German Jews who might have found safety in South Africa were to perish in Hitler's death camps as a direct consequence of the agitation by the Nationalist Party and the cowardice of the Hertzog government," according to one scholar. Another Nationalist Nazi organization was the South African Gentile National Socialist Movement, devoted to destroying the "perversive influence of the Jews in economics, culture, religion, ethics, and statecraft and to re-establish European Aryan control in South Africa for the welfare of the Christian peoples of South Africa". You get the gist of it. South Africa went to war on the British side on a majority of one in the vote in Parliament. After the war both the Nazism and the anti-Semitism became "unfashionable" and subsided - or at least disappeared from view, mostly. But such things, once implanted, are very difficult to uproot. Each of them would rear their ugly heads now and again. I don't suppose many people know about all this, but it's true enough - there's a lot more of it, all well-established. I don't think it's controversial. There's at least one book about it, The Rise of the South African Reich, written in the 60s. I just checked some of the names and figures there, but I know the story well. In essence, South Africa's murderous white racist regime was a Nazi plot. Despite the eerie echoes, I don't make much of a comparison between the Boer War concentration camps on the one hand and Israel and the Holocaust on the other, excepting to note that in both cases it's resulted in the victims wreaking victimisation on others. But there are comparisons. It's often said the Palestinians have been forced into virtual Bantustans. Israelis and Palestinians have visited the new South Africa together to try to build bridges of peace that might help Israel to follow the same path of reconciliation. Anyway, Zionist Israel doesn't seem to mind collaborating with Nazis if it wants to. If they don't mind, why should you, Arthur? Where does that leave your knee-jerk labelling of anyone who criticises them a hate-filled anti-Semite and a Nazi? What's the Holocaust got to do with it? Would my London landlords have done that? No way in the world. No real Jew would, except maybe a confused one. I think such confused Jews are to be found mainly in two places, Israel and the US. In Israel there are more and more dissidents all the time, in all walks of life, adamantly opposed to the state's murderous, counter-productive, and in the end futile suppression of the Palestinians. Twenty years ago or so there was a strong pro-Israel bias in all the Western countries, in the media, in politics and just about everywhere else. That has changed radically, and now only in the US is that still the case. For instance, the Financial Times reported that a recent poll had found that anti-Semitism had fallen in Europe but hostility to Israel had grown. "The poll's findings could also undermine the argument, supported by some civil rights movements including the ADL itself and think-tanks in Israel and the US, that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism." http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullS tory&c=StoryFT&cid=1079420630825 An "argument supported by some civil rights movements" is not how it could be described in the US - a whole clutch of current reports show that everywhere that it matters, in the media, the professions, throughout politics, in the US anti-Zionism IS anti-Semitism. As we can see, right here this week. After all, it's the US that the money comes from, the weaponry, the blind eye turned always where it's needed, the UN vetoes. It's there that the Israeli Zionists have made a truly Faustian pact with the so-called Christian Zionist nutters who now have such great influence there, at the top level, and see the State of Israel as essential to their own plans for a future Holocaust in the form of Armageddon. "We will always support Israel, no matter what." It's at the US that the full weight of the Zionist propaganda Rabbi Weiss talks of is aimed, with good effect, which is why the monstrous Sharon can boast that the US will do what he tells it to, and proves it. Would my London landlords ever have condoned the ongoing daily crushing of the Palestinians, hiding the inhuman brutality of it behind the mindless mantra you and Matt and so many other American Jews trot out so facilely that "Israel as a Jewish state has the right to exist"? Again, no way, nor millions of other Jews like them. Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism? I don't much care what some old book says about it. What happens on the ground is quite sufficient, and that says that being Jewish and Judaism is one thing, and Zionist Israel is another, a view shared by very many people I have reason to respect. True Judaism no more condones such actions as Irgun's Deir Yassin massacre, Sabra and Shatila, Jenin, and the countless other ongoing Israeli atrocities than true Islam condones mutilating dead mercenaries and hanging their corpses from bridges or flying airliners into civilian tower blocks. This is Judaism? "In 1937, Winston Churchill said of the Palestinians, I quote, "I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place." That set the trend for the Israeli State's attitude towards the Palestinians. In 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said, "Palestinians do not exist." Her successor, Prime Minister Levi Eschol said, "What are Palestinians? When I came here (to Palestine), there were 250,000 non-Jews, mainly Arabs and Bedouins. It was a desert, more than underdeveloped. Nothing." Prime Minister Menachem Begin called Palestinians "two-legged beasts." Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir called them "grasshoppers" who could be crushed. This is the language of Heads of State, not the words of ordinary people." - Come September by Arundhati Roy (an excellent read!) http://www.lannan.org/_authors/roy/transcript.htm More and more American Jews are saying it's not Judaism: "In short, Zionism was based on a faulty, colonialist world view that the rights of the indigenous inhabitants didn't matter. The Arabs' opposition to Zionism wasn't based on anti-Semitism but rather on a totally reasonable fear of the dispossession of their people. One further point: being Jewish ourselves, the position we present here is critical of Zionism but is in no way anti-Semitic." (Jews for Justice in the Middle East) There are plenty of similar groups saying similar things. This is how to treat the notion that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, with the Nazi-Hitler card and the Holocaust handy as moral clubs: IT'S BULLSHIT. Israel is a rogue state, way out of control, bent on genocide and sowing the seeds of its own destruction with it - worse, it's a nuclear rogue state, with an estimated 200 warheads, run by maniacs in the most dangerous place in the world. Israel as a Jewish state has the right to exist? You'd better take it away from these thugs then, maybe it's not too late yet. So go ahead, tell me I'm a hate-filled anti-Semitic Nazi who spreads hatred and kills more people than wars. I won't mind, I'll just laugh at you for a fool and take no further notice. And, at long, long last, get on with business. This thread is called "Oil and Israel", it started with a commentary at TomPaine.com: http://www.tompaine.com/articles/oil_and_israel.php "The two unmentionables about Iraq are suddenly getting mentioned. The real reasons for the attack on Iraq had nothing to do with WMDs, that ultimate red herring. The real reasons: oil and Israel." One reason cited for it's being unmentionable: you get attacked and accused of being an anti-Semite. Well, so what. So it prevents rational discussion on an essential aspect of oil politics - Israel's role - and thus of biofuels politics. In another thread, an American said this: "I am confident about one thing! When I go to the pump and fill up my car... I still can't help but feel that I am funding a terrorist organization." So use biodiesel instead. They're always saying it: "I simply don't want my driving habit to support Islamist terrorism." That is a warped view of the good reasons for using biodiesel, it will simply help to cause yet more problems in the world, including the US. Yet millions of Americans think that. But, try to fill in the missing context to identify the real reasons for using biodiesel, and it runs into this nest of snakes of Zionism and criticising Israel. Not any more it doesn't, not here anyway. By order. Signed: List owner. For which move there's rather wide support among the membership. This post will go into the archives, and in future anybody who makes that objection can be countered with one url and simply told to stop, no arguments, or else. Keith Addison ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Make a clean sweep of pop-up ads. Yahoo! Companion Toolbar. Now with Pop-Up Blocker. Get it for free! http://us.click.yahoo.com/L5YrjA/eSIIAA/yQLSAA/FGYolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://infoarchive.net/sgroup/biofuel/ Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/biofuel/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! 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