Dov Osheroff and Willy Maley: perespectives from the left on political violence, history, colonialism, imperialism, racism, antisemitism, social media and the importance of critical thinking and debate
Participants:
Willy Maley
Dov Osheroff
Moderator:
Mark White
By mandating a politically driven meaning of the word genocide, German law now trivializes the actual meaning of genocide–exactly what is forbidden by its own penal code. In doing so, the German law is itself a form of hate speech, and the German government is participating in a bizarre act of anti-semitic revisionism.
Hint: it doesn’t mean 5 minutes for the Jews and 5 minutes for Hitler.
In 1971, over the course of several months, historian Gitta Sereny trudged regularly into a prison in Dusseldorf, Germany to sit across a small table from Franz Stangl, former commandant of the extermination camp Treblinka. Between April and June of that year, Sereny collected over 70 hours of interviews with Stangl who died on June 28–within hours of her last visit. For the following 18 months Sereny continued researching details of the stories Stangl had told her and to speak to people who had known him when he was in charge of killing operations at Treblinka.
A little over a week ago, on October 11, a young woman in France sat down in front of her video camera and earnestly recounted the story of her narrow escape from a sex trafficking and possible organ trafficking gang operating from the train station in the city of Marseille. Against the backdrop of ominous music she tells her story...
Today, there is intense talk of possible use of ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons by Putin in Ukraine. A recent NYtimes headline read: ‘In Washington, Putin’s Nuclear Threats Stir Growing Alarm' and the subhead went on to say that ‘U.S. officials are gaming out responses’.
I appreciate the opportunity to respond to Mark White’s blog in Plebity arguing that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. I take up some but not all of Mark’s arguments. But Mark’s analysis is off base both conceptually and factually in several places.
When Jews discourage debate about Israel and Jewish identity, they prevent open conversation and legitimate criticism of Israel, which leaves the field open for real antisemites to use anti-Zionist language to promote and spread their actual antisemitism.
Witch hunts in various forms are one of those recurring themes of human history. One variation, known as McCarthyism, has returned recently, at least in the lexicon. The word McCarthyism has been thrown around a lot lately. Like ‘fascist’ or ‘marxist,’ it is a part of the word arsenal deployed in our current culture wars.
Why are the rich so much better at uniting around class issues than the plebes? Outrage is a sentiment that feels so pure and so right. When it is pointed at injustice and burns bright inside of us we are reaffirmed as the moral beings that we believe ourselves to be. That our strongly held sense of righteousness could be a useful tool for others and even redirected to serve their purposes may seem impossible and even unbearable.