Recent Readings ...

Well, I've finished Richard J. Evans's The Third Reich in Power. I really don't have a problem with it. He makes the case that the Germans were not brainwashed, nationalist fanatics, when they supported Hitler. He quotes Nazi institutions' own reports on public opinion at the time to show the half-hearted acquiescence to the government's policies.

For instance, when Hitler was threatening war over the Sudetenland, and it took Goring, Neville Chamberlain, Mussolini, and Daladier to get out of it by betraying the Czechs, German public opinion was verging on panic. They did not want a war. They were terrified. Hitler ordered a military parade in Berlin and stood at his office balcony window to watch it and rouse the people. Only about 200 people showed up to watch the soldiers march by. Hitler stormed inside in a rage. When war finally came over Poland, there was no mass celebration as there had been in 1914, but silent foreboding.

Evans doesn't focus on Hitler's treatment of the Jews in his book. It comprises one chapter out of seven, with references to the regimes anti-Semetic policies when they're relevant to his chapters on economic policy or foreign affairs. But the racist, pseudo-scientific sickness of the Nazi's anti-Semetism were an important element of their rule and so the references are many, and the chapter on "Creating the Racial Utopia" is extensive. And it's very, very, depressing, infuriating, and heartrending. The plundering, humiliation, cruelty, hypocrisy, sadism, of these boorish bullies against the Jews is not easy reading.

One of my other recent reads, The Great Mortality, by John Kelly, also has a section on European anti-Semetism in it. Numerous groups, including the bizarre, anti-clerical, anti-Semetic Flagellants, came up with the idea that the plague was being spread as part of a Muslim, Jewish, Leper (!) conspiracy. Something about the Muslims being converted to Judaism, taking the Holy Land but rewarding the original Jews with their own new homeland in France, ... or some crazy idea ... and the way they were going to get France was to poison all the wells in Europe, together with their agents, the lepers, who hated healthy Christians and wanted to kill them all.

It seems that after you torture people, they begin to respond positively to your questions (if that's what they think you want them to do) and so, enough torture victims [are you listening, advocates for torture in Afghanistan?] answered in the affirmative that they received packets of poison given out to them by a Rabbi in Spain, and that they were told to do things in a certain way, at a certain time, ... and, in the end, the Christians decided that the Jews were spreading the plague and in response they attacked them, robbed them, killed them in the streets, and often drove their entire community into large sheds built for the purpose, which were set alight, burning them all, men, women, and children. (Apparently attractive young Jewish females were given the choice of converting to spare their temporarily valuable lives. If they refused they were sometimes returned to their families to burn, or taken against their will.)

So, I've recently read two books documenting (among other things) the brutal treatment of the Jewish community in Europe. It makes my current reading all the more thought provoking. I'm reading Bitter Harvest: A Modern History of Palestine by Sami Hadawi. The long and the short of it is that I've never sat down and read a detailed history of the Palestine crisis before. I knew about the Balfour Declaration, and I've read bits and pieces of Uri Avnery's accounts of the events of the 1940s, and I've followed the news more closely since the First Intifada, but I haven't read anything systematic and sustained on the subject.

I picked up Hadawi's book at a library discard sale for two bucks. I'm going to try and find some reviews for it, and I'm going to check his references to validate many of his assertions. Hadawi is a Palestinian, and as such, his perspective might well be distorted. I say "might" because he provides dense, extensive references for everything that he writes, and if they check out, then the anger with which he writes is justified. Suffice to say, the Zionists appear to have been quite nasty and ruthless in their dispossession and mass murder of the Palestinian people. This book carries a strong indictment of Zionism and the Israeli state.

But reading it immediately following two books on the centuries-long sufferings of the Jewish people (in Europe) causes me to think about justified the ruthlessness of the Zionists was. Obviously it was directed against the wrong people, but by the 1940s Zionism had long ago selected Palestine as their new home. Events in Hitler's Europe only cemented their desire to get out of Europe and find a place of their own.

[Another recent read, David Fromkin's A Peace to End All Peace shows the start of the Palestinian problem with the fanciful notions of British imperialists to have the Jews serve as a European stronghold along a path joining British Africa with British India in the former Ottoman Empire. From Cape to Cairo to Caliph to the Raj. These delusions fell apart, but their consequences continue to torment us still.]

Europe doesn't have a monopoly on violence and cruelty. But Europe's worldwide reach has made European problems international problems, with the Middle East being the most evident example. If will focus for a moment on the children, ... the children who were never given the opportunity to find out who they were going to become, the children of plague-ridden Europe, Christian and Jewish, and then only the Jewish children, driven into a burning house with their parents, and then the Jewish children of Hitler's Germany, ostracized, tormented, humiliated, and many coldly murdered, and then I think about the Palestinian children, themselves murdered in their homes, shot in the fields, crushed by bulldozers.

This is the real tragedy of humanity.