Saturday, April 28, 2007

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.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

BOOK REVIEW:

Pros: Fast-paced spy-thriller to an unbelievable ending.

Cons: Everyone thought this couldn't happen, then it did.
Mr. Spirko discusses all the issues confronting the Middle East through the minds of both the Palestinians and Israelis. His understanding of the collective mindsets (those who are continually at war with each other) brings a new dimension of reality to the Palestinian question, which has now become the ever-persistent Israeli obstacle. How to achieve peace in the Middle East? If the Palestinian problem can be solved where both sides achieve peace, then world terrorism will go away. Mr. Spirko is more right than anybody knows.


CLEVELAND, Ohio – THE PALESTINE CONSPIRACY, a genre spy-thriller by Robert Spirko, was fourth on the best-seller list at Atlasbooks, Inc., a national book distributor. Ingram Books is the worldwide distributor.

Spirko, a financial and geo-political analyst who has given his advice to the National Security Council, turned his attention to the Middle East in 1987, after discovering several common elements related to the Middle East question. He wrote down his analysis, and when he was finished, he not only had a solution to the quagmire, he had a story to tell. THE PALESTINE CONSPIRACY foreshadowed the Persian Gulf War by three years, and the resultant Iraq War followed by the Sept. 11 attack.

Spirko states, "The chief threat in the region I see right now is the threat to Saudi Arabia by Iran and Al Qaeda. If Al Qaeda were to overthrow the present royal family in Saudi Arabia, cutting off the oil supply to western nations including Japan and China, it would bring down entire world economies. France and Germany would be begging us to go to war to retake those oil wells. It would be World War III."

“If such a scenario were to occur,” he reiterates, “France and the European economies would collapse in a matter of weeks.”

“Another looming concern is Iran which wants to develop nuclear weapons to couple with their Shahab 4, 5 & 6 missiles on the drawing boards which have a range to hit London, Israel, all of Europe, southern Russia and the United States. Also, the Iranian government has said it initially had 300 centrifuges to enrich uranium to weapons grade material. They have increased that to 3,000. They will soon increase that again to 10,000 centrifuges,” Spirko says. “They have the additional capacity to add another 20,000 centrifuges in mass production techniques that will enable them to produce at least seven nuclear bombs in about a year. Where did they get these centrifuges?”

Spirko answers that question by stating an Arab proverb, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

“Simply put,” Spirko explains, “they probably got them from Saddam Hussein before the Iraq War started and were probably smuggled out of Iraq and into Iran just like he did his air force of 600 Soviet fighter planes. In other words, he gave them to his former enemy rather than let them be destroyed on the ground.”

“Why would he have done any differently with the 30,000 centrifuges he supposedly had on a decentralized basis inside Iraq before the war?” Spirko asks. “Isn’t it strange that Iran could come up with a nuclear weapons program in about six months to a year when it took the United States six years under the Manhattan Project with 5,000 of the world’s most brilliant scientists like Robert Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr, Seaborg, Einstein, Fermi, and others working on it?”

Another point Spirko makes on the Mideast is that, “It is time for the Israelis and Palestinians to return to the Camp David Peace Talks or some other place, resume where they left off and "freeze in place" the already-agreed-upon negotiating points,” Spirko says.

"And, it's all related to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict which I said back in 1987 was the crux of my book. It always has been, and always will be until it's settled,” Spirko says. “That linkage is exactly what Osama Bin Laden stated in a taped message aired the weekend before the election in November of 2004. Whether you believe him or not is beside the point. That's what's he told us, and we'd better take that into account."

The novel is a mass market paperback produced by Olive Grove Publishers, and can be purchased at area bookstores through Ingram Book Group, New Leaf Distribution, and Baker and Taylor, priced at $14.99, ISBN 0-9752508-0-9. THE PALESTINE CONSPIRACY can also be ordered on the web at www.atlasbooks.com, or email orders from: order@bookmasters.com, or from Barnes & Nobles, Border's, Dalton's, efollett.com & Follett bookstores at colleges and universities, WaldenBooks, Amazon.com, Walmart.com, Target.com and other popular retail bookstores. Or, readers and store managers can call 1-800-BOOKLOG, or 800-247-6553 direct, to order.