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Peace with the Past
Shamir’s Introduction to Mahler Interview
Last year, the German edition of the US Magazine Vanity
Fair published an interview with important German radical thinker and
revolutionary Horst Mahler. Now we present you with a shortened English
translation of the interview rendered by Mahler’s comrade, Markus Haverkamp
– on our website
www.israelshamir.net . It is exciting reading! A friend of Palestine and
anti-zionist, an anti-imperialist freedom fighter, Mahler is considered Public
Enemy № 1 by the present German regime. He is somewhat
akin to Roger Garaudy, Jean Genet and Jean Luc Godard, to Carlos Ilich Sánchez
and Che.
1Mahler and Shamir in Berlin
In the late sixties he was trained in a fedayeen Fatah camp
in Jordan (Genet and Godard also went there), and in the seventies he applied
his knowledge as an active member of the urban guerrilla group Red Army Fraction
(RAF), also known as the Baader-Meinhof group. They fought the imperialist
establishment as “the fifth column of the third world”, fighting the war for
Vietnam, Palestine, Bolivia. He spent ten years in jail, while his comrades
Andreas Baader and Ulrika Meinhof were murdered by the prison guards. He was
such a charismatic personality that even his defending lawyer (Schily) became
minister of the interior and a chancellor of Germany (Schroeder).
After his release from jail he changed his far left
terminology into a far right one. In his view the German and European Left had
become as “jewified” as the Galilee [the official term of Israeli internal
politics, meaning that Jewish priority is assured], taken over by Zionists.
“Antifascism” became the slogan of pro-American and pro-Israel activists in
Europe. “Antifascists” today are against Palestinians, and support US
intervention in the Middle East, mass immigration and neo-liberalism.
The far right contains a staunchly anti-globalist,
anti-imperialist, anti-neoliberal, anti-American and anti-Zionist nucleus. (Only
very recently the pro-Zionist far right,
Nazis for Israel, was formed
http://nasofi.blogspot.com/ to coincide with British National Party
overtures to British Jews.) While the Left has been gentrified and has gone
upmarket, rebellious working class youth are much more likely to join far right
militants than a left-wing group. The leftists’ infatuation with immigrants and
gender minorities also undermines their appeal to indigenous underprivileged
workers.
As one learns from the interview, despite his apparent
rightward swing, Mahler has remained faithful to his anti-imperialist and
anti-zionist worldview. “Left” and “Right” are less important labels; it is
one’s attitude towards imperialism and Zionism that counts. A
denial of yesterday’s views in changing circumstances is the only way of
remaining true to oneself. Likewise, Lawrence of Arabia condemned the British
order in the Middle East after 1920, though he worked hard to establish it; he
remained true to his love to the Arabs. De Gaulle was for the Brits and against
the Germans in 1940s, and for the Germans and against the British in the 1960s,
but he remained true to the cause of French independence. Thus, for us the north
is cold, but the ship in the South Seas has to steer northwards to stay in warm
waters.
As a Red freedom fighter, Mahler fought
US imperialism, while now he identifies the Judaic Mammonite spirit of rootless
capitalism as the main enemy. “Today we can see clearer what US imperialism is,
and as such the enemy is the same”. Mahler refers to the larger-than-life role
played by the US Jewish Lobby in defining the US policies, and to the exalted
place prepared for Jews in the Pax Americana. But he looks well beyond the
narrative proposed by Miersheimer and Walt: it is the Judaic Mammonite spirit
that moves US imperialism, not a lobby of sorts. This is a Marxist thought: Karl
Marx wrote of “Jewish spirit in control of America”. Mahler is closer to Marx’s
disciple Werner Sombart who insisted that the spirit was brought over by the
Jews. He does not separate the spirit from people. Here he fails to notice that
the Judaic spirit may exist without a single Jew, as it was already preinstalled
in some Protestant sects even among the earliest Fathers Pilgrims, and I’ve
written about at length in Cabbala of Power.
Paradoxically, Mahler’s attitude to
Jews fits the traditional Jewish outlook.
(1) He compares Jews with a thumb that
opposes the four fingers and allows the hand to grasp things. Jewish Rabbis
often offer similar comparisons proposing a special role of Jews opposing the
Nations of the Earth.
(2) Mahler speaks of Jewish negativity,
as opposed to the constructive role of non-Jews. Iliya Ehrenburg, a great
Russian Jewish writer, expressed this sentiment in his Julio Jurenito. In
this fantastic novel, published in 1923, Europe is visited by the Spirit of
Destruction, embodied in the unlikely form of a Mexican itinerant philosopher.
He calls the Jews ‘his best weapon’. “Aren’t Jews the same people as we are?”
asked a disciple, and Julio the Destroyer replies: ‘Dynamite is not the same as
cement’. Julio asks his disciples to choose one word, yes or no,
and all of them – a Russian Tolstoy follower, an Italian anarchist, a French
bourgeois, an American millionaire, an African savage, a German order-addict –
prefer yes. Only Iliya the Jew chooses no. Nobody has yet to call
Ehrenburg an antisemitic writer.
(3) Mahler speaks of eternal enmity
between Jews and non-Jews. This is an axiom of the Jewish worldview: Mount Sinai
is so called so because of sina [enmity, hatred] between Jews and goyim;
if it is good for Jews, it’s got to be bad for goyim, and vice versa, say the
Rabbis.
Thus, Mahler agrees with the Jewish
worldview but from a diametrically opposing departure point. A mouse can agree
with a cat that Cats and Mice are enemies, but their understanding of the
reasons for their animosity may be quite different.
Nowadays, these ideas (right or wrong)
are permitted to Jews but forbidden to non-Jews by ‘hate laws’. Similarly, a Jew
(Deborah Lipstadt) may campaign against Jew-Gentile marriages, but a goy (her
opponent David Irving) may not do so, under threat of imprisonment. Indeed
Mahler is a frequent visitor in German jails. A proud man, he accepted the
Judaic narrative but inverted it.
Mahler’s attitude to Jews is a violent reaction to the
philosemitic indoctrination that persists in Germany, from the servile words of
Frau Merkel to the Israeli parliament, to the supply of nuclear-capable
submarines to Israel, to relentless Holocaust propaganda. He exaggerates when he
proposes that Germany is occupied by Jews. In reality, Germany is occupied by
the US troops, and this special treatment of Jews is imposed on the Germans as a
sign of their integration into the New World Order.
Indeed, Mahler’s adulatory attitude towards the Third Reich
and to Adolf Hitler is an embarrassment and calls for explanation. One possible
explanation was provided by President Bush, who
declared that “Saddam is the new Hitler”. This is affirmed by many
Jewish and Christian Zionist pundits, like
this. Formal logic says that this identity claim works both ways. If
Saddam is the new Hitler, Hitler is a Saddam of old. If Gamal Abdel Nasser was a
Hitler on the Nile, Hitler was a Nasser on the Rhine. These rebellious rulers
had all challenged the Anglo-American Empire.
Iranians, Kurds or Iraqi Communists could not possibly say
a single positive word for Saddam, and with a good reason. But for the Iraqi
resistance fighters the name of Saddam means ‘Down with the US occupation of
Iraq and down with the US-installed regime’ as I previously
wrote. Mahler’s ‘Heil Hitler” means “Down with the US occupation of
Germany and with the US-dependent regime”, though the Russians or Jews or German
Communists would never agree with any adulation of Hitler. And indeed for many
annoyed and unemployed youths it means just “Fuck you!”
Hitler was similar to Saddam even in his
mistakes: both leaders sought the friendship of the Anglo-American empire and
rejected bids for friendship from the Empire’s enemies, Stalin’s Soviet
Russia and respectively, Khomeini’s revolutionary Iran. These
mistakes turned out to be fatal for both. Apparently, Mahler did not look that
far, but this is an important lesson for today’s rulers.
We may, however, understand Mahler’s words as a sign of his
love for Germany and his desire for a resurrection of the German national spirit
and national pride, for German independence and resistance to Anglo-American
imperialism. Germans once had an excess of national hubris, but not anymore; now
they probably could use a bit more of the old poison, to counterbalance the
all-eroding influence of globalization. After all, the Mongols placed a statue
of Genghis Khan
in their capital Ulan Bator after winning independence, the French still adore
Napoleon, and the Russians love Stalin. Israelis named their airport after David
Ben Gurion, the Father of al-Nakba. It is obvious that these leaders are loved
for what they signify today, not for their evil deeds.
We condemn the German practice of
punishing positive references to Hitler by jail sentences. Germans may learn
from their eastern neighbour: in Russia, one may refer to Josef Stalin
approvingly and admiringly without being prosecuted. Sooner or later, nations
should come to peace with their past.
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