We have learned “Do
not make yourself a god”; now it is the time to learn “do not
make yourself a demon”.
Demons and Angels
By Israel Shamir
Demonisation of one’s enemy
is a relatively new invention. In the good old times, men fought
and then
made
friends – and then fought again, like the valiant heroes of the
Iliad and like the gallant knights of King Arthur. The warriors
who fought and killed each other will forever drink mead and
fight at the same table in the Valhalla. True, the Old Testament
tells of Joshua who initiated the first Nuremberg trial by
killing five captive kings in the name of the Lord for they
“hated Jews and fought against them.” [Joshua, 10]. But from
the time of Joshua and until the 20th century,
defeated kings were rarely killed and a good fight had little to
do with hate. The ideological wars of faith – the Crusades –
weren’t exceptional from this point of view as the Muslim and
Christian warriors did not forget they – and their enemies -
were human. Don Rodrigo El Sid served in turns the King of
Castile and the Emir of Saragossa; Pagan Clorinda was a heroine
of Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata. At the famous
wedding in besieged castle of Kerak, the Crusaders had sent
besieging Saladin a slice of wedding cake, and he enquired which
tower the newly-weds would sleep in, so his army would turn
their mangonels elsewhere. Prince Igor of Kievan Rus attacked
the Kipchaks, the people of steppe, was defeated and captured,
but married the Kipchak Khan’s daughter while in captivity. In
19th century, Goethe of Germany and Lermontov of
Russia admired Napoleon the enemy of their countries, while
Kamal and the Colonel’s son exchanged gifts after exchanging
shots at Fort Bukloh of Kipling’s ballad.
Things began to change a
hundred years ago, with advent of democracy and mass media as
there was the need to convince a lot of people that a war is
necessary and justified. The “good guys/bad guys” simplification
of Hollywood supplanted the old division of “friend/foe”, and
the foe became intrinsically and irredeemably “bad”. This was
bad news, because a foe can become a friend, but a bad ‘un can’t
become good. He had to be killed, and indeed he usually was
killed at the high noon. Admiration for the enemy became
impossible; every war became a war between the Sons of Light and
the Sons of Darkness. In such a war, there is no place for
compassion; cruelty towards civilians is de rigueur.
A first serious bout of
enemy demonisation was launched by the US media in order to pull
unwilling America into the World War One against Germany, as the
reward promised by Weitzman to Balfour for Palestine. In the
words of
Benjamin Freedman, “after the Zionists saw the possibility
of getting Palestine, everything changed, like a traffic light
that changes from red to green. Where the newspapers had been
all pro-German, all of a sudden the Germans were no good. They
were villains. They were Huns. They were shooting Red Cross
nurses. They were cutting off babies' hands.”
The Germans were accused of
making soap out of British POWs (yes, the soap story of
Nuremberg fame is just a replay of the old sham), of bayoneting
Belgian babies (this was replayed in 1991 when the Iraqis were
accused of throwing Kuwaiti babies out of incubators), of
sinking a
passenger liner (loaded with munitions, but this was
considered quite an atrocity thirty years before Dresden). There
is a wartime poster showing the German as a dreadful gorilla
snatching a fair maiden, a precursor to King Kong.
This demonisation of
Germans only increased in 1930s, allowing for boycott of German
goods with
Zionist Palestine as an opening, and after the war it was
crystallised into a new hierarchy of evil with Hitler
incarnating a new Satan of flesh and blood. Since then, evil
Nazis appeared more often than cowboys in so many Hollywood
movies, and we live today in a world, where reference to Hitler
equates to ultimate evil.
Now, in order to demonise,
one has only to draw a similarity with Hitler, and that will do.
Arabs and Muslims fight against Jews, thus they are Nazis and
may be considered evil. In 1956, the British PM Macmillan
described Jamal Abd el Nasser as a “new Hitler”, for he
nationalised the Suez Canal. In 1982, Begin called Yasser Arafat
“a new Hitler” as he had to justify his aggression and
bombardment of Beirut. Stalin was “worse than Hitler” in a
speech by President Bush. Now it is the turn of Iran, whose
president is habitually described as “new Hitler” and his people
– as “islamofascists”. Ironically, supporters of Iran compare
Bush with Hitler, and Bushites with Nazis. This brings to mind
Huey Long of Louisiana; when asked whether fascism could ever
come to America, he replied, "Sure. Only it will be called
anti-fascism".
Hollywood has produced a
few movies featuring demon-exorcising priests; they can make one
about a demonising rabbi based on
Shmuley Boteach, an author of a book on the necessity of
hating evil who wrote: “Ahmadinejad is an international
abomination who can lay strong claim to being the single most
hate-filled man alive.” The politicians weren’t far behind, thus
Netanyahu: “Hitler went out on a world campaign first, and then
tried to get nuclear weapons. Iran is trying to get nuclear arms
first.” And Gingrich: “This is 1935 and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is
as close to Adolf Hitler as we’ve seen”.
The Israelis wax livid with
fury when they are compared with Nazis. They immediately open
endless “point out the difference” contest: the Nazis shod
boots, we boot shoes, they snarl in German, we sing in our
melodious Hebrew, the Nazis were against wonderful Jews, we are
against beastly Arabs. Surely Israelis are different from Nazis;
and it’s preferable to be a Frenchman in German-occupied France,
than a Palestinian in Jews-occupied Palestine. There is no
Palestinian Celine, no Palestinian Sartre or Gide to side with
the occupying power for the Jewish occupation is harsher.
The Americans like to
consider themselves the ‘good guys’ vs. Hitler’s ‘bad guys’.
But objectively speaking, there was not much to choose between
the two sides. The Americans were beastly enough: they burned
Dresden, nuked Hiroshima, starved to death millions of German
POWs. Even their racism was quite comparable: in the US, a
sexual union of an Aryan and a Black was considered a criminal
offence many years before the Nuremberg Laws, and
remained so many years after the Nuremberg Laws were voided
(Alabama dropped it from their book of laws in 2000).
I do not bother even to
speak about the Soviet side in the war, for it became a
commonplace to view Stalin as morally equal to Hitler, and the
Communists as being morally equal to Nazis, though this claim is
based of some fantasy of Cold War statistics, and actually
Stalin’s Gulag never had as many inmates as George Bush’s
prisons.
Now, demonisation is a
heathen thing. Only an arrogant and godless man can, in his
hubris, claim inherent moral superiority over another mortal.
This is why demonisation was not known until the Church was
marginalised. It is no better to demonise flesh and blood than
to idolise it. We have learned “Do not make for yourself a god”;
now it is the time to learn “do not make for yourself a demon”.
We are blessed with our friends, and we are blessed with our
enemies. We are not angels, and our enemies are not demons.
In understanding this, we
may learn from Jews who stubbornly and wisely refuse to demonise
their own. Ariel Sharon was a brutal killer of women and
children who reputedly wanted to be “a Hitler to Palestinians”;
but The New York Times of Sulzberger disregarded our
futile attempts to demonise him, he was well received by the
high and mighty, and he went down in history as a kind old
soldier. The Jews did not allow the demonisation of the Jewish
executioners of Stalin’s Secret Police nor even of ruthless
Jewish mob killers and recorded them all as “men
who loved their Jewish mothers”.
The Jews do not fall into
the trap of demonisation for they know: everyone can be
demonised. This lesson is given in Talmud on the example of Job,
who “was perfect and upright and feared God and eschewed evil”.
Still the Sages proved him a bad ‘un, just for fun of it. The
Writ said that Job did not sin with his lips. Sages said: but he
did sin within his heart. If this were not enough, Job had said
“he that goes down to Hell shall come up no more” – and thus
denied the resurrection of the dead, etc. Thus anyone can be
demonised, and therefore none should be demonised.
Moreover, the wise Jews did
not demonise Satan himself. Why did Satan incite God against
Job?, asked a Talmudic Sage, and he answered: God became
overenthusiastic over Job, and He almost forgot the love of
Abraham. Satan interfered for the best of reasons, in order to
preserve the rightful place of Abraham. “When Satan had heard
this homily he came and kissed the Sage’s feet”, says the Talmud
(Baba Bathra 15). This was wise, for Satan is not equal to God,
and he has a place in His plans.
This theological fallacy of
demonisation was well understood by the German Catholic
political scientist Carl Schmitt. He is often presented as a man
of no moral scruples; but this is a result of misunderstanding
him. For him, “the distinction between friend and foe cannot be
grounded in morality. It is a matter of us against
them, not of good against evil. Both sides are
human, so a politician who characterizes “them” as
morally inferior or “bad” risks not only the hubris of
arrogance but also the blasphemy of denying God to be the
creator of all. The power of the Lord is over all, even over
one’s enemies. It would be blasphemy to treat one’s foes as less
than human. We are all moral equals, on Schmitt’s view, even
though politics sometimes makes it “necessary” to kill one’s
enemies”, in the short but precise presentation of modern
American philosopher
Newton Garver.
Scott Horton misunderstood the idea of Schmitt so completely
that one wonders whether it is even possible. He wrote: “For
Schmitt, the key to successful prosecution of warfare against
such a foe is demonisation… According to Schmitt, the norms of
international law respecting armed conflict reflect the romantic
illusions of an age of chivalry.” It's the ther way around:
Schmitt was for the War of Uniforms, carried out between two
armies, where civilians are kept out of trouble. He was against
demonisation, for it is unacceptable for a religious man. Horton
is aware that his reading of Schmitt is flawed, for he writes,
correctly: “Schmitt expresses from the outset the severest moral
reservations about his concept of demonisation. It is, he fears,
subject to “high political manipulation” which “must at all
costs be avoided.” He uses Schmitt to attack John Yoo, a Bush
appointee who followed Alan Dershowitz into permitting torture,
but instead of referring to Dershowitz the Zionist, he appeals
to Schmitt who can be presented as a “Nazi legal thinker”. The
goal (attacking Yoo) is worthy, but the means (connecting to
Schmitt) are foul.
Horton’s article can be
understood as a follow-up to the extreme demonisation of 30’s
Germany. He refers to Leo Strauss, “a lifelong admirer of Carl
Schmitt, a scholar and teacher of his works” but fails to see
the great difference. Schmitt was aware of God, Strauss was so
godless that he shocked Zionists in Jerusalem of 1930s by his
total atheism. Of these two men, of Strauss the Neocon precursor
and Schmitt the Nazi legal mind, it’s Schmitt who was calling
for a human attitude to an enemy, while Strauss dehumanised all.
Horton writes: “Carl
Schmitt was a rational man, but he was marked by a hatred of
America that bordered on the irrational. He viewed American
articulations of international law as fraught with hypocrisy,
and saw in American practice in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries a menacing new form of imperialism.” I
wonder what is irrational about it? Even a man on our side of
the barricades (and Horton is here) can’t admit that the state
that vetoes every resolution condemning Israel and calls to war
on Iran is so hypocritical that Molière would rewrite his
Tartuffe if knew about it? Horton’s typically Jewish
attitude – “if we are criticised, this is irrational hatred” –
became the hallmark of American thinking which grew out of
demonisation of the enemy.
You can’t demonise just one
person and stop: the demonisation of one causes more
demonisations to follow. The attacks on Muslims, Arabs, Iranians
are a follow up of the preceding attacks on Germans. Thus the
Canadian Jewish columnist Mordecai Richler wrote: “Germans are
an abomination to me. I'm glad Dresden was bombed for no useful
military purpose. The Russians couldn't withhold and mistreat
German prisoners of war long enough for me.” And Nobel Peace
Prize winner Elie Wiesel improved on him:
“Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should
set apart a zone of hate—healthy virile hate—for what the German
personifies and for what persists in the German.” From here, it
was a short jump to Dan Gillerman,
Israeli representative at UN, calling the Hezbollah “ruthless,
indiscriminate animals”, to 1982 Israel's chief of staff Rafael
Eitan pushing Palestinians as “drugged cockroaches into a
bottle”. But now, even Germans happily
follow this line of accusations against their late Fuehrer, and
join in the universal condemnation of Iran and Arabs. “President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a rising Adolf Hitler with his stand on
Iran's nuclear programme, German Chancellor Angela Merkel
said”.
Indeed, people who suffered
from attacks of hostility are keen to join the group and to be
hostile to somebody else, it is only a human, or even simian
quality. Enchanting Mexican painter Miguel Covarrubias mentions
such a case in his immensely entertaining book on Bali. In a
Balinese household, an angry tame ape climbed up on a tree and
tossed coconuts all over. In vain the owners tried to get the
ape down by offering him sweetmeats. Then they cornered a
pitiful dwarf, a servant, and made a convincing scene of
thrashing and punching him, and lo! The ape climbed down and
joined the persecutors in the free-for-all. In no time the silly
beast was back in a cage. In order to stay out of the cage, the
ape should steer clear of the temptation to join in a permitted
attack on somebody else. Apparently, this is a hard task even
for humans.
Thus, if we want to restore
peace in the world, we have to eschew demonisation altogether,
including the Pole of Evil, Adolf Hitler. I really could not
care less about Hitler, one way or other. I neither admire nor
demonise, neither love nor hate him, nor Napoleon nor Genghis
Khan. These scourges are dead. I have a warm spot for the
present Hitler, Ahmadinejad; I feel no qualms about yesterday's
hitlers, be they Saddam Hussein, Nasser or Yasser Arafat. My
father fought for Stalin, and you were told by President Bush
that Stalin is worse than Hitler. For me “Hitler” is a generic
name of an enemy of Jews, like “Amalek”.
Indeed, a man who feels so
strongly about Hitler is a heathen; he denies God and chooses
flesh and blood as his personal god and his personal demon. That
is why the observant Jews of Neturei Karta could go to the
Teheran Conference, while godless ones were scared off by the
name of the dead Austrian. The demonisation of Hitler caused the
deification of Jews, and thus the new theology of thoroughly
heathen neo-Judaism was created.
Creation of a man-made Pole
of Evil caused a number of anomalies in public discourse. The
demonisation of racism is a result. One may disapprove of a
silly man who considers himself being of a better breed than
others. Still this is a very common sort of vanity, shared by
many people of “higher castes”, i.e. of noble, priestly and
Jewish descent in our society. Belief in superiority of the
white race, or of Anglo-Saxon stock is just a democratic version
of the higher-caste vanity, suitable for people who can’t claim
noble or Jewish descent. If and when these supposedly
higher-caste persons will give up their vanity, when they
renounce their titles and make a bonfire of the Threat of
Assimilation book by Lipstadt, then they may attend to the
mote in their commoner neighbour’s eye.
Small-time racism is hardly
a problem in our society. I, a dark-skinned and moustachioed
Mediterranean man, have never been on the receiving end of it
for 60 years of my well-travelled life. Admittedly I never tried
to annoy the native inhabitants by playing loud foreign music,
practising strange customs in public or behaving in conspicuous
way. There is some tribal like and dislike in Israel, mainly
between various Jewish tribes, and it is surely unpleasant
enough, but I am not sure it is up to bad old racism.
Racism is so little of a
problem, that the search for sacrificial racist went completely
astray. French MP
Georges Freche was thrown out of his party because he said
that the national football team of France should not be all
black. He publicly said, “nine of 11 players in our national
football team are black. Three or four black players would have
been a normal proportion.” Blacks indeed are well endowed in
sports and music, like the Greeks of Homer, but maybe the native
French are also interested and are entitled to play football in
their own team. Yes, this sentence appears slightly off the
strict reading of political correctness; but it is certainly
common sense.
These equality ideas should
be given a say, not a free run. It is all right for Swedes to
have a female pastor from time to time, but there are no male
pastors anymore, and very few worshippers. Likewise, if all
football players were black, maybe the native French will not be
interested enough even to watch football anymore. Indeed, the
French national football team should not be all (or
predominantly) black; and the leading journalists and talking
heads of French TV should not be all (or predominantly) Jewish.
The Africans and the Jews came to France, are happy with French
hospitality, and do not intend to displace the natives. If the
French socialists continue to be that strict with their members,
they will frogmarch into oblivion with the dinosaurs; and
Segolene Royal will be just the name of a politician who stopped
le Pen to advance Sarkozy.
In England,
a ballet dancer Simone Clarke expressed her view that the
country has enough immigrants, and the endless process of
importing workers should slow down or even cease. Well, it is a
view, certainly a reasonable one, and within the Bill of Rights,
or Magna Carta or whatever nowadays authorizes freedom of
speech. Some crazy anti-racists went to demonstrate against the
dancer’s being engaged in the Ballet. The dancer is a good
person, not a racist in any meaningful meaning of the word; not
that it matters, but she is even married to a Chinese dancer;
but for godless, obsessive Hitler-demonisers even such a
moderate view may not be expressed, and if expressed, the person
should be kicked to the street, unemployed and homeless. As a
Communist, I do stand for Simone Clarke’s right to belong to BNP
and to dance Giselle on the scene of English National
Opera, and the active protesters should go first to protest
Barbara Amiel writing in the Daily Telegraph.
In Germany, these
anti-racists and anti-Nazis walk around with the Israeli flag
and demand
kaffiyehs to be taken off like Schneider of Leipzig:
“What we all share is support for Israel and coming out against
any form of anti-Semitism, fascism and sexism,” says the
center's director, Christian Schneider, 26.
A good example of the pro-Israel activity in Leipzig is the
public campaign against wearing kaffiyehs, once an
essential accessory in the European left-wing activist's
wardrobe. "Do you have a problem with Jews or is it only that
your neck is cold?" was the slogan for the campaign organized by
the center in recent years. The campaign aimed to prevent young
people from wearing what the center perceived as a symbol of
identification with the Palestinians and with anti-Semitism,
reported Haaretz.
These crazy things are a
result of the extreme demonisation of Hitler. Again, we may
learn from Jews, who expel immigrants by planeloads, fight
miscegenation and assimilation while always adding
“this is not racism”. Why is it
not racism? In a Jewish joke, a Rabbi was delayed on a trip, he
noticed Sabbath is approaching, so he prayed and a miracle
occurred: it was Sabbath everywhere, but still Friday in the
Rabbi’s Cadillac. Likewise, opposing (or even mouthing the word)
miscegenation is racist; but miraculously,
not for a Jew.
“Racism”, i.e. preference
given by a native to a native at the expense of a stranger is a
perfectly normal and normative behaviour. This attitude is
ordered by the Bible, this attitude safeguards the intimate
relationship between a man and his soil. In the Jewish prayer,
God is asked to give rain and to disregard the prayers of a
stranger who asks for a dry weather. Some moderate “racism” is
the best guard of the land; and you have no reason to worry:
cosi fan tutti, they all do it.
Mind you, “racism” is not a
virtue in the Christian book. But nor are greed, gluttony, lust,
envy and pride. Still we do not see a politician being expelled
from, say, a Socialist party for running a gourmet column, for
giving an advice on the stock market, for marching on a gay
pride parade, for buying a car as good as that of his neighbour.
There are “anti-hate” laws, but no “anti-pride” laws.
Whatever one may think of
racists of old, today this title of contempt is given to anyone
who does not deny roots and attachment of a man to its soil and
community. The archetypal racist of our days, say, a racist
saint, would be Simone Weil, who considered roots a virtue,
and uprooting a sin. (She vehemently
objected to the demonisation of Germany in France 1939).
Thus, whoever supports immigration, sins, for he supports
uprooting. So one can argue whether it is better to be good to
one’s neighbour the potential immigrant by allowing him to come
and stay; or by forbidding him to leave his home country. There
is no sure-fire answer to this question, and I say that as a
perpetual immigrant. And if you are told ‘you are racist’ for
you object to mass immigration, respond with ‘You are uprooting
poison’, as Simone Weil did.
Being unable to “demonise
back” the Jews and the Americans; the Nationalists and the Far
Right tend to demonise the Russians, the Soviets, the
Communists. They are not too successful, so we do not have to
fight it much. Suffice to say, the mad numbers of “millions
killed by Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot” are just a figment of
imagination. None of them killed as many as the American Empire
did and does. None of them exiled so many as Israelis did.
There are no Evil Empires,
only unchecked ones. Soviet Russia was not an Evil Empire, nor
was Communism embodied in Stalin and the Gulag. Sholokhov,
Block, Pasternak, Esenin, Mayakovsky and Deineka embraced the
Revolution and expressed its ideas in art. It was a land of the
great and partly successful experiment in equality and
brotherhood of Man, of a brave attempt to defeat the spirit of
Greed. Communists and their supporters tried to liberate labour,
to bring the Kingdom of Heaven to earth, to remove poverty and
free the human spirit. Communism brought forth the social
democracy of Europe.
Germany was not an Evil
Empire, nor was the spirit of organic traditionalism embodied in
Hitler and Auschwitz. The Traditionalists tried to establish an
alternative paradigm based on Wagner, Nietzsche and Hegel, to go
to the roots and traditions of the folk. Not in vain, the best
writers and thinkers of Europe from Knut Hamsun to Louis
Ferdinand Celine to Ezra Pound to William Butler Yeats to
Heidegger saw a positive element in the Traditionalist organic
approach. If Russia and Germany had not been demonised, it is
quite possible we would not have seen them coming to such
extremes.
We have to restore the
balance of mind and discourse lost in the aftermath of the World
War Two, due to the too-complete victory of the bourgeois
‘Judeo-American’ thought. While condemning excesses and war
crimes, we should regain the kingdom of the spirit from
Mayakovsky to Pound. There are no evil men, we are created in
the image of God, and all ideas are needed to produce new
thought.
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