SHAMIR - IGNATIEV DIALOGUE
Our good friend Noel Ignatiev, one of the
editors of Race Traitor magazine, visited Palestine, and
we had a chance for long and exhaustive conversations. Later
Noel wrote an ‘unofficial report’ of his journey, including some
presentation of my ‘controversial’ views (see extracts at the
bottom). It is a basically fair and well-intentioned
presentation; Noel had to justify his contact with me to his
comrades and he did it well. As always happens, certain
misunderstandings have occurred; I wrote this correction to
present my views to you.
Dear Noel,
Thank you for your long exposition of our
talks. Probably it makes sense to point out some
misunderstandings:
·
You write: “Shamir is
pro-black. He believes that black people historically constitute
the most progressive sector of U.S. society.” Though I
understand it is a compliment coming from you, my friend, but I
must reject it. I am not overly concerned with blacks, a small
and particular minority of ex-slaves who have not integrated
fully into mainstream of American society. Their problem is
rather distracting you, and your American friends, from carrying
out the more important battle against your power elites. Instead
of fighting the Power (you may describe it as Capital, though my
vision is different) you keep fighting ‘racists’. This is a
minority problem, like the problem of gay marriages or that of
AIDS sufferers. You make a mistake (a bourgeois-liberal one, in
the Marxist parlance) of attaching yourself to a minority
problem at the expense of the main struggle. Sure, minority
problems vary from small ones (such as the quality of service at
your gas station) to the much larger one of racial
discrimination, but they are still minority problems in your
country (as opposed to Israel/Palestine, where discrimination
and inequality is a majority problem). In my view, we have to
change the main thing, to smash the Power, nothing less than
that.
·
Not for a second do I
think that “the black people are the most progressive sector”
and that Salvation will come through them. I am neither ‘pro-
nor contra-Black’. I admire Cynthia McKinney, not because she is
black, but because she stood bravely for the right cause. I am
not colour-conscious; I am not even sure that the ex-slaves’
problem of assimilation into American society is due to their
skin colour, but perhaps to their historically low social
position. Indeed, upper-class African Blacks have told me they
experience no racist treatment in the US. We have the example of
the Buraku in Japan, who made up a social minority of extremely
low status in pre-Meiji society, and are still discriminated
against in Japan – though they are racially indistinguishable
from other Japanese. Then there is the problem of the
untouchables in India who are not all that racially different
from other Indians. Such problems should be attended to
slowly and patiently, while taking into account local
conditions. Discrimination should be banned; but after that, a
society may proceed slowly.
·
This is connected
with your biggest misunderstanding: “the best label for
[Shamir’s] politics is national socialism”. Now, I am not
horrified by your suggestion. Indeed, I live in a country of
National Socialism triumphant. Israel was a National Socialist
state, and it still has some remnants of this regime, though now
its Socialist tendency is mainly undone. But I oppose Israeli
National Socialism, and any other NS for
the following
reasons.
·
I share with
national-socialists the belief in the existence of ‘organic
units’, but I do not consider the ‘nation’ to be the basic
organic body, nor ‘race’ as the building element, nor ‘blood’ as
a defining factor. In my view, the organic unit is a much
smaller territorial unit than the present ‘nation’ is.
For instance, in the US I would envisage New England, Dixie or
the Mid-West – as organic bodies. Maybe I am mistaken, and even
smaller units – states, regions – are also organic in your
country. In France, the provinces like Bretagne and Provence are
organic bodies; in Germany – Bavaria, Saxony and other federal
'lands' (ie, länder).
·
National Socialism
was a quasi-Judaic movement for it preferred ‘blood’ to ‘soil’.
For NS, a German is a German wherever he lives, like for Jews, a
Jew is a Jew even on Mars. That is why NS was a movement for
the unification of all German-speaking people from the
Volga to Alsace; I stand for the full individuality of separate
units, against Ein Reich, ein Volk, indeed, for the ideal
of the State and Revolution. That is why (and not because
of ‘blood dilution’, as is the case with NS), I am against
migration between organic units: for instance, a Parisian’s
migration to rural Bretagne is as bad as a Virginia Black’s
migration into Montana. Your racial problem is mainly a problem
of migration between organic units.
·
Why are ‘organic
units’ important? It is not only because of their beautiful
variety and the intricate mosaic of the world. The existence of
Nantucket or Normandie has an intrinsic value not to be given up
for the false coin of ‘the right of free movement’. But the main
reason is even heftier. Human beings have a real need for unity,
as real as their need of sexual union. This unity, or
solidarity, in its ideal form is the unity in God, of people
united in the Church. But in order to function together, people
should be shaped by territory as well. Territory is not an empty
space, but a unique unit of terrain, with its own climate,
agriculture, flora and fauna, tame and wild. Living together for
a very long time, the people of a given territorial unit come to
share similar characteristics/qualities, and thus they are able
to reach unity easier and faster than in a heterogeneous
society. That is why they express ‘xenophobia’, ie, the normal
desire in relatively homogeneous societies to have no strangers
in their midst who will slow the drive towards unity-in-God.
·
In the Jewish
tradition, a stranger who agrees to sleep in a room with a
married couple is considered to be ‘a killer’, for because of
his presence the couple is forced to avoid sexual union.
Likewise, we should be careful not to hinder the sacred union of
an organic unit by enforcing ideas and paradigms that interfere
with it. For instance, a civil-rights-conscious Jew who fights
the erection of a Nativity scene on public property acts like a
stranger sleeping in a married couple’s room.
·
Organic units have
rights, just as human beings – or even companies – have. In the
neo-liberal paradigm, societies have no rights; only individuals
and companies have rights. Probably the only exception is the
collective rights of Jews; this forces us to give more thought
to the centrality of Jews to the Neo-Liberal World Order.
·
As I consider these
units ‘organic’, their ‘xenophobia’ is not any different from a
biological immunity mechanism which rejects a foreign body or a
transplant. Naturally, the units have some capacity to absorb
foreign elements, but this capacity is limited. Intra-unitary
migration undermines immunity and creates a sort of “acquired
immunodeficiency syndrome” leading to the death of the organic
unit. A dead unit is one that has no solidarity between its
members. It can be assessed in terms of its social gap or by its
intensity of exploitation. It is not by chance that two
immigrant, anti-native societies – those of the US and Israel –
have the highest social gap in the developed world and the worst
conditions for their indigenous workers.
·
Death is not forever;
there are forces in action that try to bring a dead unit back to
life. If the bombardment by migration comes to a stop, these
forces will win the day. For instance, the Normans conquered
England; they killed the old organic unit and created a Chimera
of ‘horse and rider’. But the supply of Normans ran out pretty
soon; the Normans in England were eventually absorbed, as
Spaniards in Ireland were or Huguenots in Sweden. In the absence
of intra-regional migration, the regions of the US will have a
chance to become alive again – that is if they fight alienation
and promote solidarity.
·
Economically, I stand
at the opposite pole of NS, for I support Communism as the
highest form of solidarity, an earthly projection of the Church.
Communism with the Church is invincible. In the USSR, the Party
tried to act as the Church, with some success. But the Church
without God is like coitus interruptus; it leads to
frustration and the break-up of the union. Thus atheistic
godless communism failed, but it does not mean communism is
impossible. It will come back after connecting itself with the
Church. National Socialism was even more anti-Church, and
anti-God than Communism or Neo-Liberalism. For me, the Church
and God are not some add-ons easily removed by Occam’s razor,
but the most important elements of existence; thus I really must
decline the title of National Socialist. If a label is
necessary, that of Christian Local Communist would fit me
better.
·
However, even happy
couples need some space for their individualities; likewise, we
can accept some individualist dissent, including economic
dissent (= free enterprise) within organic communities. People
should be entitled to some minor independent economic activity,
provided society removes excesses of their income in order to
discourage greed. Thus, I am in favour of extremely high (over
one hundred per cent) taxation for the wealthy, zero taxation
for ordinary folk and of the total non-enforceability of debts.
·
My attitude towards
Jews is quite different from NS. While NS is concerned with the
‘Jewish race’, thus fully accepting Jewish self-vision, I stand
on the Orthodox Christian position and deny the existence of a
‘Jewish race’, for nobody has to be a Jew. I fully reject ‘the
Judaic tendency’, that is, in Marx’s terms, anti-solidarist,
antisocial tendency of “turning alienated man and alienated
nature into alienable, sellable objects’. The fight against
alienation is the most important fight, in my view; and here I
follow Simone Weil who was as anti-Judaic as possible. My
attention to ‘organic units’ is what Weil called
‘l’enracinement’, ‘the need for roots’.
·
Saying that, I see in
the fight against Jewish privilege an important direction in the
fight against the Power. For historic reasons, the Jews have
become a dominant group in the Neo-Liberal World Order, as it is
witnessed today in Jerusalem by the mass pilgrimage of world
leaders, including Kofi Annan, to the Holocaust Museum. Since
every Jew may cease being (= behaving like) a Jew, we are at war
with those who do not use this opportunity. The fight for
‘liberating Jews by liberating the world from Jews’, in Marx’
words, was an important part of the Left's ideology; it should
be renewed and not be left in the hands of NS.
·
We may extract the
grain of reason and truth from every evil idea. Behind the
paranoid, sadistic descriptions in the Turner Diaries one
can see the desire for a solidary society, where people are one.
But in the godless universe of Pierce, such unity can be
achieved only by mass killing. If Pierce were aware of God, he
would know of a different way to reach unity, that is of
communion. While you are horrified by his racism, I feel
compassion towards a lonely man who seeks solidarity and knows
not where to find it. Surely his dreams of the ‘rope days’ are
quite revolting – until one remembers the revolutionaries whose
dream it was to ‘hang the last king on the gut of the last
priest’.
·
It is possible that I
am less horrified by the Diaries than you are, for it
reads like a paraphrase of a Zionist book for youth written in
1946-48. Just replace ‘British’ for System, and ‘Arabs’ for
Blacks, remove references to nuclear weapons and you will end up
with a standard Israeli juvenile text of that time. The
terrorist acts read like the usual glorification of Lehi attacks
on British police stations and Arab markets. The expulsion of
Blacks and the writer’s joy in seeing a purely white collective
working the fields reads like the actual diaries of Joseph
Weitz, the head of Jewish Agency Settlement Department: he
enjoyed travelling the 'purified' (from Arabs) lands of
Palestine and observing the purely Jewish kibbutzim with a
similar joy. Thus a person horrified by the Diaries and
still collaborating with Zionists may be accused of duplicity,
at best.
·
I hope I have
clarified the main points of misunderstanding.
With comradely regards
Shamir
From Noel Ignatiev’s Report:
Last December I sent Shamir the following
letter (edited to eliminate repetition and personal references):
Your claim that Russia under
Stalin was a workers’ paradise is absurd. Mere mention of Orwell
and Solzhenitsyn should be enough to jar you back to reality….
The greatest proof of the character of Stalin’s regime is the
ease by which the Brezhnevites and later the gangsters came to
power. For thirty years Stalin made war on the Russian workers,
broke up their organizations, killed or forced into exile every
independent thinker among them, and so exhausted and demoralized
them that they were an easy mark for anyone (e.g. Vlasov) who
offered them hope of escape…
My second difference with you is
over the historic importance of the Jews… Even if no such people
as the Jews had ever existed,… the world would be pretty much as
it is…. Nineteenth-century capitalist society brought with it
poverty, disease, and ignorance for the wage slaves of Europe
and America, not to mention the Irish famine, the poisoning of
the Chinese people with opium, [and] the reduction of the
population of the Congo by ten million over fifteen years¾and
no one has ever suggested that nineteenth-century capital was
dominated by Jews or that it had a neo-Judaic character. In
Capital and the Grundrisse Marx analyzed and forecast
with amazing accuracy the development of society from his day to
ours , and while he was certainly not soft on the Jews he had no
need for them as an element in his study. Even if every Jew were
a capitalist and every capitalist a Jew, I would still be
anti-capitalist, not anti-Jew, because capital is the force
driving the planet to destruction, and “the Jew” is at most its
personification.
I recall someone reproaching you
for being soft on David Duke. You replied that in all likelihood
the one reproaching you would have been willing to overlook
Duke’s white supremacism had Duke not also been against the
Jews. If so, it were a grievous fault. It is also wrong to
overlook Duke’s white supremacism because he is against
the Jews. Duke, the National Alliance, and other advocates of
White Power are no friends of ours, notwithstanding their
anti-zionism….
Shamir never replied substantively to my
letter… As I expected, I found him to be a warm host and a
considerate travelling companion, able to discuss knowledgeably
and intelligently a wide range of human activity, including
history, philosophy, literature, music, film, painting and
sculpture, architecture, and the physical and natural sciences.
He enjoys good food and wine and a good story. He likes women.
He is a good partner in conversation, able to listen as well as
to contribute—except when it comes to a few areas. Nevertheless,
I must report that I made not the slightest progress on any of
the topics I raised in my letter or others that came up. I shall
now outline our talks.
1)
Shamir
knows his Marx, including the 1844 Manuscripts. He
claimed to have been influenced by the currents of 1968, and to
have worked with groups in Russia comparable to Praxis in
Yugoslavia, Cahiers du communisme in France or for that
matter ourselves in the U.S. He told me he regarded State and
Revolution as Lenin’s most important work. When I asked him
how he squared his appreciation of that work with his positive
attitude toward Stalin, he replied that times were different
then, that Stalin faced a difficult task, that he had tried
conscientiously to raise the cultural level of the workers and
peasants, including increasing the proportion of persons of
proletarian and peasant origin in the institutions of higher
education and especially in the Party, that the purges of the
mid-1930s were directed toward eliminating a layer of old
Bolsheviks (many of Jewish origin) who had come to regard the
country as their personal property, and that the circulation of
State and Revolution in the millions was a token of
Stalin’s commitment to the ideal of proletarian democracy. In
response to my saying that Stalin’s historic function was to
industrialize Russia, bring about universal literacy, emancipate
women formally, and in general establish the conditions for
capitalist accumulation, and that today’s gangster republic was
the outgrowth, he accused me (in a humorous tone) of sounding
like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. To my comment
that I had not read the Protocols and that I was not
talking about a conspiracy of Jews but about the logic of
capitalist development, he made no reply.
2)
Shamir is
unequivocal in his writings and in private conversations that he
is against what he calls the Judaic ideology and Jewish
interests, not against people of Jewish origin. He genuinely
admires Marx, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Simone Weil, and others
of Jewish origin who refused to identify as Jews, and also Isaac
Deutscher, Chomsky, and others who did not go quite so far.
There is nothing racial in his attitude. I suggested that
Jews were at most the carriers in Europe and North
America of an ideology that would have existed without them, and
brought up the cases of China and Japan, capitalism without
Jews. I said that targeting “the Jews” rather than capital was
dangerous because it made room for favoring one sector of
capital (“productive”) over another (“speculative”). He admitted
that Jews could not be held accountable for Japan and China. He
also admitted that he found industrial capital, with all its
defects, preferable to the present phase, which he identifies as
“neo-Judaic.” Given the reality of global parasitism, the
tendency to prefer the former is understandable; in Shamir’s
case it may explain his positive evaluation of Stalin’s regime,
which was nothing if not “productive.”…
3)
We had
our most difficult and acrimonious discussions on the subject of
whiteness in the U.S. Shamir is pro-black. He believes that
black people historically constitute the most progressive sector
of U.S. society. He has published odes to Cynthia McKinney (the
Afro-American Congresswoman from Atlanta who was defeated by
AIPAC et al for opposing U.S. mideast policy). At the same time,
he thinks racial oppression is no longer the policy of the
ruling class, and that it exists only as a legacy, unable to do
much harm. He thinks we place too much importance on color, and
that we should develop programs that represent “the majority”
rather than “ten percent.” I made the arguments you might
expect, to no avail. He seemed as deaf on the subject as the
white leftists we have been arguing against for thirty-five
years. Even after I explained that our aim was not to fight for
“ten percent” but to confront the principal barrier preventing
white workers from acting as part of a class, and that we would
be glad to forget about color as soon as the white workers did,
he went right on accusing me and RT of fighting only for a
“minority.” Some specifics: he sees the New York Teachers’
Strike of 1968 as a response to ruling-class (“Jewish”) efforts
to restructure the educational system using the demand for
“community control,” and argues that instead of supporting
community control people like us should have tried to find a
position that could unite black and white. He pointed out that
Jews do not send their children to urban public schools. He also
made no reference to the fact—which I know he knows—that Jews
made up a majority of the NY Teachers’ Union and all of its
leaders. Unfortunately I let him get away without addressing the
paradox that the main enemy of “Jewish” efforts to destroy
public schools was the “Jewish” Teachers’ Union…. His view of
the 1973 Boston busing crisis was consistent with his view of
the NY strike, namely that the ruling class (“the Jews”) used
busing as a way of destroying public schools, and that instead
of supporting it people like us should have searched for a way
that united black and white.
4)
Like
anyone who takes history seriously, Shamir reads it backwards:
he has his own interpretation of “Birth of a Nation,”
characterizing the American abolitionists as the forerunners of
U.S. imperialism. I tried to give him a history lesson (He knows
some of DuBois’s work, but not Black Reconstruction.),
describing the efforts of the former slaves to carry out a
revolution within the revolution. I conceded that the activities
of the slaves and their allies ultimately led to the triumph of
industrial capital, but said the responsibility lay not with
them but with the failure of white labor to recognize a labor
movement when it appeared in a black skin. He listened and said,
“Times have changed since then, and the struggle for racial
equality does not have the same potential as before.” A
reasonable position, I thought, and congratulated myself on a
small breakthrough, until the next day when he described Wendell
Phillips as “one of those people who would rather fight for the
slaves elsewhere than for the laborers under his nose”—as if he
had not heard a word I said.
5)
Shamir
opposes massive immigration, on the grounds that it is harmful
both to the immigrants and to the society receiving them. His
opposition is not motivated by racial sentiments, and it is not
absolute: he believes that a small number of people entering a
society from outside are beneficial. To prevent massive
population shifts he favors a combination of economic
transformation of the South and restrictions in Europe and North
America. When I expressed opposition to his view, on the grounds
that if the workers of Europe and North America agreed to
restrict immigration they would never be able to constitute
themselves as part of a global class, and therefore there would
be no transformation of the South, he accused me of attaching no
importance to traditional cultures. I denied the charge, saying
I agreed with him that change happens best when it happens
gradually, but said that I thought the damage caused by building
walls was greater than the damage caused by tearing them down….
Just as Israel had done more than Hitler to destroy whatever was
of value in Yiddish culture, so the exclusion of immigrants
would do more than their unrestricted admission to destroy
whatever there was of value in the American tradition, part of
which was its openness to newcomers. He listened politely and
then said, “Well, you place no value on traditional culture.”….
Charitably, he added that there must be room in the world for my
opinion as well as for the opinion of those who valued tradition
above all.
6)
Shamir
said that since racial equality had largely been achieved, we
need not concern ourselves with the past of people like David
Duke, who was these days talking more against zionism and the
Iraqi war than he was against black people. He advised us to
find a way to make common cause with him against the federal
government. I replied that even if he had dropped his explicit
white supremacy, and even if he was sincere, it was necessary,
given American tradition, to bear in mind the potential for
white solidarity as a rallying basis for a movement. So long as
the economy held up more or less, no explicitly white
supremacist movement could pose much of a threat, but if the
dollar collapsed and took with it the daily lives of ordinary
whites, it was likely that many would seek to solve their
problems at the expense of black people, as they had in the
past, not excluding genocide, and that it was not out of the
question that such a movement could come to power in the U.S.,
either alone or in coalition with a sector of capital. This he
called “Judaic thinking,” a continuation of the habit of Jews to
see themselves always as the target of persecution. That was the
other occasion I got angry with him—accusing me, of all people,
of “Judaic thinking.”
I left
Shamir with copies of State Capitalism and World Revolution,
Race Traitor, and the speeches of Wendell Phillips, and
urged him to read the Turner Diaries, but I am not
optimistic. Based on my talks with him and my reading of his
published works, I would say that the best label for his
politics is national socialism. For Americans brought up on
Steven Spielberg movies and Hollywood images of monocled Nazis
saying “Ve haf vays to make you talk,” I hasten to add that the
national socialism of today is not the National Socialism of
1933. (Moreover, Shamir’s Russian sympathies prevent him from
identifying unreservedly with Hitler.) Shamir’s politics are not
ours (if “ours” can still be said to exist), but neither are the
politics of social-democracy, green localism, third-world
nationalism, individualist anarchism, or liberalism, and I don’t
see how these days national socialism represents a greater
problem than any of the others…. In a talk he made before the
House of Lords, Shamir said that whoever supports Israel should
apologize to Rhodesia and South Africa. I agree with him, and in
like manner say that no one who maintains relations with two-staters
or anti-NAFTA protectionists has the moral right to attack me
for opposing efforts to oust Shamir from an anti-zionist
organization.
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