Kevin Myers on the Wiesenthal fairytale

Following Irish President Mary McAleese’s recent dispute with the Simon Wiesenthal Centre columnist Kevin Myers of Ireland’s Independent has written an interesting article that, despite its pro-Israel slant, I can’t imagine ever appearing in a national newspaper in the US.

Wiesenthal was a liar - but that doesn’t fit the fairytale

The President has once again discovered what a dung-deluge you can trigger by apparently taking the name, the works and the pomps of a modern saint like Simon Wiesenthal in vain. As it happens, Wiesenthal was a self-aggrandising liar, who had nothing to do with Eichmann’s capture, as he so often claimed: but because he has become one of the icons of secular, post-Christian Europe, one has to genuflect at his name.

He now stands alongside those other self-promoting and fraudulent deities of Western civilisation: Sartre, Picasso, Camus, Pinter, Churchill, et alia.

Of course, at one level I understand why Wiesenthal dedicated his life to hunting down the perpetrators of the Holocaust; he and his wife lost 89 family members to it (or so we are told: this is a figure which no one is likely to examine, never mind dispute).

But unspeakable though the catastrophe that befell Europe’s Jewry was, Nazi Germany didn’t pioneer the use of industrialised murder to solve a political ‘problem’.

It was the Soviet Union that actually blazed the trail in the creation of death camps. I have said previously that the 20th- century creator of the concept of mass murder to expedite political ends was the Russian Jew Zinoviev; but further research has shown that the Polish Catholic Felix Dzerzhinksy actually proposed the mass murder of inconvenient populations before Zinoviev did.

Either way, the Germans were not the 20th-century architects of mass murder as a political weapon: we can give credit to Judaeo-Papist communists for that.

So where are the hunters of murderers in the cause of communism, whose victims are numbered in the tens of millions?

Well, apart from in Kampuchea, they are almost non-existent; for the liberal left, who are the guardians of the public conscience in such matters, have always become distinctly uncomfortable at the prospect of hunting down fellow lefties.

But it is not just an issue of the left: why did Wiesenthal never pursue the proto-Eichmann of the Soviet Union, Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich, whose murder machinery might well have accounted for some 20 million lives, perhaps a million of them Jewish?

He died in his bed in 1991, aged 98. Was his immunity from investigation by Wiesenthal because he himself was Jewish?

And why did the great genocide-avenger never pursue the local communist commissars who destroyed the national leaderships of Poland, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia in 1940? Was it because most of them were Jews also? This is difficult territory. We know there’s not a child in Europe who hasn’t heard of Eichmann: nor one who has ever heard of Kaganovich. But there we are. We compose narratives to make our inconstant consciences happy: and so the left-liberal tale of popular culture excludes Kaganovich from its pantheon of devils, and then bizarrely proceeds to demonise Israel for, amongst other things, trying to protect itself with a wall, without which hundreds of Israelis would certainly now be dead.

Yet to compound the illogicality behind all this, the wall that the Egyptians had constructed to confine the citizens of the Gaza Strip was never mentioned in all the hysterical denunciations of Palestinian immuration.

Similarly, we hear every day about Israeli strikes against Gaza: but who knows of the thousands of rockets that have been fired from Gaza into the Israeli town of Sderot, where children have to sleep every night underground, and where 28pc of the population are now suffering from serious post-traumatic stress disorder?

The uncomfortable truth is that we’re not very good at telling ourselves the whole truth, even about the most obvious things.

This is because we apparently need to create historical narratives that have a moral rather than factual consistency, which are blessed by heroes, and which incorporate the taboos and dogmas of our value system.

So, because anti-Semitism is understandably and very properly a key-value in the post-Holocaust world, we don’t make a Jew like Kaganovich a villain in our popular political narratives, as we freely do for Eichmann, a Christian.

On the other hand, modern popular culture identifies with the ‘oppressed’ Palestinians: there is certainly no politically chic kudos in trying to empathise with the existential hell that is life for the people of Sderot—or indeed, for any Israeli community.

So the dead Jews of the Holocaust can evoke all sorts of sympathy; but the plight of the living Jews of Israel, after six decades of war, with absolutely no end to terrorist hostilities in sight, arouse no compassion whatever amongst the bien-pensant, for whom only Palestinians can be victims.

One could call this anti-Semitism, which in part it is, but it’s more complex than that. Adults create and live within narratives that resemble the fairy-tales of their childhoods; indeed, we can actually see the emergence of different narratives in the US primaries right now.

These narratives are incompatible with the complexity, nuance and simple random incomprehensibility of actual existence. So instead, we prefer to abolish reality and elevate the fictional narrative into the ‘truth’.

That is why frauds like Weisenthal can get away with their deceits, and always will. They understand, and play to, the insatiable human desire to live in a story-book.

Posted by Matra on Thursday, January 31, 2008 at 05:07 AM in
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Comments:

Posted by Matra on January 31, 2008, 05:43 AM | #

Myers’ references to Israel getting bad press may cause those used to American media to scoff. But it is true that in Ireland, at least, the media are biased in favour of the Palestinians in a way that is reminiscent of their coverage of black South Africans during the 80s.

Posted by Desmond Jones on January 31, 2008, 07:41 AM | #

Of course Jews distanced themselves from the crimes of the Communists by emphatically and repeated suggesting they were not really Jews.

KMac:

Slezkine attempts to dodge the issue of the degree to which the horrors perpetrated by the early Soviet state were rooted in the traditional attitudes of the Jews who in fact played such an extensive role in their orchestration. He argues that the Jewish Communists were Communists, not Jews.

http://www.vdare.com/misc/051105_macdonald_stalin.htm

Plocker also comments on this official position.

The Jews active in official communist terror apparatuses (In the Soviet Union and abroad) and who at times led them, did not do this, obviously, as Jews, but rather, as Stalinists, communists, and “Soviet people.” Therefore, we find it easy to ignore their origin and “play dumb”: What do we have to do with them? But let’s not forget them. My own view is different. I find it unacceptable that a person will be considered a member of the Jewish people when he does great things, but not considered part of our people when he does amazingly despicable things.

Even if we deny it, we cannot escape the Jewishness of “our hangmen,” who served the Red Terror with loyalty and dedication from its establishment. After all, others will always remind us of their origin.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3342999,00.html

Posted by Desmond Jones on January 31, 2008, 07:50 AM | #

Eugene Girin adopts this tactic as well, when trying to refute MacDonald.

Kevin MacDonald also demonstrates his utter ignorance of Soviet Jewish historical realities when he argues that ex-Jews like Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and the thousands of Cheka operatives and Bolshevik party members retained their Jewish identity and “Eastern European shtetl culture.”

In fact, Jewish Bolsheviks were simply apostates who turned their back on their faith and people. Some of them were simply violent scoundrels without any sense of ethnic pride and belonging, shunned and despised by their community. Others were brutal revolutionaries—like Trotsky who refused to bury his father in a Jewish cemetery, refused to meet with Jewish delegations, and violently persecuted Russian Zionists. “I am not a Jew and have nothing in common with the Jewish people,” he said around 1919.

Jewish Communists viewed Judaism as a shameful relic of the pre-Soviet past that had to be eradicated. Thousands of synagogues were desecrated and closed down only to be re-opened as athletic societies, social clubs, and warehouses. Rabbis were arrested and imprisoned with Christian clergymen in the horrid Solovki prison camp. There, they were housed in the same barracks as common criminals.

In 1918, the Ukrainian rabbinical congress, which met in Odessa, issued a cherem—a declaration of excommunication—against Trotsky and other prominent Jewish Bolsheviks. The famous Jewish sage Chofetz Chaim characterized communism as the “destruction of the soul” and in 1927, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, the leader of the Hassidic Chabad Lubavitch movement, was arrested by the Soviet secret police and only pressure from abroad prevented the Soviet authorities from sending him to a labor camp.

Thousands of Jews were murdered, raped, assaulted, and robbed by units of the Red Army in the Ukraine and Belarus during the Russian Civil War (1918-22) and the Russo-Polish War (1919-20). In the town of Gluhov, Red soldiers murdered over a hundred Jews, shot the rabbi, looted the synagogue, and tore up the Torah scrolls. In another Ukrainian town of Novgorod-Seversky, Red Army soldiers slaughtered eighty-eight Jews and maimed many others. The anti-Semitic brutality of the Red Army is magnificently depicted in Isaac Babel’s haunting novel Red Cavalry.

Large numbers of Russian Jews were arrested, tortured, exiled, and executed by the Bolsheviks for either belonging to “enemy parties” like the Mensheviks, the Socialist-Revolutionaries, and the Kadets, to “enemy classes” like the merchants and the intellectuals. At least 200,000 Russian Jews fled Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution and the Red Terror.

Russian Jews were active contributors to the anti-Bolshevik struggle. A Jewish Socialist Revolutionary, Fanya Kaplan attempted to assassinate Lenin and was executed by the Bolsheviks. Dozens of Jews served in the White (anti-Bolshevik) armies and one of them, David Pasmanik, organized the Jewish Anti-Communist Committee in Paris. The army of the anti-Bolshevik Western Ukrainian People’s Republic in Galicia and Bukovina had a Jewish detachment of 1,200 soldiers under the command of Solomon Leinberg and dozens of Jews served in the guerrilla forces of the Ukrainian anti-Bolshevik anarchist Nestor Makhno. The legendary Ukrainian Jew, Lev (“Lyovka”) Zadov was Makno’s counter-intelligence chief.

Contrary to Kevin MacDonald’s brazen assertions, Communist rule was a tragedy for Russian Jews. We were deprived of our traditions, culture, language, and communal cohesiveness. The Russian Jewish community has been ravaged by assimilation, intermarriage, and indifference because of Soviet rule. Many Russian Jews lost all sense of ethno-religious identity and became perpetual outsiders, unaccepted by neither Jews nor Russians.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on January 31, 2008, 12:37 PM | #

The refutation of that, Desmond, is simply that there are different branches of the Jewish tribe, secularist non-believing non-practicing Jews among them. The latter are no less members of the tribe, motivated by many of the same core tribal motivations as the others.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on January 31, 2008, 12:39 PM | #

It should be crystal-clear that a Jew need not be religious to belong to the Jewish tribe and act in accordance with certain fundamental Jewish tribal motivations.

Posted by Frank Messmann on January 31, 2008, 04:25 PM | #

Can you please give me a citation for the Myers article in case I should quote him?

Posted by Kicking on January 31, 2008, 05:51 PM | #

Myers on another Jewish icon:

I wish I had kicked Susan Sontag

If ever a single person was living proof that intelligence is a meaningless quality without modest common sense, it was Susan Sontag who died last week. The reverential tone of the obituaries served to confirm that self-proclaimed intellectuals, no matter how deluded or preposterous, exert a strange, intimidating power over non-intellectuals – especially if they employ that infuriating literary device, the epigram.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/01/02/do0206.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2005/01/02/ixop.html

Posted by torgrim on January 31, 2008, 07:17 PM | #

Thanks for posting about Susan Sontag, Kicking!

Kevin Meyers writes like no one in the US, at least alive today, both in diction and substance, it is like food for the mind.

Old Edward Abbey, the “Desert Anarcist”, comes to mind, as he also tipped over icons. Only his writing style, was very different.

Anyway, it happens, now and then, that hearing of an obituary, sometimes, is a cause for celebration, I think I will pour one to Ed Abbey and Kevin Meyers tonight and try to forget Sontag.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on January 31, 2008, 10:50 PM | #

Frank Messmann, clicking on the underlined words ”Wiesenthal was a liar - but that doesn’t fit the fairytale” near the top of the log entry takes you to the original article.

Posted by DavidL on February 01, 2008, 12:17 AM | #

Thanks Matra for bringing Kevin Myers writing to our attention.

You’re correct - you will not find that level of criticism aimed

at “yahweh’s favorites” in a US paper.

Posted by Svigor on February 01, 2008, 03:43 AM | #

Of course Jews distanced themselves from the crimes of the Communists by emphatically and repeated suggesting they were not really Jews.

This a good one. I’ve heard it several times from intellectuals and jewish netizens alike. Many religious jews state “born a jew, die a jew”; most jews feel this way, that Jewishness is a (chiefly racial) tribal thing. Those who offer up this “not really jews” crap are lying (no doubt a mitzvah under such circumstances). Suckers are its target audience; it’s just more of the same old shell game (I’m a jew if you’re giving out rewards to jews; I’m an atheist if you’re giving out fines to jews; jews are a religion when it suits our purposes; jews are a tribe when we’re being candid; and on and on and on). There’re always a few rubes around to play.

“The jewish People.” Time and again we’re exposed to this phrase in the jewish press.

As ever, just change the whos and whoms around, and ask questions. Would the media buy the “not real x” if we were talking (Christians|Catholics|National Socialists|Council of Conservative Citizens|Germans|Stormfront Posters|Etc.)? Would they just sound the trumpets, write it into the main narrative of the History of the Victors, and let the chips fall where they may? Would anyone buy the “aww, they’re not real “Christians|Muslims|etc”? How about “aww, they’re not real “whites|blacks|yellows”?

For that matter, where IS the media on these Holocausts of Communism’s? Passed-out at the wheel, if one is being generous. Just like they’re too busy looking for boy-buggering priests (whom liberals would never allow to be purged from Catholicism) too even mention the SCANDALOUS behavior found amongst Rabbis.

Posted by Svigor on February 01, 2008, 03:49 AM | #

Y’know, we American WNs bitch about the lack of freedom in our press, but really we’re just whining because the American herd doesn’t know about this lack; it usually true that the best reporting on taboo subjects is to be found in foreign countries. We’re actually quite lucky in that we have a large Anglophone press outside the USA.

Posted by Svigor on February 01, 2008, 04:02 AM | #

On the other hand, if the polls are to be trusted, Americans are starting to get the picture about the press.

I wonder how many the Paul campaign will cause to break with the media mind control.

Posted by ben tillman on February 02, 2008, 04:24 PM | #

The funniest thing about the Girin argument is that, after he denies that Jewish Bolsheviks were Jewish, he repeatedly refers to “Jewish Bolsheviks” and “Jewish Communists”. He can’t even convince himself.

Posted by Hibernia Girl on February 03, 2008, 10:48 PM | #

DavidL: “Thanks Matra for bringing Kevin Myers writing to our attention.”

Kevin Myers is one of the very, very few journalists in Ireland who has had anything sensible to say about immigration in Ireland (and the West).

If you enjoy his writing, you might like to watch him “live” on a discussion about amnesty for illegal immigrants in Ireland (yeah, we got the same problems over here):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlWB7Ik0CEM

You can watch the entire programme here, which also includes Kevin Myers telling the Irish people that they’re nuts for demanding that the U.S. give illegal Irish immigrants amnesty there. Go, Kev!:

http://www.rte.ie/news/2007/1112/qanda.html [click on “watch the show” in right-hand column]

Posted by Fred Scrooby on February 03, 2008, 11:47 PM | #

Hibernia Girl, first let me say you and Kevin Myers are a Godsend. God bless you both!

For the second video you link, after clicking on “watch the show” in the right-hand column viewers may wish to click on “Q2: When is Bertie Ahern going to make the undocumented Irish in the US a priority?” on the drop-down menu that opens up. In that discussion they go over the problems Irishmen are encountering living as illegals in the States and all but Myers express the wish the U.S. government would “look the other way” where Irishmen are concerned. I agree, the U.S. government should look the other way where Irishmen or other Euro-race illegals are concerned, up to a point. ("Up to a point” only in the sense that too many illegals of even European race lowers U.S. workingmen’s wages and that cannot be tolerated without limit — there are laws governing these things, after all — but harshness isn’t appropriate for Euros and the authorities should cut them some slack in these situations, no question whatsoever.) The race-replacement crisis isn’t being caused by Irishmen here illegally. No problem, whether wage-lowering or otherwise, that I can see is being caused by them, certainly not the “three thousand to twenty-five thousand” of them cited by one of the participants in the video. The race-replacement problem and wage-lowering problem is caused by non-Europeans coming in in their millions. Needless to say, those are the ones the U.S. government should be strict with on all counts, first and foremost their role in literally changing the country’s race, their most intolerable effect of all, of course. Also needless to add is the fact that for political reasons, showing racial favoritism toward Euros is extremely hard in today’s U.S. But interestingly, it’s not extremely hard in the case of Jews who want to enter — they all get shown favoritism (I wonder why? .... Something about “he who pays the piper”? Something like that; I forget the rest of it just at the moment ...) Whites have to take a stand and make it happen, that’s all there is to it. They’re not dead yet: this country is still some 70% white. The minute they want, they can start moving things back in the direction that suits them.