Brett Hetherington's Blog: "First thought:" My Substack page, page 59

"Women of Spain, go back to the bad old days!"

Sometimes I get the sense that I am living in a past era...
“A how-to manual called Marry and Submit Yourself (Casate y se sumisa) is proving a hit in Spain...
It is aimed at newly-wed women - teaching them to accept criticism of their cooking or housekeeping, and to learn to keep the peace in a marital home. 
 
The author, Costanza Miriano [has said] that her book is not about women being doormats, but being supportive.”

Source: here.

"The Remade Parent" now available

 I am extremely happy to say that my new non-fiction book is finally now availableas a Kindle e-book (at only $4.82.) 
It includes a chapter looking at parenting in Spain.
The print-on-demand soft-back version will soon also be for sale...

"Anti-Semitism and the Catalan left"

The entrance to the Auschwitz Birkenau death campMatthew Tree (author of the remarkable novel SNUG) writing in Catalan for nuvol.com with his usual clear sight and bravery...


"Before World War II , anti-Semitism - a toxic hybrid
of anti-Judaism and Christian European pseudo-
scientific racism - was fashionable throughout
Europe, especially among young people. From 1945,
when everyone realized that some 5.8 million people
had been executed, starved, beaten, gassed or - in
the case of many babies- impaled on bayonets or
smashed against walls, simply for having non-Gentile
surnames, anti-Semitism began to lose popularity.
According to Labour MP Denis MacShane ('The New
Anti-Semitism', 2008) during the 60s and 70s certain
European intellectuals helped to make anti-Semitism
a socially acceptable prejudice once again thanks to
the concept (also a hybrid) of “anti-Zionism”, which
denies the right of Israel to exist as a state (on the
grounds that it is fascist and colonialist) while hinting
that all Israelis (or all Jews, even) manipulate
international opinion (especially U.S. opinion) in favor
of the said state of Israel by means of powerful
lobbies. 

In other words, rather than make specific
criticisms of certain undeniable crimes committed by
the Israeli state, anti-Zionists treat this country as if it
were the only beneficiary of a powerful and diabolical
conspiracy, against which everything from boycotts
to physical elimination is therefore justifiable.

In Catalonia this discourse has enjoyed huge success,
partly because it is often accompanied by an equally
huge ignorance of history: just look at the
incredulous face of almost any Catalan 'anti-Zionist' if
you tell him, for example, that in 1947, the
Palestinian Arabs were offered their own state, twice
as large as the current Occupied Territories; or that
the Gaza Strip and the West Bank were occupied
from 1948 up to Six Day War [in 1967] by Egypt and
Jordan respectively (though these states did not treat
the Palestinians any better than the Israelis have
done). 

And perhaps our anti-Zionist may not know –
accustomed as he is to qualifying the Israelis as Nazis
–that an important part of the Palestinian national
movement had genuinely Hitlerian roots, having been
founded by Yasser Arafat 's mentor, Haj Amin el-
Husseini, a personal friend of Himmler and the
architect of a plan to exterminate all the Jews of
North Africa and the Middle East with an
einsatzkommando led by Walter Rauff, the inventor
of the gas trucks used in Chelmno.

What is more, after centuries of relative tolerance
by Muslims towards Jews, European anti-Semitism,
imported directly from the Third Reich by el-Husseini,
has thoroughly infected the doctrines of radical
Islamist organizations such as Hezbollah or Allah
Hamas, both funded by Iran, a country that denies
the Holocaust, and has repeated again and again
hat Israel should be wiped off the face of the planet.

Yet when these same countries and organizations do
things that are somewhat worse than anything Israel
has done (such as now sending military support to
the current Syrian regime, which is responsible for
more deaths of Arab civilians in the last three years
than in Israel in it's entire history) the Catalan anti-
Zionists don't mutter so much as a word of protest.

In a nutshell, anti-Semitism has taken on many
different guises over the years, and the Catalan
variety - a generic anti-Zionism, often poorly informed
and pseudo-progressive (because it implicitly supports
regimes that are homophobic, sexist and, of course,
anti-Semitic) - is yet another variation on an old
European theme. Having said which, that does
not deny anybody the right to crticise a cruel and
unjustifiable occupation on the part of the state of
Israel. But of course, that's so obvious it doesn't need
to be stressed. Or maybe it does."

Claude Lanzmann and "The Last of the Unjust" in Seville

Lanzmann, left, with Benjamin Murmelstein in 1975, in a still from The Last of the Unjust French producer-director Claude Lanzmann, author of the singularly penetrating memoir “The Patagonian Hare” visited Seville this week.
His new movie is titled “The Last of the Unjust.” It is about Benjamin Murmelstein, the Jewish Council president in Theresienstadt ghetto, the concentration camp in the city of Terezín (in the modern-day Czech Republic.) who collaborated with the Nazis, a man who Lanzmann saidhe actually “grew to love.”
“The Last of the Unjust” will be released in Spain on January 10.