Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“it was a way of transforming organic ignorance into manufactured error, so the political representation of the interests of the white poor remains unnecessary. Those interests need not be given serious consideration—just rhetorical alliance. My point is that African Americans are still being employed in that way: to disappear the white poor and unify all classes and regions, erasing the real lines of conflict.”

“Ben-Gurion coined the slogan ‘from class to nation’ and redefined the class struggle as a war against Arab workers. Labor Zionism consciously undermined Palestinian trade unionism. Jewish class struggle in Palestine was for the most part a fight against Arab workers. To be anti-capitalist in Palestine almost always meant to be practically anti-Arab.’ ”

“Ze’ev Sternhell described Labor Zionism as ‘nationalist socialism’. ”

“Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi Party’s main theoretician, wrote in 1919 that ‘Zionism must be vigorously supported in order to encourage a significant number of German Jews to leave for Palestine or other destinations.’ Rosenberg ‘intended to use Zionism as a legal justification for depriving German Jews of their civil rights’ and ‘eventually the Jewish presence in Germany.’ ”

“Anti-Semitic ideologues and politicians in the 19th century were almost unanimous in their universal endorsement of Zionism. They considered Zionism ‘a useful vehicle for ridding Germany of its Jewish population and thus found it worthy of support.’ ”

“The Nazi leadership quoted Zionist sources to validate their claims that Jews could not be assimilated. It was difficult for German Jews to refute Nazi claims that they were aliens ‘when a loud and visible group of their own continually published identical indictments… Zionism had become a tool for anti-Semites.’ ”

“Bloom argued that Ruppin’s interaction with the Nazis cannot be dismissed as simply realpolitik. Rather it was ‘clearly the outcome of a congruent weltanschaung’ [worldview]. For Ruppin and many other eugenicists, ‘the pre-mass murderer Hitler seemed a refreshing politician.’ ”

“Ruppin saw a problem: where Jews live in the midst of peoples whose racial make-up is very different from theirs. This seems to be Ruppin’s and Günther’s common ground: that a solution to the Jewish problem must include the Jews’ removal from Northern Europe.”

“Morris-Reich accepted that there wasn’t simply an identity of interest between Zionism and National Socialism but also an ideological affinity. He argued that Ruppin’s concern was ‘eugenic rather than racial.’ A distinction without a difference. What is the purpose of eugenics if not ‘improving’ the ‘race’?”

“race bias is not absolute, inevitable, or immutable. It has a beginning, a life, a history in scholarship, and it can have an end”

“We are being bullied into understanding the human project as a manliness contest where women and children are the most dispensable collateral.”

“The inability or unwillingness to contemplate a future that is neither afterlife nor the tenure of grandchildren. Time itself seems not to have a future that equals the length or breadth or sweep or even the fascination of its past. Infinity is now, apparently, the domain of the past. And the future becomes discoverable space, outer space, which is in fact the discovery of past time. Billions of years of it.”

“Lewis Namier...the personal secretary of Weizmann...wrote the preface to Ruppin’s Jews in the Modern World...a few months after the Ruppin-Günther meeting. Bloom described how Weizmann – who worked closely with Ruppin - read it and had to warn Namier not to be so open in expressing their common toleration of Nazism... because: the louts will say, the Jews themselves think that it will be all for the good”

“August 1933 Ruppin... travelled to Jena: to meet Prof. Hans F.K. Günther, the founder of National-Socialist race theory.... Günther was most congenial… and agreed with me ... that the Jewish Question has to be solved justly. Hans Günther, a member of the Nazi party from 1929, was Heinrich Himmler’s ideological mentor and ‘the highest scientific authority concerning racial theory.’ ”

“Weizmann even tried to persuade the British authorities to limit the Jewish immigration quota during the third and fourth aliya. ‘The price was paid by the tens of thousands of Ukrainian Jews who were murdered during this period.’ ”

“ ‘These Jewish Migrants Survived Pogroms, Riots and Famine. Then They Were Faced With Zionist Cruelty’, citing Professor Gur Alroey, “Land of Refuge: Immigration to the Land of Israel, 1919-1927,” Ben-Gurion Research Institute, 2021 (Ha’aretz, 1.12.21)”

“[Arthur] Ruppin's... first intellectual curiosity was in the field of Racial Hygiene (Rassenhygiene). He saw inter-marriage as ‘detrimental to the preservation of the high qualities of the race.’ In 1899 Ruppin took second prize in a competition to devise ways of applying Social Darwinism to the organisation of state and society. The Krupp Prize marked ‘a turning point in the acceptance of eugenics in Germany.’ ”

“[Arthur] Ruppin was a fervent believer in the racial sciences and Social Darwinism. ... He sought to create a new Jew as part of a non-Semitic Jewish volk in Palestine. Ruppin believed that European Jews were descended from Indo-Germanic tribes. ‘In all his writings Ruppin explicitly stressed the superiority of the Ashkenazi Jews over the Sephardic and Oriental Jews in all fields.’ ”

“Max Nordau, Herzl’s deputy, believed that the degeneration of society was due to art and immorality. ‘Degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists and pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists.’ Nordau’s theories on art and illness ‘ripple through the writings of Nazi race ideology, including Mein Kampf...’ ”

“No more apologies for a bleeding heart when the opposite is no heart at all. Danger of losing our humanity must be met with more humanity.”

“For one’s language—the one we dream in—is home.”

“Consider another consequence of the blatant, violent uses to which foreignness is put—ethnic cleansing. We would be not merely remiss but irrelevant if we did not address the doom currently faced by millions of people reduced to animal, insect, or polluted status by nations with unmitigated, unrepentant power to decide who is a stranger and whether they live or die at, or far from, home.”

“The relocation of peoples has ignited and disrupted the idea of home and expanded the focus of identity beyond definitions of citizenship to clarifications of foreignness. Who is the foreigner? is a question that leads us to the perception of an implicit and heightened threat within difference. We see it in the defense of the local against the outsider; personal discomfort with one’s own sense of belonging”

“Anti-Zionism is not the product of the non-Jews. On the contrary, the Gentiles have always encouraged Zionism, hoping that it would help rid them of the Jews in their midst. Even today, in a perverse way, a real anti-Semite must be a Zionist.’ (A B Yehoshua)”

“the destiny of the twenty-first century will
be shaped by the possibility or the collapse of a shareable world"

“Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there
must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.”

“The European’s refusal to meditate cogently
on any event except the ones that concern his comfort or survival dooms
him. When insight finally seeps through, he feels annihilated by it.”

“a suspension of belief in an unbreachable difference between
humans.”

“The spectacle of mass movement draws attention inevitably to the
borders,... the vulnerable points where one’s concept of
home is seen as being menaced by foreigners. Much of the alarm hovering
at the borders, the gates, is stoked, it seems to me, by (1) both the threat and
the promise of globalism and (2) an uneasy relationship with our own
foreignness, our own rapidly disintegrating sense of belonging.”

“A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.”