by Seth Franzman
PART I: FABRICATING HISTORY THROUGH THE EYES OF THE PRESENT
It is hard to escape the burden of the present. Others like to speak of the burden of history, but it is truly the present that burdens our vision of the past. A recent book by a British woman, Eva Figes, another 'Holocaust survivor' turned rabid Israel hater, has written that the U.S "cleared Europe of its unwanted Jewish refugees" and that America created the "mess" that is the Middle East. Hindsight is 20/20 for every currently weak forgetful European. America cleared Europe of her Jews? Not the Nazis to be sure. America 'created' the Modern Middle East? Not the white haired men of Versailles who drew the modern borders. Not the European colonial officers, the Ottomans or the Arabs, surely not them. Not King Faisal and Abdullah and Lawrence and Lloyd George and Churchill. No. It was America. The Burden of the present paints us a picture of a strong America 'clearing' Europe of her Jews and drawing the borders of the Middle East, all so another person can bash America and claim Israel ruins the world.
There is a common need by those viewing history to imagine it like the present. This has always been the case. During the Middle Ages King David was depicted in European armour, as a knight. Later the Crusader knights and their enemies were also imagined assaulting European style castles. The Old City of Jerusalem and its Temple often looked like more European than foreign in depictions. This isn't always the fault of the historian or artist. How can someone imagine architecture that they have never seen? How can they imagine costumes and garb they have never witnessed? Aliens too seem to replicate only the most extreme imaginations we have. Thus computers in the movie Alien are large and clunky, indicative of the time that they were imagined, in the 1980s. Thus the future and past must in some way reflect those who imagine them. This idea is taken by post-modernists and others to believe that therefore nations are merely 'imagined communities' and that all history is 'narrative'. But in fact what we increasingly see is not the way the right wing uses modernity to justify imagining history as truth, but the way the left distorts history based on its own modern ideology.
Let's take the issue of human rights and values such as 'tolerance'. Societies in the past are condemned, especially if they are seen as 'western', to the dustbin if they are not tolerant. Meanwhile 'good' societies in the past such as Athens are raised up as former incarnations of our modern selves. Those 'bad' societies are heaped with hatred and referred to as 'proto-fascist' or 'proto-nazi'. The Spartans are but one example of this. There is no nuance that recognizes that Athenian democracy is no more a utopian homosexual proto-San Fransisco than Sparta was a previous version of Nazi Germany. Slavery and 'racism' are forever twisted and fabricated in order to suit our modern era. Thus western slavery is seen as the greatest evil while Muslim slavery, which began earlier and murdered more people, is seen as positive and tolerant, all because we have a common view of the Old South as evil and Modern Islam as tolerant and diverse. We are unable to see Hamas as the KKK, both terrorist organization who wear white hoods, because we need white western slavery to be a unique institution.
Think of the history of the PLO. It is inevitably seen not as its original self but as a former version of its modern self. Thus its 'moderation' is projected backward. People forget its role in Lebanon and Jordan, its mass murder of Olympic Athletes or its bombing of synagogues in Europe. People even forget that it was founded long before 1967, along with Fatah, and that its original goal was not the liberation of Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, but the opposite, only the destruction of Israel inside the Green Line. These things are easily forgotten because it's hard to imagine the rhetoric of the Palestinians without their insistence on Jerusalem and without their 'occupation'. Likewise the 'proto-PLO' of the 1930s is seen as having been 'prescient' for imagining that the Arabs would be 'dispossessed'. While books discuss 'violence in the history of Zionism' there is no discussion of 'violence in Arab nationalism' as if such violence was not endemic to the movement. This mistaken idea that the Arab terror of the 1930s was merely predicting the occupation of the 1990s excuses the former terror.
There may be no greater example of the fabrication of history through imagining the present than Eva Figes' Journey to Nowhere: One woman looks for the promised land, a futile solution. A 'Holocaust survivor' she has a deep hated for Israel, which is why her book was published and widely read in the UK. "As a Jew she felt the need" to say that the creation of Israel was a 'catastrophic mistake' and 'unpardonable' and 'ugly' and 'inherently racist'. Like so many self-described 'holocaust survivors' from Europe Israel didn't live up to her expectations and therefore must be destroyed. But what is unique is that Figes "reserves her real fury for the Americans."
The next sentences are extraordinarsh refugees, but did not care to have them in America. Thus Israel was born, not out of global remorse, but of 'continuing anti-Semitism'. America, writes Figes, is a country 'which has made a habit of dictating to countries of which it is profoundly ignorant ... Rather than engage with people, it prefers to bomb them from a great height.' It is to America, she argues, that we must look for the true culprit for the wretched mess that the Middle East has become."
This claim must be parsed and explored for it shows the degree to which people, even older people like Figes who recall the 1940s, can have their memories distorted. They are unable to think outside of the current period of American power. Listen to how they imagine the past. America in 1945 was "determined to clear Europe of unwanted Jewish refugees." In fact it was the Nazis and the European collaborators who wanted to clear Europe of its Jews. But these are now forgotten because the imagination cannot even imagine European Nazis and their collaborators in the modern metrosexual Europe of flaccid men. A British citizen, Figes cannot recall that it was actually the UK that played a great role in all this because she cannot imagine the UK of 1945, the British empire that spanned the globe at the time. She speaks of the US not wishing "to have them [Jews] in America." But did the UK want them? Did the UK take them? No. No.
But note that in the present need to hate America there is no soul searching among the European, or the Jewish 'holocaust survivor.' But which country was it that treated the Jews humanely in 1945 and carried out the Nuremburg trials? The UK? France? No. No. It was the UK that actually arrested the surviving German and Italian Jews found in Germany in their occupation zone and placed them in POW camps as 'enemy nationals'. It was only when the U.S and its JDC found out about this treatment, where Jews were housed next to their former jailors, that they were placed in their own Displaced Persons camps. These Displaced Persons, some 300,000 of them, could not be repatriated to Eastern Europe where most had come from because they were not wanted and they themselves did not want to return. Outbreaks of anti-semitism and pogroms in 1946 in Kielce Poland sent another 100,000 Jews pouring into the allied occupation zone of Germany. For Figes this cannot be imagined. She wants to see the U.S ethnically cleansing Europe of Jews and creating Israel. In fact the U.S JDC helped bring Jews to Australia and didn't originally funnel them to Palestine, which at the time was run by the British who, in 1939, had made Jewish immigration all but illegal, ensuring that Jews could not flee Europe. But there is no recollection of the role England played in all this. England is imagined and small and weak, as she is today, not as she was.
It is amazing to read that the U.S should be condemned for dictating to countries of which it is ignorant and bombing countries when the UK has been equally guilty of this. But there is, once again, no recollection. UK citizens can't even imagine that they participated in all the Gulf Wars and Operation Desert Fox in 1998 and the bombing of Kosovo and Serbia twice. Nope. No recollection. Like some sort of Orwellian world the British and their adopted citizens such as Figes simply cannot recall. There is a hole in their memory. The hole extends to wanting to believe that it was the U.S that was a close ally of Israel in 1948, based on the modern knowledge that the U.S and Israel are allies. This is an astounding act of historical denial, for the U.S was no friend of Israel until the 1960s. Where is the recollection of the UK's role in creating Israel, the Balfour declaration, the Mandate, the handover to the UN, the partition plan, the Soviet recognition of Israel?
The past is fabricated to meet the standards and stereotypes and current rages of the present. Other ideologies have perverted history to their own ends. The Communists subverted it to economics. The Nazis found secret Aryan tribes inhabiting Tibet and founded 'research institutes' to study them. But our destruction of history is just as bad. We subvert it to liberalism. Think of the abuse and misuse of the Holocaust. It is used to describe other massacres, such as when Avraham Burg describes the 'Heroro Holocaust' in his latest book. The Jews are said to 'monopolize and manipulate' the Holocaust, daring to emphasize that they were its central victims. Then people say the Holocaust is an 'excuse' for creating Israel and that Jews 'use the Holocaust' to shield Israel from criticism. And leftists can't criticize anything without calling it a 'Holocaust' or using the word 'nazi' so beholden are they to this imagery. The abuse of America is even worse. People want to find the 'sources' of American 'empire' in the 19th century, finding it in the colonization of some Guano islands in the pacific. This in a time when the entire world was carved up by empires, America should be condemned for invading an uninhabited atoll?
The height of the blinding arrogance is the supposition that America was responsible for all sorts of things that have nothing to do with her. Listen to the UK Holocaust survivor Figes "It is to America, she argues, that we must look for the true culprit for the wretched mess that the Middle East has become." Really? It couldn't possibly be the Arabs or the Ottomans or the Europeans who successively carved up the Middle East and colonized it? It is America? It couldn't be Islamism and Arab nationalism? It couldn't be Nasser or Saddam Hussein? It couldn't be the post World War one settlement? It couldn't be the Soviet role? No. We can't imagine that the Soviets and Russians even had a role in the Middle East because the current weak state of Russia won't even allow us to imagine it. That's the false memory. It views history from the present rather than the present from the point of view of history. This is why everything is so distorted. We can't understand conflicts or human history because it's never in perspective. We see millions of refugees today and we project their status into history so that their entire history becomes 'dispossessed'. We see racism today and we can't imagine a society that imagined race differently.
Seth J. Frantzman
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
No comments:
Post a Comment