Changing the shape of anti-fascism/Variousness 31

15Sep10

Two essential posts from Terry Glavin at Transmontanus:

Antifaschismus: Shifting The Paradigm, In For The Long Haul.

Extract:

Thankfully, [the Israel=Nazi] paradigm is also increasingly vulnerable to Hazoney’s analysis, which draws from the same robust approach that informs Jeffrey Herf, author of Nazi Propaganda from The Arab World, in a fascinating conversation with the brave anti-fascist writer Karl Pfeifer:

I think it is also the case as advocates of the paradigm whose key words are “third world,” “anti-imperialism,” “Orientalism,” “sub-altern studies” and in the case of the Middle East, “anti-Zionism” tied themselves in knots when faced with clear evidence that some very important Arab, Palestinian and Islamist leaders, such as Haj Amin el-Husseini, enthusiastically, willingly and effectively collaborated with the Nazi regime, shared its hatred of the Jews as Jews, and played a major role the cultural fusion of Nazi and Islamist—not Islamic—forms of anti-Semitism.

They will indeed “tie themselves into knots.” Here we have the red-fascist demagogue George Galloway doing what he does best, opening a new propaganda campaign for Islamist fascism aimed at the west’s liberal intelligentsia. Here we have one of Galloway’s most slavish admirers in the Canadian establishment media, doing Galloway’s propaganda for him. The clear evidence against Galloway hasn’t made a jot of difference. He’ll be warmly embraced. As he is here. Do you really need more?

Unreconstructed white fascists are also enjoying their recrudescence in Europe, as Karl Pfeifer, whose interview with Jeff Herf I just mentioned, amply illustrates in this chilling account. Here’s a lovely gentleman for you: “I am not an anti-Semite, but an a-Semite. This means a world without Jews, a Hungarian society free of Jews.”

Don’t kid yourself. This is not just about merely words, yesterday, and ideas. It’s about deeds, today, life, and death.

Here are a few friends the white fascists have only recently murdered: Activists Alexei Krylov, Ivan Khutorskoi,Alexander Ryukhin Fyodor Filatov, Ilya Dzhaparidze, Stanislav Markelov, Nikolai Girenko, Alexander Ryukhin; lawyer Stanislav Markelov, and journalist Anastasia Baburova.

Less than a week ago, fascists of the Islamist variety murdered Glen Lapp, Tom Little, Dan Terry, Thomas Grams, Cheryl Beckett, Brian Carderelli, Karen Woo, Daniela Beyer, Mahram Ali, and Jawed. It happened this way: The first sign of danger was the crackle of gunfire over their heads. Ten gunmen, their faces covered, rushed toward terrified humanitarian workers and began shouting “Satellite! Satellite!” — a demand to surrender their phones. Moments later, 10 of them lay dead, including two women hiding in the back seat of a car the attackers hit with a grenade.

If what is happening is not clear to you by now, you really need to do something about your paradigm.

A tribute to “activists with impeccable credentials on the European left.”

Extract:

Although anti-fascism was also a Central European tradition, it had been drowned out, even trumped, by anti-imperialism and Third Worldism since the 1960s. But in recent years liberal and social democratic variations of the anti-fascism of the 1940s and 1950s have made common cause with a distinctive brand of left-liberalism that emerged first in Germany and then in Austria.

That’s from an important essay by Jeffrey Herf in The New Republic. Do note the reference to the Euston Manifesto, to which I lent my own name straight out the blocks (I explained my reasons in this 2006 essay in the Globe and Mail). The manifesto grew out of what the Guardian’s Keith Kahn-Harris last October called “the most serious split within the left since the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956,” which is a reasonable assessment in an otherwise unreasonable speculation that the split is healing.

Three years ago, in his Atlantic magazine essay Whither The Antitotalitarian Left?, James Kirchick accurately predicted the retreat of the U.S. Democratic Party into an isolationist posture that he likened to “a feral crouch from which it is more suspicious of what the Western democracies do to protect themselves than it is with the plight of oppressed people abroad.” A suitable description of Canada’s New Democratic Party, that.

But a truly progressive politics keeps on erupting from the ashes of the old. See, for instance: Though Cowards Flinch And Traitors Sneer. Directly related: Antifaschismus: Shifting the Paradigm, In for The Long Haul. You’ll find more adumbration than you will likely need in this conversation in Platypus Review: Afghanistan, Internationalism and The Left.

Comments welcome.

Below the fold, variousness 31, with some examples of right-left convergence, left antisemitism, anti-anti-Zionism, “autonomous anarchism” and more.

Radical-left icons who defended Israel. // Martin Seymour Lipset on the socialism of fools. //Andre Glucksmann on the Jerusalem syndrome. // Anti-War Human Rights Activist Or Far-Right Racist Lunatic? I Bet You Can’t Tell. // Murray Bookchin on the Arab-Israeli conflict. // Bill Weinberg on 9/11 conspiracies. // BANANAs versus Mexploitation.

Critique and theory:

• The Jurgen Habermas Web Resource
• Daniele Archibugi: Critical Analysis of the Self-determination of Peoples
• Ulrich Beck: Toward a New Critical Theory with a Cosmopolitan Intent
• Etienne Balibar: Europe: Vanishing Mediator
• Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida: February 15, or What Binds Europeans Together: A Plea for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in the Heart of Europe
• Jürgen Habermas: Understanding the Fall of a Monument
• Raul Hilberg: The Relevance of Behemoth Today
• Axel Honneth: Anxiety and Politics: The Strengths and Weaknesses of Franz L. Neumann’s Diagnosis of Social Pathology
• Claus Offe: The Problem of Social Power in Franz L. Neumann’s Thought
• Seyla Benhabib: Unholy Politics
• Subversion: The Revolutionary Alternative to Left-Wing Politics (1994)
• V/A: ‘The Origins of Primitivism’ set (1977-1988)
• TPTG: If you want peace, prepare for class war (1993)

Variousness elsewhere: But I Am A Liberal.

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