This Monday, January 27, marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. We’re constantly being enjoined “never to forget” the significance of this day. Just to remind you of what actually happened on January 27, 1945: the Red Army defeated the Wehrmacht, wresting Auschwitz from the Nazis, liberating its inmates in one sense, and “liberating” Poland in a somewhat different one. Recall that it was the Soviet government that, in league with the Nazis, carved up and invaded Poland to start the war in the first place. Had they not done so, there might never have been an Auschwitz. And recall that we then spent the Cold War fighting the government of this same Red Army, which arguably went on to instigate the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, and commit genocide in Afghanistan. Continue reading
Tag Archives: norman finkelstein
An Open Letter to the IDF Maglan Unit in Englewood, New Jersey
Victim-blaming and aggressor-valorization are two sides of the same maudlin, propagandistic coin. From a piece in The Jewish Standard (Teaneck, New Jersey): Continue reading
Norman Finkelstein on Naz Shah’s “Anti-Semitism”
I just happened to read Norman Finkelstein’s recent interview with MintPress News, discussing the British Labour Party’s fundamentally ridiculous “anti-Semitism” scandal involving MP Naz Shah and others. I highly recommend it. I don’t agree with every last thing Finkelstein says (read it for yourself and decide for yourself), but I certainly agree with general point he’s making: the accusations of anti-Semitism being made against Shah are almost complete nonsense, and reflect an amazing double standard when it comes to the standards that govern acceptable political speech in the Anglophone world. No one seems to feel the need to make an argument for why Shah’s actions were anti-Semitic; the accusation is supposed to be too obvious to require argument. But there isn’t a particle of evidence to support the accusations in question: they seem literally to have been generated out of whole cloth, and accepted at face value despite that. Continue reading
Policy of Truth 