Why Do Some People Keep Repeating the Same Mistakes?

GILAD ATZMON • MARCH 7, 2019

 

It is pretty much established that although most people have internalised the lessons of the holocaust, Jewish institutions have somehow failed to do so. They have continued to repeat the same mistakes that brought disasters on the Jews and others throughout their history.

The universal lessons learned from the Holocaust are based on common sense reasoning.

A. Racial hatred is wrong– If X = a social, racial, religious, ethnic or sexual orientation group then hating X for being X is categorically wrong.

B. Supremacy, exceptionalism and chosenism provide a manual for a colossal disaster.

C. Suppressing dissent is very dangerous and often leads towards tyrannical conditions.

While most Western political institutions and States have acknowledged and integrated these post-WWII imperatives into their core principles, political attitudes and value systems, the Jewish State and most Jewish institutions around the world (both Zionist and ‘anti’) have ignored these imperatives.

Israel’s record of war crimes and its racist attitudes have no precedent. The Jewish state is institutionally brutal, discriminatory and racist towards the indigenous people of the land and towards African immigrants. Jewish institutions around the word reflect the same attitudes. As the mainstream media reports on a regular basis, the Jewish bodies that oppose racism are not necessarily fighting against racism on a universal basis. Instead, they are focused on the sensitivities of one group that happens to be themselves. The Western media frequently portrays Jewish groups whose ‘battle’ against ‘racism’ is a struggle to mute opposition to Israel. Jewish so-called ‘anti’ Zionists institutions and activist groups also seem to have learned nothing from the holocaust, arrogantly adopting a radical form of racial exclusivism. The Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL), for instance, openly informs the rest of the Labour Party of its racially exclusive policy:

“We welcome support from ALL members of the Labour Party who agree with our statement of principles. If you are not Jewish you can join us as a solidarity member.” (jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk)

Simply put, Goyim members of Labour may ‘support’ the ‘Jews only’ group but cannot really join-in as actual membership is open only to Jews.

How have devoted anti racists, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his closest ally Chris Williamson, become comfortable being associated with such a racially exclusive political group* one in which even they aren’t ‘racially qualified’ to be members?

Both Zionists and the so-called ‘anti’ invest a substantial amount of their resources silencing dissenting views. The ridiculous Zionist witch-hunt scouring the Labour party has been the only news that the Labour party has managed to generate for the last three years. Yet surprise, surprise, Momentum, the activist group formed to support Corbyn, has launched its own witch-hunt storm troopers. ‘Jewish Momentum,’ as they call themselves, have been seen chasing and harassing David Icke and a score of other commentators and truth seekers. They have been caught on tape fabricating quotes of mine. Not only did they not adopt the lessons of the Holocaust, they seem desperately eager to impose authoritarian conditions and restrict free political debate. If this isn’t bad enough. Momentum produced an ‘educational’ video denouncing the ‘conspiratorial’ tendency to criticise oligarchs who happen to be Jewish.

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The principal question remains, why do so many Jewish bodies both Zionist and ‘anti’ fail to draw the essential universal messages from the holocaust? Why do they enthusiastically replicate past mistakes?

In his book Heidegger and “the Jews” Jean Francois Lyotard had a phenomenal insight; he observed that although history may claim to tell us what happened in the past, in practice, history serves to conceal our collective shame.

Suppressing collective shame isn’t particularly a Jewish symptom, it is a universal inclination that can be detected in almost every culture. In an attempt to suppress its imperial past Britain allocates a large portion of its Imperial Wars Museum to the Holocaust. But the Jewish Holocaust had little to do with British Imperial wars. The empire caused holocausts of its own of which Palestine is only one. But none of its imperial bloodbaths are portrayed at the Imperial Wars Museum. And even in the holocaust section, the Museum omits the embarrassing fact that in the1930s Britain closed its gates to Jews in desperate need of refuge.

We can see that America deals with the shame of slavery, the disgrace of nuking Japanese cities, wiping out German metropolises and obliterating native Americans by building holocaust museums in every American city. Like the Brits, the Americans present a pseudo empathic gesture in lieu of acknowledging the carnage they created. And, like the Brits, American holocaust museums fail to acknowledge that the USA closed its gates to European Jewish refugees who were in a state of total despair.

Jewish institutions, in this regard, are no different. They are dedicated to the concealment of the reasons why Jewish history has been an endless chain of disasters. In the canonical Jewish historical tale, the Jews are always the victims and the Goyim, the Gentiles are always morbidly racist, sub humans, motivated by envy, greed and/or blind hatred.

The outcome of this concealment has been devastating. As bizarre and disturbing as it may sound, Jews are often collectively and institutionally oblivious to the conditions that lead toward their destruction. More troubling, many, if not most, self identified Jews, fail to understand the Jewish role in causing the conditions that precipitate Jewish disasters.

The only Jews who have openly tackled this problem in a scholarly, ideological and academic manner were a group of Early Zionists who were astonishingly brave enough to examine themselves and their fellow Jews by means of self reflection. Early Zionists such as Herzl, Nordau, Borochov, Gordon and a few others openly discussed the Jewish cultural malaise. They explicitly criticised the non proletarian nature of Jewish diaspora life and the Jewish affinity with capitalism (Brochov, Gordon and Labour Zionism). They identified the danger of Jewish proximity to political power (Herzl and the criticism of court Jews). In his invaluable book, “Antisemitism Its History and Causes,” early Zionist Bernard Lazare identifies Jews as the culprit in their own suffering. According to Lazare, it is the trait of choseness that brings disasters on the Jews.

But there is a grave problem. Most contemporary Jews and certainly Zionist Jews are aware of Herzl but are ignorant of Herzl’s philosophy. They know about the Kibbutzim but they know little of the ideology that drove Jews to operate in socialist agriculture collective formations. They do not know that Kibbutz’ members, in the eyes of Labour Zionist ideologists, were the antithesis of the Diaspora Jew. The Kibbutz (in its original setting) was a socialist formation devoid of private property, where Jews cultivated the land instead of mammon.

This is what Early Zionist philosopher A.D Gordon had to say about Jewish Diaspora culture and the role of Labour Zionism in ‘fixing the Jews.’ “We have been accustomed to every form of life, except a life of labour- of labour done at our behalf and for its own sake. It will require the greatest effort of will for such a people to become normal again. We lack the principal ingredient for national life. We lack the habit of labour… for it is labour which binds a people to its soil and to its national culture, which in its turn is an outgrowth of the people’s toil and the people’s labour.. We must create a new people, a human people whose attitude toward other peoples is informed with the sense of human brotherhood and whose attitude toward nature and all within it is inspired by noble urges of life-loving creativity…. we are engaged in a creative endeavour the like of which is itself not to be found in the whole history of mankind: the rebirth and rehabilitation of a people that has been uprooted and scattered to the winds… (A.D. Gordon, “Our Tasks Ahead” 1920)

While contemporary Zionists proudly affiliate themselves with Israel, they are either ignorant of or choose to ignore its Zionist ideological roots. Zionism wasn’t about ‘Jewish self determination,’ as contemporary Zionists insist, it was about redefining who Jews were and are. Contemporary Zionists fail to acknowledge the crude antipathy early Zionists settlers in Palestine had towards their diaspora brethren.

This raises the question of how all of that early Zionist attitude to Jewish past evaporated? Why are contemporary Jewish institutions are so often blind to history? Israeli academics admit that Jewish culture is an ahistorical adventure. Shlomo Sand reveals that in between Josephus Flavius (70 BC) and David Gans (16th century),), Jews didn’t write any significant historical texts. One of the reasons that Jews didn’t leave historical chronicles was because the Rabbinical tradition offered an alternative to historical writing. The Rabbinical tradition together with Judaic religious texts provide Jews with the ‘answers’ to every possible historical development relevant to Jewish life. When ‘anti-Semites’ come along we look at Amalek or Pharaoh. When an ethical universal insight threatens to break the tribe we look to the prophets. When a Jew falls in love with a lass who isn’t a member of the tribe we look at the fate of Samson. When a government is hostile, we re-examine Esther and so on.

In this regard Zionism was a radical development. It allowed Jews to reinvent their history and to emancipate themselves from their culture; from their texts, from the ghetto, from the dark incomprehensible past. It invited the Jews to reinvent themselves. It even advised Jews to take responsibility for their own suffering. Early Zionists blamed failures on themselves instead of throwing mud at the Goyim. Herzl’s message was that – when you give us a piece of land, we will show you that we are people like all other people.

There is little left of the Early Zionist spirit. I may be the last Early Zionist enthusiast. Zionism, as I plan to show in my next book, was crudely hijacked by Jewishness and Judaism. Israel doesn’t call itself the Zionist State, in the eyes of Israelis, Zionism fulfilled its promise in 1948. Israel defines itself as ‘The Jewish State.’ Unlike the Early Zionists who examined the Jewish past with the hope of bringing to life a ‘new’ Jew that marched toward a new Jewish future, Israel has taken a step back. Israel and its supporting lobbies are buying into the traditional Judaic ahistorical narrative.

Jewish bodies are increasingly acting as if blind to their past: to that which brought disasters on Jews throughout their history. Jewish institutions arrogantly harass American, British and French artists, politicians and national political parties. The obscene hubris of the Zionist league far exceeds anything in the Jewish past including the Bible. We see Jewish Zionist groups persistently tormenting political bodies. In the USA the congress shamelessly bowed to Benjamin Netanyahu. Here in Britain we saw saw Theresa May attempt to speak Hebrew, and the Deputy Labour Leader singing in Hebrew. But the one thing I fail to see is a wide-awake Jew brave enough to stand up and put all of this to an end because 1938 is about to turn into 1939.

*I am intentionally not commenting on the claim that Jews are a race. I am instead criticizing what seems to me as political racism.

http://www.unz.com/gatzmon/why-do-some-people-keep-repeating-the-same-mistakes/