More on fascism and ideology

[Louis N Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis:

Today's NY Times has a bit of nonsense about the NOI's Web page versus
similar wording found in ultraright Web pages. This, of course, is the
same concept embodied in James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time": Malcolm X
as a black version of George Lincoln Rockwell.

I am currently reading "Defiance", a wonderful book on the Bielski
Partisans. Tuvia Bielski was a Jew from Byelorussia who fought against
the Nazi occupiers and saved the lives of ghetto Jews. They has base
camps deep within the forests and made period raids into towns and
villages and rescued Jews.

The Bielski Partisans were all Jewish. Bielski originally wanted to
cooperate with the Communists, but they had a bit too much antisemitism
in them for Bielski to handle. So Bielski went ahead and organized
an exclusively Jewish resistance. He did so, as he put it, out of a love
for "the Jewish people". Note that he didn't do so out of a love for
socialism or the working-class, etc. Condemn him? Of course not.

But if you transpose the Bielski brigades to Palestine, with its ideology,
you have a whole different story. If anybody has read Leon Uris's
"Exodus" or seen the wretched movie based on the novel, will realize that
this is much of what Zionism is about.

Jewish nationalism in Byelorussia in 1942 is not the same thing as Jewish
nationalism in Palestine in 1947. Context is everything.


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