[Marxism] Adorno, Zionism and The 'Anti-Deutschers'

["Ian Pace" <ian@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: "Johannes Schneider" <Johannes.Schneider@xxxxxxx>
> >    Another component of the "anti-German" political spectrum is the
> > "Arbeiterbund fÃr den Wiederaufbau der KPD" [Workers leage for the
> > reconstruction of the PC], for whom the war against Jugoslavia was
> > instigated by Germany, who had just used the US military for their
> > purposes.
>
> Which has only a few dozens of members.
>
> Most of the Anti-Germans are followers of the Frankfurt School (Adorno, 
> Horkheimer).

That's very interesting. I'm about to investigate further Adorno's 
relationship with Zionism and views on the Islamic world. According to 
Stefan Muller-Doohm's biography of Adorno:

'Towards the end of 1956, when France and Britain launched a military 
assault on Egypt and an article in Der Spiegel attacked the way the United 
Nations had condemned their invasion, Adorno and Horkheimer wrote to the 
writer Julius Ebbinghaus, agreeing with Der Spiegel.[9]

'The fact that people have discovered humanity when faced by a fascist 
chieftain like Nasser who conspires with Moscow; that, as in Hitler's time, 
they show greater concern about breaking treaties than about the treaties 
themselves and their sanctity; and that no one even ventures to point out 
that these Arab robber states have been on the lookout for years for an 
opportunity to fall upon Israel and to slaughter the Jews who have found 
refuge there - all this is a symptom of public consciousness that has to be 
taken very seriously indeed. The hypocrisy ... in almost every camp is proof 
of a confusion of thought that bodes ill for the future' [10]

[9] Ebbinghaus was a philosopher at the University of Marburg and a member 
of the board of trustees of the International Association of the Philosophy
of Law and Social Philosophy.
[10] Max Horkheimer, Briefwechsel, GS, vol. 18, p. 377

(Stefan Muller-Doohm - Adorno: A Biography, translated Rodney Livingstone 
(Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2005), p. 413)


For me this is the most damning thing I've come across about Adorno (more so 
than his actions with the students in 1968-9) - a para-Zionist view of the 
Holocaust that becomes used to lend support to Western imperialism. Sounds 
like Adorno and Horkheimer were on the verge of becoming neo-conservatives 
long before the movement took off in recent times :(

There are similar sentiments that Adorno expressed in 1967 - I could just 
about forgive those on grounds of naivete (as I can with Paul Celan - who 
celebrated the retaking of Jerusalem in 1967 in his poem 'Denk Dir' - the 
following is interesting here -
http://barbaricdocument.blogspot.com/2006/03/complicity-of-paul-celan.html ), 
but not in 1956. Anthony Eden was able to count upon Adorno and Horkheimer 
for support for action that even the US balked at at the time.

By the way, this is coming from one (myself) who is extremely sympathetic to 
a lot of Adorno's work and ideas. The ontological view that he assigned to 
Auschwitz and German Nazism in the post-war years clouds his earlier Marxism 
in many ways, and actually comes close to the type of mystification of the 
Holocaust (precluding a materialist understanding of the growth of fascism) 
that Norman Finkelstein criticises so powerfully. I think there's somewhere 
he said to Horkheimer that the agent of history seemed to be the Jew rather 
than the proletariat (I'll look up the reference for this if anyone wants 
it) - this seems to be a belief that inexorably leads one towards the 
'socialism of fools' that is Zionism.

Solidarity,
Ian


> Some of the theorems of the Anti-Germans can be traced back to Stalinism 
> (e.g. popular front and disregard for the working class). Some German 
> Stalinists even saw the allied occupation of Germany as the just 
> punishment for the German working class which proved to be incapable of 
> having prevented Hitler. Alexander Abusch theoritisied this view 1945 in 
> his book "Irrweg einer Nation". (French title: Allemagne, jugeÌe par un 
> Allemand.) This view will be certainly shared by today's Anti-Germans, who 
> come to anti-Nazi demonstrations with the slogan: "Bomber Harris, do it 
> again!".



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