Realistic Dove has a smart piece on Christian philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr, who he states is Obama's spiritual muse. Realistic says that Niebuhr was a Zionist in 1941 out of a sense of fairness for Hitler's victims even then--Niebuhr's belief being that human beings are sinful and we need a strong "ethic of progressive justice."
Realistic bashes me and my crowd for not understanding that Zionism fulfilled liberal visions of how to provide a refuge for the Jews. It's true I don't talk about that much, though I think it's a little off point now. Speaking of now, Realistic says what Niebuhr would want is a two-state solution and quickly, to answer the burning injustices. Dan Fleshler (Realistic) was pleased a year ago when I endorsed the two-state solution because I was sick of the storyline and wanted to get this all over with. We were told it was an urgent matter then. And now I hear people saying: Obama's second term. That would seem to be too late. As Avraham Burg says, all the technicalities are a distant second to a spiritual issue, a basic acknowledgement by Israel of its trespasses against the Palestinians. Acknowledgement, deferred 60 years now...
Edward Said has a fierce critique in The Question of Palestine of Niebuhr's positions on Israel. I remember reading it and being kind of shocked, like: "You just don't criticize Reinhold Niebuhr like that!" But he was pointing out this chronic blind spot of liberal writers privileging a European narrative (in this case, the suffering the European Jews) over the experience of an indigenous population.
Said was right.
Should the Kurds have a state of their own?
As a matter of fact, Niebuhr was a front-line Cold War ideologist, despite this remark by Basevich, which so-called 'realistic dove' hastens to quote:
“Niebuhr specialized in precise distinctions. He supported US intervention in World War II – and condemned the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended that war. After 1945, Niebuhr believed it just and necessary to contain the Soviet Union. Yet he forcefully opposed US intervention in Vietnam.”
Niebuhr was a jerk, and it is not particularly surprising that Neocons and apologists for Neocons like him. From The Theology of American Empire:
Niebuhr wrapped that traditional notion of sin in a new intellectual package and sold it successfully, not only to theologians but to the foreign policy elite. Since the 1940s, foreign policy has largely been reduced to an endless round of debates about how to apply Niebuhr's "realism." Policymakers who still tried to follow the Social Gospel path have been marginalized and stigmatized with the harshest epithet a Niebuhrian can hurl: "unrealistic.”I will blog this later today, but Niebuhr's fairness was completely myopic, unethical, and un-Christian.
Lack of a house does not grant license to steal the home of someone else, and I am completely baffled at the idea of justice to the Jews collectively (?) in the case of Jewish suffering during WWII without a discussion of Jewish complicity collectively (?) in 90 years of sabotage, terrorism, assassination, murderous revolutionary radicalism, mass murder, ethnic cleansing, and genocide in the Czarist Empire and the Soviet Union in addition to 60 years of violence against the native population of Palestine before WWII started.
In any case, Medoff documents in Baksheesh Diplomacy that Husseini and the Palestinian leadership was willing in 1937 to accept a 55% Palestinian 45% Jewish unitary state.
Guess what! Even if all the 300,000 Jewish DPs came to Palestine that would have created a population consisting of 1.1 million Palestinians and 900,000 Jews, to with 55% Palestinians and 45% Jews. Booth Grodzinsky and Dawidowicz document that only about 30% of Jewish DPs actually wanted or intended to emigrate to Palestine.
There really was no coherent Palestinian leadership in 1947, for its members were either in exile or in jail.
Thus there is really no way to argue that Palestinians rejected the partition proposal, but partition was simply unacceptable because it divided clans and families while placing a large majority of Palestinians under the rule of a population that had a record of mass murder worse than that of the German Nazis and that probably hated all non-Jews because of the trauma of the Holocaust.
Palestinians adopted a wait-and-see position in the hope that partition would be replaced by a unitary state. Sachar in A History of Israel obscures this situation by focusing on anti-Jewish violence that took place in Arab countries outside of Palestine and that was probably incited by Zionist agents provocateurs.
The Zionists fearful that sanity might break out at the UN immediately claimed to accept the partition proposal and then went on a binge of murder and ethnic cleansing. (Is it surprising that the action in Haifa was called Biur Hametz?)
Zionists and their apologists have been justifying the Zionist crimes of 1947-8 with complete fabrications every since.
To claim "Zionism fulfilled liberal visions of how to provide a refuge for the Jews" is a complete lie. Zionism has no liberal vision whatsoever but represents a calculating perverted ethnic fundamentalism every bit as murderous and vile as German Nazism, but Zionism is worse than German Nazism because Zionism is smarter.
Frankly, Realistic Dove is simply a Lying Snake.
I will try to blog a more polished reply on this subject later to day at EAAZI.
Martillo pretty much said it all. (I mostly wanted to post just to put an end to the unclosed italics tag in Rowan Berkeley's comment…)
…except it doesn't seem to have worked. So the blog software here lets you leave an italics tag unclosed, but won't let a later comment close it? Yeesh.
omg
way to go Rowan – mock my spelling will 'ya?
lol
Welcome, Joachim, among the italic/bold thread creators. Never miss the opportunity to close a html tag. ;)
I don't know much about Niebuhr. But I do trust Gary Dorrien who is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics so, hmm?
In case some of you do not know Dorrien, he is a harsh critic of the neocons.
It would be quite an enterprise to find what exactly means Christian in your and in Ed's case.
I haven't read his second on the neo-crowd yet, since I decided to follow Ed(Chris Moore)'s suggestion to have Terry Eagleton, one of "my favorite 'Marxist' Profs" invite me for mental meal. So Dorrien's "Imperial Designs" have to wait.
for a mental meal
Ah, sorry. It was Rowan. Then welcome to you!
We here expect you to come away from your mental meal with an
ethical view of what's happening regarding the P-I issue, which
is the tail wagging the dog of the world. We can't wait to hear you
on this subject, especially as you review the new American Obama
government in waiting.
BTW, do you think Eichmann got a bit of a raw deal? Or you more
with Arndt?
You like Marc Rich, just one more Jew who thankfully had a safe harbor from the foaming anti-semites?
observer, I shouldn't have send this.
My response to Joachim was as rash and unreflected as Richard Witty's often feel to me.
The article of Ira Chernus drives me mad; …
Niebuhr watched the Nazi rising threat early, at a time the world was still asleep: Let Liberal Churches Stop Fooling Themselves, March 25, 1931
… The Germans express themselves with increasingly unrestrained resentment against the Polish depredations upon German minorities. Worst of all, the growing anger of the German people over the economic slavery to which the treaty of Versailles condemns them, voiced particularly in the Hitler movement, threatens not only the parliamentary government of Germany but the whole peace of Europe. There is no real health and there are only a few signs of convalescence in the body politic of continental Europe.
That's written in 1931.
Timeline of World War II
Do you honestly ask me to recognize in this context the Zionists as the only "evil" force?
The problem lies here:What is the National Interest? The Neoconservative Challenge in International Relations Theory
In 1930 the German Jew Theodor Lessing wrote a book called: Jewish self-hate, Der Jüdische Selbsthass.
Bill Pearlman/SOG probably would call Phil a self-hating Jew. Do you Bill?
Compare for yourself, do you think he shares features with Phil? I read about the books of this guy, but had no idea he was Jewish. I hope his story can tell you what the mental atmosphere was like over here in the early 20th century. Zionism for Jews was a way out of this madness and not even under this conditions many went there–and no, it does not excuse what happened to the Palestinians:
Arthur Trebitsch
And, yes, I agree with Hannah Arendt. She relies heavily on the studies of Raul Hilberg, read his autobiography. There he tells you something about it.
Sorry, tired again. I forgot to mention, that Trebisch is one of five portraits of self-hating Jews. The most peculiar.
Speaking of Gary Dorrien…It's fashionable for lefties to disparage Niebuhr for being a Cold War conservative and for neo-cons to claim him as one of their own. Dorrien is a Niebuhr scholar who has also written two books on neoconservatives. Check out his answer in this interview:
Q: You’ve written two critical books on political neoconservatism. Don’t many neoconservatives claim to be Niebuhrians?
A. In various phases of his public career, Niebuhr was a liberal pacifist, a neo-Marxist revolutionary, a Social Democratic realist, a cold war liberal and, at the end, an opponent of the war in Vietnam. He zigged and zagged enough that all sorts of political types claim to be his heirs. Even the neoconservatives can point to a few things.
But over all, they’re kidding themselves. Niebuhr’s passion for social justice was a constant through all his changes. Politically he identified with the Democratic left. We can only wish that the neocons had absorbed even half of his realism.
Dan F here: I offer this gift to you folks because no one commenting on my post seems terribly interested in what Niebuhr thought…
The term 'social justice' is liberal cant. As an absolutely general rule, I take it that all racial, religious, and cultural conflicts are displacements of class conflicts. This happens to make sense of the phenomena, which is more than any of the theories presented here ever do.
I can see how class conflicts can often manifest themselves as cultural clashes, but I'm not sure ALL conflicts are class-based (by which I assume you mean economic). How does a conflict like what's occuring in Palestine fit into that definition?
Dorrien does not have much understanding of the different ethnic Ashkenazi intelligentsias that emigrated from Russia to N. America.
He repeats the red herring of Schachtmanite origins of Neoconservative (Schachtman ended up a labor Zionist and not a Jabotinskian. He is probably more relevant to understanding Martin Peretz than to understanding Neoconservatism.)
Dorrien ignores the clear roots of Neoconservatism in American Revisionism (Jabotinskianism) of the 20s, 30s and 40s.
He confuses Jabotinskian Neoconservatives and Friedmanite Neoliberals. Thus he misses the ethnic monist component of Neoconservatism.
Because Dorrien does not understand the distinction between Neoliberals and Neoconservatives, he obscures the gradual synthesis of Friedman's ideas based in the epistemic Yiddish economic culture with the ideas of Jabotinsky and Achimeir about waging ethnic warfare in the economic sector.
RE: "I can see how class conflicts can often manifest themselves as cultural clashes, but I'm not sure ALL conflicts are class-based (by which I assume you mean economic). How does a conflict like what's occuring in Palestine fit into that definition?"
In Israel and the occupied lands class conflict is enmeshed with Zionism. It's not either/or. Of all self-styled "Western democracies" (Every American politico parrots Israel & USA have the same values)
in the context of haves versus have-nots, Israel is at the absolute
bottom of the list.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12184.htm