I was in Israel during the Lebanon war and met a guy a lot like me at a bus stop. A smart outsider type, too skinny, he had a beard, intelligent eyes, and wore purple crocs on his feet, under a uniform and semiautomatic. He was a reservist going north to Kiryat Shemona. And he told me, All Israel is united in the necessity of this war.
What a deluded guy. Lebanon was a giant mistake. But that's what happens when a country goes to war, and it's a state of the Jews in the sea of Arabs. Ethnocentrism, patriotism. That fervor is reflected in two pieces in Haaretz. One on the terror of expressing dissent, by the great Gideon Levy. And this curious piece by Anshel Pfeffer, an Israeli in the U.S., who sees the Diaspora Jews slowly leaving the Israel party over the Gaza slaughter:
not the widest one, but I believe quite significant – who have more
complex and uncomfortable feelings on the matter. They care deeply for
Israel and understand even why its government felt compelled to launch
the devastating Operation Cast Lead, but they are extremely disturbed
and hurt by the level of civilian deaths and destruction that almost
seems part and parcel of the action. Surely, they say, there must,
there has to be another way of doing this. And they live with those
doubts, often unexpressed, even among families and close friends
because the worst thing they find is that others around them don't seem
to discern between the different nuances, and can't find in themselves
compassion for the dead and wounded on the other side. [brilliantly stated] They begin
asking themselves very awkward questions: Are they surrounded by latent
racists, or is something wrong with them that denies the feelings of
certainty of those around them? Or does everyone have similar doubts
but are simply afraid to express them?
Oh wow. Wheels comin off cart. Only in Haaretz.
These questions will become part of the cultural stew in the USA too–among Gentiles. I hope so.
Many illustrations from Der Sturmer are cartoons that present
Jews as animals or as evil, deformed creatures bent on the destruction of Germany. Many cartoons attempted to show Jews as a threat to German women or girls, thereby appealing directly to German manhood and nobility. These cartoons and articles were quite effective in conditioning the German people into a state in which they regarded the Jews as pure evil. As propaganda, Der Sturmer was a masterpiece. While it convinced Germans that Jews were evil, its most important accomplishment was that it created an atmosphere of indifference. Most Germans didn't run out and attack Jews after reading this stuff. What they did do was not stand up when laws began to appear that stripped Jews of their rights. In other words, Der Sturmer convinced most Germans to do nothing to help Jews.
The Nazis were building their particular programs on a foundation that had been created by other authors in the past. This foundation allowed Streicher's propaganda to work much faster and accomplish more in a shorter time. The dislike and distrust were already in place. All Streicher did was to bring it up to date and articulate it in a way that was easy for the common German to understand. Streicher may have not been a brilliant party organizer, but he certainly accomplished what he set out to do. With all that Streicher got accomplished, and the way he did it, I'd say he was a genius at propaganda, and one who rivaled Joseph Goebbels, who many historians think was Streicher's intellectual "better".
Now, for this blog, substitute SOG (Bill Pearlman) & his sock puppets, recently, such as"journalist" and "Journalist" & his stolen real names (e.g. Charles Keating) for Streicher. And Witty for Goebbels…
Get the picture?
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
The Bully Pulpit, September 10, 2007
By M. G Watson "Miles Watson" (Los Angeles) – See all my reviews
This review is from: Julius Streicher: Nazi Editor of the Notorious Anti-Semitic Newspaper Der Sturmer (Paperback)
I should start by saying the title of Randall Bytwerk's book, JULIUS STREICHER, is a bit misleading. STREICHER is not strictly speaking a biography; only about fifty of its 200 pages are devoted to the life of the man who from 1923 – 1945 was Hitler's chief anti-Semitic propagandist, agitator and "Jew-baiter." The rest of the work is essentially an examination of his newspaper, DER STUERMER, and the various methods it used to stir up anti-Jewish bias in Germany. One might call the book a study of how Streicher and the STUERMER (Stormer or Attacker) laid the emotional (if not the ideological) foundations for what happened to Europe's Jews during World War II.
Streicher is more or less a forgotten figure now, but he played a fairly crucial role in the struggle of the Nazi Party to attain power in Germany, and long after he himself had fallen from the Party's graces, he continued to enjoy Hitler's personal protection. A coarse, depraved, bullying man with a hair-trigger temper and a pugnacious attitude, Striecher had precisely the sort of characteristics which would endear him to Hitler: he was of common birth, a Bavarian, had won the Iron Cross in WWI, and held militant socialist, nationalist and anti-Jewish opinions, which he was more than ready to defend with his fists. Hitler respected Streicher for his courage and energy, and frequently told his confidants that DER STUERMER was the only news publication in Germany he read from cover to cover. He was not alone. Simon Weisenthal contended: "The SS who murdered our families had DER STUERMER in their field packs." His execution at Nuremberg was largely due to this fact, and it remains a controversial act: was Streicher truly guilty of anything except big-mouthed bigotry, or was he murdered (as many contend Rosenberg was) simply for what he thought and wrote?
A good way to address this question is by asking, What sort of paper was the STORMER? The most common description by Western historians is "a vile anti-Semitic rag", one which combined salacious gossip, detailed conspiracy theory, and quasi-pornography in an attempt to produce an emotional, rather than intellectual, reaction in the reader. If Alfred Rosenberg was the intellectual pillar of anti-Semitism in the Third Reich, Streicher was its vulgar streetcorner shill. THE STORMER is a nasty, villainous piece of work, and it is Bytwerk's thesis (just as it was the Allies contention at Nuremberg in 1946) that the STORMER was responsible for creating an atmosphere of hatred which made things like Krystalnacht and the Einsatzgruppen possible. Bytwerk uses many examples to show that while many Germans found the STORMER to be disgusting nonsense or at least in incredibly bad taste, its cumulative effect was to benumb the German populace to their fate. If it did not necessarily produce hatred, it certainly produced indifference ("Machts nicht," as the Germans say).
As a book, STREICHER is a bit of a mixed bag. The biography of Streicher himself is entertaining but fairly superficial – it left me hungry for more. The examination of the STURMER's message and methodology is very interesting, and Bytwerk has some penetrating insights as to the nature of propaganda. The main flaw in the work is his examination of anti-Semitism – not because it is factually inaccurate but because it is too partisan. When tackling radical ideology, a historian has three courses open to him: sympathy, neutrality or antipathy. Sympathy is always to be avoided, but many historians seem to think that objectivity amounts to the same thing. Afraid of appearing pro-Nazi, they spend too much time attacking its ethos and not enough time trying to explain the more legitimate sources of its appeal. No less a man than George Orwell has said that in order to fight fascism, it is necessary to understand that it contains some good as well as much evil; and any honest study of German anti-Semitism must start by recognizing that (whatever its origin) German Jews did have a disproportionate representation in import-export business, the diamond trade, banking, the legal profession, the medical profession, publishing, music, entertainment, and teaching (particularly at the university level), among other vocations. This applies to involvement in communist politics as well. This was bound to cause resentment and breed conspiracy theories, and it would hardly be "anti-Semitic" to admit this before entertaining a discussion of why the STORMER found such fertile soil. But when Bytwerk mentions these sort of things, he usually is quoting them as statistics taken from the STORMER, which leaves the reader with the assumption that they must be false. He is willing to expose the innumerable instances where Streicher lied, exaggerated, took statements out of context, or used logical fallacies to support his arguments, but he seems unwilling to grant that the conditions which led to such a surplus of anti-Jewish feeling in Germany were sometimes rooted in everyday reality, and not merely a product of Streicher's strident and incessant Jew-baiting. Obviously, it's ticklish to discuss these things, lest the historian be accused of validating the Nazi ethos that "the Jew was our misfortune", but I think anyone intelligent enough to read a history book of this nature can tell the difference between an explanation of bigotry and an apologia for it.
Having said that, I maintain that STREICHER is a solid and important work by a diligent historian who perhaps attempted a bit too much for just 200 pages (this could be two books; a bio on Streicher and an analysis of his paper) but does not come off any worse for the attempt. I would recommend it to any collection of history on the Third Reich.
what's your point, "rabbi"?