Désinformation: Retour sur l’Affaire Sacco-Vanzetti (Looking back on Comintern’s most successful lying-for-the truth operation)

The purpose was “to Stalinize the glamor culture, while simultaneously giving the apparatus a cash cow capable of producing a large, untraceable supply of much-needed American hard currency to finance various operations around the world.” (…) You do not endorse Stalin. You do not call yourself a communist. You do not declare your love for the regime. You do not call on people to support the Soviets. Ever. Under any circumstances. You claim to be an independent-minded idealist. You don’t understand politics, but you think the little guy is getting a lousy break. You believe in open-mindedness. You are shocked, frightened by what is going on right here in our own country. You are frightened by the racism, by the oppression of the working man. You think that the Russians are trying a great human experiment, and you hope it works. You believe in peace. You yearn for international understanding. You hate fascism. You think the capitalist system is corrupt. You say it over and over again and you say nothing, nothing more. Stephen Koch

Pour en terminer avec le mythe Sacco-Vanzetti, il nous faut bien sûr revenir sur le magistral travail de l’historien américain Stephen Koch qui a le mérite de l’inscrire dans la perspective plus générale de l’appareil de propagande stalinien. Notamment dans son livre de 1994 sur le Komintern (Double lives*) où, s’appuyant sur des archives soviétiques récemment ouvertes, il évoque l’étonnant parcours d’une de ses grandes figures (nécessairement cachée!), le propagandiste allemand Willi Münzenbuger.

Chef d’orchestre invisible d’une campagne de manipulation sans précédent (du milieu des années 20, le système Münzenberg se perpétua même au-delà de sa mort jusqu’aux années 60), la liste est longue de ceux que ses services réussirent à “recruter”, au moins comme “compagnons de route”. Hemingway, Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, Bertold Brecht, Thomas Mann, les deux André, Gide et Malraux, rien de moins en fait que le gotha de l’intelligentsia occidentale. Sans parler des Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, Heinrich Mann, Romain Rolland, Aragaon et sa muse russe Elsa Triolet, etc.

Et ce justement… à partir de l’Affaire Sacco et Vanzetti, cette magistrale opération de “mensonge au service de la vérité” dont le Komintern se fera par la suite une spécialité:

Extraits :

Around 1925, the Comintern entrusted Münzenberg and his propaganda machine with a little-known but large role in giving shape and political function to the Communist Party of the United States as it was to be under Stalin. At that time, the American party, that congregation of the militant naïve, home and battleground for John Reed and Louise Bryant, needed to be re-assembled. It had been left in a shattered state by its late-Leninist internal struggles combined with devastating police action inflicted on it by what later became the FBI.

(…)

For the world proletariat of 1925, the leading counter-myth to the myth of revolution was, by far, the idea of America. That vision—the notion of the melting pot, the Golden Door, the Land of Opportunity— is what held the real political attention of the International. To the Bolsheviks, this was the true American menace. And in 1925, the task of the American party was to counteract it.

So Münzenberg’s first idea was to create and sustain a worldwide anti-American campaign that would focus its appeal upon the mythology of the country’s immigration. The purpose of such a campaign would be to instill a reflexive loathing of the United States and its people as a prime tropism of left-wing enlightenment. To undermine the myth of the Land of Opportunity, the United States would be shown as an almost insanely xenophobic place, murderously hostile to foreigners.

To this end, Münzenberg surveyed his options, in search of a cause that would disgrace America in the eyes of the proletarian foreign-born. He found it in the obscure case of two anarchist immigrants who’d got themselves into some very bad trouble: Niccola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

(…)

Together with the Dreyfus case, this is perhaps the most famous legal struggle in the whole history of modern propaganda and injustice. It seemed at first incredible to me that this epochal case could have been manipulated at such a distance, and so cynically.

And indeed the origins of the Sacco–Vanzetti case are far more complex than that. Yet in one sense the Sacco–Vanzetti campaign does turn out to have been “Münzenberg’s idea.” It was indeed at Münzenberg’s instigation that Communist propaganda networks worldwide took up the plight of the two Boston immigrants and made it the centerpiece of a vast new anti-American operation—just as a little later it was Willi’s executive decision to turn the Scottsboro Boys into prime martyrs for the International. The Comintern and Willi’s organization were the ones who transformed a case of troubled local injustice into a worldwide cause célèbre.

In that effort, however, the Communists latched onto the Sacco–Vanzetti case as latecomers and opportunists. Sacco and Vanzetti were not themselves Communists, and theirs was not, at first, a Communist struggle. The two Italians were anarchists, and so their political myth was shaped during the early 1920s by anarchists, guided especially by that doyen of Italo-American radicalism, Carlo Tresca.

By the mid-1920s, however, the political sponsorship of the case decisively changed. In 1926, the American Communist Party stood directionless and in disarray, very much in need of a new motivating spirit and a new task. At the same time, the International was demanding its anti-American cause. The Soviet propagandists decided to satisfy both these needs at once. In 1926, speaking to his colleagues in the WIR, Münzenberg announced it was their task, as propagandists, to rescue the American party and supply its new direction. And so it was: the first task of a revived American party was to seize and hold the Sacco–Vanzetti case for its own, while around the world the Comintern turned it into the preoccupying moral issue of the era. By 1928, Willi was cooly and quite correctly claiming credit for the Sacco– Vanzetti campaign, understood as a worldwide political moral mania, and among the highest triumphs of his apparatus.

Here is how it worked. Way back in 1920, two Italian immigrants, both militant anarchists, were arrested and charged with stealing the payroll of a Braintree, Massachusetts, shoe factory and murdering its paymaster and his guard. In 1921, they were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.

The two men belonged to a small anarchist cell of Italian immigrants like themselves. When the pair was arrested, this group immediately formed a defense committee. Naïvely convinced that the two would get off, they proposed creating “great publicity for the anarchist movement.”

But Sacco and Vanzetti did not get off. Nor did their case advance the anarchist cause; its later co-option by the Communists was used to betray and undermine American anarchism. The Defense Committee was right about one thing: These two men’s condemnation offered the basis for a political vision.

That vision in its anarchist incarnation was the creation of one man above all: an eccentric Westerner, one of the grand lawyers of the American left, a brilliant but more flaky Clarence Darrow named Fred Moore, recommended to the Defense Committee by Carlo Tresca.

(…)

Moore invented the case. He set out to rescue his clients with any and every maneuver a fertile legal mind could conceive, convinced they were lost without the pressure of outraged world opinion. To this end, long before Münzenberg knew anything about the case, he single-handedly created the political argument of Sacco and Vanzetti: that they were powerless, despised, radical immigrants being subjected to judicial murder by a smug, chauvinist, puritanical, nativist, red-scared New England establishment. In promoting this defense, Moore was unscrupulous, ingenious, indefatigable, driven. Of his passion and sincerity there can be no doubt. He was a man obsessed. And his belief in his clients’ innocence was quite genuine. At first.

Except unfortunately their innocence wasn’t quite genuine. Best evidence shows beyond all reasonable doubt that Sacco was in fact one of the Braintree gunmen and the murderer of the guard, whom he shot to death after the man had fallen to his hands and knees, begging for his life while struggling to reach his own revolver. Vanzetti may have been innocent of the Braintree holdup, though he probably knew or guessed Sacco’s guilt. He certainly had guilty knowledge of Sacco’s participation in an earlier robbery where no blood had been spilled.

In a way, the facts make the two men’s political solidarity all the more compelling. One word of the truth from either man—Sacco in ordinary decency; Vanzetti in ordinary self-protection—would have saved Vanzetti’s life. But it also would have demolished their cause in disgrazia. Bartolomeo Vanzetti laid down his life on the bloody altar not of justice but of propaganda. He died lying for the truth.

The murky integrity of this self-sacrifice gives Vanzetti—he was in every way the more interesting of the pair—a tremendously affecting dignity. It also sustained his stumbling, broken, justly famous eloquence. “If it had not been for this thing, I might have live out my life talking on street corners to scorning men. I might have die unknown, unmarked, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph.”

The little coterie of anarchists on the Defense Committee also knew the truth, and they too maintained the vow of silence for la causa. The last survivor, a man named Ideale Gambera, wrote a full account of the affair for disclosure by his son after his death. Gambera died in 1982, and his son released the documents to Francis Russell, a principal scholar of the case. It was the last word.

Somewhere along the way, Fred Moore seems to have stumbled onto the truth as well. There is no evidence that this in any way modified Moore’s passion for his clients’ defense, but in 1923, in the midst of a paranoid psychotic episode (he’d attempted suicide and was hospitalized), Sacco dismissed Moore in a violent incoherent rage. Taking his dismissal with dignity, Moore packed up, got into his car, and drove back west, selling knickknacks as he went to pay for his gasoline.

The case now began to die. The appeals dragged on, but the headline makers of the world had dropped the Massachusetts fishmonger and shoemaker. Then, in 1925, on orders of Münzenberg and the Comintern, an American branch of the Red Aid called the International Labor Defense, created in Chicago with James Cannon as its director, was set up to be the focus of organization for the new American Communism. Its first mission was to make the Sacco–Vanzetti case into a worldwide myth.

The campaign became a juggernaut, tenaciously co-ordinated from Berlin, vast and unrelenting. Now, once again, protest meetings gathered to shout and sob in the great squares. From all its outlets, organs of the Trust produced an unstanchable stream of attacks on the assassin viciousness of American justice, defending the innocence and holiness of the immigrant martyrs in Braintree. Around the world, heart-rending appeals for cash were staged to provide for Sacco and Vanzetti’s defense and “protection.” Children gave their pennies, workers donated wages, philanthropists opened their checkbooks.

The apparat’s fund-raising was, incidentally, an almost complete fraud. Sacco and Vanzetti and their Defense Committee saw next to none of the money raised in their names. Of the approximately half-million dollars raised in the United States, the Defense Committee received something like $6,000. Of large sums collected in mass protest meetings around the world, the Defense Committee saw precisely nothing.

Cannon seems to have understood that Sacco was guilty, and so Münzenberg very possibly also knew the truth. Not that anybody cared. The Communist goal was never to save the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti. Acquittal would have dissolved the whole political point. Katherine Anne Porter, like hundreds of writers and artists of the time, participated in the Boston deathwatch. She reports an exchange with the Comintern agent who was her group leader, Rosa Baron, “a dry, fanatical little woman who wore thick-lensed spectacles over her accusing eyes, a born whiphand, who talked an almost impenetrable jargon of party dogma. … I remarked … that even then, at that late time, I still hoped the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti could be saved. … ‘Saved’ she said, ringing a change on her favorite answer to political illiteracy, ‘who wants them saved? What earthly good would they do us alive?’”

Francis Russell, in his Sacco and Vanzetti: The Case Resolved (1986), describes the European demonstrations:

“Demonstrations took place that autumn in France and Italy, with lesser demonstrations in Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Scandinavia, and South America. A bomb exploded in the American embassy in Paris. Another was intercepted in the Lisbon consulate. Reds in Brest stoned the consulate there. American consuls in Mexico were threatened with death if Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. In Rome, thousands of workers marched on the American embassy demanding justice for their compatriots.”

Some of this agitation was anarchist inspired, some actually spontaneous, but most of it was directed by Communist leaders in Paris.

(…)

Felix Frankfurter, then a leading professor of law at Harvard and later one of this century’s great justices of the U.S. Supreme Court (…) was drawn into the affair by the dual force of his passion for justice and his concern for his wife.

(…)

When the condemned men’s last appeal was denied, the outraged Felix proceeded to write one of the most powerful polemics of his career, a denunciation of the case’s legal history, a brilliant exercise in controlled vituperation. The piece appeared in The Atlantic. It was more influential than any other factor in marshaling American non-radical opinion behind the pair, and it was even more influential in Europe. Münzenberg’s Berlin office arranged for it to be reprinted throughout the world, while in London H. G. Wells produced a flamboyant summary which promptly became the received British view.

What followed was orchestrated multinational mass hysteria.

August 22 was the night of the executions, and around them the apparat, poising itself for the outpouring of international grief, organized a vast international deathwatch. Francis Russell describes the event:

After the news flashed from Charleston that Sacco and Vanzetti had at last been executed, the reverberations were international. Demonstrations in American cities were duplicated and in many places exceeded all over Europe. In Paris the Communist daily Humanité printed an extra sheet on which was splashed the single block word “Assassinés!” Crowds surged down the Boulevard Sebastopol, ripping up lampposts and tossing them through plate glass windows. Protective tanks ringed the American embassy, and sixty policemen were injured when a mob tried to set up barricades there. Five thousand militants roamed the streets of Geneva the evening before the executions, overturning American cars, sacking shops selling American goods, gutting theaters showing American films. One of the greatest demonstrations in the history of the Weimar republic took place in Berlin; there were tumultuous demonstrations in Bremen and Wilhelmshaven and Hamburg, and a two hour torchlight parade in Stuttgart. During that turbulent week, half a dozen German demonstrators were killed. No one was killed in England, but on the night of the executions, a crowd gathered in front of Buckingham Palace and sang “The Red Flag.”

The night of the executions was marked by a vigil at Charleston Prison. Before this dour building an enormous crowd gathered in the dark. “I was never in that place before,” Porter wrote, “but I seem to remember that it was a great open space with the crowd massed back from a center the police worked constantly to keep clear. They were all mounted on fine horses and loaded with pistols and hand grenades and tear gas bombs.” The law in its generosity provides that the condemned are entitled to every minute of their last day. After having been granted this largess, Sacco and Vanzetti were led to the death chamber at midnight exactly. Sacco entered it first, at 12:11. Vanzetti followed at 12:20. By 12:27 both had been pronounced dead. Both men met their end with indescribable dignity.

So the American Communist Party was revived, in part, to function as a local instrument in a worldwide and remarkably successful effort to create a new anti-American myth, the support and development of which persisted for decades to come.

Lying for the truth:
Münzenberg & the Comintern
Stephen Koch
1994

* Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas against the West, traduit en français en 1995 sous le titre: La fin de l’innocence : les intellectuels d’Occcident et la tentation stalinienne – 30 ans de guerre secrète

Voir aussi:

Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West.
book review by Ronald Rodosh
National Review, 1994

THE name Willi Munzenberg is familiar to readers of Arthur Koestler and Manes Sperber, writers whose chronicles of European and German Communism first told us of his work on behalf of the Comintern. But it has been the unique task of Stephen Koch, who was able to utilize material hidden until recently in the archives of the former Soviet Union, to tell us the whole story of how this remarkable Comintern operative fashioned a widespread network of agents–”Munzenberg’s men,” as Mr. Koch calls them–who created a propaganda apparatus that gained the allegiance of the most prominent writers, intellectuals, artists, and politicians in the major capitals of the Western world.

Indeed, the network Munzenberg fashioned went beyond merely creating Communist propaganda. Rather, it was at times indistinguishable from an espionage organization. Munzenberg’s chief operatives–the urbane Otto Katz, a Sudeten German born in Prague, and the “elegant but slightly seedy” Louis Gibarti, a Hungarian– were most likely not only Comintern agents, but NKVD cadre as well. And the task they accomplished went to the heart of what Stalin wanted to develop in the West: a legion of true believers who could be counted upon to justify the most egregiously brutal Soviet policies and practices. Their task, as Mr. Koch explains, was to propagate the idea that to “criticize or challenge Soviet policy was the unfailing mark of a bad, bigoted, and probably stupid person, while support was equally infallible proof of a forward-looking mind committed to all that was best for humanity and mankind by an uplifting refinement of sensibility.”

In that task, Munzenberg succeeded all too well. With willing victims ranging from Lillian Heilman, Josephine Herbst, and Dorothy Parker in America, to Thomas and Heinrich Mann in Germany, to Elsa Triolet and Louis Aragon in Paris, Munzenberg’s agents, led by Katz and Gibarti, used the lure of “anti-fascism” to attract their prey, and a strong lure it was. At its center was the distinction these gullible intellectuals made between Communism and fascism. The former, they thought, derived from the Enlightenment, and hence they were incapable of discerning the evils stemming from a Marxist-Leninist state. “Protecting the progressive ideal,” Mr. Koch explains, “seemed to rest on denying or evading the manifest horrors that had sprung from their radical application. And within the needs of such a denial, Munzenberg and his heirs moved and found their element.”

Again, that element was “anti-fascism.” It is perhaps Mr. Koch’s signal contribution to reveal, in a complex and textured analysis, that in reality this anti-fascism was a complete illusion. From the very beginning Josef Stalin planned a secret working relationship with the Nazi Party and Hitler’s Germany. That pattern began, Mr. Koch shows us, with the real story of the Reichstag Fire trial in 1933 and the role played by Comintern leader Georgi Dimitrov. For decades, it has been part of the fiction of received history that the Nazis themselves burned down the Reichstag, blaming it on the Communists and subjecting the Bulgarian Dimitrov to a mock trial–in which Dimitrov, due to an outstanding performance and to world support, turned the tables on the Nazis and gained his acquittal.

The truth, until Mr. Koch’s discoveries, has lain buried in the vaults of the Comintern and, as one might have suspected, is much more complex and nuanced. Of course, the passions roused against fascism were quite genuine, and justified. Hence the “progressive” world was enthralled by Dimitrov’s unflinching and seemingly brave challenging of the Nazis from the Leipzig courtroom. What Mr. Koch tells us is that Dimitrov was brave for one reason alone: “He was in no danger and knew perfectly well there was nothing for him to fear.” In effect, the Nazis had rigged the trial in Dimitrov’s favor. It was all part of a covert operation organized jointly by the NKVD and the Gestapo, “through which he was assured of acquittal and a triumphant return to Russia at the end of what was a propaganda charade played out as a whole high drama of defiance.”

How could this be? Indeed, how could the totalitarian Nazi regime allow its courts to free the top Comintern leader, who supposedly was using their courtroom to expose the Nazis’ own perfidy? As is often the case with espionage, we here enter the wilderness of mirrors. Katz and Munzenberg had already created the world-famous Brown Book of Hitler Terror, which appeared simultaneously with the Leipzig trial, and which did so much to inform the Western world of the nature of German fascism. As Mr. Koch says, every informed person was aware of its contents, and the volume was a best-seller throughout the West. But close examination reveals the limits of its anti-fascism. Stalin’s real policy, as Mr. Koch writes, was “overt anti-fascism plus secret appeasement.” The Brown Book of Hitler Terror, despite its title, let Hitler off the hook. As did the Reichstag trial, and the Western response. Mr. Koch writes:

Hitler’s persecution of German Communism was almost certainly pursued in full collaboration with Stalin and the full knowledge and direct personal co-operation of the future head of the Communist International, using the Comintern’s “anti-fascism” as cover. Almost certainly, the acquittal of Georgi Dimitrov was the result of secret arrangements with the Nazis, and the founding scandal of the Soviet-sponsored anti-fascist movement, one of the leading forces in the moral life of this century, was created in direct collaboration with Hitler himself.

As Mr. Koch explains, this charade was really not as surprising as it may at first seem. The Brown Book, as it turns out, and the expose of the Nazis by Dimitrov, concentrated on the paramilitary Brown Shirts, or SA, a group Hitler had come to see as a major contender for power, and which he rightly saw as standing in the way of his own authority. Stalin, meanwhile, feared the SA’s ability to militarize Germany quickly, and he believed the stabilization of the new regime by Hitler would forward his own interests. Hitler and Stalin alike saw that the SA and its leader, Ernst Rohm, had to be prepared for slaughter, and Hitler thus allowed Dimitrov to use his courtroom pulpit, as Mr. Koch puts it, “to discredit the SA, prior to its elimination.”

In that effort, the propaganda apparatus of Munzenberg sprang into action. A “counter-trial” was held to much fanfare in London, and the gullible “progressives” in the West flocked to sign up for service in various Munzenberg fronts. And there were many.

It should be acknowledged here that the idea of a Dimitrov conspiracy orchestrated jointly by Hitler and Stalin seems preposterous on the face of it. Is the evidence that Mr. Koch has unearthed in the Comintern files confirmed elsewhere? Reviewing this book in The New York Times Book Review, Maurice Isserman states definitively that no historian has “ever stumbled across evidence of the Hitler-Stalin partnership of 1933.” In fact, that is not so. In Robert Tucker’s important biography, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941 (1990), Mr. Tucker points out that, in seeking stability, Moscow saw that its “best bet, from Stalin’s point of view, was a diplomacy of accord with Germany.” Fearing a non-Communist socialist Germany should fascism be defeated, Stalin sought a Nazi takeover, which he thought would give him a better chance of cementing his power in Russia. Hence, as Mr. Tucker puts it, “Stalin abetted the Nazi victory,” by engaging in “a certain amount of collaboration.”

Mr. Tucker goes on to document precisely what Mr. Isserman denies: that in 1933, “Stalin signaled his interest in doing business with Berlin.” That cooperation included secret diplomacy carried out by Comintern head Karl Radek in October 1933. The policy continued into the late 1930s. And like Stephen Koch, Mr. Tucker refers to “the mask of anti-fascism,” and shows how Stalin used the Popular Front as cover for his purge against such actual anti-Nazi elements as Field Marshal Tukhachevsky. Among other historians, Walter Laqueur, in his own book on Stalin, notes that the documents used to frame Tukhachevsky were forged for Stalin by the Gestapo.

While Karl Radek orchestrated the policy in Moscow, Munzenberg’s men carried it out with zeal in the West. Munzenberg’s had his greatest success in the United States. Indeed, one of his most notable victories was his courting of the Hollywood liberal Left, with its writers, directors, and actors whose new-found wealth during the Great Depression led to pangs of guilt, and made them willing participants in Otto Katz’s legion of front groups. The key to success was the Popular Front, portrayed as a broad anti-fascist alliance.

As Mr. Koch writes, the Front was really Stalin’s mechanism for gathering support while he carried out the Great Terror at home. His followers in the West simply could not understand that the Front was conceived, as Mr. Koch writes, to be “what no decent person could turn against, in spite of the trials.” And so Willi Munzenberg devised the technique of zeroing in on the best of the adversary culture—the enlightened elite of the middle classes–using their sensibility and concern in service to the malign purposes of Stalin. It worked all too well. In England his men recruited the Cambridge spy network. In Washington, D.C., they formed the notorious Ware group, which infiltrated the ranks of the State Department and the Roosevelt Administration. Nor was the press ignored. In England Claud Cockburn’s influential newsletter The Week passed along to its readers the Comintern disinformation provided by Otto Katz. In New York, Katz was instrumental in forming the supposedly independent Left-liberal newspaper P.M., which Mr. Koch describes as a “classic Munzenberg-style daily.” (P.M. did employ a few prominent anti-Communists, but as cover for its generally pro-Soviet foreign-policy line.)

In Hollywood Katz touched the lives of Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, Donald Ogden Stewart, and scores of others of the Tinseltown nobility. Here were the beginnings of the molding of Hollywood on behalf of the “right” causes, something that has continued through our own day. The purpose was “to Stalinize the glamor culture, while simultaneously giving the apparatus a cash cow capable of producing a large, untraceable supply of much-needed American hard currency to finance various operations around the world.” And so Munzenberg’s agent Otto Katz charmed his way through Hollywood, appearing at functions and testifying falsely about his heroic struggle against the Nazis, and asking for checks at the end of each appearance. The main concern was support for Stalin, not resistance to Hitler. When the Nazi-Soviet Pact was finally announced, not one of the Hollywood set defected. Instead, they applauded the invasion of Poland and the Soviet attack on Finland, which Miss Hellman promptly described as “a pro-Nazi little republic.”

Mr. Koch presents a powerful challenge to the anti-fascist pretensions cherished by the Left from the Thirties to the Fifties. It has long been said that whatever Stalin’s own motives and policies, at least the anti-fascist crusade and the Popular Front were a genuine response by idealists to the betrayal of the Western heritage. And indeed, for some, they were that. But the same well-meaning idealists allowed themselves to be used as instruments in the campaign orchestrated by Stalin to consolidate his totalitarian regime, either as actual agents (Hiss, Field, Herbst, and others), or as apologists (Hellman, Parker, and other members of the literary elite). Anti-fascism, Mr. Koch writes, “was the most urgent moral cause of the 1930s” and it was “betrayed from within precisely by the Communists who most ardently claimed it as their own.” This should put to rest the claim made by the pro-Communist Left that they were fighting “the good fight.” It is not surprising that writers who, like Mr. Isserman, have sought to defend that claim, now turn fiercely against Mr. Koch’s findings.

The story that Stephen Koch tells, then, is not very pretty. Of course, it is a cliche that a revolution devours its own children. Katz was most likely involved in the murder of Munzenberg, who died, seemingly alone, in a woods in France in 1940. As for Katz, he was to meet his end in the Prague trials of 1952, accused of being a Western agent and convicted on the “evidence” of the American traitor and Soviet agent Noel Field, betrayed in fact by the very apparatus he had helped create in the Thirties and Forties. What Mr. Koch has shown us is nothing less than the complete involvement of the Soviet secret services in the intellectual life of the West from the years before World War II into the early Cold War. It was Willi Munzenberg in particular who shaped key operations directly for Stalin, from the Sacco-Vanzetti defense of the Twenties, to the peace movement of the Thirties. What appeared to be independent acts of protest, it turns out, were either run by Soviet intelligence from the start or taken over and orchestrated by it shortly thereafter. One hopes–given the new availability of files still to be opened and examined–that this superb effort will be but the first step toward a full understanding of what until now has been the hidden history of the twentieth century.

Mr. Radosh is Professor Emeritus of History at the City University of New York, and co-author, with Joyce Milton, of The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth.

Le mythe Sacco-Vanzetti (Who wants them saved? What earthly good would they do us alive?)

Therefore, I, Michael S. Dukakis, Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts … hereby proclaim Tuesday, August 23, 1977, “NICOLA SACCO AND BARTOLOMEO VANZETTI MEMORIAL DAY”; and declare, further, that any stigma and disgrace should be forever removed from the names of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, from the names of their families and descendants, and so … call upon all the people of Massachusetts to pause in their daily endeavors to reflect upon these tragic events, and draw from their historic lessons the resolve to prevent the forces of intolerance, fear, and hatred from ever again uniting to overcome the rationality, wisdom, and fairness to which our legal system aspires. Reprenant, en ce 29e anniversaire du Sacco-Vanzetti Memorial Day, notre exploration de l’antiaméricanisme renaissant, il nous faut naturellement revenir, après le grand sommet dans les années 50 de l’Affaire Rosenberg, au véritable mythe fondateur que fut 20 ans plus tôt l’exécution des célèbres anarchistes italo-américains.

Même mythique erreur judiciaire (tout comme Julius Rosenberg, Nicola Sacco était réellement coupable et, à l’instar d’Ethel Rosenberg, Bartoloemeo Vanzetti aurait préféré se sacrifier plutôt que de parler). Même aveugle conviction (jusqu’à aujourd’hui !) de l’intelligentsia américaine et internationale de leur innocence (de Dorothy Parker, John Dos Passos et Upton Sinclair aux Etats-Unis à George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells et Bertrand Russel en Grande-Bretagne). Et surtout même campagne mondiale de désinformation orchestrée par les services secrets soviétiques qui avaient déjà largement infiltré les milieux intellectuels américains, provoquant en cascade toute une série de mouvements de masse en Europe (émeutes à Londres et en Allemagne, bombe à l’Ambassade américaine à Paris, etc.).

D’où l’intérêt du récit (repris par l’historien américain Stephen Koch) de ce véritable acte de naissance de la pensée de gauche américaine (son Affaire Dreyfus en quelque sorte) que fit, 50 ans après et dans le magazine the Atlantic, Ia grande dame des lettres américaines Katherine Anne Porter.

Surtout que pour elle ce fut à la fois sa première et… dernière grande expérience de militante de gauche:

Extraits :

It is hard to explain, harder no doubt for a new generation to understand, how the “intellectuals” and “artists” in our country leaped with such abandoned, fanatic credulity into the Russian hell-on-earth of 1920. They quoted the stale catchphrases and slogans. They were lifted to starry patriotism by the fraudulent Communist organization called the Lincoln Brigade. The holy name was a charm which insured safety and victory. The bullet struck your Bible instead of your heart.

(…)

“For me and others like me, the Kremlin meant the Third Internationale and this meant the organization of the ‘workers of the world’ to vindicate their human rights against everything we hated in contemporary society.” Edmund Wilson wrote that, as well and clearly expressed as it has been until now.

“I have seen the future and it works.” Lincoln Steffens is reported to have said this, though it has been much denied.

(…)

It was some time later that afternoon when we were discussing world events, and all of us wanted to know how in the world Russian people could survive the latest disaster to their government, and he said: “All progress takes its toll in human life. Russia is the coming power of the world. I have seen the future and it works.” So much for that. No matter how sad it may seem now, Mr. Steffens said it then, jovially, but in earnest. I wrote it down word for word, then and there, in my notebook.

My group was headed by Rosa Baron, a dry, fanatical little woman who wore thick-lensed spectacles over her blue, accusing eyes–a born whip hand, who talked an almost impenetrable jargon of party dogma. Her “approach” to every “question” (and everything was a question) was “purely dialectical.” Phrases such as “capitalistic imperialism,” “bourgeois morality,” “slave mentality,” “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” “the historical imperative” (meaning more or less, I gathered, that history makes man and not the other way around), “the triumph of the workers,” “social consciousness,” and “political illiteracy” flew from her dry lips all day long. She viewed a “political illiterate” as a conventional mind might a person of those long-ago days born out of wedlock; an unfortunate condition, but reprehensible and without remedy even for its victim. Conservative was only a slightly less pejorative term than Reactionary, and as for Liberal, it was a dirty word, quite often linked in speech with other vaguely descriptive words, even dirtier, if possible. There were many such groups, for this demonstration had been agitated for and prepared for many years by the Communists. They had not originated the protest, I believe, but had joined in and tried to take over, as their policy was, and is. Their presence created the same confusion, beclouding the issue and discrediting the case as it always had done and as they intended it to do. It appeared in its true form and on its most disastrous scale in Spain later. They were well organized to promote disorder and to prevent any question ever being settled–but I had not then discovered this; I remarked to our Communist leader that even then, at that late time, I still hoped the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti might be saved and that they would be granted another trial. “Saved,” she said, ringing a change on her favorite answer to political illiteracy, “who wants them saved? What earthly good would they do us alive?”

I was another of those bourgeois liberals who got in the way of serious business, yet we were needed, by the thousands if possible, for this great agitation must be made to appear to be a spontaneous uprising of the American people, and for practical reasons, the more non-Communists, the better. They were all sentimental bleeders, easily impressed.

(…)

Lenin was known to think little of people who let their human feelings for decency get in the way of the revolution which was to save mankind: he spoke contemptuously of the “saints” who kept getting underfoot; he had only harsh words for those “weak sisters” who flew off the “locomotive of history” every time it rounded a sharp curve. History was whatever was happening in Russia, and the weak sisters, who sometimes called themselves “fellow travelers” were perhaps, many of them, jolted by the collision with what appeared to be a dream of the ideal society come true, dazzled by the bright colors of a false dawn.

I flew off Lenin’s locomotive and his vision of history in a wide arc in Boston, Massachusetts, on August 21, 1927; it was two days before the putting to death of Sacco and Vanzetti, to the great ideological satisfaction of the Communist-headed group with which I had gone up to Boston. It was exactly what they had hoped for and predicted from the first; another injustice of the iniquitous capitalistic system against the working class.

Toasts were drunk at parties “To the Red Dawn”–a very pretty image indeed. “See you on the barricades!” friends would say at the end of an evening of dancing in Harlem. Nobody thought any of this strange; in those days the confusion on this subject by true believers, though not great, was not quite so bad and certainly not so sinister as it is now. It was not then subversive to associate with Communists, nor even treasonable to belong to the Communist Party. It is true that Communists, or a lot of people who thought themselves Communists–and it is astonishing how many of them have right-about-faced since they got a look at the real thing in action–held loud meetings in Union Square, and they often managed to get a few heads cracked by the police–all the better! Just the proof they needed of the brutalities of the American Gestapo. On the other hand, they could gather thousands of “sympathizers” of every shade of political and religious belief and every known nationality and carry off great May Day parades peaceably under police protection. The innocent fellow travelers of this country were kept in a state of excited philanthropy by carefully planted stories of the struggle that the great Russian reformers were having against local rebellious peasants, blasted crops, and plagues of various kinds, bringing the government almost to starvation. Our fellow travelers picketed, rebuking our government for failure to send food and other necessaries to aid the great cause in that courageous country. I do not dare say that our government responded to these childish appeals, but tons upon tons of good winter wheat and other supplies were sent in fabulous quantities. It turned out that the threatened famine took place there–it was real–under orders from Lenin, who directed a great famine or an occasional massacre by way of bringing dissidence under the yoke, and I remember one blood-curdling sentence from a letter of his to a subordinate, directing him to conduct a certain massacre as “a model of mercilessness.”

What struck me later was that I had already met and talked to refugees from Russia in Mexico who had got out with their lives and never ceased to be amazed at it. In New York I saw picketing in Times Square and Wall Street, solemn placard-carrying processions of second-generation descendants of those desolate, ragged, hopeful people who had landed on Ellis Island from almost every country in the West, escaping from the dreadful fates now being suffered by their blood kin in Russia and other parts of the world. Not one of them apparently could see that the starvation and disease and utter misery were brought on methodically and most successfully for the best of political and economic reasons without any help from us, while the Party was being fed richly with our wheat.

Then there was AMTORG, headquartered in New York, managed by a Russian Jewish businessman of the cold steel variety, advertised as a perfectly legal business organization for honest, aboveboard trade with the Soviets.

There was ROSTA (later TASS), the official Russian news agency and propaganda center in America, run by an American citizen, Kenneth Durant, who enjoyed perfect immunity in every Red scare of the period when dozens of suspects were arrested–not he. I assisted the editor of ROSTA for a short time and I know the subsidy was small, though the agency was accused of enjoying floods of “Moscow gold.” If this was so, I don’t know where it went. The editor claimed that Moscow gold was passed out at the rate of $75.00 a week for salaries (he took $50.00 and gave me $25.00). A perennial candidate for President of the United States popped up every four years regularly on the Communist ticket–an honest man. I knew nothing of his private politics, but his public life was admirable and his doctrine was pure Christian theory.

Once on the picket line, I took a good look at the crowd moving slowly forward. I wouldn’t have expected to see some of them on the same street, much less the same picket line and in the same jail. I knew very few people in that first picket line, but I remember Lola Ridge, John Dos Passos, Paxton Hibben, Michael Gold, Helen O’Lochlain Crowe, James Rorty, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Willie Gropper, Grace Lumpkin, all very well known then and mostly favorably–most of them have vanished, and I wonder who but me is alive to remember them now? I have a strangely tender memory of them all, as well as the faces of strangers who were being led away by the police.

We were as miscellaneous, improbable, almost entirely unassorted a gathering of people to one place in one cause as ever happened in this country. I say almost because among the pickets I did not see anyone identifiably a workingman, or “proletarian,” as our Marxist “dialecticians” insisted on calling everybody who worked for his living in a factory, or as they said, “sweatshop,” or “slave mill,” or “salt mine.” It is true that these were workdays and maybe all the workingmen were at their jobs. Suppose one of them said to his boss, “I want a day off, with pay, to picket for Sacco and Vanzetti.” He would be free to picket at his leisure from then on, no doubt. There were plenty of people of the working class there, but they had risen in the world and had become professional paid proletarians, recruits to the intelligentsia, dabbling in ideas as editors, lawyers, agitators, writers who dressed and behaved and looked quite a lot like the bourgeoisie they were out to annihilate. What a vocabulary–proletarian, intelligentsia, bourgeoisie, dialectic–pure exotics transplanted from the never-never-land of the theoretically classless society which could not take root and finally withered on the stalk. Yet, they had three classes of their own and were drawing the lines shrewdly. During that time I went to a meeting of radicals of all kinds and shades, most of them workers, but not all by any means; and Michael Gold made a speech and kept repeating: “Stick to your class, damn it, stick to your class.” It struck me as being such good advice that I decided to take it and tiptoed out the way one leaves church before the end.

The Never-Ending Wrong
Katherine Anne Porter
The Atlantic Monthly
June 1977

Source illustrations:
1) détail mosaïque de Ben Shahn, Syracuse University
2) affiche française, 1924
3) dernière déclaration de Vanzetti, Ben Shahn

traduction française: Si cette chose n’était pas arrivée, j’aurais passé toute ma vie à parler au coin des rues à des hommes méprisants. J’aurais pu mourir inconnu, ignoré : un raté. Ceci est notre carrière et notre triomphe. Jamais, dans toute notre vie, nous n’aurions pu espérer faire pour la tolérance, pour la justice, pour la compréhension mutuelle des hommes, ce que nous faisons aujourd’hui par hasard. Nos paroles, nos vies, nos souffrances ne sont rien. Mais qu’on nous prenne nos vies, vies d’un bon cordonnier et d’un pauvre cœur de poisson, c’est cela qui est tout ! Ce dernier moment est le nôtre. Cette agonie est notre triomphe. (réponse de Vanzetti au juge Thayer le 9 avril 1927)

Idiots utiles: Epouser toutes les mauvaises causes de sa génération sans en manquer aucune (Gunther Grass as the ultimate useful idiot)

Justes paroles encore que celles de Guy Sorman dans Le Figaro d’hier sur toutes ces “consciences nationales” qui, comme Gunter Grass, auront chacun à leur tour, en leur temps et à leur niveau, “épousé toutes les mauvaises causes de sa génération sans en manquer aucune” …A l’instar de notre Sartre national qui, fidèle compagnon de route et emporté par sa fièvre anti-américaine, “oublia, pendant toute la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, de protester contre le nazisme et l’antisémitisme”.

Et avec qui tant d’entre nous (ou de nos parents) préféraient se tromper et qui, tout en prétendant aussi subrépticement que fallacieusement que chaque Français avait comme lui plus ou moins été – au moins “en pensée – “résistant”), écrivait en septembre 44:

“Jamais nous n’avons été plus libres que sous l’occupation allemande” /…/ Et je ne parle pas ici de cette élite que furent les vrais Résistants, mais de tous les Français qui, à toute heure du jour et de la nuit, pendant quatre ans, ont dit non.”

Ou plus tard (en… 75 !):

“J’ai menti. Enfin ‘menti’ est un bien grand mot. J’ai dit des choses aimables sur l’URSS que je ne pensais pas. Je l’ai fait d’une part parce que j’estimais que, quand on vient d’être invité par des gens, on ne peut pas verser de la merde sur eux à peine rentré chez soi, et d’autre part parce que je ne savais pas bien où j’en étais par rapport à l’URSS et par rapport à mes propres idées. (…) Je ne savais pas qu’ils [les camps] existaient encore après la mort de Staline, ni surtout ce qu’était le Goulag.”

Heureusement qu’il y avait quelques Aron ou Camus:

Toute idée fausse finit dans le sang, mais il s’agit toujours du sang des autres. C’est ce qui explique que certains de nos philosophes se sentent à l’aise pour dire n’importe quoi.

Et juste parole aussi que cet avertissement de Sorman:

On ne se garde pas assez, en revanche, de l’artiste quand son talent le dissimule, surtout quand le talent est grand : des magiciens, grimés en moralistes, on ne se méfie jamais assez.

Que nous rappelions dans notre dernier billet à propos d’un des dessinateurs-fétiche des nouvelles générations d’anti-américains (pardon; d’ “anti-impérialistes”), le fameux… “boy from Brazil”, Carlos Latuff ! (Voir sa photo ci-dessus au côté de Leila Khaled, la passionaria – désormais recyclée dans le “pacifisme” – de… Black September!)

Dont le fait que, comme tout bon compagnon de route (ou “idiot utile”, si l’on préfère) et pas plus que Sartre lui-même, il ne porte littéralement de valises fait justement toute la séduction et… toute la valeur pour tous les “Kominterns” de l’histoire !

Cette apparence d’indépendance qui mine de rien sape l’esprit critique de générations et générations, leur faisant successivement militer puis espionner (à la Rosenberg et Fuchs – ce qui leur a quand même fait gagner 5 ans pour l’acquisition de la bombe, sans parler du radar et des technologies dérivées) pour les totalitaires, avant d’avaler tout rond le pacte Ribbentrop puis refuser de “mourir pour Dantzig” ….

Avant de proférer des imbécillités du style “better red than dead” … Pour finir aujourd’hui par soutenir (au moins objectivement) des Saddam et proférer d’autres nouvelles imbécillités du style “Bush = Sharon = Hitler ou, pire encore, gueuler ou laisser gueuler des… “mort au Juifs” dans les mêmes manifs pour… “la paix” !

Mais bon, comme le rappelle Sorman, il y en aura toujours qui refuseront “d’avoir raison avec Aron” …

Extraits:

tout au long de sa phénoménale carrière publique, il n’aura cessé d’adopter des postures consternantes. «Homme de gauche», absolument de gauche, il aura épousé toutes les mauvaises causes de sa génération sans en manquer aucune, aura approuvé toutes les révolutions sanguinaires, de Cuba à la Chine. Toujours disposé à accabler ces fascistes d’Américains, Ronald Reagan et, bien sûr, George W. Bush (c’est sans risque), l’a-t-on en revanche entendu, ne serait-ce qu’un peu, dénoncer le fascisme de Mao Zedong ? Ou celui des islamistes ?

comment s’interdire de songer à cette génération entière d’intellectuels et d’artistes en Europe, en France surtout, autoproclamée de gauche – au point que le mot ne fait plus sens –, qui n’ont cessé d’adopter des postures morales tout en illustrant des causes absolument immorales ? Comment ne pas voir surgir des spectres : ceux qui hier, ont aimé Staline et Mao et, bientôt, vont pleurer Castro ? Ceux qui n’ont rien vu à Moscou, Pékin, La Havane, Téhéran, Sarajevo, et Billancourt ? Ceux qui, maintenant, devinent dans l’islamisme une rédemption de l’0ccident ? Cette grande armée des spectres, de l’erreur absolue, dieu merci, elle n’a jamais cessé de se tromper d’avenir.

par-delà ce cas singulier, on ne se méfie pas assez du grand écrivain et de la star dès qu’ils abusent de leur séduction pour propager des opinions politiques, seulement politiques, mais déguisées autrement. (…) On se garde de l’homme politique, l’élu démocratique, beaucoup trop puisqu’il avance à découvert. On ne se garde pas assez, en revanche, de l’artiste quand son talent le dissimule, surtout quand le talent est grand : des magiciens, grimés en moralistes, on ne se méfie jamais assez.

Plus fort que Serguei: Le meilleur caricaturiste antisémite est… brésilien! (Carlos Latuff: The new boy from Brazil)

Les Vietnamiens se battent pour tous les hommes, et les forces américaines contre tous. Sartre

L’islam est aujourd’hui la foi des opprimés comme le communisme l’était hier. Robert Redeker

A l’heure où les Iraniens s’apprêtent à annoncer le lauréat de leur concours de la meilleure caricature antisémite, quelqu’un devrait peut-être les avertir que celui-ci est connu depuis belle lurette et qu’il a déjà une abondante oeuvre derrière lui.

On aura bien sûr reconnu, bien plus fort que Serguei ou Plantu, le célèbre dessinateur brésilien Carlos Latuff, coqueluche des sites palestiniens et anti-américains occidentaux (dits “Indymedia”).

Infatigable compagnon de route du nazislamisme, il est, comme au bon vieux temps de l’agitprop du Komintern et de ses légendaires “Appels” ou “Conférences pour la Paix” (appelée aussi en interne: “défaitisme révolutionnaire”), passé maitre dans l’art du détournement et du retournement de toutes les images (camps nazis, ghetto de Varsovie, apartheid, esclavage, racisme, guerre du Vietnam, etc. – ne dédaignant pas à l’occasion les bons vieux stéréotypes médiévaux du juif dévoreur d’enfants ou détournant à son profit le fameux faux tsariste des “Protocoles des sages de Sion”!).

Et notamment dans l’inversion systématique du rapport oppresseur-opprimé, tout se ramenant dans ses dessins à l’équation de base juifs = nazis ou Américains = nazis (les deux apparaissant interchangeables, notamment via le thème commun du lien supposé guerre-affairisme et ses symboles habituels Mc Donald’s et Coca Cola) et les Palestiniens reprenant tout aussi systématiquement la place de victimes.

D’où, en plus d’un réel talent graphique et artistique, une redoutable efficacité idéologique (on peut difficilement faire plus “simple” ou plutôt plus “simpliste”) et une instante lisibilité qui ne sont pas pour rien dans son succès dans les divers milieux anti-américians (pardon: “anti-impérialistes”) et antijuifs (repardon: “antisionistes”) de la planète.

Voir aussi:

Carlos Latuff
Wikipedia

Carlos Latuff is a political cartoonist, born in November 30, 1968, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

He is the author of the famous “We are all Palestinians” series, depicting oppressed people of the world over history (Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, Blacks in South Africa and so on), and comparing them to Palestinians. Latuff’s works have been published on different Indymedia websites and on the Gush Shalom website, as well.

A Swiss-based Jewish organization “Aktion Kinder des Holocaust” sued him in 2002 with anti-Semitism allegations. The subject was the last cartoon of “We are all Palestinians” series (published in Switzerland Indymedia), depicting a Jewish boy in Warsaw Ghetto saying: “I am Palestinian.”
Criminal proceedings which AKdH had instituted against Indymedia and the Brazilian cartoonist were suspended by Swiss court. In the official judgement, it is said:
Even if the observer is emotionally biased against the Jewish people with this [cartoon], it is not the Jewish people as such that is being criticized, but their political behaviour towards the Palestinians. The issue is not a certain characterization of the Jews, but their stance in the current conflict. The constitutional equality of the Jews as human beings is thereby not denied. (p.2, paragraph 1.2.) In February 2006, Latuff had one of his artworks published in an Iranian Web site for cartoonists, “Iran Cartoon”, which launched a contest for cartoons about the Holocaust, in response to a series of caricatures about the Prophet Mohammed. Latuff’s cartoon depicts an old man wearing a Nazi-era concentration camp uniform, with the Israeli “Separation Wall” and guard tower in the background. On his chest is a red Muslim crescent with a letter “P” for Palestinian:

Voir aussi la très complète collection du site de l’historien antisioniste américain  Norman Finkelstein.

Terrorisme: It’s the religion, stupid! (Proliferation is also an issue of theology)

Alors que l’échéance, à la fois politique (réponse de l’Iran au Conseil de sécurité sur la question nucléaire) et religieuse (Coran 17:1) du 22 août approche …

Et suite à la toute récente première démonstration, par ses supplétifs du Hezbollah interposés, de la détermination iranienne au Sud-Liban …

Petit retour sur une intéressante explication de texte, par l’islamologue américain Hillel Fradkin, de la fameuse “lettre de toutes les ruses” qu’avait envoyée Ahmadinejad au président américain en mai dernier :

Extraits:

Ahmadinejad did decide to approach the world, Muslim and non-Muslim, theologically–to insist that nuclear proliferation is not only an issue of policy but also of theology, indeed of the most fundamental and important issues of theology. He defends the right not only of Iran to nuclear technology but also of all Muslim countries as Muslim. Indeed they have not only a right but a duty to pursue such technology. The issue must be understood in the light of the most fundamental and important conflict in the world today as Ahmadinejad sees it–a fundamental conflict between Islam and its rivals, most immediately liberal democracy as embodied in the United States, but also Christianity.

Ahmadinejad’s emphasis on Christian hypocrisy, which may in this context mean two things: violations by self-professed Christians of the standards and teachings of historic Christianity, or the violation by historic Christianity of the true teachings of the Prophet Jesus. The latter is a traditional Islamic view of the defect and even crime of historic Christians. In calling upon Bush, as Ahmadinejad does emphatically, to embrace the “teachings of the prophets,” he is calling upon him not only to abandon liberal democracy but Christianity as well–to embrace Islam, to which all the world must ultimately submit, and which is gathering momentum in our time.

Ahmadinejad has presented himself as the herald or “prophet” of the Hidden Imam–the ultimate, if absent, ruler and authority for so-called Twelver Shiism–and has gone so far as to claim that he had a vision of the Imam, at the U.N. of all places. (…) At least one ayatollah is reported to have declared in recent days that Ahmadinejad’s letter was the “hand of God.”

what is known, or what should be known and deeply grasped, is that everything Ahmadinejad–and for that matter the radical movement as a whole–does is guided by an ideological vision and commitment. It needs to be addressed as such.

It is necessary to inform Ahmadinejad and his radical allies that they are in for a real fight. This may not suffice to lead them to question their fundamental assumption and inspiration that we are on the run. But it may give pause to the many Muslims and non-Muslims standing on the sidelines, who see radical success and do not see American or Western resolve.

we have within living memory experience of revolutionary leaders who faced apparently great odds in coming to personal power and great odds in taking on the powers of the world and nevertheless achieved both.

Reading Ahmadinejad in Washington
The Iranian president’s letter needs to be taken seriously.
by Hillel Fradkin
05/29/2006

WILL THE UNITED STATES declare war on the Islamic Republic of Iran? For months, this question has been the theme of diplomatic and public discourse–with horror usually expressed at the idea. But it now seems that we have this backwards. For the import of the letter that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, sent to President Bush in the first week of May is that Ahmadinejad and Iran have declared war on the United States. Many reasons are given, but the most fundamental is that the United States is a liberal democracy, the most powerful in the world and the leader of all the others. Liberal democracy, the letter says, is an affront to God, and as such its days are numbered. It would be best if President Bush and others realized this and abandoned it. But at all events, Iran will help where possible to hasten its end. (The full text of the letter, translated into English from the original Persian, can be found at www.cfr.org/content/publications/attachments/Ahmadinejad%20letter.pdf.)

Neither the Bush administration nor its many critics appear to appreciate the significance, ideological and practical, of the letter. Nor do they appear to appreciate the remarkable boldness of Ahmadinejad personally. For the formal characteristics of the letter as well as its substance have ancient and modern analogs–letters of Muhammad to the Byzantine, Persian, and Ethiopian emperors of his day warning them to accept Islam and his rule or suffer the consequences, and a letter from Khomeini to Mikhail Gorbachev along similar lines. Thus, Ahmadinejad presents himself as the true heir of Muhammad and Khomeini and may even be suggesting that he is a founder himself. At the least, he presents himself as the spokesman and leader of Islam and the Muslim world in its entirety, transcending the Shiite/Sunni divide. Both this boldness and this claim are consistent with the whole series of pronouncements and actions Ahmadinejad has taken in the brief period since he was elected last summer. But the letter, in its form and substance, raises this to a new and much higher level of clarity and power as well as menace.

The Bush administration and its critics have ignored all this. They have chosen to view the letter within a narrower prism–the question of negotiations or rather non-negotiations over Iran’s enrichment of uranium. For the administration, the letter contained “nothing new” in this regard. For Bush’s critics, it was an “opening,” one that could best be exploited if the United States were to drop its resistance to direct participation in negotiations with Tehran.

This reaction is not entirely surprising. Ahmadinejad’s letter does have a bearing on the struggle over Iran’s pursuit of enriched uranium. Its long catalog of alleged U.S. crimes against Muslim interests and states specifically, and against Africa, Latin America, and the poorer parts of the world more generally, mimics the standard litany of anti-American complaints. It is intended to further undermine support for the United States and weaken its position in the confrontation over Iran’s nuclear program. In this it may have some success. But for these purposes, it need not have presented its critique in a religious and ideological mode, up to and including the charge that Bush is a hypocrite in his claim to be “a follower of Jesus Christ.” That is, Ahmadinejad could have done without the theological “meanderings” about which both the administration and its critics complained. Indeed, for these purposes it would have been better if he had. Bush’s critics–including most recently Russia’s Vladimir Putin–like to charge him with hypocrisy, but they are by and large not concerned with Christian standards. And above all, the attack on liberal democracy could not be assumed to appeal to secular critics.

Yet Ahmadinejad did decide to approach the world, Muslim and non-Muslim, theologically–to insist that nuclear proliferation is not only an issue of policy but also of theology, indeed of the most fundamental and important issues of theology. He defends the right not only of Iran to nuclear technology but also of all Muslim countries as Muslim. Indeed they have not only a right but a duty to pursue such technology. The issue must be understood in the light of the most fundamental and important conflict in the world today as Ahmadinejad sees it–a fundamental conflict between Islam and its rivals, most immediately liberal democracy as embodied in the United States, but also Christianity.

All of this can be seen partially but still somewhat dimly in Ahmadinejad’s emphasis on Christian hypocrisy, which may in this context mean two things: violations by self-professed Christians of the standards and teachings of historic Christianity, or the violation by historic Christianity of the true teachings of the Prophet Jesus. The latter is a traditional Islamic view of the defect and even crime of historic Christians. In calling upon Bush, as Ahmadinejad does emphatically, to embrace the “teachings of the prophets,” he is calling upon him not only to abandon liberal democracy but Christianity as well–to embrace Islam, to which all the world must ultimately submit, and which is gathering momentum in our time.

THIS IS THE WAY THE LETTER will be understood and received by many Muslims, both inside and outside Iran. Far from being simply meandering, the letter manages to interweave appeals to two different audiences, the non-Muslim and largely secular world and the Muslim world. Its objective–to prosecute the war on behalf of Islam–unites the two. To that end, it aims to divide and weaken Islam’s adversary–the non-Muslim world–and to rally the Muslim world behind Ahmadinejad. In both respects it seems so far to be succeeding. Ahmadinejad followed the publication of the letter with a visit to Indonesia, the largest and most moderate of all Muslim countries and also very far removed from Iran’s usual sphere of concerns. Iran invested heavily in ensuring that he received a warm and even triumphal reception there. Ahmadinejad seems to have received praise from Indonesian officials and the leaders of other Muslim countries in the region, as well as from clerical figures, including the head of Indonesia’s Islamic State University, generally regarded as a leader of moderate Islam. Ahmadinejad has not only declared war but has taken an interim victory lap.

But, it may be asked, So what? So what if Ahmadinejad has declared that Islam is in fundamental, even mortal, conflict with the rest of the world? Formally that has always been the position of the Iranian Revolution. So what if he declares that Iran and the Muslim world are now on the march and have seized the initiative? The power of Iran may be measured in concrete ways and is, for now, limited and may remain so if we can only reach agreement on halting uranium enrichment. Are Ahmadinejad and Iran not further limited by his disability that he is a Shiite in a Muslim world that is overwhelmingly Sunni? And so what if Ahmadinejad implicitly lays claim to the mantle of Khomeini? Will he not ultimately be constrained by the very regime Khomeini established and built, in which he is presently subordinate to others–the regnant ayatollahs, including Khamenei the Supreme Guide–with a greater claim on authority? Will not the latter constrain him, if only out of self-interest and their own ambition to rule?

So what, in short, if Ahmadinejad wants to see the world in theological terms and to believe Islam is on the march and he is at its head? So what if he sees fit to burden us with these theological musings? The world, when all is said and done, is something else, and his views are out of touch with its reality and even, may it be said, delusional.

These objections would be more persuasive if we could forget that we have within living memory experience of revolutionary leaders–for that is what Ahmadinejad emphatically is–who faced apparently great odds in coming to personal power and great odds in taking on the powers of the world and nevertheless achieved both. Such people come up with practical if brutal solutions to their apparent disabilities. For us, who are ever so prudent and cautious, it would be safer to entertain the possibility that Ahmadinejad is a man who may also find solutions to the obstacles in his way, a man who finds great opportunities to be exploited and has the cunning and the will to do so.

Indeed, there is substantial evidence that he has already begun. Although subordinate to higher authority in the Iranian regime, he came to office in that regime at a time when its morale was low. He has managed to revive its spirit, especially among the cadres, like the militia, on whom it depends. It is a serious question whether his superiors–who ever since the rise of the reform movement in 1997 have been preoccupied by fear of collapse–do not need him as much as he needs them.

It is true that Ahmadinejad presently occupies a subordinate office, a deficiency reinforced by the fact that he is not a jurist, let alone an ayatollah, and thus lacks the credentials for supreme rule as defined by the principle of the regime–”the rule of the jurisprudent.”

But he may be in the process of addressing that difficulty by enlisting a source of authority–the Hidden Imam–consistent with and even superior to that principle. Ahmadinejad has presented himself as the herald or “prophet” of the Hidden Imam–the ultimate, if absent, ruler and authority for so-called Twelver Shiism–and has gone so far as to claim that he had a vision of the Imam, at the U.N. of all places.

It remains to be seen what further use Ahmadinejad may make of this status and the kind of authority it may convey and with what success. It would amount to a further radicalization of Khomeini’s original radical break with the tradition of Twelver Shiism, which opposed and still opposes the political engagement of clerics. Formally it is constrained by the regime Khomeini founded, but emotionally it is a plausible extension. At least one ayatollah is reported to have declared in recent days that Ahmadinejad’s letter was the “hand of God.”

AT ALL EVENTS, there is little evidence that his ostensible superiors are inclined to restrain him. Ayatollah Khamenei gave a talk prior to the letter that endorsed Ahmadinejad’s policies without reservation. Moreover, Ahmadinejad’s supporters in the Basij militia and other “revolutionary” institutions have announced and begun to implement a purge of “opponents of the revolution” in key places, including the universities. In the presently unforeseeable event that his superiors tried to force a showdown, it is not clear who would have more “troops.”

Outside Iran, Ahmadinejad encounters a world of opportunities. The non-Muslim countries are very much divided over Iran’s ambitions, acting either hesitantly or at cross purposes. Even his main adversary, the United States, seems divided and uncertain.

The Muslim world, for its part, is rich with the opportunities created by great longing, great resentment, and great anger. Those longings (for a more glorious role for Islam) and those resentments (over the fallen estate of Islam) have been brewing for a long time. For those in the Muslim world moved by these sentiments, the attacks of September 11, 2001, offered the satisfaction of a victory and produced admiration for Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.

But Osama also promised further victories, that this was the beginning, not the end, of the new Islamic jihad. And in this he has not been successful, presumably because of the vigor of American and allied attacks on al Qaeda in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Even in Iraq, where al Qaeda under the direction of Abu Musab al Zarqawi keeps up the battle, it has not yet achieved its aim of driving American forces out and may not. Moreover, its engagement in Iraq has had liabilities for al Qaeda, which were the substance of al-Zawahiri’s letter of last summer. Al Qaeda as such may be in decline.

In these circumstances, Ahmadinejad has attempted to step into bin Laden’s place as the leader of the radical Islamic movement, as the man with the will and capacity to challenge and threaten the United States. Ahmadinejad has already enjoyed some success in parts of the Muslim world. This has been accompanied by the resurgence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and especially Palestine, where Hamas won control of the Palestinian Authority. This has permitted him to assert, as he does in his letter, that the forces of radical Islam–or, as he would have it, simply Islam–are on a roll. Ahmadinejad has bent every effort to support and join forces with Hamas and may well succeed. And, as always, he has Hezbollah in Lebanon at his disposal.

From all these developments, the radical movement has gained renewed confidence in the claim, first put forward by Osama bin Laden, that its adversaries, principally the United States, do not have the stomach for a long fight, or even a short one. Islam’s enemies can and will be pushed back and defeated by radical forces, because the latter, unlike their enemies, do not fear death and even welcome it. They can even, as Ahmadinejad recently said, accept the possibility of nuclear war as a necessity of the struggle. Altogether the spirits of the radical Islamic movement are high, and Ahmadinejad is the most powerful voice of that spirit.

This renewed ideological vigor and confidence present us with a host of difficulties in addition to the more material problem of the prospective Iranian bomb. It remains to be seen what we can and will do to keep the mullahs from obtaining nuclear bombs. Were we to be successful by diplomacy–unlikely–or by military action–ruled out of bounds by many–it would certainly affect the ideological struggle, as well as be a great good in itself. It would do so because it would be a defeat, and a significant one, for radical Islam. But given the temper of the man and the needs of the Iranian regime, it would not end ideological and other kinds of warfare.

For the moment all this is unknown. But what is known, or what should be known and deeply grasped, is that everything Ahmadinejad–and for that matter the radical movement as a whole–does is guided by an ideological vision and commitment. It needs to be addressed as such. For the moment and not only for the moment, this requires that liberal democrats declare that they have no intention of abandoning their way of life and see no need to do so, since they are fully prepared to defend it and because that way of life provides the resources–political, economic, and military–to defend itself.

It is necessary to inform Ahmadinejad and his radical allies that they are in for a real fight. This may not suffice to lead them to question their fundamental assumption and inspiration that we are on the run. But it may give pause to the many Muslims and non-Muslims standing on the sidelines, who see radical success and do not see American or Western resolve.

Of course the best person to make the first such declaration is President Bush–not as a Christian but as the world’s leading liberal democrat. And not to Ahmadinejad, for whom a direct reply would be a victory, but to the Iranian people, the Muslim world, and the non-Muslim world.

Hillel Fradkin is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and coeditor of Current Trends in Islamist Ideology.

Terrorisme: Sur la “divine victoire” du Hezbollah… (“Divine victory”, eh… ?)

Un autre regard sur ce que, 600 de ses meilleurs combattants (sur quelques milliers ?), 80% de ses missiles de moyenne et longue portée hors d’état de nuire et son chef terré dans les caves d’une ambassade iranienne après, nos médias persistent à appeler la… “divine victoire” du “Parti de Dieu”!

EDITO: Le Hezbollah a t-il vraiment gagné ? Le Hezbollah a subi de lourdes pertes et n’a pas gagné. «Politiquement et militairement, le Hezbollah ne peut désormais plus faire ce qu’il veut au Liban ».

Shimon Peres le numéro deux du gouvernement israélien, a estimé que «le Hezbollah ne finit pas en grand héros, mais la queue basse. A mon avis, nous avons fini en étant plus au moins vainqueurs sur le plan politique et militaire. Nous avons commencé lentement et nous sommes à plein rendement, alors que le Hezbollah a débuté très fort et maintenant, ils sont relativement épuisés».

Dans Libération : “Les établissements du Hezbollah gisent à terre. Le faubourg de Haret Hreik évoque un volcan après une éruption. Une poussière grise recouvre un paysage dévasté d’où s’élèvent, un peu partout, des fumerolles. Pas une rue sans son champ de ruines.”

Le Hezbollah a t-il vraiment gagné ?
aou14
Par Laurent Tissot

Au-delà d’une propagande médiatique bien orchestrée par le Hezbollah et omniprésente dans les médias internationaux, nombre d’éléments mènent à analyser une forte déconvenue pour la milice chiite.

Les “victoires du Hezbollah” sont très souvent sur le front médiatique. Des techniques de propagande efficaces ont donné l’impression que cette milice avait remporté un succès foudroyant… surtout auprès des masses arabes.

En réalité la milice a bien perdu.

Le Hezbollah est à présent condamné par les Nations Unies et défait partiellement sur les plans humains, territoriaux, militaires et financiers.

Ainsi, Paris Match nous décrit l’avenir désolant du chef du Hezbollah : “L’immeuble qui abrite le domicile de Hassan Nasrallah et celui du QG du parti de Dieu sont pulvérisés. Al-Manar, la télévision du hezbollah, subit le même sort. Traqué comme Saddam Hussein en 2003 à Bagdad par les avions américains, Hassan Nasrallah se terre pour échapper aux chasseurs israéliens”.

Les rapports israéliens nous rassurent sur ce qu’il reste de l’arsenal du hezbollah et sur sa capacité à infliger des dégats : le ministre israélien de l’Intérieur Roni Bar-On, “Le potentiel du Hezbollah en termes de roquettes de longue portée a été réduit pratiquement à zéro”.

“Nous avons un avantage diplomatique car le Hezbollah est désormais sous la loupe des instances internationales. Le cadre juridique international se resserre sur Hassan Nasrallah», le chef de la milice chiite, a déclaré M. Palmor (porte-parole) ”.
• Sur le plan humain, la milice chiite a perdu de très nombreux combattants. Initialement fort de quelques milliers de combattants, le Hezbollah a été “très fortement touché” selon Tsahal.
• Sur le plan international, la résolution 1701 des Nations Unies reconnaît clairement la responsabilité du Hezbollah à l’origine du conflit :

“The Security Council, expressing its utmost concern at the continuing escalation of hostilities in Lebanon and in Israel since Hezbollah’s attack on Israel on 12 July 2006, which has already caused hundreds of deaths and injuries on both sides”

Selon Ehud Olmert, “la situation stratégique à la frontière Nord d’Israël signe une victoire de fait pour Tsahal”, malgré une opinion publique israélienne reprochant à Ehud Olmert de s’être arrêté en chemin.

• Sur le plan territorial, le Hezbollah a perdu une grande partie de ses territoires et a été repoussé au-delà de la rivière Litanie.

Malgré 6 ans de préparations minutieuses depuis le retrait unilatéral israélien du Sud Liban, les réseaux de bunkers et les tapis de mines antipersonnelles et antichars n’ont finalement pas résisté à Tsahal.

Le Hezbollah perd, au moins pour le moment un “Etat dans l’Etat”.
• Sur le plan militaire, sur un arsenal original de plus de 12,000 missiles, l’essentiel a été utilisé contre Israël ou détruit par Tsahal.

Sur plus de 6000 missiles lancés par le hezbollah, seuls 3970 ont touché le sol israélien, dont 901 dans des secteurs urbains. Donc plus de 3000 missiles (>50%) ont atterris dans des secteurs isolés en campagne, et plus de 2000 (>30%) n’ont pas passé la frontière.
• Sur le plan financier, une grande partie du trésor de guerre du hezbollah a été brûlé par les intenses combats. L’ONU devra vérifier que les dons et oeuvres charitables de la communauté internationale ne soient pas partiellement détournés vers le Hezbollah.
• Quant à l’avenir de la branche politique du Hezbollah au Liban, seul l’avenir pourra nous dire ce qu’il adviendra. Les Chrétiens Libanais joueront certainement ici un rôle crucial.

On souligne en Israël que «le secrétaire général de l’ONU, Kofi Annan, est tenu de présenter dans les 30 jours des propositions concrètes pour appliquer la résolution 1559, jusqu’ici restée lettre morte, qui exige le désarmement du Hezbollah».

Le Figaro résume bien la situation du Hezbollah :

“Le Hezbollah est «sous la loupe» des instances internationales, ce qui confère à Israël «un avantage diplomatique», a affirmé un porte-parole du ministère israélien des Affaires étrangères, Yigal Palmor.

«Le cadre juridique international se resserre sur Hassan Nasrallah», le chef de la milice chiite, a-t-il déclaré. Selon lui, «la nature de Nasrallah et du Hezbollah n’a pas changé. Mais ils vont devoir respecter la résolution 1701» des Nations unies sur la cessation des hostilités.

«Israël respectera les termes de cette résolution», a assuré le porte-parole en notant que «politiquement et militairement, le Hezbollah ne peut désormais plus faire ce qu’il veut au Liban ».-

COMPLÉMENT:

Voir aussi le bilan présenté par le site, généralement bien informé, de la Mena:

Nasrallah n’a pas de quoi pavoiser. La meilleure preuve c’est qu’il doit lire ses communiqués de “victoire” terré dans l’anonymat d’un bunker… Son organisation, Le parti de Dieu, comptait 3500 hommes armés au moment où il a agressé la patrouille sur la frontière israélienne. Ces personnels se divisaient en trois groupes distincts : 750 soldats, 600 individus chargés exclusivement de lancer des roquettes et des missiles, 1200 miliciens armés sans capacité de combat et le reste en supplétifs et en hommes chargés de la coordination, de la communication, de l’administration et du commandement.

Selon Michaël Béhé, dont on se rappelle la précision des bilans qu’il avait donnés au faîte des combats, trois jours avant les autorités israéliennes et libanaises, il y aurait eu 1950 tués au Liban durant cette guerre sans nom. 350 victimes, au grand maximum, sont des civils qui n’avaient aucun lien avec les combats ; tous les autres faisaient partie du Hezbollah et des forces qui s’étaient jointes à lui. Sur les 750 combattants dignes de ce nom, entre 670 et 690 ont été soit éliminés par Tsahal, soit faits prisonniers. 350 lanceurs de projectiles islamistes sont également au nombre des victimes. De plus, il y aurait environ 800 blessés au sein des Fous de Dieu. Pas étonnant, au vu de ces chiffres, que les communiqués libanais ne comportent aucune mention des pertes intégristes…

sans compter les dégâts en matériel militaire. La ligne Maginot, construite à coups de centaines de millions de pétrodollars perses le long de la frontière israélienne, est aux mains de l’ennemi ou entièrement dynamitée. Le Hezb a perdu 28 missiles balistiques de type Zilzal (20 selon Tsahal), sur les 30 que les ayatollahs lui avaient livrés. Tous les servants de ces engins sont soit morts soit hors de combat.

Ce qui reste à l’organisation terroriste chiite ?

– Ses leaders politiques, qui ont, pour la plupart, échappé à la chasse qui leur a été donnée par le Mossad et le Khel Avir. Ceci dit, je ne connais pas de compagnie d’assurance qui se risquerait à assurer Nasrallah sur la vie.

– Environ 2000 Katiouchas, surtout celles de faible portée. Quelques centaines de roquettes plus lourdes et une quarantaine de Fager de moyenne portée. On considère, à la Ména, que le Hezbollah, en cas de reprise des hostilités, serait capable de faire encore usage de la moitié de ces armes.

Hormis ces maigres résultats, le Hezbollah a le mérite stratégique – c’est sans doute ce que son chef appelle une victoire stratégique – de continuer d’exister et de jouir du soutien de la majorité de la population chiite libanaise. Le Parti de Dieu n’a pas été rayé de la carte, comme le prophétisait Olmert, même s’il est devenu itinérant, après que toutes ses bases de commandement au Liban aient été pulvérisées. De plus, on ne distingue pas de forces armées présentes au Liban, qui possèderaient l’intention ou la capacité de compléter le désarmement de la milice intégriste. Ceci présente assurément le risque de la voir se réarmer à courte ou moyenne échéance.

Ca va pas à la tête (info # 011608/6)
Par Jean Tsadik

© Metula News Agency

Eric Hoffer: Ce qui adviendra d’Israël sera notre sort à tous (So will it go with all of us)

Au moment où l’infâme “machin” qui a pour nom “l’Organisation des Nations Unies” ou “Communauté internationale” vient à nouveau d’être utilisé pour empêcher Israël de protéger sa frontière nord, autrement dit son simple droit à l’existence, il faut relire ces paroles fortes d’Eric Hoffer d’il y a presque 40 ans (au lendemain d’une autre et énième tentative victorieuse de ce petit parmi les petits Etats pour continuer à exister) et qui auraient pu être écrites… hier!

Tout comme d’ailleurs les célèbres lignes du pasteur allemand Niemöller: D’abord, ils sont venus pour les juifs  …

D’autres nations victorieuses sur les champs de bataille dictent les conditions de la paix. Mais quand Israël est vainqueur il doit supplier pour obtenir la paix. Chacun attend des Juifs qu’ils soient les seuls vrais Chrétiens sur terre.

La situation particulière d’Israël
Eric Hoffer*
LA Times
26 mai 1968
Traduit par Norbert Lipszyc

*Les Juifs sont un peuple particulier : ce qui est permis à d’autres nations est interdit aux Juifs. D’autres nations expulsent des milliers, et même des millions de gens, et il n’y a pas de problème de réfugiés. La Russie l’a fait, la Pologne, la Tchécoslovaquie l’ont fait, la Turquie a expulsé un million de Grecs, et l’Algérie un million de Français. L’Indonésie a expulsé, Dieu sait combien de Chinois, et personne ne dit un mot au sujet des réfugiés. Mais dans le cas d’Israël, les Arabes déplacés sont devenus d’éternels réfugiés.

Tout le monde insiste sur le fait qu’Israël doit reprendre tout Arabe. Arnold Toynbee appelle ce déplacement des Arabes une atrocité plus grande que tout ce qu’ont commis les Nazis.

D’autres nations victorieuses sur les champs de bataille dictent les conditions de la paix. Mais quand Israël est vainqueur il doit supplier pour obtenir la paix. Chacun attend des Juifs qu’ils soient les seuls
vrais Chrétiens sur terre.

D’autres nations, quand elles sont vaincues, survivent et se rétablissent, mais si Israël était défait une seul fois il serait détruit. Si Nasser avait triomphé, en juin dernier, il aurait effacé Israël de la carte, et personne n’aurait levé le petit doigt pour sauver les Juifs. Aucun engagement pris envers les Juifs par quelque gouvernement que ce soit, dont le nôtre, ne vaut le papier sur lequel il est écrit.

Le monde entier s’indigne quand on meurt au Vietnam, ou quand deux noirs sont exécutés en Rhodésie. Mais quand Hitler massacra les Juifs, personne ne protesta auprès de lui.

Les Suédois, qui sont prêts à rompre leurs relations diplomatiques avec les Etats-Unis à cause de ce que nous faisons au Vietnam, ne bronchèrent pas quand Hitler massacrait les Juifs. Ils envoyèrent à Hitler du minerai de fer de première qualité, des roulements à bille, et assurèrent l’entretien de ses trains de troupes destinés à la Norvège. Les Juifs sont seuls au monde. Si Israël survit, ce sera uniquement grâce aux efforts des Juifs. Et aux ressources juives.

Pourtant, en ce moment même, Israël est notre seul allié inconditionnel et fiable. Nous pouvons compter sur Israël plus qu’Israël peut compter sur nous. Il suffit seulement d’imaginer ce qui se serait produit, l’été dernier, si les Arabes, avec leurs soutiens russes, avaient gagné la guerre, pour comprendre à quel point la survie d’Israël est vitale pour l’Amérique, pour l’Occident en général.

J’ai une prémonition qui ne me quittera pas : ce qui adviendra d’Israël sera notre sort à tous. Si Israël devait périr, l’holocauste fondrait sur nous.

Eric Hoffer

* Eric Hoffer était un Américain non-Juif, philosophe et sociologue. Il est né en 1902 et mort en 1983. Il a écrit 9 livres et reçu la Médaille Présidentielle de la Liberté. Son premier livre, /The True Believer/ – Le Vrai Croyant, publié en 1951, est considéré comme un classique.

Israel’s peculiar position
Eric Hoffer
LA Times
5/26/68

The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews.

Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people and there is no refugee problem. Russian did it, Poland and Czechoslovakia did it, Turkey threw out a million Greeks, and Algeria a million Frenchman. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese-and no one says a word about refugees. But in the case of Israel the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees.

Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab. Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis.

Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious it must sue for peace. Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world.

Other nations when they are defeated survive and recover but should Israel be defeated it would be destroyed. Had Nasser triumphed last June he would have wiped Israel off the map, and no one would have lifted a finger to save the Jews.

No commitment to the Jews by any government, including our own, is worth the paper it is written on. There is a cry of outrage all over the world when people die in Vietnam or when two Negroes are executed in Rhodesia. But when Hitler slaughtered Jews no one remonstrated with him.

The Swedes, who are ready to break of diplomatic relations with America because of what we do in Vietnam, did not let out a peep when Hitler was slaughtering Jews. They sent Hitler choice iron ore, and ball bearings, and serviced his troop trains to Norway. The Jews are alone in the world. If Israel survives, it will be solely because of Jewish efforts. And Jewish resources.

Yet at this moment Israel is our only reliable and unconditional ally. We can rely more on Israel than Israel can rely on us. And one has only to imagine what would have happened last summer had the Arabs and their Russian backers won the war to realize how vital the survival of Israel is to America and the West in general.

I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish the holocaust will be upon us.

Bilan de Chirac: Attention, un bourbier peut en cacher un autre (We’re liberators, not occupiers!)

On ne peut pas avoir d’un côté des soldats qui se battent et qui meurent, et de l’autre des troupes qui distribuent des sucettes à Kaboul. Général Richards

Helmand province is no place for defence forces that cannot go out at night without their mothers. Col Tim Collins

Attention: un coup de poignard peut en cacher un autre!

Au moment du bilan de notre roi-fainéant et actuel squatter et futur SDF de l’Elysée …

Et pour ceux qui nous bassinent encore avec la soi-disant grande clairvoyance du grand homme sur l’Irak, il faudrait peut-être rappeler l’autre bourbier (plus, comme nous le rappelions en novembre dernier, de pertes occidentales en proportion) où cette fois nos troupes étaient dès le départ soi-disant partantes.

Ou plus précisément, nos troupes fantômes puisque, avec le grand courage qu’on lui connaît et reconnaît, Notre Génie de Corrèze ne reconnaitra que quelque six mois plus tard et seulement suite à une indiscrétion de la presse et de sa ministre de la défense (on allait quand même pas provoquer les terroristes!), que la “Patrie (autoproclamée) des droits de l’homme” avait quelque 200 forces spéciales à la poursuite de Ben Laden.

Troupes qui viennent d’ailleurs d’être tout aussi discrètement, et suite à des pertes relativement importantes, retirées (pardon: “redéployées”!).

Quant aux troupes restantes (1100 pour l’Armée de Terre et quelque 200 pour l’Air et la Marine, dont il n’est pas question de mettre en doute la valeur et dont on imagine la frustration), elles se limitent pour l’instant, avec leurs homologues allemands (interdits de sortie après 18h ! – les Espagnols de Bambi se limitant à de la figuration: à peine 600 sur 35 000 et 30 pays) à la reconnaissance en vol ou au babysitting en ville …

Laissant ainsi à leurs “petits camarades” britanniques (qui viennent eux, avec la petite Norvège, de promettre des troupes de plus) ou canadiens… l’essentiel des pertes !

Mais n’allez pas chercher ça dans vos quotidiens hexagonaux, sinon bien cachés en fond de page ou entre deux entrefilets (qui, “la Corrèze avant le Zambèze” oblige, a entendu parler en France de nos troupes spéciales tombées au champ d’honneur afghan?), d’où l’obligation (désolé pour les non-anglophones) de se référer à la presse de langue anglaise …

Confirmation de l’OPA iranienne sur le terrorisme mondial (Iran-Terror Inc.)

Confirmation par un journal saoudien (et donc sunnite mais reprise par Iran-Resist), que le leader chiite de l’Axe du Mal ne ménage pas sa peine et ses ressources pour multiplier tous azimuts ses franchises terroristes …

Du Golfe persique à l’Afghanistan en passant bien sûr par l’Irak et le Liban, et d’Asie du sud à l’Amérique du sud, y compris avec l’installation de camps d’entrainement!

Sans parler de l’aide idéologique vers l’Amérique du nord et l’Europe.

Y compris apparemment (en plus des habituels Chomsky et Galloway)… notre propre Antoine Sfeir national !

Manque plus maintenant, pour compléter la panoplie, que la bombe !

Rendez-vous au… 22 août ?

Extraits:

“soutiens technique, logistique, informatique, diplomatique et parfois militaire aux populations chiites du Koweït, de Bahreïn, d’Arabie Saoudite” afin de les préparer à pouvoir prendre le pouvoir dans leur pays respectif”

“la seule aide aux organisations comme le Hezbollah, tant en personnel (formateurs) qu’en armes et équipement divers se chiffre au minimum à 1 milliard de dollars chaque année.”

“Les camps d’entraînement du Hezbollah sous contrôle iranien ou sous le nom du Hezbollah sont disséminés sur les quatre continents, dont l’Argentine, le Paraguay, la Colombie et probablement au Venezuela, en Asie Pacifique, l’Indonésie intéresse les mollahs. Il ne faut surtout pas oublier l’Afrique où les mollahs comptent de nombreux alliés parmi lesquels au premier rang se trouve l’Afrique du Sud, pays phare de ce continent et intermédiaire diplomatique dans de nombreux conflits
régionaux.”

“Mais, il y a aussi les Etats-Unis, où le régime compte des nombreux partisans débarqués dans ce pays avec des passeports iraniens et des titres de professeurs ou chercheurs. L’Europe compte aussi d’importants centres (d’études et de recherches) gérés par le Hezbollah et selon la presse allemande, le nombre des partisans du Hezbollah sera de 900 dans ce pays. L’ensemble des ces réseaux internationaux qui sont présent en Amérique Latine, dans les pays du Golfe Persique, aux Etats-Unis, en Europe ou en Asie Pacifique font état d’une éclatante santé idéologique.”

“Dans ces conditions, nous songeons au dernier article d’Antoine Sfeir dans le Figaro. Sfeir qui est un des agents du lobby des mollahs en France et se rend souvent en Iran écrit naïvement : L’Iran possèdera tôt ou tard l’arme nucléaire. La véritable question est de savoir s’il l’aura avec nous ou contre nous ?”

Terrorisme: Le seul parti politique au monde à disposer de… 12 000 missiles! (The world’s only political party with… 12,000 missiles!)

Le placement cynique, par les Serbes, d’armes et de véhicules dans des habitations et des bâtiments civils, la présence de véhicules militaires dans des convois civils et, parfois, le recours à des boucliers humains, a compliqué les frappes aériennes. Les Serbes ont ainsi pu exploiter le souci qu’avait l’OTAN d’éviter de faire des victimes civiles.

Crise au Kosovo, OTAN, octobre 2000 (un an après une campagne de bombardements qui, on s’en souvient, avait fait plus de 500 victimes civiles)

Au moment où nos médias et dirigeants n’en peuvent plus de s’extasier devant le prétendu savoir-faire politique du Hezbollah, voici une petite et éfifiante sélection d’images sur… le seul parti politique au monde à posséder 12 000 missiles !

Mais n’allez pas chercher ces photos dans vos médias, à l’exception peut-être du journal australien Herald Sun qui a pris la peine de montrer en plus les vraies conditions d’utilisation de ces missiles, à savoir en pleine ville et au beau milieu de ces fameux civils dont les unes de nos journaux sont pleines.

Photos that damn Hezbollah

Chris Link

July 30, 2006
Sunday Herald Sun

THIS is the picture that damns Hezbollah. It is one of several, smuggled from behind Lebanon’s battle lines, showing that Hezbollah is waging war amid suburbia.

The images, obtained exclusively by the Sunday Herald Sun, show Hezbollah using high-density residential areas as launch pads for rockets and heavy-calibre weapons.

Dressed in civilian clothing so they can quickly disappear, the militants carrying automatic assault rifles and ride in on trucks mounted with cannon.

The photographs, from the Christian area of Wadi Chahrour in the east of Beirut, were taken by a visiting journalist and smuggled out by a friend.

They emerged as:

US President George Bush called for an
international force to be sent to Lebanon.

ISRAEL called up another 30,000 reserve troops.

THE UN’s humanitarian chief Jan Egeland called for a three-day truce to evacuate civilians and transport food and water into cut-off areas.

US SECRETARY of State Condoleezza Rice returned to the Middle East to push a UN resolution aimed at ending the 18-day war, and:

A PALESTINIAN militant group said it had kidnapped, killed and burned an Israeli settler in the West Bank.

The images include one of a group of men and youths preparing to fire an anti-aircraft gun metres from an apartment block with sheets hanging out on a balcony to dry.

Others show a militant with AK47 rifle guarding no-go zones after Israeli blitzes.

Another depicts the remnants of a Hezbollah Katyusha rocket in the middle of a residential block blown up in an Israeli air attack.

The Melbourne man who smuggled the shots out of Beirut and did not wish to be named said he was less than 400m from the block when it was obliterated.

“Hezbollah came in to launch their rockets, then within minutes the area was blasted by Israeli jets,” he said.

“Until the Hezbollah fighters arrived, it had not been touched by the Israelis. Then it was totally devastated.

“It was carnage. Two innocent people died in that incident, but it was so lucky it was not more.”

The release of the images comes as Hezbollah faces criticism for allegedly using innocent civilians as “human shields”.

Mr Egeland blasted Hezbollah as “cowards” for operating among civilians.

“When I was in Lebanon, in the Hezbollah heartland, I said Hezbollah must stop this cowardly blending in among women and children,” he said.

Voir aussi:

One photograph depicts a fighter with an AK-47 rifle guarding “no-go” zones after an Israeli attack, and another with a group of men and youths preparing to fire an anti-aircraft gun in an apartment block, with sheets hanging out to dry on a balcony. Another shows the remnants of a Hezbollah Katyusha rocket in the middle of a residential block destroyed in an Israeli airstrike. An Australian was standing just down the street when the block was obliterated. “Hezbollah came in to launch their rockets, then within minutes the area was blasted by Israeli jets,” he said. “Until the Hezbollah fighters arrived, it had not been touched by the Israelis. Then, it was totally devastated…It was carnage. Two innocent people died in that incident, but it was so lucky it was not more.”

Hezbollah’s human shields
The Washington Times
July 31, 2006

Israel is being vilified by opportunistic politicians and the international media over the air strike that killed 56 persons early yesterday in the Lebanese village of Qana. In the rush to blame Israel, a number of relevant facts are ignored: 1) the sad fact of the matter is that, no matter how much is done to minimize the risk to civilians, civilians inevitably die in wars; 2) Israel has placed its soldiers at risk in order to minimize civilian casualties in Lebanon, while Hezbollah, in flagrant violation of international law, including the Geneva Conventions, deliberately behaves in ways to maximize harm to Israeli and Lebanese civilians; 3) in Qana there were indisputable military targets, including locations from which Hezbollah has been firing rockets into Israel; 4) pending the outcome of an investigation, there is no way to tell whether all of those killed in the airstrike were “civilians,” as Israel’s critics confidently tell us, or whether the dead were actually a mix of combatants and noncombatants.
Senior Israeli officials said yesterday that Hezbollah rocket launchers were concealed in civilian buildings in the village, from which 150 rockets were fired over the past 20 days. They showed reporters video footage of rocket launchers being driven into Qana, from whence rockets were fired at northern Israeli towns, including Kiryat Shemona, Afula and Ma’alot. Israel targeted the building hit early yesterday because intelligence reports indicated that Hezbollah operatives were inside, along with Katyusha rockets and launchers. Typically Hezbollah fighters fire rockets at Israeli targets and then dart into nearby buildings.
Indeed, as it has repeatedly done in the course of the 19-day-old military campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Israel Defense Forces have relinquished the element of surprise by dropping leaflets on Qana and many other Lebanese towns telling residents that they should leave the area because the IDF is preparing to conduct military operations against Hezbollah. Just as Israel tries to move Lebanese civilians out of the line of fire, Hezbollah does its best to put them in danger and peril. In a dispatch published yesterday in Australia, the Sydney Sunday Herald Sun demonstrates just how Hezbollah wages war.
The photographs, from a Christian area of eastern Beirut called Wadi Chahrour, were smuggled out of Lebanon. One photograph depicts a fighter with an AK-47 rifle guarding “no-go” zones after an Israeli attack, and another with a group of men and youths preparing to fire an anti-aircraft gun in an apartment block, with sheets hanging out to dry on a balcony. Another shows the remnants of a Hezbollah Katyusha rocket in the middle of a residential block destroyed in an Israeli airstrike. An Australian was standing just down the street when the block was obliterated. “Hezbollah came in to launch their rockets, then within minutes the area was blasted by Israeli jets,” he said. “Until the Hezbollah fighters arrived, it had not been touched by the Israelis. Then, it was totally devastated…It was carnage. Two innocent people died in that incident, but it was so lucky it was not more.” (The pictures are posted online at www.news.com.au/heraldsun.)
Hezbollah’s treatment of both Israeli and Lebanese civilians violates international law. Article 51 of the Additional Protocol to the Geneva Convention states that: “The civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians, shall not be the subject of attack.” Moreover, by using Lebanese civilians as human shields, Hezbollah appears to be violating Article 58 of Protocol 1, which requires parties to a conflict to “Avoid locating military objectives within or near densely populated areas.” Article 28 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states: “The presence of a protected person may not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations.”
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan falsely accuses Israel of deliberately attacking members of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), even as Hezbollah repeatedly targets U.N. peacekeepers. Last Monday, an Internet site called Little Green Footballs notes that the United Nations issued a press release reporting that an unarmed U.N. observer was critically wounded by small arms fire originating from a position controlled by Hezbollah. He was airlifted to an Israeli hospital for treatment. The following day, Hezbollah opened fire on a U.N. convoy, forcing it to turn back. On Friday, U.N. forces issued a press release reporting that “Hezbollah fired from the vicinity of five U.N. positions” in southern Lebanon, and that the number of troops in a Ghanaian battalion of the U.N. is “somewhat reduced” due to Hezbollah firing from near the U.N. positions, which provokes retaliatory shelling from the Israeli side.
In sum, Hezbollah — along with its enablers in Tehran and Damascus — bears full responsibility for the carnage in both Israel and Lebanon.

“showing that Hezbollah is waging war amid suburbia. The images…show Hezbollah using high-density residential areas as launch pads for rockets and heavy-calibre weapons. Dressed in civilian clothing so they can quickly disappear, the militants carrying automatic assault rifles and ride in on trucks mounted with cannon.”

Voir également:

http://www.honestreporting.com/articles/45884734/critiques/Qana_In_Context.asp

http://extremecentre.org/wp-content/uploads/2006/08/lebanon.swf

Voir enfin :

Israel Under Fire
Honest reporting
July 16, 2006

A look at some of the myths and facts following Hezbollah’s attack on Israel.

Israeli military operations in Lebanon are taking place in response to an unprovoked border attack which left 8 Israeli soldiers dead and two kidnapped by the Hezbollah. Since then many more Israelis have been wounded and killed by over 700 Katyusha missiles and mortars that have rained down on Israel’s northern cities, including as far south as Haifa and Tiberias. Israel is exercising her legitimate right to self-defense.

Please stand up for Israel at this extremely difficult time and support our efforts to promote balance in the media, particularly as the volume of media coverage expands so dramatically.

MYTHS AND FACTS SURROUNDING THE CRISIS

Myth – “Israel’s response is disproportionate.”

Fact – The definition of a “disproportionate” response is a subjective one. The question that could be asked of any other country in the world is simply: “What would you do in the same situation?” When protecting its citizens, exercising the right to self-defense and responding to missile attacks over a recognized border, most countries would respond in a similar manner. After all, how many Israelis need to die before the world believes that Israeli responses are proportionate?

Any civilian casualties in a conflict are, of course, tragic and regrettable. Civilians on both sides are suffering. However, Israeli air strikes on Lebanon are not intended to kill civilians, unlike the hundreds of Hezbollah missiles that are targeted specifically at Israeli civilians who have been forced into bomb shelters for their own safety. Israel has even dropped leaflets on Beirut suburbs calling on civilians to stay away from Hezbollah strongholds to avoid being caught up in the fighting.

Israel has also been criticized for targeting Lebanese infrastructure such as the Beirut airport. However, it is also interesting to note what has not been targeted. For example, while the airport runway was bombed, other vital installations such as the control tower were left untouched and Lebanese civilian airliners were allowed to fly to safety. Transport hubs and bridges have been targeted in order to prevent Hezbollah moving the kidnapped Israeli soldiers deeper into Lebanon and possibly even as far as Iran, as well as to prevent the terrorist organization being re-supplied with arms from Iran and elsewhere.

Many of Hezbollah’s facilities and missile launch sites are located near residential areas, such as the suburbs of southern Beirut. Terrorists hide within the civilian population and use this population as a shield. Israel’s priority is to strike at the Hezbollah terrorist infrastructure that has been allowed to develop in Lebanon.

Israel has, so far, avoided initiating a major ground offensive into Lebanese territory and has barely used a fraction of the firepower available to the IDF.

Myth – “Lebanon bears no responsibility for the actions of Hezbollah.”

Fact – UN Security Council Resolution 1559 of September 2004, which referred back to Resolution 425, called “upon all remaining foreign forces to withdraw from Lebanon”; “for the disbanding and disarmament of all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias”; and supported “the extension of the control of the Government of Lebanon over all Lebanese territory”.

Syria eventually complied with 1559 and removed its occupying forces. However, the Lebanese government has not disarmed Hezbollah nor has it sent its armed forces to secure southern Lebanon and the border with Israel.

In addition, Hezbollah is actually part of the Lebanese government, which contains two Hezbollah members in the Cabinet. The Lebanese government, therefore, cannot abstain from responsibility for the actions of a part of its own leadership.

Myth – “Hezbollah is an indigenous Lebanese ‘resistance’ organization.”

Fact – According to the Council on Foreign Relations, the Hezbollah:

is a Lebanese umbrella organization of radical Islamic Shiite groups and organizations. It opposes the West, seeks to create a Muslim fundamentalist state modeled on Iran, and is a bitter foe of Israel. Hezbollah, whose name means “party of God,” is a terrorist group believed responsible for nearly 200 attacks since 1982 that have killed more than 800 people.

Hezbollah and its affiliates have planned or been linked to a lengthy series of terrorist attacks against the United States, Israel, and other Western targets. These attacks include:
• a series of kidnappings of Westerners in Lebanon, including several Americans, in the 1980s;
• the suicide truck bombings that killed more than 200 U.S. Marines at their barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1983;
• the 1985 hijacking of TWA flight 847, which featured the famous footage of the plane?s pilot leaning out of the cockpit with a gun to his head;
• and two major 1990s attacks on Jewish targets in Argentina – the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy (killing twenty-nine) and the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center (killing ninety-five).

In addition, Hezbollah is sponsored, funded and armed by Iran and Syria who use the organization as a proxy to fight Israel and to destabilize the region. Hezbollah is designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the US State Department.

For more information on Hezbollah, see the following sources:

Anti-Defamation League

Institute for Counter-Terrorism

Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center

Terrorism Knowledge Base

Myth – “Outside actors such as Iran are not fuelling the crisis.”

Fact – A number of analysts have suggested that the timing of the Hezbollah operation is no coincidence, occurring just prior to the G8 Summit in St. Petersburg. The G8 was expected to concentrate heavily on Iran’s refusal to comply with demands to curtail its nuclear program. A wider Mideast crisis, provoked by Iran’s Hezbollah proxies, has now moved to the top of the G8 agenda, thus relieving some of the pressure on Iran.

In addition, Iranian fingerprints are to be found in the current conflict. The Katyusha missiles that are currently raining down on the north of Israel are supplied by Iran. An Israeli Naval vessel was also struck by an Iranian-made C802 missile, killing four sailors.

Myth – “Israel continues to occupy Lebanese land, specifically the Shebaa Farms area.”

Fact – On May 24, 2000, Israel completed the unilateral withdrawal of all IDF forces from southern Lebanon, in accordance with Israeli government decisions and UN Security Council Resolution 425, ending an 18-year presence there.

On June 18, 2000, the UN Security Council endorsed the Secretary-General’s conclusion that, as of 16 June, Israel had withdrawn its forces from Lebanon in accordance with Resolution 425.

As explained by Israel’s Foreign Ministry, the Shebaa Farms area is not, and should not be, considered disputed territory – its status was clarified by a number of United Nations statements following the withdrawal of Israel forces from Lebanon in May 2000.

The United Nations views the Shebaa Farms area as Syrian territory. Therefore, UN Security Council Resolution 425 – which concerns Lebanon – does not require Israel to withdraw from this area.

While Lebanon claims to be the owner of the Shebaa Farms area, the UN has encouraged the Lebanese and Syrians to negotiate between themselves as to who is the rightful owner. If Syria were to cede ownership of the area to Lebanon, then it is probable that Israel and the UN would then reconsider the status of the territory. In the meantime, the issue of the Shebaa Farms is used simply as an excuse for the Hezbollah to maintain itself as an armed force in the region.

Myth – “Arab prisoners held in Israeli jails were kidnapped from Lebanese soil and should be released.”

Some Lebanese and other Arab spokespeople have defended Hezbollah’s actions as a legitimate form of “resistance” aimed at securing the release of Lebanese prisoners held in Israeli jails from the period of Israel’s presence in its southern Lebanon security zone.

Fact – The prisoner whom Hezbollah is demanding, above all others, be released, is Samir Kuntar, jailed in Israel since a 1979 attack in the northern Israeli town of Nahariyah, in which he entered an apartment and murdered three family members and an Israeli police officer.

Kuntar is quite simply a terrorist and a murderer who committed a terrible atrocity on Israeli soil. Those prisoners held in Israeli jails captured during Israel’s stay in southern Lebanon are, likewise, held for terrorist offences and due to the inherent risk that they will return to their previous activities.

FURTHER READING AND ANALYSIS

Israel’s next war has begun, Yossi Klein Halevi, New Republic

The Nation of Hezbollah, Megan K. Stack and Rania Abouzeid, LA Times

Necessary Steps for Israel, Michael Oren, Washington Post

Israeli crisis is a smokescreen for Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Con Coughlin, Daily Telegraph

States of Terror, Editorial, Wall Street Journal

Terror as Statecraft, Editorial, Chicago Tribune

Mideast Madness, Editorial, Houston Chronicle