Right Wing Reading Rainbow VI: Obstacle To Peace

Baruch atah Adonai. What the hell you doin' back there, boy?

It’s a complicated situation.

It’s just a never-ending cycle of violence.

Anger burns like the sand in the desert sun.

Tensions are high in the region.

The logic of revenge is tragically winning out.

Shots are ringing out.

Clashes are erupting.

Explosions are rocking cities.

Hunger stalks the children.

The nuances comprise the buried layers of the microcosm of the conflict.

People are having deadly encounters. Prior to such events, there are bullets, aloft and mobile in a forward trajectory. In the interim, they make contact with the aforementioned persons.

As the hungry crowd a convoy, a crush of bodies, gunshots, and a deadly toll.

The Book

Obstacle to Peace is the book to read if you want to understand Israel-Palestine. It carries my highest endorsement. This series is called Right Wing Reading Rainbow for a reason. Far too many people have a very confused understanding of “left” and “right” when it comes to this topic. Usually because they’re being deliberately obtuse, but some of them just have rotten, polluted souls. They pretend they don’t care, because they are, to quote a certain Nobel Prize winning Macroeconomist, “Fools, Knaves, or Lunatics.”

The book was written in 2016, and uses the 2009 Gaza War (“Operation Cast Lead”) as a primary narrative through-line. Starting with the 2006 rise of Hamas in Gaza, and concluding with the end of Obama’s first term, it branches off to explain every item of historical context as it becomes relevant. Thus do the distant past and the recent past converge to an incredibly unpleasant present.

After reading this book, you will know everything that you need to know about “what they’re all fighting about over there.” You’ll know about Area A and Area C. You’ll know about “UNDP” and “UNESCO” and “UNHCR” and “UNHRC” and “UNSCOP” and “UNMAS” and “UNICEF” and “UNRWA”. You’ll learn about 1947 and 1967 and 1973 and 1994 and 2006 and 2009. You will be qualified, more than qualified, to engage in educated discussion, which is what this whole article series is all about.

Follow Up Readings

If you have more to ask about Zionism and Israel:

• The Jewish Century, by Yuri Slezkine. A fantastic book decribing the evolution of Jewish identity in the 20th century. The book discusses the three great Jewish migrations of the twentieth century: to Israel, to America, and to the cities of the USSR. A Russian-born Jew himself, Slezkine elaborates decisively on the peculiar relationship between the Jewish community and the USSR. In his telling, Jews were not pioneering Bolsheviks, as antisemites argue. Instead, large numbers of down-trodden Jews abandoned their faith to join the movement when it was already underway, achieving a disproportionate but not dominant role, particularly in the NKVD. This was done out of an opposition to rural backwardness. The title of the book doesn’t refer to the century as “belonging to” the Jews, but rather as the century in which humanity “became Jewish.” More people became what he calls “service nomads.” For example The average American changes houses eight times in his life.

• They Knew They Were Right, by Jacob Heilbrunn. This book is a little redundant if you already read Reclaiming The American Right from last weeks article. However, Raimondo’s book is more told from the perspective of the “victims,” that is, from the perspective of the somewhat obscure Paleoconservatives and Libertarians who were displaced by the Neoconservatives. Heilbrunn’s book is more focused on the mindset of perpetrators of that displacement.

• The Israel Lobby, by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. A comprehensive and thoroughgoing explanation of how the Israel lobby works. It’s actually quite alarming how many people who ought to know better continue to make inane arguments that are directly refuted by the book. For example, common arguments about the role of Christian Zionism or the Oil Lobby are debunked with finality. Mearsheimer and Walt went through a lot to give us this book. I think we owe it to them to read it and not butcher or outright ignore their arguments.

And if you want books about The Hate That Mutates:

• The ‘Jewish Threat’, by Joseph Bendersky. A highly informative book about the surprising pervasiveness of antisemitic attitudes, and even outright Reich sympathy, in the US military in the first half of the 20th century. The book primarily cites the files of the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department. It was believed that Jews were almost unanimously in favor of the Bolshevik movement in 1919, that Jews were loyal only to each other and not to the people among whom they live, and that Jews planned on usurping the United States outright from ‘True Americans’. Particular focus is given to General George Van Horn Moseley, General George S. Patton, and General Albert C. Wedemeyer. Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh also gets quite a few mentions, naturally, along with Lothrop Stoddard and William Lange.

• Henry Ford and the Jews, by Neil Baldwin. Did you know that during WWI, Henry Ford was a major peace activist? But he was a hypocrite, because his company produced war materiel. After the Great War, Ford got it into his head that the Jews had profited from the previous war, were engaged in a systematic attack on European civilization, and would start another war if they weren’t stopped. He published a four-volume treatise to that effect, The International Jew, in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. Two of the eighty chapters cited The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is now known to be a forgery by the Tsar’s secret police. There isn’t any such group with that name, nor has there ever been. Thankfully, an ADL-coordinated boycott and a 1927 libel lawsuit by Aaron Sapiro against the paper shut it down. Ford was also on the board of Lindbergh’s America First Committee. This is a book about Ford’s antisemitism.

• Esau’s Tears, by Albert Lindemann. An excellent broad survey of “Modern” antisemitism. Lindmann identifies antisemitism not as a contagious psycho-spiritual disease, but rather as a gentile overreaction to what he calls “the rise of the Jews.” That is, people don’t become antisemites because of Christian brainwashing or psychological projection of the darkness in their hearts. Rather, people and groups become antisemites because they perceive the Jews as doing well, and it makes them anxious and upset. Lindemann’s book is comprehensive and well researched, demonstrating patterns of antisemitism with numerous examples across time and place.¹

And Something Fun

The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth. We’re back to Alt-History. The book describes a nightmarish alternate world where Charles Lindbergh wins the 1940 election, preventing Franklin D. Roosevelt from serving a third term as president. Once in office in January 1941, Lindbergh signs non-aggression pacts with Germany and Japan. December 1941 comes and goes without incident, and America enters 1942 in an appalling, unthinkable, and intolerable state of peace with the Axis Powers and the Greater East-Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. But that’s not all: Charles Lindberg reveals the full depths of his hatred for the Jewish people with a program called the Office of American Absorption that forces immigrant Jewish teenagers to work on farms over the summer in order to assimilate to gentile American culture. Worse still, the entire American South inexplicably becomes pro-Lindbergh and pro-isolationist.² There are also active Klan cells in New Jersey.

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This is the sixth in a series of eight articles on right-wing book recommendations.

The next article will be about the collaboration between America's "national security experts" and the most vile, sadistic men calling themselves Muslims today.

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1. Lindemann notes very strangely that antisemitism even appeared inside Western communist parties:

“Even within the various and often violently contending factions of the nascent communist parties of the West, ‘foreign Jews, taking orders from Moscow’ became a hot issue. It remained mostly taboo in socialist ranks to refer openly to Moscow’s agents as Jewish, but the implication was often that such foreign Jews were destroying western socialism.” (pp. 435)

Ex-Col. Charles A. Lindbergh said in his speech in Fort Wayne that it looks as if we were on the point of losing our democratic heritage of free speech and assembly. That's not the half of it. We have already lost it in the South. Try to hold a Lindbergh meeting here and see what happens to it, or even to wear an America First button. There wasn't a single radio station, so far as I know, in this vast cultural desert called the South that carried Lindbergh's speech. I had to tune in a station 700 miles from here to pick it up. It is getting more like living in Germany every day.

The same people who called themselves unreconstructed rebels when they were forced back into the Union 75 years ago are now trying to crawl back into the British Empire by the back door, and anybody with the "un-American" gall to say them nay is called a Nazi. The same region that accepted anti-Catholicism as a basic issue in the presidential campaign of 1928 now utters an audible sh-h-h that is heard all the way from Cumberland Gap to Eagle Pass whenever the slightest breath of anti-Semitism is sniffed down the wind. […] When the land of the Ku Klux Klan, chattel slavery, Judge Lynch and the poll tax starts whooping it up for the four freedoms, that alone ought to be enough to make it suspicious to the minds of all thinking men everywhere.

2. -An Outspoken Noninterventionist from Tarrant, Alabama to the Birmingham News, 12 October 1941. Quoted by Wayne S. Cole.