The Nazis shipped their victims to death camps. The Israelis will ship their victims to squalid refugee camps in countries outside of Israel.
Jewish prisoners of the Gestapo prison KZ Radogoszcz in Lodz, Poland, 1940. (Bundesarchiv, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 de)
Israel’s lebensraum master plan for Gaza, borrowed from the Nazi’s depopulation of Jewish ghettos, is clear.
Destroy infrastructure, medical facilities and sanitation, including access to clean water. Block shipments of food and fuel. Unleash indiscriminate industrial violence to kill and wound hundreds a day.
Let starvation — the U.N. estimates that more than half a million people are already starving — and epidemics of infectious diseases, along with the daily massacres and the displacement of Palestinians from their homes, turn Gaza into a mortuary.
The Palestinians are being forced to choose between death from bombs, disease, exposure or starvation or being driven from their homeland.
There will soon reach a point where death will be so ubiquitous that deportation — for those who want to live — will be the only option.
Danny Danon, Israel’s former ambassador to the U.N. and a close ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told Israel’s Kan Bet radio that he has been contacted by “countries in Latin America and Africa that are willing to absorb refugees from the Gaza Strip.”
“We have to make it easier for Gazans to leave for other countries,” he said. “I’m talking about voluntary migration by Palestinians who want to leave.”
Danny Danon during a Security Council session in 2017, while he was Israel’s U.N. ambassador. (Eskinder Debebe, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
The problem for now “is countries that are willing to absorb them, and we’re working on this,” Netanyahu told Likud Knesset members.
In the Warsaw Ghetto, the Germans handed out three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to anyone who “voluntarily” registered for deportation. “There were times when hundreds of people had to wait in line for several hours to be ‘deported,’” Marek Edelman, one of the commanders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, writes in The Ghetto Fights. “The number of people anxious to obtain three kilograms of bread was such that the transports, now leaving twice daily with 12,000 people, could not accommodate them all.”
The Nazis shipped their victims to death camps. The Israelis will ship their victims to squalid refugee camps in countries outside of Israel. Israeli leaders are also cynically advertising the proposed ethnic cleansing as voluntary and a humanitarian gesture to solve the catastrophe they created.
A Palestinian infant sleeps on the sidewalk after being displaced from Al-Bureij refugee camp in #Gaza Strip. pic.twitter.com/9CKUwytNU6
— PALESTINE ONLINE ?? (@OnlinePalEng) December 27, 2023
This is the plan. No one, especially the Biden administration, intends to stop it.
The most disturbing lesson I learned while covering armed conflicts for two decades is that we all have the capacity, with little prodding, to become willing executioners. The line between the victim and the victimizer is razor thin. The dark lusts of racial and ethnic supremacy, of vengeance and hate, of the eradication of those we condemn as embodying evil, are poisons that are not circumscribed by race, nationality, ethnicity or religion.
We can all become Nazis. It takes very little. And if we do not stand in eternal vigilance over evil — our evil — we become, like those carrying out the mass killing in Gaza, monsters.
The cries of those expiring under the rubble in Gaza are the cries of the boys and men executed by the Bosnian Serbs at Srebrenica, the over 1.5 million Cambodians killed by the Khmer Rouge, the thousands of Tutsi families burned alive in churches and the tens of thousands of Jews executed by the Einsatzgruppen at Babi Yar in Ukraine. The Holocaust is not an historical relic. It lives, lurking in the shadows, waiting to ignite its vicious contagion.
We were warned. Raul Hilberg. Primo Levi. Bruno Bettelheim. Hannah Arendt. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. They understood the dark recesses of the human spirit. But this truth is bitter and hard to confront. We prefer the myth. We prefer to see in our own kind, our own race, our own ethnicity, our own nation, our own religion, superior virtues. We prefer to sanctify our hatred.
Some of those who bore witness to this awful truth, including Levi, Bettelheim, Jean Améry, the author of At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, and Tadeusz Borowski, who wrote This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, committed suicide.
“The moral universe has been turned upside down. Those who oppose genocide are accused of advocating it. Those who carry out genocide are said to have the right to ‘defend’ themselves.”
The German playwright and revolutionary Ernst Toller, unable to rouse an indifferent world to assist victims and refugees from the Spanish Civil War, hanged himself in 1939 in a room at the Mayflower Hotel in New York City. On his hotel desk were photos of dead Spanish children.
“Most people have no imagination,” Toller writes.
“If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother? Slogans which deafened us so that we could not hear the truth.”
Primo Levi in the 1950s. (Mondadori Publishers, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
Primo Levi railed against the false, morally uplifting narrative of the Holocaust that culminates in the creation of the state of Israel — a narrative embraced by the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
The contemporary history of the Third Reich, he writes, could be “reread as a war against memory, an Orwellian falsification of memory, falsification of reality, negation of reality.” He wonders if “we who have returned” have “been able to understand and make others understand our experience.”
Levi saw us reflected in Chaim Rumkowski, the Nazi collaborator and tyrannical leader of the Lódz Ghetto. Rumkowski sold out his fellow Jews for privilege and power, although he was sent to Auschwitz on the final transport where Jewish Sonderkommando — prisoners forced to help herd victims into the gas chambers and dispose of their bodies — in an act of vengeance reportedly beat him to death outside a crematorium.
“We are all mirrored in Rumkowski,” Levi reminds us.
“His ambiguity is ours, it is our second nature, we hybrids molded from clay and spirit. His fever is ours, the fever of Western civilization, that ‘descends into hell with trumpets and drums,’ and its miserable adornments are the distorting image of our symbols of social prestige.”
We, like Rumkowski, “are so dazzled by power and prestige as to forget our essential fragility. Willingly or not we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train is waiting.”
Levi insists that the camps “could not be reduced to the two blocks of victims and persecutors.” He argues, “It is naive, absurd, and historically false to believe that an infernal system such as National Socialism sanctifies its victims; on the contrary; it degrades them, it makes them resemble itself.”
He chronicles what he called the “gray zone” between corruption and collaboration. The world, he writes, is not black and white, “but a vast zone of gray consciences that stands between the great men of evil and the pure victims.” We all inhabit this gray zone. We all can be induced to become part of the apparatus of death for trivial reasons and paltry rewards. This is the terrifying truth of the Holocaust.
“We all can be induced to become part of the apparatus of death for trivial reasons and paltry rewards. This is the terrifying truth of the Holocaust.”
It is hard not to be cynical about the plethora of university courses about the Holocaust given the censorship and banning of groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace, imposed by university administrations.
What is the point of studying the Holocaust if not to understand its fundamental lesson — when you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not, you are culpable?
It is hard not to be cynical about the “humanitarian interventionists” — Barack Obama, Tony Blair, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Samantha Power — who talk in sanctimonious rhymes about the “Responsibility to Protect” but are silent about war crimes when speaking out would threaten their status and careers.
None of the “humanitarian interventions” they championed, from Bosnia to Libya, come close to replicating the suffering and slaughter in Gaza. But there is a cost to defending Palestinians, a cost they do not intend to pay. There is nothing moral about denouncing slavery, the Holocaust or dictatorial regimes that oppose the United States. All it means is you champion the dominant narrative.
The moral universe has been turned upside down. Those who oppose genocide are accused of advocating it. Those who carry out genocide are said to have the right to “defend” themselves.
Protester holds a dead baby doll at a ceasefire for Gaza demonstration in Washington, D.C., Oct. 28, 2023. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Vetoing ceasefires and providing 2,000-pound bombs to Israel that throw out metal fragments for thousands of feet is the road to peace. Refusing to negotiate with Hamas will free the hostages.
Bombing hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, ambulances and refugee camps, along with killing three former Israeli hostages, stripped to the waist, waving an improvised white flag and calling out for help in Hebrew, are routine acts of war.
Killing over 21,300 people, including more than 7,700 children, injuring over 55,000 and rendering nearly all of the 2.3 million people in Gaza homeless, is a way to “deradicalize” Palestinians.
None of this makes sense, as protesters around the world realize.
A new world is being born. It is a world where the old rules, more often honored in the breach than the observance, no longer matter. It is a world where vast bureaucratic structures and technologically advanced systems carry out in public view vast killing projects.
The industrialized nations, weakened, fearful of global chaos, are sending an ominous message to the Global South and anyone who might think of revolt — we will kill you without restraint.
One day, we will all be Palestinians.
“I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous, in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful and increasing, in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization and bureaucratization, and in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms,” Christopher R. Browning writes in Ordinary Men, about a German reserve police battalion in World War Two that was ultimately responsible for the murder of 83,000 Jews.
“In such a world, I fear, modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts for being unable to induce ‘ordinary men’ to become their ‘willing executioners.’”
“The industrialized nations, weakened, fearful of global chaos, are sending an ominous message to the Global South and anyone who might think of revolt — we will kill you without restraint.”
Evil is protean. It mutates. It finds new forms and new expressions. Germany orchestrated the murder of 6 million Jews, as well as over 6 million Gypsies, Poles, homosexuals, communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Freemasons, artists, journalists, Soviet prisoners of war, people with physical and intellectual disabilities and political opponents.
It immediately set out after the war to expiate itself for its crimes. It deftly transferred its racism and demonization to Muslims, with racial supremacy remaining firmly rooted in the German psyche. At the same time, Germany and the U.S. rehabilitated thousands of former Nazis, especially from the intelligence services and the scientific community, and did little to prosecute those who directed Nazi war crimes. Germany today is Israel’s second largest arms supplier following the U.S.
The supposed campaign against anti-Semitism, interpreted as any statement that is critical of the State of Israel or denounces the genocide, is in fact the championing of White Power. It is why the German state, which has effectively criminalized support for the Palestinians, and the most retrograde white supremists in the United States, justify the carnage.
Germany’s long relationship with Israel, including paying over $90 billion since 1945 in reparations to Holocaust survivors and their heirs, is not about atonement, as the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé writes, but blackmail.
“The argument for a Jewish state as compensation for the Holocaust was a powerful argument, so powerful that nobody listened to the outright rejection of the U.N. solution by the overwhelming majority of the people of Palestine,” Pappé writes.
“What comes out clearly is a European wish to atone. The basic and natural rights of the Palestinians should be sidelined, dwarfed and forgotten altogether for the sake of the forgiveness that Europe was seeking from the newly formed Jewish state. It was much easier to rectify the Nazi evil vis-à -vis a Zionist movement than facing the Jews of the world in general.
It was less complex and, more importantly, it did not involve facing the victims of the Holocaust themselves, but rather a state that claimed to represent them. The price for this more convenient atonement was robbing the Palestinians of every basic and natural right they had and allowing the Zionist movement to ethnically cleanse them without fear of any rebuke or condemnation.”
The Holocaust was weaponized from almost the moment Israel was founded. It was bastardized to serve the apartheid state.
If we forget the lessons of the Holocaust, we forget who we are and what we are capable of becoming. We seek our moral worth in the past, rather than the present. We condemn others, including the Palestinians, to an endless cycle of slaughter. We become the evil we abhor. We consecrate the horror.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”
NOTE TO READERS: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, “The Chris Hedges Report.”
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Also to be noted is that Christians of fundamentalist persuasion were thrilled at the idea of Jews returning to their ancient homeland as part of alleged fulfillment of Bible prophecy regarding the “End Times”, and did not care that this was at the expense of Palestinians who had been living there for hundreds of years and who had had nothing to do with the Holocaust or persecutions in Europe.
According to their understanding of the Bible, the so-regarded “Word of God” (which dare not be questioned as being such), the return of Jews to their ancient homeland sets the timetable for events which will culminate in the return of Jesus Christ. Not supporting Israel is tantamount to standing in the way of God’s plan. And many of them look forward to the “Rapture”, in which they will be part of a select group of people who will be raptured away while the rest of the world (those who are “unsaved”) will suffer through the “Great Tribulation”.
They already believe in a cruel God, a God who condemns those who, for whatever reason, do not come to “accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior” in this present lifetime, to an eternity in hell. Thus it is not really surprising that they might not have any problem with the sufferings of the Palestinians who are displaced, whom they regard as mere pawns in God’s plan (along with Jews who do not come to “accept Jesus Christ” in this lifetime).
As Thomas Paine has said, belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man.
If God, in the commonly understood sense of the word, and as believed in by Christians and Jews and other theists, is really real and worthy of the name, then God is concerned about the welfare of all people and does not favor any particular tribe or nation or any one particular group of people over others. This includes the United States, and includes Israel. And this includes the Jews, the so-called “chosen” people. And I think that many Christians and Jews, particularly those who do not buy into a fundamentalist way of thinking, would very strongly agree.
I would think that God would be very displeased, to say the very least, at anybody who supports Israel in the name of being on the right side of God’s alleged “end times” plan, and who cares nothing about the real sufferings of real Palestinian people, including Palestinian children, in the here and now. In fact Jesus Christ himself said “It must needs be that trials and tribulations will come, but woe to those by whom they come. It would be better for such to have a millstone wrung around their neck and be thrown into the sea …” (Luke 17:1-2)
Note: With all due respect to (non-fundamentalist) Christians and Jews, and Muslims, I consider myself to be a Deist, and do not believe the Bible or the Koran or any other alleged revelation from God to actually be such.
It wasn’t Palestinians who killed 6 million Jews…it was the German Nazis. So why this animosity, hatred towards Palestinians? Has it anything to do with RACE??? Today’s generations of israelis never lived through Germany’s Nazi times, never personally experienced what was inflicted on Jews at that time. I totally fail to understand these actions against people who only wish to live on their own land. Jews are racists – even to the point of European Jews looking down on Arab Jews.
A number of articles have pointed out that President Reagan was willing to get tough with Israel when he felt such action was needed.
Lawrence Korb wrote in 2021:
“A year later, in August 1982, when Israeli forces advanced beyond southern Lebanon and began shelling the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in Beirut, Reagan responded with an angry call to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, demanding a halt to the operation.”
“Ronald Reagan wasn’t afraid to use leverage to hold Israel to task” (Responsible Statecraft website).
Was Reagan suckered into deploying US Marines to Lebanon as part of a multinational “peacekeeping” force, whose barracks were truck-bombed on October 23, 1983?
Without a doubt, ”almost everyone is mad; but, some people can control their madness,”
……..“The most disturbing lesson I learned while covering armed conflicts for two decades is that we all have the capacity, with little prodding, to become willing executioners. The line between the victim and the victimizer is razor thin. The dark lusts of racial and ethnic supremacy, of vengeance and hate, of the eradication of those we condemn as embodying evil, are poisons that are not circumscribed by race, nationality, ethnicity or religion.
…….. We can all become Nazis. It takes very little. And if we do not stand in eternal vigilance over evil — our evil — we become, like those carrying out the mass killing in Gaza, monsters.
……… This is the plan. No one, especially the Biden administration, intends to stop it.” Chris Hedges
Basically, “Israel’s Genocide Betrays the Holocaust” answers the question, “Can 2024 be any worse?”
Horrors revisited — and approved by the West and its allies.
As usual for me, I question Chris’s use of the word “we”, when he means government actors. We the people are not asked for consent to the vicious imperialist policies of our governments. You might respond with “You voted for them,” but do the citizens of, say, the United States actually choose their leaders? I would say they do not. The candidates are pre-chosen and marketed and are limited to a select few by a mere two parties, both of which are capitalist parties of the rich. So that attempt to blame citizens falls. Chris is a Christian, so I suggest that he was taught guilt in a big way. Well, Chris, we the people are not guilty unless we stand silent and do not protest. I am in the camp of those who protest, along with Julian Assange, the late Daniel Ellsberg, the late John Pilger, and all of the others who are persecuted for protesting and revealing the truth.
“Chris is a Christian, so I suggest that he was taught guilt in a big way.”
AND, Carolyn, Chris Hedges was not alone @ that school of hard knocks. Not for nothin’; but, “We (Catholics/Lutherans/Episcopalians aka Christians) are taught we are born w/original sin. It’s present @ conception. “Because of that original sin by Adam, we are all imputed w/the guilt of sin, the wages to which is death.”
Granted, “Not all Christian Sects adopt the doctrines of original sin,” i.e., “the state of sin inherited by all human beings as a result of Adam and Eve’s disobedience.”
….. “Original sin is often seen as a universal human condition.”
….. “Original sin is seen as the fallen state of humanity;”
….. “Original sin, is thought of as a drop of poison;”
….. “Some Christians believe that baptism washes away Original Sin, while others believe that it remains a part of human nature until death.”
Are we “born, sinners” w/a proclivity to feel guilty b/c out fate is in the hands of those whom we don’t trust; and we fail to stop ‘em? Do we feel guilty b/c “we the people” can’t do better?!? IF, they were right, “we, the people,” would agree. Hence, “We, the people,” persevere in slaying the f/“Capitalist Parties of the rich,” you correctly call out!!! “Greed makes ‘em do embarrassing things.”
……… “Although we all make mistakes, it is important to remember that original sin does not define our worth as individuals.” – “The notion of original sin can be seen as a way to understand the universal human tendency to err.”
Onward & upwards, Carolyn, CN, Chris Hedges, Mr. Fish, et al. “Keep It Lit!”
It was Goebbles, Hitler’s Reich Minister of Propaganda advocating
extermination of Jews that frightfully is so similar to the Israel Lobby;
that silences criticism of Israel’s genocide and threatens American
academia with career losses, and that JFK tried to have registered as
a foreign lobby, but as a then and now, Israel Lobby bought and sold
US Congress defeated.
Only authentic journalism will awaken the good in
people to make a clear choice against another holocaust in Gaza.
Yes, you are right.
Strange to say that the killing machine kills all and anyone that crosses their path – for no particular reason. A TV interview pitted a British journalist against another more critical protestant high ranking cleric. A number of protestant women were chased into a church and kept there for an unspecified time. Three of the women needed to go to the toilet. As they made their way across the ruined short-yard an Israeli sniper shot them all. What fun! Even the Pope was outraged at this, as he should have been.
This is the level to which the ‘enlightened’ west has descended. Western barbarism on toast!
The whole episode was recorded in British TV. I saw it.
From: Eric Arthur Blair
Here is an (honest) alternative to the Tar Bangled Spanner to post on your website. It is called:
VAMPIRE EMPIRE, EMPIRE OF VAMPIRES
Politicians for sale, enshrined in our law,
All queued up for the revolving door,
Scrambling to get their retirement stash,
All that is needed is buckets of cash.
Vampire Empire, Empire of Vampires
Freedom of speech, well that’s what we say,
But not for Assange, who has hell to pay,
We bring you democracy, the light on the hill,
How do we do it? We lie, cheat, steal and kill.
Vampire Empire, Empire of Vampires
The mask has come off, as Musk said it blunt,
We will coup whosoever we want,
Doing the dirty, all the dirty being done,
If you don’t quite believe it, just ask Imran Khan.
Vampire Empire, Empire of Vampires
Yanukovich, Mossadegh, Arbenz, Allende,
If you don’t do our bidding, we will screw you, comprende?
Otherwise we’ll invade based on despicable lies,
Or use our dumb proxies with Neonazi ties.
Vampire Empire, Empire of Vampires
We are exceptional, we call the shots,
Don’t you dare look at history, don’t you dare join the dots,
Just blindly obey our great Rules Based Order,
To turn every Ukrainian into dead cannon fodder.
Vampire Empire, Empire of Vampires
Our reserve dollar status grants far more than we need,
It confers wealth unimagined, beyond any greed,
Bretton-Woods was a larcenous confidence caper,
To exchange real world wealth for printed loo paper.
Vampire Empire, Empire of Vampires
China kills Uyghurs! We lied as we cried,
Crocodile tears over fake genocide,
Meanwhile we support indiscriminate slaughter,
Of every Palestinian’s wife, son and daughter.
Vampire Empire, Empire of Vampires
If you dare speak up for Palestinian plight,
We will ruin your life, we will use all our might,
To smear your good name until it is mud,
We are Nosferatu, WE SUCK YOUR BLOOD!
Vampire Empire, Empire of Vampires
Vampire Empire, Empire of Vampires
Vampire Empire, Empire of Vampires
“The industrialized nations, weakened, fearful of global chaos, are sending an ominous message to the Global South and anyone who might think of revolt — we will kill you without restraint.”
“One day, we will all be Palestinians. ”
Thanks, Chris Hedges for reminding us that justice is not a trophy you can carry with you from generation to generation, with the tattered names of the same countries engraved upon the plaque. The birth pangs of our colonialist past still cling to us. Once upon a time, we liked to call them the the birth pangs of democracy. Now we call them our right to install and maintain a “rules-based order” over everyone else. The “city upon a hill” was never anything more than a prison house, built to keep certain people in and certain people out. Our continued “micro-aggressions” against other nations, by which we only tar and feather ourselves as a failing empire, prove that our only manifest destiny is the destruction of everything we once claimed to hold more dear than life itself. Destroying meaning for the sake of enriching ourselves at the expense of anyone we choose to plunder is not a courageous act, it just means that we have already humbled ourselves into an active, destructive nihilism. And that nihilism will be a wider, tougher plain to cross than the land between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans ever were. And look at how many we killed in that, supposedly, noble pursuit. Israel will soon find that when it begins to build settlements upon stolen land (and paying money for it after you’ve taken it doesn’t change that fact), no amount of superior firepower will keep those structures aloft. When you discard meaning in the pursuit of ignoble ends, what is there to stop someone else from doing the same? And there will no longer be any argument against it. Having opened the floodgates yourself, you can hardly act again on the same meanings you destroyed to gain advantage. Now that we have all seen the reality of non-diplomacy and non-humanitarian intervention, every action going forward must lug the weight of its ultimate futility.
Brilliant comment! Thanks.
I totally agree firspersoninfinite (or should I say god?) Chris has shown us what the meaning of the present horror is . But in developed international capitalism there can only be the ‘people pacifying pretence’ of morality. And Israel is the land of the city on the hill for capitalism. The Jews had a vast underground influence on the governance of the United States almost from its inception and fully took over visa the Neocons some decades ago.The reckless and immoral founding of Israel was a certainty after WW2 and the reprehensible nature of that may well lead to a finally fatal WW3 in the near future. But the if that does not extinguish us capitalism’s addiction to the golden eggs of fossil fuel will in the finale of catastrophic climate change .