Growing up, I always found one of the most bizarre things in history to be the dramatic turnabout of the Communist movement the day that Germany invaded Stalinist Russia.
Just to remind you of what happened, the Communist movement, its fellow travelers, and other Far Leftists were ferociously anti-fascist in the mid-1930s, but were decidedly pro-Hitler from the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 23, 1939. Germany had already gobbled up Czechoslovakia within the framework of the Munich Agreement - an early precursor of Yossi Beilin?s Geneva Accord.
Even before the Pact, Josef Stalin had been carefully nursing a neutrality position regarding Nazi Germany, hoping to deflect the German war machine onto the capitalist West. Stalin repeated his friendship for Germany at the usual party meetings and congresses, and the Comintern issued instructions for how good leftists must think. Comintern was the international propaganda poodle of Stalin, and after the Pact, toed his line on the need for ?non-aggression? with regard to Germany. Stalin repeated his hope for good neighborly relations with Adolph Hitler.
Hitler was in a hurry. After taking Memel from Lithuania, he was planning to conquer Poland before the end of the summer of 1939, while the weather was still good. Stalin replaced his foreign minister Litvinov with Molotov and began a series of secret negotiations with Hitler, somewhat similar to those early Oslo talks held illegally by Israel?s Far Left lemmings with the PLO in Oslo. Hints that things were developing could be first found in an article by Zhdanov in Pravda on June 29, attacking Britain and France. Hitler needed Russia neutralized to complete the invasion of Poland.
On August 3, 1939, Hitler agreed to Stalin?s terms for sitting by while Poland was destroyed. Germany never even bothered to inform its ally, Italy, of its plans. On the night of August 19, the Nazi-Soviet trade treaty was signed. When he received Stalin?s assent, Hitler pounded on the wall with his fists and shouted, ?I have the world in my pocket!? On the night of August 23, 1939, the non-secret text of the pact was officially released.
The Communist parties abroad, which had no official warning of the Soviet switch-around, reacted at first with confusion. On September 6, Thorez and other French Communists joined the calls for aid to Poland, only to desert that tack at Moscow?s behest a few days later. Harry Pollitt, the British Communist leader, wrote a pamphlet entitled ?How to Win the War?, and after two weeks, both he and his pamphlet had to drop from public gaze. The German Communists in exile made strange noises suggesting that the Allies were worse than Hitler. The general line was that already stated by Stalin in March, that the war was an ?imperialist? one for the division of the world. The Communists said much more about Allied than about Nazi ?culpability? and demanded ?peace?.
Stalin collaborated openly with Hitler in dividing up Eastern Europe, with the uniform approval and applause of the world Communist parties and the ?progressive? Left. After the invasion of France by Germany, Stalin ordered military occupation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and all three were ?admitted? into the Soviet Union as constituent republics in July. In late June, the Soviets also annexed Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. All this was done by way of an ultimatum to Romania. The Russians then used most of the annexed territory to create a new Moldavian SSR.
Ah, but Stalin?s Russia quickly became a victim of its betrayal of civilization. Hitler was not simply going to war against the capitalist West, but had been planning all along to destroy the Soviet Union and annex its lands. In July 1940, Hitler had secretly decided to prepare to attack the Soviet Union. In September, a German-Italian-Japanese Tripartite Pact was signed, and although it stipulated that it would not affect the relations of any of the three powers with the Soviets, a deterioration in Berlin-Moscow amity had become apparent.
In November 1940, Molotov visited Berlin for further discussions of a vague and grandiose kind, but Hitler did not cancel his plans for attack. On December 18, 1940, he issued the directive for operation Barbarossa, the code name for the invasion of the Soviet Union, to be launched in the middle of 1941.
Within hours of the crossing of the Soviet lines by German tanks, the world Communist movement reversed its political position regarding Nazi Germany by 180 degrees. As if speaking in the voice of a single man, which of course it was, the Communist parties of the world and their leftist fellow travelers became the most militant warmongers on earth. Appealing to pretended patriotism, they demanded that the Western countries attack Germany and its evil allies.
Just days earlier, they had been praising Germany for its campaign against Western capitalism, endorsing isolationism, calling for neutrality and non-aggression, demanding that proletarians from all nations cooperate, regardless of whether their governments were at war, and even praising some of the ?progressive? elements of Nazism, such as its nationalization of some of the means of production. And days later, the very same people were marching against Germany, labeling it the epitome of evil, demanding support and solidarity with the Soviet victim of German aggression, supporting rearmament by the same Western nations it had been denouncing as imperialists in the previous breath.
As I say, I always had a great deal of difficulty imagining and understanding how people could display such totalitarian self-abasement, such slavish obedience to such naked hypocrisy, as did that generation of the Left.
That is, until I observed the turnabout of the Israeli Left regarding the security fence.
Let us note that the idea of building a security fence, composed of segments of walls, fences and electronic gimmicks, was long the official banner of Israel?s Oslo Left. The Left wanted the wall built for several reasons. Mainly, they believed that such a wall would create de facto separation of Israel from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and behind the wall, the Palestinians could exercise sovereignty or semi-sovereignty as a major step towards statehood. In addition, the Left presumed that once Israel had erected the barrier, all Jewish settlers on the wrong side of it would be forced to leave, handing Arafat an ethnically-cleansed (of Jews) set of lands. The Left presumed that once the fence was up, they would be able to block Israeli military incursions into what they regarded as ?Palestinian lands?. Finally, the Left probably hoped that reductions in Palestinian atrocities as a result of the wall would boost support for the Left in Israel and its agenda of appeasement.
For years, the banner slogan of the Oslo Left in Israel was ?Us Over Here and Them Over There?. The wall they proposed to erect in the West Bank would reduce terrorist infiltrations, much as did the existing fence around most of the Gaza Strip and the existing security fence along the Lebanese border. All we need is some electronic gee-whiz gadgets, and terrorism from our Oslo peace partners will end, the Left assured the nation. And once the carnage dropped, it would be possible once again for the radical Left to stampede the country into following the Left?s plans, or so it hoped.
The wall was the Left?s master strategy, a program to impose withdrawal by Israel from most of the West Bank, under the guise of protecting Israeli civilians from terrorist barbarism.
It was, at first, the Right that criticized the wall. The main criticism was that it would not effectively end the terror. The PLO was already firing mortars and rockets over the Gaza wall into Jewish civilian homes. What would stop it from doing so with new walls? And what exactly did the Left think the Palestinians would be doing behind it, once Israel abandoned the territory behind the wall? Pursue quilting?
The only way to suppress the carnage would be to maintain full Israeli military control of the West Bank and Gaza, no matter how shrilly the rest of the world complained, bellyached and moaned. The Right also feared the idea that the wall would be construed as a stage in Israeli complete withdrawal and abandonment of the West Bank to PLO control, which was precisely the same reason the Left wanted the wall.
The uberleftist and super-dove Ehud Barak had been one of the original promoters of a security fence for the West Bank as the solution to problems of Middle East violence (see, for example, PR Newswire, April 27, 2002). Numerous leftist politicians from the Labor Party, especially Haim Ramon, who saw himself as a contender for party chief, endorsed the idea. Amram Mitzna, from the Labor Party?s Shi?ite far Left, won the nomination and endorsed a security wall and unilateral withdrawal by Israel from the West Bank and Gaza. He was clobbered in the election by Ariel Sharon in a landslide. Numerous members of Meretz, a party even further to the Left and containing Marxist components, also chimed in to support the wall.
The Left?s endorsement of a security wall for Israel, fencing out most of the Palestinians, was so enthusiastic and near-universal that there was only one possible development that could have turned the Left against the idea - namely, its adoption by Ariel Sharon and the Likud.
While at first highly skeptical of the practicality of the wall and its ability to keep the Palestinian savages from murdering Israelis, Sharon and his people were under enormous pressure to do something as the terrorist violence escalated. Sharon became convinced that it was worth giving the wall a try. Better partial prevention of terrorist infiltration than none at all, they believed. The targeted assassinations by Israel of Palestinian terrorist leaders escalated at the same time, resulting in reduced incidence of terrorist attacks in Israel and creating the impression that the partially-completed wall was somehow responsible.
Shimon Peres was the lone vote against the security fence when the Sharon cabinet approved it officially in June 2002. He did not oppose it in principle, but disliked the specific lines for it. Peres and the Left wanted the fence to trace the old pre-1967 ?Green Line?, signaling that Israel planned to turn over the entire area in full to the PLO. The rest of the Israeli Left then carried out a 180-degree reversal of direction of the sort that has not been seen since the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact collapsed under the German invasion of Russia.
Within weeks, the entire Israeli Left, which had been united for years in favor of the wall as their consensus position, ?Us Over Here and Them Over There?, was suddenly as equally united and displaying totalitarian uniformity in opposition to the wall. Some even compared it to the walls around the Warsaw Ghetto, denouncing it as a racist way to ?victimize? the po? Palestinians. The Left labeled it an ?Apartheid Wall?.
You see, the PLO did not like the wall. It made it harder for terrorists from the PLO and its affiliates to enter Israeli cities and murder Israeli civilians. And it encompassed somewhat less than the entire 100% of the West Bank that the PLO hoped to control as its launching base for destroying the rump Israel, roughly the same way the rump Czechoslovakia was destroyed after being stripped of the Sudetenland.
The Israeli Left today takes its cues from the PLO the same way that the Communists in the late 1930s and 1940s took their cues from the Comintern. No sooner had Sharon and the Likud begun construction of the security wall than the Israeli Left and its amen choruses from around the world started a coordinated totalitarian campaign against it!
In recent days, the pro-terror Western radical anti-Semites from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM; but it actually stands for I Support Murderers) joined Israeli Leftists and Palestinian fascists in joint physical attacks on the fence, trying to vandalize it and cut it with wirecutters.
Just a few months after it was the preferred recipe for peace endorsed by nearly the entire Israeli Left, the wall is today a colonial aggression, denounced by all progressive leftists and people for peace, people so opposed to it that they are willing to risk prison, tear gas and getting shot in the legs to tear it down and rip holes in it. Israel must be prevented from erecting obstacles to mass murderers and must be prevented from protecting its children at all costs.
Just to remind you of what happened, the Communist movement, its fellow travelers, and other Far Leftists were ferociously anti-fascist in the mid-1930s, but were decidedly pro-Hitler from the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 23, 1939. Germany had already gobbled up Czechoslovakia within the framework of the Munich Agreement - an early precursor of Yossi Beilin?s Geneva Accord.
Even before the Pact, Josef Stalin had been carefully nursing a neutrality position regarding Nazi Germany, hoping to deflect the German war machine onto the capitalist West. Stalin repeated his friendship for Germany at the usual party meetings and congresses, and the Comintern issued instructions for how good leftists must think. Comintern was the international propaganda poodle of Stalin, and after the Pact, toed his line on the need for ?non-aggression? with regard to Germany. Stalin repeated his hope for good neighborly relations with Adolph Hitler.
Hitler was in a hurry. After taking Memel from Lithuania, he was planning to conquer Poland before the end of the summer of 1939, while the weather was still good. Stalin replaced his foreign minister Litvinov with Molotov and began a series of secret negotiations with Hitler, somewhat similar to those early Oslo talks held illegally by Israel?s Far Left lemmings with the PLO in Oslo. Hints that things were developing could be first found in an article by Zhdanov in Pravda on June 29, attacking Britain and France. Hitler needed Russia neutralized to complete the invasion of Poland.
On August 3, 1939, Hitler agreed to Stalin?s terms for sitting by while Poland was destroyed. Germany never even bothered to inform its ally, Italy, of its plans. On the night of August 19, the Nazi-Soviet trade treaty was signed. When he received Stalin?s assent, Hitler pounded on the wall with his fists and shouted, ?I have the world in my pocket!? On the night of August 23, 1939, the non-secret text of the pact was officially released.
The Communist parties abroad, which had no official warning of the Soviet switch-around, reacted at first with confusion. On September 6, Thorez and other French Communists joined the calls for aid to Poland, only to desert that tack at Moscow?s behest a few days later. Harry Pollitt, the British Communist leader, wrote a pamphlet entitled ?How to Win the War?, and after two weeks, both he and his pamphlet had to drop from public gaze. The German Communists in exile made strange noises suggesting that the Allies were worse than Hitler. The general line was that already stated by Stalin in March, that the war was an ?imperialist? one for the division of the world. The Communists said much more about Allied than about Nazi ?culpability? and demanded ?peace?.
Stalin collaborated openly with Hitler in dividing up Eastern Europe, with the uniform approval and applause of the world Communist parties and the ?progressive? Left. After the invasion of France by Germany, Stalin ordered military occupation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and all three were ?admitted? into the Soviet Union as constituent republics in July. In late June, the Soviets also annexed Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. All this was done by way of an ultimatum to Romania. The Russians then used most of the annexed territory to create a new Moldavian SSR.
Ah, but Stalin?s Russia quickly became a victim of its betrayal of civilization. Hitler was not simply going to war against the capitalist West, but had been planning all along to destroy the Soviet Union and annex its lands. In July 1940, Hitler had secretly decided to prepare to attack the Soviet Union. In September, a German-Italian-Japanese Tripartite Pact was signed, and although it stipulated that it would not affect the relations of any of the three powers with the Soviets, a deterioration in Berlin-Moscow amity had become apparent.
In November 1940, Molotov visited Berlin for further discussions of a vague and grandiose kind, but Hitler did not cancel his plans for attack. On December 18, 1940, he issued the directive for operation Barbarossa, the code name for the invasion of the Soviet Union, to be launched in the middle of 1941.
Within hours of the crossing of the Soviet lines by German tanks, the world Communist movement reversed its political position regarding Nazi Germany by 180 degrees. As if speaking in the voice of a single man, which of course it was, the Communist parties of the world and their leftist fellow travelers became the most militant warmongers on earth. Appealing to pretended patriotism, they demanded that the Western countries attack Germany and its evil allies.
Just days earlier, they had been praising Germany for its campaign against Western capitalism, endorsing isolationism, calling for neutrality and non-aggression, demanding that proletarians from all nations cooperate, regardless of whether their governments were at war, and even praising some of the ?progressive? elements of Nazism, such as its nationalization of some of the means of production. And days later, the very same people were marching against Germany, labeling it the epitome of evil, demanding support and solidarity with the Soviet victim of German aggression, supporting rearmament by the same Western nations it had been denouncing as imperialists in the previous breath.
As I say, I always had a great deal of difficulty imagining and understanding how people could display such totalitarian self-abasement, such slavish obedience to such naked hypocrisy, as did that generation of the Left.
That is, until I observed the turnabout of the Israeli Left regarding the security fence.
Let us note that the idea of building a security fence, composed of segments of walls, fences and electronic gimmicks, was long the official banner of Israel?s Oslo Left. The Left wanted the wall built for several reasons. Mainly, they believed that such a wall would create de facto separation of Israel from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and behind the wall, the Palestinians could exercise sovereignty or semi-sovereignty as a major step towards statehood. In addition, the Left presumed that once Israel had erected the barrier, all Jewish settlers on the wrong side of it would be forced to leave, handing Arafat an ethnically-cleansed (of Jews) set of lands. The Left presumed that once the fence was up, they would be able to block Israeli military incursions into what they regarded as ?Palestinian lands?. Finally, the Left probably hoped that reductions in Palestinian atrocities as a result of the wall would boost support for the Left in Israel and its agenda of appeasement.
For years, the banner slogan of the Oslo Left in Israel was ?Us Over Here and Them Over There?. The wall they proposed to erect in the West Bank would reduce terrorist infiltrations, much as did the existing fence around most of the Gaza Strip and the existing security fence along the Lebanese border. All we need is some electronic gee-whiz gadgets, and terrorism from our Oslo peace partners will end, the Left assured the nation. And once the carnage dropped, it would be possible once again for the radical Left to stampede the country into following the Left?s plans, or so it hoped.
The wall was the Left?s master strategy, a program to impose withdrawal by Israel from most of the West Bank, under the guise of protecting Israeli civilians from terrorist barbarism.
It was, at first, the Right that criticized the wall. The main criticism was that it would not effectively end the terror. The PLO was already firing mortars and rockets over the Gaza wall into Jewish civilian homes. What would stop it from doing so with new walls? And what exactly did the Left think the Palestinians would be doing behind it, once Israel abandoned the territory behind the wall? Pursue quilting?
The only way to suppress the carnage would be to maintain full Israeli military control of the West Bank and Gaza, no matter how shrilly the rest of the world complained, bellyached and moaned. The Right also feared the idea that the wall would be construed as a stage in Israeli complete withdrawal and abandonment of the West Bank to PLO control, which was precisely the same reason the Left wanted the wall.
The uberleftist and super-dove Ehud Barak had been one of the original promoters of a security fence for the West Bank as the solution to problems of Middle East violence (see, for example, PR Newswire, April 27, 2002). Numerous leftist politicians from the Labor Party, especially Haim Ramon, who saw himself as a contender for party chief, endorsed the idea. Amram Mitzna, from the Labor Party?s Shi?ite far Left, won the nomination and endorsed a security wall and unilateral withdrawal by Israel from the West Bank and Gaza. He was clobbered in the election by Ariel Sharon in a landslide. Numerous members of Meretz, a party even further to the Left and containing Marxist components, also chimed in to support the wall.
The Left?s endorsement of a security wall for Israel, fencing out most of the Palestinians, was so enthusiastic and near-universal that there was only one possible development that could have turned the Left against the idea - namely, its adoption by Ariel Sharon and the Likud.
While at first highly skeptical of the practicality of the wall and its ability to keep the Palestinian savages from murdering Israelis, Sharon and his people were under enormous pressure to do something as the terrorist violence escalated. Sharon became convinced that it was worth giving the wall a try. Better partial prevention of terrorist infiltration than none at all, they believed. The targeted assassinations by Israel of Palestinian terrorist leaders escalated at the same time, resulting in reduced incidence of terrorist attacks in Israel and creating the impression that the partially-completed wall was somehow responsible.
Shimon Peres was the lone vote against the security fence when the Sharon cabinet approved it officially in June 2002. He did not oppose it in principle, but disliked the specific lines for it. Peres and the Left wanted the fence to trace the old pre-1967 ?Green Line?, signaling that Israel planned to turn over the entire area in full to the PLO. The rest of the Israeli Left then carried out a 180-degree reversal of direction of the sort that has not been seen since the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact collapsed under the German invasion of Russia.
Within weeks, the entire Israeli Left, which had been united for years in favor of the wall as their consensus position, ?Us Over Here and Them Over There?, was suddenly as equally united and displaying totalitarian uniformity in opposition to the wall. Some even compared it to the walls around the Warsaw Ghetto, denouncing it as a racist way to ?victimize? the po? Palestinians. The Left labeled it an ?Apartheid Wall?.
You see, the PLO did not like the wall. It made it harder for terrorists from the PLO and its affiliates to enter Israeli cities and murder Israeli civilians. And it encompassed somewhat less than the entire 100% of the West Bank that the PLO hoped to control as its launching base for destroying the rump Israel, roughly the same way the rump Czechoslovakia was destroyed after being stripped of the Sudetenland.
The Israeli Left today takes its cues from the PLO the same way that the Communists in the late 1930s and 1940s took their cues from the Comintern. No sooner had Sharon and the Likud begun construction of the security wall than the Israeli Left and its amen choruses from around the world started a coordinated totalitarian campaign against it!
In recent days, the pro-terror Western radical anti-Semites from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM; but it actually stands for I Support Murderers) joined Israeli Leftists and Palestinian fascists in joint physical attacks on the fence, trying to vandalize it and cut it with wirecutters.
Just a few months after it was the preferred recipe for peace endorsed by nearly the entire Israeli Left, the wall is today a colonial aggression, denounced by all progressive leftists and people for peace, people so opposed to it that they are willing to risk prison, tear gas and getting shot in the legs to tear it down and rip holes in it. Israel must be prevented from erecting obstacles to mass murderers and must be prevented from protecting its children at all costs.