Real Class
The BBC has a report that would seem to indicate that Israel really doesn’t like pacifists:
Israel has declared the German author Guenter Grass “persona non grata” and barred him from entering the country.
Grass, a Nobel laureate, recently criticised Israel in a poem.
In it, Grass condemned German arms sales to Israel, and said the Jewish state must not be allowed to launch military strikes against Iran.
Israeli interior minister Eli Yishai says Grass is not welcome because he has tried “to inflame hatred against the State and people of Israel.”
Yishai, the leader of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish party in Israel’s coalition government, suggested that Grass should go to Iran, “where he would find a sympathetic audience should he want to continue disseminating his warped and mendacious work.”
Glass condemns his own government for selling arms, and suggests that bombing other countries doesn’t solve problems, so “he must be anti-Semitic”.
I guess we can all ignore the fact that there is no credible intelligence showing that Iran is engaged in a nuclear arms program, and ignore Israel’s belief that they, and they alone, must be permitted to attack other countries without any penalty. It is perfectly alright with Israel that the world economy will go into a freefall if they attack and Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz. They are Israel and must not be criticized for any reason.
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Grass is old enough to have a history with the Hitler Youth, a fact which he admitted only after he was awarded his Nobel prize… but even then, Grass confessed of his own free will, with no apparent pressure on him to do so. That, more than any single poem, however critical of Israel, is probably the source of Israeli hostility. To Israel, the only thing worse than a Nazi is a repentant, reformed, antiwar Nazi.
Grass is a genuinely great writer; even with my limited skills in German, I can tell that. You might enjoy some of his work, if you haven’t already read it all.
Grass wasn’t in the Hiltler Youth, he was drafted into the Waffen SS. He was from the Free City of Danzig [now the Polish city of Gdansk] and was drafted because his father was German, although his mother was Polish. As he wasn’t a ‘pure German’ he couldn’t be sent into the Heer, the regular Army, and was posted to the Waffen SS who could accept ‘foreigners’. He tried to enlist in the German Navy, in a fit of patriotism, but was rejected [probably due to his status as an ‘impure German’]. Being drafted is not exactly a political statement, but a lot of people who have been drafted tend to become pacifists.
His best known work is The Tin Drum, which is part of the Danzig trilogy, so his antiwar attitude is not something new. His status after the war as a displaced person who couldn’t go home, would tend to make him feel a certain kinship to the Palestinians, but his general point is that violence never seems to solve anything.
Apologies for the error; my memory failed me, and I didn’t look it up. Once again I am reminded… re-minded… to look up things I only think I remember.
In addition to the obligatory “Tin Drum” in German, left over from my school days, I have a book of English translations of various occasional speeches and essays. I’m afraid Grass was never a very happy man…
At least he has channeled his sadness in a useful way by writing about it. Of course, the Danzig he remembers never really existed outside of his mind, but something like that takes hold of you.
The world would be a much better place if people would just deal with the reality of here and now, and avoid ‘memories’ of places that are imaginary. It isn’t just the Middle East. I often wonder if conservatives were off their meds when they talk about the 1950s in the US. I remember the time, and it wasn’t so great.
I would note that I come from a long line of ‘party poopers’. My maternal grandfather would rant on when anyone suggested that the days of his youth were so wonderful and carefree. He would reel off a string of discoveries and inventions that didn’t exist when he was a child, and made the lives of a lot of people short and miserable. He always started with a trip to the outhouse in winter was not something he ever wanted to do again.
He always started with a trip to the outhouse in winter was not something he ever wanted to do again.
I “rough it” from time to time. When I get back home, the first thing I do is jump in the shower for a nice, long warm shower. Hot water is the most amazing invention, like, *evah*. Cl0sely followed by indoor plumbing — the odors of an outhouse are amazingly horrid, and squatting over a cathole sucks (though now I have a portable folding “potty” thingy since I’m getting too bloody old for squatting over catholes when I don’t need to).
Regarding Israel, there was a good reason for the founding of the state of Israel — the surviving Jews of Europe, in 1947, were still in the same concentration camps that Hitler had put them into, except now re-named “relocation camps” and with the guns turned outwards to protect them from the Europeans who wanted to finish the job Hitler started. Pretty much all of them wanted to emigrate to the United States but the United States didn’t want the “filthy kikes” either (which led to some tragic incidents prior to U.S. entry into WW2 when the U.S. turned away shiploads of Jews and sent them right back to Hitler’s extermination camps, where most of the turned-away Jews died).
The situation as the Soviet Union collapsed where the Soviet Jews wanted to emigrate to the US and Reagan said “Nyet!” is another example. Sure, a lot of those “Jews” were no more ethnically and racially Jewish than I am, but the only state willing to take them in was Israel despite the fact that they were by and large well educated and capable of being productive members of any society they ended up in. (Well, except for the large contingent of Russian Mafya who used the exodus for setting up branch offices elsewhere, but that’s a different story).
I.e., racism and hatred against Jews pretty much requires something like Israel to exist. But that doesn’t give Israel the right to act like total assholes, yo.
– Badtux the History Penguin
The world is truly screwed up, Badtux. In one of the great ironies, if Ahmadinejad gets in trouble with Khamenei to the point of being thrown in prison or ‘disappeared’, he has the right to emigrate to Israel. He was born Jewish, and his father converted for ‘business reasons’. Like many people who convert, Ahmadinejad gets a bit carried away with proving what a ‘good’ Muslim he is.
Actually, after the fall of the Soviet Union the largest group of Jewish emigrants went to Germany for years until Israel pushed to have German law changed to make Israel as simpler destination. Because of Soviet propaganda, Soviet Jews thought that Israel was on a par with the 19th century US West as far as civilization went.
The Likud need threats to stay in power, and if there isn’t a real threat they will create one. Peace is that last thing that the Likud and US Republicans want, because they lose power during peaceful times.