PATRICE GREANVILLE
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As part of our effort to make crucial political documents better known and more accessible (text, video, film, etc.) we recently published Italian historian/philosopher Domenico Losurdo's effective rebuttal of yet another Western wave of historical revisionism equating fascism with communism, while denying the Soviet Union her due for defeating the Nazis. Using their CIA-influenced, bought off, or confused bourgeois intellectuals like Hannah Arendt as ideological battering rams, the Western propagandists sought to make "imperialist democracies" (conveniently rebranded in their lingo "liberal democracies", but in truth capitalist dictatorships), the only ethical choice in a world otherwise defined by "totalitarianism". Obviously, a huge amount of bad faith and confusion was injected into this debate, scandalously lopsided by definition, considering the overwhelming dominance of pro-imperialist voices in all areas of opinion shaping: media, academia, pop culture, and politics, and their little regard for truth. (See Stalin and Hitler: Twin Brothers or Mortal Enemies?, TGP, Dec 28, 2023).
It is in this vein that we now add two more indispensable offerings (also free to download), one by Harpal Brar (Zionism: A Racist, Antisemitic and Reactionary Tool of Imperialism), the other, also focusing on the Palestine/Israel conflict, by Noam Chomsky, his important but all but ignored (by Western intelligentsia) The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians (1983).
I fully realise that many people in the TGP anti-imperialist audience have a problem with Chomsky, and that many have simply given up on him as an effective or noteworthy voice in contemporary politics, some dismissing him as "controlled opposition". While all of that may be true, and Chomsky in some areas can indeed be dismissed as a fake revolutionist or simply an anti-communist liberal or socdem spouting radical rhetoric, there is no denying that at least some of his prolific output remains relevant and even visionary to our current dilemmas. Just consider these random quotes from Fateful Triangle (1983):
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“Similarly, it is not at all concealed in Israel that its invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was undertaken in part to destroy the secular nationalism of the PLO, becoming a real nuisance with its persistent call for a peaceful diplomatic settlement, which was undermining the U.S. -Israeli strategy of gradual integration of the occupied territories within Israel. One result was the creation of Hizbollah, an Iranian-backed fundamentalist group that drove Israel out of most of Lebanon. For similar reasons, Israel supported fundamentalist elements as a rival to the accommodationist PLO in the occupied territories. The results are similar to Lebanon, as Hamas attacks against the Israeli military become increasingly difficult to contain. The examples illustrate the typical brilliance of intelligence operations when they have to deal with populations, not simply various gangsters. The basic reasoning goes back to the early days of Zionism: Palestinian moderates pose the most dangerous threat to the goal of avoiding any political settlement until facts are established to which it will have to conform. In brief, Islamic fundamentalism is an enemy only when it is “out of control." In that case, it falls into the category of “radical nationalism” or “ultranationalism," more generally[…]” Or this passage, from p. 50 of iFrame version of the same book: These examples illustrate the diplomatic and material support that the U.S. provides for Israel. 9 A concomitant, at the ideological level, is the persistence of considerable illusion about the nature of Israeli society and the Arab-lsraeli conflict. Since 1967, discussion of these issues has been difficult or impossible in the United States as a result of a remarkably effective campaign of vilification, abuse, and sometimes outright lying directed against those who dared to question received doctrine.* This fact has regularly been deplored by Israeli doves, who have been subjected to similar treatment here. They observe that their own position within Israel suffers because of lack of support within the U.S., where, as General (Res.) Mattityahu Peled observed, the “state of near hysteria" and the “blindly chauvinistic and narrow-minded" support for the most reactionary policies within Israel poses “the danger of prodding Israel once more toward a posture of calloused intransigence.” 10 The well-known Israeli journalist and Zionist historian Simha Flapan describes “the prejudice of American Jewry” as now “the major obstacle to an American-Palestinian and Israeli-Palestinian dialogue, without which there is little chance to move forward in the difficult and involved peace process." 11 In concentrating on the role of American Jewry, these Israeli writers focus much too narrowly, I believe. You activate terrorists to plant bombs in the cars of their elected mayors, you arm the settlers and a few Arab quislings to run rampages through Arab towns, pogroms against property, not against people. A few Arabs have been killed by settlers. The murderers are known, but the police are virtually helpless. They have their orders. What’s your excuse for not speaking out against these violations of Israeli law and Jewish morality? |
Does the above sound to you out of whack, lacking in intrinsic interest, or plainly insidious as some have claimed? In any case, for those who harbor doubts about Chomsky, (which this editor certainly shares), TGP has run a number of critical pieces. See, for example, Chomsky’s libertarian/anarcho-syndicalist mentality has undermined, if not denied, his credibility as an anti-imperialist. Or the even more conclusive, The Mainstream and the Margins: Noam Chomsky vs. Michael Parenti.
DOWNLOAD/READ FREE OF CHARGE THE FATEFUL TRIANGLE
1. Go directly to the Internet Archive LOCATION, OR read below, in iFrame embedded format. (Choose the double-page format, and adjust size to your preference.)
Now for the second recommended author.
Harpal Brar's formidable work.
Being a genuine socialist, Harpal Brar has spent most of his life in relative obscurity. Yet Brar's work in contemporary revolutionary politics and thought is as unique and significant as the man himself. A stubborn old-fashioned socialist (a "tankie", thereby a defender of Stalin) in an ocean of turncoat revisionists, Brar, born in India in 1939, has been planted in the British metropolis since 1962, first as a student, then as a lecturer in law at Harrow College of Higher Education (later merged into the renamed University of Westminster), and later in the textile business—whose proceeds he mostly uses to advance the revolutionary cause. The overall quality of his work is comparable to that of another great Anglo-Indian communist theorist, R. Palme Dutte, the man who provided probably the best description of fascism to date. And though less well-known, as mentioned earlier, Brar is the only communist intellectual to support Losurdo's fight against Eurocommunism.
Brar is the founder and former chairman of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist–Leninist), a role from which he stood down in 2018. His daughter Joti —a brilliant intellectual and revolutionist thinker in her own right—and the rest of his family are also involved in progressive struggles, chiefly through the party they founded, the Communist Party of Great Britain-ML (Marxist-Leninist). In 2017 Brar published a pamphlet for the party on the issue of Zionism, which he analyses with typical lucidity. Below an excerpt from the preface, and the download link. We strongly recommend it.
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Download/Read Free of Charge
•ZIONISM: A RACIST, ANTI-SEMITIC AND REACTIONARY TOOL OF IMPERIALISM
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