Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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 Posted: Wed Jan 23, 2008 7:29 pm Post subject: On AntiAmericanism and "Self-Loathing Jews..." |
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I would like to lay this issue to rest. Many here complain that nationalists or patriots or what-have-you label any critic "antiAmerican" or "self-loathing Jew" merely for voicing contrary opinions reference "the official line." I also recall Mindmetoo's taking a position not so long ago that Americans cannot be antiAmerican. It would follow that the British cannot be antiBritish. And no Jew can be "self-loathing." Etc., etc.
I disagree.
George Orwell, an Englishman of the East, born in South Asia, held and articulated bitterly anti-British views. And he proclaimed that he was anti-British. Point for Orwell for credibility and integrity. Probably one of the many reasons some of us celebrate his work. See Burmese Days and his short, autobiographical essay, "Shooting an Elephant."
In Burmese Days, for example, Orwell's protaganist "James Flory" broods...
| George Orwell wrote: |
| ...And as to the English of the East, the sahiblog, Flory had come so to hate them...that he was quite incapable of being fair to them...Time passed, and each year Flory found himself less at home in the world of the sahibs, more liable to get into trouble when he talked seriously on any subject whatever...But it is a corrupting thing to live one's real life in secret...In the end the secrecy of your revolt poisons you like a secret disease...The time comes when you burn with hatred of your own countrymen, when you long for a native rising to drown their Empire in blood. |
Orwell, Burmese Days, 69-70.
Orwell clarifies several of the anti-phenomenon's constituent elements: one is poisoned by a profound hatred of one's own countrymen -- or another nationality like, say, Israel -- and an inability to be fair to them; one demonstrates an inability to talk on politics or other "serious subjects" without launching into diatribes and betraying one's true feelings.
If Norman Finklestein's freinds were privately advising him "to tone it down" yet he continued employing bitter language like "a repellent gang of plutocrats, hoodlums, and hucksters" intent on extorting..." to describe Jewish leaders, then I suggest Finklestein shared much in common with Orwell's "Flory."
Note also that, in both cases, there are not problems to tweak or address more systematically inasmuch as the entire subject under discussion is necessarily rotten-to-the-core and irredeemably evil.
Further, American historian and foreign-affairs critic William Appleman Williams showed decades ago that one could criticize American foreign policy without becoming a prisoner to anti-Americanism. He was very well aware that that line existed and he consciously declined to cross it. He also advised other critics not to cross it, too...
| William Appleman Williams wrote: |
| Not even Joseph Stalin maintained that America's record in world affairs was exactly the reverse of [that which the so-called official line asserts], and for Americans to do so would be to mistake a candid and searching reexamination of their own mythology for a tirade of useless self-damnation. [Americans' mythology on] American foreign policy [is] not all wrong... |
Williams, Tragedy of American Diplomacy, New ed., 20.
So, no, then. I would respond to those who leap to "critics" like Finklestein's defense, countering he merely critiqued Jews, that such defenders fail to acknowledge that he has launched a tirade of uselss self-damnation, thus rashly and unwisely alienating people he need not have alienated as an assistant professor whose tenure was not yet secure -- and now he is feeling its consquences (and asking others to sympathize with him on sentimental grounds, counting on the likely truth that many antiZionists/antiIsraelis will easily flock to him).
However you may stand on this, I trust you will at least be as honest with yourself as Orwell was with himself and that you will recognize the kinds of distinctions that highly-respected critics like Williams recognized with respect to anti-phenomena worldviews.
Finklestein Thread |
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