Jun 242019
 

Unknown Anne Frank 1941
Merwedeplein, Amsterdam

 

As I watch the – if you ask me pretty vapid- discussion develop that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) started by using the term “concentration camps” to describe the places on the US-Mexico border where “migrants” are being held, and where some of them die, I think back. Now, I actually like AOC, because she’s young (29) and that means she’s the future, simple as that.

And if there’s anything America needs today it’s young people, not even more Joe Biden or Donald Trump or Nancy Pelosi. America’s young people need someone to speak up for them, and the old guard is not going to do that, if only because they have no idea what their grandchildren are thinking or doing.

Being just 29 also means AOC will say silly things and make mistakes, but more importantly it means she’s allowed to make mistakes. So when she calls the border facilities “concentration camps”, I don’t have a huge problem with that, certainly now that kids are actually dying in them. As I read has happened.

 

As bad as the Holocaust was, there’s no need to give anyone the exclusive right to use the “concentration camp” term. History has been rewritten enough to exclude the gays, the Roma, the gypsies victims etc etc who were “exterminated” in WWII, from our past. Could AOC have done better by using “internment camps” or some such term? Yeah, maybe, but she was going for the shock effect, and she wasn’t around in the immediate aftermath of WWII.

Was she perhaps wrong in going for the shock effect? Not that I can see. She just doesn’t understand it the same way older generations than hers do. Where she did slip is in blaming it all on Trump. Because what comes out now is how Obama was the master “extraditor”. Under his 8-year administration, countless -100s of 1000s, millions even?- migrants were extradited that the media didn’t pay attention to.

None of that excuses what is happening under Trump, but it does provide perspective. As does America’s long-term support for the very people whose ancestors were the victims of the actual WWII camps, in suppressing another people, the Palestinians, in much the same way their parents were suppressed and murdered . That is something I have a hard time comprehending. And that inevitably makes me wonder what Anne Frank would have made of it all. Who, far more than Benjamin Netanyahu, and far more than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, would be considered an authority on the topic.

I published the article below on January 11 2010, almost 9 1/2 years ago. Time doesn’t just fly, time has gone hypersonic. AOC’s focus is different from what that of older generations is. But you can’t hold that against her. She’s not trying to insult WWII victims, or their legacies. She should probably still be careful though, about swinging big terms like “concentration camps” around, and about blaming everything wrong on Trump. But, as I said, she’s allowed to make mistakes.

Here’s my take on the death of Miep Gies at the age of 100, whereas Anne Frank never made it beyond 15. Originally from Monday, January 11, 2010:

 

 

Ilargi: Miep Gies died today. She was 100 years old. Born Hermine Santrouschitz in 1909, Miep worked for Otto Frank in Amsterdam when WW2 started. She helped hide the Frank family in the “achterhuis” on the Prinsengracht, the secret room (annex) in the shadow of the Westerkerk church the family lived in for a long time, until they were betrayed.

After Anne was put on a train to the Bergen Belsen concentration camp in 1944 and died there from typhus in March 1945, Miep managed to retrieve her diary, which she handed to Anne’s father, Otto, the sole survivor from the household, in 1945, after the war had ended. In 1947 Otto had his daughter’s diary published, and everything else, including now Miep Gies, is history.

Now I’m not Jewish, nor was I born and bred in Amsterdam proper, but I am an Amsterdammer nonetheless, and have for as long as I can remember been aware of what happened to the Jordaan neighborhood in the city that borders on the part of the Prinsengracht where the Westerkerk and the Anne Frank House are. To this day, there are a ton of words in Amsterdam that are unique to the city, and there are a ton more in the Dutch language at large, that are all joods, jiddish, yiddish.

Every Dutch person knows that Mokum means Amsterdam. A yiddish term. Like mazzel! (good luck), bajes (prison), gabber (mate, friend), gein (fun), geteisem (‘bad’ people), goochem (smart), jatten (to steal), kapsones (“hot air” behavior), penose (criminals), pleite (outtahere), schlemiel (dumbass), smeris (cop), smoes (excuse), sores (trouble), stiekem (stealthily), tof (nice!).

The Dutch language would be a hell of a lot poorer if not for the centuries of Jewish culture that enriched the country, and most of all Amsterdam. Rembrandt and Vermeer, and all of their 17th century peers, would not have created what they did without the Jews. The tulip bubble, well, perhaps, but the spice trade that made the city the center of the universe would never have happened without Amsterdam’s Jordaan people. And no, rich they were not. In fact, for most of them most of the time, they were the poorest of the poor.

And it’s all still there, the culture, the songs, the humor, the words. It’s just that the people are not. They were renditioned away.

Through the ages, Holland was a refuge for Jewish people from all over Europe. In the 1940’s, they were put on transport trains to camps, and 90% never came back, including Anne. The city center, and the Jordaan, may now be populated with well-to-do 21st century citizens, but if you take the time to stand still on one of the many bridges in the hood and you listen well, you can still feel the emptiness left behind by those who were forced to die like so much cattle.

And that, my friends, is my personal hinterland. That is me.

And don’t worry, I know about the Dutch part in the slave trade, and a 100,000 other despicable trades. My people are about as guilty as they come. And that is me too. But my people were also welcoming the Jews for centuries when they were cast out everywhere else.

History is a multi-pronged tool, a bird of many feathers and a beast of many moods. Nothing changed there, and nothing ever will. We are a blood-thirsty species, more, much more, than we are willing to allow. It will decide our way forward as it has our ways in the past. And we will not make it a pretty picture. We simply can’t. We’ll be cruel as can be. As we are.

But we will also have always another Anne Frank and another Miep Gies. One lived to be 15 years old, the other 100. Both saw, first-hand, more gratuitous violence than most of us will ever see in our lifetimes. There is some layer of comfort in there, and I hope you will forgive me for not being able to identify it off the bat. I’m just sure it’s there.

Here’s Miep Gies in her own words:

I am not a hero

‘More than twenty thousand Dutch people helped to hide Jews and others in need of hiding during those years. I willingly did what I could to help. My husband did as well. It was not enough.

There is nothing special about me. I have never wanted special attention. I was only willing to do what was asked of me and what seemed necessary at the time.”

 

 

 

 

Aug 012018
 


Salvador Dali Swans reflecting elephants 1937

 

I am often confused by events that happen and by things that people say. But then I think them over and they mostly become less confusing, even if often slivers of confusion remain. This was again the case yesterday morning. Donald Trump went after the Koch brothers, the one biggest symbol of everything that’s wrong with American politics, and I expected the anti-Trump echo-chamber to finally agree on something with him.

But no, what was I thinking? The echo-chamber has deafened and blinded its inhabitants for far too long and far too loudly for one single word of agreement to come out of it. Trump could sing the praises of Hillary Clinton tomorrow morning and it would be used against him. This is not new, it’s been going on for his entire presidency, and before, but it’s still good for people to acknowledge that it’s getting worse be the day – or better perhaps in their eyes?!

Still, if you want to call yourself a journalist, and want to be taken seriously as such, objectivity is the number one requirement. But who in the US or international press can claim to be objective when it comes to Trump? Trump sells, on all sides of the aisle. Be very much for him, or equally much against him, and your paper or TV channel can expect revenues to rise. Being neutral on him: not so much.

Anyway, so Trump went after the Koch brothers. That must have shaken up a lot of the Republican party, because countless senators and congressmen and lower level politicians owe their seats more or less exclusively to the hundreds of millions the brothers throw at election campaigns. Trump does not. Here’s how Tyler Durden covered the action:

Two days after Charles Koch voiced his growing displeasure with Trump’s domestic, foreign and economic policy, warning that Trump tariffs could trigger a US recession, President Trump responded on Tuesday by slamming the powerful Koch-led donor network as “globalist” and “a total joke,” rejecting the conservative group amid reports that the network was shifting away from him over trade and immigration issues. Trump alleged that his policies have “made them richer” and that they “want to protect their companies outside the U.S. from being taxed,” while he supports the American worker. In another tweet Trump called them: “Two nice guys with bad ideas.”

“The globalist Koch Brothers, who have become a total joke in real Republican circles, are against strong borders and powerful trade. I never sought their support because I don’t need their money or bad ideas,” Trump said in a post on Twitter. “They love my Tax & Regulation Cuts, Judicial picks & more. I made them richer” Trump continued his angry tirade: “Their network is highly overrated, I have beaten them at every turn. They want to protect their companies outside the U.S. from being taxed, I’m for America First & the American Worker – a puppet for no one. Two nice guys with bad ideas. Make America Great Again!”

That seems obvious enough. The 82- and 78-year-old brothers have bought much of the GOP with their billions, but not Trump. Whether that is because they didn’t want to, or couldn’t, is largely irrelevant. One would think even the anti-Trumpers could feel some sense of gratification in the demise of the brothers’ pernicious influence over America as a country, but no, their hate of Trump trumps their dislike of the Koches.

 

And you know what they found to rationalize this? The word ‘globalist’. Yesterday morning I was watching in amazement as my Twitter feed supplied one tweet after the other on the theme. It lasted just a few hours and then it was gone; this morning the whole thing has died out. But the message, or should I say the damage, had been conveyed.

The allegation in these circles is that Globalist Equals Jew. And so you can’t call anyone a globalist, or at least Trump can’t, or you -and he- only can when someone ‘s not Jewish. Now, globalism is a real thing, it’s a philosophy concerning how economies can and should be organized. And it’s sort of the opposite of Trump’s America First and Make America Great Again.

People who ‘believe’ in globalism are opposed to Trump’s trade tariffs. Not so much his proposal to the EU to drop all tariffs though, because that is what they also want. For Trump, globalism means the jobs America lost to people like the Koch brothers moving manufacturing to China et al. His view is that America needs those jobs back. These are simply different views of how economies and societies should be organized. Nothing more, nothing less.

But by making the word Globalist the same as Jew, the discussion about the different views becomes impossible. You cannot call a Jewish person a globalist, even if that person ‘believes’ in the concept of globalism. On the other hand, it’s fine to call non-Jewish people globalists. And this is because certain rightwing forces have at some point allegedly used the term as an anti-semitic slur, or dog-whistle.

However, who decided to let the rightwing decide what a word means? See, I’m sure those who bring this up didn’t invent it out of thin air, but globalism is still a real thing, and since no-one wishes to equate globalism with Judaism one-on-one, I’d say caution is required. Like this: If you cannot positively prove that someone is an antisemite, don’t go there girlfriend. It’s toxic.

 

In Britain, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, 180 light years away from Trump politically, is the subject of an anti-semitism smear campaign at the same time. Though all he’s ever done is be critical of Israeli policies vs the Palestinians. And if we can’t criticize that kind of thing anymore, I don’t know what we live in, but a democracy it’s certainly not. By the way, The Guardian ran a headline yesterday saying “Corbyn Ally Says ‘Jewish Trump Fanatics Making Up’ Antisemitism Claims”. Wait, Jewish Trump fanatics? Oh, never mind…

And yes, we all know that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is Jewish, and his favorite daughter Ivanka has converted to orthodox Judaism when she married Kushner, and Trump’s grandchildren by the couple are Jewish too. Still when economic adviser Gary Cohn left earlier this year, and Trump said “he’s a globalist, but I still like him”, that is now being used against him. Trump’s an antisemite. But Cohn would still be a globalist even if he weren’t Jewish.

Which fits in nicely and seamlessly with Trump being a racist and misogynist and rapist and Putin-puppet and yada yada. But you know, the anti-Trump chamber has become so deafening it’s become fully dysfunctional. There is no information emanating from it anymore, even if many journalists reside in that chamber.

There’s just a bunch of people trying to trump each other in their hate of the man. For them that seems to do the trick, but for anyone outside of the chamber, it’s just a whole lot of noise. It has taken Robert Mueller a year and a half to come up with absolutely nothing in the way of collusion, and he just keeps going. For what? He wants to make it the full 4-year Trump term?

I’m sure there are people out there who use Globalist as a slur for Jewish, but I have no way of being sure Trump uses it in that sense, and neither do his detractors. They have reached a stage where any allegation or rumor or innuendo seems for them to prove their unproven suspicions even and ever more, but they have long lost sight of what is actually true, and what is mere conjecture.

Labeling someone an antisemite is one of the worst things one can accuse another person of, and it should therefore never be done lightly, let alone without any proof. It’s just dirty smear if you have no evidence; and mere allegations don’t cut it. Sure there are people who voted for Trump who fit the picture, but that doesn’t make the man an antisemite. Nor does calling someone who believes in open borders everywhere, a globalist. Whether that person is Jewish or not. Don’t just throw shit around hoping it will stick.

 

Oh, and if you feel tempted to call me an antisemite now, here’s something I wrote in January 2010 when Anne Frank’s friend Miep Gies died aged 100, about where I grew up: Miep Gies Died Today. Good luck with that.