Harry’s Place

I think Thomas Cahill wrote the book Gift of the Jews, as well as another, Gift of the Irish, each showing the profound, central contributions each group made to Western civilization.

Bizarre list. Bizarre post.

On Dennis Leary, all I can say is that he had a great stand up act. Indeed, it belonged to someone else: Bill Hicks.

I would add Conor Cruise O’Brien (see HP recently). But interestingly, seeing Orwell is on the list, here is a quote from O’Brien re Orwell:

“Orwell disliked Catholics much more than he did Jews; he always tried to be fair to individuals in both categories, often in a grumpy and dispirited sort of way. The categories, indeed, overlapped to some extent in his mind: political Catholicism, like Zionism, is a form of digested “nationalism” in his system, and he writes in a 1932 essay of “the Hebrew-like pride and exclusivity of the genuinely Catholic mind”. It is all very Protestant. Jews and Catholics who love the English language and value honesty and decency must admire Orwell, but from a certain distance.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/dec/21/conor-cruise-obrien

I was surprised to see W.B. Yeats on the list. He was mixed up in the Golden Dawn and theosophy and was a close friend of Ezra Pound, which would suggest, if anything, philofascism. Apart from writing an early work, described as a “poetic drama”, entitled Masada (which I haven’t read) what did he do that was so philosemitic?

Changing the subject — In Sao Paulo, where I lived for several years, it’s not unknown for non-Jewish households, even practising Catholics, to have mezuzot on their outer doorposts. That’s something I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere else. To a certain extent it shows a common Brazilian approach to religion – why restrict yourself to just one when there are so many of them out there waiting to welcome you – but also it’s sometimes meant as a political statement as well.

I am a philosemite. Because it takes real love to bear the sabras sometimes…

But Israelis love Argentinians. Must be the only country in the world. Forever indebted.

Gene, I’m genuinely interested in your opinion of who in the Obama administration fits the profile.

I’ve got Biden and Clinton in my list - who else? (some of them are already Jewish of course, Emanuel and Axelrod)

Ok, why Pete Townsend?

I read that Orwell was cool towards Zionism because the left at the time was very pro-Zionist, and he was reacting against the political correctness of the 1940s. Of course, he may have been genuinely against “exclusivity” as well.

Julie Burchill seems missing. An obvious one no?

I read that Orwell was cool towards Zionism because the left at the time was very pro-Zionist, and he was reacting against the political correctness of the 1940s. Of course, he may have been genuinely against “exclusivity” as well.

I think it was tied into his general hostility to nationalism.

Must admit I’d have been happier to see a list which includes the reasons why these people are listed. In most cases, I’m totally ignorant. Anyone care to fill the rest of us in?

I’m shocked to notice that I’m not on the list.

But Israelis love Argentinians. Must be the only country in the world. Forever indebted.

Partly because Israelis admire Argentinian soccer players, I suppose.

Yeah I agree it’s pretty pointless without any explanations. You can have Jimmy Saville though, he’s always going on about getting some Israeli medal.

Is it possible to be a semitic semitophile? If so, count me in.

Is this Norman Finkelstein’s new website?

It is amazing how many “magazines” and “journals” which portray themselves as neutral carriers of the news are just Jewish papers which disguise it by their names

“Ok, why Pete Townsend?”

People try to put us down
Just because we’re phhhhhhhhilosemites

Pete Townshend apparently said:

And where are we today? We’re in the same anti-Semitic apologetic denial - it’s a dishrag of a policy. Trying to blame Israel for defending a country we created. And I’m not even Jewish! [...] At this time in my life, with nuclear threats coming from Iran and Korea, I am becoming so impatient with the ex-hippies all around me.

The Yids are Alright:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=rmowtt9vhLY

This is yet another opportunity for me to announce my desire for a date with Natalie Portman.

It is amazing how many “magazines” and “journals” which portray themselves as neutral carriers of the news are just Jewish papers which disguise it by their names

And you didn’t make the list either.

People who aren’t oppressed want to feel oppressed. I don’t know why.

This cuts both ways for Jews, of course - depending on whether you think that Jews are perennially persecuted, or are at the centre of a huge web of deceit and influence, twitching the strings…

At this time in my life, with nuclear threats coming from Iran and Korea, I am becoming so impatient with the ex-hippies all around me.

Pete Townsend is no loss to international politics. He should read the intelligence and other reports describing the the lack of nuclear threat from Iran, and understand the fact that (North) Korea is no threat, not least because it is contained by China, but also because it is still technologically backward in many ways, despite the fact it may have created a nuclear explosion. I suppose he must be frustrated by the boring pacifism of the US government on both these issues, but there is such a thing of as a pesky evidence basis on which to proceed.

He should read the intelligence and other reports describing the the lack of nuclear threat from Iran

Would you bet your life on that?

Am I allowed to be a philosemite while regretting that the terrorist Begin died peacefully in his bed?

Nodrog:

“Am I allowed to be a philosemite while regretting that the terrorist Begin died peacefully in his bed?”

Why? Was Begin King of all Jews?

Oh, cripes. I am not a Jew, and I don’t have “Friends of the British (Scottish, English) with a bit of Dutch, no religious affiliation” supporting my tribe. Dammit! Where the hell do I get a celebrity filled support group?

Would you bet your life on that?

No, but neither would I have bet my life on Saddam not having chemical nuclear or biological weapons with which to use against invading US troops. However, before the invasion of Iraq, I did bet someone the princely sum of £20 that there would be no such weapons used by the mustachioed dictator at that time, and I won.

[Quote] People who aren’t oppressed want to feel oppressed. I don’t know why.

The usual reason, I believe, is so that they can say, “It’s not my fault.”

I read Exodus when I was 11 or 12, and become a rabid zionist and philosemite if you will. Not until university and a very decent professor, Lebanese Arab chap that I stopped being so rabid. I’m a two stater now and still believe strongly in the right to exist etc but more cynical when Israel blows up a UN Observation Post.

If Nabokov is in the list, why not Lev Tolstoy or Nikolai Leskov? And certainly Andrei Sakharov deserves to be in it.

3 more names to toss into the conversation pit.

Hitchens, C.
Amis, M.
Balfour A.

The great thing about the USA is the embedded nature of Jews/Judaism in its society and culture.

I am amazed at how many radio hosts are Jewish and those who aren’t are strong supporters of Israel. It natural to hear “Happy Channukah” on both radio and tv, and I haven’t checked but tv news stations have had menorah’s in the studio whether actual or virtual images.

Bush returned from his recent show dodging to host the White House Channukah party and Wall Street closed for the Jewish New Year right in the midle of the bail-out discussions.

Mentioning that a politician or personality is Jewish or the use of Yiddish words on the media is natural, unlike in the UK where any hint of being Jewish makes one wary of the comments and outrage that are bound to follow no matter what you say.

I remember a recent article in Ha Aretz that stated there were now 45 Jews in all houses of the political make up of USA Government. You don’t get to such positions if people don’t vote for you.

Isn’t it Mississippi (or somewhere with a large Black population) that voted for a Jewish Govenor?

USA is definitely a Philosemite Society. I remember that in the ’70’s in New Jersey I saw the largest gathering of Orthodox Jews in my life in Morrisstown (almost a serendipity pun), amazed at how brazenly they openly walked the streets of the town as if there was nothing wrong with being Jewish (as compared with ’70’s Britain with its remaing Golf Club attitudes towards Jews)

However Orwell wrote a perceptive essay about British antisemitism and had a number of close Jewish friends

Or alternatively: Some of my best friends are Jewish as well as Mi5 agents.

“Oh, cripes. I am not a Jew, and I don’t have “Friends of the British (Scottish, English) with a bit of Dutch, no religious affiliation” supporting my tribe. Dammit! Where the hell do I get a celebrity filled support group?” Benjamin

Well, Benjamin, don’t despair, you’ve got me on your list, I’m a philo-Benjaminist But, what a disappointment that you are not Jewish! I had taken this for granted. Never mind, I’m not Jewish either - tho’ I have a Jewish great grandmother. Scottish English with a bit of Dutch is not bad at all

So top of the list, we have Winston Churchill, who railed in the Morning Post in 1920 against the international Jewish conspiracy. The one also who ignored the pleas to bomb the lines to the death camps during the Holocaust. Yes, he loved the Zionists, whom he patronisingly called “loyal Jews”, but he’s no friend of mine.

Her is what he had to say about Jewish radicals:

“This movement amongst the Jews (the Russian Revolution) is not new. From the days of Spartacus Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kuhn (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany) and Emma Goldman (United States), this world wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and the reconstruction of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognizable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities has gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire. There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistic Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from Jewish leaders.”

William Butler Yeats? Can anyone explain why his name is on the list?

I would add the name of Edmund Wilson the great American literary critic.

Charlie Chaplin should be on that list.

Hitchens, C.? No the former David Irving friend does not belong on the list.

Lord Jim of Saville is according to Wikipedia an ‘Esteemed friend of Israel’. Respect I think is due.

I find ‘friend of the Jews’ worse than Philosemite. In my case it’s identification with the Jews. I think I AM a Jew, and anyone who tries to contradict this will be in trouble with me.

My friend Moses said that if you gathered a thousand Jews into one place, you would find every type of person imaginable, but he did admit that circumstances in Europe tended to draw strivers and achievers from out of his people.

Two things come together in my love of Jews. Firstly a natural identification with cultural outsiders (like Benjamin) and then the achievements of Jews in Europe, holding up a mirror to their adopted societies.

Paradoxically - or not surprisingly - my identification with Jews comes mostly from German cultural roots. No wonder, anyone who was anyone there would have wanted to be a Jew. But I am quite drenched in German Jewish poets, composers, thinkers, without whom my life would have been much poorer.

Heine was one of the greatest minds in Germany, and he would not have written the way he did had he not been Jewish. Ditto for my favourite poet, Else Lasker-Schueler, who outdid her contemporaries with her striking originality.

Then there were Moses, Abraham, Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn, the family that illuminated the musical culture of Berlin. Karl Kraus, the great critic of language, Gertrud Kolmar, Nelly Sachs, Marx as a thinker not as politician, ROSA LUXEMBURG - who could want a better person than her in politics? Mahler,Schoenberg, Zemlinsky. And others.

Last but not least, The Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, the brains of which were mainly Jewish. I think I might have committed suicide if I had not encountered T.W. Adorno’s writings on music, poetry and philosophy.

I am also attracted to the pronounced semitic features both of Jews and Arabs. But plastic surgery would be going too far…

I won’t start on Jews outside Germany. There is my friend Moses, who could not think the way he does if he weren’t Jewish. Of course there is David T whom I idolise.

I am keeping Johannes Brahms separate. He’s on the list of philosemites. I don’t know quite why. I know his biography pretty thoroughly and have found no evidence. Maybe someone knows something I don’t; I’d be very interested.

He was called a Jew by Wagner, for whom he represented false German culture. Brahms was not at first enthusiastic about Mendelssohn - like Schumann who idolised him. But as he grew older Brahms’ enthusiasm for Mendelssohn incresed. People are still snotty about, On the Wings of Song, but Brahms said of it, “That is the way people should be able to compose.”

Am I allowed to be a philosemite while regretting that the terrorist Begin died peacefully in his bed?

NODROG

Only if you view the death of John Kelly with similar chagrin, and attack proportionally greater distaste to the of likes of those of Georgios Grivas or Lazar Kaganovich, to name but two.

The one also who ignored the pleas to bomb the lines to the death camps during the Holocaust.

DAVID ROSENBERG

This has been discussed before. In a period of total war, one or two sources of intelligence discussed an unprecedented practice. There were no smart bombs to strap onto Biggles’ Sopworth Camel and, when targets in or around the camp were targeted (notably August 1944), hundreds of prisoners died.

Alec, on the bombing question: I had a teacher many years ago who had been in a POW camp (*not* a concentration camp). I remember clearly his description of a bombing raid when the RAF knocked a wall down enabling hundreds of POWs to escape. Unforunately I don’t remember the name or location of the camp.

PS. The Sopwith Camel (no kin) was a WW1 plane.

Felix

No, I’m not Jewish. Christ, I’ve tried. Yes, I am bitterly disappointed by this turn of events. Apparently I look like a Jew (whatever Jews are supposed to look like), according to a cockney chap I once knew in England (he actually called me a ‘four by two’), who was convinced that I regularly attended synagogue. All rather odd.

No, I’m not Jewish. Christ, I’ve tried. Yes, I am bitterly disappointed by this turn of events.

Don’t worry, I think its still possible you could have a valid and fulfilling life ahead of you. It will just be a little bit harder, that’s all.

Text Message from Christ: “Benjamin, being Jewish is a cross I had to bear. Believe me, you’re better out of it. Why not marry a Jewish girl and have Jewish kids. PS - after three years you’ll need to take a mistress”

Churchill’s writings on Jewish radicals simply pointed out that the Jewish people had two possible futures ahead of them, to whit international-leftism and zionism. The choice was as stark as that between evil and good and if the Jews made the wrong choice and became subsumed in the most wicked and murderous force in human history, socialism, this would deservedly make their name execrable for eternity.

He was right and Baruch Hashem the Jews chose Zionism.

tho its worth pointing out, while we’re celebrating the sons of Israel that like David Rosenberg, te above-mentioned Lazar Kaganovich made the other choice, and a right stinker he was too.

I did my PhD on Adorno, Felix, and I think it had the opposite effect (he was one very unhappy man).

My nomination would be for Yevgeni Yevtushenko, whose poem commemorating the massacre of Jews at Babi Yar was set to music by Shostakovich. The poem closes…

And I myself, like one long soundless scream
Above the thousands of thousands interred,
I’m every old man executed here,
As I am every child murdered here.

No fiber of my body will forget this.
May “Internationale” thunder and ring
When, for all time, is buried and forgotten
The last of antisemites on this earth.

There is no Jewish blood that’s blood of mine,
But, hated with a passion that’s corrosive
Am I by antisemites like a Jew.
And that is why I call myself a Russian!

http://remember.org/witness/babiyar.html

At last, Benjamin, I have got a direct response from you. It has made my Christmas!

But aren’t you dramatising about your ‘bitter disappointment?’ Who hasn’t felt bitter disappoimtmet? You are you, a sum of your developing experiences. Everything else falls by the wayside compared with this. And what would HP be without you? Your mobbers would be quite lost without you. When you are not there, they look for you, they try to find you under other names, to attack you in advance. They love you.

So you ‘look Jewish?’ Well, count your lucky stars. I wish I did! (But I am a lunatic, and I love over the top joking - this should certainly make me Jewish).

Well, I’m going off thread, for my dear Benjamin’s sake. Ignore my endearemts as David T does. Business is business. I spent the morning HPeeing and I HAVE to stop to do Christmas shopping. But I hope the Spirit of the Age thread does not disappear too soon, as I’m quite passionate on the subject of failed socialism and communism. Maybe there will be other opportunities.

Maybe I will just add two poems by my Jewish heroine in another post to complete my philosemitic picture.

But aren’t you dramatising about your ‘bitter disappointment?’

Of course. :-)

Don’t worry, I think its still possible you could have a valid and fulfilling life ahead of you.

Thanks! :-)

Else Lasker-Schueler, translated by me

MY PEOPLE

Rotten the rock
From which I spring up
And sing my songs to God…
Sheer I plunge from the roadside
Rustling deep inside myself
Far down alone on lamenting stone
Toward the sea.

Have streamed off so
From my blood’s
Bitter fermentation.
And always, always still the echo
In me,
When fearful in the East
The rotten bone-rock
My people
Shrieks to God.

Relevance to our threads:
She breaks the hold of the hardened ego, eg. that of Nazism, and lets it plummet into the sea.
There is an appeal to a preindustrial identity, but quite, quite different from that of Islam fanaticism. But, still, one has to see the connection.
The references are obviously Jewish, but I believe she was also aiming at an alter ego of the German people. The theme of My People/Mein Volk was popular already in Neo-Romanticism, and increasingly so under Nazism. ELS knocks the theme for a loop from which it can never recover.

DEDICATION (HINGABE)
(Published in old age in Jerusalem about the unfulfilled promise of poetry)

I look at the picture rows of clouds as they go by
Till they dissolve and show the azure path on which they lie.

Along all worlds in solitude sad I drifted
Until the staroglyphs and man’s moon-signs I’d sifted.

And asked myself abashed and shy, if and when
I once was born and then had lost my life again.

I was clothed in doubt in a dress the wheel of time had spun
Consecrate to me when in hoary grief my time had run.

And every image that I of this our world had won
Suffered a twofold loss and every thought I ever thought had gone.
************
Oh my God! There has just been an earth tremour in Verona. The whole building shook. Execute the gays before it’s too late!

Based on his portrayal of the Jewish families in “Berlin Stories,” I’d add Christopher Isherwood.

Hitchens a philosemite?!?! So far as I know, he still admires Paul Wolfowitz and is on good terms with David Frum and Hitchens’s mother was Jewish (but converted). However, he never misses an opportunity to heap scorn on the religion and its followers, including damning the Macabees last Hanukka as ignorant monotheistic fanatics who failed to appreciate the occupiers’ ostensibly superior Hellenistic culture (which included descrating Jewish temples with swine) and persistently refers to Jesus and his immediate family Palestinians although the historic evidence is clear they were observant Jews.

Joe Camel:

If you see mezzuzot on the doorposts of “non-Jewish” Brazillians, practicing Catholics or not, it could have more to do with the residents being the descendents of forced converts who fled the Portuguese Inquisition, than any cosmopolitan notions. My home city of Toronto has a huge Portuguese Catholic population, but a very small number were discovered to light candles on Friday nights down in the basements of their homes, a practice that could only be attributed to the probability that they were also descendents of forced converts who kept a tiny aspect of the old faith.

G - I just wanted to check that I understood you. So, it’s OK for Winnie C to blame Jews for being the evil international conspiracy behind every subversive and dangerous radical and revolutionary movement as long as he makes the right noises about Zionism? Hmmm.

Wonder what his views were on other peoples of the world. Here’s a quote:

“I do not admit…that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia…by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race…has come in and taken its place” - (Churchill to Palestine Royal Commission, 1937)

My number 1 would be Rudolph Rocker, brought up in a catholic orphanage in Germany who became a hero of the jewish sweatshop workers in the East End of London in the 1890s and 1900s, whom he unionised and led on strikes for better conditions and better wages. He also edited yiddish anarchist papers and journals - not bad for a goyishe German!

Alec.
Kaganovich,Kelly (presumably of Wexford),and Grivas.All prize bastards, no doubt, with various degrees of justification.
Thanks for the information.

Paul:

“Charlie Chaplin should be on that list.”

He was Jewish already!

“I did my PhD on Adorno, Felix, and I think it had the opposite effect (he was one very unhappy man).” Alex Ross

I’m not surprised by your reaction to Adorno. It is very common. I suppose it depends on which angle you appraoch him from. I did not get to know him as a scholar, but through passionate involvement, and I entered through the ‘backdoor’ of his essays on literature and music.

He would have agreed with you that he was an unhappy man as he believed that sharing in the suffering of humanity was the only path he could follow.

His happiness resided in his sadness. No-one makes the joys of music, poetry radiate as he does. No-one I know understood music and poetry as completely as he did. His generosity knows no bounds in essays on Eichendorff, Goethe, Schoenberg, Alban Berg and many others in which he piles riches on riches.

If he didn’t like an author he tended to see the virtues as faults, and vice versa the faults became virtues.

After boring University studies my interest in music and poetry had palled - until I read his essays which made everything come to life again and to a life that could only increase and grow. No one made me happier in the arts than he did. True, reading him in German is more satisfying.

He was indirectly my best piano teacher, because he taught me to look for the last nuances and this had its effects, because my listeners notice this.

But there was also a particular personal affinity. Before I knew of his existence, I was a little backward Adorno at school. I grew up in a world of Anglo-Saxon positivism and pragmatism, and who knows how - German DNA, perhaps - , I was dissatisfied with descriptive books on music. I wanted to know what the composer was telling us through his music.

Adorno had a particular love of Schumann who was my favourite traditional composer.

German friends in Flensburg advised me to buy his and Walter Benjamin’s books. I gave them away as I told my friends that I had tried my level best, but couldn’t understand a word. The only thing I could do was give up.

Then one day I was in a bookshop and noticed a volume of his Notes on Literature. I opened it and saw that he was writing about a favourite poet. I began to read, and without really understanding, I noticed something in the texture of his prose that reminded me of Schumann’s Kreisleriana. From this moment on there was no stopping me. I can only understand philosophical texts if I have a libidinal relationship to them.. Later I learned that a piece from Kreisleriana was played at his funeral.

So you can see that in my case there are a lot of personal affinites and connections. I think his philosophy crystallised best fragmentarily, in those essays than in the big tomes on Negative Dialektik and Aesthetische Theorie. He himelf was opposed to Masterworks and prefered fragmentary thought.

I’m leaving aside a battle on his philosophy, because it would take us too far. But I wrote these notes as I think Adorno will be of some relevance to discussion on HP. I smuggle in his ideas, which are also mine, carefiully here and there and usually avoid mentioning his name, since it is as a red cloth to a bull for many people.

His Philosophische Terminologie is the most wonderful introduction to philosophy I can imagine. His lectures were improvised and recorded by students: I don’t know whether you encountered these two paperbacks during your studies.

I don’t know how Adorno would have reacted to your Yevtsuchenko citation. It may have sufferd from inadequate translation. Y. has his heart in the right place, but the articulation is weak.It smacks of platform oration and cheap sentiments.”Precisely the weakest achievements of art,” wrote Walter Benjamin, are based on an immediate invocation of life., the most convincing, however, rely (…)…on a mythically oriented sphere: das Gedichtete (meaning the concentration of elements in the poem. (Gedicht, means poem, but also concentration in German). Now this clearly does not occur in the Yevtuschenko translation. It folds in on its own weakness. And it’s no good saying, fuck great poetry, he’s getting his message across. I’m not sure that he is, exept to a captive mob, that might react with equal sympathy to an anti-semitic tirade. Adorno was averse to art that presses aesthitc pleasure out of the screams of victims. He felt a greater empathy with poets like Samuel Beckett, who never mention Hitler and concentration camps, but show what the human spirit has been reduced to in our era, once strpped of outer appearances.

I have diverged slightly form Adorno’s view, as, though I think he and Beckett are basically in the right, I can’t just throw overboard the rest of deluded humanity to which I belong and which contains all the seeds of developments in all directions.

“I was surprised to see W.B. Yeats on the list. He was mixed up in the Golden Dawn and theosophy and was a close friend of Ezra Pound, which would suggest, if anything, philofascism. ”
I was astonished/ The letters between Yeats and Mau Gonne are sprinkled with references to “Jew doctors” or “Jew financiers” or “jew lawyers”- Gonne being much the worse, but Yeats joining in too. Antisemitism was an element in many varieties of Irish Nationalism. Not just for allegedly killing Jesus Christ- which presumably underlay the Limerick pogrom organised by a roman catholic priest- but as representatives of modern imperialist plutocracy and so as the bitter opponents and opposites of the Palin People of Ireland dancing at crossroads in the twilight.

As late as 1943 Oliver J. Plunkett, T.D. said: “There is one thing that Germany did and that was to rout the Jews out of their country. Until we rout the Jews out of this country it does not matter a hair’s breadth what orders you make. Where the bees are there is honey, and where the Jews are there is money.”
He remained in the Dail for many years after the war.

Oliver J. Flanagan, not Plunkett. Apologies.

Felix,

As far as Adorno goes, I tend to see much truth in Lukacs’ assertion that he resided in the “Grand Hotel Abyss”. In spite of often brilliant insights into aesthetics, philosophy and literature, I just find that his hostility to the practical matters of politics frequently smacks of a sheltered, self-indulgence.

I didn’t intend there to be a linkage to the Yevtushenko piece but perhaps it is apposite in light of the above. I referenced the poem not because I think it is a great piece of literature but because I think it demonstrated great bravery on the part of Yevtushenko (and Shostakovich). At the time, it was denounced by Khrushchev as “un-patriotic” for very bluntly bringing up the question of Soviet anti-Semitism (which officially did not exist - as didn’t any form of ethnic discrimination). Many attempts were made to suppress the opening performance of the work by Soviet apparatchiks. Both Yevtushenko and Shostakovich persevered.

Compare and contrast to Adorno whom (according to Raymond Geuss) refused to take part in political demonstrations because he was “too fat”.

Joe Camel (about four hundred posts up), fair enough about the mis-spelt and out-dated Sopwith. Next, I think the closest P.o.W. camp to Auschwitz was Stalag-344. However, a brief Wiki shows no record of a bombing raid, and the idea of bombs being precise enough to demolish a wall instead of being by pure happenstance is pretty much what I was getting at.

As for the extermination camps at Auschwitz, Leon Greenman appears to have been the only (existing) British citizen to have survived it; dying this March. However, other Britons did die in the ‘hospital’ section, notably my tribeswoman, Jane Haining. There’s a cairn on Calton Hill in Edinburgh which commemorates her.

Elsewhere, at that crazy time, Eric Liddell similarly submitted himself to save the lives of Chinese civilians at Weihsien, culminating in his giving his offer of passage to a Chinese.

This one’s for you, Maven.

Alec, I didn’t mean to give the impression that the POW camp in question was located close to Auschwitz or to any other concentration/extermination camp. All I meant to say is that somewhere in occupied Europe (possibly even in Germany itself, but I simply don’t know) a bombing raid of that kind was successfuly conducted at some moment during WW2. The point of the story was that the RAF bombed a very precise target: the crews had been told which wall(s) to knock down and they did it, without causing any casualties.

But, as I say, it was an eyewitness account told in a school classroom many years ago. I have put down as much as I can remember about it.

“People who aren’t oppressed want to feel oppressed. I don’t know why.”
Good point but we all have that complex.
“This cuts both ways for Jews, of course - depending on whether you think that Jews are perennially persecuted, or are at the centre of a huge web of deceit and influence, twitching the strings…”
I actually think neither.
I am very uneasy with this list.
It seems the author wants to pigeon hole human beings into two Dud and Pete Good versus evil cricket teams.
Next week 25 anglophiles versus 25 top francophiles. Winners play the top 25 Darwinophiles, if that is a word in the final.
It did make me chuckle seeing WB Yeats on the list. There must be a touch of irony there.

Alex

Adorno was a worthy figure to be metioned on this thread.

I think the thread is gradually petering out. I wanted to answer a few points but can’t as I have left all my shopping etc to be done all in one day.

I know Adorno pretty much inside out and the remarks about the Grand Hotel and his lack of involvement in practical matters are pitiful misrepresentations. If it’s true that he said he was too fat to go on a demonstration - doesn’t look that fat to me - it was because he didn’t want to go with the Trots, Leninists, Marxists and thugs. I have read a book of essays by ex-Adorno students and they carry on about this pracrical inovlvement with the working class etc. but none of them say what they are actually doing and - alas! alas! - I have the feeling that nothing has come of their efforts.

I saw quite a lot of Germans who had ‘turned against’ Adorno. I have to be brief here, but one of my arguments was, “There are so few people like Adorno, W.Benjamin, Mozart, Haydn, you should be protecting them so they can do their work. Single people can’t do everything, and A’s contribution is (he was still alive) to critical reflection.” When I had exhausted my arguments I turned to them and asked, “Now you tell me what you are doing of a practical nature, eg. with the working class?” They were embarrassed, because they were doing pretty much nothing and had no strategies to offer. They had to dig up something, so they told me they were thinking of building a swimming pool for the workers at some big factory, “and, Felix,” they said, “for your sake we will hang a picture of Alban Berg on the wall.” This makes Adorno’s painful awareness about the lack and difficulties of social practice even more painful.

P.S. Rosa Luxemburg told one of her male friends who was a literary, type - cited fro memory - “For God’s sake, keep out of politics and stick to your poetry!”

The more I think about ROSA LUXEMBURG, the more I think she belongs to the Pantheon of greatest Jews

Tail end.

T.W.Adorno

The more he appears to be your enemy, the closer he is to being your friend.