Fwd: ZGram - 2/20/2004 - "White Nationalists - a possible ally?" - Part II

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

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>Zgram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever
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>February 20, 2004
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>Good Morning from the Zundelsite:
>
>Part II of the Joh Domingo essay takes up where Part I left off - at 
>the need of a suppressed ethnic entity to perceive the essentially 
>biological  struggle in "practical" terms.  Again, the bolded 
>emphasis is mine:
>
>[START]
>
>   What does not have a place in the Palestinian struggle, is an 
>ideological agenda. Zionists are not particular about who supports 
>them, so why should Palestinians be reliant on a bogus ideological 
>cleanliness? It makes little  difference whether the Palestinians 
>enjoy the support of ADL-affected communities. These communities 
>provide nothing of value to the Palestinian struggle. In fact they 
>provide material assistance to the enemy. Yet the friends  of 
>Palestine pretend to cringe at the mere thought of occupying 
>political space with deluded nationalists. They may be even 
>supremacists, but they provide another avenue by which the enemy can 
>be engaged. Engaging the enemy  on every conceivable front is what 
>struggle is all about. Ideology is secondary.


>   The White groups on the right are not all the same, and they not 
>all subscribe to the same philosophies. I am convinced that the 
>brush is applied far  too widely and liberally. I have corresponded 
>with a few, and I find them to be courteous and intelligent. Quite 
>the opposite of the rabid racist bigot. They always concede a point 
>well made and are content to rest on genuine  differences of 
>opinion. Joe Sobran is a great guy and always takes the time and 
>effort to respond comprehensively and interestingly. I also find 
>some of their prose about the Middle East and Palestine to be the 
>most passionate around. Most genuinely admire the Palestinians for 
>doing what they failed to do - resist, adapt and survive against a 
>vile and vicious hate campaign. There is a genuine solidarity with 
>the Palestinians amongst disaffected  white people. As genuine as 
>yours or mine is. It does not serve any purpose to question their 
>motives, they are quite clear about them: they support  the 
>Palestinians because the Palestinians are engaged in direct action 
>against a common enemy. The fact that you or I are opposed to White 
>Supremacy is quite irrelevant. It is not White Racist Supremacist 
>oppressing Palestinians. If I were a Palestinian, the White 
>Nationalists would be my legitimate  ally. After all, those White 
>Nationalists write great prose and have the ability to influence far 
>more people where it counts.
>   On the other hand, I have found anti-Zionist Jewish people (with 
>some notable exclusions) on my correspondence list to be extremely 
>annoying because of their penchant to obscure obvious circumstances 
>while compiling dirges in  a vain attempt to throw people off the 
>scent. Instead of acknowledging patent realities regarding Jewish 
>individuals at the heart of influence in the  US administration, and 
>then putting your views regarding it, a ridiculous  attempt is made 
>to smear the content of an article like that of Mr. Shamir' s as 
>latent Nazism. Whether we are incorrect and flirt with an 
>anti-Semite canard is a tenth order issue for both Israeli Jews and 
>Palestinians. I have taken the trouble to read Shamir's body of work 
>and can vouch that they are inspirational. He is an extremely 
>talented writer and uses words to great effect. His vision of a 
>future Palestine/Israel is a refreshing departure  from the rutted, 
>stilted and ideologically driven drivel that passes for discourse on 
>this issue. I would even go so far as to defend his use of anti 
>-Semitic imagery, it is a valid posture buster and certainly more 
>effective  than an AK47. Like all of us, his ideas can be 
>considerably cleansed of incorrect thoughts. But that is his 
>greatest gift - his ability to communicate at every level and bust 
>through - despite incorrect thoughts. Cleansing is not always 
>desirable and would place his writing beyond the reach of all  but 
>the most pure amongst us. Purists always fail when they ultimately 
>discover what Shamir instinctively knows, that none of us are pure. 
>But we can  at least be honest with ourselves. You cannot help the 
>Palestinians until you can free Israeli Jews from the stultifying 
>Boot of Diaspora Jewry. You cannot lead from behind. Shamir might 
>just be the vanguard of an Israeli liberation movement, its 
>liberation from racist Jewry.


>   Explaining its political Application.


>   All people have strange and wonderful traditions. It is the 
>therapy of the  times to subsume oneself and experience a diversity 
>of cultural traditions.  Nationalism, properly defined, is the 
>celebration of one's own kind and the mocking of another. It is a 
>common human characteristic and is hardwired  to our DNA. One does 
>not acquire nationalism, it comes with the package and  it was vital 
>to the early survival of human communities. We would not have  been 
>here if it were not for nationalism. In some situations, it still 
>has a valid and vital function.    However it is chemically 
>triggered, it is clear that its occurrence is proportional to the 
>level of threat to our own culture and identity. Remove that threat 
>and over time the ethnocentric trigger is deactivated and replaced 
>by other "in-group" triggers. Any historical analysis of Jewish 
>nationalism, whatever slant one wished to put on it, reveals a 
>steady flow of the activation of triggers and counter-triggers as 
>Jewish communities wrestled with the twin demons of Supremacy and 
>antisemitism. That one feeds off the other has been the observation 
>of many historians. If Jews think that they were superior, chosen by 
>God, many people also think that they are superior. For many, the 
>only defence to such an attitude is to mock those that think t his 
>way, and to celebrate their own superiority. It is primordial; it is 
>instinctive; and it works.


>   In organized political terms, it is called Group Consciousness. 
>Stokely Carmichael was one of the first proponents of this approach. 
>He developed it a s a result of observing the sorry state Black 
>people had been reduced to by centuries of slavery, dispossession 
>and ridicule. It came to be known as " Black Consciousness" and was 
>a culmination and synthesis of the ideas of many earlier Black 
>thinkers in Africa, the United States and The West Indies.  It was 
>given an expression by Malcolm X who, in an earlier his trip to 
>Africa began to urge that the Black struggle be conducted using any 
>means necessary. The most practical demonstration of its 
>effectiveness was in the early 1970's when a young Black Medical 
>Student called Steven Biko, then a black representative on the 
>executive of the mostly White National Union of South African 
>Students, unreservedly adopted its principles. In a sudden 
>turnaround, he led the Black Student caucus in a walkout of NUSAS to 
>found the  South African Students Organization (SASO) and the 
>corresponding Black Peoples Convention (BPC). He unilaterally cut 
>off ALL political contact with White South Africans from the 
>Liberation Struggle, arguing that White activists carried too much 
>political baggage and were hindering, rather than advancing, the 
>liberation of the Black People in South Africa. By holding up 
>positive white cultural attributes as a desirable yardstick for 
>Black People to emulate, they were in fact emasculating legitimate 
>Black anti-Racist expression. He began to mock White people 
>generally and agitate for a defiant Black anti-Racist discourse. The 
>results were astonishing. Within 14 months,  (after 90 years of 
>failing to achieve any significant uprising by the Black indigenous 
>population), South Africa was in flames and ungovernable. By 1976, 
>Biko was dead, murdered by the South African Regime, but South 
>Africa  was never to be the same again. There were no "ISMS" in his 
>campaign. It was pure affirmation. The goal was to make it possible 
>to decide the future,  not to create a utopian society. Dark was no 
>longer "evil", and white "good ". In fact, the opposite was the 
>case. White people were devils.
>
>   Naturally, Steve did not really believe this, but it is what he 
>taught. There were no complicated speeches given and philosophical 
>treatise written. The medium of communication was song, and dance, 
>and poetry. It electrified  the people. They sang the songs on the 
>trains, at work, everywhere. The white man did not understand the 
>words that said "watch out, I am going to kill you." The "Toyi Toyi" 
>(the enduring image of Black South African protest  marches) 
>terrified the young White conscripts and they wet their pants. It 
>was a national joke. They laughed even amidst the tragedy of slain 
>friends  and comrades. Young White friends were asked to leave 
>public meetings. It was pure nationalism. Black Activists were 
>roundly condemned for their Racism, even by other Blacks: "is this 
>the way to fight Racism" it was asked; "by being racist yourself?"


>   But it was not Racism; it was nationalism - the most effective 
>weapon there is against Racism; which is the dispossession of your 
>property, your liberty and your identity. When Apartheid crumbled, 
>the trigger lapsed as suddenly as it had appeared. The need to 
>destroy another's identity to regain yours vanished. You already had 
>it.


>   There is definitely a problem when you can celebrate your cultural 
>particularity only in the absence of other cultural identities - 
>when affirmation can only come at the expense of forcing another to 
>disavow theirs or the parts you take offence to. Mocking another 
>culture is the essence of Nationalism. Cultural hegemony is the 
>essence of colonialism. Calling an Individual a  "Nazi" for his 
>instinctive reaction to a nationalist trigger is ignorance  about 
>the true nature of Racism, and the cure for it, which is cultural 
>affirmation, "consciousness" or "nationalism".
>
>[END]
>
>=====
>
>Joh Domingo is a South African born Muslim with roots in the full 
>spectrum  of the varied racial mix that makes up the South African 
>milieu. His background traverses the divide between his traditional 
>African tribal kin and the rich cultural influences of colonial East 
>Asia. His maternal grandfather  was the sibling of a Methodist 
>Scottish priest, and was a Methodist priest himself. His paternal 
>grandfather was an indentured Indian sugar cane worker from Madras, 
>India who provides him his religious background. He married  a South 
>African born Chinese/African Christian and has two adult Daughters 
>and a teenaged son.
>
>   Joh cut his political teeth during the upheaval of 1970's South 
>African revolution. He was the inaugural President of the Black 
>Students Society at the University of the Witwatersrand, in 1974 and 
>held that post until 1977. During this period he also served as 
>editor in chief of the society's magazine "By Ministerial Consent" 
>(a reference to the Government permission required for a Black 
>Person to attend a White University in Apartheid South Africa.).
>
>He was a member of both the South African Students Organisation and 
>the Black Peoples Convention. His studies were cut short in 1977 
>after his consent to attend university and his Scholarship were 
>withdrawn. In 1980 he  married his childhood sweetheart and in 1985 
>they left South Africa after being granted permission to migrate to 
>Australia.
>
>Joh is a Building Contractor in Brisbane, Australia. He still 
>believes that the "Black Consciousness"  Soweto Uprising of 1976 was 
>the defining moment in the demise of the Apartheid System, paving 
>the way for the broader based African National Congress , which had 
>been rendered moribund by ideological battles, to re-energize itself 
>and exert its more experienced political leadership. There is little 
>doubt in his mind that political change begins at the grassroots 
>level. His  email johd7894 at hotmail.com