Interview with Israel Shamir

by Kim Petersen (http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m22995)

May 1, 2006

Israel Shamir is a prominent and controversial Russian-Israeli thinker, writer, and translator who lives in Jaffa. Shamir brings to his political writing a refreshing candor, sharp insight, and inspiring humanity. His principled stand supporting the Palestinian refugees’ right of return and the rebuilding of their destroyed villages led to his firing from the “progressive” Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Following Israeli attacks on Palestinians in January 2001, Shamir became dedicated to political writings in English.

For the intellectual Karl Marx, the Jewish question was an “unreal subject.” Marx was baptized a Lutheran and married to a gentile.

Shamir has renounced Judaism and embraced Christianity.

He is a strong proponent of the “One Man, One Vote, One State” solution for a united Israel-Palestine.

I interviewed the unflinching maverick writer Israel Shamir.

Kim Petersen: You wrote recently that the historian David Irving, who the corporate media reports as being sentenced for holocaust denial, was sentenced for denial of “Jewish superiority.” Could you elaborate on this and what holocaust denial means for you?

Israel Shamir: I wrote about it, in “For Whom The Bell Tolls,” and in the “Vampire Killers,” at length. No free man can agree with the proposition that Jewish death (and life) is more important than that of a goy. But the ban of Holocaust revisionism is the only legally enforced prohibition in our society. The Armenians were envious of this elevated status of Jews, and actually succeeded to protect their tragedy of 1915 by a similar law in France. The result was tragicomic. They brought an important Jewish historian (and warmonger of first degree) Bernard Lewis to the court of Paris, and he was found guilty of denying their tragedy, just like David Irving. But David Irving has got three years in jail, and now his name is always preceded with the title “discredited” (see an interview with him in the Observer), while Bernard Lewis was fined one franc and he still appears everywhere, and his name graces various petitions. He was not discredited, but the Armenians were. Apparently, Jewish blood is redder than Armenian, not to mention lesser species. I quoted an article by a Jewish American historian denying the genocide of the native Americans. He was not discredited, either. The scourge of Irving, Debora Lipstadt, denied the fiery holocaust of Dresden, and was not discredited, either. Face it, Kim: the very concept of H is a concept of Jewish superiority.

This has an important religious meaning: Christianity is the denial of Jewish superiority. Whoever believes or accepts Jewish superiority, denies Christ for He made us equal. The French Jewish filmmaker Claude Lanzman, the creator of “Shoah,” said: if you believe in holocaust, you can’t believe in Christ. I am ready to take his challenge: I believe in Christ. We can rephrase the words of Lanzman: belief in a special historical meaning of death of Jews is a sign of apostasy. Indeed, the creed of holocaust competes with the Church: we believe that Christ suffered for us and came back to life. The H believers believe that the Jewish people suffered and came back by creating the Jewish state. In this competition, the Jews win: as opposed to H, you can deny Crucifixion and Resurrection and your career won’t suffer a bit.

Thus the question of H denial is the question of apostasy: will our society stand on the rock planted by Christ, or will it worship the Jewish state. This is an important discovery of eternal religiosity of human spirit: the attempt to create a secular society did not work out. After an illusionary short break, the gods came back.

KP: Is it appropriate to use such loaded terms as "goy"?

IS: Well, I am not aware this is a loaded term. I translated some Hebrew books, from Samuel Yosef Agnon, the only Hebrew Nobel Prize winner, to the Book of Lineage by Rabbi Zacuto, a 15th century Judaeo-Iberian sage, my most recent translation into English. They all used “goy” and so do Israeli newspapers. The word "goy" has a meaning: this is a non-Jew as seen by Jews. If you think it is not a complimentary term, you mean that in your view Jews look with distaste at a goy. Maybe. But we should deal with problems, not with words. Dealing with words is easier, but brings no relief. If we were to use 'gentile', would it change the Jewish attitude to one? This is also a sign of weakness. When (in 19th century) Jews felt weak, they liked to be called Israelites, or Hebrews. Now they do not mind being called "Jews."

KP: You have described the US as a “greater Jewish state.” You laud Jeffrey Blankfort as having taken “an important next step” in rejecting the views of Noam Chomsky and others. Is the influence of the “Jewish lobby” preponderant over US corporate imperialism?

IS: I wrote about it in “A Yiddishe Medina.” The US corporate imperialism is not a bodiless spirit; it is the sum of desires and actions by the US elites. And the US elites are Jewish, to great extent, and they have accepted Jewish values and ideas, to even greater extent. A few years ago, an American Jewish writer Philip Weiss wrote in the New York Observer: “I don’t claim to know how Jewish the membership of the establishment is. Twenty percent, 50 percent? I’m guessing 30.” Jews compose at least 30% of Harvard students, reported The Forward, a Jewish American newspaper. The Hillel Society gives such numbers: Total Undergraduate Population: 6658; Jewish Undergraduate Population: 2000 (approx.); Total Graduate Population: 10351 Jewish Graduate Population: 2500 (approx.). Thus the US elites are Jewish to a great extent, in the ordinary meaning of the word. As for spirit, Karl Marx spoke of “Jewish spirit” of the Yankees. A less known Marxist, Sombart, wrote about it at length. Thus in my view it is a mistake to speak of “Jewish Lobby” -- we may refer to a takeover, a displacement of the old WASP elites. The Jews constitute some three percent of the US population. The Brits took over India with much less percentage; so did the ruling minority in Syria. Normans ruled over Britain for centuries with less than that. All Russian nobility in the Tsar’s days was 2-3% of the population, while upper castes of Hindu societies constitute some 5% at most. Now, the Jews are well integrated in the “US corporate imperialism” on many levels, and they do not have to fight it, they use it. The Jewish Lobby is an additional mechanism, consisting of hard-core Jewish nationalists. The problem is that the rest, the non-Jewish-Lobby part of the US establishment consists, as I have said, of not-so-nationalistic Jews to great extent. They reach compromise, and this compromise is the middle ground of mild-Jewish-nationalism.

KP: On the invasion of Iraq, you stated: “Too many coincidences for a purely American war.” To what extent do you see a Zionist hand behind the attack and occupation?

IS: Yes, I partly agree with the Chicago-Harvard duo, the conquest of Iraq and present threat to Iran are caused by the Zionist affiliates within the Administration. The old canard of Oil Interests was debunked by reality: oil costs more, oil companies leave Iraq, none of their executives supported the war. Probably your readers do not even think of Iraqi WMD or the silly stuff of “bringing democracy” to the Arabs. Thus the Zionist plot is the first and obvious explanation.

But the Iraqi war, as a part of War on Terror, has a second leg: this is an even more scary totalitarianism, the drive to create a caste-based oligarchy of the Iron Heel, in Jack London’s terms. Fear is its important tool; dismantling of civil freedoms and of cohesive natural society is the first goal. Without War on Terror, the US rulers wouldn’t be able to read our emails, listen to our conversations, store in their data banks every bit of information about our lives. This totalitarianism was predicted by George Orwell, an avid reader of the Protocols, and it was lauded by Leo Strauss, a guiding light of Neo-Cons. Strauss endorsed a society with dictatorial powers of elites; a follower of Hobbes, he distrusted the people. Though his views were formed before the WWII, after the war he frequently referred to the Holocaust as a phenomenon that is liable to come back unless the society is firmly kept in check. I called the supporters of this paradigm by the name “Mammonites,” mammon-worshippers. The Iraqi war, and the War on Terror in general, is a joint product of Zionists and Mammonites, while these two groups often coincide, as is the case with the leading Neo-Cons.

That is why our struggle is with Zionists and Mammonites; this is not only a laudable campaign of support of the peoples of the Middle East, but first of all the decisive battle for preservation of democracy and freedom in the US and Europe, for a chance of better life for our children, for creation of a more egalitarian and more spiritual society, against the Dark ages were are being led to.

KP: Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has taken a lot of flak from the western media for citing the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini about wiping Israel off the map. Apparently, judging by the western media’s silence, it was okay to wipe Palestine off the map though. Is the state of Israel a legitimate entity?

IS: No, it is not. We can’t consider legitimate a state that gives no rights to its inhabitants and officially belongs to World Jewry. It is in our interests to achieve full independence from the Jews, and to shift the whole lot of rights and responsibilities to the population of the country. The sovereignty should be ours, of the people of Palestine/Israel, not of the Jewish People, the extra-territorial worldwide body. I call upon my country-fellows to give up their “Jewishness” and to become adoptive Palestinians, brothers and sisters to the native folk. I hope eventually it will happen; we shall integrate and forget the overseas connection. Meanwhile we follow the colonial paradigm and exclude the natives in the name of “Jewishness.” We should follow the example of Mexico, where immigrants from Spain and Italy form one nation with the descendents of Montezuma.

KP: What does the election of Hamas mean for you? Should Hamas recognize the state of Israel?

IS: I wrote about the results. The Palestinians rejected the Fatah rule because they made too many concessions to Israel, and received nothing in return. Hamas should not recognise the state of Israel, at least until the Israeli rulers recognise the Palestinian independence, remove their armed forces and stop to interfere with the free traffic of Palestinians within and without Palestine. This is reciprocity. I can imagine an even better solution: Hamas may call for full integration of all Palestine from the River to the Sea, and for general elections on the basis of One Person-One Vote. But until it happens, Hamas should be guided by reciprocity principle: mutual recognition, inter alia.

KP: You are an ex-Jew, a convert to Christianity -- why is this? You have written of “many ex-Jews.” Is this for the same reason as you? Do you think a growing trend in Jewish apostasy would be effective in bringing about justice for Palestinians?

IS: Christianity and Judaism are strongly connected religions. A Christian, Karl Marx said: Christianity is sublime Judaism, while Judaism is sordid Christianity. A real Christian knows that a goy is not worse than a Jew; so the idea of Jewish exclusivity is not acceptable to a Christian. In our country we have many Russian Orthodox Christians (some of Jewish origin, and some not), and they pray and celebrate holidays together with our Palestinian Orthodox Christian brothers and sisters. I was baptised by the Palestinian priest, Archbishop Theodosius Attalla Hanna, and it helped me to sort out the question of identity. The important point is not to create a separate Jewish “Christian” set-up, for such an arrangement defeats its purpose. Thus I am worried that there are “Jewish Christian” churches that are devoutly Zionist. In short, yes, baptism is a solution, but only in connection with rejection of Jewishness. If it is done as an addition to Jewishness, it is void, and brings no benefit.

Kim Petersen, Co-Editor of Dissident Voice, lives in the traditional Mi'kmaq homeland colonially designated Nova Scotia, Canada. He can be reached at: http://mail.yahoo.com/config/login?/ym/Compose?To=kim@dissidentvoice.org.

Israel Shamir writings can be read at his website. His essays are collected in three books, The Flowers of Galilee, Our Lady of Sorrow, and the Pardes.

:: Article nr. 22995 sent on 02-may-2006 02:56 ECT
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On the Move

By Israel Shamir

This mosaic always reminds me of our beautiful world, this delightful mosaic of small towns, green meadows, civilised megapolises, castles and cottages, rivers and streams, churches and mosques, each piece of the mosaic is fine, precious and perfect. I saw a lot of them and I love them all. The rocky low-lying islands in lucid and transparent Baltic, where yellow-haired kids wave to the passing ships from the pier. La France Profonde of Conque, a tiny hamlet in the Massif Central on the old pilgrim road to St Jacques, with a narrow chatty river skirting the hill, slated roofs, thousand years ago paved streets. Domes of Russian churches in the high grass on Oka River, where girls in flowery shawls listen to a harmony. Pretty voices of Suzhou girls reverberate in the temple courtyard among canals crisscrossing South China. Baroque houses of Trinidad tobacco factors and proud stature of Cubans dancing on its streets. Superb bodies of tattooed Masai around the bonfire at Serengeti savanna. This world is lovely and its folks are very good.

This beautiful and intricate set-up is threatened by the forthcoming hostilities, as this Third World War is not only against the Third World. This war started even before the first bomb fell on the rocky ground of Afghanistan. A million of new refugees are on the road, creating the great commotion and unsettling Asia. There is no doubt, sooner or later the refugee wave will hit Europe. Hundreds of thousands refugees already are on the move towards Europe, Russia and relatively stable countries on the rim. One can understand them: as the US promised to use nuclear weapons against their homes, the defenceless population has no choice but flee the target areas. No border controls would be able to withstand their hectic push. Pakistan will be first, but not last. As the US and Britain plan to turn their Crusade into a long war ‘against terror’, there will be more and more refugees, until, eventually, the fragile social fabric of Europe would crumble and collapse. Europe would be overrun, as Roman Empire in its day, and it will face a stark choice: to establish a system of apartheid and discrimination, or to lose its identity.

Would Europe be an incidental victim of American fury, like an innocent bystander in a Western shoot-out? It appears to me that Europe is rather one of the real targets of the forthcoming offensive. It is not what the ordinary people of the United States wish, but they are not being asked. The new ruling elites of the US and their partners and agents overseas put destruction of prosperous independent and cohesive Europe on their list. This desire has a practical short-term reason: Europe is a competitor to America, it is too independent, it started its own monetary unit that can push dollar. Europe supports more even-balanced policy in Palestine. Europe is too egalitarian: in New York, I saw a lift boy, an immigrant from devastated Panama, who actually lives in the elevator. You would not find such things in Europe, as Europe is not yet Mammonized.

II

The new ruling elites do not care much for Christ or Muhammad, it is true, but they have a lot of religious feeling towards another old Deity, Mammon. This ancient god of greed was much loved by Pharisees, some two millennia back, as we learn from the Gospel. Jesus told them: you can not serve both God and Mammon. But Pharisees sneered at him, because they loved money’[i]. This faith was pushed away by the following developments. Love of Mammon became known as Avarice, one of the Mortal Sins, it was condemned by Christian and Muslim societies alike.

But it did not disappear completely. Two thousand years later, a grandson of the Trier Rabbi, Karl Marx, came to a revolutionary conclusion: the faith of Mammon, this ‘weekday religion of Jews’, in his words, became the real religion of American elites. Marx approvingly quoted a colonel Hamilton, ‘Mammon is Yankees’ idol, they worship it not only with their lips, but with all strength of their body and soul. In their eyes, the earth is but a stock exchange, and they are convinced that they do not have other purpose on earth but to become richer than their neighbours’. Marx concluded, ‘The practical domination of Jewish spirit over the Christian world has achieved in North America its unambiguous, complete expression’.

This victorious Jewish spirit, for Marx, was based on ‘greed and egoism, its confession was business, it’s god - Money’[ii]. These words, as other ideas of Karl Marx, were known but their deep spiritual meaning was not understood in full. For a good reason: until our days, the religious features of the creed of Greed were not expressed, and one could possibly imagine a capitalist who thinks of his own interest and promotes the common good, as it was presented by Adam Smith.

Things changed with advent of ‘neo-liberalism’. Lectures of Milton Friedman manifested ‘outing’ of Mammonites, adepts of the new/old faith. They differ from ordinary greedy folks, as they elevate Greed to the level of jealous God, that does not suffer other gods. The traditional wealthy men would not dream of destroying their society. They cared about their land and community. They would like to be the first among their own kind. They still considered themselves ‘shepherds of men’. It is true, shepherds also eat sheep, but they would not sell the whole lot to the butcher just because the price is good.

The Mammonites see such consideration as a betrayal of Mammon. As Robert McChesney wrote in his Introduction to Noam Chomsky’s Profit Over People[iii], ‘they demand a religious faith in the infallibility of the unregulated market’, in other words, a faith of egoism and greed unlimited. They are devoid of compassion to the people they live amongst, they do not see the local people as ‘their own kind’. If they would be able to eliminate local folks and supplant them by poor immigrants, to optimise their profits, they would do it, as their brothers did in Palestine.

The Mammonites do not give a damn for the people of America, but use them as their tool to achieve world domination. Their ideal picture of the world is archaic, or futuristic: they dream of the world of slaves and masters. In order to achieve it, the Mammonites strive to destroy cohesiveness of social and national units.

As long as people stay on their land, speak their tongue, live among their own kith and kin, drink water of their rivers, worship in their churches and mosques, they can not be enslaved. But if their lands are flooded by masses of refugees, their social structure will collapse. They will lose their great advantage, the feeling of belonging together, the feeling of brotherhood, and they will become an easy prey for Mammonites.

II

Afghanis are wonderful folk, sturdy, independent, self-reliant. They are formed by their mountains, and as all highlanders, they are quite stubborn and conservative. Fear of American bombs would push them into the lowlands of Holland and into the cities of France, and they will unwillingly but irreversibly change the land they enter. This process is going on for quite a while. As the global policies of the Mammonites deplete the poor countries of the Third world, pump out natural resources and incomes, support the nasty quisling rulers, destroy their nature, more and more people are forced to join the stream of refugees to Europe and the US.

This threat is already felt in Europe. Oriana Fallaci, a well-known Italian journalist, published in the leading Milanese newspaper, Corriere della Sera[iv], an article bewailing the fate of Europe overrun by “Muslim hordes”. She viewed immigrants as a courtier of Romulus in Ravenna considered the Germanic warriors. Oriana says that “Somali Muslims defaced and shitted and outraged for three months the main square of my city”, that some "children of Allah" urinated on the walls of the Cathedral, that they had mattresses inside the tent "to sleep and fuck on" and poisoned the square with the smell and smoke of their cooking. Oriana goes on to say that Florence, "once the capital of art and culture and beauty" is "wounded and humiliated" by "arrogant Albanians, Sudanese, Bengalese, Tunisians, Algerians, Pakistanis and Nigerians" who "sell drugs" and pimp whores. She calls for the support of American-led Crusade and contends, "If America falls, then Europe will fall [...] instead of church bells, there will be the muezzins, instead of miniskirts, chadors, instead of cognac, camel's milk".

Before condemning her style, let us attend the faults of her logic. Ms Fallaci, an experienced and not too young journalist sees in America a possible protection, rather than the source of her – and Florence’s trouble. She should be worried by victory, not by fall of America. If America succeeds in her Afghan war, Oriana’s nightmare can become a reality.

She does not want to notice that the refugees and immigrants arrive to Italy because their lands were devastated by the US and its allies. She would not see Albanians if NATO would not ravage Balkans. She would not see Sudanese, if Clinton would not bomb Sudan. She would not see Somalis, if Somali would not be ruined by Italian colonization and American intervention. Neither she, nor America would see a Palestinian immigrant if the peasants of Saffurie would still tend their pomegranate groves.

Nobody, but nobody would leave his own land with its unique nature, lifestyle, friends and relatives, holy places and fathers’ graves for the dubious pleasure of camping by the walls of an Italian Cathedral. Like ducklings have their imprinting, men are born to love their native land. Young Telemachus compares his rocky and lean island with broad meadows and rich fields of Lacedaemon, and says to his host, ‘we’ve got hardly any grass, and still, I prefer our mountains with its goats to all your meadows suitable for horses’[v] People immigrate when their lands are ruined. The Irish would not leave the green fields of Erin for Chicago, if English government would not starve them out. My own Russians would not come to occupy Palestine if Russia would not be ruined by pro-American forces of Yeltsin and Chubais.

For host folk, immigration wave is a nuisance at the best, a disaster at the worst. It is not their fault, it is the question of numbers. Carlos Castaneda joined an Indian tribe and learned a lot of their ways. I am sure the tribe learned something from Carlos Castaneda. Now imagine, that thousand wonderful guys and gals from Yale and Berkeley would join the Indian tribe. The tribe would disappear, it would not be able to keep its ways. While a single émigré would be always welcomed, and would add some colour to the society, mass immigration is bad.

Whether immigrants come as invaders and conquerors, or as refugees, the receiving society gets a shock. If they are smart, they push local people away from interesting and important social positions, and create their own subculture. If they are violent, they can take over the land by other means. If they are humble and timid, they will bring down the price of labour. That is why in normal circumstances immigrants are not popular.

A good man and my friend, Miguel Martinez, who brought Oriana’s article to the attention of English-reading audience, was justly horrified by her racism. He is right, Ms Fallaci speaks as a racist, as Ann Coulter, this American scourge of ‘swarthy men’. But he failed to see some truth in her words. A man whose garden was overrun by buffaloes does not notice the hunter who rushes the herds his way and blames the innocent animals. He is mistaken, the blame behoves the hunter, but it does not mean the buffaloes do not ruin the garden. Mass immigration is painful for immigrant and host alike.

But it is not painful for the Mammonites. They actually like immigration, as it lowers the price of labour. A leading Mammonite magazine is the British weekly Economist. Their leader called a few weeks ago, before the ‘new Pearl Harbour’ to increase intake of immigrants from the Third World. The most dynamic, best qualified people from Africa, Asia and South America could be useful for Britain, Europe and the US, wrote the Economist. It would push down salaries of European workers and increase profits of entrepreneurs. As a side profit, the outflow of the dynamic element weakens the donor societies and makes them an easy prey for the hostile takeover. It is an improved version of slave trade, as what could be better that willing slaves competing for the board of slave ship. Naturally, the first condition of this intake was not written down in the leader: the countries of the Third World should be devastated and ruined.

Mammonites need immigrants for their own sake, as well. A cohesive and healthy society rejects men of greed instinctively, as greed is a socially destructive drive. In a healthy society, Mammonites would remain pariahs. Immigration destroys cohesiveness of the host society. Mammonites do not like their society being cohesive, they prefer it thinnish and liquescent, so it would be easier to drink it up. That is why Mammonites support immigration. Immigrants conceive them as their natural allies and fail to comprehend that the Mammonites like them as vampires like fresh blood. Because of this lack of understanding, immigrants support with their votes the Mammonite power of Tony Blair and New York Democrats. It is the Mammonites, who should be on the receiving end of Oriana’s diatribes, instead of innocent immigrants on the streets and squares of Europe.

III

A Mammonite senator for California, Diane Feinstein, imports more and more poor Mexicans into her state. They give her the vote, stay out of politics for many years, they agree to work for less, they undermine the organised labour. Ordinary Californians live worse, but she does not care. Some people consider her a Zionist by virtue of her support for Israel.

However, it would be a mistake to call her a Zionist. Historically, Zionists felt that man needs roots. They considered easy mobility of Jews to be a sign of wanting. They wanted to provide the rootless Jews with the roots in the Holy Land. Mammonites do not understand who needs roots. They want to uproot everybody. Zionists felt that Mammonite way of life is wrong. Mammonites of all backgrounds adopted the way of life discarded by Zionists.

The Zionists were wrong as they did not understand that without Palestinians, they can not achieve their goal of striking the root in the soil of Palestine. They were wrong, as a person of Jewish origin can strike his root anywhere, not only in Palestine. A Jew can become an American, an English, a Russian as well as a Palestinian. It calls for identification with his countrymen, for supreme concern with his land. Every land is a Promised Land to man who loves it. People who force America to send away billions of dollars to Israel, instead of providing for America’s poor, are not loyal to America. But they are not loyal to Israel, either. They admire Israel as the model of their world.

Many good men dislike Zionism, for it caused this massive destruction of the lovely land of Palestine and uprooted Palestinians. But Zionism is a local disease. Its big brother, Mammonitis, is a world-wide plague, that wants to turn the world into a “ Big Israel”, with shopping malls and destroyed villages, settlements for the chosen few, and many-many refugees as a source of cheap labour. Zionists ruined nature of Palestine, Mammonites ruin the world environment. Zionists uprooted Palestinians, Mammonites uproot all.

Zionists fight Christ. In modern Israel, St Paul and St Peter would be jailed for teaching Gospel. Mammonites fight every faith, every conviction, Christ and Muhammad, Nationalism and Communism. Enemies of Zionism hope Mammonites will reign the Zionists in, as too independent policy of Zionists can become an obstacle to the world-embracing plans of Mammonites. But I tell you, God tolerates the excesses of Zionists so you would notice the plans of Mammonites.

IV

It is not a cry of dye-in-the-wool Leftie. We can live with some people of wealth, we can survive some amount of privilege. Both the left and the right are good and needed for the society, as left leg and right leg are needed to stand up. Imagine a springtime meadow in the Jerusalem mountains. It is a magic carpet of flowers, that calls you to seat on it. If everybody will walk it, there will be no flowers left. If it will be fenced, it will be lost for us. These two tendencies: of access and of preservation, are the paradigms of Left and Right. Their correct combination allows many people to enjoy the meadow.

The right is the conservative force, preserving the power of traditional elites. They save the landscape, protect nature, keep the tradition. The left is a moving force of society, the guarantee of its liveliness, of ability to change, of social mobility. A society without its left would rot, a society without its right would collapse. Left provides movement, right provides stability. But Mammonites create for their purposes a pseudo-left and pseudo-right, using errors of real left and right.

One of the faults of the European ‘real’ right was its lack of compassion and racist tendency. Their knee jerk reflex was correct: immigrants destabilize the society. But it is not because they are worse men, as racists say. Immigrants could be wonderful folk, and they are still a trouble. Dutch moved to Indonesia, and plagued their land for quite a while by their presence. They ruined Indonesia heavily. Indonesians went to Holland and troubled it back. English plagued America in the heavy way: they exterminated the natives. Colonial process often leads to mutual plaguing: Brits despoiled Ireland and were troubled by Irish.

Racism is wrong, as it claims that some groups of men are inherently better or worse than others. Everybody is wonderful, Zulu and British, Russians and Chechens, Palestinians and French, Pakistanis and Turks, while at their own ground. At others’ land, these good people become a nuisance. In the days of European imperialism and colonial expansion, racist theories were necessary to justify the one-sided flow of men. Without racism, one could not exterminate natives, take their property, ban their industries, create huge landholdings, and keep people without basic human rights. But now racism is not needed anymore. As the colonial adventure of Europe is over, morally wrong and scientifically mistaken theory of racist superiority can be laid to rest.

The real left should promote interests of lower classes and it means to object to mass immigration. But, under Mammonite influence, the liberal left supports immigration for the reason of compassion. Mammonites, normally devoid of compassion, utilise this humanitarian reasoning in their own purposes. It gives them an additional profit: European and American working people are being alienated from the liberal left. For workers, the dangerous nature of immigration is obvious. Immigrants live in close quarters with the local workers, and suffer from their competition for the work places. Thus, they are forced to embrace the racist extreme right.
There is a good way out of the impasse, a way that is good for everybody but Mammonites. Stop immigration, and open money transfer line to the Third World. Africa and Sweden should have the same income. Tax money should flow to the Indians of Amazon and to the peasants of Afghanistan. Not many Pakistanis will immigrate to Britain, if they would have the same (or almost the same) income back home. The EC is a proof of it: though Swedes still earn more than Portuguese, Greek and Italians, the difference is not that big, and the lands are peaceful, so there is a very little immigration into Sweden or Germany. If you say: compassion; the true Christian compassion tells you to let people live at home, under their vine and their fig tree, as good as they would live at your land. You would not have very cheap cleaners, but you will live in a cleaner and better land. It would be just, as for hundreds of years Europe and the US pumped out the wealth of the South and the East.

The immigrant’s lot is a sad one. After all, immigration is an exile, this saddest state of man. Ovid bewailed it on the Moldavian shore, and prince Genji decried in Suma. My Palestinian friend Musa brought his elderly father from the village of Aboud to his new home in Vermont, and the old man began to build terraces, as on the slopes of Samarian hills. We are so much a part of landscape, a part and parcel of mountains and valleys. Now, when in the US, there are attacks on immigrants, probably many of them think of their homes they were forced to leave.

While I think that immigration should be stopped and supplanted by transfer of funds to the poorer lands until the incomes would level, immigrants that already came over, probably came to stay. They could become locals: Germans in Germany, French in France, Americans in America, Palestinians in Palestine. The ancestors of European and American people also migrated, and adopted to new ways. Germanic tribes of Franks overrun Romanised Celtic Gaul, and together with its old population they formed modern French. Descendents of European Crusaders still live in Palestinian village Sinjil that preserves the glorious name of the Provencal commander Raymond de St Gilles, but they became Palestinians in every way and are being besieged by Israelis as everybody else. So did the Georgians brought eight hundred years ago to the Jerusalemite village of Malcha by the orders of Queen Tamar. They became Palestinian, and shared the fate of other Palestinians when they were expelled from their houses by Zionist invaders in 1948.

Human beings are adaptable, and if the immigrants love their new land, they can become locals. I know it: a native of Siberia, I choose to become a Palestinian.

V

WWIII is a war against variety per se, initiated by the adepts of Greed. They do not like the delightful mosaic of races and cultures, they would rather homogenise the world. They have a practical reason: it is easier to sell goods to homogenised mankind. They have a moral reason: they do not want people to enjoy this beauty for free, so it has to be destroyed. They have a religious reason: the Mammon worshippers, they feel this jolly plurality is a sacrilege against their jealous god. Beautiful things of old belong in a museum, where they can charge entrance fee, after the village is destroyed.

In a beautiful adolescent movie, the Never-Ending Story, the many-coloured world of Fantasy disappears into Nowhere. The same thing happens to our marvellous world. Old and unique places are being erased and supplanted by shopping malls and scorched land. The left and the right should join forces against the Nowhere that threatens our very existence.

Ottoman Empire, please come back!

by Israel Shamir

On Mt Carmel, there is a pleasant townlet, slightly more than a village, called Zichron Yaakov. Now known for its robust wine and Frenchy restaurants, in the days of World War One it was a home for the Zionist pro-British espionage ring, NILI. Its members, prominent Zionist settlers and citizens of Turkey, communicated with the British troops in Egypt, delivered to them news of the Turkish forces’ disposition and contributed to the Empire’s defeat. They were connected with Haim Weitzman, who squeezed the Balfour declaration from unwilling Brits and became the first president of the Jewish state. To this day, the NILI is greatly venerated in Israel, and schoolchildren are often taken to the museum where they are indoctrinated in Jewish loyalty to the Jews only, and in their duty to betray any other power if it is called for by their loyalty as Jews.

They had a good reason to betray their country, the Ottoman Empire, for if the Empire were still intact, the Jewish State with its millions deprived natives immured beyond the high wall, its millions of equally deprived guest workers locked in shantytowns would have never come into existence. Incidentally, the US attack on defenceless Iraq with its hundreds of thousands dead and ensuing civil strife would have never materialised, either, for Iraq was a part of that powerful Empire.

And not only has the Middle East suffered from the Empire’s demise, but NATO planes would have never had the fun of bombing Belgrade, if the Empire were still with us. Even Greece, the first break-away province, now devastated by the introduction of the Euro, and reduced to the status of an hotelier for wealthy Northerners, has a good reason to regret the days when Greeks formed the elite of the Empire from Alexandria to Constantinople. The Turks, the Empire-building nation, were admired and feared in Europe, while now they are treated as unwanted competitors for dish-washing jobs in Frankfurt and London.

We, the heirs to the Byzantines and the Ottomans, have now to deal with a great new challenge, the American colonisation project. The Mammonite forces now at the helm of the US are using the dismantlement of the great continental Empires to build their world-embracing neo-liberal one. In this new Empire, Western Europe will be ‘the old country’, Greece to Rome, object of imperial benevolence and guidance; while the rest of the world will be re-colonised. Instead of trying to fit into this plan by trying to join the EU, as some Turkish leaders hope to do, a better response would be to re-establish a big civilisation-based framework. Mankind is ripe for a new stage in its development, the re-formation of civilisation blocks. By the end of this stage, there will be five super-states, five civilisations: the US, Europe, China, Latin America and ours, the Commonwealth of the East. The alternative is a world colonised by Mammonite America.
Indeed, it is the right time to give a thought to bringing the Ottoman Empire back. The Empire did not fail because it was too big and unwieldy: in its heyday it was smaller than Brazil or Russia. It failed because inexperienced local elites grasped the poisoned fruit of nationalism, offered by the western Masters of Discourse.

Nationalism, this European invention, has probably killed more people than the Black Plague of old. Worse, it has not offered a plausible alternative to the unity of the Empire, where dozens of tribes and ethnic groups felt at home, in peace with each other. None of the break-away countries has succeeded in creating a viable state, and the Western predators continue to spread strife among smaller and smaller groups, as the Kurdish rebellion in Turkey and Iraq reminds us. The Pan-Arabism of Nasser and the Ba’ath Party, the Islamism of Osama, the Pan-Turkism of Ziya Gökalp and Halide Edib Adivar have all failed to propose a viable ideology to counteract the continuing onslaught of the Mammonite forces.

We should take a leaf from the book of our brothers in the EU. Europe has succeeded in bringing back the Empire of Charlemagne, which collapsed a millennium ago; our Empire is still alive in the memories of people, and in the glorious palaces, fortresses, mosques and churches. Our reconstituted Empire may and should embrace the entire post-Byzantine expanse: the bright future of Turkey, the Middle East, and the Balkans lays in joining in with Russia, Ukraine, and the Turkic republics of Central Asia.

These two heirs to the glory of Byzantium, the Russian and the Ottoman Empires, fought each other for centuries; but the same can be said of the French and the Germans, the heirs to the Western Roman Empire. If these eternal enemies in the West could succeed in uniting, it can be done in the East, too.

This summer as I travelled in Russia and Ukraine, I noticed much in common between the Russians and the Turks (or Tatars, in Russian usage). “Scratch a Russian and you will find a Turk”, fumed Churchill, his cigar in full blast. “And the other way around”, quipped Leon Gumilev, a great and late Russian historian, the guru of the Russian pro-Eastern tendency. Indeed, Russia as a state came into being as the union of the steppe-dwelling Muslim Turks and the forest-based Orthodox Slavs. Gumilev demolished the Western myth of the ‘Tatar (Turk) Yoke’ and correctly described the Moscow Rus as the successor state to the Golden Horde founded by the Turkic Genghisid princes. “Russia is unbeatable in its union with the brave Turks”, said Gumilev who identified the West as the greatest source of danger for Russian identity.

The National Bolshevik leader and a prominent writer, Edward Limonov, wrote recently of Russia being ‘a Turkey with German coating’. Russians still prefer ‘sharovary’, baggy trousers popular among Anatolian peasants and the Ottoman nobility of old. They squat like the Turks do, noticed Limonov. This positive feeling of Russians towards the Turks is so different from the European mistrust of them. It finds its way into the cinema: the new Russian blockbuster called The Turkish Gambit describes the Russo-Turkish war for Plevna without the usual, for Hollywood, racist overtones and presents Osman Nuri Pasha as a hero.

The commonality of Turks and Slavs goes back a long way. In northern Ukraine, I visited the erstwhile capitals of Russian princedoms, Novgorod, Chernigov and Kiev. Their princes married Turkic princesses, daughters of the steppe, and Turkic warriors formed an integral part of their retinue. The Russian epic lay of the 12th century depicts a Novgorod Prince Igor war raid into Turkic steppe; the prince was defeated, but his captor Konchak Khan gave him his daughter in marriage, and he returned home to Novgorod. A sizable part of Russian nobility still has Turkic names, be it Nabokov, the author of Lolita, or Usupov, the wealthiest Russian prince at the court of Nicolas II.

In a recent book, The Eurasian Symphony by St Petersburg writer van Zaichik, an alternative history of our part of the world is proposed. What would have happened if the Turkic Golden Horde’s enlightened ruler Sartak Khan, a friend of St Alexander Nevsky, had survived an assassination attempt and, as a consequence, the Russians and the Turks had remained in one prosperous state? Van Zaichik calls this resulting empire ‘Ordus’, an amalgam of Horde and Rus, embracing the bulk of the Eurasian landmass. Ordus is a land where modernity has incorporated tradition and religion; the family has remained intact; and even though there are wealthy men, the unbridled pursuit of wealth is frowned upon.

“We work together and contain our egoism”, this is the credo of Ordus, a model suitable for the East. Mosques and churches are plentiful; however, all the citizens are united in harmony. This image of an alternative universe was so attractive to the Russians that I spotted a few cars carrying stickers “I want to live in Ordus”. By the way, Ordus includes a Jerusalem Vilayet, where many of the descendents of Jews found refuge from Hitler’s rise in Germany (yes, there was a Hitler and a Germany even in the alternative universe), but live as equals with the native inhabitants.

A fascinating new Russian historian, Fomenko, has proposed a heretical model of history: in his eyes, there was always an Empire, or rather, The Empire; and the city on the Bosporus is the natural capital of Eurasia. Whether or not it was ever the case in the past, it can certainly be the case in the future.

Instead of fighting for leadership in Eurasia, the Turks, Slavs, Arabs (and their smaller neighbours) can unite their forces and make Constantinople (‘Istanbul’ is just a corrupt reading of Constantinople) their joint capital and the seat of the Imperial government. Constantinople can be our answer to Brussels, New York and Beijing. While the centuries-long quest for hegemony in Eurasia has caused many wars, a union would satisfy all desires: the Russians will have Constantinople as their capital, without dislodging the Turks; the Turks will have lifelines to the Crimea and Tashkent, even to the far-away diamond reserves of Yakutia, the land of the Pravoslav Turks, restored without fighting a single Russian. The Middle East will once again be incorporated in Eurasia as it was; and it won’t have to listen to orders from Washington, London or Brussels. Instead of being a far-away place, Turkey will become the meeting place for the people of Baghdad and Kiev, Belgrade and Cairo, Vladivostok and Ankara.

Let us raise the twin-headed eagle of Byzantium once again as the symbol of our Eastern Civilisation’s unity of the Orthodox and the Muslims, invest our ruler with the twin crown of Caliph of Islam and Emperor of the Orthodox, bury petty nationalisms of the recent past and begin an exciting new page in our history and the history of the world. The reconstituted Commonwealth of the East, the rightful successor to the Eastern Roman, Byzantine, Russian and Ottoman Empires, will possess vast material and spiritual resources, making it a world superpower, next to a united Europe, to the US and to China.

This Commonwealth will be united by an idea, as well as by material considerations. For East and West are different, split by a metaphysical cleavage. In the West, the Mammonite heresy brought in the American troop carriers of the World War, had won the day. They accepted a brutal faith of greed, of unbridled desire for individual success, of the right and duty to grab and consume as much as possible. They rejected solidarity in the name egoism they call “absolute freedom of man”. They destroyed Woman by turning her into an imitation of man; they destroyed Man by making him compete with women. Having rejected God, their churches are empty, their cities are centred on the business quarters, while ours are centred on learning, art and prayer.

The East has retained its Christian identity, for Islam is just a form of Christianity, though as distanced from the Nicene Orthodoxy as is the Calvinism of the Swiss. The East denies Mammon for we have not rejected God; we put spirit above material considerations as we have not rejected Christ al Mesih, we adore Woman for we have not rejected His Mother, Sitt Maryam. The East still loves nature, despises the dishonest rich, believes in the value of work, and prefers harmony to success. We like manly men and womanly women. We respect tradition and family. The US-led West creates a nomad civilisation out of an open society of atomised individuals disconnected from family and soil. In the Commonwealth of the East, we shall proceed in the opposite direction. We will discourage immigration and encourage capital transfer. We shall be in favour of the autochthon, for the autochthon knows the needs and desires of his locality better.

The West has proclaimed the sanctity of private property. We respect it so long as it is small, but reject its excesses. We shall rule against greed by taxing the super-rich, confiscating their property and sending them for re-education and ‘de-greeding’ to a friendly Anatolian or Siberian village. There will be no privatisation of resources, no sale of lands to foreigners, no dispossession of peasants. We shall discourage the growth of cities and promote the countryside. The West over-regulates private life; we shall uphold the eternal liberties of the East. We shall be good friends to our neighbours, or terrible enemies, if they so choose.

This fantasy is actually the only plausible alternative to having our lands colonised by the US or by the rising superpowers of Europe and China.