Neocon propagandists redefining American history

[Moses]

townhall.com


Searching for Mr. Wilson
Michael Barone

December 20, 2004


Now, as George W. Bush's first term is ending and his second is about to begin, is a good time to examine his foreign policy under the lens of scholar Walter Russell Mead's splendid 2001 book, "Special Providence." Mead describes four "contrasting, competing voices and values" that have contributed to American foreign policy over the years, each named after a major statesman. How well is Bush doing on each?

 Start with the Jacksonian tradition, which, Mead writes, "represents a deeply embedded, widely spread populist and popular culture of honor, independence, courage and military pride among the American people."

 Bush's bold response to Sept. 11, his decisions to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq -- not every president would have done those things, but Andrew Jackson would have. Yet Bush apparently did order the pullback from Fallujah last April -- probably a mistake and, if so, probably rectified by November's offensive there. He has not settled on a confrontational approach to Iran and Syria, even as they interfere in Iraq, as the recent U.S. News cover story documented. And he has refrained from a Jacksonian approach to North Korea.

 Bush's Jacksonianism has led to collateral successes -- Libya's retreat from its nuclear weapons program, an apparent Saudi crackdown on terrorism (no telling how effective it has been), and the recent friendly moves toward Israel by Egypt and other Arab nations. To an unknowable extent, our Iraq policy has gotten Arabs and Iranians contemplating the possibilities of freedom and democracy.

 Mead's second tradition, Hamiltonianism, "sees the first task of the American government as promoting the health of American enterprise at home and abroad."

 He has proved he's pro-business at home. But when it comes to the abroad part, Bush hasn't shown himself to be enthusiastically subscribed to the vision of Alexander Hamilton. He seems to have little interest in international finance and has made few appointments from the financial community.

 But he has given free rein to Special Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, who has done outstanding work in negotiating free-trade agreements with various countries and in reviving negotiations on the Doha round of talks designed to reduce multilateral trade barriers. More progress is likely if Bush can keep Zoellick, or if he can find someone similarly talented.

 Thomas Jefferson's tradition, in Mead's view, "has consistently looked for the least costly and dangerous method of defending American independence, while counseling against attempts to impose American values on other countries." This ain't George W. Bush. In fact, Jeffersonians in the career ranks of the State Department and CIA tried to defeat Bush with well-timed leaks to sympathetic reporters. CIA Director Porter Goss seems determined to get career officers under control. It's not clear whether Condoleezza Rice will do so at State.

 Mead's Wilsonians believe that the United States "has both a moral and a practical duty to spread its values through the world." George W. Bush did not campaign as a Wilsonian in 2000, but he became one after Sept. 11. His continued insistence that freedom is a universal yearning recalls the rhetoric of Woodrow Wilson himself.

 But institutionally, the first Bush term has fallen far short in promoting its values. Few appointees abroad have effectively countered the fashionable anti-Americanism of European elites and media. Efforts to create favorable media outlets in the Arab world have been limited. There has been nothing like the broad-scale creation of pro-American cultural institutions in the early years of the Cold War.

 There seems to be no counterpart in the Islamic world of the Reagan administration's covert programs encouraging peaceful regime change in Eastern Europe. The administration sometimes seems to discourage, more than encourage, the efforts of evangelical Christian and Jewish organizations to spotlight religious persecution of Christians and others.

 In his first term, Bush proved to be a successful Jacksonian and Hamiltonian president. In his second term, will he prove to be a successful Wilsonian, as well?


Michael Barone is a senior writer for U.S.News & World Report and principal coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics.

[Moses]

Dr. Martin Luther King Day
nyjtimes.com/cover/01-18-05/DrMartinLutherKingDay.htm


By Yariv Ovadia (Embassy of Israel)

On April 4, 1968, humanity lost Dr. Martin Luther King to an assassin's bullet, and as the world honors his legacy, we in Israel remember the special bond he had with our people and our country. Dr. King witnessed the birth of the State of Israel, and spoke out against those who would destroy her, stating, "Peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all our might to protect its right to exist, its territorial integrity. I see Israel as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy. Peace for Israel means security and that security must be a reality."

Dr. King fought for the most sacred of human rights: to live in peace with your neighbors and to stand as equals in the eyes of their fellow men and women. His embrace of nonviolent resistance, of the right of every citizen to work for change with their voice and their vote, and not with guns or bombs, made him a true freedom fighter.

Even when it was politically unpopular to do so, Dr. King did not compromise his defense of both Jews and Israel, answering an overtly hostile question about the issue of Zionism, saying, "When people criticize Zionists they mean Jews, you are talking anti-Semitism."

Now, as Israel begins again her quest for peace, Dr. King's legacy is more important to us than ever. He knew firsthand the destruction to the soul caused by oppression and discrimination. He knew that true liberation was as necessary to life as breathing, regardless of race, creed or religion.

From the Ethiopian Jews rescued from war and famine in Africa to the release of the many prisoners of conscience from the former Soviet Union, over a million people fleeing oppression in their native countries have made their new home in Israel.

Then and now, Israel remains an oasis of safety for all who come seeking freedom of worship, political beliefs, gender and sexual orientation. Dr. King's dream encouraged their journey to freedom, while his insistence the world not turn a blind eye to the suffering of those not yet free inspired action.

Israel, one of the smallest countries in the world, has consistently been a country with one of the most open hearts.

Were he alive, Dr. King would celebrate the diversity that is the democratic reality of Israel, from its dual official languages of Hebrew and Arabic and coexisting populations of Jew, Arab, Druze, Bedouin, to its absorption of even more immigrants comprising dozens of languages and nationalities.

With each of Israel's new citizen's embrace of freedom have come unique challenges and opportunities. Dr. King spoke prophetically of the rewards to a society with such multicultural openness when he said, "The large house in which we live demands that we transform this worldwide neighborhood into a worldwide brotherhood. Together we must learn to live as brothers or together we will be forced to perish as fools."

We in Israel miss Dr. King. We miss his courage, his vision and his voice. He inspired us to reach higher, to put aside our fears and insecurities, and embrace each other, to find and nurture both our commonalties and our differences as the only way to strengthen all of humanity.

This was Dr. King's dream, his legacy, and, just like the trees we plant in the Martin Luther King Memorial Forest in Israel, it grows stronger in the hearts, dreams and aspirations of the people and State of Israel.

[Moses]

January 17 / 18, 2004

Desperation and Drastic Measures

The Use and Abuse of Martin Luther King Jr. by Israel's Apologists

By FADI KIBLAWI and WILL YOUMANS

In formal logic, Argumentum Ad Verecundiam refers to arguing a point with an appeal to authority. This type is categorized as a logical fallacy. Citing one seemingly authoritative source is simply not conclusive evidence, even if the authority is seen as an expert on the given subject.

For the sake of clarity, there are three degradations of this maxim enumerated in this essay. First, it is especially fallacious as proof when the quoted authority demonstrates no special knowledge on the subject. Second, when the authority who is not an expert on the given subject is also quoted out of context, the argument is even weaker. Third, the lowest violation of this formal logic principle is when an advocate uses a false rendition, or a fabricated quote, by the same authority who can claim no expertise.

This is the best framework for understanding how various exponents of Israel have used Martin Luther King Jr. to promote their cause.

Dr. King's expertise as a non-violent civil rights leader and visionary are unparalleled in U.S. history. However, that does not make him an informed commentator on Middle Eastern affairs or on the ideological facets of Zionism. As impressive as the references to his views on Israel may seem, this is a textbook example of Argumentum Ad Verecundiam.

Finding direct and published utterances by Dr. King about the modern Middle East and Zionism is extremely rare. A cursory review of dozens of books on and by the civil rights leader turned up nothing.

Nonetheless, defenders of Israel often refer to a letter by Dr. King. This letter is reprinted in full on many web pages and in print. One example of a quotation derived from this letter is:


"... You declare, my friend; that you do not hate the Jews, you are merely 'anti-Zionist' ... And I say, let the truth ring forth from the high mountain tops, let it echo through the valleys of God's green earth: When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews... Anti-Semitism, the hatred of the Jewish people, has been and remains a blot on the soul of mankind. In this we are in full agreement. So know also this: anti-Zionist is inherently anti-Semitic, and ever will be so."

Antiracism writer Tim Wise checked the citation, which claimed that it originated from a "Letter to an Anti-Zionist Friend" in an August, 1967 edition of Saturday Review. In an article on January, 2003, essay he declared that he found no letters from Dr. King in any of the four August, 1967 editions. The authors of this essay verified Wise's discovery. The letter was commonly cited to also have been published in a book by Dr. King entitled, "This I Believe: Selections from the Writings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr." No such book was listed in the bibliography provided by the King Center in Atlanta, nor in the catalogs of several large public and university libraries.

Soon afterwards, CAMERA, a rabidly pro-Israeli organization, published a statement declaring that the letter was "apparently" a hoax. CAMERA explained how it gained so much currency. The "letter" came from a "reputable" book, Shared Dreams, by Rabbi Marc Shneier. Martin Luther King III authored the preface for the book, giving the impression of familial approval. Also, the Anti-Defamation League's Michael Salberg used the same quotes in his July 31st, 2001 testimony before the U.S. House of Representative's International Relations Committee's Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights.

The bogus letter was further quoted by writers in prominent publications one would imagine armed with fact-checkers capable of spending the short amount of time needed to verify the primary source. Mort Zuckerman, the editor-in-chief of the U.S. News & World Report quoted the letter in a column (9/17/01). Warren Kinsella followed suit in an article for Maclean's (1/20/03). Commentary, which is known more for its ideological zeal than any appreciation for factual scruples, ran a piece by Natan Sharansky. He quoted the false passage as a block--some ten months after CAMERA declared it a hoax.

More recently, the Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) featured excerpts from the letter prominently on its website. Despite its name, SPME is an advocacy group seeking to bolster Israel's image on campus--a mission it claims promotes peace in the region. Ironically, right under the false Dr. King quotation is an announcement of the formation of a task force "dealing with academic integrity with respect to fabricating and falsifying data when discussing the Middle East."

After one of the authors of this article informed SPME's director of the quotation's discredited status, he replied with hostility despite the simple verifiability of the claim that the citation is incorrect. After several exchanges he replaced it with another seemingly far-fetched quote:

Martin Luther King addressed the issue in 1968, in a speech at Harvard when he said: ".. You declare, my friend, that you do not hate the Jews, you are merely 'anti-Zionist.' ...When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews... And what is anti-Zionist? It is the denial to the Jewish people of a fundamental right that we justly claim for the people of Africa and freely accord all other nations of the Globe...When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews--make no mistake about it."

When a citation for this new quote was requested, he refused to provide one, leaving visitors only with its claim that Dr. King delivered it in a 1968 Harvard "speech." However, the language of SMPE's new posting strongly resembles their original one -- on account of the fact that it too comes from the same discredited "Letter to an Anti-Zionist Friend."

The first time the fake letter was quoted, it could have been a mistake, but to draw on different lines from the same fictitious letter is strikingly unscholarly -- as is the false citation of it to a 1968 "speech" at Harvard. Either this citation was invented or taken from another unspecified source--classic plagiarism, whether intentional or out of gross negligence.

SPME's reference to a 1968 "speech" at Harvard mirrors the details from a published account that appeared in two sources: First, it was in right-wing and ardently pro-Israeli sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset's 1969 articlein Encounter. Second, it was in a January, 2002 San Francisco Chronicle op/ed by Congressman John Lewis, who knew Dr. King personally.

Lipset wrote in his essay "The Socialism of Fools: The Left, the Jews & Israel" about a "dinner" for Dr. King he attended. When one black student made "some remark against the Zionists," Dr. King "snapped" back, "'When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You are talking anti-Semitism'."

The piece by Congressman Lewis also quotes this same remark though it is not clear if it is gathered from Lipset's essay.

Congressman Lewis claims Dr. King made this comment "shortly before his death" during "an appearance at Harvard." Lipset states it was "shortly before he was assassinated" at a "dinnergiven for him in Cambridge." This quotation seems on its face much more credible. Yet, SPME presents snippets from the fake letter while apparently citing this statement (a 1968 "speech" at Harvard).

There are still, however, a few reasons for casting doubt on the authenticity of this statement. According to the Harvard Crimson, "The Rev. Martin Luther King was last in Cambridge almost exactly a year ago--April 23, 1967" ("While You Were Away" 4/8/68). If this is true, Dr. King could not have been in Cambridge in 1968. Lipset stated he was in the area for a "fund-raising mission," which would seem to imply a high profile visit. Also, an intensive inventory of publications by Stanford University's Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project accounts for numerous speeches in 1968. None of them are for talks in Cambridge or Boston.

[Moses]

....One of the principal arguments of Lipset's 1969 article is that the split between blacks and Jews "stems much more from the American situation than from the Middle East Conflict." He identifies Jews as a dominating force within the civil rights movement. Black nationalist leadership wanted to distance themselves from Whites in the movement, Lipset argues. In Lipset's own words, he summarized what Black nationalists were saying: "We don't want whites, but we particularly don't want Jews, and we are expressing antagonism to Jews in the form of opposition to Israel."

Few of the articles that cite Lipset's essay mention this crucial context. One individual who did explore this, albeit crudely, still managed to contrive another Dr. King quote unimaginatively. Dr. Andrew Bostom, a medical professor at Brown University, wrote an article for Front Page Magazine (1/20/03) that was reprinted on former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's website. In it, he claimed that Dr. King had the "moral courage" to confront the anti-Jewish rhetoric of black left-wing and Muslim organizations. This is not to say that Dr. Bostom is a reliable source. Central to his article is a 347 word passage which he attributes to Dr. King. He fails to cite a source for the outlandish tirade. A quick google search determined it was lifted entirely from original material on the homepage of www.yahoodi.com (which has a copyright date of 2002), plus healthy portions of the fake "Letter to an Anti-Zionist Friend." Dr. Bostom's article featured the least creative and perhaps most fraudulent doctored script yet: a patchwork of plagiarism.

Taking the context described by Lipset and Dr. Bostom to be generally correct for the sake of argument would shed light on the credible Dr. King quotes. If the movement he figured so prominently in was facing such a rift, his response was only natural. To borrow Lipset's analysis then, Dr. King's statement also "stems much more from the American situation than from the Middle East Conflict." Given his local political anxieties, Dr. King was hardly the kind of disinterested authority worth quoting on the subject.

As a note: the actual validity of Lipset and Dr. Bostom's views of that context is beyond the scope of this essay. While it is true that black nationalists, such as SNCC's leadership, became increasingly critical of Israel after 1967, it is not convincing that the motive was to alienate American Jews even if that was the foreseeable effect. An ardent internationalist for example would care more about linking oppressed people's struggles across the globe than they would about the relatively mainstream political movement for equality in the American polity.

Back to the main point: if the forged quotes reflecting Dr. King's views on Israel were accurate, citing him would still be classic Argumentum Ad Verecundiam. Where is the proof that Dr. King studied the region or its modern history? The dearth of then-publicized comments and writings on the region by Dr. King shows that it was probably not a subject he was well-versed on, nor did it appear to be a priority of his throughout his career.

Even the statements Congressman Lewis attributes to him are low in substance and high on flourishing rhetoric. For example, Dr. King stated that Israel is a "marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy." Referring to it as "marvelous" and an "oasis" sounds rather uninformed given the realities of military occupation and the forced exile the Palestinians have witnessed since Israel's foundation. They surely do not sound like the words of someone familiar with both sides of the story.

More significantly, as Tim Wise pointed out, Dr. King's supposed statements on Zionism came before the more than three decades of crippling Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and the 1987 intifada that grabbed the world's attention. The Palestinian narrative was sparsely conveyed in the United States up to that point. There were few Arabs or Palestinians in the U.S. and fewer Arab academics, policymakers, and activists working with Dr. King. Wise also suggests that application of Dr. King's principles logically give way to more sympathy to the Palestinian side given the systematic inequality it faces.

That advocates of Israel have relied on fabricated and out-of-context quotations from a leading moral figure of yesteryear only underscores the absurdity of the general point that all opposition to a Jewish state in a diverse land is anti-Semitic. There are obviously many legitimate ways to critique Zionism. One quite reasonable observation is that after more than a half-century of conflict, the Zionist project has failed to bring the Jews of Israel peace and security--its raison d'etre. One might counter that this is due to Arab intransigence; the Palestinians should accept their dispossession. However, Palestinian opposition to this fate is an indisputable fact, and security was and is Zionism's key goal. This necessarily was an analytical failure on the part of the Zionists who assumed the Palestinians would blend in to other Arab countries while the later generations forget their past. To dismiss this argument--one that evaluates Zionism by its own goals--and every other critique of Zionism as anti-Semitism is not only dishonest but a cowardly evasion of meaningful debate.


This is not to say that all opponents of Israel are not anti-Semitic. Of course the Palestinian cause, like all movements, is exploited by those with other agendas, such as David Duke and Osama Bin Laden. Blanket statements in either direction are inaccurate.

The main reason why critique of Zionism persists is that whether Israeli officials like it or not, history as it is written and the actual land are still disputed by the millions of Palestinians who are refugees as a result of Israel's birth, the 3.5 million Palestinians living under Israel's direct military rule, and the Palestinians who compose 20% of Israel's citizens in second class status. If Israel was founded and developed on uncontested terrain then arguments against its existence would more likely be out of hatred against the Jewish people. For supporters of Israel to wipe away all critics of the methods and outcomes of Israel's foundation with the "anti-Semitic" label denies completely the legitimacy of the Palestinian narrative--the experiences and perspectives that never show up in Dr. King's imagined "oasis."

Dr. King, though long-passed, is still monumental in the continuing movement for civil rights in the United States. His legacy should be celebrated, and also critiqued constructively; it should not be falsified or stretched to accommodate a different agenda today. The context behind Dr. King's authentic statements on Zionism was unique to a particular domestic political moment in order to sustain a fragile political coalition. Beyond that, Dr. King never claimed any expertise on the subject, nor made it a frequent topic of his speeches or writings. Claiming that all critiques of Zionism are anti-Semitic based on the force Martin Luther King Jr.'s words on the matter fails as an argument on many different levels.

---

Fadi Kiblawi is a law student at George Washington University and can be reached at [e-mail].

Will Youmans, who contributed an essay to The Politics of Anti-Semitism, can be reached at [e-mail]

[Moses]

Judi Bari Survives Character Assassination
  By Kelpie Wilson


  Wednesday 19 January 2005

  Some women are so strong you have to kill them three times to make sure they stay dead.I remember the first time they tried to kill Judi Bari in 1990:

  I was sitting on the deck enjoying the spring sunshine on the first morning of leisure I'd had in months - we had just wrapped up the signature campaign to get the Forests Forever sustainable logging initiative on the California ballot - when the phone rang. It was Betty Ball from the Mendocino Environmental Center in Ukiah telling me that Judi's car had been bombed and she was in the hospital in Oakland.

  My first call was to the Seeds of Peace collective house. A stranger answered the phone. "Do you know what happened to Judi and Darryl?" I asked. "Yeah, I heard they blew themselves up," he replied, and that's when I knew I was talking to a cop who was in the middle of ransacking my friends' home.

  I had been at the Seeds house the night before along with Judi and a dozen other people, finalizing our schedule for the Redwood Summer action campaign. We planned to host several thousand activists from all over the country in a summer of non-violent protest actions against the logging of ancient redwoods.

  The bomb had been placed under the driver's seat of Judi's car and went off when she hit the brakes in the middle of an Oakland traffic jam. Over the next few weeks, while Judi lay in the hospital with a fractured pelvis and ruptured nerves, the FBI and Oakland police charged her with transporting a bomb and began to investigate her and her associates for possession of bomb-making materials. No evidence was found, and eventually the charges were dropped, but the FBI never broadened their investigation to include real suspects like the timber industry and an anti-abortion fanatic who sent a letter claiming responsibility (the "Lord's Avenger" letter).

  Judi survived the bombing, famously quipping: "They blew up the wrong end of me," meaning her pelvis and not her mouth.

  Judi continued her work as a leader in both the ecology and labor movements, but she was in constant and excruciating pain. Still, she wanted very much to live, to see her children grow up, to win more battles for the redwoods and to prevail in the lawsuit she was bringing against the FBI for falsely accusing her of carrying a bomb.

  Judi died in 1997 of a sudden and aggressive cancer. A dedicated team of friends and supporters carried on the lawsuit and in 2002 they won an historic judgment of $4.4 million against the FBI and Oakland police for violating the civil rights of Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney. The bulk of the jury's damage award was for the First Amendment violation of framing the pair as violent terrorists, effectively silencing their free speech and political organizing in defense of the forests.

  The latest attempt to smear and silence the voice of Judi Bari comes in the form of a supposed biography by neocon writer Kate Coleman titled The Secret Wars of Judi Bari.

  The Judi Bari that Kate Coleman creates in the pages of her book is not a person whom I recognize. The book has plenty of color and detail that rings true, but that's because so much has been written about Judi and by Judi herself that documents the Earth First! movement and Judi's role in it. Coleman had mountains of already published material to lift from and she used it to construct a myth based on a template provided by her publisher, the right-wing Encounter Books headed by neocons Peter Collier and David Horowitz.

  Encounter Books is a project of Encounter for Culture and Education, a tax exempt, non-profit corporation that is part of that well-funded conservative intellectual think tank establishment we are always hearing about. According to the Center for Media and Democracy, the Encounter for Culture Foundation received over $4.6 million from right wing funders like the Bradley Foundation between 1991 and 2002. Its books include an attack on Title IX funding for women's sports and a hit piece on Hillary Clinton called The Hillary Trap, where pundit Laura Ingraham warns that Hillary is a pathetic victim and a terrible women's role model because she did not leave her husband over his adultery. One Amazon.com reviewer called the book "character assassination."

  Character assassination is the best description of Coleman's work on Judi Bari. To call Coleman Judi Bari's "biographer" is an insult to any genuine biographer. You could call her a collage artist because that is what she does, snipping and ripping bits out of Judi's life and pasting them into a new picture, adding ugly embroidery of her own design. The palette of colors is there, but the portrait is defaced.

  Colman has morphed a funny, smart, loving, creative and sometimes temperamental and egotistical activist into a pathetic victim of domestic violence who attempted to take out a contract on her ex-husband's life and whose rigid ideology inclined her toward violence. This is an utterly false picture and it is suspiciously similar to the picture that the FBI tried to paint of her as an eco-terrorist.

  Coleman never met Judi Bari. She never contacted or spoke to most of Bari's close associates. Instead, as primary sources, she chose to publish a number of outright lies from four avowed enemies of Judi Bari, a boatload of not-so-swift-veterans of the Mendocino Timber Wars.

  One of these persons, source of the allegation that Judi sought to kill her ex-husband, is Irv Sutley, an unstable character who, also without evidence, accused the same ex-husband of planting the bomb in Judi's car. Both Judi and journalist Steve Talbot were convinced that Sutley was a police agent, possibly working for the FBI. The other three are profiled on a web site (www.colemanhoax.com) that friends and associates have set up to document the lies and errors in the Coleman book.

  Judi's long time friend Betty Ball said: "It's absurd that such a lie-filled book could be published when there's so much information readily available to expose it."

  When not promoting outright lies, Coleman turns to distortion and innuendo. Here's an example of her method:

  "Potential violence against Bari and Cherney was implied in the threats they were now receiving in letters and in flyers, about which they complained loudly, but without ever acknowledging that their provocative utterances and publications only intensified the climate of hostility. In fact, Cherney had put out his own not-so-veiled death warrant against Maxxam's Charles Hurwitz." (The Secret Wars of Judi Bari, p 137-8)

  This paragraph accomplishes three things. First it lies about Darryl Cherney's Charles Hurwitz poster. The poster offered a "$50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest, conviction and jailing of corporate raider Charles Hurwitz." Veiled or unveiled, this is not a death threat.

  Second, it trivializes the real death threats that Judi was receiving that included things like a picture of her in crosshair sights, a dead cat on her doorstep and numerous letters promising to kill or rape her.

  Third, it says that the death threats were justified because of Bari and Cherney's "provocative utterances." These provocative words, Coleman implies, were tit-for-tat threats of violence, which is untrue. Bari and Cherney had real critiques of corporate crime and government policies. They delighted in their lamthingys but never threatened anyone with physical harm. To say they deserved it or brought it upon themselves is to say that free speech deserves no protection when it provokes and annoys.

  Fortunately, a real biography of Judi Bari is forthcoming from Pulitzer-Prize winning author Susan Faludi. Judi's own book, Timber Wars, is available from Common Courage Press.

  Judi Bari's reputation will survive this latest assassination attempt, but it's important to ask why she is still being targeted. The answer is because, like Hillary Clinton, she was and still is a powerful role model for women.

  Judi was articulate and smart. She was extremely effective as an organizer and pioneered the effort to bring labor unions and environmentalists together. She was outspokenly pro-choice. But the number one reason to target her is because she showed no fear and never backed down an inch. That is also the reason why she won the admiration of activists all over the world.

  As activists we need and deserve our heroes. As realists we know that they have feet of clay, but that only endears them to us more because we recognize that the real hero is the community and we are all a part of it.

---

    Kelpie Wilson is the t r u t h o u t environment editor. A veteran forest protection activist and mechanical engineer, she writes from her solar-powered cabin in the Siskiyou Mountains of southwest Oregon.

[Moses]

The ruins of Dresden, bombed by Allied forces in February 1945. (AP File Photo)
How good was the Good War?
On May 8, 1945, the war against Hitler’s Third Reich was won — and some of the victors’ most cherished myths were born
By Geoffrey Wheatcroft  |  May 8, 2005

‘‘NO ENGLISH SOLDIER who rode with the tanks into liberated Belgium or saw the German murder camps at Dachau or Buchenwald could doubt that the war had been a noble crusade.’’ Forty years ago the historian A.J.P. Taylor eloquently expressed what has become a universal belief. Other wars are looked back on with horror for their futile slaughter, but the conflict that ended in Europe in May 1945 is today seen as what Studs Terkel called his famous oral history of it: ‘‘The Good War.’’

In one way it will always remain so. A revisionist case, that defeating Hitler was a mistake, would be not only perverse and offensive, but simply absurd. And yet we have all been sustained since V-E Day, 60 years ago today, by what Giovanni Giolitti, the Italian prime minister of a century ago, once called ‘‘beautiful national legends.’’ By ‘‘we’’ I mean the countries that ended the war on the winning side (the Germans and Japanese have some national legends of their own).

Some of these legends are more obvious than others. The French suffered a catastrophic defeat in 1940, and the compromises many Frenchmen made with their conquerors thereafter ranged from the pitiful to the wicked. More Frenchmen collaborated than resisted, and during the course of the war more Frenchmen bore arms on the Axis than on the Allied side. Against those grim truths, Charles de Gaulle consciously and brilliantly constructed a nourishing myth of Free France and Resistance that helped heal wounds and rebuild the country.

Other myths about the war have grown up less deliberately. For Americans, the first national legend concerns the very definition of World War II. In recent decades it has come more and more to mean the war against Hitler’s Germany. But for the American people at the time, ‘‘the war’’ meant the Pacific war. That was where the first and last American blood was spilled, where America was engaged in combat the longest, and where Americans for most of the time watched the war unfold.

Funnily enough, when President Bush says that the war on terror, like World War II, began with a surprise attack on America, he is echoing that original perception. To say that the war started with the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941 (which is what he means) will come as a surprise to Europeans and especially the Poles, who have an idea it began on Sept. 1, 1939, when the Wehrmacht invaded their country. And yet Bush is harking back unconsciously to the days when the war for America meant ‘‘The Sands of Iwo Jima,’’ rather than ‘‘Saving Private Ryan’’ and ‘‘Band of Brothers.’’

The reason for the subtle shift in American perception is easy to see. If a purely evil regime ever existed, it was the Third Reich, and if any war ever had a moral purpose it must have been the war fought to end its mad persecution. By contrast the morality of the Pacific war was much less clear-cut. To be sure, Japan launched that surprise attack, and Japanese troops behaved horribly to American, British, and Australian POWs and much worse to the Asian peoples they conquered. Still, the Marines scarcely pretended to take prisoners (even when the Japanese wanted to surrender), while the score for Pearl Harbor was more than settled at Hiroshima.

Apart from the way it was fought, that war was pretty much a traditional contest for imperial hegemony. The Philippines did not belong to Japan by right, nor to America. And while the Third Reich practiced a kind of evil different in kind even from Japanese atrocities, the Germans were never demonized and dehumanized in American propaganda and popular culture as the Japanese were a difference grimly reflected in the way Japanese-Americans were interned but German-Americans were not.

. . .

For my own country the first nourishing myth is that ‘‘we won the war.’’ It’s true that only the British, along with their Commonwealth and Empire, took part in the war from its start in September 1939 to its end in August 1945; true too that British defiance of Hitler in the year from June 1940 to June 1941 was absolutely crucial. But the British, as they knew even at the time, could only play a negative partby not surrendering. They could not defeat Hitler on their own, but had to wait for him to bring about his own doom, by invading Russia in June 1941 and declaring war on the United States (rather than the other way round, be it remembered) in December.

Even then, others did the fighting. The best description of how Hitler was defeated was Stalin’s. The old monster said that England provided the time, America provided the money, and Russia provided the blood.

Not only did it take the Western Allies nearly three years after the German attack on Russia seriously to engage the German army in Normandy, but even then most of the fighting was still on the other side of Europe. In the campaign from D-Day to V-E Day, something like 110,000 American soldiers were killed, as well as about half as many from the combined British-Canadian armies. That sounds formidable, and indeed is by today’s standards, until you remember that in the same 11-month period more than half a million Russians were killed on the Eastern Front. Leaving aside the respective Allied casualties, to see how the war was won you need only compare two figures. In all the western campaigns of the war against French, British, Americans, and troops of many other lands, some 200,000 German soldiers died. Four million Germans died on the Eastern Front.

Behind this lies an awkward truth, one we didn’t learn in the cheerful war comics and books of my boyhood in the 1950s, but on which all serious military historians are now agreed. From the beginning to the end of that war, whenever the British Army met the Wehrmacht on anything like equal terms, the Germans always prevailed. And that pretty much goes for the US Army too, from their first disastrous encounter with the Germans, at Kasserine Pass in North Africa, in early 1943. American and British commanders always took good care thereafter that they had an overwhelming superiority in men and especially in weaponry before engaging the enemy.

That is not a cause for shame. The British were haunted by memories of the Great War and its vast carnage. As much to the point, Great Britain and the United States were democracies. Their soldiers were not brutalized peasants, or even an ‘‘army of mercenaries,’’ as A.E. Housman called the 1914 British regular army. As the British military historian Max Hastings puts it in his excellent recent book ‘‘Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-45’’ (Pan), they were citizens in uniform, and they could not be treated as German or Russian soldiers were.

For that fighting spirit of the Germans had another side to it. Hitler ruled by glamour and terror; his soldiers were driven by fear as well as zeal. In a war during which no British soldier, and only one GI, was shot for cowardice, at least 15,000 German servicemen were executed for dereliction of duty.

And that went for the Russians even more so. A heroic Russian narrative of the war, and the memory of the tens of millions of Russian dead, is still potent and plays a part in the sinister nostalgia for Stalin resurfacing in Russia but Russian heroism also has to be qualified.

We now know that in the first winter of the war on the Eastern Front in 1941-42, more than 8,000 Russian soldiers died not in action but shot by their own army for cowardice or desertion. During the battle of Stalingrad alone, another 12,000 men of the Red Army were put to death pour encourager les autres. This was a regime fighting a desperate war that could nevertheless put to death well over a full infantry division of its own men. On the other hand, the Russians relaxed at the end of the war, with Stalin’s encouragement, by indulging in the greatest act of gang rape in history against millions of women in Hungary, Austria, and eastern Germany.

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For the Western Allies, the ‘‘good war’’ was compromised in other ways, particularly by the bombing campaign that reduced the cities of Germany to rubble. Here is another somber comparison, between the 300,000 British servicemen killed in the war and the 600,000 German civilians killed by Allied mainly British bombing. At the time consciences were numbed the war had to be won, and ‘‘they had it coming’’ but it is not now easy to look back with pride on the scores of thousands of women and children incinerated in Hamburg in July 1943 or Dresden in February 1945.

Nor on the other moral compromises at the war’s end. Great Britain did not go to war to save the Jews from Hitler’s torment (and did not succeed) but to protect the freedom and integrity of Poland, an aim that Churchill, with Roosevelt’s encouragement, abandoned at Yalta. Worse still was the forcible repatriation of prisoners to torture and death in Russia and Yugoslavia. And yet all this was not simply conspiracy or betrayal: The Iron Curtain, with half of Europe under Soviet rule, was a painful but logical consequence of the way the West had let Russia do most of the fighting.

Was it ‘‘a noble crusade’’? For the liberation of western Europe, maybe so. Was it a just war? That tricky theological concept has to be weighed against very many injustices. Was it a good war? The phrase itself is dubious. No, there are no good wars, but there are necessary wars, and this was surely one.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an English journalist and author. His most recent book is ‘‘The Strange Death of Tory England.’’  



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