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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Rowan Berkeley
Published Letters: 176
[...] Democratic Party Representative Dov Hikind’s political and other positions have never been less than an open book, both in his heavily hassidic Brooklyn district, and in the Jewish state he visits regularly and admits to considering his main passion. In fact, he even goes as far as to say he’s “guilty” of not living here. This might sound peculiar for someone who has been an elected politician in the United States for nearly three decades — particularly when the question of Jewish “dual loyalty” continues to be raised by certain Americans wishing to stick it to prominent Zionists in their midst. But Hikind, the son of Holocaust survivors — and husband of Shoshana, who runs the New York office of American Friends of Ateret Kohanim Yeshiva — sees nothing wrong with his priorities, which he promotes without apology. He likens his type of partisanship to that of gay rights advocates, who, he claims, are unabashed about the issue closest to their hearts, minds and ballot-casting. “As a proud Jew, I will never support a candidate who is bad on Israel, even if he or she is good on all other issues important to me,” he says. This might help to explain why the veteran member of the Democratic Party who wears a crocheted kippa often supports Republican candidates, such as George W. Bush — and now John McCain [...]
Ruthie Blum, JPost, April 2, 2008
I may be not an American, not a Salon subscriber, and new around here, but I have spent decades doing this, more or less on my own, and I have plenty of practice in keeping it simple.
First, I shall take the easier issue, which is economic philosophy. Every time people make facile oppositions like 'marxist versus libertarian' they are doing the GOP's work for it. The essential 'marxist' insight, which is confirmed by Keynes, is that capitalist economies have to expand continually or they will collapse. This is NOT because of the nature of fiat money - the idea of blaming the money suppliers, i.e. the bankers, is an old capitalist dodge and one of the main ingredients of anti-Semitic politics, which we shall get to later. The expand-or-collapse dynamic is intrinsic to the process of the capitalist production and sale of commodities, because of the obvious fact that aggregate wages can never be enough to allow the producers to purchase the whole of aggregate production, some of which has to go into the production of capital goods, which are goods to make the next cycle of consumer goods. The process of resource allocation is intrinsically unstable, and the easiest way to fend off the instability is by imperialist expansion of markets. This would still be true even if there was no such thing as fiat money, and all money was gold, silver, and copper, exchanged at market value.
Now to Jews, Israel, and anti-Semitism. It is entirely misleading to identify 'Israel,' the actually existing nation-state, with AIPAC and the American Jewish lobby. In my opinion, their interests are antithetical. The lobby, in my view, prostitutes the laudable concern of Americans of all sorts for Israel's welfare, by selling it to the imperialist, militarist sector of the US economy, which has become practically the only growth sector because of the problematic nature of capitalist economies already mentioned. To some extent, politics in Israel is itself controlled by parties which are sold to these US-based imperialist-militarist interests, and certainly the Israeli economy is unpleasantly dependent upon the military sector. A further complication is the ideological submission of the secular zionist nationalism which desires Israel to be 'like unto all other nations,' and which informed most of early practical zionism, to a grandiose religious vision concocted by bourgeois American Orthodox Jews in conjunction with bourgeois American Christian imperialists. I have every reason to suppose that most Jewish Israelis, especially the younger ones, detest religious grandiosity, and would agree with me, and this is one of the reasons I am teaching myself modern (not Biblical) hebrew. If I have overshot 1000 words I apologise.
Referring this to a British-derived concept of 'monarchic' rule is misleading, I think. Me being British, I immediately noticed, when I started reading the serious American press, that Calvinism had had a much more profound effect on the USA than it had on Britain. The Calvinist axioms include the notion that an absolute morality should be revealed to each virtuous individual by an interior revelation. Thus, morality is non-negotiable, every individual being expected to proceed by the interior light of his own revealed moral sense. This makes impossible demands on the law, so the law too ends up being treated as a revealed text. This requires that the whole system of legal philosophy also bases itself on an imagined non-negotiable revelation derived from 'Judeo-Christian values.' Everything else is regarded as debauched, and I think this is why 'liberals' (not to mention Leftists in the proper, radically sceptical, sense) are regarded as, at best, a sort of demi-monde. My impression is that our monarchy, at the time of your revolution, while famously oppressive and barbaric in its colonial policy, was forced to deal with our own bourgeoisie on the basis of a quite cynical, Lockean moral philosophy, not at all 'the divine right of kings.'
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
