Joanna wrote:
> Next time, perhaps you could convey it without insult.
Where was I being insulting? When I used the word "ignorant"? Ignorance is no crime. I am ignorant of many things. Pointing this out is not an insult. If I had called Michael "stupid" or something along those lines, that would indeed be insulting. But I said that Michael is unfamiliar with the debates of the German left in the past 30 years, and that he also couldn't possibly be expected to. Why is that insulting?
Michael wrote:
> One seems to have touched a nerve here.
Not really, I've actually stayed out of most of this thread so far. What passes for a "left" in the United States is so marginal and irrelevant that it's really not capable of inflicting any damage on this issue.
When the teabagger fascists start adopting a vehement anti-Zionism, then I might worry. They are a force capable of doing real harm.
> These "tendencies" are even stronger in Germany than here in the US, as > far as I can tell, with my schoolboy German. Would New Angel disagree?
No, I wouldn't disagree. I would disagree with the reasons you gave for this development. You stated it had something to do with an instinctive, unexamined guilt complex. I pointed out that it's actually the result of extensive political debate. It is in no way something to take for granted, but something that was the result of a struggle within the left.
> One of the forces tending to emancipate American lefties from their
> anti-anti-Semitic
See, this is where we disagree. I think communists have a responsibility to be anti-anti-Semitic, as anti-Semitism is a constitutive element of the spontaneous consciousness in capitalist societies. Sometimes it is openly proclaimed anti-Semitism, such as that found among the German NPD or in the Hamas charter. Other times it is an implicit anti-Semitism that gets worked up about the Federal Reserve, the "East Coast", and "international bankers".
Until any nominal left in the United States is unwilling to examine how a society of generalized commodity production and exchange spontaneously reproduces anti-Semitic ideology, it will not get anywhere.
http://libcom.org/library/anti-semitism-national-socialism-moishe-postone