THE HANDSTAND

july 2005

Jaffa Lizards

By Israel Shamir

This May was a time of great disillusionment for Russians. Years have passed since they parted with Communism, broke up the Soviet Union, granted independence to (or gave away to the US) every land they ever controlled, allowed Western companies to buy and sell their heirlooms and livelihood, closed down their military bases, let their missiles and submarines rust in peace, fulfilled every demand and desire of the US. Then they prepared a great celebration of V-Day, invited guests, brushed up their medals, retold the stories of supreme heroism – and were cold-shouldered by the US and UK, their erstwhile allies in the World War II. President Bush, tactful as ever, went to Tbilisi and declared that there was no big difference between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

“O God, why did we fight for them?” thought many Russians. “Why did we support the Anglo-American landing in Normandy instead of signing a separate peace treaty with practically defeated Germany in the spring of 1944, when our territory was liberated? Why did so many Russian soldiers have to fight and die while liberating Poland or Czechoslovakia or West Ukraine? Now we see that the Czechs and the Poles prefer German hegemony; they let them in via the EU treaty. The West Ukraine celebrates their volunteers in the SS division and pushes for NATO membership. We could let them have it their way; stay put behind the old borders and let the Wehrmacht deal with Private Ryan.”

If time messaging were possible, have no doubt – that is what would have happened in 1944; and we would be living today in a different world. In that alternative world, the Russians would not have to listen to the complaints of an American president about why they were so rough with their enemy

Such grossly unjust philippics appear in the Western media because the Western and the Eastern visions of the War differ greatly. For the Russians and their neighbours, the important thing was their great victory over the German enemy; but in the West, the Jewish holocaust blotted out the victory of Stalingrad and Berlin. The West adopted a strange narrative centred on the Jewish fate. According to this narrative, the Germans decided to exterminate all Jews, from babies to the old men; that is why they fought the war. The world callously disregarded the Jewish tragedy, but a miracle occurred: Jews were saved and created their state of Israel from the ashes of the Holocaust.

From the Russian point of view, the USSR did not ‘callously disregard’, but shed the blood of its best sons and daughters. The war was not fought for Jews or because of Jews; but Russia deserves their eternal gratitude anyway for saving them from their peril. Because of this claim on Jewish gratitude, the Russians went a long way with the creators of the holocaust narrative; but Jewish gratitude was extremely short-lived (as it usually is – google up my essay Prince Charming).

In the present Jewish narrative that became the official version of modern history in the West thanks to efforts of Jewish media lords, the USSR/Russia is conspicuous by its absence. Even the Americans appear in this story as people who failed to bomb Auschwitz and supplied their know-how to the Germans. In the endless corridors of the Yad va-Shem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, the Red Army is not even mentioned. Millions of perished Russian soldiers find no place in the Zionist narrative of the Jewish tragedy, a Jewish heroic fight and an indifferent gentile world.

The American and European leaders fully accepted the Jewish narrative, not least because it released them from their obligations towards the ally that shouldered the immense burden of the war. They watched with incomprehension and irritation the V-Day celebrations in Moscow. For them, the key event took place a few months earlier in Auschwitz: as opposed to Moscow, none failed to appear there to ask for Jewish forgiveness. For them, the Jewish tragedy was the only important event of 1945; as for victory – what victory?

That Victory was stolen. In Israel this May 9 they spoke of the heroism of Jewish soldiers and partisans, as if they had won the war single-handedly. The Israeli school syllabus does not refer to the War except in the context of the holocaust. Israeli well-nurtured ignorance is complete:

A Russian student wrote a thesis on the Battle of Moscow, in the winter 1941, and mentioned it while meeting with the Israeli students in Tel Aviv. “Who actually fought whom at Moscow in 1941?” asked an Israeli youth. After a brief silence, an Israeli teacher explained: the Germans fought the Japanese!

Thus the story of the Jewish holocaust obscured the war and the Soviet victory. The Western anti-communists wanted to steal the victory; the Zionists helped them while minding their own interests. Now they collect billions in reparations, while the heroic feat of our fathers is forgotten. For me, a dweller of Jaffa, this turn of events recalls the myth of Perseus and his victory over the Sea Monster. You probably remember how the Sea Monster threatened Jaffa with destruction lest the Princess Andromeda were delivered into his paws; Perseus beheaded the Medusa Gorgona, donned the winged sandals of Hermes, flew to Jaffa and turned the Sea Monster into stone, thus saving Princess Andromeda.

Now imagine that a few years after this exploit, a young man named Jason decided to check the story and have a peek at the Princess. He gathered his friends, young Athenian gentlemen with much spare time on their hands, and sailed his black ship east. Winds and currents were favourable, and the ship reached Jaffa safely and speedily. If the Athenians had any doubts about Perseus’s veracity, these were dispelled most convincingly: the vast bulk of the sea monster was beached on the rocks a hundred yards from the shore, thus creating a cosy nook of a harbour. (It is still here, and is shown to tourists).

In a café serving local arrack, a fiery, milky drink not dissimilar to the Hellene Ouzo, the Athenians enquired about the Sea Monster.

“Yes, this skeleton is timeless reminder of the great lizard tragedy,” said the barman.

“What lizard tragedy?” asked a sailor.

“The Monster was devouring the lizards,” said the barman. “The lizards, these harmless, exquisite and gracious creatures, were his favourite food. Every day he would swallow them by thousands. The lizards would be eliminated if the Monster were not slain. Until now, we have a Lizard tragedy remembrance day, and here is the memorial of the Devoured Lizard.”

Indeed, our sailors had not noticed until now a modest sculpture embellishing the city square. It depicted a lizard in a tortured pose, his tail gone and small paws raised to the blue Jaffa sky.

“Strange! We have never heard of this lizard angle from Perseus,” muttered Jason.

“Ah, Perseus!” exclaimed the barman. “He never cared for lizards. There are dreadful stories that he killed many lizards himself. When he carelessly flashed his weapon, the Medusa head, thousands of lizards were turned into stone. Some people say that Perseus was not better than the dragon.”

The barman’s son intruded into their conversation, “We learned in school that this Perseus was very weak on morals, too. He had many sordid adventures, took advantage of the old women of Graiae, assassinated the poor Gorgon in her sleep; and worse -- he murdered his own father!”

“He was a mass murderer,” intervened another Jaffaite, busy with his arrack and olives, “he murdered his mother’s suitor Polydectes and many others by means of the same Gorgon head. Perseus is not our hero, just remember it!”

“Every time we look at our harbour and see the Monster, we bless the Almighty God for saving the lizards,” piously intoned a priest.

“But he vanquished the dragon!” – bellowed Jason.

“The dragon was defeated by the joint efforts of brave lizards and their human friends. Perseus played but a minor role in this drama. Anyone could do what he did: he just flashed the Medusa head at the dragon and turned it into stone. But before that, our Allied forces carried out a dangerous and brutal war; thousands of lizards attacked the monster, and we all prayed for the Monster’s end. Don’t you think that our prayers should be mentioned first as the greatest reason for victory?”

“But why are we talking about defeating the dragon?” asked the barman’s son. “The dragon was defeated by everybody and anyway, the important story is that of the Lizards’s Tragedy. And Perseus is not our hero.”

“Are you Lizards?” asked daring Jason.

“Oh no, we are humans. But the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to us. We always follow their advice.”

“And what happened to Andromeda?” – asked Jason.

“Nothing special. Her house is out there, on Lizards Street.”

The sailors paid for their drinks and proceeded to the house which the barman pointed out. Andromeda the Beautiful was there. She was obviously astonished when the sailors brought her the regards of Perseus.

“It seems the people of Jaffa forgot who saved them from the Dragon. But you, Andromeda, surely you remember Perseus who saved you?” asked Jason.

“Perseus?” asked the Princess, gazing through the window at the monument of the Devoured Lizard. “Perseus? He never cared about the Lizards.”

The Greek team rose and departed back home in visible disgust. Since then, mankind has been divided into those who read the story of Perseus the Victorious, and those who worship the Devoured Lizard.

The Old Canard

Such a paradigm shift occurred in the West. The East celebrates the victory over the Dragon, while the West laments the Devoured Lizards. Naïve folk think that the Lizard worshippers are moved by compassion and try to copycat this narrative with stories of their own suffering: the Ukrainians suffered the famine of 1930s, the Africans suffered under slavery. Then they are amazed to discover that it does not bring in the flood of compensations.

They forget that every narrative has its moving interest. The Western anti-communists and the Zionist Masters of Discourse are not moved by compassion; they promote a story of suffering when it is suitable for them. They promoted the story of the Ukrainian famine in order to set the Ukrainians against the Russians and to break the Soviet Union. They promoted the story of the Holocaust in order to obscure our victory. They invented the stories of Communist atrocities in order to eradicate Communism and privatise public assets from California to Siberia.

For a while the ‘Red atrocities’ yarn was forgotten, but it came back with a vengeance when Russians put the squeeze on the oligarchs and slowed down the Western companies’ hostile takeover of the Russian economy. The mad exaggerations of Conquest were resurrected, and according to them, the Reds killed more people than were ever born in Russia.

If I may use a Jewish cliché much loved by ADL’s Abe Foxman and his kin, it’s time to discard the old canard of “Communists killing millions”. Not only is it used to promote the American way-of-life-and-death, it is simply not true. These wild holocaust-copycat stories were debunked not only by left-wing Russian historians like Sergey Kara-Murza, but also by Russian nationalist historians who can’t be suspected in pro-communist sympathies: Vadim Kozhinov and Stanislav Kunyaev.

Now, our erstwhile friend Patrick Buchanan whom I much admired for his stand against the Iraqi war and against Zionism, went back to his Cold War follies. He wrote another of his attacks on “Russian Commies”:

“Bush told the awful truth about what really triumphed in World War II east of the Elbe. And it was not freedom. It was Stalin, the most odious tyrant of the century. Where Hitler killed his millions, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, and Castro murdered their tens of millions. Leninism was the Black Death of the 20th century.”

Not more, not less – the Black Death! Indeed, Elie Wiesel's holocaust stories are Sunday Gospel reading in comparison with this raving. Communists – Stalin and Mao and Castro – are forever guilty in the eyes of Buchanan’s compatriots and fellow Mammon-worshippers; but not for their alleged atrocities: their real crime was that they did not allow the US to ravage their lands. The ‘Commies’ did not sell the goods, the tangible assets, oil, gas, lands to the American Moloch.

I begin to doubt both the sanity and sincerity of Buchanan. His sanity, because he claims that “Castro murdered tens of millions” on an island with total population of nine million. His sincerity - for what are his anti-Zionist diatribes worth if he wants to return Cuba to Meyer Lansky and his mafia?

Buchanan is not alone, oh no. On May 7, 2005, The Economist of London condemned “Russian reluctance to acknowledge the Soviet Union's sins before, during and after the war, such as the Katyn massacre of Polish officers in 1940, the atrocities committed as the Red Army marched on Berlin or the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 that carved up Europe.” Russia was unfavourably compared with “Germany, that has fully admitted the sins of its past: whereas, for instance, it will open a new Holocaust memorial in Berlin”.

Should the Russians repent for the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement between the USSR and Germany? Hardly. The only regret is that it did not hold for long. Brutal Hitler and cunning Churchill were equally hostile to Russia. Churchill’s Fulton speech declaring the Cold War on Soviet Russia came before the last Russian casualty of the war was laid to rest. And this hostility is still strong: The Tbilisi speech of Bush is but an update of Fulton. (I have a personal reason to be an ardent supporter of Molotov-Ribbentrop -- this treaty sent the Red Army into Galicia and saved my father-to-be from the Einsatzgruppen.)

Should the Russians repent for Katyn? The Katyn story is promoted to set the Poles against Russians and to restore le cordon sanitaire around Russia. Our enemies do not care a fig for the slain Poles. Otherwise, they would speak about tens of thousands of Poles slaughtered by Bandera gangs, the ultra-Nationalist West Ukrainians. But they keep mum, for the Bandera followers are their allies in the fight against Russians. Indeed, after 1945 these allies of Hitler were supported, armed and trained by the CIA, and survived up to our days when they were the leading force of the Orange Putsch in December 2004. (The city of Lvov named the main street after this mass murderer of Poles, Russians and Jews.)

Should the Russians repent for “the atrocities committed as the Red Army marched on Berlin”? The fate of German civilians does not concern the British hypocrites. London cherishes the memory of Air Marshal “Bomber” Harris, and even raised a bronze statue to honour his memory ten years ago, although this war criminal killed more people than Genghis Khan. In the 1920s, Harris bombed and strafed Iraqis, and later planned and executed the allied bombings of German cities, including the fiery hecatomb of Dresden, turning a hundred thousand German refugees to ashes. While this mass murderer is honoured in England, the Russians have no reason to skip a heartbeat over their uphill struggle on the way to Berlin. They are not guilty of Dresden, Hiroshima and Auschwitz, nor did they pour Agent Orange on innocent civilians.

III

What the Russians do not need is your apologies. I tell you, curators of holocaust museums and editors of the Economist, Mr Conquest and Mr Buchanan, shove your catalogues of suffering and calls for pity and repentance you-know-where. It befits beggars to brag about sores and show off their deformities, not warriors and philosophers. Enough of this flirting with death and suffering. Let the dead bury their own. The worst legacy of Jews in this Jewish century is their obsession with death, grief, mourning, and suffering: their two most holy sites in Israel are the Wailing Wall and the Holocaust Museum, the most important day of a year is the fast of repentance; it is backed up by the fallen soldiers’ remembrance day, the holocaust day, the temple destruction remembrance day and more. The favourite Jewish genre is kina, lamentation. This disease of the mind spreads around the world in a paroxysm of self-pity, guilt and angst.

If you intend to follow the Jewish discourse of grief, follow it consistently. Jews are not so silly as to recognise their guilt and apologise. Nobody yet has got an apology from a Jew. A Jew would reply with: “Did ALL Jews do it?”. This marvellous reply can be equally well used by all of us, by Russians regarding Katyn, by Germans regarding Auschwitz, by English regarding Dresden, by the Yanks regarding Mai Lai and Abu Ghraib.

And do not go around demanding apologies or begging forgiveness. This is sick. The late Pope opened the gates of Hell when he travelled around the world and asked forgiveness for deeds he did not do, from the sack of Constantinople to starvation in Dachau. Now we are asked daily to apologise for something we did not do. We should leave it for the Sunday of the Great Lent, like good Christians.

Our Polish philosopher-friend Marek G. was right: “If one wants to have a healthy society, he has to extinguish, not inflame, ancient ethnic and other sores within it. In order to keep the people of Athens united, the democratic government of this polis, after a bloody civil war, declared “amnesia”: it was forbidden, under the penalty of death, to recall publicly who had killed whom in the preceding decades. Today’s Judeo-American paradigm has decided otherwise: all wounds have to be constantly kept bleeding”.

Enough whining! I can hardly read anymore the reports from Palestine written by a good man (and a good reporter) Gideon Levy, for his story is just a story of suffering. Yes, there is suffering, but there is also courage, bravery, heroic mighty deeds and victory at the end, as I tried to describe in the story of Farris Ode (google it!). Old Russian chronicles tell us that the Mongol conquerors loved to listen to the sad songs of the vanquished. Let us sing the songs our conquerors will hate.

This differing view of victory is not a lapse into some pagan belief, as Nietzsche thought. It is a precious gift of the Eastern Orthodox Christianity whose main image is one of Christ Triumphant. You won’t find a suffering Christ on an Eastern icon. We remember His suffering on Good Friday, but otherwise we live under the shining sun of His Resurrection. Only after its fateful schism from the East, with Prima Lumi, did Western art begin to present Christ tormented. Even our True images differ:

the Western True Image (of Veronica, right) shows Christ in a crown of thorns on the Via Dolorosa; the Eastern True Image (of Edessa King Abgar, left) shows Him as the Ruler of the World. This masculine victorious Christianity of the East found expression in the Eastern vision of the great victory.

These two paradigms – of the victorious Perseus and of the Devoured Lizards - meet in Berlin represented by two monuments. One is the Soviet Russian statue in Treptov Park, that of a powerful, somewhat Nordic soldier; his proud shoulders proclaim his victory, his formidable foot tramples the broken swastika, a mighty sword in one hand is lowered, a little German girl sits on his other arm clinging to his neck. They could be taken for a father and his daughter, an inverted Madonna with Child. This is an Orthodox Christian symbol made familiar by the icon of Christ holding his small Mother. The soldier apparently saved the little girl in battle – like Christ saves His Mother and like Perseus saved Andromeda.

Soviet Russians indeed felt they had saved Germany and Europe from an evil spirit, and never induced guilt feelings in the East Germans. That is why East Germans are more masculine and less broken than their West German brethren.

The statue was cast by Eugene Vutechich, a great Soviet Russian counterpart of the best contemporary German sculptor, Arno Breker. In German eyes, this soldier does not look ethnically or aesthetically foreign. It could have been made by Breker who created many fine and noble warriors, though with a touch of Hellenic homoeroticism. Vuchetich and Breker incarnated the aesthetic and moral ideals, even the spirit of the Soviet and the National-Socialist societies. Despite so many differences they were united in their Nordic and Hellenic masculinity, the forcefulness of the Iliad heroes so admired by Simone Weil.

A Russian art historian noted that the “brutal and heroic energy of Vuchetich’s statues is near in spirit to the German plastics of the Third Reich”. Such a statue does not offend Germans – it is not a shame to be defeated by a better warrior. The Russians and the Germans courageously fought a hard war that cost millions of civilians and soldiers’ their lives. Their efforts and their losses dwarfed those of other participants of the European war. Their battle was a battle of Titans, of Nordic Asar, of two strong heroes, and the best won, all praise to the hero. (I despise those who describe their common masculinity as ‘totalitarianism’.)

(Left – The Soldier with a Girl, Vuchetich; Right – Readiness, Breker)

But the best doesn't win in the long run, said Ecclesiastes. The masculine heroic ideologies faded away, while we are living today under an ideology that found its aesthetic and moral expression in another piece of memorial art in Berlin, creating a cemetery-like sprawling field of stone slabs near the Brandenburg Gate, namely, the Holocaust Memorial. This aesthetically ugly, conceptually diminishing, intrusive and insulting installation was made by their new occupying power.

Our adversaries claim that the holocaust is a question of fact; and some Revisionists argue the facts: whether gas chambers existed or not. But for the Left, this is not a question of fact but of dominant narrative. Even if all the facts they claim were true, we should refuse the narrative and deny its importance. An important Dutch far left thinker, Paul Treanor, wrote in an essay called Why Forget the Holocaust:

“The Holocaust was the primary historical reference used to justify military intervention, by the US and its allies. Indirectly, it is also used to legitimise social injustice in liberal-democratic nations, and to imply a liberal-democratic entitlement to a monopoly of power. It is used to legitimise global inequality, as if it entitled opponents of the Holocaust to prosperity, while others starve. Remembering the Holocaust is not a moral imperative: the memory serves no good purpose, only evil purposes. The memory of the Holocaust has become an instrument of the right. The Holocaust should be publicly forgotten, in the same sense as it is now publicly remembered.”

Europe still can choose between the two narratives of the WWII, one of masculine salvation expressed by the Russian soldier with the saved German girl, and the other of emasculation, piling slabs of guilt on your soul. After all, this is the choice of Andromeda, whether to remember her saviour Perseus or to bewail the Lizards.

Epilogue

But the Lizard story did not end here. In his report from future, called So Long and Thanks for all the Fish, Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) tells what happened later.

A spacecraft, a flying saucer landed on earth, and out of it marched down a silver robot, a hundred feet tall, and said “I come in peace”, adding after a long moment of grinding, “take me to your Lizards”.

An experienced extra-terrestrial, Ford, explained this strange request: “The robot comes from a very ancient democracy, you see”.

“You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?”

“No,” said Ford, “Nothing so simple. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.”

“I thought you said it was a democracy.”

“I did, “said Ford. “It is.”

“You mean they actually vote for the lizards?”

“Oh yes, “said Ford, “Of course!”

“Why?”

“Because if they did not vote for a lizard,” - said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in. Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them. They're completely wrong of course, but someone's got to say it.”

Apparently, the Lizards of Jaffa have moved elsewhere and found themselves a fresh supply of gullible humans.

Israel Shamir©