While I find elene's reading helpful, it nevertheless does seem to me that Mr. Ahmadinejad is deliberately suggesting that there's a reasonable case for the holocaust not having occurred, particularly through all those strategic "if's." That is a problem. And the Iranian state is, well, not certainly my ideal state.
I don't want more nuclear weapons in the world, but he is absolutely right that the US, in particular, is being entirely hypocritical in demanding that the nuclear nonproliferation treaties be so selectively applied when we are still actively using and developing nuclear-enhanced weapons. We are definitely creating this problem, but acting as though it's just these crazy Iranian mullahs.
These two things:
So the young in Israel bear some responsibility for supporting their government, for going to the army, for continuing to resettle etc. It is not just something that their grandparents did wrong, but something that is still going on to this day. While the German genocide of Jews stopped in 1945. (from Bruno)
and
Mr. President, doesn't there come a time when one should accept that the world is the way it is and that we must accept the status quo? , from the article,
have me thinking...
I've been studying writings by a Sioux/Dakota woman from the beginning of the 20th c. and historical analyses of U.S./American Indian relations/diplomacy, so this may be a bit tangential. But, to me, the US situation bears some similarities--it is compounded and complicated by the sheer number of Indian Nations in the U.S. and the lengthy history of some of the illegal actions.
All those "broken" treaties we signed? Well, they still exist--it was one of the ways that the US established itself as a legitimate nation was by deliberately making a paper trail of treaties in which American Indian Nations are treated as sovereign territories and in which the US became/called itself a sovereign entity, taking the place of the treaty-making done by Britain & France & Spain. Those documents could still be enforced (won't be), but there's no statute of limitations in foreign policy precisely. Cubans in the US still wield tremendous power by insisting that their land "rights" be respected--they are mostly Euro Cubans; the ones left behind are mostly Afro/indigenous roots.
Meanwhile, White America has long expected the native people somehow to just go away, to just disappear like "the Last of the Mohicans" fantasy, but despite attacks, wars, forced migrations, land siezures, graft, corruption, denial of human rights, and forced starvation, stealing of mineral and water rights... Despite all this there are now more Native people here, in the US, and all of them have a kind of dual citizenship (since 1924).
So we have established dubious or patently illegal claims to lands, properties and mineral rights, which have been now been inherited (& reinherited) and passed down in white families for generations and sold off (to other whites) and lost in bankruptcy courts to banks and land corporations, but it's all stolen goods, still, no?
Me, I have lived my whole life in land that was deliberately "cleared" (as they euphemistically say) for the use of people like me, and not so long ago (within the last 150 years, basically). So ok the actual people who "did this" are gone, but the paper trail exists and is periodically resurrected in various court cases (there have been recent ones in upstate NY for example). They are no older than some of the claims that have been passed down within families.
Even though most of these cases seem to have little realistic chance of gaining American Indians what they are putatively after in the cases--the land (sometimes some fairly significant quantities)--they are important in that they raise the spectre of the illegitimacy of US occupation of specific portions of its territory. That's a kind of cultural and political work, if nothing else--not simply a condemnation, I think.
I realize that the situations are quite distinct--other than the fact that both involve illegal occupation and an ongoing colonialist legacy--but this one is even more invisible, even (or perhaps especially) to most US residents.
I'm not comfortable with Spiegel's position that at some point one must simply "accept the status quo"...because it's always the "winners" that make that point, and they often do so from quite early in the battle. They do this to try to paint resistance as foolish, futile, shrill, and unpleasant, tasteless at best, immature. But I'm not sure when certain modes of resistance become counterproductive...often that's part of the hegemonic system: modes of resistance do turn into attacks on other crabs in the barrel. (E.g., the 8 years of the Iran-Iraq war which is so alive in his mind, but dead history to most Westerners.)
It's in the winners' interest, their fantasy, that the other simply recede or quiet down or "disappear" by like all those American Indians in all those sunset paintings. But we don't treat other parts of our own histories so lightly: we don't say to people we perceive as "equals": "just forget that deed you signed forty years ago giving you title to this land and your house," or "you'll have to ignore that will that your great grandfather wrote 100 years ago leaving it to your father," or "forget that Constitution you put together in 1787." The Western establishment does need to be taken to task for making these arrogant decisions about what pieces of history and even which legal documents matter and what things don't or "shouldn't." |
