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since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
After reading the book entitled Saviors and Survivors, I have to hope that President Obama will appoint author Columbia Professor Mahmood Mamdani to serve on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) Council. Because it is still running the Darfur campaign, Mamdani's expertise would be more than relevant.
Not only would a council seat give him a good vantage point for some American sociological studies, but the same sorts of analysis that one might apply in Sudan should be applied to the American Jewish community especially when there is so much historical precedent for some of the Save Darfur pathologies, which reproduce a lot of the nonsense of Holocaust studies.
Creating the Orthodoxies
Stanislawski discusses one of the basic constructed orthodoxies of Jewish studies in theory only tangentially related to Zionism but deeply connected to Judonia in Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews, The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1823-1855[296] on p. 3:
Before we can study the history of the Jews in the Russia of Nicholas I, we must examine the legacy of interpretation bequeathed to us by the classic historians of Russian Jewry. With the luxury of hindsight it is possible to discern that this scholarship reflected the social and political circumstances of its authors as much as history itself. This is, of course, true to some extent of all history writing, but Russian-Jewish historiography was particularly conditioned by contemporary reality: apolitical objectivity was neither its hallmark nor even its pretended goal. On the contrary, all the major historians of Russian Jewry consciously and candidly wrote history as a political and national statement, hoping to redress the tragedies by chronicling their horrors and thereby to influence in the most direct fashion the political fate of the Jews. Many of the resultant works were issued as party publications or parliamentary briefs. Most were published by openly ideological presses or periodicals. While the ideologies involved ranged across a reasonably broad spectrum of political opinion, they were all united against one common enemy, the tsarist regime and its obvious anti-Semitic bent as exemplified by the governments of Alexander III and Nicholas II.
This exogenous stimulus to scholarship quite naturally had considerable effect on the assumptions, as well as the conclusions, of the scholars. To a large extent, their research was aimed at tracing the origins and background of contemporary attitudes and actions of the Russian authorities in regard to the Jews. This led, perhaps inevitably, to what now appears as an overidentification of the past with the present, a projection backward of the context of the government’s relations with the Jews.
The analogy with contemporary Holocaust scholarship can hardly be avoided. (See Bringing Holocaust Religion to Arabs.[297])
The analogy with Save Darfur literature is also unavoidable.
Obviously, if one suspects that the later historiographers were ideological with regard to their past (and our more distant past), one has to wonder about the soundness of their discussion of their own time period. For example, we all read about the terrible 1881 pogroms in Czarist Russia, but they came in the aftermath of a targeted assassination of the Czar that was probably mostly led and planned by radical Russian ethnic Ashkenazim after considerable radical sabotage and violence on the part of a segment of the Russian ethnic Ashkenazi community.
Russia in the 19th century was no more black and white than Rwanda, Darfur, or Europe in the 1930s. (When the German Nazis were burning books, the Soviets leadership, which was disproportionately ethnic Ashkenazi, was having the authors shot by executioners, who were almost always ethnic Ashkenazim.)
History aside, there is also a very peculiarly modern Jewish aspect to the Save Darfur movement.
When I testified before the Massachusetts legislature (see 5th Question: Darfur), I spent some time in speaking with the a lot of the Jewish Day School Save Darfur activists and their minders. There was probably a desperate desire on the part of Jewish parents and grandparents to create a safe form of activism for Jewish high schoolers and college students lest they become involved in anti-Israel Divestment movements, which are themselves largely Jewish -- at least according to my experience at MIT and Harvard.
Such a safe haven was needed because a lot of older Jews will never admit it but are aware that the Palestinian question is far more black and white than the Holocaust ever was because -- to be frank -- a bunch of racists invaded from E. Europe and stole the country from the native population after planning the crime for approximately 66 years.
Just as Jewish group psychology behind Saved Darfur requires more exposure, Professor Mamdani needs to look more closely at the Jewish aspects of the development of the anti-war movement in the 1960s versus Save Darfur in the 2000s. There seems to have been a feeling in a large part of the organized Jewish community circa 1965 that resources were being squandered in Vietnam that Israel might need soon need. Just as the organized Jewish community put its considerable mobilization resources into the service of Save Darfur because it believed Save Darfur to be good for the Jews, it put its resources into the service of the anti-War movement in the 60s because it believed that resistance to the Vietnam War was good for the Jews. (LBJ complained about the behavior of the Jewish community in this regard.)
The politics of Darfur has another interesting Jewish aspect.
In his discussion of the history of Sudan, Professor Mamdani alludes to the underlying benefit of Arabization to the native Sudanese merchants of Funj but never seems to state it explicitly. As far as I can tell Arabization allowed the developing capitalist class to plug into Arab trade networks and apply the traditional Arabic-Islamic commercial code that made long distance trade possible. The Judaization of the Khazars probably took place for more or less the same reasons as I discuss in The Origins of Modern Jewry. In the cases of both Funj and also E. European ethnic Ashkenazim, migrant origins have been assumed or postulated for reasons that often relate to Zionist politics. In her most recent research Columbia Professor Nadia Abu el-Haj has addressed some of the genetic anthropological issues that appear in the comments section of the Origins article.
Even though Professor Mamdani mentions involvement of Hollywood personalities in Save Darfur activism, he fails to address Hollywood Jewish Zionist scripting of bloodthirsty Arabs in the Palestine-Israel context since the 1950s and how this sort of racist propaganda has been used by Save Darfur activists.
The 1959 movie Solomon and Sheba is an early example. Here is the description.
King Solomon, who is played by Yul Brynner, repeats all sorts of Zionist slogans throughout the movie, and the geopolitical situation described in the movie is obviously constructed to the reflect Zionist perception of the situation of the State of Israel in the 1950s.
Vidor had strong connection to Premillennial Dispensationalist Christianity. He grew up in Vidor, Texas, which was founded by his father C. S. Vidor. This town is still noted for irredentist unreconstructed Confederate attitudes, apocalyptic evangelical fundamentalism, KKK connections and extreme racism. It is also very typical bedrock Texas community of the sort the supports George Bush.
Solomon and Sheba was not a blockbuster, but it did make money and was perhaps symptomatic of things yet to come.
Note that Shindler's List has a structure and scene breakdown that is very similar to The Wizard of Oz.
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