Désinformation: Retour sur l’Affaire Sacco-Vanzetti (Looking back on Comintern’s most successful lying-for-the truth operation)

24 août, 2006
ImageVous nous avez déjà fait le coup avec Sacco et Vanzetti et il a réussi. Cette fois, il ne réussira pas. Vous rappelez-vous Nuremberg et votre théorie de la responsabilité collective. Eh bien ! C’est à vous aujourd’hui qu’il faut l’appliquer. Vous êtes collectivement responsables de la mort des Rosenberg, les uns pour avoir provoqué ce meurtre, les autres pour l’avoir laissé commettre. Jean-Paul Sartre (« Les animaux malades de la rage », Libération, 22 juin 1953)
L’objectif était de « staliniser la culture du glamour, tout en donnant à l’appareil une vache à lait capable de produire une quantité importante et non traçable de devises américaines dont on avait tant besoin pour financer diverses opérations dans le monde ». (…) Vous ne soutenez pas Staline. On ne se dit pas communiste. Vous ne déclarez pas votre amour pour le régime. Vous n’appelez pas les gens à soutenir les Soviétiques. Jamais. En aucune circonstance. Vous prétendez être un idéaliste indépendant d’esprit. Vous ne comprenez pas la politique, mais vous pensez que les petites gens sont mal lotis. Vous croyez en l’ouverture d’esprit. Vous êtes choqué, effrayé par ce qui se passe dans notre propre pays. Vous êtes effrayés par le racisme, par l’oppression des travailleurs. Vous pensez que les Russes tentent une grande expérience humaine et vous espérez qu’elle fonctionne. Vous croyez en la paix. Vous aspirez à la compréhension internationale. Vous détestez le fascisme. Vous pensez que le système capitaliste est corrompu. Vous le répétez sans cesse et vous ne dites rien, rien de plus. Stephen Koch

Pour en terminer avec le mythe Sacco-Vanzetti, il nous faut bien sûr revenir sur le magistral travail de l’historien américain Stephen Koch qui a le mérite de l’inscrire dans la perspective plus générale de l’appareil de propagande stalinien. Notamment dans son livre de 1994 sur le Komintern (Double lives*) où, s’appuyant sur des archives soviétiques récemment ouvertes, il évoque l’étonnant parcours d’une de ses grandes figures (nécessairement cachée!), le propagandiste allemand Willi Münzenberg.

Chef d’orchestre invisible d’une campagne de manipulation sans précédent (du milieu des années 20, le système Münzenberg se perpétua même au-delà de sa mort jusqu’aux années 60), la liste est longue de ceux que ses services réussirent à « recruter », au moins comme « compagnons de route ». Hemingway, Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, Bertold Brecht, Thomas Mann, les deux André, Gide et Malraux, rien de moins en fait que le gotha de l’intelligentsia occidentale. Sans parler des Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, Heinrich Mann, Romain Rolland, Aragaon et sa muse russe Elsa Triolet, etc.

Et ce justement… à partir de l’Affaire Sacco et Vanzetti, cette magistrale opération de « mensonge au service de la vérité » dont le Komintern se fera par la suite une spécialité:

Extraits :

Around 1925, the Comintern entrusted Münzenberg and his propaganda machine with a little-known but large role in giving shape and political function to the Communist Party of the United States as it was to be under Stalin. At that time, the American party, that congregation of the militant naïve, home and battleground for John Reed and Louise Bryant, needed to be re-assembled. It had been left in a shattered state by its late-Leninist internal struggles combined with devastating police action inflicted on it by what later became the FBI.

(…)

For the world proletariat of 1925, the leading counter-myth to the myth of revolution was, by far, the idea of America. That vision—the notion of the melting pot, the Golden Door, the Land of Opportunity— is what held the real political attention of the International. To the Bolsheviks, this was the true American menace. And in 1925, the task of the American party was to counteract it.

So Münzenberg’s first idea was to create and sustain a worldwide anti-American campaign that would focus its appeal upon the mythology of the country’s immigration. The purpose of such a campaign would be to instill a reflexive loathing of the United States and its people as a prime tropism of left-wing enlightenment. To undermine the myth of the Land of Opportunity, the United States would be shown as an almost insanely xenophobic place, murderously hostile to foreigners.

To this end, Münzenberg surveyed his options, in search of a cause that would disgrace America in the eyes of the proletarian foreign-born. He found it in the obscure case of two anarchist immigrants who’d got themselves into some very bad trouble: Niccola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

(…)

Together with the Dreyfus case, this is perhaps the most famous legal struggle in the whole history of modern propaganda and injustice. It seemed at first incredible to me that this epochal case could have been manipulated at such a distance, and so cynically.

And indeed the origins of the Sacco–Vanzetti case are far more complex than that. Yet in one sense the Sacco–Vanzetti campaign does turn out to have been “Münzenberg’s idea.” It was indeed at Münzenberg’s instigation that Communist propaganda networks worldwide took up the plight of the two Boston immigrants and made it the centerpiece of a vast new anti-American operation—just as a little later it was Willi’s executive decision to turn the Scottsboro Boys into prime martyrs for the International. The Comintern and Willi’s organization were the ones who transformed a case of troubled local injustice into a worldwide cause célèbre.

In that effort, however, the Communists latched onto the Sacco–Vanzetti case as latecomers and opportunists. Sacco and Vanzetti were not themselves Communists, and theirs was not, at first, a Communist struggle. The two Italians were anarchists, and so their political myth was shaped during the early 1920s by anarchists, guided especially by that doyen of Italo-American radicalism, Carlo Tresca.

By the mid-1920s, however, the political sponsorship of the case decisively changed. In 1926, the American Communist Party stood directionless and in disarray, very much in need of a new motivating spirit and a new task. At the same time, the International was demanding its anti-American cause. The Soviet propagandists decided to satisfy both these needs at once. In 1926, speaking to his colleagues in the WIR, Münzenberg announced it was their task, as propagandists, to rescue the American party and supply its new direction. And so it was: the first task of a revived American party was to seize and hold the Sacco–Vanzetti case for its own, while around the world the Comintern turned it into the preoccupying moral issue of the era. By 1928, Willi was cooly and quite correctly claiming credit for the Sacco– Vanzetti campaign, understood as a worldwide political moral mania, and among the highest triumphs of his apparatus.

Here is how it worked. Way back in 1920, two Italian immigrants, both militant anarchists, were arrested and charged with stealing the payroll of a Braintree, Massachusetts, shoe factory and murdering its paymaster and his guard. In 1921, they were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.

The two men belonged to a small anarchist cell of Italian immigrants like themselves. When the pair was arrested, this group immediately formed a defense committee. Naïvely convinced that the two would get off, they proposed creating “great publicity for the anarchist movement.”

But Sacco and Vanzetti did not get off. Nor did their case advance the anarchist cause; its later co-option by the Communists was used to betray and undermine American anarchism. The Defense Committee was right about one thing: These two men’s condemnation offered the basis for a political vision.

That vision in its anarchist incarnation was the creation of one man above all: an eccentric Westerner, one of the grand lawyers of the American left, a brilliant but more flaky Clarence Darrow named Fred Moore, recommended to the Defense Committee by Carlo Tresca.

(…)

Moore invented the case. He set out to rescue his clients with any and every maneuver a fertile legal mind could conceive, convinced they were lost without the pressure of outraged world opinion. To this end, long before Münzenberg knew anything about the case, he single-handedly created the political argument of Sacco and Vanzetti: that they were powerless, despised, radical immigrants being subjected to judicial murder by a smug, chauvinist, puritanical, nativist, red-scared New England establishment. In promoting this defense, Moore was unscrupulous, ingenious, indefatigable, driven. Of his passion and sincerity there can be no doubt. He was a man obsessed. And his belief in his clients’ innocence was quite genuine. At first.

Except unfortunately their innocence wasn’t quite genuine. Best evidence shows beyond all reasonable doubt that Sacco was in fact one of the Braintree gunmen and the murderer of the guard, whom he shot to death after the man had fallen to his hands and knees, begging for his life while struggling to reach his own revolver. Vanzetti may have been innocent of the Braintree holdup, though he probably knew or guessed Sacco’s guilt. He certainly had guilty knowledge of Sacco’s participation in an earlier robbery where no blood had been spilled.

In a way, the facts make the two men’s political solidarity all the more compelling. One word of the truth from either man—Sacco in ordinary decency; Vanzetti in ordinary self-protection—would have saved Vanzetti’s life. But it also would have demolished their cause in disgrazia. Bartolomeo Vanzetti laid down his life on the bloody altar not of justice but of propaganda. He died lying for the truth.

The murky integrity of this self-sacrifice gives Vanzetti—he was in every way the more interesting of the pair—a tremendously affecting dignity. It also sustained his stumbling, broken, justly famous eloquence. “If it had not been for this thing, I might have live out my life talking on street corners to scorning men. I might have die unknown, unmarked, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph.”

The little coterie of anarchists on the Defense Committee also knew the truth, and they too maintained the vow of silence for la causa. The last survivor, a man named Ideale Gambera, wrote a full account of the affair for disclosure by his son after his death. Gambera died in 1982, and his son released the documents to Francis Russell, a principal scholar of the case. It was the last word.

Somewhere along the way, Fred Moore seems to have stumbled onto the truth as well. There is no evidence that this in any way modified Moore’s passion for his clients’ defense, but in 1923, in the midst of a paranoid psychotic episode (he’d attempted suicide and was hospitalized), Sacco dismissed Moore in a violent incoherent rage. Taking his dismissal with dignity, Moore packed up, got into his car, and drove back west, selling knickknacks as he went to pay for his gasoline.

The case now began to die. The appeals dragged on, but the headline makers of the world had dropped the Massachusetts fishmonger and shoemaker. Then, in 1925, on orders of Münzenberg and the Comintern, an American branch of the Red Aid called the International Labor Defense, created in Chicago with James Cannon as its director, was set up to be the focus of organization for the new American Communism. Its first mission was to make the Sacco–Vanzetti case into a worldwide myth.

The campaign became a juggernaut, tenaciously co-ordinated from Berlin, vast and unrelenting. Now, once again, protest meetings gathered to shout and sob in the great squares. From all its outlets, organs of the Trust produced an unstanchable stream of attacks on the assassin viciousness of American justice, defending the innocence and holiness of the immigrant martyrs in Braintree. Around the world, heart-rending appeals for cash were staged to provide for Sacco and Vanzetti’s defense and “protection.” Children gave their pennies, workers donated wages, philanthropists opened their checkbooks.

The apparat’s fund-raising was, incidentally, an almost complete fraud. Sacco and Vanzetti and their Defense Committee saw next to none of the money raised in their names. Of the approximately half-million dollars raised in the United States, the Defense Committee received something like $6,000. Of large sums collected in mass protest meetings around the world, the Defense Committee saw precisely nothing.

Cannon seems to have understood that Sacco was guilty, and so Münzenberg very possibly also knew the truth. Not that anybody cared. The Communist goal was never to save the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti. Acquittal would have dissolved the whole political point. Katherine Anne Porter, like hundreds of writers and artists of the time, participated in the Boston deathwatch. She reports an exchange with the Comintern agent who was her group leader, Rosa Baron, “a dry, fanatical little woman who wore thick-lensed spectacles over her accusing eyes, a born whiphand, who talked an almost impenetrable jargon of party dogma. … I remarked … that even then, at that late time, I still hoped the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti could be saved. … ‘Saved’ she said, ringing a change on her favorite answer to political illiteracy, ‘who wants them saved? What earthly good would they do us alive?’”

Francis Russell, in his Sacco and Vanzetti: The Case Resolved (1986), describes the European demonstrations:

« Demonstrations took place that autumn in France and Italy, with lesser demonstrations in Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Scandinavia, and South America. A bomb exploded in the American embassy in Paris. Another was intercepted in the Lisbon consulate. Reds in Brest stoned the consulate there. American consuls in Mexico were threatened with death if Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. In Rome, thousands of workers marched on the American embassy demanding justice for their compatriots. »

Some of this agitation was anarchist inspired, some actually spontaneous, but most of it was directed by Communist leaders in Paris.

(…)

Felix Frankfurter, then a leading professor of law at Harvard and later one of this century’s great justices of the U.S. Supreme Court (…) was drawn into the affair by the dual force of his passion for justice and his concern for his wife.

(…)

When the condemned men’s last appeal was denied, the outraged Felix proceeded to write one of the most powerful polemics of his career, a denunciation of the case’s legal history, a brilliant exercise in controlled vituperation. The piece appeared in The Atlantic. It was more influential than any other factor in marshaling American non-radical opinion behind the pair, and it was even more influential in Europe. Münzenberg’s Berlin office arranged for it to be reprinted throughout the world, while in London H. G. Wells produced a flamboyant summary which promptly became the received British view.

What followed was orchestrated multinational mass hysteria.

August 22 was the night of the executions, and around them the apparat, poising itself for the outpouring of international grief, organized a vast international deathwatch. Francis Russell describes the event:

After the news flashed from Charleston that Sacco and Vanzetti had at last been executed, the reverberations were international. Demonstrations in American cities were duplicated and in many places exceeded all over Europe. In Paris the Communist daily Humanité printed an extra sheet on which was splashed the single block word “Assassinés!” Crowds surged down the Boulevard Sebastopol, ripping up lampposts and tossing them through plate glass windows. Protective tanks ringed the American embassy, and sixty policemen were injured when a mob tried to set up barricades there. Five thousand militants roamed the streets of Geneva the evening before the executions, overturning American cars, sacking shops selling American goods, gutting theaters showing American films. One of the greatest demonstrations in the history of the Weimar republic took place in Berlin; there were tumultuous demonstrations in Bremen and Wilhelmshaven and Hamburg, and a two hour torchlight parade in Stuttgart. During that turbulent week, half a dozen German demonstrators were killed. No one was killed in England, but on the night of the executions, a crowd gathered in front of Buckingham Palace and sang “The Red Flag.”

The night of the executions was marked by a vigil at Charleston Prison. Before this dour building an enormous crowd gathered in the dark. “I was never in that place before,” Porter wrote, “but I seem to remember that it was a great open space with the crowd massed back from a center the police worked constantly to keep clear. They were all mounted on fine horses and loaded with pistols and hand grenades and tear gas bombs.” The law in its generosity provides that the condemned are entitled to every minute of their last day. After having been granted this largess, Sacco and Vanzetti were led to the death chamber at midnight exactly. Sacco entered it first, at 12:11. Vanzetti followed at 12:20. By 12:27 both had been pronounced dead. Both men met their end with indescribable dignity.

So the American Communist Party was revived, in part, to function as a local instrument in a worldwide and remarkably successful effort to create a new anti-American myth, the support and development of which persisted for decades to come.

Lying for the truth:
Münzenberg & the Comintern
Stephen Koch
1994

* Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas against the West, traduit en français en 1995 sous le titre: La fin de l’innocence : les intellectuels d’Occcident et la tentation stalinienne – 30 ans de guerre secrète

Voir aussi:

Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West.
book review by Ronald Rodosh
National Review, 1994

THE name Willi Munzenberg is familiar to readers of Arthur Koestler and Manes Sperber, writers whose chronicles of European and German Communism first told us of his work on behalf of the Comintern. But it has been the unique task of Stephen Koch, who was able to utilize material hidden until recently in the archives of the former Soviet Union, to tell us the whole story of how this remarkable Comintern operative fashioned a widespread network of agents–« Munzenberg’s men, » as Mr. Koch calls them–who created a propaganda apparatus that gained the allegiance of the most prominent writers, intellectuals, artists, and politicians in the major capitals of the Western world.

Indeed, the network Munzenberg fashioned went beyond merely creating Communist propaganda. Rather, it was at times indistinguishable from an espionage organization. Munzenberg’s chief operatives–the urbane Otto Katz, a Sudeten German born in Prague, and the « elegant but slightly seedy » Louis Gibarti, a Hungarian– were most likely not only Comintern agents, but NKVD cadre as well. And the task they accomplished went to the heart of what Stalin wanted to develop in the West: a legion of true believers who could be counted upon to justify the most egregiously brutal Soviet policies and practices. Their task, as Mr. Koch explains, was to propagate the idea that to « criticize or challenge Soviet policy was the unfailing mark of a bad, bigoted, and probably stupid person, while support was equally infallible proof of a forward-looking mind committed to all that was best for humanity and mankind by an uplifting refinement of sensibility. »

In that task, Munzenberg succeeded all too well. With willing victims ranging from Lillian Heilman, Josephine Herbst, and Dorothy Parker in America, to Thomas and Heinrich Mann in Germany, to Elsa Triolet and Louis Aragon in Paris, Munzenberg’s agents, led by Katz and Gibarti, used the lure of « anti-fascism » to attract their prey, and a strong lure it was. At its center was the distinction these gullible intellectuals made between Communism and fascism. The former, they thought, derived from the Enlightenment, and hence they were incapable of discerning the evils stemming from a Marxist-Leninist state. « Protecting the progressive ideal, » Mr. Koch explains, « seemed to rest on denying or evading the manifest horrors that had sprung from their radical application. And within the needs of such a denial, Munzenberg and his heirs moved and found their element. »

Again, that element was « anti-fascism. » It is perhaps Mr. Koch’s signal contribution to reveal, in a complex and textured analysis, that in reality this anti-fascism was a complete illusion. From the very beginning Josef Stalin planned a secret working relationship with the Nazi Party and Hitler’s Germany. That pattern began, Mr. Koch shows us, with the real story of the Reichstag Fire trial in 1933 and the role played by Comintern leader Georgi Dimitrov. For decades, it has been part of the fiction of received history that the Nazis themselves burned down the Reichstag, blaming it on the Communists and subjecting the Bulgarian Dimitrov to a mock trial–in which Dimitrov, due to an outstanding performance and to world support, turned the tables on the Nazis and gained his acquittal.

The truth, until Mr. Koch’s discoveries, has lain buried in the vaults of the Comintern and, as one might have suspected, is much more complex and nuanced. Of course, the passions roused against fascism were quite genuine, and justified. Hence the « progressive » world was enthralled by Dimitrov’s unflinching and seemingly brave challenging of the Nazis from the Leipzig courtroom. What Mr. Koch tells us is that Dimitrov was brave for one reason alone: « He was in no danger and knew perfectly well there was nothing for him to fear. » In effect, the Nazis had rigged the trial in Dimitrov’s favor. It was all part of a covert operation organized jointly by the NKVD and the Gestapo, « through which he was assured of acquittal and a triumphant return to Russia at the end of what was a propaganda charade played out as a whole high drama of defiance. »

How could this be? Indeed, how could the totalitarian Nazi regime allow its courts to free the top Comintern leader, who supposedly was using their courtroom to expose the Nazis’ own perfidy? As is often the case with espionage, we here enter the wilderness of mirrors. Katz and Munzenberg had already created the world-famous Brown Book of Hitler Terror, which appeared simultaneously with the Leipzig trial, and which did so much to inform the Western world of the nature of German fascism. As Mr. Koch says, every informed person was aware of its contents, and the volume was a best-seller throughout the West. But close examination reveals the limits of its anti-fascism. Stalin’s real policy, as Mr. Koch writes, was « overt anti-fascism plus secret appeasement. » The Brown Book of Hitler Terror, despite its title, let Hitler off the hook. As did the Reichstag trial, and the Western response. Mr. Koch writes:

Hitler’s persecution of German Communism was almost certainly pursued in full collaboration with Stalin and the full knowledge and direct personal co-operation of the future head of the Communist International, using the Comintern’s « anti-fascism » as cover. Almost certainly, the acquittal of Georgi Dimitrov was the result of secret arrangements with the Nazis, and the founding scandal of the Soviet-sponsored anti-fascist movement, one of the leading forces in the moral life of this century, was created in direct collaboration with Hitler himself.

As Mr. Koch explains, this charade was really not as surprising as it may at first seem. The Brown Book, as it turns out, and the expose of the Nazis by Dimitrov, concentrated on the paramilitary Brown Shirts, or SA, a group Hitler had come to see as a major contender for power, and which he rightly saw as standing in the way of his own authority. Stalin, meanwhile, feared the SA’s ability to militarize Germany quickly, and he believed the stabilization of the new regime by Hitler would forward his own interests. Hitler and Stalin alike saw that the SA and its leader, Ernst Rohm, had to be prepared for slaughter, and Hitler thus allowed Dimitrov to use his courtroom pulpit, as Mr. Koch puts it, « to discredit the SA, prior to its elimination. »

In that effort, the propaganda apparatus of Munzenberg sprang into action. A « counter-trial » was held to much fanfare in London, and the gullible « progressives » in the West flocked to sign up for service in various Munzenberg fronts. And there were many.

It should be acknowledged here that the idea of a Dimitrov conspiracy orchestrated jointly by Hitler and Stalin seems preposterous on the face of it. Is the evidence that Mr. Koch has unearthed in the Comintern files confirmed elsewhere? Reviewing this book in The New York Times Book Review, Maurice Isserman states definitively that no historian has « ever stumbled across evidence of the Hitler-Stalin partnership of 1933. » In fact, that is not so. In Robert Tucker’s important biography, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941 (1990), Mr. Tucker points out that, in seeking stability, Moscow saw that its « best bet, from Stalin’s point of view, was a diplomacy of accord with Germany. » Fearing a non-Communist socialist Germany should fascism be defeated, Stalin sought a Nazi takeover, which he thought would give him a better chance of cementing his power in Russia. Hence, as Mr. Tucker puts it, « Stalin abetted the Nazi victory, » by engaging in « a certain amount of collaboration. »

Mr. Tucker goes on to document precisely what Mr. Isserman denies: that in 1933, « Stalin signaled his interest in doing business with Berlin. » That cooperation included secret diplomacy carried out by Comintern head Karl Radek in October 1933. The policy continued into the late 1930s. And like Stephen Koch, Mr. Tucker refers to « the mask of anti-fascism, » and shows how Stalin used the Popular Front as cover for his purge against such actual anti-Nazi elements as Field Marshal Tukhachevsky. Among other historians, Walter Laqueur, in his own book on Stalin, notes that the documents used to frame Tukhachevsky were forged for Stalin by the Gestapo.

While Karl Radek orchestrated the policy in Moscow, Munzenberg’s men carried it out with zeal in the West. Munzenberg’s had his greatest success in the United States. Indeed, one of his most notable victories was his courting of the Hollywood liberal Left, with its writers, directors, and actors whose new-found wealth during the Great Depression led to pangs of guilt, and made them willing participants in Otto Katz’s legion of front groups. The key to success was the Popular Front, portrayed as a broad anti-fascist alliance.

As Mr. Koch writes, the Front was really Stalin’s mechanism for gathering support while he carried out the Great Terror at home. His followers in the West simply could not understand that the Front was conceived, as Mr. Koch writes, to be « what no decent person could turn against, in spite of the trials. » And so Willi Munzenberg devised the technique of zeroing in on the best of the adversary culture—the enlightened elite of the middle classes–using their sensibility and concern in service to the malign purposes of Stalin. It worked all too well. In England his men recruited the Cambridge spy network. In Washington, D.C., they formed the notorious Ware group, which infiltrated the ranks of the State Department and the Roosevelt Administration. Nor was the press ignored. In England Claud Cockburn’s influential newsletter The Week passed along to its readers the Comintern disinformation provided by Otto Katz. In New York, Katz was instrumental in forming the supposedly independent Left-liberal newspaper P.M., which Mr. Koch describes as a « classic Munzenberg-style daily. » (P.M. did employ a few prominent anti-Communists, but as cover for its generally pro-Soviet foreign-policy line.)

In Hollywood Katz touched the lives of Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, Donald Ogden Stewart, and scores of others of the Tinseltown nobility. Here were the beginnings of the molding of Hollywood on behalf of the « right » causes, something that has continued through our own day. The purpose was « to Stalinize the glamor culture, while simultaneously giving the apparatus a cash cow capable of producing a large, untraceable supply of much-needed American hard currency to finance various operations around the world. » And so Munzenberg’s agent Otto Katz charmed his way through Hollywood, appearing at functions and testifying falsely about his heroic struggle against the Nazis, and asking for checks at the end of each appearance. The main concern was support for Stalin, not resistance to Hitler. When the Nazi-Soviet Pact was finally announced, not one of the Hollywood set defected. Instead, they applauded the invasion of Poland and the Soviet attack on Finland, which Miss Hellman promptly described as « a pro-Nazi little republic. »

Mr. Koch presents a powerful challenge to the anti-fascist pretensions cherished by the Left from the Thirties to the Fifties. It has long been said that whatever Stalin’s own motives and policies, at least the anti-fascist crusade and the Popular Front were a genuine response by idealists to the betrayal of the Western heritage. And indeed, for some, they were that. But the same well-meaning idealists allowed themselves to be used as instruments in the campaign orchestrated by Stalin to consolidate his totalitarian regime, either as actual agents (Hiss, Field, Herbst, and others), or as apologists (Hellman, Parker, and other members of the literary elite). Anti-fascism, Mr. Koch writes, « was the most urgent moral cause of the 1930s » and it was « betrayed from within precisely by the Communists who most ardently claimed it as their own. » This should put to rest the claim made by the pro-Communist Left that they were fighting « the good fight. » It is not surprising that writers who, like Mr. Isserman, have sought to defend that claim, now turn fiercely against Mr. Koch’s findings.

The story that Stephen Koch tells, then, is not very pretty. Of course, it is a cliche that a revolution devours its own children. Katz was most likely involved in the murder of Munzenberg, who died, seemingly alone, in a woods in France in 1940. As for Katz, he was to meet his end in the Prague trials of 1952, accused of being a Western agent and convicted on the « evidence » of the American traitor and Soviet agent Noel Field, betrayed in fact by the very apparatus he had helped create in the Thirties and Forties. What Mr. Koch has shown us is nothing less than the complete involvement of the Soviet secret services in the intellectual life of the West from the years before World War II into the early Cold War. It was Willi Munzenberg in particular who shaped key operations directly for Stalin, from the Sacco-Vanzetti defense of the Twenties, to the peace movement of the Thirties. What appeared to be independent acts of protest, it turns out, were either run by Soviet intelligence from the start or taken over and orchestrated by it shortly thereafter. One hopes–given the new availability of files still to be opened and examined–that this superb effort will be but the first step toward a full understanding of what until now has been the hidden history of the twentieth century.

Mr. Radosh is Professor Emeritus of History at the City University of New York, and co-author, with Joyce Milton, of The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth.

Image Un commentaire | Image anti-américanisme, communisme, désinformation, guerre et paix, histoire, idiots utiles/compagnons de route | Image Permalien
Image Publié par jcdurbant

Le mythe Sacco-Vanzetti (Who wants them saved? What earthly good would they do us alive?)

23 août, 2006
Sacco and Vanzetti
Si cette chose n’était pas arrivée, j’aurais passé toute ma vie à parler au coin des rues à des hommes méprisants. J’aurais pu mourir inconnu, ignoré : un raté. Ceci est notre carrière et notre triomphe. Jamais, dans toute notre vie, nous n’aurions pu espérer faire pour la tolérance, pour la justice, pour la compréhension mutuelle des hommes, ce que nous faisons aujourd’hui par hasard. Nos paroles, nos vies, nos souffrances ne sont rien. Mais qu’on nous prenne nos vies, vies d’un bon cordonnier et d’un pauvre cœur de poisson, c’est cela qui est tout ! Ce dernier moment est le nôtre. Cette agonie est notre triomphe.Vanzetti (9 avril 1927)
Par conséquent, moi, Michael S. Dukakis, Gouverneur du Commonwealth du Massachusetts … proclame par la présente le mardi 23 août 1977 « JOURNÉE MÉMORIAL DE NICOLA SACCO ET BARTOLOMEO VANZETTI » ; et déclare, en outre, que tout stigmate et toute disgrâce devraient être à jamais retirés des noms de Nicola Sacco et Bartolomeo Vanzetti, des noms de leurs familles et de leurs descendants, et ainsi … appelle tous les habitants du Massachusetts à s’arrêter dans leurs efforts quotidiens pour réfléchir à ces événements tragiques et à tirer de leurs leçons historiques la détermination d’empêcher les forces de l’intolérance, de la peur et de la haine de se manifester. … appellent tous les habitants du Massachusetts à s’arrêter dans leurs activités quotidiennes pour réfléchir à ces événements tragiques et à tirer de leurs leçons historiques la détermination d’empêcher les forces de l’intolérance, de la peur et de la haine de s’unir à nouveau pour vaincre la rationalité, la sagesse et l’équité auxquelles notre système juridique aspire. Michael S. Dukakis
Il est difficile d’expliquer, et sans doute plus difficile à comprendre pour une nouvelle génération, comment les « intellectuels “ et les ” artistes » de notre pays ont sauté avec une crédulité aussi abandonnée et fanatique dans l’enfer russe de 1920. Ils ont cité des phrases et des slogans éculés. Ils ont été portés à un patriotisme étoilé par l’organisation communiste frauduleuse appelée la Brigade Lincoln. Le saint nom était un charme qui assurait la sécurité et la victoire. La balle frappait la Bible au lieu du cœur. Katherine Ann Porter (1977)

Reprenant, en ce 29e anniversaire du Sacco-Vanzetti Memorial Day, notre exploration de l’antiaméricanisme renaissant, il nous faut naturellement revenir, après le grand sommet dans les années 50 de l’Affaire Rosenberg, au véritable mythe fondateur que fut 20 ans plus tôt l’exécution des célèbres anarchistes italo-américains.

Même mythique erreur judiciaire (tout comme Julius Rosenberg, Nicola Sacco était réellement coupable et, à l’instar d’Ethel Rosenberg, Bartoloemeo Vanzetti aurait préféré se sacrifier plutôt que de parler). Même aveugle conviction (jusqu’à aujourd’hui !) de l’intelligentsia américaine et internationale de leur innocence (de Dorothy Parker, John Dos Passos et Upton Sinclair aux Etats-Unis à George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells et Bertrand Russel en Grande-Bretagne). Et surtout même campagne mondiale de désinformation orchestrée par les services secrets soviétiques qui avaient déjà largement infiltré les milieux intellectuels américains, provoquant en cascade toute une série de mouvements de masse en Europe (émeutes à Londres et en Allemagne, bombe à l’Ambassade américaine à Paris, etc.).

D’où l’intérêt du récit (repris par l’historien américain Stephen Koch) de ce véritable acte de naissance de la pensée de gauche américaine (son Affaire Dreyfus en quelque sorte) que fit, 50 ans après et dans le magazine the Atlantic, la grande dame des lettres américaines Katherine Anne Porter.

Surtout que pour elle ce fut à la fois sa première et… dernière grande expérience de militante de gauche:

Extraits :

It is hard to explain, harder no doubt for a new generation to understand, how the « intellectuals » and « artists » in our country leaped with such abandoned, fanatic credulity into the Russian hell-on-earth of 1920. They quoted the stale catchphrases and slogans. They were lifted to starry patriotism by the fraudulent Communist organization called the Lincoln Brigade. The holy name was a charm which insured safety and victory. The bullet struck your Bible instead of your heart.

(…)

« For me and others like me, the Kremlin meant the Third Internationale and this meant the organization of the ‘workers of the world’ to vindicate their human rights against everything we hated in contemporary society. » Edmund Wilson wrote that, as well and clearly expressed as it has been until now.

« I have seen the future and it works. » Lincoln Steffens is reported to have said this, though it has been much denied.

(…)

It was some time later that afternoon when we were discussing world events, and all of us wanted to know how in the world Russian people could survive the latest disaster to their government, and he said: « All progress takes its toll in human life. Russia is the coming power of the world. I have seen the future and it works. » So much for that. No matter how sad it may seem now, Mr. Steffens said it then, jovially, but in earnest. I wrote it down word for word, then and there, in my notebook.

My group was headed by Rosa Baron, a dry, fanatical little woman who wore thick-lensed spectacles over her blue, accusing eyes–a born whip hand, who talked an almost impenetrable jargon of party dogma. Her « approach » to every « question » (and everything was a question) was « purely dialectical. » Phrases such as « capitalistic imperialism, » « bourgeois morality, » « slave mentality, » « the dictatorship of the proletariat, » « the historical imperative » (meaning more or less, I gathered, that history makes man and not the other way around), « the triumph of the workers, » « social consciousness, » and « political illiteracy » flew from her dry lips all day long. She viewed a « political illiterate » as a conventional mind might a person of those long-ago days born out of wedlock; an unfortunate condition, but reprehensible and without remedy even for its victim. Conservative was only a slightly less pejorative term than Reactionary, and as for Liberal, it was a dirty word, quite often linked in speech with other vaguely descriptive words, even dirtier, if possible. There were many such groups, for this demonstration had been agitated for and prepared for many years by the Communists. They had not originated the protest, I believe, but had joined in and tried to take over, as their policy was, and is. Their presence created the same confusion, beclouding the issue and discrediting the case as it always had done and as they intended it to do. It appeared in its true form and on its most disastrous scale in Spain later. They were well organized to promote disorder and to prevent any question ever being settled–but I had not then discovered this; I remarked to our Communist leader that even then, at that late time, I still hoped the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti might be saved and that they would be granted another trial. « Saved, » she said, ringing a change on her favorite answer to political illiteracy, « who wants them saved? What earthly good would they do us alive? »

I was another of those bourgeois liberals who got in the way of serious business, yet we were needed, by the thousands if possible, for this great agitation must be made to appear to be a spontaneous uprising of the American people, and for practical reasons, the more non-Communists, the better. They were all sentimental bleeders, easily impressed.

(…)

Lenin was known to think little of people who let their human feelings for decency get in the way of the revolution which was to save mankind: he spoke contemptuously of the « saints » who kept getting underfoot; he had only harsh words for those « weak sisters » who flew off the « locomotive of history » every time it rounded a sharp curve. History was whatever was happening in Russia, and the weak sisters, who sometimes called themselves « fellow travelers » were perhaps, many of them, jolted by the collision with what appeared to be a dream of the ideal society come true, dazzled by the bright colors of a false dawn.

I flew off Lenin’s locomotive and his vision of history in a wide arc in Boston, Massachusetts, on August 21, 1927; it was two days before the putting to death of Sacco and Vanzetti, to the great ideological satisfaction of the Communist-headed group with which I had gone up to Boston. It was exactly what they had hoped for and predicted from the first; another injustice of the iniquitous capitalistic system against the working class.

Toasts were drunk at parties « To the Red Dawn »–a very pretty image indeed. « See you on the barricades! » friends would say at the end of an evening of dancing in Harlem. Nobody thought any of this strange; in those days the confusion on this subject by true believers, though not great, was not quite so bad and certainly not so sinister as it is now. It was not then subversive to associate with Communists, nor even treasonable to belong to the Communist Party. It is true that Communists, or a lot of people who thought themselves Communists–and it is astonishing how many of them have right-about-faced since they got a look at the real thing in action–held loud meetings in Union Square, and they often managed to get a few heads cracked by the police–all the better! Just the proof they needed of the brutalities of the American Gestapo. On the other hand, they could gather thousands of « sympathizers » of every shade of political and religious belief and every known nationality and carry off great May Day parades peaceably under police protection. The innocent fellow travelers of this country were kept in a state of excited philanthropy by carefully planted stories of the struggle that the great Russian reformers were having against local rebellious peasants, blasted crops, and plagues of various kinds, bringing the government almost to starvation. Our fellow travelers picketed, rebuking our government for failure to send food and other necessaries to aid the great cause in that courageous country. I do not dare say that our government responded to these childish appeals, but tons upon tons of good winter wheat and other supplies were sent in fabulous quantities. It turned out that the threatened famine took place there–it was real–under orders from Lenin, who directed a great famine or an occasional massacre by way of bringing dissidence under the yoke, and I remember one blood-curdling sentence from a letter of his to a subordinate, directing him to conduct a certain massacre as « a model of mercilessness. »

What struck me later was that I had already met and talked to refugees from Russia in Mexico who had got out with their lives and never ceased to be amazed at it. In New York I saw picketing in Times Square and Wall Street, solemn placard-carrying processions of second-generation descendants of those desolate, ragged, hopeful people who had landed on Ellis Island from almost every country in the West, escaping from the dreadful fates now being suffered by their blood kin in Russia and other parts of the world. Not one of them apparently could see that the starvation and disease and utter misery were brought on methodically and most successfully for the best of political and economic reasons without any help from us, while the Party was being fed richly with our wheat.

Then there was AMTORG, headquartered in New York, managed by a Russian Jewish businessman of the cold steel variety, advertised as a perfectly legal business organization for honest, aboveboard trade with the Soviets.

There was ROSTA (later TASS), the official Russian news agency and propaganda center in America, run by an American citizen, Kenneth Durant, who enjoyed perfect immunity in every Red scare of the period when dozens of suspects were arrested–not he. I assisted the editor of ROSTA for a short time and I know the subsidy was small, though the agency was accused of enjoying floods of « Moscow gold. » If this was so, I don’t know where it went. The editor claimed that Moscow gold was passed out at the rate of $75.00 a week for salaries (he took $50.00 and gave me $25.00). A perennial candidate for President of the United States popped up every four years regularly on the Communist ticket–an honest man. I knew nothing of his private politics, but his public life was admirable and his doctrine was pure Christian theory.

Once on the picket line, I took a good look at the crowd moving slowly forward. I wouldn’t have expected to see some of them on the same street, much less the same picket line and in the same jail. I knew very few people in that first picket line, but I remember Lola Ridge, John Dos Passos, Paxton Hibben, Michael Gold, Helen O’Lochlain Crowe, James Rorty, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Willie Gropper, Grace Lumpkin, all very well known then and mostly favorably–most of them have vanished, and I wonder who but me is alive to remember them now? I have a strangely tender memory of them all, as well as the faces of strangers who were being led away by the police.

We were as miscellaneous, improbable, almost entirely unassorted a gathering of people to one place in one cause as ever happened in this country. I say almost because among the pickets I did not see anyone identifiably a workingman, or « proletarian, » as our Marxist « dialecticians » insisted on calling everybody who worked for his living in a factory, or as they said, « sweatshop, » or « slave mill, » or « salt mine. » It is true that these were workdays and maybe all the workingmen were at their jobs. Suppose one of them said to his boss, « I want a day off, with pay, to picket for Sacco and Vanzetti. » He would be free to picket at his leisure from then on, no doubt. There were plenty of people of the working class there, but they had risen in the world and had become professional paid proletarians, recruits to the intelligentsia, dabbling in ideas as editors, lawyers, agitators, writers who dressed and behaved and looked quite a lot like the bourgeoisie they were out to annihilate. What a vocabulary–proletarian, intelligentsia, bourgeoisie, dialectic–pure exotics transplanted from the never-never-land of the theoretically classless society which could not take root and finally withered on the stalk. Yet, they had three classes of their own and were drawing the lines shrewdly. During that time I went to a meeting of radicals of all kinds and shades, most of them workers, but not all by any means; and Michael Gold made a speech and kept repeating: « Stick to your class, damn it, stick to your class. » It struck me as being such good advice that I decided to take it and tiptoed out the way one leaves church before the end.

The Never-Ending Wrong
Katherine Anne Porter
The Atlantic Monthly
June 1977

For several years in the early 1920s when I was living part of the time in Mexico, on each return to New York, I would follow again the strange history of the Italian emigrants Nicola Sacco a shoemaker, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti a fishmonger, who were accused of a most brutal holdup of a payroll truck, with murder, in South Braintree, Massachusetts, in the early afternoon of April 15, 1920. They were tried before a Boston court and condemned to death about eighteen months later.

In appearance it was a commonplace crime by quite ordinary, average, awkward gangsters, the only unusual feature being that these men were tried, convicted, and put to death; for gangsters in those days, at any rate those who operated boldly enough on a large scale, while not so powerful or so securely entrenched as the Mafia today, enjoyed a curious immunity in society and under the law. We have only to remember the completely public career of Al Capone, who, as chief of the bloodiest gang ever known until that time in this country, lived as if a magic circle had been drawn around him: he could at last be convicted only of not paying his income tax–that « income » he had got by methodical wholesale crime, murder, drug traffic, bootleg liquor, prostitution, and a preposterous mode of blackmail called « protection, » a cash payment on demand instead of a gunpoint visit, the vampire bat of small businesses such as family delicatessens, Chinese laundries, et cetera. After serving his time on Alcatraz, he retired to Florida to live in peace and respectable luxury while his syphilitic brain softened into imbecility. When he died, there was a three-day sentimental wallow on the radio, a hysterical orgy of nostalgia for the good old times when a guy could really get away with it. I remember the tone of drooling bathos in which one of them said, « Ah, just the same, in spite of all, he was a great guy. They just don’t make ’em like that anymore. » Of course, time has proved since how wrong the announcer was–it is obvious they do make ’em like that nearly every day…like that but even more indescribably monstrous–and world radio told us day by day that this was not just local stuff, it was pandemic.

That of course was in a time later than this episode, this case of Sacco and Vanzetti which began so obscurely and ended as one of the important turning points in the history of this country; not the cause, but the symptom of a change so deep and so sinister in the whole point of view and direction of this people as a nation that I for one am not competent to analyze it. I only know what happened by what has happened to us since, by remembering what we were, or what many of us believed we were, before. We were most certainly then of a different cast of mind and feeling than we are now, or such a thing as the Sacco-Vanzetti protest could never have been brought about by any means; and I much doubt such a commotion could be roused again for any merciful cause at all among us.

Four incidents a good many years apart are somehow sharply related in my mind. Long ago a British judge was quoted as saying he refused clemency at popular demand to uphold the principle of capital punishment and to prove he was not to be intimidated by public protest. During Hitler’s time, Himmler remarked that for the good of the state, popular complaints should be ignored, and if they persisted, the complainers should be punished. Judge Webster Thayer, during the Sacco-Vanzetti episode, was heard to boast while playing golf, « Did you see what I did to those anarchistic bastards? » and the grim little person named Rosa Baron (she shall come later) who was head of my particular group during the Sacco-Vanzetti demonstrations in Boston snapped at me when I expressed the wish that we might save the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti: « Alive–what for? They are no earthly good to us alive. » These painful incidents illustrate at least four common perils in the legal handling that anyone faces when accused of a capital crime of which he is not guilty, especially if he has a dubious place in society, an unpopular nationality, erroneous political beliefs, the wrong religion socially, poverty, low social standing–the list could go on but this is enough. Both of these unfortunate men, Sacco and Vanzetti, suffered nearly all of these disadvantages. A fearful word had been used to cover the whole list of prejudices and misinformation, and in some deeply mysterious way, their names had been associated with it–Anarchy.

If there really was a South Braintree gang as it is claimed, to which two Anarchists belonged, it seems to have been a small affair operating under rather clumsy leadership; its real crime seems not to have been exactly robbery and murder, but political heresy: they were Anarchists it was said who robbed and murdered to get funds for their organization–in this case, Anarchy–another variation on the Robin Hood myth.

Anarchy had been a word of fear in many countries for a long time, nowhere more so than in this one; nothing in that time, not even the word « Communism, » struck such terror, anger, and hatred into the popular mind; and nobody seemed to understand exactly what Anarchy as a political idea meant any more than they understood Communism, which has muddied the waters to the point that it sometimes calls itself Socialism, at other times Democracy, or even in its present condition, the Republic. Facism, Nazism, new names for very ancient evil forms of government–tyranny and dictatorship–came into fashion almost at the same time with Communism; at least the aims of those two were clear enough; at least their leaders made no attempt to deceive anyone as to their intentions. But Anarchy had been here all the nineteenth century, with its sinister offspring Nihilism, and it is a simple truth that the human mind can face better the most oppressive government, the most rigid restrictions, than the awful prospect of a lawless, frontierless world. Freedom is a dangerous intoxicant and very few people can tolerate it in any quantity; it brings out the old raiding, oppressing, murderous instincts; the rage for revenge, for power, the lust for bloodshed. The longing for freedom takes the form of crushing the enemy–there is always the enemy!–into the earth; and where and who is the enemy if there is no visible establishment to attack, to destroy with blood and fire? Remember all that oratory when freedom is threatened again. Freedom, remember, is not the same as liberty.

On May 15, 1927, Nicola Sacco wrote from the prison in Charlestown, where he had been in and out of the death cell since July 1921, to his faithful friend Leon Henderson: « I frankly tell you, dear friend, that if he [Governor Fuller of Massachusetts] have a chance he’ll hang us, and it is too bad to see you and all the other good friends this optimism while today we are facing the electric chair. »

Bartolomeo Vanzetti, his fellow prisoner, wrote as early as 1924, after four years in prison under sentence of death, with a reprieve: « I am tired, tired, tired: I ask if to live like now, for love of life, is not rather than wisdom or heroism mere cowardness. » He did consent to live on: he wished so dearly to live that he let his life be taken from him rather than take it himself. Yet near the end, he arrived apparently without help at a profound, painful understanding: « When one has reason to despair and he despairs not, he may be more abnormal than if he would despair. »

They were put to death in the electric chair at Charlestown Prison at midnight on the 23rd of August, 1927, a desolate dark midnight, a night for perpetual remembrance and mourning. I was one of the many hundreds who stood in anxious vigil watching the light in the prison tower, which we had been told would fail at the moment of death; it was a moment of strange heartbreak.

The trial of Jesus of Nazareth, the trial and rehabilitation of Joan of Arc, any one of the witchcraft trials in Salem during 1691, the Moscow trials of 1937 during which Stalin destroyed all of the founders of the 1924 Soviet Revolution, the Sacco-Vanzetti trial of 1920 through 1927–there are many trials such as these in which the victim was already condemned to death before the trial took place, and it took place only to cover up the real meaning: the accused was to be put to death. These are trials in which the judge, the counsel, the jury, and the witnesses are the criminals, not the accused. For any believer in capital punishment, the fear of an honest mistake on the part of all concerned is cited as the main argument against the final terrible decision to carry out the death sentence. There is the frightful possibility in all such trials as these that the judgment has already been pronounced and the trial is just a mask for murder.

Both of them knew English very well–not so much in grammar and syntax but for the music, the true meaning of the words they used. They were Italian peasants, emigrants, laborers, self-educated men with an exalted sense of language as an incantation. Read those letters! They also had in common a distrust in general of the powers of this world, well founded in their knowledge of life as it is lived by people who work with their hands in humble trades for wages. Vanzetti had raised himself to the precarious independence of fish peddler, Sacco had learned the skilled trade of shoemaker; his small son was named Dante, and a last letter to this child is full of high-minded hopes and good counsel. At the very door of death, Sacco turned back to recall a glimpse of his wife’s beauty and their happiness together. Their minds, each one in its very different way, were ragbags of faded Anarchic doctrine, of « class consciousness, » of « proletarian snobbism, » yet their warmth of feeling gave breath and fresh meaning to such words as Sacco wrote to Mrs. Leon Henderson: « Pardon me, Mrs. Henderson, it is not to discredit and ignore you, Mrs. Evans and other generosity work, which I sincerely believe is a noble one and I am respectful: But it is the warm sincere voice of an unrest heart and a free soul that lived and loved among the workers class all his life. »

This was a state of mind, or point of view, which many of the anxious friends from another class of society found very hard to deal with, not to be met on their own bright, generous terms in this crisis of life and death; to be saying, in effect, we are all brothers and equal citizens; to receive, in effect, the reserved answer: No, not yet. It is clear now that the condemned men understood and realized their predicament much better than any individual working with any organization devoted to their rescue. Their friends from a more fortunate destiny had confidence in their own power to get what they asked of their society, their government; courts were not sacrosanct, they could be mistaken; it was a civic duty now and then to protest their judgments, persuade them by one means or another to reverse their sentences. The two laboring men, who had managed to survive and scramble up a few steps from nearly the bottom level of life, knew well from the beginning that they had every reason to despair, they did not really trust these strangers from the upper world who furnished the judges and lawyers to the courts, the politicians to the offices, the faculties to the universities, who had all the money and the influence–why should they be turning against their own class to befriend two laborers? Sacco wrote to Gardner Jackson, member of an upper-middle-class family, rich enough and ardent enough to devote his means and his time to the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee: « Although we are one heart, unfortunately we represent two opposite class. » What they may not have known–we can only hope they did not know–was that some of the groups apparently working for them, people of their own class in many cases, were using the occasion for Communist propaganda, and hoping only for their deaths as a political argument. I know this because I heard and saw. By chance and nothing else I was with a committee from the Communist line of defense. The exact title is of no importance. It was a mere splinter group from the national and world organization. It was quiet, discreet, at times the action seemed to be moving rather in circles; most of the volunteers, for we were all that, were no more Communists than I was. A young man who did a lot of running about, on what errands I never tried to discover, expressed what most of us thought when we learned that we were working under Communist direction: « Well, what of it? If he’s fighting on my side, I’ll go with the Devil! » [I hear this again years later from Germans in Berlin when Hitler was beginning to infect the local mind like a medieval plague.]

It was the popular way of talking and a point of view fatal to any moral force or any clear view of issues; it was only a kind of catchphrase, but a symptom of the confusion of the times, the loss and denial of standards, the scumbling of boundary lines, and the whole evil trend toward reducing everything human to the mud of the lowest common denominator.

A certain hotel near the Boston Common had been quite taken over by several separate and often rather hostile organizers of the demonstrations and I was prepared to fall eagerly and with a light heart into the atmosphere I found established there–even though it held a menace I could not instantly define–of monastic discipline, obedience, the community spirit, everybody working toward a common end, with faith in their cause and in each other. In this last, I was somewhat mistaken, as I was very soon to find out. The air was stiff with the cold, mindless, irrational compliance with orders from « higher up. » The whole atmosphere was rank with intrigue and deceit and the chilling realization that any one of them would have sold another to please superiors and to move himself up the ladder.

Politically I was mistaken in my hopes, also. For I see now that they were only that, based on early training in ethics and government, courses which I have not seen lately in any curriculum. Based on these teachings, I never believed that this country would alienate China in the Boxer Rebellion of 1900; or that we would not help France chase Hitler out of the Ruhr, as Mussolini had chased him single-handedly out of the Polish Corridor (and Mussolini himself was receiving heavy financial and political support from very powerful people in this country); or that we would let the Communists dupe us into deserting Republican Spain; or that we would aid and abet Franco; or let Czechoslovakia, a republic we had helped to found, fall to Soviet Russia. It is quite obvious by now that my political thinking was the lamentable « political illiteracy » of a liberal idealist–we might say, a species of Jeffersonian.

In the reckless phrase of the confirmed joiner in the fight for whatever relief oppressed humanity was fighting for, I had volunteered « to be useful wherever and however I could best serve, » and was drafted into a Communist outfit all unknowing; this no doubt because my name was on the list of contributors to funds in aid of Sacco and Vanzetti for several years. Even from Mexico, I sent what bits of money I could, when I could, to whatever group solicited at the moment: I never inquired as to the shades of political belief because that was not what was important to me in that cause, which concerned common humanity. In the same way, I went with the first organization that invited me, and at the Boston boat at the foot of Christopher Street was pleasantly surprised to see several quite good friends there, none of whom had any more definite political opinions than I had. I was then, as now, a registered voting member of the Democratic Party, a convinced liberal–not then a word of contempt–and a sympathizer with the new (to me) doctrines brought out of Russia from 1919 to 1920 onward by enthusiastic, sentimental, misguided men and women who were looking for a New Religion of Humanity, as one of them expressed it, and were carrying the gospel that the New Jerusalem could be expected to rise any minute in Moscow or thereabouts.

It is hard to explain, harder no doubt for a new generation to understand, how the « intellectuals » and « artists » in our country leaped with such abandoned, fanatic credulity into the Russian hell-on-earth of 1920. They quoted the stale catchphrases and slogans. They were lifted to starry patriotism by the fraudulent Communist organization called the Lincoln Brigade. The holy name was a charm which insured safety and victory. The bullet struck your Bible instead of your heart. Not all of them merit being enclosed in the pejorative quotation marks; they were quite simply the most conventionally brought-up, middle-class people of no intellectual or other pretensions. There was a Bessie Beatty who was all for the Revolution, capital « R, » but who meanwhile did nicely in New York as editor of a popular magazine for women; Albert Rhys Williams, a minister’s son, very religious himself, whose main recognition was based on the amusing story of how he had spent the first three days of the fall of the Russian Empire in complete formal attire–white tie, wing collar, tails–and was somewhat the worse for wear when the third day appeared. (Nobody ever explained to me how anyone, no matter how sympathetic, could have survived a true Communist revolt in that dress belonging to the most criminal of the classes of society, or how Mr. Williams, a dedicated fellow traveler, should have had occasion to appear in that outfit.) But let us go on. There was Frank Tannenbaum, Jewish by birth, a good journalist, really trying to help build a New Jerusalem anywhere and everywhere and believing firmly that the foundation stone had at last been laid in Moscow.

« For me and others like me, the Kremlin meant the Third Internationale and this meant the organization of the ‘workers of the world’ to vindicate their human rights against everything we hated in contemporary society. » [See Endnote at bottom of Part 1]. Edmund Wilson wrote that, as well and clearly expressed as it has been until now.

« I have seen the future and it works. » Lincoln Steffens is reported to have said this, though it has been much denied. It is claimed that he did not ever say such a reckless thing. He was there, on the spot, admiring everything in Russia at the time when William Bullitt was Ambassador to Russia, carrying on a delightful social life, although no one says quite how it was done in that particular atmosphere. I can say, once for all, that he may not have said this in Russia, but I heard him say it in Mexico in 1922 at a victorious desert celebration where the President, the Cabinet, « Congress, » and all the radical politicians in the government were holding a great fiesta on a wonderful hot dusty day, where there were dozens of mariachi bands playing–drums and trumpets going–and all of us were sitting on the ground in a joyous picnic spirit eating mole, the national dish. I was with a party with which Mr. Steffens had come to see what a true revolution could do for people who needed a revolution. He was frightfully unhappy and uncomfortable. He did not like sitting on the ground and he did not see the beauty and the picturesqueness of the Indians’ figures and clothing, and he referred to them as « uncivilized. » He could not endure the sight, the taste, the smell, or even the presence of the mole; it was very peppery. The rest of the party were eating and scraping up the sauce with savory folded tortillas. His eyes behind their thick glasses swiveled around once at us and he said, « I wish you could see your mouths–you would rub your faces in the sand to clean them up.

It was some time later that afternoon when we were discussing world events, and all of us wanted to know how in the world Russian people could survive the latest disaster to their government, and he said: « All progress takes its toll in human life. Russia is the coming power of the world. I have seen the future and it works. » So much for that. No matter how sad it may seem now, Mr. Steffens said it then, jovially, but in earnest. I wrote it down word for word, then and there, in my notebook.

My group was headed by Rosa Baron, a dry, fanatical little woman who wore thick-lensed spectacles over her blue, accusing eyes–a born whip hand, who talked an almost impenetrable jargon of party dogma. Her « approach » to every « question » (and everything was a question) was « purely dialectical. » Phrases such as « capitalistic imperialism, » « bourgeois morality, » « slave mentality, » « the dictatorship of the proletariat, » « the historical imperative » (meaning more or less, I gathered, that history makes man and not the other way around), « the triumph of the workers, » « social consciousness, » and « political illiteracy » flew from her dry lips all day long. She viewed a « political illiterate » as a conventional mind might a person of those long-ago days born out of wedlock; an unfortunate condition, but reprehensible and without remedy even for its victim. Conservative was only a slightly less pejorative term than Reactionary, and as for Liberal, it was a dirty word, quite often linked in speech with other vaguely descriptive words, even dirtier, if possible. There were many such groups, for this demonstration had been agitated for and prepared for many years by the Communists. They had not originated the protest, I believe, but had joined in and tried to take over, as their policy was, and is. Their presence created the same confusion, beclouding the issue and discrediting the case as it always had done and as they intended it to do. It appeared in its true form and on its most disastrous scale in Spain later. They were well organized to promote disorder and to prevent any question ever being settled–but I had not then discovered this; I remarked to our Communist leader that even then, at that late time, I still hoped the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti might be saved and that they would be granted another trial. « Saved, » she said, ringing a change on her favorite answer to political illiteracy, « who wants them saved? What earthly good would they do us alive? »

I was another of those bourgeois liberals who got in the way of serious business, yet we were needed, by the thousands if possible, for this great agitation must be made to appear to be a spontaneous uprising of the American people, and for practical reasons, the more non-Communists, the better. They were all sentimental bleeders, easily impressed.

Rosa Baron’s young brother once presumed to argue with her on some point of doctrine when I was present. « I’ll report you to the Committee, » she said, « if you talk about Party business before outsiders. » This was the first time I had ever come face to face, here and now personally, with the Inquisitorial spirit hard at work.

« From each according to his capacity, to each according to his need. »

Lenin was known to think little of people who let their human feelings for decency get in the way of the revolution which was to save mankind: he spoke contemptuously of the « saints » who kept getting underfoot; he had only harsh words for those « weak sisters » who flew off the « locomotive of history » every time it rounded a sharp curve. History was whatever was happening in Russia, and the weak sisters, who sometimes called themselves « fellow travelers » were perhaps, many of them, jolted by the collision with what appeared to be a dream of the ideal society come true, dazzled by the bright colors of a false dawn.

I flew off Lenin’s locomotive and his vision of history in a wide arc in Boston, Massachusetts, on August 21, 1927; it was two days before the putting to death of Sacco and Vanzetti, to the great ideological satisfaction of the Communist-headed group with which I had gone up to Boston. It was exactly what they had hoped for and predicted from the first; another injustice of the iniquitous capitalistic system against the working class.

Toasts were drunk at parties « To the Red Dawn »–a very pretty image indeed. « See you on the barricades! » friends would say at the end of an evening of dancing in Harlem. Nobody thought any of this strange; in those days the confusion on this subject by true believers, though not great, was not quite so bad and certainly not so sinister as it is now. It was not then subversive to associate with Communists, nor even treasonable to belong to the Communist Party. It is true that Communists, or a lot of people who thought themselves Communists–and it is astonishing how many of them have right-about-faced since they got a look at the real thing in action–held loud meetings in Union Square, and they often managed to get a few heads cracked by the police–all the better! Just the proof they needed of the brutalities of the American Gestapo. On the other hand, they could gather thousands of « sympathizers » of every shade of political and religious belief and every known nationality and carry off great May Day parades peaceably under police protection. The innocent fellow travelers of this country were kept in a state of excited philanthropy by carefully planted stories of the struggle that the great Russian reformers were having against local rebellious peasants, blasted crops, and plagues of various kinds, bringing the government almost to starvation. Our fellow travelers picketed, rebuking our government for failure to send food and other necessaries to aid the great cause in that courageous country. I do not dare say that our government responded to these childish appeals, but tons upon tons of good winter wheat and other supplies were sent in fabulous quantities. It turned out that the threatened famine took place there–it was real–under orders from Lenin, who directed a great famine or an occasional massacre by way of bringing dissidence under the yoke, and I remember one blood-curdling sentence from a letter of his to a subordinate, directing him to conduct a certain massacre as « a model of mercilessness. »

What struck me later was that I had already met and talked to refugees from Russia in Mexico who had got out with their lives and never ceased to be amazed at it. In New York I saw picketing in Times Square and Wall Street, solemn placard-carrying processions of second-generation descendants of those desolate, ragged, hopeful people who had landed on Ellis Island from almost every country in the West, escaping from the dreadful fates now being suffered by their blood kin in Russia and other parts of the world. Not one of them apparently could see that the starvation and disease and utter misery were brought on methodically and most successfully for the best of political and economic reasons without any help from us, while the Party was being fed richly with our wheat.

Then there was AMTORG, headquartered in New York, managed by a Russian Jewish businessman of the cold steel variety, advertised as a perfectly legal business organization for honest, aboveboard trade with the Soviets.

There was ROSTA (later TASS), the official Russian news agency and propaganda center in America, run by an American citizen, Kenneth Durant, who enjoyed perfect immunity in every Red scare of the period when dozens of suspects were arrested–not he. I assisted the editor of ROSTA for a short time and I know the subsidy was small, though the agency was accused of enjoying floods of « Moscow gold. » If this was so, I don’t know where it went. The editor claimed that Moscow gold was passed out at the rate of $75.00 a week for salaries (he took $50.00 and gave me $25.00). A perennial candidate for President of the United States popped up every four years regularly on the Communist ticket–an honest man. I knew nothing of his private politics, but his public life was admirable and his doctrine was pure Christian theory.

Once on the picket line, I took a good look at the crowd moving slowly forward. I wouldn’t have expected to see some of them on the same street, much less the same picket line and in the same jail. I knew very few people in that first picket line, but I remember Lola Ridge, John Dos Passos, Paxton Hibben, Michael Gold, Helen O’Lochlain Crowe, James Rorty, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Willie Gropper, Grace Lumpkin, all very well known then and mostly favorably–most of them have vanished, and I wonder who but me is alive to remember them now? I have a strangely tender memory of them all, as well as the faces of strangers who were being led away by the police.

We were as miscellaneous, improbable, almost entirely unassorted a gathering of people to one place in one cause as ever happened in this country. I say almost because among the pickets I did not see anyone identifiably a workingman, or « proletarian, » as our Marxist « dialecticians » insisted on calling everybody who worked for his living in a factory, or as they said, « sweatshop, » or « slave mill, » or « salt mine. » It is true that these were workdays and maybe all the workingmen were at their jobs. Suppose one of them said to his boss, « I want a day off, with pay, to picket for Sacco and Vanzetti. » He would be free to picket at his leisure from then on, no doubt. There were plenty of people of the working class there, but they had risen in the world and had become professional paid proletarians, recruits to the intelligentsia, dabbling in ideas as editors, lawyers, agitators, writers who dressed and behaved and looked quite a lot like the bourgeoisie they were out to annihilate. What a vocabulary–proletarian, intelligentsia, bourgeoisie, dialectic–pure exotics transplanted from the never-never-land of the theoretically classless society which could not take root and finally withered on the stalk. Yet, they had three classes of their own and were drawing the lines shrewdly. During that time I went to a meeting of radicals of all kinds and shades, most of them workers, but not all by any means; and Michael Gold made a speech and kept repeating: « Stick to your class, damn it, stick to your class. » It struck me as being such good advice that I decided to take it and tiptoed out the way one leaves church before the end.

Each morning I left the hotel, walked into the blazing August sun, and dropped into the picket line before the State House; the police would allow us to march around once or twice, then close in and make the arrests we invited; indeed, what else were we there for? My elbow was always taken quietly by the same mild little blond officer, day after day; he was very Irish, very patient, very damned bored with the whole incomprehensible show. We always greeted each other politely. It was generally understood that the Pink Tea Squad, white cotton gloves and all, had been assigned to this job, well instructed that in no circumstance were they to forget themselves and whack a lady with their truncheons, no matter how far she forgot herself in rudeness and contrariety. In fact, I never saw a lady–or a gentleman either–being rude to a policeman in that picket line, nor any act of rudeness from a single policeman. That sort of thing was to come later, from officers on different duty. The first time I was arrested, my policeman and I walked along stealing perplexed, questioning glances at each other; the gulf between us was fixed, but not impassable; neither of us wished to deny that the other was a human being; there was no natural hostility between us. I had been brought up in the fixed social belief that the whole police system existed to protect and befriend me and all my kind. Without giving this theory any attention, I had found no reason to doubt it.

Here are some notes of my conversations with my policeman during our several journeys under the August sun, down the rocky road to the Joy Street Station:

He: « What good do you think you’re doing? »

I: « I hope a little…I don’t believe they had a fair trial. That is all I want for them, a fair trial. »

He: « This is no way to go about getting it. You ought to know you’ll never get anywhere with this stuff. »

I: « Why not? »

He: « It makes people mad. They take you for a lot of tramps. »

I: « We did everything else we could think of first, for years and years, and nothing worked. »

He: « I don’t believe in showing contempt for the courts this way. »

I: « Neither do I, in principle. But this time court is wrong. »

He: « I trust the courts of the land more than I do all these sapheads making public riot. »

I: « We aren’t rioting. Look at us, how calm we are. »

He (still mildly): « What I think is, you all ought to be put in jail and kept there till it’s over. »

I: « They don’t want us in jail. There isn’t enough room there. »

Second day:

He (taking my elbow and drawing me out of the line; I go like a lamb): « Well, what have you been doing since yesterday? »

I: « Mostly copying Sacco’s and Vanzetti’s letters. I wish you could read them. You’d believe in them if you could read the letters. »

He: « Well, I don’t have much time for reading. »

Third day:

The picket line was crowded, anxious, and slowmoving. I reached the rounding point before I saw my policeman taking his place. I moved out and reached for his arm before we spoke. « You’re late, » I said, not in the least meaning to be funny. He astonished me by nearly smiling. « What have we got to hurry for? » he inquired, and my scalp shuddered–we moved on in silence.

This was the 23rd of August, the day set for the execution and the crowds of onlookers that had gathered every morning were becoming rather noisy and abusive. My officer and I ran into a light shower of stones, a sprinkling of flowers, confetti, and a flurry of boos, catcalls, and cheers as we rounded the corner into Joy Street. We ducked our heads and I looked back and saw other prisoners and other policemen put up their hands and turn away their faces.

I: « Can you make out which is for which of us? I can’t. »

He: « No, I can’t, and I don’t care. »

Silence.

He: « How many times have you been down this street today? »

I: « Only once. I was only sent out once today. How many times for you? »

It was now late afternoon, and as it turned out, this was the last picket line to form. The battle was lost and all of us knew it by then.

He (in mortal weariness): « God alone knows. »

As we stood waiting in line at the desk, I said, « I expect this will be the last time you’ll have to arrest me. You’ve been very kind and patient and I thank you. »

I remember the blinded exhaustion of his face, its gray pallor with greenish shadows in it. He said, « Thank you, » and stood beside me at the desk while my name was written into the record once more. We did not speak or look at each other again, but as I followed the matron to a cell I saw him working his way slowly outward through the crowd.

The same plain, middle-aged, rather officious woman with a gold front tooth always came and put me in a cell and locked the door. Sometimes I was alone in the foggy light and stale air, being forbidden to smoke and wishing for something to read. Sometimes there would be other women, though never once a soul I knew, and we would begin at once to talk, to exchange our gossip and rumors and ideas, for, being in the dead center of this disturbance, it was quite hard to find out what was really happening. After a time, usually two or three hours, the matron would come with her keys, open the door, and say, « Come on out. » Out we would come, knowing that Mr. Edward James, Henry James’s nephew, was there again, putting up our bail, getting us set free for the next round. Helen O’Lochlain Crowe, who had trained with Jim Larkin as his disciple and mistress in the Irish Trouble, tried to refuse bail, insisted on staying in prison, and was finally hauled out and set on the sidewalk. Not roughly, just firmly and finally. She was, her jailers told her, bailed out whether she liked it or not, and this was very ungrateful behavior to Mr. James who was only trying to help.

Mr. James was a thin, stiff, parchment roll of a man, maybe sixty years old, immaculately turned out in tones of expensive-looking gray from head to foot, to match his gray pointed beard and his severe pale gray eyes with irritable points of light in them. He left the hall once with several of my group, and the dark young Portuguese boy who always came with him walked beside me. He was a picture of exuberance, with his oily, swarthy skin, his thick, glistening black hair, the soft corners of his full red mouth always a little moist; his young, lazy fat heaving and walloping at every step. I asked him what organization they were working with, for by now I knew too well that this whole protest was the work of a complicated machine or a set of machines working together, even if not always intentionally or with the same motives, and we were all of us being put rather expertly through set paces by distant operators, unknown manipulators whose motives and designs were far different from ours. « Oh, Mr. James and I, » said the smiling, eupeptic being trundling along at my side, his red silk scarf necktie flapping, « we have our own little organization. I’m Mr. James’s secretary, » he said in his childish voice « and we are perfectly independent! » He gave a coy little bounce and wiggle. He was as contented and unconcerned as a piglet in clover.

« That’s charming, » I said in a breath of relief from the distrust and fright growing in my mind as if I had breathed an infection from the air, « it’s nice to know someone is acting on his own! »

« Mr. James and me, we’ve been working on this for years!  »

I have only to sort out and copy these notes down here to realize how long fifty years are, not only in the life of an individual, but of a nation, a world–to realize again, not for the first time, how one sets out for a certain goal and ends at another, different, unforeseen, and too often dismaying. We need restored to us of course that blinded obscured third eye said once to exist in the top of the brain for our guidance. Lacking it we go skew-gee in great numbers, especially those of us brought up so believingly on Judeo-Greek-Christian ethics, prone to trust the good faith of our fellows, and therefore vulnerable to betrayal because of our virtues, such as they are; that is to say, our human weaknesses. There are many notes, saved almost at random these long past years, many by mere chance; they were scrambled together in a battered yellow envelope marked Sacco-Vanzetti, and had worked their way to the bottom of many a basket of papers in many a change of houses, cities, and even a change of country. They are my personal experiences of the whirlwinds of change that brought Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler crowded into one half a century or less; and my understanding of this event in Boston as one of the most portentous in the long death of the civilization made by Europeans in the Western world, in the millennial upheaval which brings always every possible change but one–the two nearly matched forces of human nature, the will to give life and the will to destroy it. So, at that time and after what I have learned since, it seems strange that I was not better informed at Boston about my committee until I arrived there and was seated at a typewriter copying the Sacco and Vanzetti letters to the world. However, I was not informed and I did not ask, and this is a story of what happened, not what should have been.

After more than half a long lifetime, I find that any recollection, however vivid and lasting, must unavoidably be mixed with many afterthoughts. It is hard to remember anything perfectly straight, accurate, no matter whether it was painful or pleasant at that time. I find that I remember best just what I felt and thought about this event in its own time, in its inalterable setting; my impressions of this occasion remain fast, no matter how many reviews or recollections or how many afterthoughts have added themselves with the years. It is fifty years, very long ones, since Sacco and Vanzetti were put to death in Boston, accused and convicted of a bitter crime, of which, it is still claimed, they may or may not have been guilty. I did not know then and I still do not know whether they were guilty (in spite of reading at this late day the learned, stupendous, dearly human work of attorney Herbert B. Ehrmann), but still I had my reasons for being there to protest the terrible penalty they were condemned to suffer; these reasons were of the heart, which I believe appears in these pages with emphasis. The core of this account of that fearful episode was written nearly a half-century ago, during the time in Boston and later; for years I refused to read, to talk or listen, because I couldn’t endure the memory–I wanted to escape from it. Some of the account was written at the scene of the tragedy itself and, except for a word or two here and there in those early notes, where I have added a line in the hope of a clearer statement, it is unchanged in feeling and point of view. The evils prophesied by that crisis have all come true and are enormous in weight and variety.

Books have been written by many illustrious persons who took part in that strange event–a lawyer who was to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Felix Frankfurter, and others; a lady who was to be Ambassador to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, Daisy Borden, was attending meetings there; celebrated faculty members from universities such as Paxton Hibben; novelists such as John Dos Passos; poets such as Edna St. Vincent Millay; all of whom the public knew well, at least by name. There were many politicians in full career, some of them risking their careers by their appearances in Boston–useless to name names, there were too many, all reputable and with good influence–all of them streamed sooner or later through that large but crowded room where I sat, among other members of my special committee, at the typewriter, doing what was called « kitchen police, » that is, all the dull, dusty little jobs that the more important committee members couldn’t be burdened with. This was my good luck. My work was not only the melancholy pleasure of copying Sacco’s and Vanzetti’s letters to their friends working for them on the outside, or even of composing propaganda in the form of news items which I doubt ever got printed. I did not see a newspaper the whole time. Now and then the pioneer lady Ambassador, pleasant Daisy Borden, floated in all white, horsehaired lace garden hats and pink or maybe blue chiffon frocks, on her way to or from some social afternoon festivity. She sat beside my desk one day when I had just returned from my daily picketing and said, « One needs a little recreation, even in these terrible times. You should just go out and get a little breath of fresh air–a quiet walk by yourself. »

I said, « My idea of recreation would be a nice long night’s sleep, » for the evenings, six of them, usually were spent at some fevered mass meeting or sitting about talking with the rather random groups that formed in one stifling hot hotel room or another. I said to her, « I sometimes wonder what we are doing really. The whole thing is losing shape in my mind, but I can only hope we may learn something we need to know–that something good will come of this. »

She said very gently, « What good?–Oh, they’ll forget all about it. Most of them are just here for the excitement. They don’t really know what is going on; and they want to forget anything unpleasant. » Her broad, healthy face smiled reassuringly from under its flowering shade. Intoxicating perfume waved from her spread handkerchief when she dried her forehead. I repeated what John Dos Passos once remarked on the « imbecile » (or was the word « idiot »?) lack of memory of the human race, generally speaking.

There was the charming good woman of great riches and even greater charity and sweetness of mind–Mrs. Leon Henderson–who had been a champion of Sacco’s and Vanzetti’s from the first. I trusted her delicate, intuitional mind. She had been prodigal of all her resources, money and energy and imaginative stratagems and loving kindness. Now, at the end, when she rightly feared the worst, she was writing them letters to persuade them to break their fast, to save their strength for the new trial she was sure they would be given. She was a vegetarian and advised them to drink milk and fruit juice by way of easing themselves back into a regular diet.

She invited me to lunch. I did not then know she was a vegetarian and when she asked me what I would like, I asked for broiled lamb chops. She shuddered a little, the pupils of her eyes dilated, and she gave me a little lecture on cruelty to animals, just the same.

« I could not eat any food that had the taint of suffering and death in it; imagine my dear! Eating blood? »

I retracted at once, in painful embarrassment, and ate a savory lunch of scrambled eggs and spinach with her, and things went on very nicely. Still, I could not avoid seeing her very handsome leather handbag, her suede shoes and belt, and a light summer fur of some species I was unable to identify lying across her shoulders. My mind would wander from our topic while, bewildered once more by the confusions in human feelings, above all my own, I gazed into the glass eyes of the small, unknown peaked-faced animal.

« We should be very wrong to despair, » she said as we were getting ready to go, « even if their lives are taken away from them; nothing can take away the truth of our wish to help them, the fact of their courage in the face of death; they have never despaired or become bitter. »

I said, « Yes, and if they are innocent, it must be almost unbearable not to have had the chance to prove it… »

She was shocked at this. « Do you mean you have a doubt of their innocence? » she asked.

« I simply don’t know, » I told her. « I thought one of the questions in this whole uproar is just precisely that–that they have not had a fair trial.

« Fair trial or not, » she said–by now we were standing on the corner ready to separate–« that is not the point at all, my dear. They are innocent and their death will be a legal crime. »

I have described that scene and the conversation from the notes I took when I got back to my desk at the hotel that day.

Several of the more enterprising young reporters, who were swarming over the scene like crows to a freshly planted cornfield, had put out a few invitations to some of the girls in the various groups to something they called « a little party. » Rosa Baron, the head of my committee, went into action with the authority and prudence of a boarding school chaperone. « Just don’t go, that’s all, » she told her two or three eligibles, « just don’t be seen with them. That is the one thing we can’t afford–a scandal of that kind! » So we didn’t accept any invitations, and heard nothing more about them.

I remember small, slender Mrs. Sacco with her fine copper-colored hair and dark brown, soft, dazed eyes moving from face to face but still smiling uncertainly, surrounded in our offices by women pitying and cuddling her, sympathetic with her as if she were a pretty little girl; they spoke to her as if she were five years old or did not understand–this Italian peasant wife who, for seven long years, had shown moral stamina and emotional stability enough to furnish half a dozen women amply. I was humiliated for them, for their apparent insensibility. But I was mistaken in my anxiety–their wish to help, to show her their concern, was real, their feelings were true and lasting, no matter how awkwardly expressed; their love and tenderness and wish to help were from the heart. All through those last days in Boston, those strangely innocent women enlisted their altar societies, their card clubs their literary round tables, their music circles and their various charities in the campaign to save Sacco and Vanzetti. On their rounds, they came now and then to the office of my outfit in their smart thin frocks, stylish hats, and their indefinable air of eager sweetness and light, bringing money they had collected in the endless, wittily devious ways of women’s organizations. They would talk among themselves and to her about how they felt, with tears in their eyes, promising to come again soon with more help. They were known as « sob sisters » by the cynics and the hangers-on of the committee I belonged to who took their money and described their activities as « sentimental orgies, » of course with sexual overtones, and they jeered at « bourgeois morality. » « Morality » was a word along with « charitable » and « humanitarian » and « liberal, » all, at one time, in the odor of sanctity but now despoiled and rotting in the gutter where suddenly it seemed they belonged. I found myself on the side of the women; I resented the nasty things said about them by these self-appointed world reformers and I thought again, as I had more than once in Mexico, that yes, the world was a frightening enough place as it was, but think what a hell it would be if such people really got the power to do the things they planned. [They seem to have it and are getting on with it–1976].

A last, huge rally took place the night before the execution, with Rosa Sacco and Luigia Vanzetti, Vanzetti’s sister, on the platform. Luigia had been brought from Italy and taken through Paris, where she had been photographed as she was marched through the streets at the head of an enormous crowd–the gaunt, striding figure of a middle-aged, plain woman who looked more like a prisoner herself than the leader of a public protest. Now they brought her forward with Mrs. Sacco and the two timid women faced the raging crowd, mostly Italians, who rose at them in savage sympathy, shouting, tears pouring down their faces, shaking their fists and calling childish phrases, their promises of revenge for their wrongs. « Never you mind, Rosina! You wait, Luigia! They’ll pay, they’ll pay! Don’t be afraid..! » Rosa Sacco spread her hands over her face, but Luigia Vanzetti stared stonily down into their distorted faces with a pure horror in her own. They screamed their violence at her in her own language, trying to hearten her, but she was not consoled. She was led away like a corpse walking. The crowd roared and cursed and wept and threatened. It was the most awesome, the most bitter scene I had ever witnessed.

As we crowded out to the street, a great mass of police all around us, one of the enterprising young reporters who had helped to get up the « little party » for the girls seized my wrist, calling out, « Was this a swell show, I ask you? Did it come off like a house afire? It was all my idea; I got the whole thing up! » His face was savage too, wild with his triumph. « I got Luigia out of bed to come here. She said she was too sick, but I got her up! I said, ‘Don’t you want to help your brother?' »

« She speaks English? » I asked in wonder at him. « What did she say? » I had rather liked him before. I have forgotten his name.

« Hell no! » he said. « She’s got an interpreter. She didn’t say anything; she just got up and came along. »

The most terrible irony of this incident of Luigia Vanzetti I learned later: that Mussolini wrote a personal letter to Governor Fuller of Massachusetts asking for mercy for the two Italians. I had known and talked with a number of the earlier refugees from Mussolini’s Italy of 1922 and onward in Mexico, and I knew well what his mercy was like toward anyone unlucky enough to displease him. But at that time, Mussolini had many admirers and defenders in this country–he was more than respectable; he was getting enormous flattering publicity. There was a group of Mussolini enthusiasts in Boston, picketing and working and going to jail and being let out, then putting their heads together in the evening to sing « Giovinezza. » No harm done. The Communists thought them beneath contempt, and the liberals, the true democrats as they believed themselves to be, were then in the heyday of practicing what they preached and were ready to fight and die for anybody’s right to his own beliefs, no matter what–religious, social, or political. I thought wryly of Voltaire’s impassioned defense of an individual’s right to say what he believed, but all I could salvage at that time was that I disagreed with most of what some of these « liberals » were saying and I would defend to the death my right to disagree. « Ha, » said my little publicity inventor, listening a split second to the sweating, howling cheering crowd–« Talk about free speech! How’s that? Their heads will be the first to roll. » This phrase was one of the Communist crowd’s favorites, and the very thought of rolling heads would bring a mean, relishing smile to even the dourest face.

After Mr. James had bailed us out for the last time, we returned to the hotel and got ready to go to the Charlestown Prison where the execution was to take place at midnight. It seems odd, perhaps, but I joined with a group of persons to go in a taxi to the prison and I cannot remember a name or a face among them. It is possible that they were all strangers to me. There were several hundred of us who had been picketing in relays all day, every day from the 21st and for four days, and their faces and names, perhaps known at that moment, have vanished; and yet, when the thing was done, I remember returning with persons well known to me and several incidents which happened later. The driver of our cab did not want us to go to the Charlestown Prison. Neither did the police stationed at regular distances along the whole route. They stopped our cab and turned us back half a dozen times. We would direct the driver to go a roundabout way, or to take a less traveled street. But at last, he refused to drive further. We left him then, after making up the fare among ourselves. I was nearly penniless and I know now that a good many others among us were too. We walked on toward the prison, coming as near as we could, for the crowd was enormous and in the dim light silent, almost motionless, like crowds seen in a dream. I was never in that place but once, but I seem to remember it was a great open square with the crowd massed back from a center the police worked constantly to keep clear. They were all mounted on fine horses and loaded with pistols and hand grenades and tear gas bombs. They galloped about, bearing down upon anybody who ventured out beyond the edge of the crowd, charging and then pulling their horses up short violently so that they reared and their forehoofs beat in the air over a human head, but always swerving sharply and coming down on one side. They were trained, probably, to this spectacular, dangerous-looking performance, but still, I know it is very hard to force a good horse to step on any living thing. I have seen them in their stalls at home shudder all over at stepping on a stray, newly hatched chicken. I do not believe the police meant for the hoofs to strike and crush heads–it possibly was just a very showy technique for intimidating and controlling a mob.

This was not a mob, however. It was a silent, intent assembly of citizens–of anxious people come to bear witness and to protest against the terrible wrong about to be committed, not only against the two men about to die, but against all of us, against our common humanity and our shared will to avert what we believed to be not merely a failure in the use of the instrument of the law, an injustice committed through mere human weakness and misunderstanding, but a blindly arrogant, self-righteous determination not to be moved by any arguments, the obstinate assumption of the infallibility of a handful of men intoxicated with the vanity of power and gone mad with wounded self-importance.

A few foolish persons played a kind of game with the police, waiting until they had turned to charge in the other direction, stepping out defiantly into the center, rushing with raucous yells of glee back to safety when the police turned their horses and came on again. But these were only the lunatic fringe that follows excitement–anything will do. Most of the people moved back passively before the police, almost as if they ignored their presence; yet there were faces fixed in agonized disbelief, their eyes followed the rushing horses as if this was not a sight they had expected to see in their lives. One tall, thin figure of a woman stepped out alone, a good distance into the empty square, and when the police came down at her and the horse’s hoofs beat over her head, she did not move, but stood with her shoulders slightly bowed, entirely still. The charge was repeated again and again, but she was not to be driven away. A man near me said in horror, suddenly recognizing her, « That’s Lola Ridge! » and dashed into the empty space toward her. Without any words or a moment’s pause, he simply seized her by the shoulders and walked her in front of him back to the edge of the crowd, where she stood as if she were half-conscious. I came near her and said, « Oh no, don’t let them hurt you! They’ve done enough damage already. » And she said, « This is the beginning of the end–we have lost something we shan’t find again. » I remember her bitter hot breath and her deathlike face. She had not long to live.

For an endless dreary time we had stood there, massed in a measureless darkness, waiting, watching the light in the tower of the prison. At midnight, this light winked off, winked on and off again, and my blood chills remembering it even now–I do not remember how often, but we were told that the extinction of this light corresponded to the number of charges of electricity sent through the bodies of Sacco and Vanzetti. This was not true, as the newspapers informed us in the morning. It was only one of many senseless rumors and inventions added to the smothering air. It was reported later that Sacco was harder to kill than Vanzetti–two or three shocks for that tough body. Almost at once, in small groups, the orderly, subdued people began to scatter, in a sound of voices that was deep, mournful, vast, and wavering. They walked slowly toward the center of Boston. Life felt very grubby and mean, as if we were all of us soiled and disgraced and would never in this world live it down. I said something like this to the man walking near me, whose name or face I never knew, but I remember his words–« What are you talking about? » he asked bitterly, and answered himself: « There’s no such thing as disgrace anymore. »

I don’t remember where we left Lola Ridge, nor how it came about that a certain number of us gathered in one of the hotel rooms, among them, Grace Lumpkin, Willie Gropper the cartoonist, Helen O’Lochlain Crowe, Michael Gold, a man or two whose names I never knew–yet I recall that one of them said, « Damn it, I’m through. I’d like to leave this country! » Someone asked bitterly, « Well, where would you go? » and half a dozen voices called as one, « Russia! » in their infatuated ignorance, but it was touching because of its sincerity; there was a fervor like an old-fashioned American revival meeting in them and there was a bond between them. Some of them were the children of the oldest governing families and founders of this nation, and an astonishing number were children of country preachers or teachers or doctors–the « salt of the earth »–besides the first-born generation of emigrants who had braved the escape, the steerages, the awful exile, to reach this land where the streets, they had heard, were paved with gold. I felt somewhat alien from this company because of my experience with would-be Communists in Mexico and because of my recent exposure to the view of a genuine Party official; yet in those days, I was still illusioned to the extent that I half accepted the entirely immoral doctrine that one should go along with the Devil if he worked on your side; but my few days in the same office with Rosa Baron and her crowd had shaken this theory too, as it proved, to the foundation. Two truisms: The end does not justify the means and one I discovered for myself then and there, The Devil is never on your side except for his own purposes.

Does all of this sound very old-fashioned, like the Communist vocabulary or the early Freudian theories? Well, it was fifty years ago and I am not trying to bring anything up-to-date. I am trying to sink back into the past and recreate a certain series of events recorded in scraps at the time which have haunted me painfully for life.

Somebody suggested that he would like a drink. Michael Gold said he knew where to find it and went out and bought a bottle of bootleg gin; and then, nobody wanted to drink after all except one girl I have not named–an Irish Catholic girl I had never known to be anything but tender and gentle, now strode up and down the room in pure hysteria, swinging the open bottle of gin and singing in a loud flat voice a comic old song about an Irish wake: « They took the ice from off the corpse and put it in the beer–your feyther was a grand old man–give us a drink! » and she would upend the bottle and take a swig with a terrible tragic face and try to hand it around. Somebody shouted the first line of the Internationale; someone else began « Giovinezza, giovinezza! Primavera di bellezza! » drowning each other out and the hysterical striding girl too–I was ashamed of it, for it was no moment for a low sense of humor to assert itself, or so it seemed to me, but I thought, « Suppose I started singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’? I bet I’d get thrown out of a window! » I felt a chill of distrust or estrangement–I was far from home, a stranger in a strange land indeed, for the first time in my life

« No, don’t, darling, » said one of the men to the girl as she went on crying her tuneless chorus aloud, pouring the raw gin down her throat as she changed her tune to the gibberish of « The Battle Hymn of the Republic. » « In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea, » she sang the silly words to the claptrap tune in march time, striding back and forth. The Communist sympathizers and the Jews alike flinched, offended, and all the faces turned sour, frowning.

« Jesus, » said Mike Gold, « leave Christ out of this! »

« With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me, » sang the girl, swinging the bottle and marching, her eyes blinded, her face as white as a frosted lantern.

« We’ve got to stop her, » said a young woman–I don’t remember who, but I remember the words–« This is dangerous! » and she must have heard them too, for she turned instantly and broke from the room and ran down the hall toward the window at the end. Several of us ran after her and two of the men seized her from the open window. She broke into submissive tears and gave way at once. They brought her back and we put her to bed, fully dressed, then and there; she slept almost at once. The rest of us sat up nearly all night, with nothing to say, nothing to do, brought to a blank pause, keeping a vigil with the dead in the first lonely long night of death. It was no consolation to say their long ordeal was ended. It was not ended for us and–perhaps I should speak for myself–their memory was already turning to stone in my mind. In my whole life I have never felt such a weight of pure bitterness, helpless anger in utter defeat, outraged love and hope, as hung over us all in that room–or did we breathe it out of ourselves? A darkness of shame, too, settled down with us, a most deplorable kind of shame. It was in every pair of eyes that met other eyes in furtive roving. Shame at our useless, now self-indulgent emotions, our disarmed state, our absurd lack of spirit. At last we broke up and parted–I remember nothing more of this incident. It dissolves and disappears like salt poured into water–but the salt taste is there.

In the morning when we began straggling out in small parties on our way to the trial, several of us went down in the elevator with three entirely correct old gentlemen looking much alike in their sleekness, pinkness, baldness, glossiness of grooming, such stereotypes as no proletarian novelist of the time would have dared to use as the example of a capitalist monster in his novel. We were pale and tightfaced; our eyelids were swollen; no doubt in spite of hot coffee and cold baths, we looked rumpled, unkempt, disreputable, discredited, vaguely guilty, pretty well frayed out by then. The gentlemen regarded us glossily, then turned to each other. As we descended the many floors in silence, one of them said to the others in a cream-cheese voice, « It is very pleasant to know we may expect things to settle down properly again, » and the others nodded with wise, smug, complacent faces.

To this day, I can feel again my violent desire just to slap his whole slick face all over at once, hard, with the flat of my hand, or better, some kind of washing bat or any useful domestic appliance being applied where it would really make an impression–a butter paddle–something he would feel through that smug layer of too-well-fed fat. For a long time after, I felt that I had sprained my very soul in the effort I had to make resisting that impulse to let fly. I shut my eyes and clenched my hands behind me and saw, in lightning flashes, myself doing ferocious things, like pushing him down an endless flight of stairs, or dropping him without warning into a bottomless well, or stringing him up to a stout beam and leaving him to dangle, or–or other things of the sort; no guns, no knives, no baseball bats, nothing to cause outright bloodshed, just silent, grim, sudden murder by hand was my intention. All this was far beyond my bodily powers of course, and I like to believe beyond my criminal powers too. For I woke when we struck the searing hot light of the August morning as if I had come out of a nightmare, horrified at my own thoughts and feeling as if I had got some incurable wound to my very humanity–as indeed I had. However inflicted, a wound there was, with painful scar tissue, left upon my living self by that appalling event. My conscience stirs as if, in my impulse to do violence to my enemy, I had assisted at his crime.

In the huge, bare, dusty room where the court sat, it was instantly clear that the Pink Tea Squad had been taken off duty for this round. We were all huddled in together–I don’t remember any chairs–and stood around, or sat on the grimy floor or on a shallow flight of steps leading I forget where; the place was as dismal and breathless as a tenement fire escape in August. Big, overmuscled, beefy policemen with real thug faces bawled at us senselessly (we were all of us merely passive by then), crowded in among us to keep us moving and generally hustled us around, not violently, just viciously and sordidly and impudently, by way of showing what they could do if sufficiently provoked. We were forbidden to smoke but I tried it anyway–the whole scene struck me as just second-rate melodrama, nothing to be taken seriously anymore. John Dos Passos, sitting near me, held a spread newspaper above me while I snatched a whiff, but we were seen and yelled at. I was sorry then to have involved him in such a useless disturbance, though he did not seem in the least to mind; he always had in those days–I have hardly seen him since–a wonderful, gentle composure of manner, and I have never forgotten his expression of amiable distance from the whole grubby scene as I put out the cigarette and he folded his newspaper, while the greasy, sweating man in the blue suit stood above us and went on glaring and bawling a little longer, just in case we had not heard him the first time.

Mrs. Stuart Chase, who had been faithfully on the picket line and was now waiting trial with the rest, also had been one of the speakers at some of the rallies; she showed me several anonymous letters she had received, of an unbelievable obscenity and threatening her with some very imaginative mutilations. It was Mrs. Chase who told me that there was a rumor afloat that we were going to be treated simply as common nuisances, the charge was to be « loitering and obstructing traffic »! Arthur Garfield Hayes, the attorney for all of us, for all the various defense committees, had explained that if we were to be tried on the real charge. God knew where it would end, there could easily be embarrassing consequences all around–more to the prosecution than to us it seemed, and I remember wondering why, at that point, we should be troubled to spare their feelings. Naturally it turned out not to be a matter of feelings in any direction but of legal points obscure to perhaps any but the legal mind. There was then in existence–is it still, I wonder?–an infamous law called Baumes’ Law, which provided that anyone who had been arrested as much as four times–or was it more than four times?–should be eligible to imprisonment for life. There were a good number of perennial, roving, year-round emergency picketers in that group–people whose good pleasure it was to join almost any picket line on sight, and of course they would be arrested sooner or later and these arrests could mount up to a pretty respectable number very soon. One woman said to me, « Suppose I told them I’ve been arrested seventeen times? » and I said, « Well, why don’t you? » but of course she could not because for one thing she was not allowed to get within speaking distance of the court.

However, on getting this news straight, about twenty-five of us decided that under Baumes’ Law (some of us couldn’t believe such a monstrosity existed on our statute books; we thought someone was playing a low joke on our ignorance) we must surely be more than eligible for at least ninety-nine years each in the clink and decided to agitate for it. Our plan was to make a point of forcing them to observe that lunatic Baumes’ Law and overload their jails. For a number of us, writers and artists of all kinds particularly, it might so nicely have settled the problem of where we were to eat and sleep while writing that book or doing whatever it was we had in mind. In those days it was believed that political prisoners were not treated too badly; we learned our mistake later, that it was the big gangsters who were treated well, but at that time, in our innocence, it looked to some of us like the last broad highway to the practice of the arts.

It was not to be; we should have known from the first. The prisoners who had records of more than three arrests were simply pushed back into a captive audience, while several celebrities from various walks were chosen as tokens to stand trial for all of us. I remember of them–a half-dozen–only Edna St. Vincent Millay and Paxton Hibben. It was worth going there to see our attorney, Arthur Garfield Hayes, in confidential palaver with the judge, a little old gray man with pointed whiskers and the face of a smart, conspiratorial chipmunk. In a single rolling sentence the judge, not just with a straight face but portentously, as if pronouncing another death sentence, found us guilty of loitering and obstructing traffic, fined us five dollars each, and the tragic farce took its place in history.

When two or three of our number tried to raise a voice and demand separate trials on sterner grounds, they were squelched by everybody–the judge, our attorney, the policemen, and even their own neighbors–for a lot of them were after all home-keeping persons who had come out, as you might say, on borrowed time and now were anxious to get back home again. The judge, the lawyers, the police, the whole court, the whole city of Boston, and the State of Massachusetts desired nothing in the world so much as to be rid of us, to see the last of us forever, to hear the last of this scandal (though they have never, alas, and will never!), and all the slightest signs of dissent from any direction were so adroitly and quickly suppressed that even the most enthusiastic troublemaker never quite knew how it was done. Simply our representatives were tried in a group in about five minutes.

A busy, abstracted woman wearing pinch-nose spectacles, whom I never saw before or since, pushed her way among us, pressing five dollars into every hand, instructing us one and all to pay our fines, then and there, which we did. I do not in the least remember how my note changed hands again, but no doubt I gave it to the right person as all of us did, and there we were, out on the sidewalk again, discredited once for all, it seemed, mere vagrants but in movement, no longer loitering and obstructing traffic. « Get on there, » yelled our policemen, « get going there, keep moving »; and their parting advice to us was that we all go back where we came from and stay there. It was their next-best repartee, but a poor, thin substitute for one good whack at our skulls with their truncheons.

I returned to the hotel and found the temporary office already being dismantled. Another woman came up and said, « Are you packed and ready to go? » She pressed into my hand a railroad ticket to New York and ten dollars in cash. « Go straight to the station now and take the next train, » she said. I did this with no farewells and no looking back. I found several other persons, some of whom I had sat up with nearly all night more than once, also being banished from the scene of the crime. We greeted each other without surprise or pleasure and scattered out singly and separately with no desire for each other’s company. I do not even remember who many of them were, if I ever knew their names at all. I only remember our silence and the dazed melancholy in all the faces.

In all this I should speak only for myself for never in my life have I felt so isolated as I did in that host of people, all presumably moved in the same impulse, with the same or at least sympathetic motive; when one might think hearts would have opened, minds would respond with kindness we did not find it so but precisely the contrary. I went through the time in a mist of unbelief, or the kind of unwillingness to believe what is passing before one’s eyes that comes often in nightmares. But before in my sleep I could always say, « It is only a dream and you will wake and wonder at yourself for being frightened. » But I was suffering, I know it now, from pure fright, from shock–I was not an inexperienced girl, I was thirty-seven years old; I knew a good deal about the evils and abuses and cruelties of the world; I had known victims of injustice, of crime. I was not ignorant of history, nor of literature; I had witnessed a revolution in Mexico, had in a way taken part in it, had seen it follow the classic trail of all revolutions. Besides all the moral force and irreproachable motives of so many, I knew the deviousness and wickedness of both sides, on all sides, and the mixed motives–plain love of making mischief, love of irresponsible power, unscrupulous ambition of many men who never stopped short of murder, if murder would advance their careers an inch. But this was something very different, unfamiliar.

Now, through all this distance of time, I remember most vividly Mrs. Borden’s horsehair lace and flower garden party hats; Lola Ridge standing in the half darkness before Charlestown Prison under the rearing horse’s hoofs; the gentle young girl striding and drinking gin from the bottle and singing her wake-dirges; Luigia Vanzetti’s face as she stared in horror down into the crowd howling like beasts; and Rosa Baron’s little pinpoints of eyes glittering through her spectacles at me and her shrill, accusing voice: « Saved? Who wants them saved? What earthly good would they do us alive? »

I cannot even now decide by my own evidence whether or not they were guilty of the crime for which they were put to death. They expressed in their letters many thoughts, if not always noble, at least elevated, exalted even. Their fervor and human feelings gave the glow of life to the weary stock phrases of those writing about them, and we do know now, all of us, that the most appalling cruelties are committed by apparently virtuous governments in expectation of a great good to come, never learning that the evil done now is the sure destroyer of the expected good. Yet, no matter what, it was a terrible miscarriage of justice; it was a most reprehensible abuse of legal power, in their attempt to prove that the law is something to be inflicted–not enforced–and that it is above the judgment of the people.

AFTERWARD

I have, for my own reasons, refused to read any book or any article on the Sacco-Vanzetti trial before I had revised or arranged my notes on this trial. Since I have finished, I have read the book by Herbert B. Ehrmann, the « last surviving lawyer involved in the substance of the case on either side, » who, I feel, tells the full story of the case. Also, I have read since I finished my story « The Never-Ending Wrong, » the article by Francis Russell in the National Review, page 887 of August 17, 1973, which was discovered among my magazines early last year and which I have decided should be the epigraph to this story. Mr. Russell believes that the fact that Dante Sacco, Nicola Sacco’s son, kept his superhuman or subhuman silence on the whole history of his father proves that Nicola Sacco was guilty; that he refused to confess and so implicated Vanzetti, who died innocent. Sacco, therefore, proved himself doubly, triply, a murderer, an instinctive killer. Maybe.

Another maybe–Vanzetti’s speech at the electric chair was the final word of an honest man. It is proven by testimony that he was innocent of murder. He was selling eels on that day, for Christmas. The Italian tradition of eating eels on Christmas Eve occupied his time all that day. He called on all the families he knew who were his friends, to deliver their orders for eels, and during the trial these people, when questioned, told exactly the same story, even to each housewife remembering the hour he delivered the eels, and some of them even went so far as to say how they had prepared them. Their testimonies were ignored when the real trial was begun. Mr. Russell has, I think, overlooked one point in his argument. Vanzetti was comrade-in-arms and in mind and heart with Sacco. They were Anarchists fore-sworn, committed for life to death, for death was the known fate of all who were brought to trial for the crime, as it was considered. My point is this: Sacco was guilty if you like; some minor points make it reasonable, though barely reasonable, to believe it. Vanzetti knew his will and he believed in the cause which he knew contained death for him unless he was very lucky indeed. Anarchy is a strange belief to die for, but my good friend in Mexico, Felipe Carillo, the Governor of Yucatan, explained to me why the revolutionists in his country who were robbing trains, wrecking haciendas, burning houses, destroying crops and even whole villages of helpless people, were right. In their utter misery, they gathered money with violence, seized the materials built with their blood, to create their idea of a good society. It was right to destroy material evil and to take its loot for their cause.

This is the doctrine of desperation, the last murderous rage before utter despair. They were wrong, but not more wrong than the thing they themselves were trying to destroy. The powerful society they opposed gained its power and grew up on the same methods they were taking. Vanzetti kept a sacred pact, not just with his comrade Sacco but with the whole great solemn oath of his life, to the cause of freedom. He fasted, kept his silence, and went to his death with his fellow, a sacrifice to his faith. As he was being strapped into the electric chair, he said, « I wish to tell you that I am an innocent man. I never committed any crime but sometimes some sin. I wish to forgive some people for what they are now doing to me. » They both spoke nobly at the end, they kept faith with their vows for each other. They left a great heritage of love, devotion, faith, and courage–all done with the sure intention that holy Anarchy should be glorified through their sacrifice and that the time would come that no human being should be humiliated or be made abject. Near the end of their ordeal Vanzetti said that if it had not been for « these thing » he might have lived out his life talking at street corners to scorning men. He might have died unmarked, unknown, a failure. « Now, we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man as now we do by accident. Our words–our lives–our pains–nothing! The taking of our lives–lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler–all! That last moment belongs to us–that agony is our triumph. »

This is not new–all the history of our world is pocked with it. It is very grand and noble in words and grand, noble souls have died for it–it is worth weeping for. But it doesn’t work out so well. In order to annihilate the criminal State, they have become criminals. The State goes on without end in one form or another, built securely on the base of destruction. Nietzsche said: « The State is the coldest of all cold monsters, » and the revolutions which destroy or weaken at least one monster bring to birth and growth another.

Far away and long ago, I read Emma Goldman’s story of her life, her first book in which she told the grim, deeply touching narrative of her young life during which she worked in a scrubby sweatshop making corsets by the bundle. At the same time, I was reading Prince Kropotkin’s memoirs, his account of the long step he took from his early princely living to his membership in the union of the outcast, the poor, the depressed, and it was a most marvelous thing to have two splendid, courageous, really noble human beings speaking together, telling the same tale. It was like a duet of two great voices telling a tragic story. I believed in both of them at once. The two of them joined together left me no answerable argument; their dream was a grand one but it was exactly that–a dream. They both lived to know this and I learned it from them, but it has not changed my love for them or my lifelong sympathy for the cause to which they devoted their lives–to ameliorate the anguish that human beings inflict on each other–the never-ending wrong, forever incurable.

In 1935 in Paris, living in that thin upper surface of comfort and joy and freedom in a limited way, I met this most touching and interesting person, Emma Goldman, sitting at a table reserved for her at the Select, where she could receive her friends and carry on her conversations and sociabilities over an occasional refreshing drink. She was half blind (although she was only sixty-six years old), wore heavy spectacles, a shawl, and carpet slippers. She lived in her past and her devotions, which seemed to her glorious and unarguably right in every purpose. She accepted the failure of that great dream as a matter of course. She finally came to admit sadly that the human race in its weakness demanded government and all government was evil because human nature was basically weak and weakness is evil. She was a wise, sweet old thing, grandmotherly, or like a great-aunt. I said to her, « It’s a pity you had to spend your whole life in such unhappiness when you could have had such a nice life in a good government, with a home and children.

She turned on me and said severely: « What have I just said? There is no such thing as a good government. There never was. There can’t be. »

I closed my eyes and watched Nietzsche’s skull nodding.

Image Un commentaire | Image anti-américanisme, communisme, désinformation, histoire, idiots utiles/compagnons de route | Image Permalien
Image Publié par jcdurbant

Idiots utiles: Epouser toutes les mauvaises causes de sa génération sans en manquer aucune (Gunther Grass as the ultimate useful idiot)

22 août, 2006
Image result for Latuff Che"Image result for Latuff viet"Image result for Latuff Iraqi resistance"Plutôt rouges que morts! Manifestants allemands (années 80)
Les fusées sont à l’Est, les pacifistes à l’Ouest. Mitterrand
Tout au long de sa phénoménale carrière publique, il n’aura cessé d’adopter des postures consternantes. «Homme de gauche», absolument de gauche, il aura épousé toutes les mauvaises causes de sa génération sans en manquer aucune, aura approuvé toutes les révolutions sanguinaires, de Cuba à la Chine. Toujours disposé à accabler ces fascistes d’Américains, Ronald Reagan et, bien sûr, George W. Bush (c’est sans risque), l’a-t-on en revanche entendu, ne serait-ce qu’un peu, dénoncer le fascisme de Mao Zedong ? Ou celui des islamistes ? (…) comment s’interdire de songer à cette génération entière d’intellectuels et d’artistes en Europe, en France surtout, autoproclamée de gauche – au point que le mot ne fait plus sens –, qui n’ont cessé d’adopter des postures morales tout en illustrant des causes absolument immorales ? Comment ne pas voir surgir des spectres : ceux qui hier, ont aimé Staline et Mao et, bientôt, vont pleurer Castro ? Ceux qui n’ont rien vu à Moscou, Pékin, La Havane, Téhéran, Sarajevo, et Billancourt ? Ceux qui, maintenant, devinent dans l’islamisme une rédemption de l’0ccident ? Cette grande armée des spectres, de l’erreur absolue, dieu merci, elle n’a jamais cessé de se tromper d’avenir. (…) par-delà ce cas singulier, on ne se méfie pas assez du grand écrivain et de la star dès qu’ils abusent de leur séduction pour propager des opinions politiques, seulement politiques, mais déguisées autrement. (…) On se garde de l’homme politique, l’élu démocratique, beaucoup trop puisqu’il avance à découvert. On ne se garde pas assez, en revanche, de l’artiste quand son talent le dissimule, surtout quand le talent est grand : des magiciens, grimés en moralistes, on ne se méfie jamais assez. Guy Sorman

Vous avez dit idiots utiles ?

Justes paroles encore que celles de Guy Sorman dans Le Figaro d’hier sur toutes ces « consciences nationales » qui, comme Gunter Grass, auront chacun à leur tour, en leur temps et à leur niveau, « épousé toutes les mauvaises causes de sa génération sans en manquer aucune » …

A l’instar de notre Sartre national qui, fidèle compagnon de route et emporté par sa fièvre anti-américaine, « oublia, pendant toute la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, de protester contre le nazisme et l’antisémitisme”.

Et avec qui tant d’entre nous (ou de nos parents) préféraient se tromper et qui, tout en prétendant aussi subrépticement que fallacieusement que chaque Français avait comme lui plus ou moins été – au moins “en pensée – “résistant”), écrivait en septembre 44:

“Jamais nous n’avons été plus libres que sous l’occupation allemande” /…/ Et je ne parle pas ici de cette élite que furent les vrais Résistants, mais de tous les Français qui, à toute heure du jour et de la nuit, pendant quatre ans, ont dit non.”

Ou plus tard (en… 75 !):

“J’ai menti. Enfin ‘menti’ est un bien grand mot. J’ai dit des choses aimables sur l’URSS que je ne pensais pas. Je l’ai fait d’une part parce que j’estimais que, quand on vient d’être invité par des gens, on ne peut pas verser de la merde sur eux à peine rentré chez soi, et d’autre part parce que je ne savais pas bien où j’en étais par rapport à l’URSS et par rapport à mes propres idées. (…) Je ne savais pas qu’ils [les camps] existaient encore après la mort de Staline, ni surtout ce qu’était le Goulag.”

Heureusement qu’il y avait quelques Aron ou Camus:

Toute idée fausse finit dans le sang, mais il s’agit toujours du sang des autres. C’est ce qui explique que certains de nos philosophes se sentent à l’aise pour dire n’importe quoi.

Et juste parole aussi que cet avertissement de Sorman:

On ne se garde pas assez, en revanche, de l’artiste quand son talent le dissimule, surtout quand le talent est grand : des magiciens, grimés en moralistes, on ne se méfie jamais assez.

Que nous rappelions dans notre dernier billet à propos d’un des dessinateurs-fétiche des nouvelles générations d’anti-américains (pardon; d’ « anti-impérialistes »), le fameux… “boy from Brazil”, Carlos Latuff ! (Voir sa photo ci-dessus au côté de Leila Khaled, la passionaria – désormais recyclée dans le « pacifisme » – de… Black September!)

Dont le fait que, comme tout bon compagnon de route (ou « idiot utile », si l’on préfère) et pas plus que Sartre lui-même, il ne porte littéralement de valises fait justement toute la séduction et… toute la valeur pour tous les “Kominterns” de l’histoire !

Cette apparence d’indépendance qui mine de rien sape l’esprit critique de générations et générations, leur faisant successivement militer puis espionner (à la Rosenberg et Fuchs – ce qui leur a quand même fait gagner 5 ans pour l’acquisition de la bombe, sans parler du radar et des technologies dérivées) pour les totalitaires, avant d’avaler tout rond le pacte Ribbentrop puis refuser de “mourir pour Dantzig” ….

Avant de proférer des imbécillités du style “better red than dead” … Pour finir aujourd’hui par soutenir (au moins objectivement) des Saddam et proférer d’autres nouvelles imbécillités du style “Bush = Sharon = Hitler ou, pire encore, gueuler ou laisser gueuler des… “mort au Juifs” dans les mêmes manifs pour… “la paix” !

Mais bon, comme le rappelle Sorman, il y en aura toujours qui refuseront « d’avoir raison avec Aron » …

Lire le reste de cette entrée »

Image 2 commentaires | Image anti-américanisme, caricatures, désinformation, histoire, idiots utiles/compagnons de route, livres | Image Permalien
Image Publié par jcdurbant

Plus fort que Serguei: Le meilleur caricaturiste antisémite est… brésilien! (Carlos Latuff: The new boy from Brazil)

21 août, 2006
Latuff_freud_2Les Vietnamiens se battent pour tous les hommes, et les forces américaines contre tous. Sartre
L’islam est aujourd’hui la foi des opprimés comme le communisme l’était hier. Robert Redeker

A l’heure où les Iraniens s’apprêtent à annoncer le lauréat de leur concours de la meilleure caricature antisémite, quelqu’un devrait peut-être les avertir que celui-ci est connu depuis belle lurette et qu’il a déjà une abondante oeuvre derrière lui.

On aura bien sûr reconnu, bien plus fort que Serguei ou Plantu, le célèbre dessinateur brésilien Carlos Latuff, coqueluche des sites palestiniens et anti-américains occidentaux (dits « Indymedia »).

Infatigable compagnon de route du nazislamisme, il est, comme au bon vieux temps de l’agitprop du Komintern et de ses légendaires « Appels » ou « Conférences pour la Paix » (appelée aussi en interne: « défaitisme révolutionnaire »), passé maitre dans l’art du détournement et du retournement de toutes les images (camps nazis, ghetto de Varsovie, apartheid, esclavage, racisme, guerre du Vietnam, etc. – ne dédaignant pas à l’occasion les bons vieux stéréotypes médiévaux du juif dévoreur d’enfants ou détournant à son profit le fameux faux tsariste des « Protocoles des sages de Sion »!).

Et notamment dans l’inversion systématique du rapport oppresseur-opprimé, tout se ramenant dans ses dessins à l’équation de base juifs = nazis ou Américains = nazis (les deux apparaissant interchangeables, notamment via le thème commun du lien supposé guerre-affairisme et ses symboles habituels Mc Donald’s et Coca Cola) et les Palestiniens reprenant tout aussi systématiquement la place de victimes.

D’où, en plus d’un réel talent graphique et artistique, une redoutable efficacité idéologique (on peut difficilement faire plus « simple » ou plutôt plus « simpliste ») et une instante lisibilité qui ne sont pas pour rien dans son succès dans les divers milieux anti-américians (pardon: « anti-impérialistes ») et antijuifs (repardon: « antisionistes ») de la planète.

Latuff_nazi_camp_2
Latuff_camp_2_2

Latuff_camp_barbed_wire_1

Latuff_wall_protest
Latuff_gaz_chambers_1
Latuff_ghetto
Latuff_warsaw_ghetto_1

Latuff_sharon_devourer_1

Latuff_the_lobby
Latuff_protocols_2
Latuff_noseless

Latuff_slave_2

Latuff_kkk_4
Latuff_township_2

Latuff_my_lay_4
Latuff_nam_2

Latuff_landless_1

Latuff_peon_lady
Latuff_palestinian_che

Latuff_che_2

Latuff_ushitler1_1
Latuff_adolf_1

Latuff_bush_911
Latuff_devoil

Latuffcoke_my_lai

Latuff_war_biz

Latuff_holywood

Latuff_mc_christ
Latuff_cartoon_controversy_1

Latuff_islam

Latuff_islam_in_crooked_hand_1

Voir aussi:

Carlos Latuff
Wikipedia

Carlos Latuff is a political cartoonist, born in November 30, 1968, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

He is the author of the famous « We are all Palestinians » series, depicting oppressed people of the world over history (Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, Blacks in South Africa and so on), and comparing them to Palestinians. Latuff’s works have been published on different Indymedia websites and on the Gush Shalom website, as well.

A Swiss-based Jewish organization « Aktion Kinder des Holocaust » sued him in 2002 with anti-Semitism allegations. The subject was the last cartoon of « We are all Palestinians » series (published in Switzerland Indymedia), depicting a Jewish boy in Warsaw Ghetto saying: « I am Palestinian. »
Criminal proceedings which AKdH had instituted against Indymedia and the Brazilian cartoonist were suspended by Swiss court. In the official judgement, it is said:
Even if the observer is emotionally biased against the Jewish people with this [cartoon], it is not the Jewish people as such that is being criticized, but their political behaviour towards the Palestinians. The issue is not a certain characterization of the Jews, but their stance in the current conflict. The constitutional equality of the Jews as human beings is thereby not denied. (p.2, paragraph 1.2.) In February 2006, Latuff had one of his artworks published in an Iranian Web site for cartoonists, « Iran Cartoon », which launched a contest for cartoons about the Holocaust, in response to a series of caricatures about the Prophet Mohammed. Latuff’s cartoon depicts an old man wearing a Nazi-era concentration camp uniform, with the Israeli « Separation Wall » and guard tower in the background. On his chest is a red Muslim crescent with a letter « P » for Palestinian:

Voir aussi la très complète collection du site de l’historien antisioniste américain  Norman Finkelstein.

Image 8 commentaires | Image anti-américanisme, antisionisme/antisémitisme, caricatures, désinformation, idiots utiles/compagnons de route | Image Permalien
Image Publié par jcdurbant

Caricatures: Pourquoi j’ai publié ces caricatures (Flemming Rose: Why I published those cartoons)

19 août, 2006
Plantu9Plantu4Je suis offensé par des sujets dans le journal chaque jour: traductions des discours de Osama bin Laden, photos de Abu Ghraib, de personnes qui insistent pour qu’Israël soit effacé de la surface de la terre, de gens qui prétendent que l’Holocauste n’a pas existé. Mais cela ne signifie pas que j’hésiterai à publier ces sujets. (…) Des voix furieuses prétendent que la caricature dit que le prophète est un terroriste ou que tous les musulmans sont des terroristes. Je lis cette caricature différemment: certains individus ont pris la religion musulmane en otage en commettant des actes terroristes au nom du prophète. Ce sont ceux-ci qui ont donné une mauvaise image à cette religion. Flemming Rose

Enfin ! Après le flot ininterrompu de paroles et de pages pour le déligitimer, soit (pour les plus réactionnaires ou munichois) pour son mépris supposé des musulmans et de leur religion, soit (pour les plus « progressistes ») pour son mauvais goût, une chance pour l’éditeur du journal danois par qui le scandale est arrivé de s’expliquer.

Une chance pour montrer le vrai courage et les vraies nouveauté et force de ces dessins. D’autres comme Plantu du Monde avait déjà montré la fameuse bombe dans un turban (mais c’était celui d’un imam anglais) ou dans la main d’autres imams mais juste à côté du Coran (dans la main gauche !). Le dessin du Mahomet à la bombe dans le turban (que moi-même, je dois dire, je n’aimais pas trop au départ, lui préférant celui plus « soft » des vierges) est lui le premier, que je sache, à oser dire la vérité qui fâche (et qui semble dépasser l’éditeur danois lui-même ?).

A savoir que le problème n’est PAS SEULEMENT un problème de dévoiement ou d’une interprétation dévoyée de l’islam mais… l’islam lui-même, à partir du moment où on fait (ce que n’ont toujours pas rejeté la plupart des musulmans, « modérés » ou pas – du fait notamment d’une conception de la nature du texte lui-même comme « incréé », c’est à dire d’origine divine et donc théoriquement inamendable) une interprétation LITTÉRALE du Coran et donc des paroles de Mahomet.

La vérité que personne ne veut dire explicitement, c’est que le Coran pour ceux qui prennent la peine de le lire et ceux qui le lisent LITTÉRALEMENT, c’est AUSSI  un texte GUERRIER qui relate et fait l’apologie de la GUERRE et que Mahomet lui-même était AUSSI (contrairement par exemple au prophète judéo-chrétien Jésus, vénéré par nombre d’occidentaux)… un chef de GUERRE !

Et donc tant que (comme cela a dû être fait par la plupart des juifs et chrétiens avant eux pour certains des passages les plus guerriers de la Bible – même s’ils n’atteignent pas ce niveau d’explicitation du Coran et des hadiths) cette lecture LITTÉRALE-là ne sera pas déclarée CADUQUE  (explicitement et solennellement – et réellement, pas comme Arafat avec la charte de l’OLP !) par l’ensemble des musulmans ou leurs représentants, les tribuns dits « radicaux » et autres djihadistes auront beau jeu de s’appuyer sur ces textes pour continuer à jouir, malgré les faibles et occasionnelles protestations du contraire devant les caméras occidentales, de l’assentiment ou du moins de la complaisance ou du silence plus ou moins consentant ou « compréhensif » de la plupart des musulmans pour continuer leurs appels (et réguliers passages à l’acte) au meurtre et à l’assassinat ou à la destruction de tout ou partie d’Israël ou de l’Occident, juste parce qu’ils sont peuplés de prétendus « infidèles »  …

D’où l’importance particulière de ce texte de Flemming Rose parce qu’il montre qu’en gaspillant leur (précieuse parce que rare) voix à se joindre à la meute PC des imbéciles qui passent leur temps à démolir ces dessins pour leur mauvais goût supposé, les « progressistes » eux-mêmes (même Charlie Hebdo, aussi bénis soient-ils sur ce coup-là pour leur courage, n’évite pas tout à fait ce travers!) passent encore hélas à côté d’une belle occasion:… en montrer le vrai courage et la vraie profondeur!

Pourquoi j’ai publié ces caricatures
Flemming Rose
The Washington Post
19 février 2006

Puéril. Irresponsable. Expression haineuse. Une provocation juste pour le plaisir de provoquer. Un gag de pub. Les critiques des douze caricatures du prophète Mahomet que j’ai décidé de publier dans le journal Jyllands-Posten n’ont pas mâché leurs mots.

Ils disent que la liberrté d’expression n’implique pas la permission d’insulter les sentiments religieux de personnes et, de plus, ils ajoutent que les médias s’autocensurent constamment. En conséquence de quoi, “nous vous prions de ne pas nous donner de leçons en ce qui concerne la liberté d’expression sans limites”. Je suis d’accord pour dire que la liberté de publier ne signifie pas la liberté de publier n’importe quoi. Jyllands-Posten ne publierait jamais d’images pornographiques ou des images montrant en détail des cadavres; des jurons trouvent rarement leur place dans nos pages. Nous ne sommes donc pas des fondamentalistes dans notre support de la liberté d’expression.

Mais l’histoire des caricatures est différente.

Les exemples précédents sont liés à l’exercice d’une retenue pour des raisons éthiques et de bon goût; appelons cela la mise en page. Par contraste, j’ai lancé l’histoire des caricatures pour répondre à plusieurs incidents d’autocensure en Europe, incidents causés par les peurs croissantes et les sentiments d’intimidation ressentis en adressant des problèmes liés à l’Islam. Et je suis plus que toujours persuadé que c’est un thème que nous, Européens, devons confronter, afin de pousser les Musulmans modérés à s’exprimer. L’idée n’était pas de provoquer gratuitement – et certainement, notre intention n’était pas de provoquer des manifestations violentes dans le monde musulman.

Notre but était simplement de faire reculer des limites que nous nous imposons nous-mêmes et qui semblaient devenir de plus en plus étroites. Fin septembre, un humoriste danois a dit dans une interview avec Jyllands-Posten qu’il n’avait aucun problème à uriner sur une Bible devant une caméra, mais qu’il n’oserait pas faire la même chose avec le Coran. Cet aveu a été le point culminant d’une série d’instances troublantes d’autocensure. En septembre dernier, un écrivain pour enfants danois avait de la peine à trouver un illustrateur pour publier un livre sur la vie de Mahomet. Trois personnes ont refusé le travail par peur des conséquences. La personne qui a finalement accepté a insisté pour garder son anonymat, ce qui, selon moi, est une forme d’autocensure. Des traducteurs européens d’un livre critique de l’Islam ne voulaient pas que leur nom apparaisse à côté du nom de l’auteur, une politicienne néerlandaise née en Somalie qui, elle-même, vit cachée.

Environ à la même époque, la galerie d’art Tate à Londres a retiré une oeuvre par l’artiste d’avant- garde John Latham montrant le Coran, la Bible et le Talmud déchirés en morceaux. Le musée a expliqué qu’ils ne voulaient pas envenimer la situation après les attentats de Londres. (Quelques mois plus tôt, un musée de Göteborg en Suède, a enlevé une peinture contenant un motif sexuel et des citations du Coran afin de ne pas offenser les Musulmans.)

Finalement, fin septembre, le premier ministre danois, Anders Fogh Rasmussen a rencontré un groupe d’imams dont l’un d’entre eux a demandé au premier ministre d’intervenir auprès de la presse afin de produire une présentation plus positive de l’Islam. Ainsi, au cours de deux semaines, nous avons observé une demi-douzaine de cas d’autocensure, opposant la liberté d’expression à la peur de confronter des questions concernant l’Islam. Tout celà constituait une information légitime à publier, et Jyllands-Posten a décidé de le faire en adoptant le principe journalistique bien connu: montrer mais ne rien dire. J’ai écrit à des membres de l’association danoise des caricaturistes, leur demandant de “dessiner Mahomet comme ils le voyaient”. Nous ne leur avons certainement pas demandé de se moquer du prophète. Douze des 25 membres actifs ont répondu. Nous avons une tradition satirique lorsque nous parlons de la famille royale et d’autres personnes publiques et ceci est visible dans les caricatures. Les caricaturistes ont traité l’Islam comme ils traitent le christianisme, le bouddhisme, l’hindouisme et d’autres religions. Et en traitant les Musulmans au Danemark comme des égaux, ils ont démontré un point: nous vous intégrons dans la tradition danoise de la satire parce que vous faites partie de notre société, et vous n’êtes pas des étrangers. Les caricatures incluent, plutôt qu’excluent les Musulmans.

Les caricatures en aucun cas ne démonisent les Musulmans, et ne veulent pas créer de stéréotype. En fait, elles diffèrent l’une de l’autre tant dans la manière dont elles représentent le prophète que dans leur but. Une caricature se moque de Jyllands-Posten, représentant ses rédacteurs culturels comme une bande de provocateurs réactionnaires. Une autre suggère que l’auteur du livre pour enfants, ne pouvant pas trouver d’illustrateur, a rendu ce problème public juste pour se faire de la publicité à bon marché. Une troisième a mis la tête de la présidente du parti “Danish People’s Party “, parti au programme anti-immigratoire, dans une rangée de personnages, comme si elle était suspectée d’activités criminelles.Une caricature – montrant le prophète avec une bombe dans son turban – a attiré les critiques les plus sévères. Des voix furieuses prétendent que la caricature dit que le prophète est un terroriste ou que tous les musulmans sont des terroristes. Je lis cette caricature différemment: certains individus ont pris la religion musulmane en otage en commettant des actes terroristes au nom du prophète. Ce sont ceux-ci qui ont donné une mauvaise image à cette religion. La caricature évoque aussi le conte d’Aladin et l’orange qui est tombée dans son turban, lui assurant ainsi la fortune. Cela suggère que la bombe vient du monde extérieur et n’est donc pas une caractéristique inhérente au prophète. Parfois, Jyllands-Posten a refusé de publier des caricatures satiriques de Jésus, mais pas parce que nous appliquons des règles différentes. En fait, le même caricaturiste qui a dessiné Mahomet avec une bombe dans son turban a dessiné une caricature de Jésus sur la croix avec des billets de dollars dans ses yeux et une autre avec l’étoile de David attachée à la mèche d’une bombe. Cependant, lors de leur publication, nous n’avons pas vu d’ambassades incendiées ni reçu de menaces de mort.

Jyllands-Posten a-t-il insulté l’Islam ou manqué de respect? Ce n’était certainement pas son intention. Mais que signifie “respect”? Lorsque je visite une mosquée, je montre mon respect en enlevant mes chaussures. Je suis les coutumes de la même manière que je le ferais dans une église, une synagogue ou tout autre lieu saint. Mais lorsqu’un croyant demande que moi, non croyant, je respecte ses tabous sur le domaine public, il ne demande pas mon respect, mais ma soumission. Et ceci est incompatible avec une démocratie laïque. C’est exactement à cause de cela que Karl Popper dans son ouvrage « La Société ouverte et ses ennemis » insiste sur le fait qu’il ne faut pas être tolérant avec l’intolérant. Nulle part d’autre que dans une démocratie, où la liberté d’expression est un droit fondamental, ne coexistent autant de religions de manière pacifique. En Arabie Saoudite, vous pouvez être arrêté pour avoir porté une croix ou pour avoir une Bible dans votre valise, alors qu’au Danemark, pays laïque, les Musulmans peuvent avoir leurs propres mosquées, cimetières, écoles, stations de télévision et de radio.

Je reconnais que certaines personnes ont été offensées par la publication des caricatures, et Jyllands-Posten s’en est excusé. Mais nous ne pouvons pas nous excuser pour notre droit à publier certains sujets, même des sujets offensifs. On ne peut pas publier un journal si on est paralysé par la crainte d’une insulte. Je suis offensé par des sujets dans le journal chaque jour: traductions des discours de Osama bin Laden, photos de Abu Ghraib, de personnes qui insistent pour qu’Israël soit effacé de la surface de la terre, de gens qui prétendent que l’Holocauste n’a pas existé. Mais cela ne signifie pas que j’hésiterai à publier ces sujets, pour autant qu’ils respectent la loi et le code éthique du journal. Le fait que d’autres rédacteurs feraient d’autres choix fait partie de l’essence même du pluralisme. En tant qu’ancien correspondant en Union Soviétique, je suis très sensible à des demandes de censure basées sur la notion d’insulte. C’est un truc populaire des mouvements totalitaires: taxer chaque critique ou appel au débat d’insulte et punir les offenseurs. C’est ce qui est arrivé aux activistes des droits de l’homme et a des écrivains comme Andrei Sakharov, Vladimir Bukovsky, Alexander Soljenitsyne, Natan Sharansky, Boris Pasternak. Le régime les a accusés de propagande anti-Soviétique, de la même manière que certains Musulmans décrivent 12 caricatures parues dans un journal danois comme anti-Islamiques.
La leçon de la guerre froide est la suivante: si vous cédez a des impulsions totalitaires une seule fois, de nouvelles demandes suivront. L’Occident a prévalu dans la guerre froide, parce que nous avons défendu nos valeurs fondamentales et n’avons pas apaisé des tyrans totalitaires.

Depuis la publication des caricatures, le 30 septembre, un débat constructif concernant la liberté d’expression, la liberté de religion, ainsi que le respect pour les immigrants et les croyances individuelles s’est instauré au Danemark et en Europe. Jamais auparavant, autant de Musulmans danois ont participé à un dialogue public – dans des rencontres communales, lettres aux rédacteurs, opinions de lecteurs et débats à la radio et à la télévision. Nous n’avons pas eu d’émeutes anti-musulmanes, de Musulmans fuyant le pays et nous n’avons pas vu de Musulmans commettant des actes violents. Les imams radicaux qui ont informé leurs collègues au Moyen-Orient de manière erronnée concernant la situation des Musulmans au Danemark ont été marginalisés. Ils ne sont plus les porte-paroles de la communauté Musulmane au Danemark, parce que des Musulmans modérés ont eu le courage de s’exprimer contre eux. En janvier, Jyllands-Posten a publié trois pages complètes d’interviews et de photos de Musulmans modérés, disant ne pas être représentés par les imams. Ils insistent sur le fait que leur foi est compatible avec une démocratie laïque moderne. Un réseau de Musulmans modérés, respectant pleinement la constitution, a été établi, et le parti anti-immigration “People’s Party” a appelé ses membres à faire la différence entre les Musulmans radicaux et modérés, c’est à dire entre les Musulmans propageant la charia et les musulmans acceptant la tradition de la loi laïque. La face du Danemark musulman a changé, et il devient clair que ce n’est pas un débat entre “eux” et “nous”, mais entre ceux qui sont attachés à la démocratie au Danemark et ceux qui ne le sont pas.

Ceci est le genre de débat que Jyllands-Posten a espéré produire, lorsqu’il a choisi d’explorer les limites de l’autocensure en appelant des caricaturistes à remettre en question un tabou musulman. Avons nous réussi? Oui et non. Certaines défenses de notre liberté d’expression faites avec esprit, nous ont inspirés. Mais les tragiques manifestations à travers le Moyen-Orient et l’Asie ne sont pas ce que nous avions attendu et encore moins désiré. De plus, le journal a reçu 104 menaces, 10 personnes ont été arrêtées, des caricaturistes ont été forcés de se cacher à cause de menaces pesant sur leur vie et les bureaux de Jyllands-Posten ont été évacués plusieurs fois à cause d’alertes à la bombe. Ceci est un climat qui encourage peu à modérer l’autocensure.

Je pense cependant que les caricatures ont leur place dans deux histoires différentes, l’une en Europe et l’autre au Moyen-Orient. La politicienne néerlendaise d’origine somalienne, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, dit que l’intégration des Musulmans dans les sociétés européennes a été accélérée de 300 ans par la parution des caricatures; peut-être ne devrons nous pas rééditer la bataille du Siècle des Lumières en Europe. L’histoire du Moyen-Orient est plus complexe, mais a en fait très peu à voir avec les caricatures.

Flemming Rose est le rédacteur culturel du journal danois Jyllands-Posten
[email protected]

Cet article est paru dans le Washington Post

Traduction en française: Galat

 Voir aussi:

Why I Published Those Cartoons
Flemming Rose
The Washington Post
Sunday, February 19, 2006

Childish. Irresponsible. Hate speech. A provocation just for the sake of provocation. A PR stunt. Critics of 12 cartoons of the prophet Muhammad I decided to publish in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten have not minced their words. They say that freedom of expression does not imply an endorsement of insulting people’s religious feelings, and besides, they add, the media censor themselves every day. So, please do not teach us a lesson about limitless freedom of speech.

I agree that the freedom to publish things doesn’t mean you publish everything. Jyllands-Posten would not publish pornographic images or graphic details of dead bodies; swear words rarely make it into our pages. So we are not fundamentalists in our support for freedom of expression.

But the cartoon story is different.

Those examples have to do with exercising restraint because of ethical standards and taste; call it editing. By contrast, I commissioned the cartoons in response to several incidents of self-censorship in Europe caused by widening fears and feelings of intimidation in dealing with issues related to Islam. And I still believe that this is a topic that we Europeans must confront, challenging moderate Muslims to speak out. The idea wasn’t to provoke gratuitously — and we certainly didn’t intend to trigger violent demonstrations throughout the Muslim world. Our goal was simply to push back self-imposed limits on expression that seemed to be closing in tighter.

At the end of September, a Danish standup comedian said in an interview with Jyllands-Posten that he had no problem urinating on the Bible in front of a camera, but he dared not do the same thing with the Koran.

This was the culmination of a series of disturbing instances of self-censorship. Last September, a Danish children’s writer had trouble finding an illustrator for a book about the life of Muhammad. Three people turned down the job for fear of consequences. The person who finally accepted insisted on anonymity, which in my book is a form of self-censorship. European translators of a critical book about Islam also did not want their names to appear on the book cover beside the name of the author, a Somalia-born Dutch politician who has herself been in hiding.

Around the same time, the Tate gallery in London withdrew an installation by the avant-garde artist John Latham depicting the Koran, Bible and Talmud torn to pieces. The museum explained that it did not want to stir things up after the London bombings. (A few months earlier, to avoid offending Muslims, a museum in Goteborg, Sweden, had removed a painting with a sexual motif and a quotation from the Koran.)

Finally, at the end of September, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen met with a group of imams, one of whom called on the prime minister to interfere with the press in order to get more positive coverage of Islam.

So, over two weeks we witnessed a half-dozen cases of self-censorship, pitting freedom of speech against the fear of confronting issues about Islam. This was a legitimate news story to cover, and Jyllands-Posten decided to do it by adopting the well-known journalistic principle: Show, don’t tell. I wrote to members of the association of Danish cartoonists asking them « to draw Muhammad as you see him. » We certainly did not ask them to make fun of the prophet. Twelve out of 25 active members responded.

We have a tradition of satire when dealing with the royal family and other public figures, and that was reflected in the cartoons. The cartoonists treated Islam the same way they treat Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and other religions. And by treating Muslims in Denmark as equals they made a point: We are integrating you into the Danish tradition of satire because you are part of our society, not strangers. The cartoons are including, rather than excluding, Muslims.

The cartoons do not in any way demonize or stereotype Muslims. In fact, they differ from one another both in the way they depict the prophet and in whom they target. One cartoon makes fun of Jyllands-Posten, portraying its cultural editors as a bunch of reactionary provocateurs. Another suggests that the children’s writer who could not find an illustrator for his book went public just to get cheap publicity. A third puts the head of the anti-immigration Danish People’s Party in a lineup, as if she is a suspected criminal.

One cartoon — depicting the prophet with a bomb in his turban — has drawn the harshest criticism. Angry voices claim the cartoon is saying that the prophet is a terrorist or that every Muslim is a terrorist. I read it differently: Some individuals have taken the religion of Islam hostage by committing terrorist acts in the name of the prophet. They are the ones who have given the religion a bad name. The cartoon also plays into the fairy tale about Aladdin and the orange that fell into his turban and made his fortune. This suggests that the bomb comes from the outside world and is not an inherent characteristic of the prophet.

On occasion, Jyllands-Posten has refused to print satirical cartoons of Jesus, but not because it applies a double standard. In fact, the same cartoonist who drew the image of Muhammed with a bomb in his turban drew a cartoon with Jesus on the cross having dollar notes in his eyes and another with the star of David attached to a bomb fuse. There were, however, no embassy burnings or death threats when we published those.

Has Jyllands-Posten insulted and disrespected Islam? It certainly didn’t intend to. But what does respect mean? When I visit a mosque, I show my respect by taking off my shoes. I follow the customs, just as I do in a church, synagogue or other holy place. But if a believer demands that I, as a nonbeliever, observe his taboos in the public domain, he is not asking for my respect, but for my submission. And that is incompatible with a secular democracy.

This is exactly why Karl Popper, in his seminal work « The Open Society and Its Enemies, » insisted that one should not be tolerant with the intolerant. Nowhere do so many religions coexist peacefully as in a democracy where freedom of expression is a fundamental right. In Saudi Arabia, you can get arrested for wearing a cross or having a Bible in your suitcase, while Muslims in secular Denmark can have their own mosques, cemeteries, schools, TV and radio stations.

I acknowledge that some people have been offended by the publication of the cartoons, and Jyllands-Posten has apologized for that. But we cannot apologize for our right to publish material, even offensive material. You cannot edit a newspaper if you are paralyzed by worries about every possible insult.

I am offended by things in the paper every day: transcripts of speeches by Osama bin Laden, photos from Abu Ghraib, people insisting that Israel should be erased from the face of the Earth, people saying the Holocaust never happened. But that does not mean that I would refrain from printing them as long as they fell within the limits of the law and of the newspaper’s ethical code. That other editors would make different choices is the essence of pluralism.

As a former correspondent in the Soviet Union, I am sensitive about calls for censorship on the grounds of insult. This is a popular trick of totalitarian movements: Label any critique or call for debate as an insult and punish the offenders. That is what happened to human rights activists and writers such as Andrei Sakharov, Vladimir Bukovsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Natan Sharansky, Boris Pasternak. The regime accused them of anti-Soviet propaganda, just as some Muslims are labeling 12 cartoons in a Danish newspaper anti-Islamic.

The lesson from the Cold War is: If you give in to totalitarian impulses once, new demands follow. The West prevailed in the Cold War because we stood by our fundamental values and did not appease totalitarian tyrants.

Since the Sept. 30 publication of the cartoons, we have had a constructive debate in Denmark and Europe about freedom of expression, freedom of religion and respect for immigrants and people’s beliefs. Never before have so many Danish Muslims participated in a public dialogue — in town hall meetings, letters to editors, opinion columns and debates on radio and TV. We have had no anti-Muslim riots, no Muslims fleeing the country and no Muslims committing violence. The radical imams who misinformed their counterparts in the Middle East about the situation for Muslims in Denmark have been marginalized. They no longer speak for the Muslim community in Denmark because moderate Muslims have had the courage to speak out against them.

In January, Jyllands-Posten ran three full pages of interviews and photos of moderate Muslims saying no to being represented by the imams. They insist that their faith is compatible with a modern secular democracy. A network of moderate Muslims committed to the constitution has been established, and the anti-immigration People’s Party called on its members to differentiate between radical and moderate Muslims, i.e. between Muslims propagating sharia law and Muslims accepting the rule of secular law. The Muslim face of Denmark has changed, and it is becoming clear that this is not a debate between « them » and « us, » but between those committed to democracy in Denmark and those who are not.

This is the sort of debate that Jyllands-Posten had hoped to generate when it chose to test the limits of self-censorship by calling on cartoonists to challenge a Muslim taboo. Did we achieve our purpose? Yes and no. Some of the spirited defenses of our freedom of expression have been inspiring. But tragic demonstrations throughout the Middle East and Asia were not what we anticipated, much less desired. Moreover, the newspaper has received 104 registered threats, 10 people have been arrested, cartoonists have been forced into hiding because of threats against their lives and Jyllands-Posten’s headquarters have been evacuated several times due to bomb threats. This is hardly a climate for easing self-censorship.

Still, I think the cartoons now have a place in two separate narratives, one in Europe and one in the Middle East. In the words of the Somali-born Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the integration of Muslims into European societies has been sped up by 300 years due to the cartoons; perhaps we do not need to fight the battle for the Enlightenment all over again in Europe. The narrative in the Middle East is more complex, but that has very little to do with the cartoons.

[email protected]

Flemming Rose is the culture editor of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.

Image 3 commentaires | Image caricatures, Islam-Occident, libertés, médias, terrorisme | Image Permalien
Image Publié par jcdurbant

Islam: On ne sert pas la paix en ignorant l’histoire (Peace is not served by ignoring history)

19 août, 2006
MuftiI think most people believe that enough time has passed so that historical facts can be ignored. Carter

Au moment où, du côté occidental et chrétien, la désinformation et la politique d’apaisement battent leur plein, petite remise des pendules à l’heure par l’Archévèque de Denver (merci Dhimmi watch):


Extrait:

Islam has embraced armed military expansion for religious purposes since its earliest decades. In contrast, Christianity struggled in its divided attitudes toward military force and state power for its first 300 years. No “theology of Crusade” existed in Western Christian thought until the 11th century. In fact, the Christian Byzantine Empire had already been resisting Muslim expansion in the East for 400 years before Pope Urban II called the First Crusade — as a defensive response to generations of armed jihad.

Much of the modern Middle East was once heavily Christian. Muslim armies changed that by imposing Islamic rule. Surviving Christian communities have endured centuries of marginalization, discrimination, violence, slavery and outright persecution — not always and not everywhere; but as a constant, recurring and central theme of Muslim domination.

That same Christian suffering continues down to the present. In the early years of the 20th century, the Muslim Ottoman Empire murdered more than 1 million Armenian Christians for ethnic, economic, but also religious reasons. Many Turks and other Muslims continue to deny that massive crime even today. Coptic Christians in Egypt — who, even after 13 centuries of Muslim prejudice and harassment, cling to the faith — continue to experience systematic discrimination and violence at the hands of Islamic militants.

Harassment and violence against Christians continue in many places throughout the Islamic world, from Bangladesh, Iran, Sudan, Pakistan and Iraq, to Nigeria, Indonesia and even Muslim-dominated areas of the heavily Catholic Philippines. In Saudi Arabia, all public expressions of Christian faith are forbidden. The on-going Christian flight from Lebanon has helped to transform it, in just half a century, from a majority Christian Arab nation to a majority Muslim population.

These are facts. The Muslim-Christian conflict is a very long one, rooted in deep religious differences, and Muslims have their own long list of real and perceived grievances. But especially in an era of religiously inspired terrorism and war in the Middle East, peace is not served by ignoring, subverting or rewriting history, but rather by facing it humbly as it really happened and healing its wounds.

In Christian-Muslim relations, peace not served by ignoring history
Healing of conflict requires honesty, repentance from both parties
Charles Chaput, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Denver
August 16, 2006

Over the past few decades, studies have shown again and again that Americans tend to have a poor grasp of history. In fact, the scholar Christopher Lasch once wrote that Americans love nostalgia, because we see it as a form of entertainment. But we dislike real history, because real historical facts are inconvenient. Yesterday helps shape today. Real history places annoying obligations of truth on our present and future, and gets in the way of re-inventing ourselves.

As a result, quipped a teacher friend, “history is whatever we say it is, as long as we can get away with it.”
I remembered her words recently as I read a news story. The story reported an Islamic leader as suggesting that it was European Christians, never Muslims, who tried to root out those who didn’t agree with them.
Perhaps the reporter misunderstood the speaker. Perhaps the speaker made an honest mistake. Both Muslims and Christians have committed many sins against each other over the centuries. In the United States, we have an opportunity to overcome that difficult history and learn to live with each other in mutual acceptance. But respect can’t emerge from falsehood.

Catholics who do know history may remember the following:
Islam has embraced armed military expansion for religious purposes since its earliest decades. In contrast, Christianity struggled in its divided attitudes toward military force and state power for its first 300 years. No “theology of Crusade” existed in Western Christian thought until the 11th century. In fact, the Christian Byzantine Empire had already been resisting Muslim expansion in the East for 400 years before Pope Urban II called the First Crusade — as a defensive response to generations of armed jihad.

Much of the modern Middle East was once heavily Christian. Muslim armies changed that by imposing Islamic rule. Surviving Christian communities have endured centuries of marginalization, discrimination, violence, slavery and outright persecution — not always and not everywhere; but as a constant, recurring and central theme of Muslim domination.

That same Christian suffering continues down to the present. In the early years of the 20th century, the Muslim Ottoman Empire murdered more than 1 million Armenian Christians for ethnic, economic, but also religious reasons. Many Turks and other Muslims continue to deny that massive crime even today. Coptic Christians in Egypt — who, even after 13 centuries of Muslim prejudice and harassment, cling to the faith — continue to experience systematic discrimination and violence at the hands of Islamic militants.

Harassment and violence against Christians continue in many places throughout the Islamic world, from Bangladesh, Iran, Sudan, Pakistan and Iraq, to Nigeria, Indonesia and even Muslim-dominated areas of the heavily Catholic Philippines. In Saudi Arabia, all public expressions of Christian faith are forbidden. The on-going Christian flight from Lebanon has helped to transform it, in just half a century, from a majority Christian Arab nation to a majority Muslim population.

These are facts. The Muslim-Christian conflict is a very long one, rooted in deep religious differences, and Muslims have their own long list of real and perceived grievances. But especially in an era of religiously inspired terrorism and war in the Middle East, peace is not served by ignoring, subverting or rewriting history, but rather by facing it humbly as it really happened and healing its wounds.

That requires honesty and repentance from both Christians and Muslims. Comments like those reported in the recent news story I read — claiming that historically, it was European Christians, never Muslims, who tried to root out those who disagreed with them — are both false and do nothing to help.

Image Leave a Comment » | Image dhimmis, guerre et paix, histoire, idiots utiles/compagnons de route, Islam-Occident, relativisme culturel, Violences et crimes de masse | Image Permalien
Image Publié par jcdurbant

Terrorisme: It’s the religion, stupid! (Proliferation is also an issue of theology)

19 août, 2006

Ahmadinejad_at_un_3Alors que l’échéance, à la fois politique (réponse de l’Iran au Conseil de sécurité sur la question nucléaire) et religieuse (Coran 17:1) du 22 août approche …

Et suite à la toute récente première démonstration, par ses supplétifs du Hezbollah interposés, de la détermination iranienne au Sud-Liban …

Petit retour sur une intéressante explication de texte, par l’islamologue américain Hillel Fradkin, de la fameuse « lettre de toutes les ruses » qu’avait envoyée Ahmadinejad au président américain en mai dernier :

Extraits:

Ahmadinejad did decide to approach the world, Muslim and non-Muslim, theologically–to insist that nuclear proliferation is not only an issue of policy but also of theology, indeed of the most fundamental and important issues of theology. He defends the right not only of Iran to nuclear technology but also of all Muslim countries as Muslim. Indeed they have not only a right but a duty to pursue such technology. The issue must be understood in the light of the most fundamental and important conflict in the world today as Ahmadinejad sees it–a fundamental conflict between Islam and its rivals, most immediately liberal democracy as embodied in the United States, but also Christianity.

Ahmadinejad’s emphasis on Christian hypocrisy, which may in this context mean two things: violations by self-professed Christians of the standards and teachings of historic Christianity, or the violation by historic Christianity of the true teachings of the Prophet Jesus. The latter is a traditional Islamic view of the defect and even crime of historic Christians. In calling upon Bush, as Ahmadinejad does emphatically, to embrace the « teachings of the prophets, » he is calling upon him not only to abandon liberal democracy but Christianity as well–to embrace Islam, to which all the world must ultimately submit, and which is gathering momentum in our time.

Ahmadinejad has presented himself as the herald or « prophet » of the Hidden Imam–the ultimate, if absent, ruler and authority for so-called Twelver Shiism–and has gone so far as to claim that he had a vision of the Imam, at the U.N. of all places. (…) At least one ayatollah is reported to have declared in recent days that Ahmadinejad’s letter was the « hand of God. »

what is known, or what should be known and deeply grasped, is that everything Ahmadinejad–and for that matter the radical movement as a whole–does is guided by an ideological vision and commitment. It needs to be addressed as such.

It is necessary to inform Ahmadinejad and his radical allies that they are in for a real fight. This may not suffice to lead them to question their fundamental assumption and inspiration that we are on the run. But it may give pause to the many Muslims and non-Muslims standing on the sidelines, who see radical success and do not see American or Western resolve.

we have within living memory experience of revolutionary leaders who faced apparently great odds in coming to personal power and great odds in taking on the powers of the world and nevertheless achieved both.

Reading Ahmadinejad in Washington
The Iranian president’s letter needs to be taken seriously.
by Hillel Fradkin
05/29/2006

WILL THE UNITED STATES declare war on the Islamic Republic of Iran? For months, this question has been the theme of diplomatic and public discourse–with horror usually expressed at the idea. But it now seems that we have this backwards. For the import of the letter that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, sent to President Bush in the first week of May is that Ahmadinejad and Iran have declared war on the United States. Many reasons are given, but the most fundamental is that the United States is a liberal democracy, the most powerful in the world and the leader of all the others. Liberal democracy, the letter says, is an affront to God, and as such its days are numbered. It would be best if President Bush and others realized this and abandoned it. But at all events, Iran will help where possible to hasten its end. (The full text of the letter, translated into English from the original Persian, can be found at http://www.cfr.org/content/publications/attachments/Ahmadinejad%20letter.pdf.)

Neither the Bush administration nor its many critics appear to appreciate the significance, ideological and practical, of the letter. Nor do they appear to appreciate the remarkable boldness of Ahmadinejad personally. For the formal characteristics of the letter as well as its substance have ancient and modern analogs–letters of Muhammad to the Byzantine, Persian, and Ethiopian emperors of his day warning them to accept Islam and his rule or suffer the consequences, and a letter from Khomeini to Mikhail Gorbachev along similar lines. Thus, Ahmadinejad presents himself as the true heir of Muhammad and Khomeini and may even be suggesting that he is a founder himself. At the least, he presents himself as the spokesman and leader of Islam and the Muslim world in its entirety, transcending the Shiite/Sunni divide. Both this boldness and this claim are consistent with the whole series of pronouncements and actions Ahmadinejad has taken in the brief period since he was elected last summer. But the letter, in its form and substance, raises this to a new and much higher level of clarity and power as well as menace.

The Bush administration and its critics have ignored all this. They have chosen to view the letter within a narrower prism–the question of negotiations or rather non-negotiations over Iran’s enrichment of uranium. For the administration, the letter contained « nothing new » in this regard. For Bush’s critics, it was an « opening, » one that could best be exploited if the United States were to drop its resistance to direct participation in negotiations with Tehran.

This reaction is not entirely surprising. Ahmadinejad’s letter does have a bearing on the struggle over Iran’s pursuit of enriched uranium. Its long catalog of alleged U.S. crimes against Muslim interests and states specifically, and against Africa, Latin America, and the poorer parts of the world more generally, mimics the standard litany of anti-American complaints. It is intended to further undermine support for the United States and weaken its position in the confrontation over Iran’s nuclear program. In this it may have some success. But for these purposes, it need not have presented its critique in a religious and ideological mode, up to and including the charge that Bush is a hypocrite in his claim to be « a follower of Jesus Christ. » That is, Ahmadinejad could have done without the theological « meanderings » about which both the administration and its critics complained. Indeed, for these purposes it would have been better if he had. Bush’s critics–including most recently Russia’s Vladimir Putin–like to charge him with hypocrisy, but they are by and large not concerned with Christian standards. And above all, the attack on liberal democracy could not be assumed to appeal to secular critics.

Yet Ahmadinejad did decide to approach the world, Muslim and non-Muslim, theologically–to insist that nuclear proliferation is not only an issue of policy but also of theology, indeed of the most fundamental and important issues of theology. He defends the right not only of Iran to nuclear technology but also of all Muslim countries as Muslim. Indeed they have not only a right but a duty to pursue such technology. The issue must be understood in the light of the most fundamental and important conflict in the world today as Ahmadinejad sees it–a fundamental conflict between Islam and its rivals, most immediately liberal democracy as embodied in the United States, but also Christianity.

All of this can be seen partially but still somewhat dimly in Ahmadinejad’s emphasis on Christian hypocrisy, which may in this context mean two things: violations by self-professed Christians of the standards and teachings of historic Christianity, or the violation by historic Christianity of the true teachings of the Prophet Jesus. The latter is a traditional Islamic view of the defect and even crime of historic Christians. In calling upon Bush, as Ahmadinejad does emphatically, to embrace the « teachings of the prophets, » he is calling upon him not only to abandon liberal democracy but Christianity as well–to embrace Islam, to which all the world must ultimately submit, and which is gathering momentum in our time.

THIS IS THE WAY THE LETTER will be understood and received by many Muslims, both inside and outside Iran. Far from being simply meandering, the letter manages to interweave appeals to two different audiences, the non-Muslim and largely secular world and the Muslim world. Its objective–to prosecute the war on behalf of Islam–unites the two. To that end, it aims to divide and weaken Islam’s adversary–the non-Muslim world–and to rally the Muslim world behind Ahmadinejad. In both respects it seems so far to be succeeding. Ahmadinejad followed the publication of the letter with a visit to Indonesia, the largest and most moderate of all Muslim countries and also very far removed from Iran’s usual sphere of concerns. Iran invested heavily in ensuring that he received a warm and even triumphal reception there. Ahmadinejad seems to have received praise from Indonesian officials and the leaders of other Muslim countries in the region, as well as from clerical figures, including the head of Indonesia’s Islamic State University, generally regarded as a leader of moderate Islam. Ahmadinejad has not only declared war but has taken an interim victory lap.

But, it may be asked, So what? So what if Ahmadinejad has declared that Islam is in fundamental, even mortal, conflict with the rest of the world? Formally that has always been the position of the Iranian Revolution. So what if he declares that Iran and the Muslim world are now on the march and have seized the initiative? The power of Iran may be measured in concrete ways and is, for now, limited and may remain so if we can only reach agreement on halting uranium enrichment. Are Ahmadinejad and Iran not further limited by his disability that he is a Shiite in a Muslim world that is overwhelmingly Sunni? And so what if Ahmadinejad implicitly lays claim to the mantle of Khomeini? Will he not ultimately be constrained by the very regime Khomeini established and built, in which he is presently subordinate to others–the regnant ayatollahs, including Khamenei the Supreme Guide–with a greater claim on authority? Will not the latter constrain him, if only out of self-interest and their own ambition to rule?

So what, in short, if Ahmadinejad wants to see the world in theological terms and to believe Islam is on the march and he is at its head? So what if he sees fit to burden us with these theological musings? The world, when all is said and done, is something else, and his views are out of touch with its reality and even, may it be said, delusional.

These objections would be more persuasive if we could forget that we have within living memory experience of revolutionary leaders–for that is what Ahmadinejad emphatically is–who faced apparently great odds in coming to personal power and great odds in taking on the powers of the world and nevertheless achieved both. Such people come up with practical if brutal solutions to their apparent disabilities. For us, who are ever so prudent and cautious, it would be safer to entertain the possibility that Ahmadinejad is a man who may also find solutions to the obstacles in his way, a man who finds great opportunities to be exploited and has the cunning and the will to do so.

Indeed, there is substantial evidence that he has already begun. Although subordinate to higher authority in the Iranian regime, he came to office in that regime at a time when its morale was low. He has managed to revive its spirit, especially among the cadres, like the militia, on whom it depends. It is a serious question whether his superiors–who ever since the rise of the reform movement in 1997 have been preoccupied by fear of collapse–do not need him as much as he needs them.

It is true that Ahmadinejad presently occupies a subordinate office, a deficiency reinforced by the fact that he is not a jurist, let alone an ayatollah, and thus lacks the credentials for supreme rule as defined by the principle of the regime–« the rule of the jurisprudent. »

But he may be in the process of addressing that difficulty by enlisting a source of authority–the Hidden Imam–consistent with and even superior to that principle. Ahmadinejad has presented himself as the herald or « prophet » of the Hidden Imam–the ultimate, if absent, ruler and authority for so-called Twelver Shiism–and has gone so far as to claim that he had a vision of the Imam, at the U.N. of all places.

It remains to be seen what further use Ahmadinejad may make of this status and the kind of authority it may convey and with what success. It would amount to a further radicalization of Khomeini’s original radical break with the tradition of Twelver Shiism, which opposed and still opposes the political engagement of clerics. Formally it is constrained by the regime Khomeini founded, but emotionally it is a plausible extension. At least one ayatollah is reported to have declared in recent days that Ahmadinejad’s letter was the « hand of God. »

AT ALL EVENTS, there is little evidence that his ostensible superiors are inclined to restrain him. Ayatollah Khamenei gave a talk prior to the letter that endorsed Ahmadinejad’s policies without reservation. Moreover, Ahmadinejad’s supporters in the Basij militia and other « revolutionary » institutions have announced and begun to implement a purge of « opponents of the revolution » in key places, including the universities. In the presently unforeseeable event that his superiors tried to force a showdown, it is not clear who would have more « troops. »

Outside Iran, Ahmadinejad encounters a world of opportunities. The non-Muslim countries are very much divided over Iran’s ambitions, acting either hesitantly or at cross purposes. Even his main adversary, the United States, seems divided and uncertain.

The Muslim world, for its part, is rich with the opportunities created by great longing, great resentment, and great anger. Those longings (for a more glorious role for Islam) and those resentments (over the fallen estate of Islam) have been brewing for a long time. For those in the Muslim world moved by these sentiments, the attacks of September 11, 2001, offered the satisfaction of a victory and produced admiration for Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.

But Osama also promised further victories, that this was the beginning, not the end, of the new Islamic jihad. And in this he has not been successful, presumably because of the vigor of American and allied attacks on al Qaeda in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Even in Iraq, where al Qaeda under the direction of Abu Musab al Zarqawi keeps up the battle, it has not yet achieved its aim of driving American forces out and may not. Moreover, its engagement in Iraq has had liabilities for al Qaeda, which were the substance of al-Zawahiri’s letter of last summer. Al Qaeda as such may be in decline.

In these circumstances, Ahmadinejad has attempted to step into bin Laden’s place as the leader of the radical Islamic movement, as the man with the will and capacity to challenge and threaten the United States. Ahmadinejad has already enjoyed some success in parts of the Muslim world. This has been accompanied by the resurgence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and especially Palestine, where Hamas won control of the Palestinian Authority. This has permitted him to assert, as he does in his letter, that the forces of radical Islam–or, as he would have it, simply Islam–are on a roll. Ahmadinejad has bent every effort to support and join forces with Hamas and may well succeed. And, as always, he has Hezbollah in Lebanon at his disposal.

From all these developments, the radical movement has gained renewed confidence in the claim, first put forward by Osama bin Laden, that its adversaries, principally the United States, do not have the stomach for a long fight, or even a short one. Islam’s enemies can and will be pushed back and defeated by radical forces, because the latter, unlike their enemies, do not fear death and even welcome it. They can even, as Ahmadinejad recently said, accept the possibility of nuclear war as a necessity of the struggle. Altogether the spirits of the radical Islamic movement are high, and Ahmadinejad is the most powerful voice of that spirit.

This renewed ideological vigor and confidence present us with a host of difficulties in addition to the more material problem of the prospective Iranian bomb. It remains to be seen what we can and will do to keep the mullahs from obtaining nuclear bombs. Were we to be successful by diplomacy–unlikely–or by military action–ruled out of bounds by many–it would certainly affect the ideological struggle, as well as be a great good in itself. It would do so because it would be a defeat, and a significant one, for radical Islam. But given the temper of the man and the needs of the Iranian regime, it would not end ideological and other kinds of warfare.

For the moment all this is unknown. But what is known, or what should be known and deeply grasped, is that everything Ahmadinejad–and for that matter the radical movement as a whole–does is guided by an ideological vision and commitment. It needs to be addressed as such. For the moment and not only for the moment, this requires that liberal democrats declare that they have no intention of abandoning their way of life and see no need to do so, since they are fully prepared to defend it and because that way of life provides the resources–political, economic, and military–to defend itself.

It is necessary to inform Ahmadinejad and his radical allies that they are in for a real fight. This may not suffice to lead them to question their fundamental assumption and inspiration that we are on the run. But it may give pause to the many Muslims and non-Muslims standing on the sidelines, who see radical success and do not see American or Western resolve.

Of course the best person to make the first such declaration is President Bush–not as a Christian but as the world’s leading liberal democrat. And not to Ahmadinejad, for whom a direct reply would be a victory, but to the Iranian people, the Muslim world, and the non-Muslim world.

Hillel Fradkin is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and coeditor of Current Trends in Islamist Ideology.

Image Leave a Comment » | Image antisionisme/antisémitisme, guerre et paix, Iran, Islam-Occident, Israël, terrorisme | Image Permalien
Image Publié par jcdurbant

Terrorisme: Pour que le Mal triomphe … (All that is necessary…)

16 août, 2006
Axis of Evil"-2003 : r/PropagandaPostersPour que le Mal triomphe, il suffit que les hommes de Bien ne fassent rien. (attribué à) Edmund Burke
Aujourd’hui, l’Iran est en passe de réussir, grâce au coup de bluff d’Ahmedinejad, à l’incohérence des politiques occidentales, à la violence de la réaction israélienne et à la paralysie des régimes arabes sunnites. La seule cause qui permet de connecter le front arabo-sunnite et le radicalisme chiite est la Palestine ; plus précisément, toute conjonction entre le Hamas et le Hezbollah permet à l’Iran d’articuler ses deux stratégies. Ahmedinejad a donc commencé par prendre des positions en flèche sur l’«illégitimité» d’Israël, thème évidemment porteur dans la région, tout en armant et équipant le Hezbollah. On peut gloser sur les causes qui ont poussé la branche armée du Hamas à capturer un soldat israélien en juin dernier ; mais, vu la réaction israélienne, il est difficile de croire que le Hezbollah ne s’attendait pas à une attaque israélienne après avoir à son tour capturé deux soldats. En tout cas, il était prêt à la guerre. Toujours est-il que la brutale connexion entre le conflit israélo-palestinien et israélo-hezbollah a permis à l’Iran de fusionner Front du refus et arc chiite. Pour le moment, elle a aussi permis à Téhéran de gagner sur tous les tableaux. Quant à Israël, en bombardant tout le Liban, il a réunifié chiites, sunnites et chrétiens, même provisoirement. Mais l’occasion de jouer une stratégie complexe de division et d’isolement des forces radicales au Moyen-Orient a été perdue, même si le soutien au Hezbollah reste très fragile au Liban. Surtout, Israël n’a plus de politique, sinon la bunkérisation et la destruction de toute force menaçante dans l’espèce de no man’s land qu’il crée, de la bande de Gaza au fleuve Litani. Or il n’existe pas de solution militaire durable. Seul un accord politique de long terme peut stabiliser la région. Pour cela, il faut à nouveau dissocier les deux tendances lourdes de la région, et donc, commencer par traiter différemment le Hamas (avec qui il faudra bien négocier) du Hezbollah (qu’on ne peut isoler qu’en négociant avec les autres forces politiques libanaises et arabes). Bref, il faut retrouver la spécificité de chaque conflit, au lieu de se gargariser de termes vagues et inopérants comme «guerre au terrorisme»ou «fascisme islamique». Olivier Roy
Rien n’est plus dangereux que de prétendre maintenir la paix quand il s’agit en réalité de l’imposer. Intervenir dans un conflit ouvert implique soit de s’imposer par la force auprès des belligérants, solution coûteuse, soit de prendre clairement parti (Bosnie en 1995), décision délicate et dont on fait les frais à terme (ainsi des Occidentaux face à l’UCK au Kosovo), soit enfin de prouver sa neutralité en ne faisant rien : quel meilleur exemple que la Finul déployée inutilement au Liban depuis 1978 ? Sera-t-on, le cas échéant, prêt à désarmer le Parti de Dieu par la force, réalisant ainsi l’objectif de l’Etat hébreu à sa place, si d’aventure il réengageait les hostilités en frappant à nouveau Israël depuis l’intérieur du Liban, littéralement par-dessus les «peacekeepers» ? Évidemment non (…) Bien plus qu’une simple mission de police, la stabilisation suppose de ne pas se contenter de déployer des troupes avec des objectifs aussi bienveillants que vagues mais de définir des objectifs politiques précis, traduisibles en objectifs militaires, et d’allouer les moyens correspondants, face à un ennemi potentiel ou réel. (…) Ces forces déployées mais pas employées, selon l’excellente formule du général britannique Rupert Smith, au mieux projetteront une image d’impuissance bien nuisible à la crédibilité occidentale sur d’autres théâtres, au pire seront autant d’otages livrés au Hezbollah, et donc à la Syrie et à l’Iran, alors que le bras de fer engagé avec Téhéran à propos de son programme nucléaire risque d’empirer dans les prochains mois. (…) Alors que les Américains voient dans l’Iran un Etat terroriste, ils se sont paradoxalement retrouvés dans le même camp que les Iraniens en Irak – et en Afghanistan. Quelle que soit l’issue de guerre en Irak, les chiites irakiens sont les grands vainqueurs de l’intervention américaine. Etienne de Durand (Institut français des relations internationales)

Evidemment non !

Belle illustration dans Le Figaro de vendredi, par l’un des conseillers de notre roi fainéant Etienne de Durand, de la pusillanimité (ici sous la forme du constat désabusé, d’où effectivement la justesse de nombre des observations: « L’enfer stratégique est lui aussi pavé de bonnes intentions »), dont nos dirigeants nationaux (France en tête) et instances internationales (l’ONU, pour ne pas la citer) se sont fait une spécialité* !

Et surtout de cet étrange refus d’appeler le Mal par son nom et donc de prendre clairement parti pour le Bien. Cet étrange rejet, que les débats sur l’intervention anglo-américaine en Irak avaient déjà largement révélé, de la question du Bien et du Mal comme en témoignent les sarcasmes et l’indignation qu’avait accueilli (du fait, on suppose, de son origine judéo-chrétienne et pour l’inacceptable prétention au Bien qu’elle suppose nécessairement) la simple mention par un président américain (Reagan jadis ou Bush aujourd’hui) du vocabulaire du Bien et du Mal.

Le tout apparemment en faveur d’une approche relativiste de la réalité et donc du refus de règles ou de valeurs communes qui fait qu’on s’interdit d’appeler Mal des choses aussi difficilement justifiables que… le totalitarisme ou le terrorisme!

Mais qui, par un tout aussi étrange retournement, aboutit à une sorte de sacralisation paradoxale et quasi-religieuse de la paix (dans une sorte de « croisade pacifique », autrement dit, comme on parle de « guerre sainte », une sorte de… « paix sainte »!) où les ennemis du Bien et donc le Mal ne disparaissent pas mais deviennent le libéralisme, la mondialisation, la guerre (« pire des solutions, dixit Chirac !).

D’où par exemple la présentation de la préservation d’Israël (peuple, on le sait, particulièrement et à la fois « mercantile » et « guerrier ») comme le comble de l’horreur politique (« réalisant ainsi l’objectif de l’Etat hébreu à sa place » – qui se trouve pourtant être aussi… une résolution de l’ONU !). Le nouveau Bien devenant donc la défense incantatoire de la paix à tout prix et des victimes de la mondialisation, la  sacro-sainte « multipolarité », le « respect des différences culturelles » (jusqu’au… sang du dernier dissident ?).

Vision que l’on retrouve d’ailleurs parfaitement, dans le même Figaro et sous la plume d’un autre conseiller de notre roi fainéant, notre grand islamologue national Olivier Roy.

Qui commence par multiplier les précautions oratoires et les marques de neutralité ostentatoires (« on peut gloser », « quelle que soit l’issue de guerre en Irak », « réalité ou fantasme ») et de sa compréhension, quand ce n’est pas la complaisance ou la connivence ou, l’évidente difficulté à cacher sa joie mauvaise devant les  « succès » de ses objets d’étude ou les échecs supposés des Occidentaux (« l’Iran est en passe de réussir, grâce au coup de bluff d’Ahmedinejad », « elle a aussi permis à Téhéran de gagner sur tous les tableaux », ‘l’illégitimité’ d’Israël, thème évidemment porteur dans la région », « Israël n’a plus de politique, sinon la bunkérisation et la destruction de toute force menaçante dans l’espèce de no man’s land qu’il crée »).

Et finit par ne pas avoir de mots assez durs pour fustiger l’incapacité américaine à respecter les différences (en se « gargarisant de termes vagues et inopérants comme ‘guerre au terrorisme’ ou ‘fascisme islamique’ « ), à « dissocier les deux tendances lourdes de la région », à « traiter différemment le Hamas (avec qui il faudra bien négocier »: quoi ? la… disparition d’Israël ?) du Hezbollah » ou à « retrouver la spécificité de chaque conflit ».

Mais aussi pour Israël, également responsable d’avoir (« en bombardant tout le Liban ») « réunifié chiites, sunnites et chrétiens » et d’être « la seule cause qui permet de connecter le front arabo-sunnite et le radicalisme chiite », car (refus de la guerre) « il n’existe pas de solution militaire durable. Seul un accord politique de long terme peut stabiliser la région ».

* les médias occidentaux ne se défendent pas mal non plus dans cette fausse « neutralité axiologique », comme le NYT de ce matin qui parle du secret de polichinelle du programme nucléaire iranien avec la prétendue « objectivité » qu’il convient en le réduisant, alors que ledit programme est depuis des années l’objet d’une enquête des Nations Unies, à… une « accusation occidentale »: « Iran, which invested millions of dollars in Hezbollah and which the West accuses of harboring a secret program to build nuclear weapons. »

Le piège d’une interposition au Liban
Etienne de Durand, Responsable du département des études de sécurité à l’Institut français des relations internationales (Ifri)..
Le Figaro
le 14 août 2006

L’émotion qu’engendre l’affrontement entre Israël et le Hezbollah pousse les gouvernements occidentaux à l’action. D’intenses tractations sont à l’oeuvre afin d’organiser une force internationale chargée de s’interposer entre les belligérants. Moralement louable, cette initiative est stratégiquement dangereuse et vraisemblablement vouée à l’échec.

En matière d’intervention, il n’existe guère que deux situations, le maintien de la paix et l’imposition de la paix, souvent baptisée opération de stabilisation. Le maintien de la paix a pour fonction de séparer les adversaires. Pour réussir, il suppose des moyens militaires dissuasifs, des «règles d’engagement» qui dépassent la seule autodéfense à laquelle les Casques bleus sont cantonnés, enfin et surtout un accord politique préalable entre les parties au conflit, ou à tout le moins un épuisement militaire. L’interposition n’est jamais aussi efficace que lorsqu’elle est appliquée préventivement, avant la violence, ou en sortie de crise, quand les belligérants n’en peuvent plus.

En sens inverse, les opérations de stabilisation complexes ne requièrent pas l’assentiment de tous les acteurs : certains d’entre eux sont souvent, ouvertement ou pas, hostiles à la force d’intervention. Bien plus qu’une simple mission de police, la stabilisation suppose de ne pas se contenter de déployer des troupes avec des objectifs aussi bienveillants que vagues mais de définir des objectifs politiques précis, traduisibles en objectifs militaires, et d’allouer les moyens correspondants, face à un ennemi potentiel ou réel.

Rien n’est plus dangereux que de prétendre maintenir la paix quand il s’agit en réalité de l’imposer. Intervenir dans un conflit ouvert implique soit de s’imposer par la force auprès des belligérants, solution coûteuse, soit de prendre clairement parti (Bosnie en 1995), décision délicate et dont on fait les frais à terme (ainsi des Occidentaux face à l’UCK au Kosovo), soit enfin de prouver sa neutralité en ne faisant rien : quel meilleur exemple que la Finul déployée inutilement au Liban depuis 1978 ?

Appliqué à la situation qui prévaut au Proche-Orient, le raisonnement aboutit à des conclusions nettes, quelle que soit la résolution finalement adoptée.

– Objectifs politiques : même en cas de cessez-le-feu, la confrontation politique sous-jacente ne sera en rien résolue et le sera d’autant moins qu’elle implique de nombreux acteurs, locaux et régionaux, aux intérêts fondamentalement divergents.

– Objectifs militaires : sera-t-on, le cas échéant, prêt à désarmer le Parti de Dieu par la force, réalisant ainsi l’objectif de l’Etat hébreu à sa place, si d’aventure il réengageait les hostilités en frappant à nouveau Israël depuis l’intérieur du Liban, littéralement par-dessus les «peacekeepers» ? Évidemment non, et l’on imagine encore moins des «soldats de la paix» allemands s’en prendre à des forces israéliennes organisant des représailles au Liban-Sud.

– Capacités : avec 15 000 hommes, la force internationale, même avec l’appui de l’armée libanaise, structurellement impuissante, n’aura pas les moyens de contrôler le terrain ou de désarmer le Hezbollah ; celui-ci a d’ailleurs déjà annoncé, par la voix de Hassan Nasrallah, que la «force [internationale] sera accueillie par les balles du Hezbollah». En outre, les armées occidentales connaissent déjà des problèmes d’effectifs pour mener les opérations en cours en Côte d’Ivoire, en Afghanistan, dans les Balkans, en Irak et ailleurs.

Ces forces déployées mais pas employées, selon l’excellente formule du général britannique Rupert Smith, au mieux projetteront une image d’impuissance bien nuisible à la crédibilité occidentale sur d’autres théâtres, au pire seront autant d’otages livrés au Hezbollah, et donc à la Syrie et à l’Iran, alors que le bras de fer engagé avec Téhéran à propos de son programme nucléaire risque d’empirer dans les prochains mois. Sans rien résoudre de la crise, nous nous serons ainsi placés de nous-mêmes en situation de faiblesse, à la merci d’un nouveau «Drakkar». L’enfer stratégique est lui aussi pavé de bonnes intentions.

Responsable du département des études de sécurité à l’Institut français des relations internationales (Ifri).

Voir aussi:

Moyen-Orient : empêcher la jonction des forces radicales et extrémistes
Olivier Roy*
Le Figaro
le 12 août 2006

Avec l’aggravation de la guerre au Liban et la mise au jour d’un complot terroriste à Londres, l’actualité de ces derniers jours l’illustre abondamment : deux logiques profondes sont à l’oeuvre au Moyen-Orient. D’une part, la recréation d’un «front du refus» anti-israélien, mais, cette fois, sous l’égide de l’Iran ; d’autre part, un clivage croissant entre chiites et sunnites qui atteint son paroxysme en Irak et menace de s’étendre à la toute la zone.

En soi, ces deux tendances ne sont pas nouvelles. Le Front du refus est apparu à la fin des années 1970, quand l’Egypte a entamé un processus de reconnaissance d’Israël, qui a culminé dans les accords d’Oslo. Et le clivage chiite-sunnite s’est développé dès la victoire de la révolution iranienne en 1979, mais surtout lors de la guerre entre l’Irak et l’Iran. On a assisté alors à une alliance contre l’Iran entre nationalisme arabe et sunnisme conservateur, sous la houlette de l’Arabie saoudite, mais aussi, ne l’oublions pas, du Pakistan.

Les premières attaques systématiques de groupes militants sunnites armés contre les chiites ont de fait commencé au Pakistan, vers 1985. Depuis, on a assisté à une surenchère entre groupes radicaux sunnites (dont al-Qaida est le prototype) et le régime iranien. Les milieux salafistes et wahhabites, longtemps soutiens de Ben Laden, se sont lancés dans une campagne d’anathème contre les chiites, accusés d’hérésie. Les Iraniens, quant à eux, ont toujours rêvé de prendre la tête de l’ensemble de la contestation islamique, mais se sont, dès 1980, trouvés réduits au soutien d’une partie des communautés chiites de la région. De plus, ils n’ont même pas réussi à unifier, tant politiquement que religieusement, l’ensemble des chiites sous la houlette du guide de la révolution.

Mais, la nouveauté, c’est que l’intervention américaine en Irak a changé la donne. Alors que les Américains voient dans l’Iran un Etat terroriste, ils se sont paradoxalement retrouvés dans le même camp que les Iraniens en Irak – et en Afghanistan. Quelle que soit l’issue de guerre en Irak, les chiites irakiens sont les grands vainqueurs de l’intervention américaine. Cette montée en puissance des chiites dans la région du Golfe (également perceptible à Bahreïn, Koweït et au nord-est de l’Arabie saoudite), dans ce qui constitue l’essentiel des zones pétrolières, a inspiré une vive inquiétude aux régimes sunnites arabes conservateurs de la région.

Fantasme ou réalité, la référence au péril chiite est devenue centrale dans les discussions politiques. L’alliance entre nationalistes arabes et salafis sunnites s’est reconstituée ainsi dans le nord de l’Irak, sous l’impulsion de radicaux comme Zarqaoui, et avec une certaine bienveillance des milieux conservateurs arabes, tant dans le Golfe qu’en Jordanie. Zarqaoui s’est lancé dans un djihad violent contre les chiites en Irak. L’axe qui avait permis de limiter l’expansion de la révolution islamique iranienne s’est ainsi reconstitué. Sauf que, cette fois, les Américains se retrouvaient objectivement dans le camp de l’Iran.

L’obsession iranienne a toujours été de contourner ce front arabo-sunnite pour se positionner en champion de la cause arabo-musulmane au Moyen-Orient, tout en maîtrisant et instrumentalisant les réseaux chiites. Aujourd’hui, l’Iran est en passe de réussir, grâce au coup de bluff d’Ahmedinejad, à l’incohérence des politiques occidentales, à la violence de la réaction israélienne et à la paralysie des régimes arabes sunnites. La seule cause qui permet de connecter le front arabo-sunnite et le radicalisme chiite est la Palestine ; plus précisément, toute conjonction entre le Hamas et le Hezbollah permet à l’Iran d’articuler ses deux stratégies. Ahmedinejad a donc commencé par prendre des positions en flèche sur l’«illégitimité» d’Israël, thème évidemment porteur dans la région, tout en armant et équipant le Hezbollah.

On peut gloser sur les causes qui ont poussé la branche armée du Hamas à capturer un soldat israélien en juin dernier ; mais, vu la réaction israélienne, il est difficile de croire que le Hezbollah ne s’attendait pas à une attaque israélienne après avoir à son tour capturé deux soldats. En tout cas, il était prêt à la guerre. Toujours est-il que la brutale connexion entre le conflit israélo-palestinien et israélo-hezbollah a permis à l’Iran de fusionner Front du refus et arc chiite. Pour le moment, elle a aussi permis à Téhéran de gagner sur tous les tableaux.

Les milieux salafistes et wahhabites ne s’y sont pas trompés, contraints, d’un seul coup, comme le montrent leurs déclarations récentes, à mettre un bémol à leur diabolisation des chiites et à reconnaître en Nasrallah un héros de la cause arabo-musulmane, ce que la rue arabe a fait depuis longtemps. Les Saoudiens et les Jordaniens, après avoir blâmé le Hezbollah pour le déclenchement de la crise, ont dû faire marche arrière et se retrouvent, comme le régime égyptien, en spectateurs.

Les Européens continuent de pratiquer une diplomatie cloisonnée, en traînant l’Iran devant le Conseil de sécurité pour son programme nucléaire, tout en appelant, par la voix du ministre français des Affaires étrangères, à l’intégrer dans la recherche d’une solution au Liban, comme facteur de… stabilisation (alors qu’une des motivations de l’Iran de jouer la crise au Proche-Orient est précisément de pouvoir continuer son programme nucléaire).

Les Américains sont, quant à eux, dans une situation particulièrement schizophrène : ils refusent de parler aux «Etats voyous», mais ont renoncé à les démocratiser, par crainte, dans le cas de la Syrie, d’une victoire des Frères musulmans et, dans le cas de l’Iran, d’une aggravation de la situation en Irak et dans le Golfe. Bref, on parle de guerre sans la faire et on refuse la diplomatie, ce qui a pour conséquence de laisser le champ libre à Damas et à Téhéran.

Quant à Israël, en bombardant tout le Liban, il a réunifié chiites, sunnites et chrétiens, même provisoirement. Mais l’occasion de jouer une stratégie complexe de division et d’isolement des forces radicales au Moyen-Orient a été perdue, même si le soutien au Hezbollah reste très fragile au Liban. Surtout, Israël n’a plus de politique, sinon la bunkérisation et la destruction de toute force menaçante dans l’espèce de no man’s land qu’il crée, de la bande de Gaza au fleuve Litani. Or il n’existe pas de solution militaire durable. Seul un accord politique de long terme peut stabiliser la région.

Pour cela, il faut à nouveau dissocier les deux tendances lourdes de la région, et donc, commencer par traiter différemment le Hamas (avec qui il faudra bien négocier) du Hezbollah (qu’on ne peut isoler qu’en négociant avec les autres forces politiques libanaises et arabes). Bref, il faut retrouver la spécificité de chaque conflit, au lieu de se gargariser de termes vagues et inopérants comme «guerre au terrorisme» ou «fascisme islamique».

* Islamologue, spécialiste du Moyen-Orient et de l’Asie centrale, auteur de La Laïcité face à l’islam (Stock), Les Illusions du 11 Septembre et L’Islam mondialisé (Seuil).

Image Un commentaire | Image anti-américanisme, antisionisme/antisémitisme, désinformation, dhimmis, guerre et paix, idiots utiles/compagnons de route, Islam-Occident, Israël, Liban, relativisme culturel, terrorisme, Violences et crimes de masse | Image Permalien
Image Publié par jcdurbant

Terrorisme: Sur la « divine victoire » du Hezbollah… (« Divine victory », eh… ?)

16 août, 2006

Divine_victory_2Un autre regard sur ce que, 600 de ses meilleurs combattants (sur quelques milliers ?), 80% de ses missiles de moyenne et longue portée hors d’état de nuire et son chef terré dans les caves d’une ambassade iranienne après, nos médias persistent à appeler la… « divine victoire » du « Parti de Dieu »!

EDITO: Le Hezbollah a t-il vraiment gagné ? Le Hezbollah a subi de lourdes pertes et n’a pas gagné. «Politiquement et militairement, le Hezbollah ne peut désormais plus faire ce qu’il veut au Liban ».

Shimon Peres le numéro deux du gouvernement israélien, a estimé que «le Hezbollah ne finit pas en grand héros, mais la queue basse. A mon avis, nous avons fini en étant plus au moins vainqueurs sur le plan politique et militaire. Nous avons commencé lentement et nous sommes à plein rendement, alors que le Hezbollah a débuté très fort et maintenant, ils sont relativement épuisés».

Dans Libération : “Les établissements du Hezbollah gisent à terre. Le faubourg de Haret Hreik évoque un volcan après une éruption. Une poussière grise recouvre un paysage dévasté d’où s’élèvent, un peu partout, des fumerolles. Pas une rue sans son champ de ruines.”

Le Hezbollah a t-il vraiment gagné ?
aou14
Par Laurent Tissot

Au-delà d’une propagande médiatique bien orchestrée par le Hezbollah et omniprésente dans les médias internationaux, nombre d’éléments mènent à analyser une forte déconvenue pour la milice chiite.

Les “victoires du Hezbollah” sont très souvent sur le front médiatique. Des techniques de propagande efficaces ont donné l’impression que cette milice avait remporté un succès foudroyant… surtout auprès des masses arabes.

En réalité la milice a bien perdu.

Le Hezbollah est à présent condamné par les Nations Unies et défait partiellement sur les plans humains, territoriaux, militaires et financiers.

Ainsi, Paris Match nous décrit l’avenir désolant du chef du Hezbollah : “L’immeuble qui abrite le domicile de Hassan Nasrallah et celui du QG du parti de Dieu sont pulvérisés. Al-Manar, la télévision du hezbollah, subit le même sort. Traqué comme Saddam Hussein en 2003 à Bagdad par les avions américains, Hassan Nasrallah se terre pour échapper aux chasseurs israéliens”.

Les rapports israéliens nous rassurent sur ce qu’il reste de l’arsenal du hezbollah et sur sa capacité à infliger des dégats : le ministre israélien de l’Intérieur Roni Bar-On, “Le potentiel du Hezbollah en termes de roquettes de longue portée a été réduit pratiquement à zéro”.

“Nous avons un avantage diplomatique car le Hezbollah est désormais sous la loupe des instances internationales. Le cadre juridique international se resserre sur Hassan Nasrallah», le chef de la milice chiite, a déclaré M. Palmor (porte-parole) ”.
• Sur le plan humain, la milice chiite a perdu de très nombreux combattants. Initialement fort de quelques milliers de combattants, le Hezbollah a été “très fortement touché” selon Tsahal.
• Sur le plan international, la résolution 1701 des Nations Unies reconnaît clairement la responsabilité du Hezbollah à l’origine du conflit :

“The Security Council, expressing its utmost concern at the continuing escalation of hostilities in Lebanon and in Israel since Hezbollah’s attack on Israel on 12 July 2006, which has already caused hundreds of deaths and injuries on both sides”

Selon Ehud Olmert, “la situation stratégique à la frontière Nord d’Israël signe une victoire de fait pour Tsahal”, malgré une opinion publique israélienne reprochant à Ehud Olmert de s’être arrêté en chemin.

• Sur le plan territorial, le Hezbollah a perdu une grande partie de ses territoires et a été repoussé au-delà de la rivière Litanie.

Malgré 6 ans de préparations minutieuses depuis le retrait unilatéral israélien du Sud Liban, les réseaux de bunkers et les tapis de mines antipersonnelles et antichars n’ont finalement pas résisté à Tsahal.

Le Hezbollah perd, au moins pour le moment un “Etat dans l’Etat”.
• Sur le plan militaire, sur un arsenal original de plus de 12,000 missiles, l’essentiel a été utilisé contre Israël ou détruit par Tsahal.

Sur plus de 6000 missiles lancés par le hezbollah, seuls 3970 ont touché le sol israélien, dont 901 dans des secteurs urbains. Donc plus de 3000 missiles (>50%) ont atterris dans des secteurs isolés en campagne, et plus de 2000 (>30%) n’ont pas passé la frontière.
• Sur le plan financier, une grande partie du trésor de guerre du hezbollah a été brûlé par les intenses combats. L’ONU devra vérifier que les dons et oeuvres charitables de la communauté internationale ne soient pas partiellement détournés vers le Hezbollah.
• Quant à l’avenir de la branche politique du Hezbollah au Liban, seul l’avenir pourra nous dire ce qu’il adviendra. Les Chrétiens Libanais joueront certainement ici un rôle crucial.

On souligne en Israël que «le secrétaire général de l’ONU, Kofi Annan, est tenu de présenter dans les 30 jours des propositions concrètes pour appliquer la résolution 1559, jusqu’ici restée lettre morte, qui exige le désarmement du Hezbollah».

Le Figaro résume bien la situation du Hezbollah :

“Le Hezbollah est «sous la loupe» des instances internationales, ce qui confère à Israël «un avantage diplomatique», a affirmé un porte-parole du ministère israélien des Affaires étrangères, Yigal Palmor.

«Le cadre juridique international se resserre sur Hassan Nasrallah», le chef de la milice chiite, a-t-il déclaré. Selon lui, «la nature de Nasrallah et du Hezbollah n’a pas changé. Mais ils vont devoir respecter la résolution 1701» des Nations unies sur la cessation des hostilités.

«Israël respectera les termes de cette résolution», a assuré le porte-parole en notant que «politiquement et militairement, le Hezbollah ne peut désormais plus faire ce qu’il veut au Liban ».-

COMPLÉMENT:

Voir aussi le bilan présenté par le site, généralement bien informé, de la Mena:

Nasrallah n’a pas de quoi pavoiser. La meilleure preuve c’est qu’il doit lire ses communiqués de “victoire” terré dans l’anonymat d’un bunker… Son organisation, Le parti de Dieu, comptait 3500 hommes armés au moment où il a agressé la patrouille sur la frontière israélienne. Ces personnels se divisaient en trois groupes distincts : 750 soldats, 600 individus chargés exclusivement de lancer des roquettes et des missiles, 1200 miliciens armés sans capacité de combat et le reste en supplétifs et en hommes chargés de la coordination, de la communication, de l’administration et du commandement.

Selon Michaël Béhé, dont on se rappelle la précision des bilans qu’il avait donnés au faîte des combats, trois jours avant les autorités israéliennes et libanaises, il y aurait eu 1950 tués au Liban durant cette guerre sans nom. 350 victimes, au grand maximum, sont des civils qui n’avaient aucun lien avec les combats ; tous les autres faisaient partie du Hezbollah et des forces qui s’étaient jointes à lui. Sur les 750 combattants dignes de ce nom, entre 670 et 690 ont été soit éliminés par Tsahal, soit faits prisonniers. 350 lanceurs de projectiles islamistes sont également au nombre des victimes. De plus, il y aurait environ 800 blessés au sein des Fous de Dieu. Pas étonnant, au vu de ces chiffres, que les communiqués libanais ne comportent aucune mention des pertes intégristes…

sans compter les dégâts en matériel militaire. La ligne Maginot, construite à coups de centaines de millions de pétrodollars perses le long de la frontière israélienne, est aux mains de l’ennemi ou entièrement dynamitée. Le Hezb a perdu 28 missiles balistiques de type Zilzal (20 selon Tsahal), sur les 30 que les ayatollahs lui avaient livrés. Tous les servants de ces engins sont soit morts soit hors de combat.

Ce qui reste à l’organisation terroriste chiite ?

– Ses leaders politiques, qui ont, pour la plupart, échappé à la chasse qui leur a été donnée par le Mossad et le Khel Avir. Ceci dit, je ne connais pas de compagnie d’assurance qui se risquerait à assurer Nasrallah sur la vie.

– Environ 2000 Katiouchas, surtout celles de faible portée. Quelques centaines de roquettes plus lourdes et une quarantaine de Fager de moyenne portée. On considère, à la Ména, que le Hezbollah, en cas de reprise des hostilités, serait capable de faire encore usage de la moitié de ces armes.

Hormis ces maigres résultats, le Hezbollah a le mérite stratégique – c’est sans doute ce que son chef appelle une victoire stratégique – de continuer d’exister et de jouir du soutien de la majorité de la population chiite libanaise. Le Parti de Dieu n’a pas été rayé de la carte, comme le prophétisait Olmert, même s’il est devenu itinérant, après que toutes ses bases de commandement au Liban aient été pulvérisées. De plus, on ne distingue pas de forces armées présentes au Liban, qui possèderaient l’intention ou la capacité de compléter le désarmement de la milice intégriste. Ceci présente assurément le risque de la voir se réarmer à courte ou moyenne échéance.

Ca va pas à la tête (info # 011608/6)
Par Jean Tsadik

© Metula News Agency

Image Un commentaire | Image désinformation, guerre et paix, Iran, islamisme, Israël, Liban, Moyen-Orient, terrorisme | Image Permalien
Image Publié par jcdurbant

Eric Hoffer: Ce qui adviendra d’Israël sera notre sort à tous (So will it go with all of us)

14 août, 2006
When Food Turns Toxic: How I Became the Canary in the Coal Mine | by Teresa Trimm | Oct, 2025 | MediumLe canari (…) fut longtemps élevé dans les mines où il était utilisé pour détecter le grisou. L’appareil respiratoire de l’oiseau étant fragile, le canari cessait de chanter et mourait dès l’apparition de ce gaz. Daniele
L’employé juif d’un coiffeur parisien va voir son patron et lui dit : « Patron, je dois démissionner ». « Mais pourquoi donc ? » lui répond le patron. « Parce que tous vos employés sont antisémites ! » « Allons bon, mon cher Jean-Claude. Je suis sûr que ce n’est pas vrai. Qu’est ce qui vous fait penser cela ? » « C’est simple, patron. Lorsque je leur dit qu’Hitler a voulu tuer tous les juifs et les coiffeurs… » Le patron l’interrompt : « Mais Jean-Claude, pourquoi les coiffeurs ? » « Vous voyez patron, vous aussi ! » Blague juive
D’abord ils sont venus (…) pour les Juifs, mais je n’ai rien dit parce que je n’étais pas juif … Martin Niemöller
J’ai une prémonition qui ne me quittera pas: ce qui adviendra d’Israël sera notre sort à tous. Si Israël devait périr, l’holocauste fondrait sur nous. Eric Hoffer

Au moment où l’infâme « machin » qui a pour nom « l’Organisation des Nations Unies » ou « Communauté internationale » vient à nouveau d’être utilisé pour empêcher Israël de protéger sa frontière nord, autrement dit son simple droit à l’existence, il faut relire ces paroles fortes d’Eric Hoffer d’il y a presque 40 ans (au lendemain d’une autre et énième tentative victorieuse de ce petit parmi les petits Etats pour continuer à exister) et qui auraient pu être écrites… hier!

Tout comme d’ailleurs les célèbres lignes du pasteur allemand Niemöller: D’abord, ils sont venus pour les juifs  …

D’autres nations victorieuses sur les champs de bataille dictent les conditions de la paix. Mais quand Israël est vainqueur il doit supplier pour obtenir la paix. Chacun attend des Juifs qu’ils soient les seuls vrais Chrétiens sur terre.

La situation particulière d’Israël
Eric Hoffer*
LA Times
26 mai 1968
Traduit par Norbert Lipszyc

*Les Juifs sont un peuple particulier : ce qui est permis à d’autres nations est interdit aux Juifs. D’autres nations expulsent des milliers, et même des millions de gens, et il n’y a pas de problème de réfugiés. La Russie l’a fait, la Pologne, la Tchécoslovaquie l’ont fait, la Turquie a expulsé un million de Grecs, et l’Algérie un million de Français. L’Indonésie a expulsé, Dieu sait combien de Chinois, et personne ne dit un mot au sujet des réfugiés. Mais dans le cas d’Israël, les Arabes déplacés sont devenus d’éternels réfugiés.

Tout le monde insiste sur le fait qu’Israël doit reprendre tout Arabe. Arnold Toynbee appelle ce déplacement des Arabes une atrocité plus grande que tout ce qu’ont commis les Nazis.

D’autres nations victorieuses sur les champs de bataille dictent les conditions de la paix. Mais quand Israël est vainqueur il doit supplier pour obtenir la paix. Chacun attend des Juifs qu’ils soient les seuls
vrais Chrétiens sur terre.

D’autres nations, quand elles sont vaincues, survivent et se rétablissent, mais si Israël était défait une seul fois il serait détruit. Si Nasser avait triomphé, en juin dernier, il aurait effacé Israël de la carte, et personne n’aurait levé le petit doigt pour sauver les Juifs. Aucun engagement pris envers les Juifs par quelque gouvernement que ce soit, dont le nôtre, ne vaut le papier sur lequel il est écrit.

Le monde entier s’indigne quand on meurt au Vietnam, ou quand deux noirs sont exécutés en Rhodésie. Mais quand Hitler massacra les Juifs, personne ne protesta auprès de lui.

Les Suédois, qui sont prêts à rompre leurs relations diplomatiques avec les Etats-Unis à cause de ce que nous faisons au Vietnam, ne bronchèrent pas quand Hitler massacrait les Juifs. Ils envoyèrent à Hitler du minerai de fer de première qualité, des roulements à bille, et assurèrent l’entretien de ses trains de troupes destinés à la Norvège. Les Juifs sont seuls au monde. Si Israël survit, ce sera uniquement grâce aux efforts des Juifs. Et aux ressources juives.

Pourtant, en ce moment même, Israël est notre seul allié inconditionnel et fiable. Nous pouvons compter sur Israël plus qu’Israël peut compter sur nous. Il suffit seulement d’imaginer ce qui se serait produit, l’été dernier, si les Arabes, avec leurs soutiens russes, avaient gagné la guerre, pour comprendre à quel point la survie d’Israël est vitale pour l’Amérique, pour l’Occident en général.

J’ai une prémonition qui ne me quittera pas : ce qui adviendra d’Israël sera notre sort à tous. Si Israël devait périr, l’holocauste fondrait sur nous.

Eric Hoffer

* Eric Hoffer était un Américain non-Juif, philosophe et sociologue. Il est né en 1902 et mort en 1983. Il a écrit 9 livres et reçu la Médaille Présidentielle de la Liberté. Son premier livre, /The True Believer/ – Le Vrai Croyant, publié en 1951, est considéré comme un classique.

Israel’s peculiar position
Eric Hoffer
LA Times
5/26/68

The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews.

Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people and there is no refugee problem. Russian did it, Poland and Czechoslovakia did it, Turkey threw out a million Greeks, and Algeria a million Frenchmen. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese-and no one says a word about refugees. But in the case of Israel the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees.

Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab. Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis.

Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious it must sue for peace. Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world.

Other nations when they are defeated survive and recover but should Israel be defeated it would be destroyed. Had Nasser triumphed last June he would have wiped Israel off the map, and no one would have lifted a finger to save the Jews.

No commitment to the Jews by any government, including our own, is worth the paper it is written on. There is a cry of outrage all over the world when people die in Vietnam or when two Negroes are executed in Rhodesia. But when Hitler slaughtered Jews no one remonstrated with him.

The Swedes, who are ready to break of diplomatic relations with America because of what we do in Vietnam, did not let out a peep when Hitler was slaughtering Jews. They sent Hitler choice iron ore, and ball bearings, and serviced his troop trains to Norway. The Jews are alone in the world. If Israel survives, it will be solely because of Jewish efforts. And Jewish resources.

Yet at this moment Israel is our only reliable and unconditional ally. We can rely more on Israel than Israel can rely on us. And one has only to imagine what would have happened last summer had the Arabs and their Russian backers won the war to realize how vital the survival of Israel is to America and the West in general.

I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish the holocaust will be upon us.

Image 8 commentaires | Image anti-christianisme, antisionisme/antisémitisme, discriminations/persécutions, Islam-Occident, libertés, relativisme culturel, religion, totalitarisme, Violences et crimes de masse | Image Permalien
Image Publié par jcdurbant

« Entrées Précédentes