LENIN'S TOMB

Monday, October 05, 2009

Marek Edelman posted by Richard Seymour

This is what Marek Edelman did. In April 1943 he, along with some confederates of his - notably Mordecai Anielewicz, Chaim Frimmer and Adam Halperin - embarked on a violent uprising, using a combination of home-made and obsolete weapons, against the Nazis. Their aim was to stop the Nazis from transporting them to Treblinka, one of the Operation Reinhard camps, and murdering them. Two thirds of the ghetto's population had already been taken away by the time the Jewish Fighting Organisation was formed. The Nazi regime in Poland was powerful, and had a powerful ally in Polish antisemitism. The institutions of segregation that the Nazis had introduced upon entering Poland were effective at isolating the Jewish population, and opportunities for coordinated resistance were few in number. Individual acts of resistance, such as escape, 'passing' as gentile, hiding possessions rather than allowing them to be taken, refusing to doff one's cap to a German soldier, and so on, had been accompanied by more collective forms of resistance, such as the setting up of schools for children, the observation of Jewish holidays, and clandestine political activity. But until 1943, there was no insurgency to speak of.

Poland had, on the Nazi invasion, been divided into sections integrated into the Reich, an eastern section ruled by Russia, and a remaining territory ruled by the Nazis, known as the 'General Government'. Warsaw was under the control of the General Government. In that territory, well before the promulgation of the Final Solution, Jews could expect to be beaten, rounded up for menial labour, forced to dance naked for the amusement of German troops, and have their property siezed. They were excluded from owning businesses, and from participating in certain occupations, and by the end of September 1939, the first stages of ghettoization were under way. By the end of 1940, Jews in Warsaw were confined to an area not much larger than one square mile. The peak population of the Ghetto was half a million, at which point the average room occupancy was thirteen. Deprived of jobs and incomes, much of the population began to starve, turning to beggary or smuggling to survive. But smuggling was dangerous, as anyone caught climbing the wall - usually children - would be gunned down on sight by any German soldier. Residents had to develop self-help organizations to ensure the survival of the poorest. But it wasn't enough. By May 1941, half the residents of the Ghetto were starving to death.

By 1942, news began to filter through of the massacres taking place, and of the extermination that was afoot. But for a long time few people were ready to believe such accounts, and there remained optimism that the Nazis would be defeated in the war, and life would return to normal. Edelman recorded: "The Warsaw Ghetto did not believe in the reports. All who clung to life would not believe that their lives could be taken from them in such a manner." But mass deportations began in July of that year, with thousands sent to Treblinka every day for six weeks on end. Even then, the response was to seek protection by getting employment in German industries, as it was thought that this would protect one from being deported. The Nazis sought to encourage any confusion they could by forcing victims to write reassuring postcards and letters back to the Warsaw Ghetto, before putting them to their deaths. Some of the traditional religious leadership argued that God would deliver a miracle and save the situation. The Zionist leader Dr Isaac Schipper argued that collective resistance would bring "annihilation upon the ghetto". On the other hand, communists, Bund socialists, and socialist Zionists believed that annihilation was afoot whatever they did, and urged collective resistance. Only when all hope was lost, then, was there any hope of resistance.

At the end of September 1942, two organisations emerged to resist the Nazis: the Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa (ZOB) or Jewish Fighting Organisation, and the Żydowski Związek Wojskowy (ZZW) or Jewish Military Union. The latter was led by right-wing Betari youth inspired by revisionist Zionism, and the former by a coalition of leftists. It was the ZOB to which Edelman belonged, as a member of the leftist Jewish bund. Those who could 'pass' as 'Aryans' slipped out of the ghetto, risking death to smuggle in weapons. The ZOB and ZZW forcibly taxed those few remaining Jews - mainly those in the Jewish police - who had still had assets or income to speak of, and used this to build their armoury. The Jewish police received the most severe treatment, as they had purloined the property of Jews who were sent off to be exterminated. By April 1943, the ZZW had about 400 members armed with pistols and hand grenades, and the ZOB had 500 members who had acquired pistols, hand grenades, some machine guns and submachine guns, and 30 rifles. They were ridiculously outgunned and, if it came to it, outnumbered. But as the Nazis prepared their final expulsion, to begin on 18 April 1943, the remaining population - only 30,000 by then - was hidden in prepared bunkers. The fighters situated themselves in the vacated apartments, and waited.

It took a month of bitter fighting, with Europe's most ruthless killing machine pitted against a poorly armed guerilla outfit, before General Jurgen Stroop could declare Warsaw 'judenrein'. The Ghetto was in ruins, and most of the residents were either dead or caught and sent to the death camps. But the Nazis would have killed every last resident far more efficiently if there had been no resistance, and for the first time their aura of invincibility was cracked. They suddenly had to deal with rebellions in Treblinka, in August 1943, and in Sobibor in October the same year. These rebellions, by prisoners working under constant surveillance with little access to materials, and in the most unpromising circumstances possible, were circumvented, and hundreds of prisoners were killed in reprisals, though many were able to make an escape.

Edelman had escaped the Warsaw Ghetto on 9 May 1943, using the sewers. The next year a general uprising took place across the whole city of Warsaw, in which he also took part. That too was ruthlessly crushed, and the Nazis didn't hesitate to wipe out hundreds of thousands of civilians in the aftermath. Again, Edelman escaped, and when the Nazis were finally defeated he went on to live as a cardiologist in Poland. He resisted Stalinism as well, becoming active in the workers' defence committees in the 1970s, and had a key role in the Solidarity movement when it emerged. Though he was politically centrist in his later years, particularly after the collapse of the USSR, Edelman could still arouse controversy. His resistance to the Nazi holocaust did not lead him to become a supporter of Zionism. He refused to move to Israel, and he always rejected Zionism's claim that the Warsaw Ghetto was a model of Jewish liberation that led to the establishment of the Israeli state. He sent a letter to the Palestinians in 2002 that, while it criticised tactics such as suicide attacks, affirmed solidarity with their struggle and compared theirs with that of the Jews of Warsaw.

One last thing. I have been hearing about this film, in which a crack squad of Jewish soldiers, led by an American with Brad Pitt's face, hunt down, torture, terrorise and kill Nazis. And I have been thinking about how unsatisfying this is. It is a revenge fantasy, not a document of resistance. It is not about stopping the judeocide, but about exacting a price in blood - seeking payment for a moral debt that could, by definition, never be discharged. I was thinking how much better it would be if there had been Marek Edelmans organising resistance in the ghettos of Germany in 1938. I'd certainly take Edelman over Tarantino any day of the week.

You can read Edelman's account of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising here.

Labels: antifascism, antisemitism, concentration camps, death squads, fascism, marek edelman, nazism, warsaw ghetto uprising

Saturday, May 23, 2009

A note on 'humanitarian' concentration camps posted by Richard Seymour

The British invented concentration camps, in South Africa during the Boer War. They were described by their architects as humanitarian institutions designed to protect the widows and abandoned wives and mothers of white Boers from the potential depredations of the natives. They were, of course, places of extraordinary cruelty and neglect where tens of thousands died. This reflects the tendency for liberal ideals to transform into their opposites under capitalism, a tendency which marxists have sometimes been inclined to describe in terms of the literary tropes of 'the dialectic' (which tropes they have absurdly taken to be in some sense a 'science', and one with cosmological implications at that). It happens that institutions of terror and cruelty have so often been organised under a humanitarian remit that one is inclined to wonder if the values that supposedly gave rise to them are, 'dialectically', interpenetrated with their opposites. And here it comes up again. The terms of humanitarianism turn out to have crucial national and raciological dimensions (this will be vaguely familiar to British watchers of the news,who are used to being told about 'Britons' who died in a particular calamity). Sri Lanka constructs what it refers to as 'refugee camps', to contain the victims of its war, who happen to be its supposed racial enemies. And in these camps there will be a quarter of a million people without the necessities of survival, being raped and beaten and humiliated because they are Tamils. The government turns away aid (just as the Bush administration did during Katrina), and justifies it on the grounds that aid is an affront to the dignity of the victims who don't need charity. The spectral 'international community' is advised that 'standards' are being maintained. But even if this were true, these 'standards' are being applied to a programme of obliteration, a programme carried out with intent to destroy the resistance of the Tamil community to its 'inclusion' in Sri Lankan sovereignty. This is a kind of neoliberal 'humanitarianism': if we can destroy any figment of radical statist opposition to the Sri Lankan national unit, we can promote growth and ultimately benefit those poor Tamil farmers while we're at it. Of course this promise is a lie, but surely the point is that such promises are routinely made to accomodate people to exploitation and immiseration. The recent success of the Congress Party in the Indian elections depended in part on their promise that with some modest pro-poor initiatives and opposition to communalism, the country would experience GDP growth that would lift all boats. On such ostensibly humanitarian edifices, enormous works of extraction and exploitation are constructed. And if, in some cases, it requires the imposition of technologies of authority originating in 'Old Europe', who is going to be sentimental enough to oppose it? If necessary, I should think, a healthy round of executions would be appropriate, for the good of the victims if nothing else.

Labels: 'humanitarian intervention', british empire, concentration camps, dialectics, liberal imperialism, sri lanka, tamil tigers, the liberal defense of murder

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Evil Rising: demonising the Mau Mau posted by Richard Seymour

The history of anti-imperialist insurgency is predictably littered with demonic imagery. The foes of empire are invariably barbarised, and of course this is as true of the Iraqi resistance as it once was of the Mau Mau. But the Mau Mau were considered uniquely evil, unlike other enemies of the British Empire such as the Communists in Malaysia, even though the suppression of the latter was almost as brutal. The Mau Mau was a movement that the British could only consider a recrudescence of African savagery and tribalism. Louis Leakey's 1954 book, Defeating Mau Mau, described the movement as an essentially religious one, a debased version of Christianity, that had attempted to usurp legitimate grievances for its own unspecified (but nefarious) ends. Those grievances, for Leakey, did not call into question the supposition that "European civilization" or "the white man was superior", but rather confirmed it. The grievances had only arisen as a result of the civilizing impact of whitey, so the argument went. The settler leaders, who relied on the labour of the Kikuyu on the 'White Highlands', were certainly convinced of their innate superiority, and were enraged by the resistance to their dominance.

The Mau Mau had emerged initially in 1948, just when the old European colonial powers were looking vulnerable, and just after the Kikuyu Central Association - the main political organisation that had existed beforehand - was banned. The immediate cause of their emergence was the occupation of lands in the central highlands by 30,000 white settlers, who appropriated the labour of 250,000 indigenous workers in the process and had to defeat often highly localised resistance to achieve dominance. The Kikuyu were those most affected by this process, with 1 and a quarter million of them driven into a 2000 square miles of land. By 1948, the reserve system - strikingly similar to the forms of segregation that had existed in South Africa until that time - was entering into a severe crisis. A chiefly minority remained wealthy, but the majority were being driven into utter destitution as they were worked to the bone and subject to austere political surveillance and repression. The colonial authorities believed that the declining returns experienced by the Kikuyu on their diminished land was really the result of the 'primitive' farming methods of the natives, and so restricted them to subsistence production, denying them access to the expanding colonial market, which of course made the problem worse. So, although they had provided not only the stock troops of the labour market but also fought on Britain's behalf during the Second World War (in fact many of the early Mau Mau had been soldiers for the British), they were treated contemptuously, exploited intensely, and their political demands were ignored. Such were the "legitimate grievances" that colonial writers paid patronising lip service to.

The longer term cause of the emergence of the Mau Mau was the rise of nationalism, particularly among Kikuyu women, since the 1920s. And this is such an important element of the story that early accounts tended to give it as little attention as possible. Women were central to the Mau Mau's non-combatant wing, the 'passive wing' as the British called it, and were thus a target of British policies and propaganda designed to wean them away from the movement. In fact, the colonial records tended to treat the women in the movement as either victims or prostitutes who had become intimate with Mau Mau members. They were either 'forced' into the movement through degrading rituals, or taken up as 'concubines'. And, in the course of Mau Mau resistance, the British made a great effort to portray women as the main victims of its (actual and alleged) atrocities, even though women constituted a small minority of those actually killed.

Aside from denying that crucial role of women in the insurgency, the British had to separate the Mau Mau from any claim on Kenyan nationalism, which would be potentially sympathetic. Instead, it had to be seen as an exclusively tribal movement, not only predominantly Kikuyu but in strict opposition to other tribal/ethnic groups in the country. (This happens an enduring issue in the historiography, with anti-Mau Mau intellectuals both inside and outside Kenya benefiting in part from a refulgence of imperialist sentiment in the 1980s and 1990s.) Leakey's account of the movement during the 1950s was the dominant one in colonial accounts of the period: the Mau Mau were tribalist and religious, not nationalist. Their "insane frenzy" and "fanatical discipline" could only be the manifestation of a cultish outfit, organised around leaders lusting for power (whereas the white settler elite and the colonial powers were apparently averse to their own enormous power). The Colonial Office held that the Mau Mau leaders not only wanted power, not only could not be animated by the real injustices of the colonial system, but were rejecting its benefits. Thus, the Mau Mau "seeks to lead the Africans of Kenya back to the bush and savagery, not forward into progress", according to a report to the Secretary of State for the Colonies. In fact, as the historian Bruce Berman explains, this account of the Mau Mau as a fanatical cult was immediately taken up by the Western academia, particularly American anthropologists who inserted it into an account of "tribal revival movements" and "crisis cults" which had been developed to explain native American resistance to the white colonials.

Secrecy was a crucial component of the counterinsurgency, in part because it was decided that the less that left-wing anti-colonialists in Britain knew about what was going on, the better. What was known was therefore bound to lead to erroneous conclusions, even among the principled minority who were vocally hostile to colonialism. Of course, to the extent that this was successful, it enabled the British to subject people to processes of 'villagization' (concentration camps) and mass executions. Together with the hangings, the horrible conditions in the 'villages' for the duration of the war killed up to 100,000 Kenyans according to Caroline Elkins. British officials used a range of measures for controlling the imprisoned population, including sexual violence and physical punishment. Of course, it need hardly be added that the main victims of this widespread sexual violence were women, precisely the supposed objects of British paternal protection.

Well, today's counterinsurgency propaganda has as its goals the desire to separate the resistance from any claim on Iraqi nationalism, which would be potentially sympathetic. It has to bestialise the resistance by making it seems as if the minority of atrocities characterise the whole. It has to demonise it as inherently, and essentially, misogynistic, as well as a religious/tribal affair. And it has to deprive us of access to honest reporting on the situation, through various strategies of media management, including the odd ad hoc death penalty for those not embedded with the troops. To the extent that it is successful, it acculturates people to the grave atrocities that the occupiers see as necessary to maintain their rule and secure a pliant regime.

Labels: british empire, colonialism, concentration camps, kenya, kikuyu, mau mau, resistance