Yom HaShoah and The Question of Memory: Whose memory matters?

image is from here

In response to visiting the U.S. [Nazi] Holocaust Memorial Museum, white Western Jewish feminist Andrea Dworkin wrote, The Unremembered: Searching for Women at the Holocaust Memorial Museum.
 

When atrocity happens to women, men often don't know about it even while men do what it is men don't remember. When I remember what happened to the Jews of Europe in the early to middle part of the last century, I wonder how it can be that U.S. white Jews with class privilege can now so easily overlook the contemporary genocide Indigenous people in North America and beyond. I know how it can be. We say "we didn't know", the same excuse used by white gentile Germans. Utter this phrase to Jews of European descent with regard to how the Nazi Holocaust (HaShoah) could occur, to people who lost family in WWII in concentration camps, and you'll likely be met with an expression of exasperation and anger. Appropriately. When I attempt to bring the topic of white's genocide against Native Americans, I am met with a look of disbelief or incomprehension. What kind of genocide do you mean?

The kind that results in the organised, systematic destruction of a people, I might say. The kind that causes the dissolution of culture, sickness, and mass death. Is the presence of genocide only to be measured against the particularly heinous methods used by Nazis in Europe? If there are no gas chambers and ovens, but there is virulent colonialism and racism, is a genocide not occurring? 

Please see: Ward Churchill Speaks: On Colonialism as Genocide from Maximilian Forte on Vimeo.

I won't get too far into what the Israeli military is doing to Palestinian people, not because I think it unworthy of attention, but because my Jewishness is not connected to Israel. I have a homeland called New York City. Israeli Jews are not, directly, my people. I have no personal emotional or political connection to them. My people are white U.S. Americans, and U.S. Jews of every color. As a white U.S. Jew, I do have blood on my hands to the extent that the U.S. actively supports racist, murderous apartheid in Israel and the region. I oppose the oppression and destruction of Muslim Palestinians by Israeli Jews. And the ethnic and religious divides there are not so sharp as one might believe if one only consumes U.S. media. Muslims and Palestinians live in Israel. Israeli Jews and Muslims live in Palestine. Generally, though, I am far too ignorant about the particulars of the history there to have much of use to say that could be considered informed.

I haven't even read Dworkin's book, Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation. I have read a review of it by Veronica A. Ouma (*here*), but some of the assertions about Dworkin's political views are inaccurate, such as stating she supported or advocated female supremacy. She most certainly, and explicitly, did not. Proof of that is here:

Biological Superiority:

The World's Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea  

Two days from now marks the eight anniversary of Andrea's unexpected death on 9 April 2005. I miss her voice in my world. She spoke against inhumanity in so many forms. There are few people who show such literary commitment to justice and liberation for women. I remember her. I remember those six million Jews destroyed in Europe from 1935-45. And the other five million killed during that time, in that place, who were not Jewish. I remember, on the 19th anniversary of the beginning of the Rwandan Genocide, the 800,000 Tutsis killed by Hutu extremists. I remember Indigenous Americans exterminated on this land and those who are being destroyed currently. On this day, Yom HaShoah, I remember that past and this present.

On the "Occupy" Protests: the historical and structural meaning of Political Occupation

image is from here

In case I didn't mention it last time, I don't like the choice to call these protests, located in central parts of many cities, or in the business districts specifically, "Occupy ... " Occupation is an act of white aggression, of patriarchal violation, of domineering intrusion, and of militaristic imperialistic conquering. I don't think it describes what is happening or is an appropriate political term to communicate the politics of the protests, which is by the relatively disenfranchised, the newly disenfranchised (middle class folks, relative to the working poor who have never been enfranchised).

Not that they asked me, and not that they should ask me. But, well, this is my blog for putting forth such thoughts.

After some good discussion with a friend, I come to see, as she does, that it makes sense that the white middle class is taking un-owned leadership of this wave of social-political protests and demonstrations against various forms of tyranny. I saw unowned because the white middle class males--mostly males--who are in leadership speak of wanting an egalitarian non-hierarchical structure, without admitting that they are the most enfranchised and therefore institutionally empowered people speaking out.  Pretending we can all speak and be heard is a liberal conceit that no one who has been systematically silenced will likely fall for. I see how white men are and will continue to make their voices the most media-recognised, with great help from white male supremacist media controllers who usually and ubiquitously (if not always) consider white males "experts" on anything.

I watch how Black and Brown people, many of them women, are speaking out about economic and other injustices and how the understandings they bring to the public forum, noting how race, gender, sexuality, class, national, and immigration status effect who is heard and who policy is drafted for (at least allegedly)--by a population of elites overwhelmingly white and male.

I watch how Indigenous activists put Indigenist concerns and platforms forth, only to be de-centered by the white males with class privilege.

Let us not forget that Wall Street is on occupied land--not belonging to anyone currently protesting there. Let's consider for the moment the ways in which this history is biased and organised around the interests of white occupying men:

[In the late 17th century,] Dutch settlers had built a wall to protect themselves from Indians, priates [sic], and other dangers. The path had become a bustling commercial thoroughfare because it joined the banks of the East River with those of the Hudson River on the west. The path was named Wall Street. Early merchants built their warehouses and shops on this path, along with a city hall and a church. New York was the U.S. national capitol from 1785 until 1790 and Federal Hall was built on Wall Street. George Washington was inaugurated on the steps of this building. [source: *here*]

We can note who is determined to have needed protection from whom: white colonists from Indians. The truth of the matter is that it was Indians waging efforts at self-defence against the murderous interests of white settlers to take land and everything else by any means necessary. Those who took possession of the land that is Wall Street and NYC's central financial district, as well as the shapers of the values that make people rich, are not in any way Indigenist or democratic. Corporate capitalism is inherently and unavoidably exploitive, oppressive and murderous. The goal of the biggest and wealthiest is to sufficiently hide the blood and the bodies from the masses not being murdered. This is quite effectively done through controlling media and how stories of atrocity are[n't] told.

I recommend replacing the term "Occupy" with (Radically) "Transform". The latter term may not be masculinist enough, however, for white men who want to participate in political practice that maintains the patriarchal status quo. For more on the meaning of "occupation" please see these chapters in Intercourse, by Andrea Dworkin:

Chapter 5: Possession
Chapter 7: Occupation/Collaboration

Occupation, socially-sexually-economically-politically speaking, is an act committed by the powerful against the powerless, structurally, in real life.  To believe otherwise is to indulge in egalitarian fantasies we cannot afford to pretend currently exist. The term is routinely used, however, by callous and self-serving elites to describe "others" being in places forcibly, possessively owned by elites. So, immigrants, poor people, gay men, and women are said to occupy places they don't belong: in nation-states where their forebears once lived; in neighborhoods that were once white (that were once "occupied" by Indigenous people); in military camps presumed to be effectively murderous of Brown people; and rapist towards women, if only heterosexual; in boardrooms and offices, shops and streets where men are presumed to rule.

A Broch Tzu Columbus! End Columbus Day and the Rapist, Racist, Genocidal White Male Supremacist Society it Annually Rides in on

this image was found on Facebook

From Wikipedia, First Landing of Columbus on the Shores of the New World, after the painting by Discoro

What would Amerikkka be without rape, slavery, and genocide? And I don't only mean rape, slavery, and genocide from the past. I also mean what's going on presently that WHM supremacist corporate politicians and corporate media and the followers of each will not speak about even with something called "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the press".

From my 11 October 2009 ECD post:

The Rapist Savage: Christopher Columbus, First Known White Man to Organise the Sexual Slavery of Girls and Women in the Americas

At the beginning and very end of this blogpost are images that ought to be seen on Monday, 12 October, 2009 ECD. And every other day too.

I have seen a poster and t-shirt with this statement many times, but never before now with women in the image as warriors. This image is GREAT, but when will it become reality? When will this land belong once again only to the people of the Indigenous Nations of Turtle Island?:

image found here

A DEMAND TO END COLUMBUS DAY IN THE RAPIST GENOCIDAL U.S.!!!!