Elites
Lately we've heard a lot of criticism of "the elite". Strangely, much of this criticism has come from members of the right-wing media and political elite.
If the complaint against "elite" opinion is that it's wrong, the fact that it's elite opinion is irrelevant.
If the objection is that it's the opinion of an "elite", why are people disqualified from voicing an opinion — or necessarily mistaken in their beliefs — simply because they are a member of an "elite"?
If the concern is that "elite" opinion differs from majority sentiment, since when was the majority always right?
What matters is not whether an opinion comes from an elite or not. What counts is whether the view is elitist — i.e., unjustifiably favouring the more powerful, wealthy, talented and fortunate.
Are the interests of low- and middle-income people under threat from the socially progressive elite which is sympathetic to reconciliation, a republic, a new flag, and less harsh treatment of asylum seekers? Or are their interests under threat from the economically elitist doctrines of the conservative elite which regularly demonises the socially progressive elite? Obviously the latter!
The pretence of right-wing elitists to be on the side of the average battler against the evil progressive elite is the con of the year.
Brent Howard
Rydalmere NSW
Israel I
Sorry, Philip Mendes, but Narendra Mohan Kommalapati is quite clear in denouncing the State of Israeli as a racist state, while you muddily mix up the Israeli state and the population that lives under its misrule.
The state is a weapon of class rule — it is the ruler's state. In the case of Israel, this means police, army, courts and government based on the legally enforced dispossession and subjugation of the Palestinian people.
Mendes' misanalysis of the state is open for all to see when he suggests that applying Kommalapati's analysis to Australia would see us "expelling or killing all white immigrant Australians by violence, and creating a new state consisting solely of indigenous Aborigines"!
I admit to a penchant for destroying the Australian capitalist state — seeing an end to the racist police force which terrorises indigenous people; seeing the deadly mandatory sentencing and detention laws smashed; seeing the corporate politicians removed from power. But I hardly think that puts "all white immigrant Australians" in danger!
Mendes' comparison would between the Jewish capitalist state of Israel and the Australian capitalist state would only hold true if most of Australia's indigenus inhabitants, like the Palestinians, had been expelled from Australia and were denied the right to return to it.
The dismantling (destruction) of the Zionist state of Israel and its replacement by a democratic secular state in no way means destruction of the Jewish inhabitants of Palestine — it means dismantling all racist laws, courts, army, police, government, and replacing them with a state which treats each citizen equally, regardless of their nationality, race or religion.
That is why progressive people, many Jews included, oppose Israel — not because they want to kill anyone, but on the contrary, because they want to destroy a racist, killer state.
Paul Benedek
Harris Park NSW [Abridged]
Israel II
Philip Mendes must have read two different letters by Narendra Mohan Kommalapati. The versions I read called for "the dissolution or abolition of the Zionist state and the creation of a secular and democratic republic".
In Mendes' version, Kommalapati is alleged to "specifically" call for "the destruction of the Jewish State of Israel and its replacement by an Arab State of Palestine ... the equivalent of expelling or killing all white immigrant Australians by violence, and creating a new state consisting solely of indigenous Aborigines." Mendes thus implies that Kommalapati's "Arab state" requires expelling and killing all Jews "by violence" (how else are people killed?).
I wonder if GLW can resolve this dilemma for me. Does this mean: (a) My internet version of GLW is different from Mendes' print version, or (b) in post-modern wisdom, in order to replace a racist (e.g., Zionist, apartheid, etc.) with a secular and democratic state, there is no alternative to killing or expelling ("with violence") all the civilians of the dominating national group as they are incurably corrupted with the racist ideology of the ruling class (as Mendes implies with his tired stereotypes of Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews).
Therefore, to really move on to a democratic and non-racist state, South Africa's rulers had better get on with the task of slaughtering millions of whites or driving them into the sea.
What makes it so impossibly difficult for left Zionists to comprehend words like "democratic", "secular" and "non-racist" is their unwillingness to accept that a "Jewish" state in the region, by definition, can only be racist, because democracy and secularism require equal rights for all living there (or expelled from there and desiring to return), and millions of these are not Jewish. "left Zionism" is a contradiction in terms, like "left racism".
Michael Karadjis
Hanoi [Abridged]
Israel III
I thank Philip Mendes for coming out with his second response (GLW #473) to my rejoinder to his earlier letter (GLW #472). I am now convinced that Mendes is into the tactic of deliberate misreading of my letters to label me with a softer version of the Zionist heresy ("anti-Zionist fundamentalism"). I am basically (hence fundamentally) opposed to Zionism (which is based on the lie of a land without people) and see no room for compromise with it.
I stand by my claim that I argued for the destruction (or abolition) of the Zionist state and its replacement by a secular democratic state.
If as Mendes claims, the Askhenazi elites are secular and peace loving, they could fight for the abolition of the Zionist state and replace it with a new republic where Jews, Christians, Muslims, agnostics and atheists (or Jews and Arabs if you please) have the same rights and people driven out of their homes into fetid refugee camps are allowed to return and helped to resettle and stop the policy of building Zionist settlements in new territories. The Sephardic may tend to be the supporters of the Israeli right but the leadership of the Israeli state, politics, military and the economy is in the hands of the Askhenazi.
Coming to the analogy of killing all white Australians (as Mendes accuses me of leading to), surely it doesn't take any great genius to see that I had never advocated or hinted at such a conclusion.
@letterauthw = Narendra Mohan Kommalapati
Canberra [Abridged]
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, December 5, 2001.
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