Andrew Ferguson Neil (born 21 May 1949) is a Scottish journalist and broadcaster who is chairman of The Spectator and presenter of The Andrew Neil Show on Channel 4. He was editor of The Sunday Times from 1983 to 1994. He has presented BBC political programmes and was chairman of GB News.
Born in Paisley, Renfrewshire, Neil attended Paisley Grammar School, before studying at the University of Glasgow. He entered journalism in 1973 as a correspondent for The Economist.
Neil was appointed editor of The Sunday Times by Rupert Murdoch in 1983, and held this position until 1994. After this, he became a contributor to the Daily Mail. He was chief executive and editor-in-chief of Press Holdings Media Group. In 1988, he became founding chairman of Sky TV, also part of Murdoch's News Corporation. He worked for the BBC for 25 years until 2020, fronting various programmes, including Sunday Politics and This Week on BBC One and Daily Politics, Politics Live and The Andrew Neil Show on BBC Two. Since 2008 he has been chairman of Press Holdings, whose titles include The Spectator, and ITP Media Group. Following his departure from the BBC, he became founding chairman of GB News and a presenter on the channel, but resigned amid controversy in September 2021. He later joined Channel 4 in 2022 as presenter of The Andrew Neil Show, which shares the same name as his former BBC Two programme.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Neil
Ik verzoek de lezer nu goed op te letten: in The Daily Mail Online van 8 juli 2023 wees de prominente opiniemaker Andrew Neil onder de kop ‘The Poles are rearming at a breathtaking rate and are now Europe's rising power’ op het volgende:
Around 130 miles west of Warsaw at Powidz on the way to Berlin, America has created a massive military logistics hub of seven gigantic warehouses jam-packed with everything needed to arm, equip and mobilize at speed a full U.S. armored brigade for combat.
At a cost of $360 million, it’s Nato’s biggest infrastructure project in 30 years. The U.S. forces are not there merely to act as a tripwire. They are there to defend Poland.
Warsaw has also been pivotal in funnelling aid to Ukraine. More than 90 per cent of all military and humanitarian assistance going to that war-torn country goes through Rzeszow in south-east Poland.
It’s only an hour’s drive to the Ukraine border. In the early days of the war there was a problem: who would protect the aid as it was shipped by road and rail from Rzeszow into Ukraine. As Nato members, neither American nor Polish forces could be involved.
The Poles came up with an answer. They put out a call for those who’d recently retired from Polish special forces to sign up for the task as a sort of private army. The veterans responded in their hundreds, all still fit and well-trained. Problem solved.
The rise of Poland as a military and diplomatic power of significance is rewriting the power balance in Europe. Taken together with the Nato membership of Sweden and Finland (and some rearming of their own), power in Europe is tilting east, away from Paris and Berlin, both of whom have lost their way and now squabble among themselves.
President Macron struggles to cope with unrest on his streets, Chancellor Scholz with unrest in his unruly coalition.
A resurgent Poland is also of enormous significance for Britain. Every Pole knows that Polish fighter pilots were crucial to our victory over the Nazis in the Battle of Britain.
Now they also know that Britain, under Boris Johnson, was the first to agree with Warsaw that Ukraine needed massive military aid to withstand Putin’s invasion.
We see the Russian threat in much the same way as the Poles. Indeed, we see Europe in much the same way as the Poles.
In a speech last March at Germany’s Heidelberg University, Poland’s prime minister said: ‘Europe is at an historic turning point. We need to shake up the Brussels status quo and stop those who want a superstate run by a narrow elite. Only nation states can safeguard nations — their culture, society, economy, politics, military security. The alternatives are illusory and utopian.’
The Polish government, of course, has problems of its own with Brussels. But these words could have come from the mouth of even a pro-Remain British prime minister any time in the past 20 or 30 years.
It is too late for Britain to play its part in reforming the EU but, as France and Germany decline in importance, the new rising power in Europe is a close ally of ours who sees the world largely as we do.
We have excellent relations with Warsaw, Stockholm, Helsinki, the Baltic states and other east European countries, all of whom have a high regard for us. It is a huge opportunity to continue to play a major role in Europe, even outside the EU, if only British statecraft can rise to the occasion.
Is it too much to expect the Foreign Office to desist from constantly cozying up to a Franco-German hegemony that is in retreat, and to put more emphasis on building military, political, security and cultural ties with our new and increasingly important friends in the East?
I understand our diplomats’ love affair with Paris. But I can assure them Warsaw has its delights too — and it’s much more welcoming.
From Judaism to Fascism: How Zionists Turned Their Backs on Their Own Culture
For the Zionists, the drive to climb the blood-soaked ladder of imperialism, to no longer be on the bottom rungs, shrouded not only their humanity but their own cultural teachings.
WASHINGTON — In late June of this year, New Scientist blandly reported that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) had ‘used a swarm of small drones to locate, identify and attack Hamas militants,’ the first documented case of a drone swarm being used in so-called combat.
In his book, ‘Exterminate All The Brutes,' Sven Lindqvist contextualizes Adolf Hitler’s atrocities in the imperialist violence of the nineteenth century, and in one chapter outlines how European artillery advancements gave colonizers both emotional and physical distance from the indigenous Africans they slaughtered. Europeans were an ‘invisible and unreachable opponent,’ capable of being ‘victorious without even being present.’ This can’t really be called combat, and indeed even Winston Churchill referred to it as ‘only a sporting element in a splendid game.’ Combat was something gentlemen did and in the imperialist mindset, of course, the Africans were savages, barely even human.
There’s a thread that links this kind of ‘sport’ from the atrocities in Africa to the Holocaust and now, so ironically, to the state of Israel.
YOUR LEBENSRAUM, MY LEBENSRAUM
In the 1890s, a German zoologist named Friedrich Ratzel coined the term ‘Lebensraum,’ which literally translates to living space. Those who have studied the Holocaust might be familiar with it as the Third Reich’s reasoning for invading Central and Eastern Europe. Well, this is where they got the idea. Besides the European Scramble for Africa, Ratzel had been inspired by his travels to North America, where he saw how white colonizers were taking land by force. Seeing this as a positive and indeed necessary transgression, Ratzel fashioned a brutal Darwinian ideology: in order to acquire sufficient Lebensraum, inferior races have to be displaced, which incidentally often means they will die and leave the space entirely. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
The whole concept of Zionism is that Jews need specific and exclusive Lebensraum. Therefore, others must be displaced. This displacement, far from being a negative or even cruel endeavor, merely proves the supremacy of the displacer, thereby proving the necessity of exterminating the displaced. As Lindqvist writes ‘during Hitler’s childhood, a major element in the European view of mankind was the conviction that “inferior races” were by nature condemned to extinction; the true compassion of the superior races consisted in helping them on the way.’
During the Holocaust, Jews were an ‘inferior race.’ Today in Israel, Palestinians are an ‘inferior race.’ As reporter and The Electronic Intifada Associate Editor Nora Barrows-Friedman told me when I asked her how Zionists respond to Jewish teachings of solidarity with the oppressed: ‘When you talk to Zionists about Jewish teachings and how that relates to the Palestinians, they say “well we’re not oppressing them, they’re not even people,”’ a line that could have easily been taken from Hitler himself. And when Adolf was still just a young lad in Austria, that same sub-human paradigm fueled the celebratory reports of European barbarity in Africa, as well as the U.S. and Canadian genocide of indigenous peoples in North America.
Zionists were likewise inspired by their socio-political surroundings and, as Barrows-Friedman notes, ‘were explicit about their colonialist aims. In the original documents that Zionists drew up, they specifically say “this is a colonial project,”’ she explains. ‘Everyone was doing the colonialism thing, and they [Zionists] wanted in on it.’ This wasn’t about ‘going home.’ Yes, some Jews have always lived in the area now known as Israel, and there were plenty living there quite peacefully as Palestinians up until 1948. Jews have also lived almost everywhere else. We are not a people without a home; we are a people with many homes.
ZIONISM AND SUPREMACY: PAYING OPPRESSION FORWARD
Indeed, this concept of borderless solidarity is something that has inspired many Jews to be active in liberation and justice movements. And while Zionism is packaged as the need for a safe space for Jews, it’s clear that this wasn’t about safety. There is no safety in terrorism. Rather, it was about supremacy. Having been shunned from so many communities for so long warped the perspectives of some Jews into believing that what they really needed wasn’t basic human rights but the right to thwart others’ basic human rights. The drive to climb the blood-soaked ladder of imperialism, to no longer be on the bottom rungs, shrouded not only their humanity but their own cultural teachings.
For those who haven’t had the pleasure of attending a Seder (you’re always welcome to my house for our anti-capitalist, anti-Zionist extravaganza!), the primary theme of the evening is ‘don’t be an oppressive asshole, for you know what it is to have assholes oppress you.’ I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the basic gist. And Passover is just one example. Throughout Jewish traditions and teachings, the voices and experiences of the oppressed are uplifted in order to highlight the need for Jews to not just stand up for our own human rights, but for the human rights of all. We were exiled, we were driven out, we were genocided, we were persecuted just for being ourselves. Our place is therefore in the struggle for a world beyond those atrocities. None are free till all are free. To be Jewish is to be a fighter for liberation, for justice. As Barrows-Friedman explains, ‘the term “Never Again” is not selective. It has to be universal.’
HOW ZIONISM IS PROFOUNDLY ANTI-SEMITIC
Zionism is therefore anti-Semitic — in both theory and practice. First and as noted above, it flies in the face of Jewish teachings and traditions. Second, it suggests that we only belong in one place — that we are not welcome in places that we have learned to call home, from New York to Shanghai. It pigeon-holes us into a homogeneous monolith, a singular stereotype. These points were the main drivers of the loud Jewish tradition of anti-Zionism. Again, inspired by teachings and experience, many Jews in early twentieth-century Europe were loud and proud leftists.
As John Merriman writes in his book 'Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits,’ a popular term for Jews in turn-of-the-20th-century Europe was ‘Cosmopolitan Anarchists.’ Which I actually really love. These Jews were vehemently opposed to the ideas of imperialism, nationalism and colonialism — aspects they saw as intricately linked with any sort of Zionist endeavor. Furthermore, they didn’t like the idea of appeasing anti-Semites in Europe by just disappearing. As one early twentieth-century poster shared in a recent interview with scholar Benjamin Balthaser asserts, ‘Where we live, there is our country!' Yet, appeasing anti-Semites was a cornerstone of Zionism from the beginning. Theodore Herzl, known as the ‘father of modern political Zionism,’ wrote in his diaries that '[t]he anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.’ To quote my Jewish grandmother, ‘What a schmuck.’
It’s no wonder that Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer calls himself a ‘white Zionist.’ And while Zionist-friendly media was quick to jump on the 2017 Israeli TV comment as totally misguided and a twisting of Zionism, the sad fact of the matter is that the Neo-Nazi got it right (not least of all because Israel is a very racist state, placing light-skinned Jews in higher positions of power while black Jews are considered to be just above Palestinians). Zionism is colonialism, it is imperialism, it is terrorism and apartheid — all things that Neo-Nazis, and original Nazis, hold in very high regard. Where both Zionists and their anti-Semitic pals get it so wrong is the conflation of Judaism with Zionism.
Zionism didn’t get rolling until the end of the nineteenth century and from the outset clearly pulled from imperialist, white-supremacist ideologies, not from Jewish traditions and teachings. Jews, on the other hand, have been around for roughly 6,000 years or so (it’s currently Year 5781 in the Jewish calendar). To conflate Judaism with Zionism is like conflating humanity with iPhones. It’s ahistorical and it paints a picture of Jews that fits rather too comfortably with old caricatures of the conniving Israelite.
And of course, this works out really well for the anti-Semites. I’ve gone to more than one Neo-Nazi rally where I’ve overheard fascists complain about Israel’s control over our government, our economy. ‘They control everything,’ one guy in a MAGA hat loudly proclaimed. I assume the guy standing next to him agreed, as he was wearing a ‘Hitler Missed a Few’ t-shirt. Now, if you’re a Zionist, you can’t disagree with him — because you feel that Israel = Judaism. The only way you can push back against this fascist dumbshittery (domheid. svh) is to starkly and resolutely separate Israel from Judaism.
WHY FASCISTS LOVE ZIONISTS (AND HATE JEWS)
Israel does have a disturbing stranglehold on our government — be it demands of loyalty from U.S. citizens, truckloads of arms and weapons, or the cozy relationship our police have with Israeli forces. Judaism does not. Indeed, Jews have a long history of not being welcome in the U.S., much like other immigrants, while fascism — well, that’s as American as apple pie. Hitler got plenty of ideas from the U.S. and a lot of people in the U.S. returned the favor.
In 1939, Madison Square Garden (MSG) in New York City was filled with 20,000 Nazis sieg heiling a massive portrait of George Washington flanked by giant swastikas. In October of that year, the same organization that was behind the MSG event, the German American Bund, held a massive parade through the streets of New York. Two years earlier, nearly 1,000 Jewish refugees were turned away from both Canada and the U.S. and were forced to return to Europe just as the Nazi’s Final Solution was unfolding. Three years before that, the Wall Street-backed American Liberty League plotted to overthrow the government and install a fascist dictatorship. IBM, Coca-Cola, Kodak and other corporations found in Nazi Germany ready customers — and why let a speedbump (verkeersdrempel. svh) like genocide stand in the way of a bottom line? Indeed, IBM didn’t just sell to the Nazis, they facilitated mass murder by supplying Nazi Germany with punched-card technology, making it possible to track the Jews — if you ever wondered why Jews in the Holocaust were tattooed with numbers. Thanks, IBM.
Again, this historical context matters. We need to understand this history in order to see how events like Charlottesville in 2017 are far from unique or surprising. Rather, they’re part of a long history of American fascism — or, as Mussolini suggested fascism be called, corporatism. This history also shows us the vast disparities between Zionism and Judaism.
RECLAIMING WHAT JUDAISM HAS ALWAYS BEEN
Both ideologically and in lived experiences, Zionism and Judaism are at odds. They exist on opposite ends of the power dynamic spectrum. ‘We have to dismantle Zionism — the way we work to dismantle imperialism and white supremacy, and racism and patriarchy,’ Barrows-Friedman says. ‘It’s all part of the same project. Israel is a project of exploitation of Jewish suffering to further an imperialist Western role.’ Therefore, one of the main ways we do this, she says, is to ‘reclaim what Judaism has always been, going toward Jewish tradition as open and proud anti-Zionists.’
This means taking back our history, and our present as Jewish people. It means highlighting the twisted use of Jewish suffering to claim an inalienable right to oppress. It means taking our place on the side of the oppressed, never the oppressor. Here, less than a century after the Holocaust, Israel has proven that it too can be fascist. To whose glory? What have we Jews gained by Israel’s appeal to fascist ideologies?
Furthermore, why desperately try to affirm your humanity by following a fascist’s description of your lack thereof? Because of course, it won’t ultimately matter. Inferiority is an always-moving target. It always has been — be they the Irish under British terror, the Congolese under Belgian terror, the Indigenous and African-Americans under U.S. terror, Jews in the Holocaust, or today’s War on Terror, any and every people, culture, tradition and belief can be marred and maligned in order to fit the needs of oppression. Jews will never gain peace and safety through terrorism. We will find no supremacy on the other side of brutality. We will always be inferior to the fascist. The question is why then is it so important for Zionists to appeal to fascists?
Fanon also wrote about the colonization that colonizers impose on themselves — the violence that they inflict that is also inflicted upon them. Joseph Conrad, the author of ‘Heart of Darkness,’ wrote graphically of this concept in his first short story, 'An Outpost of Progress,’ a story of two Europeans who are stationed at an outpost in the jungles of Africa in the 1890s. They gradually lose their minds, and the story ends in a murder-suicide, with Kayerts, one of the European men, hanging from a cross above his predecessor’s grave:
‘Progress was calling to Kayerts from the river. Progress and civilization and all the virtues. Society was calling to its accomplished child to come, to be taken care of, to be instructed, to be judged, to be condemned; it called him to return to that rubbish heap from which he had wandered away, so that justice could be done.’
As Lindqvist writes, these characters represent a European identity, a ‘[p]rogress that presupposes genocide.’
There is no glory in the oppressed becoming the oppressor. We who are of European descent must grapple with our genocidal history, unpack what horrors have been passed down from colonizers, and confront that trauma. We must confront that history that has become our present, as children of this Empire, so that we may stop it from becoming the future. And as Jews, we must grapple with Israel’s present for the very same reasons.
As James Baldwin explained in a 1963 interview:
‘What white people have to do, is to try to find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place, because I’m not a nigger, I’m a man, but if you think I’m a nigger, it means you need it. Why?’
Zionists need it because they seek to emulate their own oppressors. Someone must replace the Jew in their shitty remake. For they do not wish to be the Jew any longer. As reporter and host, Jacquie Luqman said recently on By Any Means Necessary: ‘If anybody in the Black community is supporting anybody else in our community who preys on other people, then those people are not our people.’ Zionists are not our people.
‘I like being Jewish. I really hate the way it’s been co-opted,’ Barrows-Friedman explains. ‘The beauty of Jewish culture is the tradition, the stories, the songs, the education about no one is free if anyone is oppressed. Zionism cannot dictate how we are Jews. We can’t let them win.’
As Jews, we stand with the oppressed — that is what our own history and our teachings demand. We must bring forward the past because, to yet again quote Baldwin, ‘history is not the past, it is the present.’ We should be proud of our heritage, proud of our culture and the thick bonds of solidarity that bolster our fight and inspire our build.
To be proud to be Jewish is a good thing, so long as we don’t lose sight of what that means. We have a lot of work to do, and the enemies we face will claim to want the same things that we do, to believe in the same teachings we believe in. The fight against Zionism is deeply personal for many Jews, but it is a part of the vital, all-embracing work of dismantling colonialism — in our own communities and likewise in the world. As Simone de Beauvoir wrote, 'A freedom that is interested only in denying freedom must be denied.’ For the sake of our liberation as Jews — as human beings — we must deny Zionism. In short: Be Jewish. Be proud. Be anti-Zionist.
Inderdaad, ’vrijheid die alleen geïnteresseerd is in het ontkennen van vrijheid’ heeft geen recht van bestaan, en er ‘is geen glorie in de onderdrukte die de onderdrukker wordt. Wij, die van Europese afkomst zijn, moeten worstelen met onze genocidale geschiedenis, de verschrikkingen ontrafelen die zijn doorgegeven door kolonisten, en dat trauma het hoofd bieden. We moeten de geschiedenis confronteren die ons heden is geworden, als kinderen van dit rijk, zodat we kunnen voorkomen dat het de toekomst wordt. En als Joden moeten we om dezelfde redenen worstelen met het heden van Israël.’
Op zijn beurt wijst Sven Lindqvist er in zijn boek Exterminate all the Brutes: One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide(1992) terecht op dat:
Auschwitz de moderne industriële toepassing [was] van een uitroeiingspolitiek waarop de Europese overheersing van de wereld […] lang heeft gesteund,
oftewel ‘[p]rogress that presupposes genocide.’ Tijdens de voorbereiding van zijn boek ontdekte Lindqvist gaandeweg dat de:
Europese vernietiging van de 'inferieure rassen' van vier continenten de grond voorbereidde voor Hitlers vernietiging van zes miljoen joden in Europa […] Het Europese expansionisme, vergezeld als het was door een schaamteloze verdediging van het uitroeien, schiep manieren van denken en politieke precedenten die de weg baanden voor nieuwe wandaden, die uiteindelijk culmineerden in de gruwelijkste van alle: de Holocaust […] En toen hetgeen was gebeurd in het hart der duisternis werd herhaald in het hart van Europa, herkende niemand het. Niemand wilde toegeven wat iedereen wist. Overal in de wereld waar kennis wordt onderdrukt, kennis die als ze bekend zou worden gemaakt ons beeld van de wereld aan gruzelementen zou slaan en ons zou dwingen om onszelf ter discussie te stellen — daar wordt overal het Hart der Duisternis opgevoerd. U weet dat al. Net als ik. Het is geen kennis die ons ontbreekt. Wat gemist wordt is de moed om te begrijpen wat we weten en daaruit conclusies te trekken.
In zijn boek A History of Bombing (2000) schreef Sven Lindqvist: ‘Wat is toegestaan in oorlogen tegen wilden en barbaren? Antwoord: alles.’ Onthoudt dit alles, nu de VS het Oostblok, met Polen voorop, gaat gebruiken om de macht van West-Europa te breken. Dit is mede het resultaat van de politiek van de Europese Unie. Meer daarover de volgende keer.
1 opmerking:
Het bij elkaar zetten van deze 2 verschillende thema's in één artikel zet tot denken aan.
Ik zat een aantal dagen geleden een verslag van Kees van der Pijl's lezing in Polen op Youtube te bekijken.
Hij opperde daar tegenover zijn toehoorders onder andere , dat het verstandig zou zijn voor Polen om een vergelijkbare positie als Turkije in te gaan nemen.
Is het niet nuttig als er weer een nieuw gesprek tussen Houcke en van der Pijl gaat plaats vinden om de laatste ontwikkelingen , en dan met name in Polen , te bespreken ?
(Het storende aan de bestaande video uit Polen is , dat de vaart in de lezing en de erop volgende vragenronde vanuit het publiek nogal stokt , omdat alles vertaald moet worden van Engels naar Pools.)
Puur intuitief en zonder kennis van de historie van het land , zou ik zeggen dat het probleem met de Polen is , dat ze nog een groot reservoir aan naïviteit , gelovigheid, goedgelovigheid , arbeidsethos , minderwaardigheidsgevoelens etcera hebben waar de Amerikanen genadeloos gebruik van gaan maken , inspelend op historische gegroeide anti-russische sentimenten.
Maar hoe dat precies zit , daar zou ik dan dus een videootje met Kees willen zien. Misschien ben ik te lui.
Ik ga dit artikel nog eens lezen!
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