[Peace-discuss] Fw: [socialistdiscussion] fwd: Avnery

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----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Reimann" <1999wildcat at gmail.com>
To: "socialist discussion" <socialistdiscussion at yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, December 16, 2009 10:32 AM
Subject: [socialistdiscussion] fwd: Avnery


I received the latest commentary from Uri Avnery, in which he compares
the founding and functioning of the States of Israel and Prussia. I
thought it was a very interesting comparison, including the heavy
emphasis on militarism in both states.

John


Uri Avnery
12.12.09
    Spot the Difference


A SHORT historical quiz: Which state:

(1)  Arose after a holocaust in which a third of its people were destroyed?

(2)  Drew from that holocaust the conclusion that only superior
military forces could ensure its survival?

(3)  Accorded the army a central role in its life, making it “an army
that had a state, rather than a state that had an army”?

(4)  Began by buying the land it took, and continued to expand by
conquest and annexation?

(5)  Endeavored by all possible means to attract new immigrants?

(6)  Conducted a systematic policy of settlement in the occupied 
territories?

(7)  Strove to push out the national minority by creeping ethnic cleansing?

For anyone who has not yet found the answer: it’s the state of Prussia.

But if some readers were tempted to believe that it all applies to the
State of Israel – well, they are right, too. This description fits our
state. The similarity between the two states is remarkable. True, the
countries are geographically very different, and so are the historical
periods, but the points of similarity can hardly be denied.


THE STATE that was respected and feared for 350 years as Prussia
started with another name: Mark Brandenburg. (Mark: march, border
area). This territory in the North-East of Germany was wrested from
its Slavic inhabitants and was initially outside the boundaries of the
German Reich. To this day, many of its place names (including Berlin
neighborhoods, like Pankow) are clearly Slavic. It can be said:
Prussia arose on the ruins of another people (some of whose
descendants are still living there).

A historical curiosity: the land was first paid for in cash. The house
of Hohenzollern, a noble family from South Germany, bought the
territory of Brandenburg from the German Emperor for 400,000 Hungarian
Gulden. I don’t know how that compares with the money paid by the
Jewish National Fund for parts of Palestine before 1948.

The event that largely determined the entire history of Prussia up to
World War II was a holocaust: the 30-years war. Throughout these years
- 1618-1648 - practically all the armies of Europe fought each other
on German soil, destroying everything in the process. The soldiers,
many of them mercenaries, the scum of the earth, murdered and raped,
pillaged and robbed, burnt entire towns and drove the pitiful
survivors from their lands. In this war, a third of the German
population was killed and two thirds of their villages destroyed.
(Bertolt Brecht immortalized this holocaust in his play, “Mother
Courage”.)

North Germany is a wide open plain. Its borders are unprotected by any
ocean, mountain range or desert. The Prussian answer to the ravages of
the holocaust was to erect an iron wall: a powerful regular army that
would make up for the lack of seas and mountains and be ready to
defend the state against all possible combinations of potential
enemies.

At the beginning, the army was an essential instrument for the defense
of the state’s very existence. In the course of time, it became the
center of national life. What started out as the Prussian defense
forces became an aggressive army of conquest that terrified all its
neighbors. For some of the Prussian kings, the army was the main
interest in life. For a time, the soldiers and their families
constituted about a quarter of the Berlin population. An old Prussian
saying goes: “Der Soldate / ist der beste Mann im Staate” – the
soldier is the best man in the state. Adulation of the army became a
cult, almost a religion.


PRUSSIA WAS never a “normal” state of a homogenous population living
together throughout the centuries. By a sophisticated combination of
military conquest, diplomacy and judicious marriages, its masters
succeeded in annexing more and more territories to their core domain.
These territories were not even contiguous, and some of them were very
far from each other.

One of those was the area that came to give the state its name:
Prussia. The original Prussia was located on the shores of the Baltic
Sea, in areas that now belong to Poland and Russia. At first they were
conquered by the Order of Teutonic Knights, a German
religious-military order founded during the Crusades in Acre - the
ruins of its main castle, Montfort (Starkenberg), still stand in
Galilee. The German crusaders decided that instead of fighting the
heathens in a faraway country, it made more sense to fight the
neighboring pagans and rob them of their lands. In the course of time,
the princes of Brandenburg succeeded in acquiring this territory and
adopted its name for all their dominions. They also succeeded in
upgrading their status and crowned themselves as kings.

The lack of homogeneity of the Prussian lands, composed as they were
of diverse and unconnected areas, gave birth to the main Prussian
creation: the “State”. This was the factor that was to unite all the
different populations, each of which stuck to its local patriotism and
traditions. The “State” – Der Staat – became a sacred being,
transcending all other loyalties. Prussian philosophers saw the
“State” as the incarnation of all the social virtues, the final
triumph of human reason.

The Prussian state became proverbial. Demonized by its enemies, it
was, however, exemplary in many ways – a well organized, orderly and
law-abiding structure, its bureaucracy untainted by corruption. The
Prussian official received a paltry salary, lived modestly and was
intensely proud of his status. He detested ostentation. A hundred
years ago Prussia already had a system of social insurance – long
before other major countries dreamed of it. It was also exemplary in
its religious tolerance. Frederick “the Great” declared that everyone
should “find happiness in his own way”. Once he said that if Turks
were to come and settle in Prussia, he would build mosques for them.
Last week, 250 years later, the Swiss passed a referendum forbidding
the building of minarets in their country.


PRUSSIA WAS a very poor country, lacking natural resources, minerals
and good agricultural soil. It used its army to procure richer
territories.

Because of the poverty, the population was thinly spread. The Prussian
kings expended much effort in recruiting new immigrants. In 1731, when
tens of thousands of Protestants in the Salzburg area (now part of
Austria) were persecuted by their Catholic ruler, the King of Prussia
invited them to his land. They came with their families and
possessions in a mass foot march to East Prussia, traversing the full
length of Germany. When the French Huguenots (Protestants) were
slaughtered by their Catholic kings, the survivors were invited to
Prussia and settled in Berlin, where they contributed greatly to the
development of the country. Jews, too, were allowed to settle in
Prussia in order to contribute to its prosperity, and the philosopher
Moses Mendelssohn became one of the leading lights of the Prussian
intelligentsia.

When Poland was divided in 1771 between Russia, Austria and Prussia,
the Prussian state acquired a national minority problem. In the new
territory there lived a large Polish population that stuck to its
national identity and language. The Prussian response was a massive
settlement campaign in these areas. This was a highly organized
effort, planned right down to the minutest detail. The German settlers
got a plot of land and many financial benefits. The Polish minority
was oppressed and discriminated against in every possible way. The
Prussian kings wanted to “Germanize” their acquired areas, much as the
Israeli government wants to “Judaize” their occupied territories.

This Prussian effort had a direct impact on the Jewish colonization of
Palestine. It served as an example for the father of Zionist
settlement, Arthur Ruppin, and not by accident – he was born and grew
up in the Polish area of Prussia.


IT IS impossible to exaggerate the influence of the Prussian model on
the Zionist movement in almost all spheres of life.

Theodor Herzl, the founder of the movement, was born in Budapest and
lived most of his life in Vienna. He admired the new German Reich that
was founded in 1871, when he was 11 years old. The King of Prussia –
which constituted about half of the area of the Reich – was crowned as
German emperor, and Prussia formed the new empire in its image.
Herzl’s diaries are full of admiration for the German state. He
courted Wilhelm II, King of Prussia and Emperor of Germany, who
obliged by receiving him in a tent before the gate of Jerusalem. He
wanted the Kaiser to become the patron of the Zionist enterprise, but
Wilhelm remarked that, while Zionism itself was an excellent idea, it
“could not be realized with Jews”.

Herzl was not the only one to imprint a Prussian-German pattern on the
Zionist enterprise. In this he was overshadowed by Ruppin, who is
known today to Israeli children mainly as a street name. But Ruppin
had an immense impact on the Zionist enterprise, more than any other
single person. He was the real leader of the Zionist immigrants in
Palestine in their formative period, the years of the second and third
Aliyah (immigration wave) in the first quarter of the 20th century. He
was the spiritual father of Berl Katznelson, David Ben-Gurion and
their generation, the founders of the Zionist Labor movement that
became dominant in the Jewish society in Palestine, and later in
Israel. It was he who practically invented the Kibbutz and the Moshav
(cooperative settlement).

If so, why has he been almost eradicated from official memory? Because
some sides of Ruppin are best forgotten. Before becoming a Zionist, he
was an extreme Prussian-German nationalist. He was one of the fathers
of the “scientific” racist creed and believed in the superiority of
the Aryan race. Up to the end he occupied himself with measuring
skulls and noses in order to provide support for assorted racist
ideas. His partners and friends created the “science” that inspired
Adolf Hitler and his disciples.

The Zionist movement would have been impossible were it not for the
work of Heinrich Graetz, the historian who created the historical
image of the Jews which we all learned at school. Graetz, who was also
born in the Polish area of Prussia, was a pupil of the Prussian-German
historians who “invented” the German nation, much as he “invented” the
Jewish nation.

Perhaps the most important thing we inherited from Prussia was the
sacred notion of the “State” (Medina in Hebrew) – an idea that
dominates our entire life. Most countries are officially a “Republic”
(France, for example), a “Kingdom” (Britain) or a “Federation”
(Russia). The official name “State of Israel” is essentially Prussian.


WHEN I first brought up the similarity between Prussia and Israel (in
a chapter dedicated to this theme in the Hebrew and German editions of
my 1967 book, “Israel Without Zionists”) it might have looked like a
baseless comparison. Today, the picture is clearer. Not only does the
senior officers corps occupy a central place in all the spheres of our
life, and not only is the huge military budget beyond any discussion,
but our daily news is full of typically “Prussian” items. For example:
it transpires that the salary of the Army Chief of Staff is double
that of the Prime Minister. The Minister of Education has announced
that henceforth schools will be assessed by the number of their pupils
who volunteer for army combat units. That sounds familiar – in German.

After the fall of the Third Reich, the four occupying powers decided
to break up Prussia and divide its territories between several German
federal states, Poland and the USSR. That happened in February 1947 –
only 15 months before the founding of the State of Israel.

Those who believe in the transmigration of souls can draw their own
conclusions. It is certainly food for thought.

-- 
Check out:
http://www.iww.org/en/blog/1411
http://www.worldwide-socialist.net/INDEX.html


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