Customer Reviews

Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This volume preceeds Brenner's more recent "51 Documents: Zionist Collaberation with the Nazis". Brenner lifts the mask off of Zionism and exposes it for all its failings. Ironically before the "Six Day War" the vast majority of Jews were not adherents of Zionism. Since that conflict Zionists have achieved a true public relations coup by making Zionism the the only "acceptable" antonym to anti-semitism. One can support Israel and not be a believer in Zionism, a political philosophy that predates, fascism, communism and the National Socialist Party. Considering that Leni Brenner is Jewish should give credibility to what the author has to say. Unfortunately much like Norman Finkelstein he is tarred and feathered with the ludicrous accusation of being a self-hating Jew for merely daring to point out the fallices of Zionism. This is a must read for anyone who wants to understand how a democracy slips into being an aberration of its former self that readily practices apartheid policies on its Arab citizens and an entire occupied population.

To understand Mr. Brenner's work, it helps to understand his intellectual precursors who, like him, have given us novel insights.

The method he uses, the Marlen Method of Great Insight (MMGI), is so named to honor George Marlen, a Trotskyist thinker of the 1940's. Marlen discovered that World War II was not a real war at all. It was a hoax, Marlen discovered, perpetrated as a conspiracy of the German, British, and American ruling class to fool the workers of the world. It was a phony war from beginning to end. Professor Noam Chomsky, among others, has testified to Marlen's importance to his own thinking.

MMGI can prove any idea that the powers that be wish to suppress. MMGI can be used, and indeed has been, to prove that the world is flat, that Napoleon never existed, that the moon is made of green cheese, that Zionists are really Nazis. This is how MMGI works. First and foremost, you decide what it is want to prove. Anything will do, as long as it is an idea that most of the world would find preposterous. Next, you go to a big library (Marlen worked at New York Public), you consult hundreds of books, you carefully write down on little pieces of paper any phrase, factoid, or even single word that fits into your pre-determined idea. Finally, you publish or at least self-publish your idea, buttressed by all these little papers you have taken from the library, and, voilà, you are a fearless, independent, scholarly thinker, and will gain, at the very least, a dozen people who think you're great.

Obviously, nothing is perfect. MMGI will not allow you to use facts from the real world if these go against your idée fixe. So to Mr. Brenner there was no Hannah Senesh, a Zionist living in the then-Palestine, who parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe to save Jews, only to be murdered by the Nazis. Nor, in Mr. Brenner's world, was there a Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, Hitler's man in Jerusalem, who was promised by Hitler that the Jews would be eliminated from the Middle East. Neither Senesh nor Husseini appear in Mr. Brenner's otherwise admirably long index.

OK, MMGI isn't perfect. But hey, you can't have it all.