Perhaps Günter Grass penned his hollow J’accuse in the strange vehicle of a poem
because even he knew that the only kind of criticism that it might somehow
withstand would be literary. That is not to say that his political broadside
does not use tropes familiar to good and bad poets, because it does: inversion,
invention, hyperbole, strategic omission, dressed-up cultural clichés, nonsense
paraded in verse form as sense, and, not to be missed, the imperial poet
orchestrating it all.
Yes, the poet. It is important to say that the
significance of the “poem’s” content is not that it comes from Grass. As a
falsifier of his own Nazi past and that of Germany’s, fabricating that six
million German POWs died in Soviet captivity – notice the magic number – Grass’s
moral and intellectual authority to speak on these issues is zero. Rather,
Grass’s significance is something that he appears not to understand: that he, no
different from those at the Stammtisch, mouths the cultural clichés and
prejudices of his time. As any student of prejudice knows, anti-Semitism is a
great leveler. The professor – in this case, the Nobel Prize winner – and the
Ungebildete speak the same nonsense. From whoever’s mouth it spills, it is that
nonsense that needs to be exposed.
There is a widespread view in Germany
and elsewhere, peddled by anti-Semites, that one may not speak the truth about
Israel. But this is manifestly false, as is Grass’s explicit claim of a “general
silence” amounting to a “lie” about Israel’s nuclear weapons, which in fact
everyone knows about and which is routinely discussed.
On a regular
basis, Israel is attacked and decried for things it actually does and for things
invented about it in media across the world, including in the United States,
including in Germany, including in Israel itself. Grass’s poem is not the
expression of previously muzzled conscience and of the courageous break with the
conventional practice, but very much a disingenuous expression of such
practice.
In fact, it is abundantly clear to me – as someone who is just
finishing writing a book on contemporary anti-Semitism – that there is far more
open and thinly coded expression of anti- Semitism in Germany and in Europe than
there is any attempt, certainly any success, at preventing its expression or,
for that matter, in preventing criticism, just or unjust, of
Israel.
There is a widespread view in Germany and Europe that Israel is a
Nazi-like state. One hears and reads this again and again. This view finds
pointed expression in the widespread belief in Germany that Israel is conducting
a war of extermination against the Palestinians. How do we know? Germans say so.
Year after year, scientific surveys of Germans show that 40 percent-50% of
Germans believe this. The perversity of this – on so many levels – is
stunning.
Do Germans need to be reminded of what the Nazis and Germans of
the time actually did? Summary: They created death factories. They slaughtered
six million Jews as part of a formal plan to annihilate every single Jew in
Europe. They slaughtered millions of non-Jews and would have slaughtered
millions more. They sought to turn most of Central and Eastern Europe into a
vast slave plantation.
Or do Germans need to be educated about what
Israel has done and is doing? Take one salient fact: From 1990 to 2010, the
Palestinian population under Israeli occupation more than doubled.
Some
war of extermination! Only a deeply prejudiced person, who is either cynically
lying or loosely in touch with reality about the object of his prejudicial
description, could say that Israel is conducting a war of extermination against
Palestinians.
Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, and previously of
Gaza, can be roundly criticized and even condemned on several grounds, but for
anyone to liken it and Israel’s practices to Nazi Germany and its
exterminationist programs is patent nonsense.
Grass takes the common
perversity – the inversion of the people of the victims into perpetrators – to a
new level, though. He says that Germans’ responsibility is to prevent another
genocide.
Okay. But he says this not with reference to a possible
genocide of the people actually regularly threatened, the same people whom
Germans once slaughtered – namely the Jews, against whom a nuclear weapon in the
hands of the millennial Iranian regime might well be used.
Instead,
according to Grass, Germans have the responsibility to turn against the country
of the once and potential victim people, in order to stop them from defending
themselves and from allegedly committing a future genocide of Grass’s
invention.
Grass’s bald assertion that Israel threatens the preemptive
annihilation of the Iranian people, which he cleverly presents as a fact and
then argues that it must be resisted, is either an anti-Semitic fantasy or a
grotesque cynical fabrication that plays on many Germans’ projections of Nazism
onto Jews and Israel. Israeli leaders have never publicly mentioned or even
hinted that they would consider such a monstrous thing as a preemptive nuclear
strike against the Iranian people, let alone a barrage of nuclear detonations to
wipe out the Iranian people, akin to what Germans actually were doing to Jews
while Grass was serving the Nazi regime as a member of the Waffen-SS. There is
not a shred of evidence, a whispered word, or any reason to believe that Israeli
leaders have for one micromoment contemplated such an act.
How absurd
that I, or anyone else, would have to write these words! There is Grass’s
underlying fabrication that many readers may not even think to catch, which is
the fabricated justification for Grass to pen his poem in the first place. The
submarines that Germany has been delivering to Israel are meant to bolster
Israel’s deterrence and survivability.
They have nothing to do with
whether Israel or, for that matter, the United States will strike Iran’s nuclear
facilities, or what weapons either may use.
Israel has the capacity to
bomb these facilities with its air force, which is undoubtedly how it would
deliver the bunker-busting, nonnuclear bombs it would use should its leaders
believe themselves compelled to prevent the murderous Iranian regime from
acquiring the nuclear weapons they might well one day use on Israel, a country
Iran’s political leaders have repeatedly threatened and against which Tehran
sponsors ongoing attacks.
Contrary to what Grass would have people
believe, the possibility of an Israeli or an American preemptive strike is
regularly discussed.
(Secretary of State Hillary Clinton just urged
Israel on American national television not to take “unilateral action against
Iran.”) But it is only discussed and only considered in terms of a surgical
mission against Iran’s nuclear production facilities with conventional
weapons.
The issue of how to do this without killing many innocent
civilians is a major consideration, and one of the major reasons – among others,
including the possibility of a wider conflict – that people, including in
Israel, argue against such an initiative.
In demonizing Israel, there is
a widespread practice in Germany, also perfected here by Grass, of ignoring the
context in which Israel exists and acts. That context is that Israel has been
existentially threatened for its entire existence and continues to be so today,
both by states that wish merely to defeat it or to have it relinquish the West
Bank (Gaza it already gave back), and by states, often supported by their
publics, that wish to destroy it and eliminate or exterminate its Jews. Why does
Grass fail to mention that Iranian leaders, and not just Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
have routinely threatened to destroy Israel and kill Jews, and occasionally even
hinted that it could be done with nuclear weapons? As the “moderate” former
Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani explained already in 2001, “the
use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything.” Why does
Grass fail to mention that the Iranian leaders speak of Israel using Nazi-like
language and metaphors, of cancer and pestilence which must be utterly
eradicated? Do I have to say that such speech has been shown to be the
rhetorical prelude to genocide? There is no Israeli crime here, no planned
crime, no German role in it, no need to finally speak out, no special German
responsibility or moral authority in this matter, no “silence” over the
nonexistent truth, no intimidation for not speaking out.
Grass’s faux cri
de coeur is a tissue of falsehoods and fabrications, one folded upon the
next.
There is only this fiction called a poem, a surrealistic inversion
of reality, and the lingering question: Is Grass so ignorant, or is he a
calculating cynic with such animosity toward Israel and its people that he urges
the world to force Israel to relinquish its nuclear shield – yes, shield –
against a sea of enemies, and is thereby, at best, reckless about its and its
people’s destruction?
The writer is the author of Hitler’s Willing Executioner:
Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust and Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism,
and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity, which is the basis of a PBS documentary of
the same name. His work can be read at goldhagen.com.
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