Study: Western intelligence failed to anticipate Holocaust

[Colorado Blue]

Western communications intelligence failed to uncover Nazi Germany's preparations before World War II, or its efforts during the war to annihilate European Jewry, claims a new study of the American National Security Agency (NSA), published this week in Washington.

The failure was mainly a result of the Nazis' extreme caution in using telephone and wireless communications for messages pertaining to the annihilation, said the NSA, which is responsible for the collection, decryption and analysis of communications messages.

snip

The study, entitled "Eavesdropping on Hell: Western Communications Intelligence and the Holocaust, 1939-1945," by Robert J. Hanyok, was published by the historical division of the NSA, and brought to the attention of the Israeli public by Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists.

One of the study's conclusions, which is not original but is still earthshaking if one considers its official status, is that anti-Semitism in the ranks of the political, security and intelligence establishments in the West, and in Britain in particular, caused the information about the destruction of European Jewry to be received skeptically and even with indifference.

snip

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/586767.html

[Colorado Blue]

1. In view of the recent discussions about antisemitism, the

Holocaust, the dropping of old taboos concerning public disrespect for Jews, and the apparent unwillingness of folks to examine this issue, I think this article is timely.

Do people seriously believe that antisemitism died with Hitler's defeat? Or that it isn't still a terribly dangerous problem?

And, I'm going to take it a step further - in light of the EU determinations about "Stage 4" antisemitism -

denying Jews the right to self-determination by claiming that Israel's existence is "racist";

applying a double standard; holding Israel to a yardstick not expected of any other democratic nation;

drawing comparisons between Israeli policy and those of the Nazis;

holding world Jewry collectively responsible for the actions of Israel -

the constant attempts, sanctioned by so-called progressives, to isolate and dismantle the Jewish state, surely represent an outgrowth of this old monster. The fact that EU found that Jews have the right to self-determination in Israel, that Israel's existence isn't racist, as stated above, and that such attempts to delegitimize her, or hold her to a different standard than any other democracy, are bigoted, is heartening.

But it isn't going to get rid of the bigotry.

So I'm asking - what can we do?

What can we do if people who consider themselves progressives and intellectuals - in other words, people WHO SHOULD KNOW BETTER - people whose credo should be founded on the principle of tolerance - are actually promoting the opposite?

The rights of minorities to survival, self-defense and self-determination - within their own states or within larger societies - should be a bedrock principle of the Left.

And what can we do if people who should be defending these rights won't discuss this intelligently when it comes to antisemitism in all its various guises, but try to pretend it doesn't exist, or worse - that it's JUSTIFIED - or fly into anger and denial at assertions it DID exist in the past and still does?

[The Magistrate]

2. It Is An Interesting Article, Ma'am

It takes an effort to realize how saturated with casual Anti-Semitism western culture, and particularly the upper classes of the western countries, were in the early decades of the twentieth century. Nazism, once its excesses were manifest and undeniable, gave the thing rather a bad name, and passed it out of polite company and conversation.

Hitler's speechifying against Jews really did not look or sound much different than the sort of thing some European politicians had been doing for decades. Even a thing like Krystallnacht was not much different than pogroms conducted not long before in the Ukraine. His declarations Jews were responsible for Communism was the common wisdom of a whole political class at the upper reaches of European and U.S. society, shared by luminaries like Wilson and Churchill, and industrial figures like Ford. The latter was a believer in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Another element that aided in promoting disbelief of early accounts, quite accurate in themselves, of Nazi atrocities, was the tremendously exaggerated propagandas of German atricities in the recent Great War. There actually was damnably atrocious conduct by German soldiers in the march through Belgium, but it fell far short of the routine fare of raped and crucified nuns and bayonetted babies to which the English press in particular treated the world during that war. In the peace that followed, it became clear to just about everyone these tales had been mere fictions, and as a result, the proverbial "Fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice, shame on me" standard became engaged in many minds to operate against belief in the tales that began to circulate by the late thirties, and that began to emerge after the occupation of Poland and invasion of the Soviet Union.

[Colorado Blue]

3. Thank you, sir, for your thoughtful response.

I was particularly intrigued by your last statement, about exaggerated accounts of German atrocities in the Great War, and how they may have affected people's response to stories about new atrocities.

Surely nobody in his right mind could have predicted just how bad things would get during WWII - it's simply incomprehensible - unless of course they actually listened to Hitler and believed him.

Yet, it makes sense to me that the combination of factors - the antisemitism you mention plus incredulity about German atrocities from WWI - factored into a sort of denial about what was really happening.

I recently read a biography about Lawrence Durrell, one of my favorite authors, which revealed his antisemitism. This was not uncommon among people of arts and letters, as well as industrialists and politicians.

In Durrell's case, he was living in Paris during the thirties, spending a great deal of time with Henry Miller and Anais Nin. These people lived in a world of extremely intelligent, creative, well-read people - yet they couldn't SEE. They couldn't see how their bigotry would have an effect on the people they despised but even more, they couldn't see how their bigotry reflected on THEM.

Though he lived through WWII, saw the horror such bigotry could cause, and though he had a Jewish publisher (when nobody else would touch his work, and whom he scornfully referred to - not by name but as "the Manchester Jew") and married two Jewish women, Durrell's antisemitism reveals itself even in his last work - although, like all his writing, it's subtle - hard to detect - and even humorous.

This particularly shocked me as I have always taken it as self-evident that well-educated, liberal individuals would also disdain bigotry.

I'm concerned, in our present era, that a similar disregard to sinister signals is being displayed. And I'm extremely concerned that people DO NOT want to talk about this matter, even now, or examine root causes. Rather, The Holocaust is simply being lumped in with any number of other massacres whether they are similar in impact, historical time and setting, or purpose.

The Holocaust was a GENOCIDE in the truest sense of the word: an attempt to exterminate an entire race - genotype - of people - for no rational reason whatsoever.

And yet, in spite of all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, bigotry against Jews today is simply not taken seriously, either in the West - historically or currently - or as a root cause and continuing factor in the violence of the Middle East.

I'm curious as to your thoughts?

[The Magistrate]

4. Mr. Durrell, Ma'am

Is one of my favorite authors as well. His first work, "The Black Book", was among the favorite reads of my youth. What you say about him is certainly true, and indeed shows in his mature efforts. The driving element of events in "The Alexandria Quartet", revealed in the volumn "Mountolive", is an alliance of Zionists and Coptic Christians, in which the former are supplying arms to the latter, to expell the English.

Regarding the larger elements of your comment above, Ma'am, several points come to mind touching upon your concerns.

The first is the fact that Anti-Semitism is the most deeply rooted prejudice in Christendom: it is, quite literally, only a few decades shy of being two thousand years old, and was able to piggy-back on views common in Republican and Imperial Rome that date back several centuries further. The thing could justly be called normal, and viewed as even an esssential constituent of the culture. It is displays of abnormal, not normal behavior, that give rise to alarm.

The second is that Nazi Anti-Semitism was a different thing than the traditional "Christ-Killer" Anti-Semitism of Christian Europe. The rooting of the thing in "blood" and "race" was not the same as the rooting of the thing in creed and practice. In the traditional form of the thing, conversion meant safety, although of course there was always a watchfulness towards relapse, and elements of racial identity tinged the traditional form of the thing. But the old form could have been satisfied by the lapse of the religion, while the Hitlerite form required the whole elimination of the people, for by its teaching, "the crime is in the blood", and not really in anything that was done by the individual or even the group. It does not seem to me that, even if one accepts that there is a rise in Anti-Semitic expression in the West, that much of it harbors this exterminationist tendency, or is a harbinger of a renewed attempt at extermination.

The third is the need to distinguish some real differences between the attitude to Jews traditional to the Moslems of the Near East, and those of Christendom. The relation of Islam to Judaism is quite tangled: Mohammed origionally believed he was bringing a perfected form of Judaism, and was somewhat dismayed to find Bedouin Jews he encountered rejecting that proposition: there are accordingly some rather bitter passages in the sacred texts and traditions, that have proved of great use to fire-brands in the modern era. But that opposition was handily over-come in the earliest days of Islam, and subsequently, Jews have always been a subject people there. The prevailing attitude therefore was not one of hate and violent rejection, as was at the root of the Christian attitude, but rather one of contempt. That which is hated is generally also feared, but that for which contempt is felt is more likely to be regarded with a certain degree of amusement than otherwise. The Jew was more a cowardly figure of fun than an object of menace, accordingly, in the Near East.

The rise of Zionism, and the early successes of the Zionist enterprise, came therefore as quite a shock. The strategy behind much of the early opposition was rooted, whether consciously or not, in that cultural stereotype, and based on the idea that it would be a simple matter to frighten Jews into ceasing to come to, and into leaving, Palestine. But the Jews who came were mostly both desperate and steeled by commitment to an ideal, and such people are very difficult to frighten. The miltary prowess eventually displayed by Israel, and maintained by that state to this day, still collides with this thousand year old view of the Jews as cowardly and ineffectual, in a perpetual cognative dissonance that paralyzes a great deal of thought.

One result has been efforts by some to re-emphasize those passages in the sacred texts mentioned above, and another is a certain attempt by some at grafting the two strains of Anti-Semitism that have been developed in the West into the political culture of the Near East. Being recent imports, neither is particularly deep in root. But their effect is certainly pernicious, as far as it goes. It does not, however, come near to explaining the origin, or the bitter duration of the current conflict, from the Arab side: these things are, along with the original cultural form, merely tools picked up in a struggle that has other, much more basic origins and drives.

To my view, there is neither point nor good to be gained by denying that the Zionist enterprise in its origin, and in its development into the state of Israel, was at bottom a movement of people into an area from which they displaced necessarily the previous inhabitants. As this has been the practice of humans throughout their history, it does not strike me as peculiarly wrong or evil in any way. But it is too much to expect the previous inhabitants not to resist and resent the doing, and not to hate those who have succeeded against what resistance could be mustered to oppose them in the effort. Nor is it necessary to probe for further reasons beyond these obvious feelings of territorial attachment, and the bitterness of loss with its inevitable concomitants of rage for vengeance and restoration of pride, for the basic emotional geography of the thing.