Thursday
11May2006
Imperialism, oppression, and racism: The anathematic mix
Thursday, May 11, 2006 at 4:24PM
I plan to contribute to the debate on Imperialism, that is currently fermenting over on the Comment is Free blog, but first, I thought I would pick out this post from David Hirsh:-
The story goes that Israel is a creature of imperialism or a client state of the USA.
[...]
There are many problems with this worldview. One problem is that Israel would have been killed at birth in the war of 1948 if it had not been armed by Stalin's Soviet Union against a British and American arms embargo.
Now clearly the Soviet Union was also imperialist, I hear you say, so it is after all true, that Israel was helped into existence by "imperialism". And a Stalinist Jew-hating imperialism at that.
Except that the Czechoslovakian weapons that were smuggled to the Jews in Palestine in 1948 were sent in the name of anti-imperialism by the "Communists", who always denied that they were imperialists. In fact they claimed to be part of the "oppressed" that opposed global imperialism.
In Prague, a major exhibit has just opened at the Military Museum, run by the Czech Ministry of Defence, to display pictures and documents that tell the story of Czechoslovakia's military aid to Israel in 1948. Interestingly, the current Czech government is trying to show with this exhibition that the Czech Republic, now a member of the European Union, is a good pro-western state. For this reason, it is very much downplaying the fact that this Czech military aid was sent by Stalin through its Czechoslovakian colony, in order to consolidate an "anti-imperialist" Jewish state in the Middle East.
in middle east, politics, russia, usa, world
middle east, politics, russia, usa, world 
Reader Comments (1)
I firmly believe, Tyger, that both Israel and the US are creatures of imperialism.Economical imperialism I mean. Both have been settled to defend the interests of the-powers-that-be, and I am starting to also believe that the European Union follows the same path, much that they try to make us believe contrarily.
However, I notice that there exist movements around the world with a tendency to defend people's interests above the western mainstream interests, but they will eventually come to be the same if they ever achieve their ambitions.