Valerie A. Traina • Feed
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Valerie A. Traina @v3ndettaval.bsky.social

To help us understand how Palestinians became stigmatized, how they became the objects of world derision, Chris Hedges shows us how the founders of Israel became like their Nazi torturers. This section also emphasizes the false narratives that the Israeli propaganda machine began disseminating.

A Genocide Foretold by Chris Hedges ©2025 Seven Stories Press (p. 120) The belief that a race or class is contaminated is used by ruling elites to justify quarantining the people of that group. But quarantine is only the first step. The despised group can never be redeemed or cured – Hannah Arendt noted that all racists see such contamination as something that can never be eradicated. The fear of the other is stoked by racist leaders such as Netanyahu, to create permanent instability. This instability is exploited by a corrupt power elite that is also seeking the destruction of civil society. Primo Levi railed against the false, morally uplifting narrative of the Holocaust that culminates in the creation of the state of Israel, a narrative embraced by the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. The contemporary history of the Third Reich, he writes, could be ‘reread as a war against memory, an Orwellian falsification of memory, falsification of reality, negation of reality.” He wonders if “we who have returned” have “been able to understand and make others understand our experience.” Levi saw us reflected in Chaim Rumkowski, the Nazi collaborator and tyrannical leader of the Lodz Ghetto. Rumkowski sold out his fellow Jews for privilege and power, although he was sent to Auschwitz on the final transport where Jewish Sonderkommando—prisoners forced to help herd victims into the gas chambers and dispose of their bodies —in an act of vengeance, reportedly beat him to death outside a crematorium. Levi insists that the camps “could not be reduced to the two blocks of victims and persecutors. He argues, “It is naive, absurd, and historically false to believe that an infernal system such as National Socialism sacrifices its victims; on the contrary; it degrades them, it makes them resemble itself.” He chronicles what he calls the “gray zone” between corruption and collaboration. The world, he writes, is not black and white, “but a vast zone of gray consciences that stands …
aug 31, 2025, 5:48 am • 2 0

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