"I was a Zionist activist in my youth. For me, Zionism meant opposition to a Jewish state. The Zionist movement did not come out officially in favor of a Jewish state until 1942. Before this it was merely the intent of the Zionist leadership. The Zionist movement for a long time stood against the establishment of a Jewish state because such a state would be discriminatory and racist".
"Israel in Global Context", Noam Chomsky interviewed by Ludwig Watzal, Challenge, No. 44, July-August 1997 [June 9, 1997]
"We hear a lot about Palestine now; it does not appeal to us. Anyone who goes there exchanges nationalism and narrowness for nationalism and narrowness. Also it is a country for capitalists".
Diários de Viktor Klemperer, entrada de 9 de Julho de 1933
"Hitler Chancellor. What, up to election Sunday on March 5, I called terror, was a mild prelude. Now the business of 1918 is being exactly repeated, only under a different sign, under the swastika. Again, it's astounding how easily everything collapses. What has happened to Bavaria, what has happened to the Reichsbanner, etc. etc.?
Eight days before the election the clumsy business of the Reichstag fire -- I cannot imagine that anyone really believes in Communist perpetrators instead of paid [swastika sign] work. Then the wild prohibitions and acts of violence. And on top of that the neverending propaganda in the street, on the radio, etc. On Saturday the fourth, I heard a part of Hitler's speech from Konigsberg. The front of a hotel at the railway station, illuminated, a torchlight procession in front of it, torchbearers and swastika flag bearers on the balconies and loudspeakers. I understood only words. But the tone! The unctuous bawling, truly bawling, of a priest. ---
Yesterday the dramaturge Karl Wolf dismissed "by order of the Nazi party" -- not even in the name of the government -- today the whole Saxon cabinet, etc., etc. A complete revolution and party dictatorship. And all opposing forces as if vanished from the face of the earth. It is this utter collapse of a power only recently present, no, it's complete disappearance (just as in 1918) that I find so staggering. Que sais-je?"
March 10, 1933
Diários de Viktor Klemperer, entrada de 10 de Março de 1933
'There he is, up to his neck, Jabotinsky, up with the leaders of the intellectual west? You didn't ever even get to where the Greeks were with their ethical & political debate, when yeer crowd were barely straggling back from Babylon, all misery & grudges, weren't they well shut of ye. Where's your Legal Title? What's this it says? Deuteronomy ch.20? Joshua ch.10 vv.28-42. You despise & slander the writings of the New Testament, yet you cite as your title to other people's land a rabid fairytale written down 700 years after the events it purports to describe? And you say your values are western? Your last two civilised rabbi emissaries, despatched to inspect the locale after the 1897 Zionist Congress in Basel reported back: "the bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man." Viktor Klemperer the Dresden Diarist wrote in 1934: the Nazis got their stupid Blut und Boden romanticism from ye.'
Rembrandt, "A Noiva Judia", c. 1667, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
As in the scriptural story itself, the precise location of the promised land remained vague, and for a time the desert lands of Arab Palestine seemed too far a stretch for the imagination. Alberto Gerchunoff was one of the pioneering Zionists who fled the steppes of Russia for the pampas of Argentina, to help found there, with earnest Argentine government encouragement, the Jewish settlement of "Moisesville." "Argentina is the Promised Land reached after a New Exodus," he declared in his book Los Gauchos Judios (The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas). "Here, in Argentina," he exulted, "we will work hard, we will eat the bread made with our own wheat, and will be farmers like the old time Jews, the ones in tne Bible." If Palestine seemed too alien for these Europeans, it also brought with it another problem: it was already inhabited, by an Arab population of hundreds of thousands of people whose families had lived there for centuries. The small community of Jews who already resided in Jerusalem, like the more sizable Jewish enclave in Baghdad, had long ago made its accommodations with Arab culture and strongly opposed Zionist pretensions that might, in arousing Arab antipathies, threaten their relatively stable existence. In the early years of the Zionist movement, two rabbis from Vienna were sent on a scouting mission to Palestine to estimate the possibilities of creating a Jewish state there. The rabbis wired back, "The bride is beautiful but she is married to another man." But for the more zealous, and focused, Zionists, this was no fatal obstacle. After all, in the very same chapter of Genesis in which the Lord first calls Abraham to the promised land, there is the explicit acknowledgement that "the Canaanite was then in the land." Nevertheless, the Lord immediately thereafter appears to Abraham and declares to him, "Unto thy seed will I give this land." In the next chapter the sequence is repeated, and elaborated. "And the Canaanite and the Perizzite dwelled then in the land." And the Lord said to Abraham, "Lift up now thine eyes, and look from the place where thou art northward, and southward, and eastward, and westward: for all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed forever." The biblical message could not be any clearer: the imagined land took precedence over the inhabited land.
It is the primary obligation of the [israeli] government to protect Jewish lives. Israel is first and foremost a JEWISH democratic State. It is NOT a non-sectarian, democratic country like the United States. As such, it is absurd for anyone other than Jews to be citizens in the first place! That is why Israel MUST revamp its Constitution making Israel unequivocally a JEWISH State… with NO possibility that any other group will ever become the majority. It is insane to have enemies of the Jewish people living anywhere within its boundaries. So how does Israel put a stop to the explosive Israeli Arab population growth? The same way one puts a stop to a growing cancer… REMOVE IT.
We, members of the People's Council, representatives of the Jewish Community of Eretz-Israel and of the Zionist Movement, are here assembled on the day of the termination of the British Mandate over Eretz-Israel and, by virtue of our natural and historic right and on the strength of the resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.
"The more fucked up and surreal the world, demonstrably, becomes, the less David Lynch films become feverish, inscrutable, schizoid texts and, more straight forwardly, just the order of the day.
The first time I saw Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, in late August of 1992, I was in the midst of a quasi-nervous breakdown resulting from the messy end to a three year love relationship coinciding with a feature film stalled in post-production with no completion funding in sight. I went alone to see the movie on a sweltering summer afternoon in a wife-beater and tiny short-shorts at the now defunct Cineplex at the Eaton's Centre in Toronto, a slew of tiny, shoebox theatres in the dank basement of a shopping mall.
The air-conditioning blasting, I sat shivering with my bare arms around my bare legs, identifying intensely with Laura Palmer, played by Sheryl Lee. I hadn't related to a character so strongly since Diane Keaton burned a hole in the screen as Theresa Dunn in Looking For Mr. Goodbar fifteen years earlier. There's something about Hollywood actresses playing promiscuous, burned-out drug addicts in female-identified movies that drives me, as a gay man, wild with passionate desire.
Enter Terrence Koh. Mr. Koh and I had often talked about our love of the movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, arguing over who was more Laura Palmer, him or me. We also expressed a mutual fascination with the Bang Bang Bar from the same movie, situated, as it is, on Canada-US border. As fellow Canadians who often find ourselves striding that border, one foot in the more demure, polite, and wishy-washy Canadian identity, one foot in the aggressive, hard, and confidant American identity, we appreciate the metaphorical notion of walking across the floor of a bar and switching identities as easily as segueing from beer to hard liquor.
We also began talking about collaborating on an installation of degenerate art consisting of horizontal glory holes, envisioning cocks coming down from the ceiling and up from the floor like stalactites and stalagmites. After all, why should glory holes be restricted to the vertical axis? That's strictly for the birds – and Republican Senators.
Combining these two ideas, Blame Canada was born. After all, the US makes a habit of blaming Canada for a variety of nasty things: a porous border, lax immigration policies, Communist tendencies, multiculturalism, gayness (gay marriage is legal in Canada), Celine Dion… so why not give them what they want: a scapegoat , a whipping boy , a lapdog, a masochist , a Judas, a boot-licker, a cocksucker, a punk . In fact, why not give them two - Terrence Koh and Bruce LaBruce – two of the biggest faggots this side of Elton John.
BLAME CANADA will be on view at Peres Projects (26 Schlesische Strasse, Berlin) in our new first floor exhibition hall, through Nov. 10, 2007. Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, from 11:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M and by appointment."