Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: la faccia come il culo

http://www.vergarimonspiero.com/
  Nel carcere mai ho domandato a nessuno perchè era là o che cosa aveva 
fatto. Tra le centinaia di persone incontrate dei più diversi stati 
sociali, parlavamo di cose religiose o di attualità; Enrico De Pedis 
veniva come tutti gli altri, e fuori dal carcere, ci siamo visti più 
volte: normalmente nella chiesa di cui ero rettore, sapendo i miei orari 
e altre volte fuori, per caso. Mai ho veduto o saputo nulla dei suoi 
rapporti con gli altri, tranne la conoscenza dei suoi familiari. Aveva 
il passaporto per poter  andare liberamente all'estero.


"Ecco, magari non era proprio un benefattore per tutti. Ma per
Sant'Apollinare si"
"Seppellire i morti è sempre un gesto di misericordia. Uno spostamento
andrebbe contro il rispetto dei morti."
"E faceva consistenti oboli. Ciò gli sarà utile nell' altro mondo.
Lassù non badano a dove si viene sepolti"
http://archiviostorico.corriere.it/2005/settembre/24/Andreotti_boss_nella_cripta_Spostarlo_co_9_050924039.shtml

 ha scritto nel messaggio 
news:he9sac$jgr$1...@news.eternal-september.org...
Nahum, mi puoi linkare la lettera di Koestler di cui parli altrove? Sarei 
molto interessato a leggerla. 

Andreas Brehme ha scritto:

Dear Sir,
Every morning when you open your paper you feel sick with fear that
your boy might have been kidnapped or blown to pieces by Jewish
terrorists. I am a person who sympathises with terrorists, and though
I disapprove of their recent methods, I might have become one of them
– by force of circumstances. I am writing to you to explain those
circumstances.
I am not speaking lightly of terror; during several years I have lived
in the same anxiety, for persons near to me, which you feel for your
son. The persons were my mother and her family; the danger which
threatened them, as Jews in German-controlled territory, was death by
poison gas or quicklime. My mother was the only one who escaped. Her
sister, her sister’s daughter and two grandchildren were gassed. My
mother's brother managed to commit suicide. Every single Jewish
terrorist in Palestine has a similar story. This is the first fact you
have to let sink in; without this background you will understand
nothing.
Obviously you will answer that these regrettable deeds were committed
by the Nazis and not by the British; that one of the reasons your boy
fought this war was precisely to save those unfortunates; and that
there is no excuse for the criminal madness of the thugs who, instead
of showing gratitude, throw bombs at their benefactors. As against
this, allow me to mention some facts, based on official British
sources, which, I submit, prove that the Jews of Palestine have no
reasons for gratitude to your country, and many reasons for bitterness
against it. There is a legend that in 1917 Mr. Lloyd George's
government, in the kindness of their hearts, promised Palestine to the
Jews; since then the Jews have insisted on this somewhat rash promise
like Shylock on his pound of flesh; while the unfortunate British,
caught between the conflicting claims and bullets of Arab and Jew,
carried heroically the White Man's Burden.
This is the legend; the facts about the motives which prompted the
Lloyd George Cabinet to launch the Balfour declaration were explained
by Mr. Lloyd George himself in his statement before the Royal
Commission in 1937. In the autumn of 1917, at the time of the Russian
collapse, the Allies were in a critical position. "In this critical
situation it was believed that Jewish sympathy or the reverse would
make a substantial difference one way or the other to the Allied
cause." Thus originated the promise of a "National Home"; the meaning
of this term was interpreted by Lloyd George, President Wilson, Cecil,
Smuts, Winston Churchill, etc., as equivalent to a future Jewish state
(Royal commission Report, pp. 23-25). The Zionist leaders, according
to Lloyd George's statement, promised in exchange "to rally Jewish
sentiment and support throughout the Allied cause. They kept their
word." (ibid., p.23). It was an honest deal, supported on both sides
by long-standing sympathies, not an act of charity, and the question
of gratitude does not arise.
The second part of the story is the period between the two wars. I
have no space to go into details, only to point out some salient
facts. It is not true that the Jews came to Palestine under the
protection of British bayonets, or at the expense of the British
taxpayer, or with British help under any form, as many countrymen seem
to believe. The transformation of Palestine within twenty years from a
malaria-infested stretch of swamp and desert into the most fertile
country of the Middle East is due to Jewish labour and capital. The
part played by the British Administration was to run the public
services, on taxes mainly levied from the Jews.
"But," you will object, “after all we did let the Jews come to
Palestine in spite of Arab opposition didn’t we? We could just as well
have locked them out, and saved ourselves all this trouble…” You are
again misinformed. Palestine never was a Colony or Protectorate of
yours: your job and raison d’être in that country was to administer a
Mandate on behalf of the League of Nations and that Mandate put you
under the obligation “to facilitate Jewish immigration,” to help the
“close settlement by Jews of the land “ and finally the establishment
of the “National Home.” The deal, concluded in 1917 and known as the
Balfour Declaration, had been ratified by fifty-two nations and had
become the legal basis, and the only basis, of your presence in
Palestine.
The third part of the story starts in 1939, with the White Paper which
Mr. Morrison, in the name of the Labour Party, called "a cynical
breach of faith, a breach of British honour," and Mr. Churchill "a
base betrayal, the filing of a petition in moral bankruptcy." You have
probably heard about this famous document which, leaving details
aside, amounted to the barring of Palestine to the Jews (after a last
batch of 75,000) for ever, and led to the prohibition of the buying
and cultivating of land by Jews in 95 per cent of the country’s total
area (Land Transfer Act of February 1940). Thus at the very moment
when the extermination of the European Jews began, the doors of
Palestine were slammed in their faces; while those already inside
Palestine were condemned to live in one more cramped, Oriental ghetto.
This policy was not only inhuman, it was apparently also illegal in
the terms of International Law, and this point is essential for the
understanding of all further developments in Palestine. For legally,
as already mentioned, Britain’s presence in Palestine was based on the
Mandate.
The League’s Permanent Mandate Commission met on June 16th, 1939, and 
found unanimously that the new policy contradicted the terms of the 
British trusteeship. Now according to Article 27 of the Mandate "the 
consent for the Council of the League of Nations is required for
any modification of the terms of this mandate." The Council of the
League was to meet in September, 1939, but meanwhile the war broke out
and it never met. As the Mandatory Commission (and leading politicians
of all parties in this country itself) had found that the White Paper
was not only a "modification" of the Mandate but directly contradicted
it, it could only gain legal validity by the League’s consent; and
this consent was never given. This is the reason why terrorists refuse
to recognize the jurisdiction of British Military Courts and prefer to
be hanged without defending themselves; and they claim that Britain’s
status in Palestine is that of an occupying Power, based on force, not
on law. For similar reasons the Jewish Agency denies the validity of
any discrimination between "legal" and "illegal" immigrants.
I am not an expert in International Law, but it seems incontestable,
as a matter of common sense, that the pretence of administering a Home
which people are not permitted to enter, even when in danger of their
lives, is a moral and legal perfidy. The story of Palestine from 1939
to this day is essentially the story of people struggling to save
their skins, and of British efforts to prevent this by force and
diplomatic pressure. Here are a few examples.
In March and April, 1939, three refugee ships – S.S. Assandu, Astir
and Assimi, packed with Jews who had escaped, mainly from Germany,
reached Palestine, and were refused permission to land. In the House
of Commons Mr. Noel-Baker asked the then Colonial Secretary, Mr.
Malcolm MacDonald, what would happen to these people. Mr. MacDonald
said that they had been sent back from where they came. Mr. Noel-
Baker: "Does that mean to concentration camps?" Mr. MacDonald: "The
responsibility rests on those responsible for organising illegal
immigration." (Debate in the House of Commons, April 26th-27th, 1939.)
Do you recognise the tune? It is unchanged to this day. The
responsibility rests with the "racketeers" who tried to save these
condemned people, not with those who sent them back to their death.
There was also much talk in 1937 about the insanitary conditions on
these hell-ships. The gas chambers, the quicklime – and the dry rot of
the D.P. camps to-day, were and are doubtless sanitary.
Try to put yourself into the place of a Jew of your own age on the
jetty of Haifa, shouting and waving to a relative – your son for
instance – on the deck of one of those ships; he is not permitted to
land; the ship lifts anchor to take its doomed hysterical load back to
where it came from. The figure of your boy grows smaller; a few years
later you hear that he has been gassed in Oswiecim. If, instead of
Smith, your name were Schmulewitz, it might have happened to you.
Something on the same lines happened, among others, to a man whom I
met in Palestine two years ago; he told me that his mother and three
brothers had been killed “by German sadism and the British White
Paper.” His name is Friedman Yellin, and he is head of the so-called
Stern Gang.
More examples? On November 24th, 1940, the passengers of the steamer
Patria, who had been refused admission to Palestine, blew their ship
up in Haifa harbour. Over two hundred people were blown to bits or
drowned a hundred yards from the promised shore. They were not even to
have been deported back to Europe, which, owing to the war, was
impossible; only to a tropical island in the Indian Ocean. But these
people had become allergic to barbed wire. When a person reaches that
state, like the survivors in the D.P. camps to-day, he is past
listening to the reasonable voice which tells him that he should never
have escaped, or saved his wife and children, without a permit in
triplicate to do so.
One last example. The year is 1942; the crematoria in Europe had
started to work, when another hell-ship, the 180-ton cattle-boat
Struma, hailing from Constanza, floundered into the harbour of
Istanbul. There were 769 escapees on board, several of whom had lost
their reason. The Turks were prepared to let them land in transit, on
condition that the British would permit their entry into Palestine.
This the Palestine Government, after consultation with London,
refused; so the Turks sent the boat back to Rumania. The rest of the
story you can guess: the ship blew up within a few miles of the
Turkish coast; one man survived; all other passengers, including 250
women and 70 children were drowned.
The Black Sea was the Jews' main life-line of escape from the European
crematorium. The Struma cut that life-line. Those who, against law and
morality, refused to grant its passengers entry into Palestine, did
not want them to be drowned. They were presumably even sorry and
surprised. All they wanted was that they should be sent back to their
"port of embarkation," where they could wash their hands of them, and
thus discourage others from trying to save their skins. In the
parliamentary debate of April, 1939, from which I have quoted, the
Colonial Secretary had said that the Government had the fullest
sympathy with Jewish refugees, but if they allowed one shipload, more
would follow. This has been the guiding principle of British policy in
Palestine from 1939 to this day. It was a policy of deliberately
obstructing by active and passive measures, by force and by diplomatic
pressure, the escape of Jews from extermination by a mass exodus into
Palestine. I have quoted to you a few examples of this policy; they
could be multiplied. Further evidence of the deliberate character of
this policy is available, but cannot be published at this moment. But
perhaps some future commission of inquiry into the administration of
the Palestine Mandate will find it useful to ask, i.a., H.M. former
ambassador in Anka to disclose the instructions he received during the
critical period before and after the Struma episode.
The White Paper of 1939 has been described as the Palestine Munich.
After the Labour victory of 1945 everybody expected that his last
relic of Chamberlain’s policy would be wiped out. No party was so
deeply committed to support Jewish immigration into Palestine as the
Labour Party. On no fewer that eleven occasions, from 1917 to 1945,
the Annual Party Conference had reaffirmed this obligation. In 1939
Philip Noel-Baker had prophesied that, if the White Paper was adopted,
the only way to stop refugees would be "to tell those kindly British
soldiers to shoot them down." In 1944, the Party conference had
affirmed that "there is surely neither hope nor meaning in a 'Jewish
National Home' unless we are prepared to let the Jews enter if they
wish." In 1945, just before the Labour Government took office, this
policy was once more confirmed, and Hugh Dalton declared that “it is
morally wrong and politically indefensible to impose obstacles to
entry into Palestine now of any Jews who desire to go there." You know
the rest of the story. It is the story of yet another broken pledge;
of the triumph of a Foreign Office clique and Ernest Bevin’s
pigheadedness over Labour's honour.
But this time the Jews' patience is exhausted. On practically every
hell-ship which approaches Palestine one or two survivor are shot down
because they resist the boarding parties which carry them off to yet
another cage, in the name of a policy which is "morally wrong and
politically indefensible". As a result, the Jews have shown that they
can fight as ruthlessly and as savagely as any other people driven to
despair. Political terrorism has not been invented by them, as the
penny press tries to make people in this country believe; it is as old
as injustice and oppression, which is its cause. From the days of
Spartacus to the French and Yugoslav maquis, the men who fought
oppression by violence were called bandits by those who turned Law and
Order into a mockery; and patriots and heroes if they succeeded. But
this romantic halo is only given them by posterity, or distant
sympathisers. Looked at from close to, the deeds of the Paris Commune,
or the Russian Social-Revolutionaries, or Tito's Partisans, all shows
the same ugly and revolting details: retaliations, expropriations,
armed robberies, bombs, execution of hostages. And it is always the
innocents who foot the bill, like Sergeants Martin and Paice, like
your boys, who have to carry out a loathsome and immoral policy; for
they are under orders, and they know not what they do.
The reason, according to Mr. Bevin, for using men o' war and
paratroopers to fight the inglorious battle of the Palestine beaches,
is Britain's duty to protect Arab interests – another version of the
White Man's Burden. In fact, the situation between Jew and Arab in
Palestine is much the same as between Moslem and Hindu in India. The
proportion of Moslem to Hindu is roughly 1 to 3; of Jew to Arab
roughly 1 to 2. In some fields, where their interests are parallel,
they collaborate; in all major points their culture and political
aspirations clash. As there is no hope of reconciling these for a
considerable time, the inevitable solution is to partition the
country. This is hard luck on the Arabs; but they have thrived on this
hard luck and grown in health and prosperity as never before in
history. It is also hard luck on the Jews; for the Mandate gave them
Palestine including Transjordan, and now they will have to be content
themselves with a fraction of one-half of it. It may be argued that it
was wrong to promise in 1917 a predominantly Arab country to the Jews,
but this argument leads nowhere; for to-day the Jewish third in
Palestine is a fact which cannot be undone, nor can their fields and
orange groves be reconverted into desert and marsh. Since the Royal
Commission recommended partition in 1937, every level-headed observer
has agreed to this – except the Labour Party, which urged a Jewish
State in the whole of Palestine.
But, you will object, all this may be true and very regrettable;
however, now that we have passed the whole problem on to Uno it is for
them, and no longer for us, to decide. Again you have been misled. The
Uno Commission is not the first which has been asked to suggest a
policy for Palestine – it is, if I remember rightly, the seventeenth
or eighteenth. The Royal Commission in 1937 suggested partition; the
Chamberlain Government issued the White Paper instead. Last year we
had the Anglo-American Commission; your Foreign Secretary pledged
himself to carry out their suggestion if they were unanimous; they
were unanimous; they were not carried out. The methods which Mr. Bevin
used to sabotage any constructive solution, to get out of his Party’s,
his Government’s, and his personal commitments, sounded more than
anything like the subterfuges of a Jewish pettifogger. The terms under
which he passed the matter on to Uno contain the same loopholes as the
previous invitations to other bodies to make “suggestions.” He
referred to Uno as an International Tribunal – but reserved the right
to accept or reject the Tribunal’s verdict. In the light of their past
experiences, it is not surprising that the Palestine Jews suspect this
latest move of being another subterfuge to gain time and to continue a
policy based on principles which Mr. Bevin’s colleagues in the Cabinet
have branded as morally and politically indefensible. The one proof of
the honesty of his intentions would be for him to state unequivocally
that Britain will either accept Uno’s verdict or surrender the Mandate
and clear out.
Meanwhile two things can be done to stop the vicious circle of terror
and retaliation. The first is to go to Uno with constructive proposals
for a just partition of the country, to be enforced if need be with
international help – instead of presenting a record of impotency and
bankruptcy. The second is to raise the monthly immigration quota from
1,500 to 5,000 during the period of transition without political
conditions, as a minimum gesture of good will. I can assure you, on
the strength of many years of experience in Palestine, that this alone
would be enough to lead to an immediate suspension of terrorism and at
least to a kind of armistice while Uno’s decision is pending.
Is it as simple as that? It is as simple as that. And if public
opinion still has a say in your country, now is the time to stop
disaster. For the Jews of Palestine fight for one thing only, for the
oldest slogan in their history: Let My People Go. There were six
million of them in Europe; only one of ten is left. Your countrymen
are very fond of the word decency; if you have any left, let them go.
If you refuse, you will have to take the consequences, which may be
more serious than you think. For you should understand that there is
more at stake here than meets the eye. A great Empire which rules the
seven seas can afford to flaunt the world’s opinion. But you are no
longer that; you cannot afford to put might before right; and you have
already antagonised on this issue public opinion in just the two
countries you need most: the U.S.A. and France. The future of a
country which is on the downward grade in terms of power depends more
than on anything else on its moral integrity. Palestine is a test for
your integrity; and in more than one sense your fate is linked with
hers.
Yours truly,
ARTHUR KOESTLER

  Nel carcere mai ho domandato 
Qual � il tuo problema? Che te ne fotte di de pedis? Pensa ai tuoi
Yigal Amir.