“Who controls the past controls the future,” wrote George Orwell in “1984,” quoting a party slogan in that book. “Who controls the present controls the past,” he added.
The resolution adopted by the European Parliament on September 19 has an Orwellian ring to it. It is called “The importance of European memory for the future of Europe.” Not everything in this resolution is bad. It deals with the importance of remembering the crimes committed in World War II, and not only for the sake of honoring the memory of the victims and punishing the executioners.
Remembering, according to this resolution, bolsters democracy, the rule of law and the defense of human rights, which enable the European Union to prevent a repetition of past crimes.
This is definitely a worthy objective, but the lofty words conceal a dangerous view, expressed in the historical tale they tell. “The Second World War, the most destructive war in European history,” it says, “began as an immediate result of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact, signed on August 23, 1939.”
This declaration is not problematic because of its falsity but because it’s not the whole truth. It’s true that the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact let Hitler move forward without worrying about a second front, but the Germans had planned the war much earlier, before this pact was signed.
Other contributing factors are not mentioned at all in the resolution, including the problem of the Treaty of Versailles, the Munich pact and the support of the Fuhrer’s allies such as Italy, Spain, Japan and the tycoons who benefited from his rule.
According to the European legislators, the war was not the result of German aggression, but of Nazi-Communist aggression. The emphasis this resolution places on Stalin, while ignoring figures such as Franco and Mussolini, raises the suspicion that the European Union’s alternative history takes the present status of Russia, Italy and Spain into consideration more than it does the historical truth.
The interpretation given to the manner in which the war ended is even sketchier. With all the justified criticism of Stalin’s crimes, one must remember that it was Russian troops who defeated the Nazis in Europe (obviously with the help of the other allies). Auschwitz was not liberated by humanist pacifists, but by armed soldiers fighting under the red flag.
The resolution adopted by the European Union repeatedly cites different variations of the words “Nazis, Communists and other totalitarian regimes.”
Placing communism on an equal footing with Nazism is a historical distortion which ignores the bravery of those who fought the Nazis. Even if one ignores the courage of the Red Army because of its role in maintaining the Soviet dictatorship, the ranks of fighters against the Nazis included loyal communists and socialists such as the Yugoslav partisans, the Polish communist Armia Ludowa partisans and many members of the French Resistance and Jewish fighters in the ghettos. Were these also responsible for the war and its crimes?
These crimes are the biggest problem with this resolution. “The Nazi and Communist regimes committed mass murders, genocide and deportations, leading to a loss of life and liberty on a scale that was unprecedented in human history,” says clause 3 of the resolution.
This statement is not wrong, but the conflation of atrocities creates a distorted picture. The European legislators do acknowledge the Holocaust suffered by European Jewry and condemn its denial, but overall, their resolution gives the impression that the crimes of the Nazis and “the crimes of Communist and other regimes” are equally heinous. Evil has its gradations, and blurring these makes it harder to combat it.
When corrupt people try to evade justice, they argue that everybody is corrupt. Similarly, painting Nazis and communists with the same brush denies the significance of the Holocaust in human history.
The Baltic states are particularly interesting in this context. They’ve been supporting such resolutions for years, to downplay their complicity in Nazi crimes by creating a false picture in which their fate under the Russian occupation was the same as the fate of the Jews.
This is why the resolution promotes practical steps such as establishing days of commemoration, the removal of offensive monuments and the determination of material included in the curriculum of European Union schools.
This is historical revisionism, which highlights the words of Prof. Yehuda Bauer, a leading Holocaust historian, published in these pages and elsewhere. Bauer said that the Holocaust was unique not because it couldn’t happen again, but because it was an attempt to totally annihilate an entire people, which was persecuted across the globe in the name of a racist and murderous ideology, with no underlying pragmatic reasons for doing so.
This distinction does not make it easier for the victims of Stalinism, but it’s required for combating genocide now and in the future, a struggle which requires an understanding of the mechanisms that enabled the murderousness and of the mechanisms that helped fight it.
These will never be understood if all aspects of human evil are lumped together, with no ability to distinguish between the different components.
Many supporters of this resolution in the European Union are not anti-Semitic or revisionists.
They are motivated by considerations that are connected to the confrontation with Russia, to promoting European integration and to contending with racist and isolationist trends across the continent. But even when intentions are good, the practicalities can be sloppy.
European leaders would do well to base their policy on a moral conception and on well-established facts, rather than on distorting history. Instead of Orwellian attempts to change the past, let them focus on amending the present and shaping the future.
Rape, torture and human experiments. Sayragul Sauytbay offers firsthand testimony from a Xinjiang 'reeducation' camp
David Stavrou, STOCKHOLM – Twenty prisoners live in one small room. They are handcuffed, their heads shaved, every move is monitored by ceiling cameras. A bucket in the corner of the room is their toilet. The daily routine begins at 6 A.M. They are learning Chinese, memorizing propaganda songs and confessing to invented sins. They range in age from teenagers to elderly. Their meals are meager: cloudy soup and a slice of bread.
Torture – metal nails, fingernails pulled out, electric shocks – takes place in the “black room.” Punishment is a constant. The prisoners are forced to take pills and get injections. It’s for disease prevention, the staff tell them, but in reality they are the human subjects of medical experiments. Many of the inmates suffer from cognitive decline. Some of the men become sterile. Women are routinely raped.
Such is life in China’s reeducation camps, as reported in rare testimony provided by Sayragul Sauytbay (pronounced: Say-ra-gul Saut-bay, as in “bye”), a teacher who escaped from China and was granted asylum in Sweden. Few prisoners have succeeded in getting out of the camps and telling their story. Sauytbay’s testimony is even more extraordinary, because during her incarceration she was compelled to be a teacher in the camp. China wants to market its camps to the world as places of educational programs and vocational retraining, but Sauytbay is one of the few people who can offer credible, firsthand testimony about what really goes on in the camps.
I met with Sauytbay three times, once in a meeting arranged by a Swedish Uyghur association and twice, after she agreed to tell her story to Haaretz, in personal interviews that took place in Stockholm and lasted several hours, all together. Sauytbay spoke only Kazakh, and so we communicated via a translator, but it was apparent that she spoke in a credible way. During most of the time we spoke, she was composed, but at the height of her recounting of the horror, tears welled up in her eyes. Much of what she said corroborated previous testimony by prisoners who had fled to the West. Sweden granted her asylum, because in the wake of her testimony, extradition to China would have placed her in mortal danger.
She is 43, a Muslim of Kazakh descent, who grew up in Mongolküre county, near the China-Kazakh border. Like hundreds of thousands of others, most of them Uyghurs, a minority ethnic Turkic group, she too fell victim to China’s suppression of every sign of an isolationist thrust in the northwest province of Xinjiang. A large number of camps have been established in that region over the past two years, as part of the regime’s struggle against what it terms the “Three Evils”: terrorism, separatism and extremism. According to Western estimates, between one and two million of the province’s residents have been incarcerated in camps during Beijing’s campaign of oppression.
As a young woman, Sauytbay completed medical studies and worked in a hospital. Subsequently she turned to education and was employed in the service of the state, in charge of five preschools. Even though she was in a settled situation, she and her husband had planned for years to leave China with their two children and move to neighboring Kazakhstan. But the plan encountered delays, and in 2014 the authorities began collecting the passports of civil servants, Sauytbay’s among them. Two years later, just before passports from the entire population were confiscated, her husband was able to leave the country with the children. Sauytbay hoped to join them in Kazakhstan as soon as she received an exit visa, but it never arrived.
“At the end of 2016, the police began arresting people at night, secretly,” Sauytbay related. “It was a socially and politically uncertain period. Cameras appeared in every public space; the security forces stepped up their presence. At one stage, DNA samples were taken from all members of minorities in the region and our telephone SIM cards were taken from us. One day, we were invited to a meeting of senior civil servants. There were perhaps 180 people there, employees in hospitals and schools. Police officers, reading from a document, announced that reeducation centers for the population were going to open soon, in order to stabilize the situation in the region.”
By stabilization, the Chinese were referring to what they perceived as a prolonged separatist struggle waged by the Uyghur minority. Terrorist attacks were perpetrated in the province as far back as the 1990s and the early 2000s. Following a series of suicide attacks between 2014 and 2016, Beijing launched a tough, no-holds-barred policy.
“In January 2017, they started to take people who had relatives abroad,” Sauytbay says. “They came to my house at night, put a black sack on my head and brought me to a place that looked like a jail. I was interrogated by police officers, who wanted to know where my husband and children were, and why they had gone to Kazakhstan. At the end of the interrogation I was ordered to tell my husband to come home, and I was forbidden to talk about the interrogation.”
Sauytbay had heard that in similar cases, people who returned to China had been arrested immediately and sent to a camp. With that in mind, she broke off contacts with her husband and children after her release. Time passed and the family did not return, but the authorities did not let up. She was repeatedly taken in for nocturnal interrogations and falsely accused of various offenses.
“I had to be strong,” she says. “Every day when I woke up, I thanked God that I was still alive.”
The turning point came in late 2017: “In November 2017, I was ordered to report to an address in the city’s suburbs, to leave a message at a phone number I had been given and to wait for the police.” After Sauytbay arrived at the designated place and left the message, four armed men in uniform arrived, again covered her head and bundled her into a vehicle. After an hour’s journey, she arrived in an unfamiliar place that she soon learned was a “reeducation” camp, which would become her prison in the months that followed. She was told she had been brought there in order to teach Chinese and was immediately made to sign a document that set forth her duties and the camp’s rules.
“I was very much afraid to sign,” Sauytbay recalls. “It said there that if I did not fulfill my task, or if I did not obey the rules, I would get the death penalty. The document stated that it was forbidden to speak with the prisoners, forbidden to laugh, forbidden to cry and forbidden to answer questions from anyone. I signed because I had no choice, and then I received a uniform and was taken to a tiny bedroom with a concrete bed and a thin plastic mattress. There were five cameras on the ceiling – one in each corner and another one in the middle.”
The other inmates, those who weren’t burdened with teaching duties, endured more stringent conditions. “There were almost 20 people in a room of 16 square meters [172 sq. ft.],” she says. “There were cameras in their rooms, too, and also in the corridor. Each room had a plastic bucket for a toilet. Every prisoner was given two minutes a day to use the toilet, and the bucket was emptied only once a day. If it filled up, you had to wait until the next day. The prisoners wore uniforms and their heads were shaved. Their hands and feet were shackled all day, except when they had to write. Even in sleep they were shackled, and they were required to sleep on their right side – anyone who turned over was punished.”
Sauytbay had to teach the prisoners – who were Uyghur or Kazakh speakers – Chinese and Communist Party propaganda songs. She was with them throughout the day. The daily routine began at 6 A.M. Chinese instruction took place after a paltry breakfast, followed by repetition and rote learning. There were specified hours for learning propaganda songs and reciting slogans from posters: “I love China,” “Thank you to the Communist Party,” “I am Chinese” and “I love Xi Jinping” – China’s president.
The afternoon and evening hours were devoted to confessions of crimes and moral offenses. “Between 4 and 6 P.M. the pupils had to think about their sins. Almost everything could be considered a sin, from observing religious practices and not knowing the Chinese language or culture, to immoral behavior. Inmates who did not think of sins that were severe enough or didn’t make up something were punished.”
After supper, they would continue dealing with their sins. “When the pupils finished eating they were required to stand facing the wall with their hands raised and think about their crimes again. At 10 o’clock, they had two hours for writing down their sins and handing in the pages to those in charge. The daily routine actually went on until midnight, and sometimes the prisoners were assigned guard duty at night. The others could sleep from midnight until six.”
Sauytbay estimates that there were about 2,500 inmates in the camp. The oldest person she met was a woman of 84; the youngest, a boy of 13. “There were schoolchildren and workers, businessmen and writers, nurses and doctors, artists and simple peasants who had never been to the city.”
Do you know which camp you were in?
Sauytbay: “I have no idea where the camp was located. During my time there, I was not allowed to leave the grounds even once. I think it was a new building, because it had a great deal of exposed concrete. The rooms were cold. Having connections with others was forbidden. Men and women were separated in the living spaces, but during the day they studied together. In any case, there were police who supervised everything everywhere.”
What did you eat?
“There were three meals a day. All the meals included watery rice soup or vegetable soup and a small slice of Chinese bread. Meat was served on Fridays, but it was pork. The inmates were compelled to eat it, even if they were religiously observant and did not eat pork. Refusal brought punishment. The food was bad, there weren’t enough hours for sleep and the hygiene was atrocious. The result of it all was that the inmates turned into bodies without a soul.”
Sins and abortions
The camp’s commanders set aside a room for torture, Sauytbay relates, which the inmates dubbed the “black room” because it was forbidden to talk about it explicitly. “There were all kinds of tortures there. Some prisoners were hung on the wall and beaten with electrified truncheons. There were prisoners who were made to sit on a chair of nails. I saw people return from that room covered in blood. Some came back without fingernails.”
Why were people tortured?
“They would punish inmates for everything. Anyone who didn’t follow the rules was punished. Those who didn’t learn Chinese properly or who didn’t sing the songs were also punished.”
And everyday things like these were punished with torture?
“I will give you an example. There was an old woman in the camp who had been a shepherd before she was arrested. She was taken to the camp because she was accused of speaking with someone from abroad by phone. This was a woman who not only did not have a phone, she didn’t even know how to use one. On the page of sins the inmates were forced to fill out, she wrote that the call she had been accused of making never took place. In response she was immediately punished. I saw her when she returned. She was covered with blood, she had no fingernails and her skin was flayed.”
On one occasion, Sauytbay herself was punished. “One night, about 70 new prisoners were brought to the camp,” she recalls. “One of them was an elderly Kazakh woman who hadn’t even had time to take her shoes. She spotted me as being Kazakh and asked for my help. She begged me to get her out of there and she embraced me. I did not reciprocate her embrace, but I was punished anyway. I was beaten and deprived of food for two days.”
Sauytbay says she witnessed medical procedures being carried out on inmates with no justification. She thinks it was done as part of human experiments that were carried out in the camp systematically. “The inmates would be given pills or injections. They were told it was to prevent diseases, but the nurses told me secretly that the pills were dangerous and that I should not take them.”
What happened to those who did take them?
“The pills had different kinds of effects. Some prisoners were cognitively weakened. Women stopped getting their period and men became sterile.” (That, at least, was a widely circulated rumor.)
On the other hand, when inmates were really sick, they didn’t get the medical care they needed. Sauytbay remembers one young woman, a diabetic, who had been a nurse before her arrest. “Her diabetes became more and more acute. She no longer was strong enough to stand. She wasn’t even able to eat. That woman did not get any help or treatment. There was another woman who had undergone brain surgery before her arrest. Even though she had a prescription for pills, she was not permitted to take them.”
The fate of the women in the camp was particularly harsh, Sauytbay notes: “On an everyday basis the policemen took the pretty girls with them, and they didn’t come back to the rooms all night. The police had unlimited power. They could take whoever they wanted. There were also cases of gang rape. In one of the classes I taught, one of those victims entered half an hour after the start of the lesson. The police ordered her to sit down, but she just couldn’t do it, so they took her to the black room for punishment.”
Tears stream down Sauytbay’s face when she tells the grimmest story from her time in the camp. “One day, the police told us they were going to check to see whether our reeducation was succeeding, whether we were developing properly. They took 200 inmates outside, men and women, and told one of the women to confess her sins. She stood before us and declared that she had been a bad person, but now that she had learned Chinese she had become a better person. When she was done speaking, the policemen ordered her to disrobe and simply raped her one after the other, in front of everyone. While they were raping her they checked to see how we were reacting. People who turned their head or closed their eyes, and those who looked angry or shocked, were taken away and we never saw them again. It was awful. I will never forget the feeling of helplessness, of not being able to help her. After that happened, it was hard for me to sleep at night.”
Testimony from others incarcerated in Chinese camps are similar to Sauytbay’s account: the abduction with a black sack over the head, life in shackles, and medications that cause cognitive decline and sterility. Sauytbay’s accounts of sexual assaults has recently been significantly reinforced by accounts from other former inmates of camps in Xinjiang published by The Washington Post and The Independent, in London. A number of women stated that they were raped, others described coerced abortions and the forced insertion of contraceptive devices.
Ruqiye Perhat, a 30-year-old Uyghur woman who was held in camps for four years and now lives in Turkey, related that she was raped a number of times by guards and became pregnant twice, with both pregnancies forcibly aborted. “Any woman or man under age 35 was raped and sexually abused,” she told the Post.
Gulzira Auelkhan, a woman of 40 who was incarcerated in camps for a year and a half, told the Post that guards would enter “and put bags on the heads of the ones they wanted.” A Kazakh guard managed to smuggle out a letter in which he related where the rapes at his Xinjiang camp took place: “There are two tables in the kitchen, one for snacks and liquor, and the other for ‘doing things,’” he wrote.
Journalist Ben Mauk, who has written on China for The New York Times Magazine and others, investigated the camps in Xinjiang and published a piece in The Believer magazine containing the accounts of former prisoners. One is Zharkynbek Otan, 32, who was held in a camp for eight months. “At the camp, they took our clothing away,” Otan said. “They gave us a camp uniform and administered a shot they said was to protect us against the flu and AIDS. I don’t know if it’s true, but it hurt for a few days.”
Otan added that since then he has been impotent and prone to memory lapses. He described the camp he was in as a huge building surrounded by a fence, where activity was monitored by cameras that hung in every corner: “You could be punished for anything: for eating too slowly, for taking too long on the toilet. They would beat us. They would shout at us. So we always kept our heads down.”
Thirty-nine-year-old Orynbek Koksebek, who was incarcerated in a camp for four months, told Mauk, “They took me into the yard outside the building. It was December and cold. There was a hole in the yard. It was taller than a man. If you don’t understand, they said, we’ll make you understand. Then they put me in the hole. They brought a bucket of cold water and poured it on me. They had cuffed my hands… I lost consciousness.” Koksebek also told about roll calls held twice a day in which the prisoners, their heads shaven, were counted “the way you count your animals in your pasture.”
A 31-year-old woman, Shakhidyam Memanova, described the Chinese regime of fear and terror in Xinjiang thus: “They were stopping cars at every corner, checking our phones, coming into our homes to count the number of people inside… People getting detained for having photos of Turkish movie stars on their phones, new mothers separated from their babies and forced to work in factories like slaves.” Later in her testimony she added that children were being interrogated at school about whether their parents prayed, and that there were prohibitions on head coverings and possessing a Koran.
Curtain of secrecy
The Xinjiang region in northwestern China is a very large. Spanning an area larger than France, Spain and Germany combined, it is home to more than 20 million people. About 40 percent of the population is Han Chinese, China’s ethnic majority, but the majority in Xinjiang are ethnic minorities, mostly Turkic Muslim groups. The largest of these is the Uyghurs, who constitute about half the region’s population; other ethnic groups include Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and others.
Xinjiang became part of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and received an autonomous status. In recent decades, the region has experienced dramatic social, political and economic changes. Formerly a traditional agricultural area, Xinjiang is now undergoing rapid industrialization and economic growth powered by the production of minerals, oil and natural gas, and by the fact that it is a major hub of the Belt and Road Initiative, which is an important part of China’s global economic expansion.
“Since the 1950s, the Chinese government has invested heavily in Xinjiang,” says Magnus Fiskesjö, an anthropologist from Cornell University who specializes in ethnic minorities in China.
“A large part of this investment is managed by a governmental military enterprise called Bingtuan [short for the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps], whose activity, together with various economic and political measures taken by the central government, created resentment among the local population. They were discriminated against and were becoming a minority in their own land, because the authorities moved masses of Han Chinese to Xinjiang,” he explains. “The tension between minority peoples and Han Chinese there is not only a result of religious feelings or a specific economic enterprise. It stems from a wide range of Chinese policies that the native population does not benefit from. Tensions reached a boiling point on several occasions, and in some cases deteriorated into organized violence and terror attacks.”
The vast majority of the minorities in Xinjiang are opposed to violence, but radical Uyghurs have at times been able to dictate the tone. Fiskesjö elaborates: “The Chinese government used these conflicts and terror attacks to paint the entire population of Xinjiang as terrorists and to start a campaign of erasing the population’s cultural identity. The Chinese are erasing minority cultures from both the public and the private arena. They are criminalizing ethnic identities, erasing any trace of Islam and minority languages, arresting singers, poets, writers and public figures. They are holding about 10 percent of the minority ethnic groups in modern-day gulags.”
According to Fiskesjö, the Chinese initially denied these claims, but when pictures and documents were leaked to the West, and satellite images showed camps being built all over the region – Beijing revised its story. Officials now admit that there is a legal campaign under way that is aimed at combating radicalism and poverty by means of vocational reeducation centers.
Sayragul Sauytbay with her husband in Stockholm
“The Chinese claim that these are vocational retraining camps and that the inmates are not there by coercion is a complete lie,” says Nimrod Baranovitch, from the University of Haifa’s Asian studies department. “I know directly and indirectly of hundreds of people who were incarcerated in the camps and have no need of vocational retraining. Intellectuals, professors, physicians and writers have disappeared. One of them is Ablet Abdurishit Berqi, a postdoctoral student who was here with us in Haifa. I hope he is still alive.”
Baranovitch finds it striking that the Muslim countries are ignoring the Chinese suppression. “For quite a few countries, we’re not only talking about coreligionists but also about ethnic affinity, as the Uyghurs are of Turkish descent. The thing is that many Muslim states are involved in the Silk Road [Belt and Road Initiative] project. In my opinion, one of the reasons for the promotion of that project, whose economic rationale is not always clear, is to facilitate the elimination of the Uyghur problem. By means of investments and the promise of huge future investments, China has bought the silence of many Muslim countries.”
Indeed, last July, an urgent letter about Xinjiang to the United Nations Human Rights Council from the ambassadors of 22 countries was answered by a letter of support for China from the representatives of 37 other states, including Saudi Arabia, Syria, Kuwait and Bahrain.
One factor that makes it easier for the world to remain silent about the events in Xinjiang is that China has effectively closed off this immense region behind a curtain of secrecy, by means of surveillance and espionage, internet and social-network censorship, travel restrictions and bans on residents’ contact with relatives and others abroad, along with policing, oversight and control on a vast scale. According to Fiskesjö, these efforts are concealing an actual genocide – according to the UN definition of the term from 1948 – even if the measures don’t include widespread acts of murder.
“Children are being taken from their parents, who are confined in concentration camps, and being put in Chinese orphanages,” he says. “Women in the camps are receiving inoculations that make them infertile, the Chinese are entering into private homes and eradicating local culture, and there is widespread collective punishment.”
A charge of treason
Sayragul Sauytbay’s story took a surprising turn in March 2018 when, with no prior announcement, she was informed that she was being released. Again her head was covered with a black sack, again she was bundled into a vehicle, but this time she was taken home. At first the orders were clear: She was to resume her former position as director of five preschools in her home region of Aksu, and she was instructed not to say a word about what she had been through. On her third day back on the job, however, she was fired and again brought in for interrogation. She was accused of treason and of maintaining ties with people abroad. The punishment for people like her, she was told, is reeducation, only this time she would be a regular inmate in a camp and remain there for a period of one to three years.
“I was told that before being sent to the camp, I should return home so as to show my successor the ropes,” she says. “At this stage I hadn’t seen my children for two-and-a-half years, and I missed them very much. Having already been in a camp, I knew what it meant. I knew I would die there, and I could not accept that. I am innocent. I did nothing bad. I worked for the state for 20 years. Why should I be punished? Why should I die there?”
Sauytbay decided that she was not going back to a camp. “I said to myself that if I was already fated to die, at least I was going to try to escape. It was worth my while to take the risk because of the chance that I would be able to see my children. There were police stationed outside my apartment, and I didn’t have a passport, but even so, I tried. I got out through a window and fled to the neighbors’ house. From there I took a taxi to the border with Kazakhstan and I managed to sneak across. In Kazakhstan I found my family. My dream came true. I could not have received a greater gift.”
But the saga did not end there: Immediately after her emotional reunion with her family, she was arrested by Kazakhstan’s secret service and incarcerated for nine months for having crossed the border illegally. Three times she submitted a request for asylum, and three times she was turned down; she faced the danger of being extradited to China. But after relatives contacted several media outlets, international elements intervened, and in the end she was granted asylum in Sweden.
“I will never forget the camp,” Sauytbay says. “I cannot forget the eyes of the prisoners, expecting me to do something for them. They are innocent. I have to tell their story, to tell about the darkness they are in, about their suffering. The world must find a solution so that my people can live in peace. The democratic governments must do all they can to make China stop doing what it is doing in Xinjiang.”
Asked to respond to Sayragul Sauytbay’s description of her experience, the Chinese Embassy in Sweden wrote to Haaretz that her account is “total lies and malicious smear attacks against China.” Sauytbay, it claimed, “never worked in any vocational education and training center in Xinjiang, and has never been detained before leaving China” – which she did illegally, it added. Furthermore, “Sayragul Sauytbay is suspected of credit fraud in China with unpaid debts [of] about 400,000 RMB” (approximately $46,000).
In Xinjiang in recent years, wrote the embassy, “China has been under serious threats of ethnic separatism, religious extremism and violent terrorism. The vocational education and training centers have been established in accordance with the law to eradicate extremism, which is not ‘prison camp.’” As a result of the centers, according to the Chinese, “there has been no terrorist incident in Xinjiang for more than three years. The vocational education and training work in Xinjiang has won the support of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang and positive comments from many countries across the world.”
Here I am, in the glass booth. Beside me sit two police officers, across from me are three judges. It’s a large room, filled with people. I’m not entirely sure how I got here, but in the minutes during which the final preparations are being carried out for what I assume to be my trial, I reconstruct the events of the past few days. It’s a bit choppy, but I remember the most important parts.
It was around 8 P.M. Someone attacked me outside, near my home. I fell down and was shoved into a parked car. There were four people in the car. They laid me down, bound my wrists, covered my mouth and blindfolded me. After that it gets blurry. I’m not sure whether the handcuffs, the detention cell and the interrogations were real or a dream. I’m positive, though, that right now an important man is standing in the room, pointing at me. It appears to be the attorney general. “When I stand before you here, judges of Israel, to lead the prosecution of David Stavrou, I am not standing alone“, he says, “With me are 6 million accusers”.
What terrible thing did I do, I ask myself. I’m a regular guy. Maybe not the greatest mind of my generation, certainly not without my faults, but even if I made mistakes here and there, I can’t come up with a single thing that would justify this kind of commotion. This is no ordinary criminal trial, I grasp that immediately. After all, I’m not a thief, a rapist or a murderer. There’s something broader here, something dark. The longer the speech continues, the more confused I become. The prosecutor’s tone grows harsher and it becomes clear that I, to my disgrace, pose a threat to the entire Jewish people.
At this stage, I must admit, I give up. What the hell do they want from me? Despite not observing all 613 commandments (truth be told, occasionally I trample rudely on some of them), I was sure that overall I do at least the minimum: I served in the military and I paid my taxes; in my humble family we speak Hebrew, hold a seder at Passover and light Hanukkah candles. We have Friday-night dinner at home and on Memorial Day we stand for the sirens. True, some of my clothes are shatnez, containing the prohibited blend of wool and linen, and there have been occasions when I have carried objects on Shabbat in an area without an eruv, but with all due respect that’s not exactly incest or idol worship.
And then, just as I’m about to give up, I have a light-bulb moment. It’s all her fault, she's why I'm here. We met 25 years ago, when she was a volunteer on the kibbutz where I lived. You know how it is. One thing leads to another. She wasn’t Jewish, but we were happy together and without giving it too much thought, seeing as I’m a simple, shallow man with little sense of history and lacking a deep national consciousness, I fell for her charms. Over time our relationship deepened and eventually we even raised a family. What a terrible mistake!
Now, as the prosecutor reaches the stage of calling the expert witnesses, an internationally known witness takes the stand. I know him. I’ve read about him in the newspaper here and there, and I’m almost thrilled by the idea that a person of his stature is taking the time to testify at my trial, even if it’s for the prosecution. It’s the Israeli minister of education. When he begins to speak his words are crystal-clear. I grasp my head in my hands and am filled with guilt feelings.
Six million Jews were lost as a result of assimilation and mixed marriages among Diaspora Jews, he says. The audience’s jaws drop as one, and I realize that my irresponsibility and lack of moral backbone have turned me into a Nazi war criminal. “Assimilation,” says the expert witness in summation, “is like a second Holocaust.”
He is followed by additional witnesses. One, I think the minister of agriculture, also speaks about the assimilation Holocaust. Another, I’m told he’s the deputy minister of religious services, laments the silent Shoah. I began to comprehend my place in the history of Israeli law: Eichmann, Demjanjuk, Stavrou.
I admit that when I waited for the verdict, I was still angry. I was suspicious about the motives of the witnesses. That gradually passed. I came to understand that trivial matters such as love, family ties and deep, true relationships cannot excuse violating the boundaries of race and Jewish religious law. I cause a Holocaust, therefore I am a Nazi, a danger to the Jewish people. Fortunately, the education and agriculture ministers are protecting the chosen people by combating Nazism with the help of race laws, which prohibit mixed marriages and strip inferior races of political and human rights.
At first I was still confused and suspicious, but a friendly prosecutor explained the background of their policy to me. As it turns out, the education minister solved all the problems of the education system and now, when Israel’s schoolchildren enjoy an excellent, free education, and the schools are brilliant campuses of academic excellence and values education, he has turned his attention to solving the problems of the Jewish people in Israel and the Diaspora. It took time, but eventually I understood, and I lovingly accepted the necessary verdict. I have sinned. I have transgressed. All I can do is to hope that on my execution day an enormous crowd will welcome me with jeers and curses.
In 1942, an SS officer told a Swedish diplomat about the Nazi death camps. Now, a new documentary revives the story. "En Svensk Tiger – The Swedish Silence" tells the amazing story of SS officer Kurt Gerstein and Swedish diplomat Göran von Otter, their meeting on a night train from Warsaw to Berlin in and the meaning and consequences that night carries to this day. It's a tragic and complicated story but a very human one too. A powerful reminder of all the hate, cruelty and indifference we are capable of but also of the fact that choice between good and evil is always possible, even in the heart of darkness itself.
On a summer’s night in 1942, on a train traveling from Poland to Germany, Swedish diplomat Göran Fredrik von Otter noticed a very troubled passenger. “I saw how he was looking at me,” he said in a 1968 interview, “as if he wanted to tell me something.” Since Sweden was neutral during World War II, it still had an embassy in Berlin, and von Otter was working there.
On this particular evening he was on his way back to Berlin after a day of meetings in German-occupied Warsaw. The passenger he met on the crowded train introduced himself as Kurt Gerstein, lit a cigarette and said: “I saw something terrible yesterday.” He then told his interlocutor that he was an SS officer, returning from a visit to two places that were almost totally unknown at the time: Treblinka and Belzec.
That summer, only a handful of office-holders in Germany knew what was actually going on in the death camps in Poland. The Nazi officer told the Swedish diplomat what he had seen, providing him with one of the earliest testimonies, both credible and detailed, to emerge from the extermination camps. From time to time the German officer broke down in tears, and in the end he urged von Otter to tell the Swedish government what he had told him and to see to it that the world put a stop to the crimes he had witnessed. The two parted ways when the train reached Berlin.
The annihilation of Jews did not cease, however, and the information revealed in that nighttime encounter, which were supposed to reach millions, were revealed to only a few in real time. Even after the war, Gerstein’s name did not become well known, even though it surfaced in a number of movies, plays and biographies. But now this story has surfaced again, in the form of a new documentary called “The Swedish Silence,” directed by Carl Svensson.
The wrong man
“I first learned about the story from Gitta Sereny’s book about Albert Speer,” Svensson says in a conversation in a Stockholm café in mid-April, referring to the Austrian-British author’s 1995 biography of the notorious Nazi leader. “I began to research it and naturally the meeting on the night train became the starting point of the film.”
The main protagonists of the story, Gerstein and von Otter, are no longer alive – the former allegedly committed suicide in 1945; the latter passed away in 1988 – but in the process of making the documentary, Svensson did track down some of their relatives. Indeed, the men’s daughters, Birgitta von Otter and Adelheid von Platen, respectively, star in the new film, which does not focus on the historical episode per se but rather on how it affected a much wider group of people over three generations.
“This became a new perspective,” Svensson tells me. “Von Otter is looking for the truth her father didn’t want to talk about, while von Platen talks a lot about being part of ‘an SS family’ after the war. We have to continue talking about the Holocaust but we need new perspectives so that it doesn’t become a cliché.
“In this film,” he adds, “the main characters are the next generation: They didn’t witness the events themselves, they are ‘witnesses of the witnesses,’ and the incident that led to the connection between them – the meeting on the train – is still very present in their lives. It’s an open wound.”
“Father didn’t really want to talk about it,” says Birgitta von Otter, who is in her 80s today and found out about the incident over the years, through letters, newspaper interviews and fragments of conversations with her parents. “My mother said that my father was pale after his encounter with Gerstein, and he proceeded directly to write a report about it. When he presented his report to his superiors at the embassy [in Berlin] he was asked not to write about it, but to tell the Foreign Ministry in Stockholm next time he went there.”
There is still a lack of clarity regarding the identity of the person who gave von Otter these instructions and the timing of his next trip to Stockholm, but it’s clear that when he arrived there a few months later, he reported Gerstein’s testimony to the head of the ministry’s political department, Staffan Söderblom.
“It’s not clear what Söderblom did with the information,” says von Otter. “At the foreign ministry they said that they only heard about Gerstein’s story when they read about it in the papers much later.”
For their part, the Swedes claimed later that they did not decide to take any action since the situation was known by the time they received it. To this day, no official document has been found to indicate that people-in-the-know in the Swedish government were planning to disseminate the information provided by Gerstein.
“I don’t want to judge von Otter,” says Carl Svensson, “but I think he was the wrong person at the wrong place and the wrong time. In many ways he’s a symbol of Sweden’s World War II policy. We were among the first to know about the Holocaust but we didn’t do anything about it. Being neutral is a commitment. We should have done more, we should have been a safe haven for refugees, not just avoid being attacked. Von Otter was in a way a typical Swede, a bureaucrat, someone that does as he’s told, respects authority and avoids conflicts.”
The documentary also presents the complex historical context in which von Otter was operating. Along with humanitarian operations such as those spearheaded by businessman and diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and efforts to help save the Jews of Denmark and Norway, Sweden cultivated ties with the Third Reich – selling iron to Germany’s military industries, which paid for it with money stolen from European Jews. Many claim that in this way Sweden contributed to the prolongation of the war.
“We are taught that Sweden was not part of World War II, but that’s not entirely true,” says Svensson. “We were also part of Europe’s history in the 1940s and we must face that.”
“The Swedish Silence” is a Holocaust movie but it’s not about Jews: Its main focal point is not the victims, and not even the murderers, but rather the onlookers and bystanders – those who had a choice about how to react.
Kurt Gerstein was an SS officer and part of the German extermination machine, but at the same time he opposed the Nazis and served as a one-man resistance movement within the SS, who tried to disseminate news about their crimes to the world. He was a devout Christian and was active in religious organizations as well as being a Nazi Party member.
In the mid-1930s, perhaps due to the murder of a relative by the Nazis, Gerstein became an active opponent of the regime, distributing anti-regime materials and participating in protests. He got into trouble with the authorities and was arrested by the Gestapo, losing his job as a mining engineer. A few months before the war broke out, however, he returned to the party, and in 1941 he became an officer in the Waffen SS Hygiene Institute. Among his responsibilities was supplying Zyklon B to Auschwitz. The highly poisonous pesticide was initially used for disinfection but in 1942 the Nazis began using it to gas people to death, and Gerstein was in charge of delivering it in large quantities.
In August of that year he was asked to go to Poland to advise senior Nazi officials Odilo Globocnik and Christian Wirth, who were responsible for building and operating camps for the extermination of Jews in that country. At those camps, Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec, the Nazis were then using carbon monoxide to murder Jews and Gerstein was tasked with two jobs: helping to expedite the process of killing people, and disinfecting the enormous piles of clothes that they left behind. After Globocnik warned Gerstein and his associates, at a meeting in Lublin, that everything they were going to see was top secret, and that divulging anything would lead to a death sentence – they left for their first stop: Belzec.
Gerstein was horrified by what he saw there. He watched a transport of thousands of Jews from Lwow arriving at the camp’s gates just after 7 A.M. one day. Hundreds were already dead. When they got off the train they were told to undress, the women’s hair was shorn, and they were all made to run naked along a fenced-in path, being whipped along the way. At the end of the path was the building holding the gas chambers. Gerstein noticed the geraniums in the yard and the picture of a Star of David on the ceiling of the building.
After an SS officer assured everyone that no harm would befall them, they were crowded into the chambers, the doors were locked, and a diesel engine started pumping in the poisonous gas. In the report he submitted to the Allies after the war, Gerstein describes how the engine failed that day, and the whole process was halted for three hours, with shouting and cries audible from the outside. After the engine started working again, the killing process took half an hour. Gerstein watched the bodies being taken out and buried.
“Even in their death you could identify the families,” he described in the report. “The bodies of children, women and men were taken out, still holding hands.”
After that fateful visit to Belzec, Gerstein toured Treblinka and then returned to Warsaw. On August 20 he got on the night train to Berlin, where he met von Otter and told him everything he’d seen. He didn’t stop after meeting the Swede by chance: He continued to disseminate the information at every opportunity: to leaders of the Catholic Church, to Swiss diplomats and to the Dutch government in exile.
His efforts had no effect, apparently, and Gerstein ended up serving in the SS until the end of the war. According to different testimonies, he suffered pangs of conscience and tried to diminish his own role in abetting Nazi crimes by destroying shipments of Zyklon B on several occasions. At the end of the war he surrendered to the French, and volunteered to write about the crimes perpetrated by Nazis and to testify at their trials.
At that time, after the war in 1945, Göran von Otter had been transferred to the Swedish embassy in Helsinki. He knew nothing had been done by his government with the information he had received from Gerstein, and asked a colleague in London to pass on the information to the Allies. If Swedish diplomacy could not save the victims, he may have thought, perhaps the information would help Gerstein avoid being executed as a war criminal. Here too, the diplomat’s actions were too hesitant and too late. The letter was sent, but the day it arrived in London, Gerstein was found hanging in his cell. He left behind a wife and three children, who learned of his death only three years later.
Families’ encounter
Birgitta von Otter (whose sister, Anne Sofie, is a world-famous opera singer) says that her father was in contact with Gerstein’s widow after the war. “He visited her in the 1980s, wanting to look her in the eyes. He must have felt guilty, thinking he could have done more.” In Svensson’s documentary, three generations are present at the encounter between the families.
“It was interesting to see how Adelheid lived in the shadow of her father,” says von Otter. “She can’t remember him but she talks about him and has kept photos and several of his possessions. Ultimately, she’s a child who lost her father and suffered greatly because of what happened to him. The family lived in poverty, was condemned as Nazis, and fought for years to clear his name.”
She adds that the recent visit to Germany helped her understand the importance of the role the war still plays there even today – as compared to Sweden, where it is much less present.
“There is a certain naivete in Sweden about the role it played during the war,” notes director Svensson, adding that Swedish TV turned down requests to air the film a couple of times. “Now we’ve shortened the film and we’re talking with SVT (Sweden’s public broadcaster), trying to have it aired anyway. But many Swedes just don’t want to talk about it.”
Thus, despite the fact that many of his countrymen wish to avoid the whole subject, Svensson’s film, in a way, is putting Sweden back in European history.
“Moral decisions are taken by individuals, not by collectives,” says Arne Ruth, a senior Swedish journalist and editor, who knew Göran von Otter personally and supports Svensson’s effort. “It’s not about collective guilt. Swedish TV may think it has dealt enough with the Holocaust and that it doesn’t need to deal with this rather strange story, but it’s an important story because it shows how a life of an individual changed because of inaction, and how even the next generation of the family was affected by this passivity. It’s a human perspective and therefore always relevant.”
Indeed, the story involving von Otter and Gerstein is important although it did not change the course of events over 70 years ago. The information brought by Gerstein about the annihilation of Jews did not stop it, and it is difficult to estimate how many people could have been saved had the official Swedish response been more resolute. However, the report he wrote at the end of the war was used in trials against Nazi war criminals, including at Nuremberg and the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. His testimony has also been used in combating Holocaust denial.
More importantly, perhaps, Gerstein’s legacy is a troubling reminder of human apathy and a powerful argument against averting one’s gaze, and against claims that it was impossible to oppose the Nazi war machine. Gerstein showed that choosing between good and evil is possible even under unbearable conditions, and that actions against evil can be carried out almost anywhere – even from within the very innards of the monster itself.
Chinese Institutes at Universities Are Under Fire, but Israeli Scholars Insist There's No Undue Influence.Are these Beijing-funded entities disseminating China’s contentious policies to the West under the guise of language courses, cultural events and research programs?
In the past, the Chinese Communist Party worked hard to suppress the legacy of Confucius. But in recent years it has been making extensive – and some would say cynical – use of the name and thought of the renowned philosopher, who lived from 551 to 479 B.C.E. The most salient example is the Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms, educational institutions which teach the Chinese language and culture and operate in some 150 countries. The institutions are established at the initiative and with the funding of Hanban, the Office of Chinese Language Council International, which is accountable to China’s Ministry of Education and represents the interests of the Communist Party.
In recent years, however, the institutes have come under fierce criticism on the grounds that they engage in censorship, disseminate propaganda and restrict academic freedom. More than 20 institutes have shut down as a result, and there are calls for greater transparency from those that continue to operate. According to the official data, 548 Confucius Institutes now operate worldwide, including in Israel, along with 1,193 smaller Confucius Classrooms. In a certain sense, the institutes, which are funded to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year, resemble international organizations that promote language and culture, such as the British Council and Germany’s Goethe Institute. But a closer examination reveals dramatic differences.
In contrast to their European counterparts, the Confucius Institutes are located within existing academic institutions and operate in tandem with Asian studies departments under a contract between Hanban and the host university. Chinese government funding for each institute can be as much as $200,000 annually. The institutes draw on teaching materials from China and in many cases employ Chinese staff who are paid by their home country. In return, the universities provide office space, computers and access to the students. The contract contains clauses that subordinate the institute to the head office in Beijing; it prohibits activity that is contrary to Chinese laws and regulations.
The lesser allegations against the institutes maintain that their presence on campus, combined with economic, legal and political pressure, restricts academic freedom and leads to self-censorship by students, lecturers and researchers. More extreme allegations hint that the Confucius Institutes are forward positions that serve Chinese interests by collecting information and engaging in industrial espionage under the cover of Chinese language courses, cultural events and academic research.
Eyes on the prize
There are two Confucius Institutes operating in Israel. The first opened at Tel Aviv University in 2007 and the second at Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2014. Senior Chinese officials, including the deputy prime minister, Liu Yandong, attended the opening ceremony in Jerusalem. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose visit to China a year earlier paved the way for the institute’s establishment, sent a recorded message with greetings.
“The decision to open a Confucius Institute, which is involved in the East Asian Studies Department and is headed by a tenured professor who gets a salary to study China without any pressure, is a distinct and clear conflict of interest,” says Noam Urbach, who teaches Chinese at Bar-Ilan University and is an Asian studies doctoral student at the University of Haifa. “There’s no reason to open an institute of this kind in the university, or for its cooperation with the department, other than to engage in censorship, exert pressure and limit academic freedom.”
Urbach cites a number of issues in the study of contemporary China that Beijing considers sensitive, which the Chinese authorities make every effort to keep out of public discourse. “Human rights in China, for example, can’t be mentioned,” he says. “Nor can you talk about domestic political problems or about the suppression of minorities such as the Uyghur community,” a reference to the persecuted Muslim group in the country.
“China can open whatever institution it wishes, from Mount Hermon to Eilat,” says Urbach, “But to allow it to operate within a university is like letting Likud open a [Ze’ev] Jabotinsky Institute in the political science department.”
Even though pressure on the local universities is not absolute and the influence emanating from Beijing can be restrained, Urbach believes it is impossible to ignore the negative effects. The academics who research these issues are liable to pay a price. One of Israel’s leading sinologists, Prof. (Emeritus) Yitzhak Shichor, was blacklisted and blocked from visiting China after he contributed to a book of essays about Xinjiang, an autonomous territory of the Uyghur people in northwest China.
“In 2000-2001 I took part in a research project about Xinjiang, which was conducted at Johns Hopkins University,” Shichor says. “A Chinese professor claimed that the project encourages Uyghur isolationism in Xinjiang, which was absolute nonsense. In the wake of his complaint, the Chinese leadership decided to blacklist all 16 participants. I was the only non-American. For 15 years, with the exception of one year, I couldn’t get a visa for China.” Three years ago, he says, something changed. “I was asked to help with the establishment of an institute for Middle East research in Sun Yat-sen University in southern China. After that, not only did I receive a visa and get invited to conferences, I also received comfortable conditions. A few weeks ago, I was awarded a lifetime achievement prize by the China Cultural Center in Israel.”
But Urbach finds it difficult to agree. “There is tremendous self-censorship among researchers of China in Israel,” he observes. “It goes well beyond the dreams of every cadre in the Communist Party.” He cites as an example the fact that Israeli students who did not want to endanger their participation in the institutes’ programs – which offer scholarships, student exchanges and trips to China – opted to stay away from a meeting with the author of an important report on Chinese government suppression of Falun Gong, a spiritual practice. There are allegations in the international community that Falun Gong practitioners have been sent to “reeducation camps,” that hundreds have been executed and that they are subjected to organ harvesting for commercial purposes.
“The Confucius Institutes distribute coveted scholarships for studies in China, and students are afraid that they will lose out on a scholarship if they’re reported to have participated in a conference of that kind,” continues Urbach. “The institutes have the right to operate like that, but why should an East Asian studies department cooperate with them? … The university’s interest does not lie in the annual budget of $100,000 or $200,000 – that’s peanuts. What’s important is the potential for other agreements in hefty areas such as biotechnology and nanotechnology. It’s important for universities to receive research budgets from China and postdoctoral students from Chinese universities. That’s the real motivation.”
‘Separate and distinct’
Various sources, including Chinese exiles, international intelligence agencies and independent researchers alike have accused the Confucius Institutes of engaging in industrial espionage, collecting information and exerting pressure on Chinese citizens living outside the country, and collaborating with the United Front Work Department, a mysterious agency under the auspices of the Communist Party in China and elsewhere. Even if these claims are exaggerated, one cannot deny the influence wielded by the Confucius Institutes on the discourse about China, which senior Chinese official Li Changchun described in 2009 as “an important part of China’s propaganda apparatus abroad.”
Dr. Lihi Yariv-Laor, head of the Confucius Institute at Hebrew University, rejects such allegations outright. “The researchers and professors here enjoy full academic freedom,” she says. “To this day, during the five years of existence of the Confucius Institute at Hebrew University, the Chinese side has not dictated anything to us.”
Yariv-Laor, a former head of the university’s Department of East Asian Studies and until 2018 the academic chairwoman of both the Education Ministry’s committee on Chinese studies and the Council for Higher Education’s steering committee to further Israel-China relations, maintains that the status of the Confucius Institute at Hebrew University is unique. As opposed to most institutes, the branch in Jerusalem is research-oriented and does not engage in teaching the Chinese language or culture, which have been taught in courses elsewhere in the university for years. In addition to Yariv-Laor, the institute’s staff consists of an associate director sent from Beijing’s Peking University and an administrative coordinator. The salaries of the Israeli employees are paid by Hebrew University while the associate director’s salary is paid by Hanban.
“Hanban supplies the institute with materials, books, decorations and various accessories such as calendars,” Yariv-Laor says. “It does not dictate the use of any textbooks. The teachers of the Chinese language, who are subordinate to the Hebrew University’s languages unit, decide exclusively about the curriculum.” She adds, “Never have we received from anyone in China a directive about which issues to address and which issues not to address, and there are no Chinese guidelines according to which the institute operates. The criteria for prizes and scholarships are also decided by the Asian studies professors alone. They are academic criteria, according to the university’s rules, and they have nothing to do with any body in China.”
In addition to academic activities, Yariv-Laor says, the institute offers financial support for Asian studies students who give talks on China in high schools in and around Jerusalem, and organizes transportation for high-schoolers who study Chinese in the Jerusalem area. The institute also supports a two-week study tour in China for Israeli teenagers.
Her views are echoed by Prof. Asaf Goldschmidt, an East Asian studies professor at Tel Aviv University who heads the Confucius Institute there. “There are no direct or hidden restrictions on subjects for discussion at the Confucius Institute,” he explains. “The content of academic conferences is decided solely by the organizers of the conference or the organizing committee. We have never received a ‘grocery list’ of subjects that may or may not be discussed, and to this day, to the best of my knowledge, no restrictions or censorship have been imposed on the institute’s activity, and of course not on the activities of the East Asian Studies Department.”
The Confucius Institute at Tel Aviv University is funded by Hanban and operates in cooperation with Renmin University in Beijing, whose representative is part of the institute. According to Goldschmidt, the partnership takes the form of scientific conferences, student exchanges and reciprocal visits by faculty members; the department at TAU and the institute are two separate and distinct entities.
“The department, its students and its researchers often deal with controversial subjects,” Goldschmidt adds. “A salient example is a conference the department recently held in which a whole session dealt with issues of minorities in a completely open way.”
Rising tide of opposition
Several prominent incidents raised suspicions about the Chinese bodies in charge of research and education. In New Zealand, accusations were leveled at the Chinese authorities when burglars broke into the home, office and car of researcher Prof. Anne-Marie Brady after she published studies about Chinese policy in Antarctica and China’s use of “soft power” in the West. According to reports in the local media, the burglars only took her computers and cellphone but ignored other valuables.
In another headline-making incident in 2014, the director of Hanban ordered her staff to tear out pages containing information about academic institutions in Taiwan from a conference program in Portugal. In 2017, China stopped funding Chinese scholars studying at the University of California, San Diego after it hosted the Dalai Lama.
Yet another highly publicized incident occurred in 2008, when a photography exhibit about the suppression of the Falun Gong movement was removed from Tel Aviv University. Following a lawsuit filed by the exhibit’s organizers, the court ordered the university to remount the show and pay the organizers 45,000 shekels (about $11,000). The judge noted that the decision to remove the exhibit was made in part after pressure, apparently from the Chinese Embassy, was brought to bear on the dean of students.
A particularly fraught case happened a number of years ago in Canada, which is home to many Chinese immigrants. In 2012, the Toronto District School Board signed an agreement with the Chinese government to fund a branch of the institute that would offer Chinese language instruction to hundreds of thousands of Canadian students.
“The agreement wasn’t made public and didn’t get media coverage, even though it was supposed to bring about the establishment of the biggest Confucius Institute in the world,” says Doris Liu, a Canadian film director who made a documentary on the subject in 2017, called “In the Name of Confucius.” “In 2014, the festive opening ceremony [of the institute] was held in the presence of senior figures from China. At that stage, the public became aware of the program and a protest started by parents who were concerned that their children would be brainwashed.”
The protest quickly gained momentum. There were letters and petitions, Liu relates, and panicky conversations with members of the schools’ boards of directors, together with fierce demonstrations. Liu’s film documents the dramatic struggle and its protagonists: a Chinese teacher who defected from the institute and was granted asylum in Canada; a senior figure in the Canadian education system who had worked to develop the ties with the Chinese and resigned for vague reasons; and a Canadian intelligence official who warned that the institute would be a Trojan horse and claimed that Chinese-Canadian organizations were faking popular support for the institutes.
The parents were victorious: Not long after the institute’s inauguration, the agreement was canceled. Naturally, the Chinese were not pleased with Liu’s film, and she says they are still trying to prevent it from being shown. “A screening at Victoria University in Melbourne, which has a Confucius Institute, was canceled. The Australian press discovered afterward that the cancelation was due to the intervention of the Chinese consulate,” she says, adding that the Chinese also tried to interfere with screenings in New Zealand and Japan.
Public criticism in Toronto resonated beyond the city and brought about the closure of other Confucius Institutes in Ontario and in Quebec. And Canada is not alone: More than 20 other institutes have shut down in recent years, including ones at the University of Chicago, Pennsylvania State University and other colleges in Texas and Florida. Institutes in Sweden, Denmark, France and Germany have also closed.
The first Confucius Institute in Europe, established in 2005 at Stockholm University, also shuttered in 2015. Alberto Tiscornia, the head of the Department of Asian, Middle Eastern and Turkish Studies, emphasizes that the institute closed due to “legal difficulties and issues of proper administration.” The reason for an end to the cooperation, he explains, “was the problematic character of hosting an institute that is financed by another country on the university’s grounds.” The case sparked criticism in the media and a demonstration by Chinese exiles.
“There is a certain naiveté amongst university bureaucrats in the West. In China’s political reality there are no independent units, they are all managed by the [Communist] Party down to the smallest detail,” the Swedish journalist Ingvar Oja wrote. “The teachers who are sent abroad are handpicked by the party and are party loyalists.”
The complexity of the ties with China may be gleaned, perhaps, from comments by Prof. Daniel Leese, an expert on Chinese history and politics from the University of Freiburg in Germany.
“After June 4th [the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989], many said we should cut our ties with China,” he says. “But how should we then keep in dialogue with the Chinese at various levels? Confucius Institutes like the ones here in Germany make the connection possible. Cross-cultural dialogue is always complicated, but the people in the institutes are individuals, and if you do it properly, real dialogue is possible. The party doesn’t have total control of what Chinese citizens think, as is sometimes described in the media. But we should also be aware of the fact that many within the Chinese populace are simply not waiting for liberal democracy to arrive, especially given recent developments in the West.”
Leese is aware of the fact that his research, which focuses on how China’s Communist Party copes with wrongdoings and atrocities that occurred during Mao Zedong’s rule, drew the attention of the authorities. There is general surveillance of what he and others are doing, he says. His academic freedom in Germany has not been compromised, he notes, but when he’s in China, pressure is put on people who work with him.
“I have to be careful who I work with,” he explains. “In recent years things have become harder and our access to archives, sources and people to interview isn’t as good as it used to be. Once the rules were clearer; today I’m not sure what things will be like in the years to come.”
Karolinska University Hospital, affiliated with the institute that awards the Nobel Prize in Medicine, named on Simon Wiesenthan Center's list for failing to respond adequately to alleged anti-Semitism towards three Jewish doctors.
STOCKHOLM – One of Sweden's most prestigious hospitals will be included in a high-profile list of the year's worst cases of anti-Semitism, in a grouping that has in the past included white supremacists and Muslim fundamentalists.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, recently informed Stockholm's Karolinska University Hospital that it will appear on its list of the 10 worst anti-Semitic incidents worldwide in 2018. The full list will be published on Thursday.
Cooper's letter to Iréne Svenonius, finance commissioner of Stockholm County, which owns the hospital, claims that the medical center's reaction to a series of anti-Semitic events that allegedly took place in one of its departments has "further inflicted suffering on innocent people, and only deepened and spread the stain of anti-Semitism."
Last October, Swedish daily newspaper Aftonbladet reported that Jewish doctors working at the hospital were victims of anti-Semitic bullying by one of their superiors – who is both a department head and senior surgeon. The alleged abuse included verbal attacks, anti-Semitic posts on social media and professional decisions that affected their careers.
In November, one of the abused doctors told Haaretz he had been systematically discriminated against by the department head for years. He added that two of his Jewish colleagues had quit the department because of the abuse, leaving him as the only Jewish physician still working there.
He also said all three had to pay both a personal and professional price for the abuse, and suffered from an extremely hostile working environment.
The Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, which confronts anti-Semitism and promotes human rights worldwide, became involved in November when Cooper was approached by one of the Jewish doctors.
After an initial correspondence with the hospital's acting CEO, Annika Tibell, Cooper traveled to Stockholm last month and met the hospital’s leadership. He then told the local press that the matter "needs to be fully addressed. If it isn’t, there will be damage to the name of Karolinska."
Over a month after his visit to Stockholm, Cooper told Haaretz he is "extremely disappointed that Dr. Tibell has failed to take quick, decisive action.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper from the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.MARK RALSTON / AFP
"The lack of action against anti-Semitic bias is a slap in the face to the Jewish doctors, to the Swedish Jewish community and to our center," he wrote to Svenonius.
His letter added that the hospital "ignored the cancer of anti-Semitism, and only reacted when the scandal went public." When the hospital finally decided to investigate, he said, the professor in charge of the investigation ignored "inconvenient truths" and found no anti-Semitism-related problem at the department.
"In America," Cooper concluded, "we call this a cover-up."
Karolinska is the name of both a major hospital and an affiliated medical institute that is one of the most respected in the world. The latter's Nobel Assembly awards the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Although the institute and adjacent hospital are two different legal entities, they are closely connected and all those who were involved in the alleged anti-Semitic behavior and subsequent investigation still work at both the hospital and institute.
Karolinska acting CEO Tibell told Haaretz that the hospital "continues to engage in ongoing efforts surrounding the report of anti-Semitism at one of our departments." She said an external investigation is ongoing and will be completed in January, which is when the hospital "will take all necessary actions based on the findings of an independent investigation and in accordance with Swedish legislation, including labor laws and regulations."
She continued: "In early 2019, the hospital is planning a number of lectures for employees on the theme of Everyone’s Equal Value, as well as a seminar based on the discussion of discrimination and victimization in health care."
Tibell also addressed the hospital's inclusion on the Wiesenthal Center list. "Clearly we see this as a very serious matter," she said. "Karolinska University Hospital has a zero-tolerance policy for all forms of discrimination, victimization and other offensive behavior – it goes without saying that this also includes all forms of anti-Semitism."
Svenonius responded to Cooper's letter, telling him: "I personally, and the whole political leadership in the County of Stockholm, have zero tolerance" to anti-Semitism. She sought Cooper's advice on the matter, welcomed a meeting with him, and suggested holding a conference promoting "work against discrimination and anti-Semitism" in the workplace.
Svenonius told Haaretz that "since Ms. Tibell was given the responsibility as acting CEO, the matter has been given top priority. I intend to immerse myself in the conclusions of the investigation and return with additional measures to the hospital unless adequate actions are taken by it.
"I take the list, as well as Rabbi Cooper's letter, extremely seriously," she continued. "I also find the growing anti-Semitism we have seen in Sweden recently totally unacceptable. Persons of Jewish descent should both feel welcome and secure in the Stockholm region and in Sweden. We need strong actions nationally and regionally to stop it," she said.
Cooper told Haaretz that while "lectures about cancer are important, action against the existing cancer of anti-Semitism is what's demanded first."
He added that the Swedish hospital "must ensure that those who have exhibited their bias never have any supervisory control over the Jewish doctors. That is a baseline for all other actions."
The link between Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme’s murder and that of Yitzhak Rabin, teaches Israelis that they should dedicate prime minister's memorial to addressing the existential dangers of political violence.
STOCKHOLM – The Palmes had just finished an evening at the cinema. It was at the end of February 1986, and Stockholm was snowy, freezing and dark. As strange as it sounds, Olof Palme, the prime minister of Sweden, had no security that evening. He and his wife left the official residence in the Old City, took public transportation to the center of town, and spent time in crowded places without bodyguards, metal detectors or patrols.
At 11:20 P.M., as they were making their way home, they were accosted by an armed man in a black coat and hooded sweatshirt who shot Palme at point-blank range. The prime minister fell, his blood staining the snow. After a split second the gunman fired another bullet at Palme’s wife, Lisbeth, which grazed her back. The assassin turned and fled. A passing cabdriver called police, who came three minutes after the shooting. The ambulance came right afterward. Palme was pronounced dead at the hospital at six minutes after midnight.
Sweden awoke to a morning unlike any they’d ever experienced. Their prime minister had been murdered and no one knew why or by whom. Thirty-two years later, the murder remains a mystery. At the end of 1988, a young alcoholic criminal named Christer Pettersson was caught, tried and convicted, but released when his conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court on appeal. From time to time there emerge new testimonies, revelations or conspiracy theories, but the truth remains unknown.
There are two reasons to recall this murder now. One is that Lisbeth Palme died of an illness three weeks ago. The second is more essential and more Israeli – the link between Palme’s murder and that of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Political assassinations are always traumatic and history is filled with them. In the case of Rabin’s murder, the incitement campaign that preceded it, its diplomatic and social significance and the political revolution that occurred afterward made its consequences critical.
That was not the case in Sweden, at least not on the surface. As after Rabin’s murder, masses gathered at the site of the Palme’s killing with candles and flowers, the funeral was attended by thousands of people and grief flooded the country. Unlike with Rabin’s assassination, though, Palme’s murder didn’t expose any clear dispute, primarily because the identity of the murderer and his motives weren’t known. Still, at least one lesson should have been clear, the prosaic and self-understood lesson that careful guarding of elected officials is at least as important as guarding democracy itself.
Palme was totally exposed during his murder and Swedish society paid a high price for this blunder. But was the lesson learned? The answer is no. Proof of this is what happened in September 2003, when Anna Lindh, then Swedish foreign minister, visited a department store in downtown Stockholm. Although she was one of the government’s senior figures, she had no security, just like Palme. While she was shopping she was approached by a 25-year-old man who stabbed her all over her body. She died in the hospital the following day.
Since then the security around senior Swedish officials has improved, but it still isn’t rare to see ministers and members of parliament walking alone in the street or riding the bus. This isn’t the result of a security failure. It’s the result of a political tradition that sanctifies accessibility, openness and transparency. These are unquestionably good traits, but interpreting them this way leaves democracy exposed to obvious dangers.
To the same degree, Sweden sanctifies freedom of expression and freedom of assembly almost without limit. These are also admirable traits, but they are exploited in the real world by the followers of the 21st century’s cancerous diseases. Neo-Nazis march through the streets in uniform; desperate, frustrated men perpetuate hate crimes against Jews and migrants; and youths in the suburbs of large cities are recruited to join ISIS. These are all symptoms of a society that doesn’t find the strength and courage to recognize that democracy has enemies, and there is no choice but to discuss ways of protecting it.
Here lies the Israeli connection to Palme’s murder. Since Rabin’s assassination in Tel Aviv in 1995, there has been a bitter debate over his commemoration. Some see it important to emphasize his political legacy, while others claim that commemoration should be dignified, neutral and lacking a political message. Yet there is another possibility. Between political remembrance, which belongs to just one camp, and official remembrance, which treats the murder as if the prime minister had died of a heart attack, there is the obvious truth.
The Rabin assassination is first and foremost a horrible case of political violence, whose message must be above all a message of setting boundaries to the political discourse and (physical) protection of democratic institutions and elected officials.
Those who assert that aspiring for unity and concealing Rabin’s path from the collective memory is superficial and often fascistic, too, are right. On the other hand, the aspiration to remember Rabin in the context of the Oslo Accords alone forgoes the attention and identification of most of Israeli society. In contrast, the debate on protecting democracy itself and on what it permits or forbids is important and relevant to all sides. It is neither an unimportant message that papers over the murder, nor a message that speaks to only one political camp. It is not partisan, but it is very political.
Democracy needs protection by all camps. It needs checks, balances and a free press. It won’t tolerate incitement and racism. And it should have freedom of expression with clear, unequivocal borders, which Rabin himself defined minutes before his death. “Violence is undermining the very foundations of Israeli democracy,” he said. “It must be condemned, denounced, and isolated. This is not the way of the State of Israel.”
The Swedes missed this basic idea in 1986 and ended up with more political violence. Israel, given as it is to internal and external conflicts, is in even greater danger. Its public leaders would do well to dedicate the memorial day for Rabin to addressing this existential danger, and not wasting it time and again on the usual spats over who will speak in the square and who will organize the ceremony.
The Continent has indeed received millions of migrants, and they pose a variety of problems to their host countries. But these emanate for the most part from right-wing nationalists, not Muslim refugees.
Generally speaking, there are two ways of describing the effects of the changes taking place in the Arab world on Europe: One speaks of millions of immigrants streaming from the rubble of the Middle East and destroying Europe by imposing their primitive, fundamentalist and terrorist culture. A less pessimistic view emphasizes Europe’s moral responsibility to take in refugees from the Middle East, save their lives and give them a new life in free and democratic societies.
Shaul Mishal’s recent piece in this newspaper (“Europe’s Muslim Moment,” September 27), belongs to the first type of view, which is held by many people, from academics and journalists to the wider public. You often hear people who had an Arab cabdriver in Paris or saw burka-clad women in Munich saying something like, “The Europeans will be sorry for what they’ve allowed to happen. Europe will turn into Europistan.” These same experts will also classify any other view as the idealistic naiveté of useful idiots in the service of Islam.
Mishal’s analysis of the Middle East and Africa is factual and addresses geopolitical fluctuations and climate crises in at least nine countries that are mentioned by name. But when it comes to Europe, Mishal doesn’t mention countries, regimes or political entities at all. His Europe is a stereotyped abstraction. What goes for France, goes for Estonia. What goes for Poland, goes for Scotland. Instead of facts and statistics, his analysis of Europe is filled with metaphors and imagery like “waves of immigration flooded Europe” and “Islamic pincers closing in on Europe.”
Take the claim that immigration is the cause of the rise of the far right. The far right has gained control in some countries, but in others it is far from having any governmental influence. Where, you might ask, does it have the most power? Actually, in countries like Poland and Hungary, which have taken in hardly any immigrants at all. In Germany and Sweden, which have absorbed large numbers of immigrants, right-wing parties have made gains but they are still far from taking power, with 12.6 percent and 17.5 percent support respectively in the most recent elections.
It’s not immigrants that boost the strength of the far right, but the fear of immigrants. This is an important distinction, one that shows that the solution to extremism and racism isn’t necessarily building walls but rather correct absorption and integration policies. The argument that immigrants lead to fascism echoes the argument that the “Jewish problem” ushered in Nazism’s rise to power. While there may be a connection, in both cases it is clear that the presence of an ethnic minority is the pretext and not the cause.
Mishal writes about “the return of factionalism, ethnicity and sectionalism,” but in Europe’s two most important countries, France and Germany, the voters keep electing leaders who support European cooperation and EU institutions. Mishal describes Europe as “a magnet for activity by radical Islamists” and he is right about that: The Middle East is indeed exporting terrorism to Europe. But a broader view shows that in 2017, two-thirds of the terror attacks on the Continent were committed by nationalist and separatist movements and only 16 percent were committed by jihadists. (The remainder were carried out by far-left and far-right organizations.)
It’s true that nearly all of those killed in terror attacks in Europe were the victims of jihadist attacks, because these employed methods imported from the Middle East and therefore were deadlier, but ISIS is just the latest addition to the bleak tradition of the Irish, Basque, neo-Nazi, white supremacist and anarchist undergrounds, and as is true for the entire population of Europe, only a tiny percentage of Muslim immigrants empathizes or justifies these attacks.
Just as the European tradition includes not just Beethoven, Spinoza and Shakespeare but also Auschwitz and the Inquisition, the immigrants also have more than just a single heritage. Millions of Muslims have integrated into European society in the last decades. They have contributed to its economy and its culture and, more important, they have developed a moderate kind of Islam that in most cases enables them to integrate into Western culture.
Migrant workers from Turkey are not the same as political exiles from Iran or refugees from a murderous civil war in Syria, but it can be said that the majority of Muslims in Europe are secular or traditional. If we hear about radical imams and people volunteering to join ISIS, it’s because they’re the ones who make headlines. In the real world, no “European countdown” has begun. Yes, a struggle over the Continent’s future is underway, but it is not a fight between immigrants seeking to impose sharia law and helpless natives, but one between liberal, democratic trends and separatist, nationalist and racist trends among both immigrants and the societies that are taking them in.
And the fight is far from being lost. National authorities are learning how to combat radicalization, many countries are adapting their immigration policies and the EU is attempting to balance and regulate the refugees’ arrival. The European mainstream still believes in multiculturalism, solidarity and democracy, but these are troublesome times and they come with challenges on many fronts. In Germany, Chancellor Merkel is contending with an opposition that decries her immigration policy; in Britain, the Euro-skeptics have prevailed; the Italians took a dramatic turn to the right; and in Spain, the Catalans are threatening to break up the kingdom.
Europe is not “in the process of returning to the bosom of Islam,” as Mishal says. Like the rest of the world, it is in the midst of a struggle between populist separatists and the old postwar establishment. And no one, including Israeli prophets of doom, knows how it will end.
David Stavrou is an Israeli journalist based in Stockholm
While Nazi criminals were hanged or committed suicide in their cells in Nuremberg, a secret network operating out of Malmö made sure the Nazi idea stayed alive.
STOCKHOLM – Last Yom Kippur, the Nordic Resistance Movement, a Swedish neo-Nazi organization, held a march in Gothenburg, Sweden’s second-largest city, that drew hundreds of participants. According to the local media, the group, which also maintains a presence in other Nordic countries, has grown stronger in the past few months, and evidence suggests that it is part of a larger pan-European trend. Parallel to the strengthening of neo-Nazis in Sweden, support for far-right movements of all types is being seen across the Continent. Some of the movements are represented in their countries’ respective parliaments, others are engaged primarily in disseminating their ideology through alternative media, and on the margins there are also organizations that resort to violence.
This phenomenon is not confined to Europe alone. Many supporters of the white supremacy concept and other European nationalists are now making common cause with the American alt-right movement. The political bloc they are forging threatens not only advocates of multiculturalism and socialists, feminists and environmentalists on the left, but also conservatives and libertarians, on the right.
Sweden, it turns out, is one of the centers of the new European right, even though it is better known for its high level of solidarity and social equality, and as a country that cultivates policies based on democratic values, human rights and generosity to asylum seekers.
Yet, for almost 100 years now, Sweden has been home to a plethora of racist, nationalist and fascist movements. The political establishment in Stockholm may be occupied with embracing universalist values and creating a social-democratic state, but extreme right-wing groups have been operating on the margins of Scandinavian society for years: from neo-Nazis and skinheads to anti-Semitic publishing houses, heavy-metal bands promoting racist values, and movements flaunting pre-Christian imagery that promote nationalist and anti-establishment ideas.
The Swedish journalist and writer Elisabeth Åsbrink probed the reasons for Sweden’s centrality in the European far-right scene in her book “1947: When Now Begins.” Åsbrink chronicles key figures and events that shaped the new world order and postwar Europe. One of the more fascinating individuals she portrays is Per Engdahl (1909-1994), the man who led the Swedish fascist movement.
“Engdahl was an intelligent and modern person,” Åsbrink said in an interview with Haaretz. “He was a fascist activist during the war, and after the war ended he understood that he would have to change his ways, so that the fascist and Nazi ideas would not die,” she relates.
“Already in 1945,” she continues, “he connected the remnants of fascist and Nazi movements from all over Europe. He made contact with Oswald Mosley’s fascists in England, with the French fascists, the Swiss Nazis and Hitler’s loyalists in Germany. He was in close touch with MSI, the Italian Social Movement, which continued Mussolini’s path in the dictator’s country, and he himself founded a Danish Nazi party. His network also included Nazis from Norway and Holland, and the postwar advocates of the Iron Cross party in Hungary. Together they formed a secret network whose center was in Malmö [Sweden], where Engdahl lived.”
The network, later known as the Malmö Movement, played a central role in the rehabilitation of Europe’s extreme right.
To begin with, according to Åsbrink, Engdahl created an escape route for Nazis from all parts of Europe. It passed through northern Germany and Denmark, and led to Malmö. From there the Nazis were smuggled to various places in southern Sweden and then sent by ship from Gothenburg to South America. In some cases these Nazis returned to West Germany, where the American authorities were releasing hundreds of S.S. men every day because they were unable to cope with the expenses of detaining the overload of fugitives. Engdahl claimed to have “saved” about 4,000 Nazis in this way.
One of those who assisted Engdahl was Johann von Leers (1902-1965), who had been Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’ right-hand man and protégé, and himself a leading ideologue of the Third Reich.
“Von Leers arrived in Malmö in 1947, and then disappeared,” Åsbrink notes. “No one knows exactly how, but in the end he got to Buenos Aires, where he edited a paper that became a communications channel between Nazis in Europe and those who ended up in Latin America. Von Leers was later brought to Egypt under the auspices of Haj Amin al-Husseini, with whom he was in close contact. Eventually he converted to Islam and changed his name to Omar Amin as a gesture to his benefactor, becoming head of [Egyptian President Gamal Abdel] Nasser’s ‘Israeli’ propaganda unit.”
The close ties between Nazis like von Leers and the Palestinian national movement is one of the stories that connect the European right of the 1940s and 1950s to contemporary political dramas. But the link runs deeper.
“Engdahl founded a network of international nationalism,” Åsbrink says, adding, “Until then, nationalism bore a local character. Engdahl turned it into an international movement. The network’s first conference was held in 1950, in Rome. Engdahl, a polyglot who taught himself Italian for the occasion, spoke at the gathering and wrote the network’s charter, dealing with the future of Europe. The central idea was that Europe would be a white continent, with no foreign elements – Jews and blacks – and no democracy, which he termed a feminine, weak type of regime. The network advocated government that was autocratic, masculine and strong, and its members believed that Europe was entitled to support itself with overseas colonies.
“The core of the network’s central idea,” Åsbrink continues, “recalls concepts that the contemporary far right is focused upon, such as theories of a Muslim takeover of the world and the ideas that appear in the manifesto of Anders Breivik [the Norwegian terrorist who massacred 77 people in 2011]. Rome was followed by a conference in Malmö, in 1951, where the Malmö Movement was effectively born, with Engdahl, one of its four leaders, being appointed a kind of international secretary general. The Malmö gathering also gave birth to the movement’s magazine, Nation Europa, edited by two former Waffen S.S. officers, which transmitted the organization’s ideas across the generations. Old-school Nazis contributed to the magazine, but later were joined by a new generation of writers. One of them was a young Frenchman named Jean-Marie Le Pen.”
Åsbrink mentions another young writer, a German named Henning Eichberg, who was the first to talk about ethno-pluralism, the idea of separation of different ethnicities which influenced many of Europe’s new right movements.
Sweden thus became an important arena for renewal of Nazi and fascist ideas after the progenitors of those concepts had been defeated by the Allies in the war. While Nazi criminals were hanged or committed suicide in Nuremberg, and the world, seeing the results of Nazism, promised “Never again” – others were ensuring that the Nazi idea would carry on. Already in the 1950s, a new right began to take shape in Sweden and on the margins of European society. The movement created an alternative history for itself, and a morality that was the opposite of what was emerging in other, newly created postwar international organizations.
“One of the leaders of the Malmö Movement was a French fascist, Maurice Bardeche [1907-1998]. Bardeche published a book that constituted the basis of all of the so-called ‘revisionist’ arguments used by Holocaust deniers to this day,” Åsbrink relates. “He and Engdahl understood something very important: that the word ‘race’ was no longer usable after the genocide of World War II. They replaced it with the word ‘culture.’ The ideas are the same, but when you talk about ‘culture’ rather than ‘race,’ you can talk about ‘my culture and your culture and how the two cultures cannot coexist.’ Engdahl created a new language. It’s racism without the word ‘race.’ In a note that Bardeche wrote in the 1960s, he pointed out that this was an important change, because right-wing movements could now espouse racist ideas and call themselves anti-racist.”
Åsbrink adds that within a few years of the founding of the Malmö Movement, members were leaving because they considered it too prone to compromise and thought its messages were vague. It was these breakaways who, effectively, established the white supremacy movement in Europe. Those who remained in the organization, on the other hand, laid the foundations for the extreme right that is now part of the European parliamentary system.
“There are many influences on the development of the European right since Engdahl,” Åsbrink says. “In the 1960s and ‘70s, they were actually influenced by the views of the critical left about the United States and about colonialism. In the 1990s, they were influenced by American Nazis who imported the ‘ZOG’ theory, which maintains that it’s legitimate to use violence against police officers and other representatives of government, because the political establishment is an emissary of the so-called ‘Zionist Occupation Government.’
“These ideas are more extreme than the original ideas of Engdahl and his colleagues,” Åsbrink continues. “Engdahl’s principal role was to keep Nazi ideas and movements alive until the arrival of the next generation – which thought they were slightly outmoded and not aggressive enough, so they updated and radicalized them.”
How was it that Sweden, a relatively marginal country in terms of population that hadn’t even taken part in World War II, became a key base for the postwar European right? Åsbrink offers a variety of explanations. One element lies in the fact that Sweden was not occupied and did not suffer directly the disastrous results of Nazism. Åsbrink notes both the traditional Swedish fear of the Russians and Swedes’ problematic attitude toward their country’s Jews, who had suffered from discrimination for many years. Moreover, a deep connection existed between Swedish elites and Nazi Germany (including the royal family and such wealthy families as the Wallenbergs).
An example of these relations is found in a secret that Åsbrink herself exposed in an earlier book. She discovered that Ingvar Kamprad, the founder and owner of the IKEA home furnishings empire, was an active Nazi. Although Kamprad’s involvement with the fascist movement was already known, Åsbrink discovered that he was also a member of the SSS, the Swedish hard-core Nazi party during the war, and that the Swedish secret police had him under surveillance because of it. She recounts that in an extremely rare interview he gave her, in 2010, Kamprad, who is today 91, asserted his conviction that Engdahl was “a great man, and I will claim that as long as I live.”
Engdahl, she says in summation, “is a kind of icon whom the present-day extreme right revere and from whose ideas they draw inspiration.”
But how do the followers of the European new right view the Malmö Movement and Engdahl’s legacy?
“The continuity between the old right and the modern nationalist movement is very weak,” says Daniel Friberg, a key figure in the Swedish new right and in the worldwide alt-right movement. In more than 20 years of being active politically, Friberg says, he has never received any kind of support from the members of the political movements of the previous generation.
“Engdahl’s movement was relatively marginal, and its members tended to be very rich people, like Ingvar Kampard,” he maintains, adding, “They despaired and gave up, and we had to rebuild everything. I funded the first magazine I published, when I was 18, from my personal savings. I feel no respect toward the old men of the old right. They were cowards and weak, they backed off easily and they lacked the tenacity to continue the struggle. Perhaps they are exaggerating their importance for narcissistic reasons, but they never helped establish the modern nationalist movement.”
Friberg doesn’t belong to the traditional right-wing establishment in Sweden, and is not a member of any of its parties. Nevertheless, he is a very central figure in the Swedish new right and in its link to the international alt-right. He terms himself a supporter of the identitarian movement, which sprang from the French new right and espouses ethno-pluralistic beliefs. Identitarianism, a key element of the global alt-right movement, assails the concept of multiculturalism, opposes migration and supports ethnic- and culture-based separation. Its opponents claim that its ideology contains fascist and neo-Nazi elements.
Friberg’s centrality stems from the fact that he founded a large number of Swedish and European alternative-right organizations, and also because he is responsible, along with American alt-right leader Richard Spencer, for bridging between the movements on both sides of the Atlantic in the form of the website altright.com. According to Friberg, the trans-Atlantic project is growing, and draws inspiration from another website of the American far right, Breitbart, whose executive chairman is former Trump adviser Steve Bannon.
The alt-right site is only one of Friberg’s projects. He also founded, and continues to manage a publishing house called Arktos, which promotes a far-right agenda, and has put out 150 titles in 15 languages. He was a partner in the founding of Metapedia, a right-wing alternative to Wikipedia, and recently he also founded the Nordic Alternative-Right movement together with a former senior figure in the Sweden Democrats, a populist right-wing organization.
Friberg, 39, engages in what he calls meta-politics. “Parliamentary politics doesn’t interest me,” he says. “I influence society in the same way that Haaretz does in Israel. I’m engaged in media, books, newspapers, magazines and websites, and that’s what I’ve always done.”
According to Friberg, this political activity is significant, because it reveals the truth that’s hidden from the public by the establishment and mainstream media. As an opponent of mass migration, particularly into Europe – which he claims causes a considerable increase in violent crimes, including rape – he argues that the true reality is concealed by a political establishment that kowtows to political correctness, and by a self-censoring mainstream media. That, he says, is the main reason for the flourishing of alternative media in Sweden, and it’s also why Sweden has become so important in the world new-right scene. There’s a large disparity, he says, between the country’s left-wing government and the public’s support for the right.
“It’s simply a matter of supply and demand,” he says. “People want to know the truth.”
The vision of Friberg and his supporters is remarkably similar to that of the Malmö Movement of six decades ago. It avoids racist language, but advocates racial separation, and it is nationalistic, autocratic and conservative. It talks about a “return to normality” and the need to put an end to what Friberg calls “the failed social experiment of multiculturalism, feminism and cultural Marxism, which has caused so much suffering to Europeans in the past 50-60 years.” He also maintains that it’s essential “to protect national and regional identities and to return to tradition, including the traditional roles of the sexes.”
In his younger days, Friberg used the pen name “Daniel Engdahl,” in homage to Per Engdahl, but despite this, and despite the similarity between Friberg’s ideas and those of the neo-Nazi movements of the mid-20th century, he is meticulous about differentiating his views from Nazism. He denies allegations that he was a skinhead in the past and a member of a Nazi movement.
“There are very few neo-Nazis in Europe today,” he says. “As for myself, I never believed in fascism and never described myself as a neo-Nazi. There are even some who accuse me of being a Jew or a Zionist, of not being anti-Semitic enough and of trying to hijack the Swedish nationalist movement. Maybe that’s because my surname ends in ‘berg.’ In any case, I don’t really care what people call me on the internet.”
“Berg” or no “berg,” an examination of the publications and statements of alt-right figures, including those published by his website and his press, turns up many types of anti-Semitism. There is Holocaust denial of different kinds, and there are Jewish-domination conspiracy theories. These phenomena are largely limited to the virtual world, but in some cases they penetrate the “real world,” too. A well-known example is the speech by Friberg’s American colleague Richard Spencer following the U.S. presidential election in November 2016. Spencer concluded his remarks with calls of “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” Many in the audience responded with the Nazi salute.
Friberg does not deny the existence of anti-Semitism in the new right, but he does not consider himself an anti-Semite, and offers many explanations for the phenomenon.
“It is perfectly obvious that the incident with Spencer was a joke,” he explains. “I know many who were present at the event. It was an excellent speech, and the end was a kind of amused response to the liberal narrative about Trump. After all, Spencer has criticism of Trump, and he would not seriously salute him. At the end of the proceedings, a few people in the audience saluted ironically in the Nazi fashion, in response to the fact that Trump is presented in the media as a fascist and a Nazi. Spencer himself regrets the incident.”
More broadly, Friberg views right-wing anti-Semitism as an oversimplification of complex issues. “I do not condemn revisionist history of the Holocaust period,” he says. “I acknowledge the suffering of the Jews in World War II. But the war as a whole, not only the Holocaust, was the most tragic event in Europe for centuries. Not only the Jews suffered in it. German children and women, too, were murdered and raped by Russian soldiers, and 10 million Ukrainians were starved to death in genocide. But despite this, we learn only about the Holocaust; no one taught us about the Holodomor [the Ukrainian term for the ‘Great Starvation’ in that country during the 1930s]. The lives of the Jews are not worth more than the lives of non-Jews, and the suffering of others also deserves recognition.”
Friberg does not believe in an all-embracing conspiracy theory that attributes magical powers and world rule to the Jews, but various versions of such theories are present in works that he publishes. “There is no one conspiracy theory,” he says. “There are many such theories, Jewish and not Jewish alike. That’s clear, after all. There’s conspiracy in every commercial company that’s led by three people, two of whom try to get rid of the third. That’s the nature of politics. It’s a dirty game, and the Jews, like others, are on all sides.”
At the same time, Friberg argues, there is an over-representation of Jews in social-change movements that have caused damage worldwide. Jews like George Soros, who promotes a liberal, globalist vision, are examples of that tendency. But there are also other Jews. Benjamin Netanyahu, he says, is a Jew who represents a more nationalist agenda, and there are also other Jews, including some Israelis he knows, who support the new right.
“In Sweden, for example, the biggest supporters of opening the borders and of the multicultural social disaster were Jews who emigrated from Poland,” he says. “That’s a pattern and we must not ignore it. But there are also Jews on the other side. For example, it was [the American philosopher and historian] Paul Gottfried, a Jew, who invented the term alt-right, along with Spencer.”
Friberg is right. No few Jews back the new right in Europe and the United States. Some others hold positions of power in Israel and cultivate close ties with their colleagues who urge deportation of foreigners, the building of walls and racial separation, and call for a struggle against “leftist elites” in the media and in academia.
The European and American new right, like the Israeli version, is neither apologetic, nor is it in hiding. It’s articulate, it has ties with big money and it is accumulating power and influence. It looks toward the future but its feet are planted deep in the neo-Nazi movement of the mid-20th century. Its Israeli supporters would do well to watch the clip of Spencer’s speech a year ago, and reflect on the comments of Friberg. In the video they will see a room filled with men enthusing over the battle cries of a white race that is being plundered by other races, which are taking over its living space. They applaud when the speaker alludes to the media as “Lügenpresse” (the lying media), the German term used by the Nazis, and laugh when he calls its members inhuman and soulless. At the end they respond to the cries of “Hail!” with loud applause and the Nazi salute.
Daniel Friberg maintains that this should all be taken ironically, that it’s just a joke. Given the fact that some of these people are so close to power in so many places around the world, all we can do is hope he’s right.
דיויד סטברו 