    From Noel Ignatiev’s Report:

      Last December I sent Shamir the following letter (edited to eliminate
      repetition and personal references):

         Your claim that Russia under Stalin was a workers’ paradise is absurd.
         Mere mention of Orwell and Solzhenitsyn should be enough to jar you back
         to reality…. The greatest proof of the character of Stalin’s regime is
         the ease by which the Brezhnevites and later the gangsters came to
         power. For thirty years Stalin made war on the Russian workers, broke up
         their organizations, killed or forced into exile every independent
         thinker among them, and so exhausted and demoralized them that they were
         an easy mark for anyone (e.g. Vlasov) who offered them hope of escape…

         My second difference with you is over the historic importance of the
         Jews… Even if no such people as the Jews had ever existed,… the world
         would be pretty much as it is…. Nineteenth-century capitalist society
         brought with it poverty, disease, and ignorance for the wage slaves of
         Europe and America, not to mention the Irish famine, the poisoning of
         the Chinese people with opium, [and] the reduction of the population of
         the Congo by ten million over fifteen years - and no one has ever
         suggested that nineteenth-century capital was dominated by Jews or that
         it had a neo-Judaic character. In Capital and the Grundrisse Marx
         analyzed and forecast with amazing accuracy the development of society
         from his day to ours , and while he was certainly not soft on the Jews
         he had no need for them as an element in his study. Even if every Jew
         were a capitalist and every capitalist a Jew, I would still be
         anti-capitalist, not anti-Jew, because capital is the force driving the
         planet to destruction, and "the Jew" is at most its personification.

         I recall someone reproaching you for being soft on David Duke. You
         replied that in all likelihood the one reproaching you would have been
         willing to overlook Duke’s white supremacism had Duke not also been
         against the Jews. If so, it were a grievous fault. It is also wrong to
         overlook Duke’s white supremacism because he is against the Jews. Duke,
         the National Alliance, and other advocates of White Power are no friends
         of ours, notwithstanding their anti-zionism….

      Shamir never replied substantively to my letter… As I expected, I found
      him to be a warm host and a considerate travelling companion, able to
      discuss knowledgeably and intelligently a wide range of human activity,
      including history, philosophy, literature, music, film, painting and
      sculpture, architecture, and the physical and natural sciences. He
      enjoys good food and wine and a good story. He likes women. He is a good
      partner in conversation, able to listen as well as to contribute - except
      when it comes to a few areas. Nevertheless, I must report that I made
      not the slightest progress on any of the topics I raised in my letter or
      others that came up. I shall now outline our talks.

      1) Shamir knows his Marx, including the 1844 Manuscripts. He claimed to
      have been influenced by the currents of 1968, and to have worked with
      groups in Russia comparable to Praxis in Yugoslavia, Cahiers du
      communisme in France or for that matter ourselves in the U.S. He told me
      he regarded State and Revolution as Lenin’s most important work. When I
      asked him how he squared his appreciation of that work with his positive
      attitude toward Stalin, he replied that times were different then, that
      Stalin faced a difficult task, that he had tried conscientiously to
      raise the cultural level of the workers and peasants, including
      increasing the proportion of persons of proletarian and peasant origin
      in the institutions of higher education and especially in the Party,
      that the purges of the mid-1930s were directed toward eliminating a
      layer of old Bolsheviks (many of Jewish origin) who had come to regard
      the country as their personal property, and that the circulation of
      State and Revolution in the millions was a token of Stalin’s commitment
      to the ideal of proletarian democracy. In response to my saying that
      Stalin’s historic function was to industrialize Russia, bring about
      universal literacy, emancipate women formally, and in general establish
      the conditions for capitalist accumulation, and that today’s gangster
      republic was the outgrowth, he accused me (in a humorous tone) of
      sounding like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. To my comment that I
      had not read the Protocols and that I was not talking about a conspiracy
      of Jews but about the logic of capitalist development, he made no reply.

      2) Shamir is unequivocal in his writings and in private conversations
      that he is against what he calls the Judaic ideology and Jewish
      interests, not against people of Jewish origin. He genuinely admires
      Marx, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Simone Weil, and others of Jewish origin
      who refused to identify as Jews, and also Isaac Deutscher, Chomsky, and
      others who did not go quite so far. There is nothing racial in his
      attitude. I suggested that Jews were at most the carriers in Europe and
      North America of an ideology that would have existed without them, and
      brought up the cases of China and Japan, capitalism without Jews. I said
      that targeting "the Jews" rather than capital was dangerous because it
      made room for favoring one sector of capital ("productive") over another
      ("speculative"). He admitted that Jews could not be held accountable for
      Japan and China. He also admitted that he found industrial capital, with
      all its defects, preferable to the present phase, which he identifies as
      "neo-Judaic." Given the reality of global parasitism, the tendency to
      prefer the former is understandable; in Shamir’s case it may explain his
      positive evaluation of Stalin’s regime, which was nothing if not
      "productive."

      3) We had our most difficult and acrimonious discussions on the subject
      of whiteness in the U.S. Shamir is pro-black. He believes that black
      people historically constitute the most progressive sector of U.S.
      society. He has published odes to Cynthia McKinney (the Afro-American
      Congresswoman from Atlanta who was defeated by AIPAC et al for opposing
      U.S. mideast policy). At the same time, he thinks racial oppression is
      no longer the policy of the ruling class, and that it exists only as a
      legacy, unable to do much harm. He thinks we place too much importance
      on color, and that we should develop programs that represent "the
      majority" rather than "ten percent." I made the arguments you might
      expect, to no avail. He seemed as deaf on the subject as the white
      leftists we have been arguing against for thirty-five years. Even after
      I explained that our aim was not to fight for "ten percent" but to
      confront the principal barrier preventing white workers from acting as
      part of a class, and that we would be glad to forget about color as soon
      as the white workers did, he went right on accusing me and RT of
      fighting only for a "minority." Some specifics: he sees the New York
      Teachers’ Strike of 1968 as a response to ruling-class ("Jewish")
      efforts to restructure the educational system using the demand for
      "community control," and argues that instead of supporting community
      control, people like us should have tried to find a position that could
      unite black and white. He pointed out that Jews do not send their
      children to urban public schools. He also made no reference to the
      fact - which I know he knows - that Jews made up a majority of the NY
      Teachers’ Union and all of its leaders. Unfortunately, I let him get away
      without addressing the paradox that the main enemy of "Jewish" efforts
      to destroy public schools was the "Jewish" Teachers’ Union…. His view of
      the 1973 Boston busing crisis was consistent with his view of the NY
      strike, namely that the ruling class ("the Jews") used busing as a way
      of destroying public schools, and that instead of supporting it people
      like us should have searched for a way that united black and white.

      4) Like anyone who takes history seriously, Shamir reads it backwards:
      he has his own interpretation of "Birth of a Nation," characterizing the
      American abolitionists as the forerunners of U.S. imperialism. I tried
      to give him a history lesson (He knows some of DuBois’s work, but not
      Black Reconstruction.), describing the efforts of the former slaves to
      carry out a revolution within the revolution. I conceded that the
      activities of the slaves and their allies ultimately led to the triumph
      of industrial capital, but said the responsibility lay not with them but
      with the failure of white labor to recognize a labor movement when it
      appeared in a black skin. He listened and said, "Times have changed
      since then, and the struggle for racial equality does not have the same
      potential as before." A reasonable position, I thought, and
      congratulated myself on a small breakthrough, until the next day when he
      described Wendell Phillips as "one of those people who would rather
      fight for the slaves elsewhere than for the laborers under his nose" - as
      if he had not heard a word I said.

      5) Shamir opposes massive immigration, on the grounds that it is harmful
      both to the immigrants and to the society receiving them. His opposition
      is not motivated by racial sentiments, and it is not absolute: he
      believes that a small number of people entering a society from outside
      are beneficial. To prevent massive population shifts he favors a
      combination of economic transformation of the South and restrictions in
      Europe and North America. When I expressed opposition to his view, on
      the grounds that if the workers of Europe and North America agreed to
      restrict immigration they would never be able to constitute themselves
      as part of a global class, and therefore there would be no
      transformation of the South, he accused me of attaching no importance to
      traditional cultures. I denied the charge, saying I agreed with him that
      change happens best when it happens gradually, but said that I thought
      the damage caused by building walls was greater than the damage caused
      by tearing them down…. Just as Israel had done more than Hitler to
      destroy whatever was of value in Yiddish culture, so the exclusion of
      immigrants would do more than their unrestricted admission to destroy
      whatever there was of value in the American tradition, part of which was
      its openness to newcomers. He listened politely and then said, "Well,
      you place no value on traditional culture."…. Charitably, he added that
      there must be room in the world for my opinion as well as for the
      opinion of those who valued tradition above all.

      6) Shamir said that since racial equality had largely been achieved, we
      need not concern ourselves with the past of people like David Duke, who
      was these days talking more against zionism and the Iraqi war than he
      was against black people. He advised us to find a way to make common
      cause with him against the federal government. I replied that even if he
      had dropped his explicit white supremacy, and even if he was sincere, it
      was necessary, given American tradition, to bear in mind the potential
      for white solidarity as a rallying basis for a movement. So long as the
      economy held up more or less, no explicitly white supremacist movement
      could pose much of a threat, but if the dollar collapsed and took with
      it the daily lives of ordinary whites, it was likely that many would
      seek to solve their problems at the expense of black people, as they had
      in the past, not excluding genocide, and that it was not out of the
      question that such a movement could come to power in the U.S., either
      alone or in coalition with a sector of capital. This he called "Judaic
      thinking," a continuation of the habit of Jews to see themselves always
      as the target of persecution. That was the other occasion I got angry
      with him - accusing me, of all people, of "Judaic thinking."

      I left Shamir with copies of State Capitalism and World Revolution, Race
      Traitor, and the speeches of Wendell Phillips, and urged him to read the
      Turner Diaries, but I am not optimistic. Based on my talks with him and
      my reading of his published works, I would say that the best label for
      his politics is national socialism. For Americans brought up on Steven
      Spielberg movies and Hollywood images of monocled Nazis saying "Ve haf
      vays to make you talk," I hasten to add that the national socialism of
      today is not the National Socialism of 1933. (Moreover, Shamir’s Russian
      sympathies prevent him from identifying unreservedly with Hitler.)
      Shamir’s politics are not ours (if "ours" can still be said to exist),
      but neither are the politics of social-democracy, green localism,
      third-world nationalism, individualist anarchism, or liberalism, and I
      don’t see how these days national socialism represents a greater problem
      than any of the others…. In a talk he made before the House of Lords,
      Shamir said that whoever supports Israel should apologize to Rhodesia
      and South Africa. I agree with him, and in like manner say that no one
      who maintains relations with two-staters or anti-NAFTA protectionists
      has the moral right to attack me for opposing efforts to oust Shamir
      from an anti-zionist organization.

    Shamir replies:

      Dear Noel,

      Thank you for your long exposition of our talks. Probably it makes sense
      to point out some misunderstandings:

      · You write: "Shamir is pro-black. He believes that black people
      historically constitute the most progressive sector of U.S. society."
      Though I understand it is a compliment coming from you, my friend, but I
      must reject it. I am not overly concerned with blacks, a small and
      particular minority of ex-slaves who have not integrated fully into
      mainstream of American society. Their problem is rather distracting you,
      and your American friends, from carrying out the more important battle
      against your power elites. Instead of fighting the Power (you may
      describe it as Capital, though my vision is different) you keep fighting
      ‘racists’. This is a minority problem, like the problem of gay marriages
      or that of AIDS sufferers. You make a mistake (a bourgeois-liberal one,
      in the Marxist parlance) of attaching yourself to a minority problem at
      the expense of the main struggle. Sure, minority problems vary from
      small ones (such as the quality of service at your gas station) to the
      much larger one of racial discrimination, but they are still minority
      problems in your country (as opposed to Israel/Palestine, where
      discrimination and inequality is a majority problem). In my view, we
      have to change the main thing, to smash the Power, nothing less than
      that.

      · Not for a second do I think that "the black people are the most
      progressive sector" and that Salvation will come through them. I am
      neither ‘pro- nor contra-Black’. I admire Cynthia McKinney, not because
      she is black, but because she stood bravely for the right cause. I am
      not colour-conscious; I am not even sure that the ex-slaves’ problem of
      assimilation into American society is due to their skin colour, but
      perhaps to their historically low social position. Indeed, upper-class
      African Blacks have told me they experience no racist treatment in the
      US. We have the example of the Buraku in Japan, who made up a social
      minority of extremely low status in pre-Meiji society, and are still
      discriminated against in Japan – though they are racially
      indistinguishable from other Japanese. Then there is the problem of the
      untouchables in India who are not all that racially different from other
      Indians. Such problems should be attended to slowly and patiently, while
      taking into account local conditions. Discrimination should be banned;
      but after that, a society may proceed slowly.

      · This is connected with your biggest misunderstanding: "the best label
      for [Shamir’s] politics is national socialism". Now, I am not horrified
      by your suggestion. Indeed, I live in a country of National Socialism
      triumphant. Israel was a National Socialist state, and it still has some
      remnants of this regime, though now its Socialist tendency is mainly
      undone. But I oppose Israeli National Socialism, and any other NS for
      the following reasons.

      · I share with national-socialists the belief in the existence of
      ‘organic units’, but I do not consider the ‘nation’ to be the basic
      organic body, nor ‘race’ as the building element, nor ‘blood’ as a
      defining factor. In my view, the organic unit is a much smaller
      territorial unit than the present ‘nation’ is. For instance, in the US I
      would envisage New England, Dixie or the Mid-West – as organic bodies.
      Maybe I am mistaken, and even smaller units – states, regions – are also
      organic in your country. In France, the provinces like Bretagne and
      Provence are organic bodies; in Germany – Bavaria, Saxony and other
      federal 'lands' (ie, länder).

      · National Socialism was a quasi-Judaic movement for it preferred
      ‘blood’ to ‘soil’. For NS, a German is a German wherever he lives, like
      for Jews, a Jew is a Jew even on Mars. That is why NS was a movement for
      the unification of all German-speaking people from the Volga to Alsace;
      I stand for the full individuality of separate units, against Ein Reich,
      ein Volk, indeed, for the ideal of the State and Revolution. That is why
      (and not because of ‘blood dilution’, as is the case with NS), I am
      against migration between organic units: for instance, a Parisian’s
      migration to rural Bretagne is as bad as a Virginia Black’s migration
      into Montana. Your racial problem is mainly a problem of migration
      between organic units.

      · Why are ‘organic units’ important? It is not only because of their
      beautiful variety and the intricate mosaic of the world. The existence
      of Nantucket or Normandie has an intrinsic value not to be given up for
      the false coin of ‘the right of free movement’. But the main reason is
      even heftier. Human beings have a real need for unity, as real as their
      need of sexual union. This unity, or solidarity, in its ideal form is
      the unity in God, of people united in the Church. But in order to
      function together, people should be shaped by territory as well.
      Territory is not an empty space, but a unique unit of terrain, with its
      own climate, agriculture, flora and fauna, tame and wild. Living
      together for a very long time, the people of a given territorial unit
      come to share similar characteristics/qualities, and thus they are able
      to reach unity easier and faster than in a heterogeneous society. That
      is why they express ‘xenophobia’, ie, the normal desire in relatively
      homogeneous societies to have no strangers in their midst who will slow
      the drive towards unity-in-God.

      · In the Jewish tradition, a stranger who agrees to sleep in a room with
      a married couple is considered to be ‘a killer’, for because of his
      presence the couple is forced to avoid sexual union. Likewise, we should
      be careful not to hinder the sacred union of an organic unit by
      enforcing ideas and paradigms that interfere with it. For instance, a
      civil-rights-conscious Jew who fights the erection of a Nativity scene
      on public property acts like a stranger sleeping in a married couple’s
      room.

      · Organic units have rights, just as human beings – or even companies –
      have. In the neo-liberal paradigm, societies have no rights; only
      individuals and companies have rights. Probably the only exception is
      the collective rights of Jews; this forces us to give more thought to
      the centrality of Jews to the Neo-Liberal World Order.

      · As I consider these units ‘organic’, their ‘xenophobia’ is not any
      different from a biological immunity mechanism which rejects a foreign
      body or a transplant. Naturally, the units have some capacity to absorb
      foreign elements, but this capacity is limited. Intra-unitary migration
      undermines immunity and creates a sort of "acquired immunodeficiency
      syndrome" leading to the death of the organic unit. A dead unit is one
      that has no solidarity between its members. It can be assessed in terms
      of its social gap or by its intensity of exploitation. It is not by
      chance that two immigrant, anti-native societies – those of the US and
      Israel – have the highest social gap in the developed world and the
      worst conditions for their indigenous workers.

      · Death is not forever; there are forces in action that try to bring a
      dead unit back to life. If the bombardment by migration comes to a stop,
      these forces will win the day. For instance, the Normans conquered
      England; they killed the old organic unit and created a Chimera of
      ‘horse and rider’. But the supply of Normans ran out pretty soon; the
      Normans in England were eventually absorbed, as Spaniards in Ireland
      were or Huguenots in Sweden. In the absence of intra-regional migration,
      the regions of the US will have a chance to become alive again – that is
      if they fight alienation and promote solidarity.

      · Economically, I stand at the opposite pole of NS, for I support
      Communism as the highest form of solidarity, an earthly projection of
      the Church. Communism with the Church is invincible. In the USSR, the
      Party tried to act as the Church, with some success. But the Church
      without God is like coitus interruptus; it leads to frustration and the
      break-up of the union. Thus atheistic godless communism failed, but it
      does not mean communism is impossible. It will come back after
      connecting itself with the Church. National Socialism was even more
      anti-Church, and anti-God than Communism or Neo-Liberalism. For me, the
      Church and God are not some add-ons easily removed by Occam’s razor, but
      the most important elements of existence; thus I really must decline the
      title of National Socialist. If a label is necessary, that of Christian
      Local Communist would fit me better.

      · However, even happy couples need some space for their individualities;
      likewise, we can accept some individualist dissent, including economic
      dissent (= free enterprise) within organic communities. People should be
      entitled to some minor independent economic activity, provided society
      removes excesses of their income in order to discourage greed. Thus, I
      am in favour of extremely high (over one hundred per cent) taxation for
      the wealthy, zero taxation for ordinary folk and of the total
      non-enforceability of debts.

      · My attitude towards Jews is quite different from NS. While NS is
      concerned with the ‘Jewish race’, thus fully accepting Jewish
      self-vision, I stand on the Orthodox Christian position and deny the
      existence of a ‘Jewish race’, for nobody has to be a Jew. I fully reject
      ‘the Judaic tendency’, that is, in Marx’s terms, anti-solidarist,
      antisocial tendency of "turning alienated man and alienated nature into
      alienable, sellable objects’. The fight against alienation is the most
      important fight, in my view; and here I follow Simone Weil who was as
      anti-Judaic as possible. My attention to ‘organic units’ is what Weil
      called ‘l’enracinement’, ‘the need for roots’.

      · Saying that, I see in the fight against Jewish privilege an important
      direction in the fight against the Power. For historic reasons, the Jews
      have become a dominant group in the Neo-Liberal World Order, as it is
      witnessed today in Jerusalem by the mass pilgrimage of world leaders,
      including Kofi Annan, to the Holocaust Museum. Since every Jew may cease
      being (= behaving like) a Jew, we are at war with those who do not use
      this opportunity. The fight for ‘liberating Jews by liberating the world
      from Jews’, in Marx’ words, was an important part of the Left's
      ideology; it should be renewed and not be left in the hands of NS.

      · We may extract the grain of reason and truth from every evil idea.
      Behind the paranoid, sadistic descriptions in the Turner Diaries one can
      see the desire for a solidary society, where people are one. But in the
      godless universe of Pierce, such unity can be achieved only by mass
      killing. If Pierce were aware of God, he would know of a different way
      to reach unity, that is of communion. While you are horrified by his
      racism, I feel compassion towards a lonely man who seeks solidarity and
      knows not where to find it. Surely his dreams of the ‘rope days’ are
      quite revolting – until one remembers the revolutionaries whose dream it
      was to ‘hang the last king on the gut of the last priest’.

      · It is possible that I am less horrified by the Diaries than you are,
      for it reads like a paraphrase of a Zionist book for youth written in
      1946-48. Just replace ‘British’ for System, and ‘Arabs’ for Blacks,
      remove references to nuclear weapons and you will end up with a standard
      Israeli juvenile text of that time. The terrorist acts read like the
      usual glorification of Lehi attacks on British police stations and Arab
      markets. The expulsion of Blacks and the writer’s joy in seeing a purely
      white collective working the fields reads like the actual diaries of
      Joseph Weitz, the head of Jewish Agency Settlement Department: he
      enjoyed travelling the 'purified' (from Arabs) lands of Palestine and
      observing the purely Jewish kibbutzim with a similar joy. Thus a person
      horrified by the Diaries and still collaborating with Zionists may be
      accused of duplicity, at best.

      · I hope I have clarified the main points of misunderstanding.

      With comradely regards

      Shamir