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