Postcolonial alliances: The lawyer Jacques Vergès and his client Klaus Barbie at the trial in Lyon
Image: Picture Alliance
The anti-Semitic undercurrent in postcolonial thought has a long history. One of its key scenes is the trial of Klaus Barbie, the head of the Gestapo in Lyon, in 1987. A guest article.
AOn the occasion of the awarding of science prizes in Ankara in December, Turkish President Erdoğan spoke of Israel's “Nazi camps” and of the difference between Netanyahu and Hitler, which lies solely in Netanyahu's wealth. Netanyahu, on the other hand, came forward in 2015 with the claim that Hitler was only persuaded to murder the Jews by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. At the other, scientific end of the fabulating spectrum, the influential genocide historian A. Dirk Moses recently announced at a lecture in Berkeley that the telos of the German culture of remembrance this time was not just the deportation of “Semites”, but the approval of their mass murder in Gaza . The wide-ranging comparisons that lightly traverse centuries, millennia, civilizations and continents, for which individual parts of Nazi history are dragged by the hair through all possible contexts, are in vogue.
In addition to political, polemical, journalistic and activist battlegrounds, the academic field is also affected by a pseudo-methodology that is essentially based on complexity reduction and decontextualization. Since students and graduates at elite universities in the Western world have been praising Hamas as a liberation organization and denouncing Israel as an apartheid regime ruled by “white” colonial rulers, German media have also made greater efforts to explain to confused readers a worldview that is influential in the university milieu. which is labeled as postcolonial or labels itself as such. The so-called amorphous, immensely influential and at least fifty-year-old currents are composed of academic, activist and political sources.
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