Good guys and bad guys

Childhood preconceptions mature into adult preconceptions

All my life, it’s been good guys and bad guys. Just like in The Virginian: James Drury and Doug McClure were the good guys, the men from Shiloh. And they took all the bad guys to task. Drury might’ve had a black hat and a black shirt, but his horse was white as the driven snow.

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First we learned about concentration camps, which Germany invented to put Jews in. They gassed them there. Loads of them. Auschwitz was one of them. How could they, how could they be so cruel, so dastardly, so inhumane? The Jews were the good guys, the Germans were the bad guys. That’s what Steven Spielberg said, as well. Schindler’s List confirms it, doesn’t it? Liam Neeson was the bad guy turned good guy. Gandhi was the good guy, and that Rafe Feens or Fines or whatever—he was the bad guy, the really, really bad guy, wasn’t he? Nasty Germans. Jewish heroes. When we learned in class that concentration camps weren’t invented by Germans, but by the nasty British in South Africa, we didn’t want to believe it. Sure, but we British never gassed the people we sent there. Did we? We didn’t, did we? We wouldn’t do that; we are British.

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First time I heard antisemitic I thought it was like anti-macassar, but I wasn’t sure, so I went and looked it up. Semitic. Like semantic, but different. But I couldn’t understand: what’s a Semite? A member of any of the peoples said (Gen. x) to be descended from Shem, or speaking a Semitic language.

So, what’s a Semitic language, then? Assyrian, Aramaean, Hebrew, Phoenician, Arabic, Ethiopic, &c. Arabic? Arabic, yes (Chambers’s Twentieth Century Dictionary, “new mid-century version”—I was still in my youth, and the mid-century had not been so very long before; I considered the information enlightenment. Antisemitic means being against Jews and Arabs. And Syrians, and Ethiopians, and Phoenicians (who, I knew, had odd-shaped figureheads on their ancient galleys.))

Who could be anti-that? I didn’t look up Aramaean, because a boy can only do so much research in one day. I did wonder who Gen x were, but that’s since been explained.

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The lessons in life have to be simple for the simple folk like me. We need to be told in unequivocal terms the things that are good and the things that are bad. Bad cowboys wear black hats, isn’t it? And good ones ... wear ponchos? Good boys are born under a wand’rin’ star; bad ones put infants to the slaughter.

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I had a big collection of Matchbox cars. They’re called that because they come in what used to be designed like a big matchbox, except the sides were dark blue, instead of sandpaper. A lot of them were cars I didn’t know: American. Lincoln Continental, Pontiac Parsine, Mercury Cougar. I had a BMC Pininfarina. I never saw one in real life, didn’t even know what BMC meant. There were a few other cars, German, Italian, no French that I recall. Anyhow, I liked the American ones. We used to play with friends and we’d pick cars and then play with them, make streets and the like. Bridges, hotels, car crashes. Ker-pow!

I see from this e-Bay photo that the doors opened on the BMC, which was handy for the wee folk getting in and out. The reason I never saw one in reality was because it was never really made. A concept car from British Leyland, which was ahead of its time and styled by an Italian to look not unlike what Citroëns would look like ten years later. I thought America was great and wanted to go there. Meet James Cagney. Bang, bang! Pow, pow! “See, mama!”

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In the 1980s, when I was in my 20s, I visited places like Dachau, Auschwitz, Theresienstadt. I went to Dachau about ten times. It was kind-of disappointing because it has gas chambers, but they were never used, so they say. They say no one knows why they weren’t used, which now makes me think they know full well, but are just not saying. There was a kind-of a feeling that at Auschwitz you had the full horror experience and that Dachau was sort-of playing at being a concentration camp. Then they showed you the films and you didn’t quite know whether it was better to be gassed or to be worked to death.

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There was a girl I knew in school. Judith Bloom, and there was a Bloom’s the Chemist in the village and my mother said it was a Jewish name and I asked Judith if she was Jewish and she said, “Yes,” with a broad smile, and I liked her for that. Her folks weren’t well off but I liked her. I was always rooting for the underdog and, in the 1960s, the Jews were the underdogs ’round our way.

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In 1985, I was at a cook-out in Ohio, and my hosts had invited many of their friends to meet the strange guy from Scotland. A woman one or two years my elder came up to me and introduced herself, by name, and then adding, “I’m Palestinian.” I didn’t quite know what to say. I had seen Yasser Arafat on the news and knew that there’s a difference between the scarfs in red and those in black. But what the difference was, I didn’t know. I thought to myself, “Aren’t Palestinians terrorists?” Echoing R. S. Zaharna’s comments on the perceptions and use of the terms Palestinian and fedayeen, I felt like the woman had just said, “I’m an enforcer for the mafia.”

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“Every kid should be made to go and watch that film,” my Dutch buddy Mario said as we lit a well-earned fag to calm our nerves upon exiting the Antwerp Kinepolis after seeing Schindler’s List. The year was 1994. It came up, the film did, as a topic of conversation in the private English class I gave to an aristocratic attorney in the law firm where I worked. He was moved by the little girl’s red coat being seen in that pile of bodies. When Steven Spielberg says, “Weep!” the world, it doth weep. Magnificently, and rightly so.

By now the Jews were not the underdogs, they were rightly remembered, honoured. Willy Brandt at the Holocaust Memorial, on his knees, became a symbol of German contrition. They enjoyed protections against those who would attack them. They had their state and they’d been in some wars but we didn’t quite understand what these wars were about. I was too young and the Israelis all needed to protect themselves against ...  well, against the Palestinians. Those terrorists. Like that woman in Ohio. Wasn’t she also a terrorist?

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I’m not sure if Doug McClure ever did anything really bad in his role as Trampas in The Virginian. I don’t know if he did any bad things in Shenandoah, either. Shenandoah was about a widower farmer and his family who just wanted to bring in the sheaves in Virginia, and not get caught up in any damned war. The Civil War came, nonetheless, and James Stewart would end up losing two of his boys and a daughter-in-law to war’s stupidity, even though he wanted no part of it. Wars do that: they consume, and take life, and destroy families; even if you want no part in them.

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Then, after Ohio, life continued and the Middle East became calm. We all had other things to do and the worst that Israel could do was produce a corrupt politician. In that, it was no different to anywhere else. I liked Golda Meir. Wished we could have a woman prime minister. Then, alakazam, we got one. Someone murdered its prime minister in 1995. That was different; a bit, anyway. Just because someone didn’t like Oslo.

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Much later, I read an astonishing statistic: six million. I even devised a quiz about it, like “What does six million say to you?” A film about a Jewish New York doctor, or the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust, or the number of Palestinians unable to return to their homes as they should be allowed to under the by then infamous Oslo Accords?

It’s all of them. Symphony of Six Million was a film made in 1932, just before Hitler came to power. There’s an odd coincidence. The infamous figure from the Holocaust. And the number of Palestinians unable to go home. They’re all six million. However, six million is not the number of people killed in the war. It’s the number of Jews, but the number of people killed was far more: twelve million, possibly up to 30 million, if you count Russians, Poles, Romani, homosexuals, mentally ill, physically ill and anyone who got in the way of a half-track. If only six million of anyone had died in World War II, things wouldn’t have been half bad. The figure is nearer … much more.

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How could it be that one signs an international Oslo accord, agrees, says, “Okay!” and then doesn’t fulfil one’s engagements? Surely that’s against the law? Had Israel not had the benefit of law all this time, so why would it break the law?

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Then along came Whoopi Goldberg. She’s black and not a bad actress. But she got into some hot water in 2022. She was a host on a programme called The View from the American Broadcasting Company, and she said that antisemitism has nothing to do with race. She was suspended for a few weeks because her employer, ABC, said that that was not true. Antisemitism is a race matter. Ms Goldberg said she was sorry and I think her apology was eventually accepted and she went back to work. Here’s how Wikipedia reports the events:

On January 31, 2022, Goldberg drew widespread criticism for stating on the show that the Holocaust was not based on race but “about man’s inhumanity to man,” telling her co-hosts: “This is white people doing it to white people, so y’all going to fight amongst yourselves.”

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In 2024, I saw an interview between former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges and Israeli university professor Ilan Pappe, in which Professor Pappe said that Israeli passports do not describe the holder as Israeli, but rather as one of two other things: Muslim, or Jew. Clearly there is no syllogism at work here, for if there is such a thing as a Muslim holder of an Israel-issued passport, then not all Israeli passport-holders are Jews, and clearly, not all Jews are Israeli passport-holders. But those Jews who are citizens of Israel are not Israelis—they are Jews. And those Muslims who are citizens of Israel are also not Israelis—they are Muslims. I wanted to ask him about the Christians, Buddhists and atheists, but I guess I need to read his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine for that.

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A lad I was at Methodist school with, his name was Ian Brown and, some time after we’d left school I got wind that he had converted to Islam and I thought that was interesting. Unlike the girl in Ohio, I did not assume that Ian had become a terrorist, but I was still young and impressionable and if everyone else thought that Muslims are terrorists, well, then, who was I to disagree with them? After all, the only Muslims that I knew of I had had but passing contact with.

Actually, that’s rubbish. I didn’t find it interesting; I was shocked silly. Yes, I was shocked silly. I can’t say I wasn’t, because I was. It’s now that I find it interesting, because I’m 40 years older and, even if I’m not 40 years wiser, my shock has been relativised into interest. If I could call two people back from my past and have a discussion with them right this instant, it would be the Ohio girl and Ian Brown. That’s the kind of thing that happens when childhood preconceptions become adult preconceptions.

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So, is a nationality a race? Is there a French race? The Swiss race? The Lithuanian race? Or are we Europeans all together one race? Except for the Jews, that is, because, as Whoopi found to her cost, the Jews are a race of their own. Which must mean that the Muslims are a race. I know a Muslim, a good friend of mine. He lives in West Africa. He speaks Wolof, but not that French nonsense they speak in Senegal, because he’s from The Gambia, but he lets me speak Senegalese Wolof to him, and he finds it funny. He understands. His mum was born on Kunta Kinteh Island, in the estuary of the River Gambia, where the distance from the north to the south banks is over ten kilometres. They’re Muslim, and they’re human. They’re of the same race as I am. The human race. But if racism is to mean anything, then we cannot cast our racist net so broadly as the human race. So, what is a race? Is it just skin colour? Are the Italians the same race as the Algerians, because their skin colour is very similar? The Kenyans and the Gambians? Do you know, it is a thousand kilometres farther from The Gambia to Kenya than it is from where I live to The Gambia? My Gambian buddy is black, and I’m white, and we’re physically closer than he is to Simon, a guy I know in Kenya. So, what is race? Is race nationality? Is race our Linnaean binomial categorisation? Or is it, and has it simply always been, the means by which we designate our enemies? As if by lending our prejudices some scientific grounding, we therefore elevate our hatred to a higher plane? Whoopi was right—we don’t need race for that. We’re perfectly capable of doing that without some Swedish botanist.

We raise the Jew up as a victim of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man and identify him as a Jew to express our disgust at the gulf created by men between themselves, the superior, and others, the inferior. And the self-same race, against which such hatred was outpoured, is granted by general consent a land unto itself, that it might thrive and prosper in its racial cocoon, safe from the predations of the rest of mankind, which had hitherto treated it so unkindly. Safe from the antisemitism (that had meanwhile been redefined to exclude Phoenicians and Arabs). Safe within its new borders, cleansed of the occupiers of yore. Safe within the national boundaries within which the Israeli passport decree’d all holders to be separated by race. As Muslims and as Jews. Whereby racial segregation becomes the imprint of Israeli nationality.

May I say this? Do, tell me if I err. For I am labouring to comprehend how a nationality can be redefined as a race, as an inculcator of hatred and prejudice against a body of people who wreak disdain on those who would assert any right against them, from whatever quarter, on racial grounds, a race that figures not in the passports of millions of Jews around the world and that yet figures not in all of the passports of the people of Israel. I repeat, what is race?

When we define our discussion in terms of racial anthropology, is it deliberately that we skim over the fundamental issues that separate us, one from another: our mutual antagonism, and our mantras, and truths, and realities, and histories, and propagandas? Founding our retribution on the acts of those who went before, or those who are to us other, even if they be our brethren? Let not the children suffer for the sins of their fathers? Indeed, let the fathers suffer for their own sins. But no father is his brother’s keeper. We must desist from this attribution of sainthood and sanctity, or ancestral claim and counterclaim, of racial purity and impurity, of economic rivalry and entitlement, by words that always eventually turn upon us to defy the falsity of our own contrived definitions. Let us transcend our sophistry, and let us transcend our self-imposed boundaries, be they described upon this Earth or in our minds: we are men and women of this world. All this world is ours to share and love; and our love is ours for all to share. If we fear others enough to hate them, then we do not love even ourselves enough to be worthy of what we hope to thereby gain.

There are some who now say that Israel has done a great thing. There are some who say that Israel has contrived matters, to be able to do this great thing. And I will no longer partake of this discussion, for I have no insight into where what justification for what outrage in these matters lies, and, quite honestly, I have not the energy to fathom them. But I am in one thing certain: that he who does wrong unto his fellow man, be he of whatever race, does wrong to all mankind, by his malice, by his act, by his example, by his impunity.

A blessing be on both their houses.