PKD: "The Zionists drove one million Arabs out of Israel, and those Arabs are the greatest single displaced persons on earth today."

PKD by Evgenia Kovda

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Evgenia was reading through a book that collected some of Philip K. Dick’s philosophical writing over the years — letters, notes, speeches, essays — when she came across something unexpected: an article titled “Naziism and the High Castle” that was published in a fanzine in 1964.

In it PKD responds to some criticisms of Man in the High Castle and riffs on themes like fascism and Nazism, which is to be expected — after all, Man in the High Castle is about a parallel world where the Nazis win World War Two. But what surprised Evgenia is that PKD devotes quite a bit of the article discussing Zionism, which he equates with Nazism and comically refers to Zionists who he knows in real life as his “blood-oriented Jewish friends.” He also explicitly references the expulsion of Palestinian from their land. And he’s doing this in 1964, three years before the Six-Day War — which made Israel’s ethnic cleansing ambitions more obvious and a lot harder to ignore.

Last week I wrote about Martin Luther King’s agitation for Soviet Jews — and he wasn’t anywhere near as radical as this on the Zionist question. While PKD publicly wrote about the similarities between Zionist ideology and Nazism, MLK was defending Israel and taking part in a Zionist campaign whose objective was to ship even more Jews to land that was being ethnically cleansed of Palestinians.

As Evgenia points out, PKD doesn’t just write about Zionism. He critiques all types of nationalisms. Throughout the article, he voices his disgust with any sort of ideology that’s obsessed with race and blood and soil, and he mocks the notion that there exists some kind of transcendent racial qualities in a whole people — and that includes “whiteness.”

In light of really grotesque Zionist outbursts in Jerusalem and Gaza over the last few days — outbursts that might have something to do with shoring up Bibi’s power, and which have culminated in a nice and fashy Jerusalem Day celebration at the Western Wall earlier today — I figured it’d be interesting for people to read to a bit of it.

It kinda rambles sometimes and makes some strange points — like talking about Jews setting up pro-Hitler organizations under Japanese occupation. (Did that really happen?) But it’s generally great and shows a side of PKD that I wasn’t familiar with. I thought it was impossible, but it makes me appreciate him even more.

—Yasha Levine

PS: Thanks Evgenia for finding this!

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“Naziism and the High Castle” (1964)

…In his comments in Niekas George H. Wells speaks of “Jewish nationalists,” and that they “were overlooked.” This is a point, too; at the time of the rise of anti-Jewish ideology among non-Jewish-Germans; the Jewish-Germans were beginning, in great part, to think—as not Germans or even Europeans, but as nationalists of the soon-to-be-reborn national state of Israel (Moses Mendelssohn pleaded with the people not to accept this, hut to “come out and be part of the European community”; generally, he failed.) So: We saw Jews, in Germany, arrive at the same idea as the pre-Nazi “racists,” such as Wagner, and it always seems that Richard Wagner is the goat in this; he invented the idea that Jews were aliens, hostile to Germany. Catcrap. A thorough study of Wagner’s ideas shows that he broke with Nietzsche in the end, saw a redemption of Germany (i.e., of man per se) in Christian love, not in military bombast (vide Parsifal). So even among the famous pre-Nazi theoreticians we don’t find the uniformity of outlook; what we do find, however, is the Englishmen Stuart House Chamberlain, and Carl Rhodes. .. and of course Nietzsche; but we find English madmen-thinkers right at the “heart of darkness,” so to speak. Teaching the idea, as Hannah Arendt says, of a small, worldwide elite of Nordics who will run things: a top caste who will tell the “darkies,” i.e., the rest of us, where to go . . . and “where to go” may be into the false shower baths that are really cyanide gas chambers. Yes, Harry Warner, writing in Niekas, is right: We squirm and we remember because it is not them but “us” who thought those awful thoughts, and hence instigated those awful deeds; and the “us” includes the Jewish nationalist fanatics, some of whom live today in Israel, who invade schools, break up grammar school class meetings with their quasi-military (I think the form is paramilitary) thugs... because the teacher of the class is not racially “correct.” In this case, however, not sufficiently Jewish, rather than sufficiently German.

The Zionists drove one million Arabs out of Israel, and those Arabs, supported—i.e., kept from starving—by the Quakers, are the greatest single displaced persons on earth today. And don't let anyone tell you that those Arabs (i.e., non-Jews and hence aliens, although their people had lived there for two thousand years) wanted to leave. They were terrorized into leaving and they cannot return. So the victims of World War Two have become the arrogant nationalists, ready to go to war (vide the Suez Crisis) with their neighbors as soon as assured of adequate military
support (and again it is Britain who gives it, Britain and France).

This is all dreadful. In the Jewish refugee settlements in the Far East under the Japanese during World War Two, many Jews set up Hitler organization, including the Nazi (or Roman, if you prefer) salute.

We like to think of the victims of tyranny and cruelty as innocent (e.g., Chessman). But often the victim is blood-stained, too; i.e., he has participated actively in the situation that has at last claimed his life. Many Jews today won’t ride in a VW, and some won’t even listen to the music of Beethoven; is this not as neurotic and sick as was the nineteenth-century ideologies of blood, race, and land being taught by both Germans and Jewish-Germans? Personally, I enjoy telling fanatical nationalistic, blood-oriented Jewish friends a fact they generally don’t know: Many of the medieval German knight-poets, the minnesingers, were—Jewish.

So, Dr. Friedrich Foerster, “the greatest modern critic of Germany to the contrary, there are now, have always been, at least two, and probably three, seven, nine Germanies; i.e., worldviews held by Germans. J. S. Bach considered himself a Pole (his monarch was under fief to a Polish king.) But we call Bach a German because he spoke German. Tony Boucher speaks German, and perfectly; is he, therefore, a German, hence a Nazi? The German Jews spoke German . . . and remember, a Jewish violinist’s hand was broken by a Zionist fanatic swinging a lead pipe he cause that violinist dared to play a Richard Strauss piece in concert m
Israel. ... Is this not the Brown Shirts of the thirties once more, or is not?

When a Jewish fanatic friend of mine calls me a gentile, I simply say, “Call me a goy and let it go at that.” Because, if I am a “gentile”then two thousand years of evolution in human thought has been abandoned.

And if he won’t ride in my VW—which was probably made in New York, not Germany, and was certainly, for sure, sold me by a Jewish person, Leon Felton of San Rafael—then I will not allow him to eat a bagel in my presence. (I am, of course, joking; I am trying to show this: That we can no more hold a people responsible than we can hold any other mythical, semantic, nonactual entity responsible; German1 is not German2, and German2 is not German3 and so forth. Just as, in this country, you and I did not bomb those little Negro schoolchildren in that church Sunday school... you know goddamn well we did not, and if we, you and I, could catch the white bastards—or rather just plain bastards—who did it, we would work just as much and quick vengeance on them as any Negro mob would or could.

I am not a “white man.” My German friends are not “Germans,” nor my Jewish friends “Jews.” I am a nominalist. To me, there are only individual entities, not group entities such as race, blood, people, etc. For example, I am an Anglo-Catholic; yet my views differ from those of my vicar, and his do—enormously—from the bishop of the diocese—whose views I happen to agree with, Bishop Pike. And so forth.

I will not walk out of a room when a German enters any more than I would have walked out of a room when a Jew entered. Nor will I allow myself to be a “gentile” —i.e., a member of a race—to my Jewish friends. If they don’t like me, let them hit me, as an individual, one right in the eye; let’s see them hit a race—as the Nazis tried to do—one right in the eye. It won’t work; the Nazis failed: Israel exists, and Jews exist. And—let us face it: Germany exists. Let’s live in the present and for the future, not dwelling neurotically on the outrages of the past. Ludwig von Beethoven did not light the fires at Dachau. Leonard Bernstein did not hit that Jewish violinist on the hand with a piece of lead pipe. Okay? And salve, as the Romans used to say. Or, as we Anglo-Catholics say, may the peace and love of God be with you. Germans included. And, please, Jews, too.