A beautiful piece by Lasse Wilhelmson

http://lassewilhelmson.wordpress.com/2013/09/04/a-portrait-that-tells-many-tales/

Picture: writer Lasse Wilhelmson

This is a portrait of me in my writing corner with some of the many books I have bought over the past ten years, mainly off the internet; books that are about history, but not the history told by the victors of Europe’s two world wars. A portrait of a blue-eyed, curly-haired little boy can be seen too, along with an old Swedish country sideboard.

Four Books

You can identify them in the bookcase in the picture. The Jewish Century (2004) by Juri Slezkine, a Jewish-born American professor of history with roots in Russia. It is probably one of the most important books ever written, as he himself says, if you wish to understand 20th century history. According to Slezkine, this is impossible unless you comprehend the Jewish influence. Everything from the Russian ”revolution” to European education, culture and science is dealt with in this book which also includes many statistics.

The next book is The Israel Lobby, and US Foreign Policy (2007) by two of America’s most prestigious academics, John J Mearsheimer, professor of political science and Stephen M Walt, professor of international politics. It came to be the classic that broke the official silence surrounding all discussions concerning Israeli and Jewish influence on US foreign policy.

Between these two, is my own book  Is the World Upside Down? (2009). It contains a selection of my articles about the Palestinian issue, Zionism and the neocolonial wars waged in the first decades of the 21st century. They are arranged in order by time which makes it possible to follow how my earlier opinions, partly Jewish-Marxist, have changed as a result of a changing world and my in-depth studies.

The red book, The Wandering Who? (2011), is by Gilad Atzmon. He grew up in a rightwing Zionist home in Israel, where he did his military service; twenty years ago he chose exile in London where he now lives with his family. He has, perhaps like no other, deconstructed Jewish mentality which he sometimes calls Jewishness or Jewish ideology. Atzmon is also an informed philosopher and one of the world’s best jazz musicians, his favourite instrument is the saxophone.

Atzmon’s upbringing and experiences are very different from mine. I found him on the internet twelve years ago. I read one of his early articles and was astonished to find that I had a soul-mate, albeit several sizes larger than myself, apart from our ages. This was when I had just written my first long essay, perhaps my most significant, dealing among other things with Moses Hess and Karl Marx: Zionism – More than Traditional Colonialism and Apartheid.

The Swedish marxist Jan Myrdal had always been my intellectual role-model up until then. Now Gilad Atzmon replaced him.