Reclaiming Zog
It seems I can't please anyone these days. A couple of days ago I was accused on indymedia and in the comments boxes of this blog of being pro-Zionist, because I criticised a couple of aspects of the political programme of Hizbollah. Now some denizens of the increasingly bizarre Harry's Place blog have used the comments box under this post to peg me as an anti-Semite, because of some remarks I made in a post on the degeneration of the political tendency Harry's Place represents.
Here's the sentence that was offered up as evidence for my anti-semitism:
If you remember, the pro-war 'left' is a tiny but noisy bunch of mainly British journos and bloggers who think that the 'pseudo-left' - that's the real left, for those of us who don't reside on Planet Zog - has betrayed its history and principles by not supporting George Bush's military adventure in Iraq.
ZOG is an acronym for Zionist Occupation Government used by neo-Nazis; the phrase even has its own wikipedia entry, complete with a sort of etymology:
The name first appeared in "Welcome to ZOG-World". This article was written by the American neo-Nazi Eric Thomson in 1976, and appears to have first been brought to widespread attention in a December 27, 1984 article in the New York Times about robberies committed in California and Washington by a white supremacist group, The Order. According to the newspaper, the crimes "were conducted to raise money for a war upon the United States Government, which the group calls "ZOG," or Zionist Occupation Government."
There's a hilarious parody of this sort of nonsense at the Creedish Occupied Government site, which alleges that Amish people are secretly running the world.
Fortunately for me, the phrase 'planet Zog' has a history of its own, and was even added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2001, where it is defined as "place or situation which is far removed from reality or what is currently happening". If that's not good enough, you can visit a website dedicated to a planet called Zog here and learn to count in Zoggish...
Here's the sentence that was offered up as evidence for my anti-semitism:
If you remember, the pro-war 'left' is a tiny but noisy bunch of mainly British journos and bloggers who think that the 'pseudo-left' - that's the real left, for those of us who don't reside on Planet Zog - has betrayed its history and principles by not supporting George Bush's military adventure in Iraq.
ZOG is an acronym for Zionist Occupation Government used by neo-Nazis; the phrase even has its own wikipedia entry, complete with a sort of etymology:
The name first appeared in "Welcome to ZOG-World". This article was written by the American neo-Nazi Eric Thomson in 1976, and appears to have first been brought to widespread attention in a December 27, 1984 article in the New York Times about robberies committed in California and Washington by a white supremacist group, The Order. According to the newspaper, the crimes "were conducted to raise money for a war upon the United States Government, which the group calls "ZOG," or Zionist Occupation Government."
There's a hilarious parody of this sort of nonsense at the Creedish Occupied Government site, which alleges that Amish people are secretly running the world.
Fortunately for me, the phrase 'planet Zog' has a history of its own, and was even added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2001, where it is defined as "place or situation which is far removed from reality or what is currently happening". If that's not good enough, you can visit a website dedicated to a planet called Zog here and learn to count in Zoggish...
posted by maps at 8/10/2006 07:36:00 pm
2 Comments:
Yeah, we do get a lot of nutters in the comments boxes - mostly people who hate us, but not always. I thought it was pretty obvious what you meant by Planet Zog and that it wasn't anti-semitic.
Obviously being a person of honesty and integrity you'll want to acknowledge that Harry's Place is distancing itself from unwarranted claims of anti-semitism against you, won't you? Whenever you're ready...
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