David Solway's Sha-Sha Poezie : if we don't talk too loud about the global climate holocaust , maybe it won't harm us here in North America

Poetic Screed

Review of GLOBAL WARNING. David Solway, the well known Canadian poet and polemicist, was born in 1941 and was much too young to sha-sha his way past smuggled-in reports of the first Holocaust as so many - too many - adult Jews did in the free world.

Now the entire world population - Jews among it - is facing a another potential holocaust.

One response, now as back during 1939-1945, is too low-ball the concerns and see them as undocumented and hysterical or exaggerated.

The other response - at the extreme - is to throw yourself under the Kings' horses, like a suffragette , or commit the then legal and moral crime of suicide, like Artur Zygielbojm : the most extreme forms of civil disobedience and public protest possible.

Sha-Sha Politik :  Sha , Shtil 

Zygielbojm's story is very well known because he was the rare exception during WWII's slow long agony for free world Jewry :
he gave up on "working through proper channels", and in practising "sha-sha politik" , to become the proverbial "Loud Jew" that Jewish leaders always warned fellow Jews not to become.

At a glance, Solway's book seems to fit more in the Loud Jew than in the sha-sha Jew category but is this really so ?

Saying things that the rich and powerful of our society approve of, no matter how stridently you say them, is still being Paul Ryan-ish.

Ryan, the VP for presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, was voted by his High School as "The Biggest Brown-noser of 1988".

And I am afraid that is what Mr Solway is too .

 What he says offends many of the world's poor and powerless and a few of its rich and powerful ; just as a few of the world's poor and powerless will approve of his message - along with most of the rich and powerful.

He has taken a highly public moral stance on the question of climate change - and this is all to the good.

But Jews have a special moral credibility whenever they say "something is happening that looks a lot like yesterday's holocaust" ; equally they have a special moral authority when they declaim any sight of a crisis on the horizon.

God will judge them all the harder,  if they abuse that special credibility......