#147: Modern Antisemitism and the Left

May 8, 2019

A number of my friends have expressed concern over the way in which Antisemitism is flourishing around the world, but particularly how it is becoming accepted as the “new normal” in U.S.. I must confess that while I’m saddened and upset by this, I’m not really surprised by it. For anyone with any awareness of history, this must really seem like deja vu all over again or, for a more contemporary reference, like Groundhog Day. Really, we’ve been here before, even to the use of the demeaning cartoons.

Current events remind me of Tom Lehrer’s lines in his song “National Brotherhood Week”:

“Oh the protestants hate the Catholics

and the Catholics hate the protestants

and the Hindus hate the Muslims

and everybody hates the Jews, …”

Well, yes, almost everybody does hate the Jews. The far right hates the Jews, the far Left hates the Jews, and the smarmy upper-crust Protestants in the middle hate the Jews. Even many Jews hate the Jews. Only the Evangelicals and Trump don’t hate the Jews.

What I write below is largely the body of an email I sent to a close friend who complained that identity politics just creates “boundaries between people, resentment, and anger” and that this should stop. My friend is quite right, but it won’t stop, not at all; it’s too useful.

We all know that Israel was founded by people with a strong Socialist ideology, an ideology which is now pretty much on the ropes there. But the fact that Israel began with that ideology obscures the fact that this tiny state embodies perfectly what modern Socialists most utterly hate. Israel’s reason for being, its essence, is to be precisely a Jewish state. Not just another interesting small democratic state, but a specifically Jewish state. This, the Left cannot allow.

First, creating boundaries between people, resentment, and anger is not just an accidental by-product of a political strategy: it is the political strategy. Fragmentation, frustration, rage are a central OBJECTIVE of the Left, not a regrettable collateral side-effect. Remember Rahm Emmanuel’s infamous line: “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” People laughed wryly at that, they should have thought a little further. The corollary of his thought is this: “create, celebrate, and encourage a crisis whenever you can, it is the path to internationalist, socialist victory.” The Left sees the existence of a national identity based on inherited values and myths, as its biggest challenge in gaining world hegemony. And, make no mistake about it, world hegemony is what they’re after.

And the Jews have always had a national identity, even when they didn’t have a nation. They are the nationalists par excellence.

The Left, on the other hand, is in its essence internationalist; internationalism is not just one of its isolated party platform items, it is defining of it, just as nationalism is defining of the Jews. [Please note that the media (and even well-intentioned conservatives) allow the Leftists to choose the political vocabulary: thus the “internationalism” of 1930s Leftie scribblers has been lost and replaced with the anodyne “Globalism” to disconnect it from its Leninist/Stalinist past.]

Thus, fragmenting polities is essential to the dissolution of the Left’s targets. To see this, one must understand that the Left, from the time of its inception, has not ever been a “friendly competitor” on the world stage capable of “agreeing to disagree” with it its political neighbors. Au contraire.

If you want to conquer the world’s nations, you can try to do it by military means, like Hitler tried, but, even if you succeed, they’ll fight a never-ending war of attrition against you. Far better to destroy what makes them nations: their cultural identities. Dissolve their cultural boundaries.

Their idea is simplicity itself: once populations’ cultural differences are erased, the physical boundaries will fall of themselves. But Jews insist on their differences. And so do Christians. In Hussein Obama’s famous line, they “cling” to their religions. Since the Lefties’ target is the West, these Western religions must be undermined. Check. Patriotism must be undermined. Check. Sexual identity must be undermined. Check. Use of a single national language must be undermined. Check. Common national narratives and icons must be undermined. Check. And so it goes.

The modern Left has learned the lessons of imperial colonialism and the Austro-Hungarian empire well. Political governance of multi-cultural components has always proven impossible, the components simply refuse to remain governed and wage irredentist wars against the empires. This was true for hard military control of the kind in French colonial Africa, and it was true of Austro-Hungary’s relatively benevolent rule of its ethnic components. The Left has seen this and understood; its solution for this problem is simply to attempt the destruction of those cultural identities. The war, then, is between Socialist a-cultural internationalism and mercantile cultural nationalism (whether totalitarian or democratic).

The existence of Nazi Germany and its defeat made it possible for the Left to claim the moral high ground, however, not only for democracy, but for the new Internationalism as well, i.e. “Globalism.”  It’s no coincidence that the post-war Leftist intelligentsia’s postmortem identified specifically and exclusively nationalism as the source of the Nazi horror. They didn’t write about French nationalism, of course. And the British? No nationalism there either, eh? But the Leftie scribblers still found the virus in nationalism. No more nationalism for the world! they cried.

PLEASE NOTE: By abjuring nationalism, the Left is not abjuring world take-over, it is just abjuring world take-over by a particular national culture. It’s goal, apparently, is to protect us from being tyrannized by a national culture by tyrannizing us without one.

Now, Hitler learned a lot from Lenin and Stalin, especially their mistakes. He did NOT reject Socialism, he improved Socialism to avoid the commies’ mistakes. Thus, he did not take over industries, he made them partners. Today’s Western Socialists are following that part of the Hitler model. Giant Western industries and the Socialists BOTH want internationalism (“Globalism”) and the industries are in partnership with the Socialists to achieve that. Unlike Hitler, they prefer to gain their ends by eroding national boundaries rather than by obliterating them with tanks and explosives.  Modern popular liberalism is a cultural anti-national identity weapon and it is wielded by and through the social media. Bottom line: internationalism is actually imperialism and colonialism (Lefties ought to have severe cognitive dissonance over this).

After WW II, Lefties all agreed that totalitarian socialism (viz. Nazism or Communism) was not the way to go. Rather, it was what they liked to call the “third way,” or “Democratic Socialism.” In fact, what it was was an adaptation of Hitler’s model: Socialism in partnership with giant industry (like the EU). Conservatives missed the boat at that point. If the third way was Hitler’s partnership of state and industry, only lacking the nationalist element, surely (they should have noticed) that the third way was necessarily internationalist, i.e. bent on world revolution and hegemony. And surely they should have noticed that that the plan would involve the systematic attack on Western cultures to make way for a homogeneous world population of worker drones.

Returning to our starting issue, these reflections lead me to a modest conclusion on Antisemitism.

There are many converging forces leading to Antisemitism, the attack on Jews is and has always been a perfect storm. But, I think, one of the most potent of these ever present factors is that  of the Jews insistence on retaining their distinct identity. Socialists have never seen a Western democratic cultural identity they didn’t hate. It’s obviously true that people were murdering Jews just for being Jews for a very long time before the late 18th century (when arguably Socialism was spawned), but that doesn’t mean that a significant factor in anti-Jewish hatred throughout history does not figure also in a modern political theology. Jews have always been hated for insisting on their difference, yes, and people have always attacked them for their difference. What I’m saying is that this propensity in people to hate the different group among them converges perfectly with the Socialist hatred of cultures. And if supporting Antisemitism in barely disguised ways causes more fragmentation and societal dissolution, say the Socialists, all to the good!

I think only liberal Jews are blinded to the Antisemitism on the Left. The rest of the Lefties simply are Antisemites. Antisemitism was the one thing that 1930s Nazis and Sozis (Social Democrats) agreed on. Add to that the American upper crust Protestant Antisemites. American Jews have short memories. They have come to think that America is safe for Jews, but they forget how recent Jew “acceptance” has been in the U.S.. From the 1880s to the 1950s (and beyond) Jews were NOT flavor of the month, barred from professions, clubs, neighborhoods, etc. That kind of baked-in Antisemitism does not disappear over a few decades. AND, not a small thing, when the Democrat party went to Identity Politics, it automatically bought Antisemitism with that package because the Democrat identity voting base is itself already deeply Antisemitic! So, from a political point of view, Jews in the U.S. are facing a double whammy from the Democrat party: 1) ingrained cultural Antisemitism, and 2) minority identity based Antisemitism.

A couple more points. There was some grudging American Brahmin Protestant sympathy for the Jews in the early 1880s, though the grudging gradually increased and sympathy decreased by 1914. Similarly, there was grudging sympathy after WW II, with the same gradual shift. Even in the 1960s when I was in graduate school, I noticed a certain coolness in my chairman. I was the only grad student not invited to soirees at his house and, I was told by “sources”, it was because he was worried about me being near his daughter! When job time came around, he offered me an interview at Wilberforce University. But that is an all black University, I responded, I’ll be eaten alive (this was the woke 1960s). Take what you can get, he replied, we fought WW II for you people, the least you can do is be grateful.

Right. They fought WW II for “us people.” I didn’t take the interview, and I was grateful … to be alive, that is, and in the United States (even though I was not going to be allowed to violate his daughter). Which brings me to a second personal reflection.

I was around a year old in 1942 living with my family in Marseilles when France fell, as has been its habit since Waterloo. Our lives were saved by the timely help of the American Society of Friends, the Quakers, who arranged for our escape via a harrowing trip into the relative safety of Switzerland. For years, I harbored a deep and abiding respect, admiration, and gratitude for the Quakers. Doing a bit of research recently, I discovered that the current Quakers are virulently pro-Palestinian and purveyors of the most extreme anti-Zionist propaganda in the form of video documentaries among others.  What’s this all about, I cried, bitterly disappointed.

Well, there’s the usual. You know, anti-Zionism isn’t Antisemitism, we’re not “against” Jews, just what their government does, blah, blah, blah.

But what’s offending them? Probably many things, but here’s just one.

We know that progressives like ethnic victims. There are many reasons for this. But one is that the alien ethnicity is an effective solvent of the host country’s culture. Introducing pockets of utterly different ethnic populations into the host is a way of incrementally destroying the host’s ability to preserve itself as a distinct cultural entity. The more primitive, the more alien, the more deranged, the better they serve the Leftie purpose. And Israel is the nation-state most notable for insisting on its cultural identity. Progressives hate that. So, Israel must be destroyed.

All that said, it can’t be escaped that the Jews and Israel are heir to their own historic infatuation with Leftism. Israel was born in Socialism and has lived with it since its inception. What this means is that Jews everywhere are dealing with both cognitive and emotional dissonance within themselves. How should we live? they ask. Should we assimilate, gradually relinquish our distinct identity? Should we retain our uniqueness within the host culture? Should we make aliyah and make the journey to Jerusalem?

If they assimilate, they lose their character after five thousand years. If they remain a ghettoized population within a larger one, the larger will inevitably turn on them. If they return to Israel, they face the same questions of cultural identity all over again. The Israeli Socialists will lean, as all Socialists do, towards internationalization and the inevitable blending of cultures and persons. The war between the homogenizers and the nationalists exists everywhere, from the micro environment to the macro. There is no escaping this dilemma, not even in Israel.

Right now, Trump and the U.S. Evangelicals are the only friends Jews have on the North American continent. Sadly, the vast majority of Left-wing Jews are too ideologically brain damaged to realize that.