#124: Jews and the Writing on the Wall

March 29, 2015

The writing on the wall.

The phrase refers to an old testament story in which a disembodied hand writes mysterious words on a wall during a feast given by Belshazzar. As they are interpreted by a Jewish seer named Daniel, they are a warning that Babylon is about to fall to Persia, which it then does.

This suggests that Bibi Netanyahu is today’s Daniel, the U.S. today’s Babylon, and Obama is today’s Belshazzar. And Obama just can’t seem to read the writing on the wall.

He’s not the only one, though. Progressive/liberal Jews suffer from the same reading impairment.

But, we’ve seen all this before.

Of course, there are minor differences. Different members of the cast are taking on different roles. That’s always bound to be the case. Last time, it was the Germans in the lead, with a supporting cast of Austrians and a multitude of bit players. Today, it looks like the French are vying for the lead, with a supporting cast from Norway, Sweden, Hungary, Greece, as well as others, not to mention the Obama administration.

We’ve seen all this before.

The 1930s were the cradle of the Holocaust and, little known though it is, one can locate the point of origin in Hungary. Of course, killing Jews had been an episodic horror in Europe for a couple of thousand years, but Hungary gets a special mention for spawning Gyula Gömbös as PM in the outset of the 30s. it was Gömbös who coined the party name “National Socialism” adopted later from him by Hitler. The Hungarians were thus the inventors of Nazism complete with virulent anti-Semitism, though it was perfected by the Germans.

Hungary has a Nazi party again, it’s called “Jobbik,” and it comes again complete with anti-Semitism. Hungary is again the canary in the mine signalling the presence of Zyklon B. Last time, the Germans made the move first, beating the French to it. This time, perhaps, the French will do it first. Marine le Pen has taken care to downplay her party’s anti-Semitism; just wait till they’re in power. The Greeks have one called “Golden Dawn.”

Violent anti-Semitism takes its cue from the top. The government “signals” that it’s “ok” to go after the Jews. The Nazi party in Germany did that under Hitler with Krystallnacht. It’s happening now all over Europe under the cover of the mantra, “I have nothing against Jews, it’s just Israeli policies I’m against.” It’s happening in the U.S. under Obama using the same mantra while demonizing Bibi Netanyahu. We know that things are changing when the comedians feel safe in attacking Jews under the umbrella of comedic license.

Dieudonne M’Bala is a French comic who spouts Nazism openly on stage, complete with anti-Semitism. Lena Dunham, who is actually nominally Jewish, just published a piece in the New Yorker which can only be called anti-Semitic. This is happening now because government and media have signalled it’s acceptability. Yes, there are people pushing back, but the damage has been done. Once this genii is out of the bottle, there’s no pushing him back in. In the New Yorker! Can you imagine!?

But Dunham is an important example. She is Jewish, she is liberal/progressive, and she attacks Jews and Judaism. It’s been like that since the Russian revolution and was seen most dramatically in the 1930s. Jews have always wrestled with the conundrum of what to do in an anti-Semitic world. Some have tried becoming a-religious (there is actually a database that was managed by the Hebrew Community Organization of Vienna which registered official withdrawal from Judaism), some tried outright conversion, others tried assimilation, others tried remaining orthodox where they were, and yet others chose Zionist aliyah, once Israel became available.

The anti-Semites have always capitalized on this internal division. Often, they didn’t have to do anything, they just sat back and watched the Jews attack themselves, siding with the enemy. I don’t know what the explanation of this phenomenon is, but for lack of a better term I term it “L.A. Syndrome” on the model of “Stockholm Syndrome,” where hostages come to identify and ally themselves with their captors. The syndrome is most aggressive among the assimilationists who use their often impressive talents to demean and humiliate the people from whom they sprang. Perhaps they hope to curry favor with the disdainful gentile environment by demonstrating that they are even more anti-Semitic than the goyim. It could, I suppose, equally be called “N.Y. Syndrome” since there are as many progressive Jews in N.Y. as L.A., but I have the irrational bias that L.A. Jews are more self-destructively progressive than New Yorkers.

Obama and the Democrat Party have declared war on Israel. There are varying explanations available for this, some making it psychological, some political. My guess is that, as always, there are multiple converging factors, some political, some economic, some psychological, all leading to the same inexorable historical conclusion: Kill the Jews, it’s all their fault. The bottom line is this: It will very likely soon become unsafe to be a Jew in the U.S., and a large number of Jews will be voluntary participants in making this come about.

Many Jews and other progressives will deride this claim as paranoid. This is the U.S.A., they will say, it will never happen here. This is simply historically ignorant.

Jews were despised in the U.S. during the early 20th C. WW II was NOT fought over saving Jews, in fact F.D.R. was far from the “friend” of the Jewish people that popular Jewish progressive mythology would make of him. Indeed, assimilated Germans in the 1930s made precisely the same claim about Germany: We are Germans, they said, nothing will happen to us. American financiers were openly pro-Nazi and American corporations had extensive business dealing with the Third Reich.

Today, we have the same internal division and conflict among the Jews in the U.S. that we saw in the 1930s in Germany and Austria. We still have the atheists, the outright conversions, the assimilationists, etc..  

There is, however, one significant difference. It is this: the Jews of the 1930s were clear on the identity of their enemy, namely the Nazis; the Jews of today are fragmented with respect to their enemy, namely the international Left.

The Jews of Europe during the 1930s were collateral damage within a brutal internecine war, one between socialist/commies, on the one side, and the Nazis, on the other. This was not, as is often said, a war between the Left and the Right. It was a war between the Left and the Nazis, it was a war between cousins, both of whom despised Jews. The “Right,” meaning by that the free enterprise conservatives, were not in the war at all, unless you mean by “in the war” profiteering wherever they could. The true Right has only one ideological commitment, and that is making as much money as is possible. Attacking the Jews was largely a part of the Nazi strategy, however much it might have also converged with other factors. There are at least two reasons that the post-war mindset does not include the wartime Leftists among the Jew murderers, 1) that they were too busy staying alive to attend to killing Jews, and 2) the post war intellectuals recast the European commies as the “good guys” in that war. Here’s a newsflash: there were no “good guys” in Europe’s part of WW II, just as there are no “good guys” in the Iranian/Arab conflict (except, probably, for the Kurds).

In that war, the Jews thought of themselves as historically and ideologically attached to the Left, however much those on the Left went about murdering them and hating them. This commitment to the Left continued after the war and the American Jews set about marketing this ideology even as they acquired disproportionate influence in the media and in the Universities. These Jews have functioned as a fifth column not only in the U.S.A., but also in Israel and they currently function as a powerful tool of the anti-Semites. L.A. Syndrome.

What they did not understand and still do not understand is that the mainstream non-Jewish Left-wing U.S. population NEVER relinquished its own 1930s loathing and contempt for the Jews. This previously concealed hatred is now being revealed as anti-Semitism, is becoming socially acceptable again. We can see it in the activities of the Presbyterian church, which is fairly frothing at the mouth. The pre-WW II American population was not that far removed from its European counterpart as far as attitudes towards Jews were concerned. Europe is currently returning to its pre-war attitudes and America is following suit.

To quote the anarchist Chernishevsky and the Communist Ulyanov (aka Lenin): What is to be Done?

I have a few thoughts on this.

1) Strengthen bonds with Christian Evangelicals, the only group for whom Israel and Jews are flavor of the month;

3) See whether the Evangelicals can work to form a relationship with the Hispanics (a long shot — the Hispanics are Catholics and the Evangelicals Protestants);

4) Shift all political allegiance to the U.S. Republican Party (for the time being, our only bet);

3) Work on regional Arab alliances, at least for the sake of security.

Jews are in greater danger now than at any time during my life. It has never been more important for Jews to identify most precisely who their friends are and who their enemies are.

Sadly, Jews have never been very good at reading the writing on the wall.