The Gaslight has started
(www.zerohedge.com)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (28)
sorted by:
That's what philosemites so often miss, antisemitism is a great gateway drug to reel in disillusioned leftoids. And once you get someone to join in on a bit of cheeky antisemitism, the n-word loses its bite.
Nothing personal against any given individual with Jewish ancestry, but for whatever reason antisemitism is a lot of fun and really gets people to work together.
None of it is philosemitism or antisemitism, jews aren't a race, and they are certainly not the entirety of semites. No one saying hatred for Bashar Al-Assad is anti-semitism.
Jew-Hatred is really the core here. It isn't used to 'reel in disillusioned leftoids'. Fundamentally, jew-hatred is a core component of Leftism itself, and the harder you assert Leftism, the more inevitable your hatred of jews becomes because Capitalism is literally nothing more than a dog-whistle against what Marx asserted was the inherent nature of jews. It's why he believed that it was impossible for jews to exist within a Socialist society, and they would disappear as assuredly as the state would.
The only reason jew-hatred isn't the norm on the Left is because jewish intellectuals who were already Leftists wanted to try and carve out jews from the Marxist narrative. They wanted to secularize it more, and they saw Zionism as an explicit form of Progressive Nationalism. After the Holocaust, they kept trying to repeat that there wasn't anything within Socialism that supported jew-hatred, and that somehow jew-hatred was "rightist/conservative/reactionary. This effectively amounts to the earliest form of Holocaust Denial.
Where everything started to go wrong was when despite the Zionist movement have succeeded in foemen ting the state of Israel, instead of allying with the Soviet Union, and becoming a full Socialist state, the Orthodox jews that the Zionists had allied with rejected atheistic Socialism and allied themselves with the US. The Socialists and Communists never forgave them, and as the Left has moved slowly away from "racialist policies are exclusively right-wing" we see the inevitable re-emergence of jew-hatred among the Left, which was always the previous norm.
Jew hate has been around since the Romans, what the Nazis pioneered was racialized Jew hate. Even the premise of the Inquisition was that ethnic Jews were claiming to be Catholics while secretly practicing Judaism, and Torquemada himself had Jewish ancestry.
Marxism is opposed to Jewish culture, not Jews as an ethnicity, as like Christians before them Marxists just wanted Jews to abandon their traditions and convert to the universal faith.
I'm not so sure, yes the NatSocs racialized Jew hate and certainly were the largest and most thorough proponents of it, but I don't know that they originated it. Frankly, I think Zionism probably did more to racialize jew hate by racializing jews. It's why I specifically avoid saying anti-semitism, because it's an inherent misnomer that tries to conflate jews as a race, rather than a religion or ethnic group.
I feel like, during the red era around the late 1910's-1920's, Leftist jews were kind of all over the place. Was Zionism a nationalist movement, a socialist movement, a religious movement? Could you be an ethnic but irreligious jew? Are jews a race? Does that fit into the concept of racism? Is anti-jewish racism an act of Capitalist oppression? What of eugenics?
Leftist jews just seemed to try and slam a square peg in a round hole and it ended up with a Holocaust, and no Leftist jew ever taking responsibility for adhering to an explicitly anti-jewish set of beliefs.
I'm really not convinced of that. Part of the problem with the genuine jew hatred from the time period is that a lot of the tropes that the NatSocs would eventually use are all from this time, and are popularly held within Socialist circles. Marx is asserting that jews just won't exist when the socialist state arrives. Clearly to Braum and Marx, you'd have to abandon everything that makes you a jew, in order to be a Socialist. But then the question becomes, can a jew ever not be a jew. The sentiments that they seemed to espoused appeared to me to be a resounding "no". I think that's the first step in racialization: asserting that these traits are biologically innate.
Hmmm...
That's a perspective on this topic I haven't heard before, and I don't mean that in a passive-aggressive way. It's pretty intriguing, actually.