Monday, April 08, 2019
Elder of Ziyon
Most of the kids marching against Israel on college campuses
today were not even born in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed, meaning they
have little to no idea how much their rhetoric and actions are built on nearly
150 years of political tactics honed during the near 150 year "Age of
Ideology" that began in the mid-19th century and ended with the
demise of the USSR.
But the behaviors we see among anti-Israel activists today
did not emerge from thin air. For just
as current Students-for-Justice-in-Palestine types insist that any true liberal
must embrace their agenda (the PEP
argument noted previously),
Marxist ideologues in previous eras scoffed at progressives who
"merely" wanted to improve the lives of workers or solve pressing
social issues, rather than replace the entire capitalist system through a spasm
of revolutionary violence.
And once it turned out that the "Dictatorship of the
Proletariat" was only ever going to be a dictatorship, the ruthlessness of
Soviet action was matched by a ruthlessness of language in which their every
crime was denied and every accusation against it buried in a mountain of
rhetoric insisting that the Marxist cause by judged solely by its theoretical
goal of creating heaven on earth.
In service to the cause, nothing was off limits: not civic
society within the USSR and not multi-national institutions outside of it,
which is why tyrannies allied with the "movement" were so successful
in corrupting virtually every organization dedicated to human rights and
international law, turning them from potential moderating influences in an
increasingly interconnected world to weapons of war.
Accusing those that created and perpetuated this system of
cynicisms would be an error, for the people who split progressive and labor
movements for their own ends, who ardently rejected any criticism of their
crimes (while perpetually attacking their opponents) were driven by fanaticism
that more resembled religious fervor than rational calculation.
The Jews played an unusual set of roles during this Age of
Ideologies. While Medieval religious
anti-Semitism was still rife when the political terms "Left" and
"Right" were first coined (they applied to which side of the king one
sat at the National Assembly at the time of the French revolution, BTW), by the
time Karl Marx was writing what would become the sacred texts of the Marxist
faith, negative reaction to Jews were being cast in economic and political vs.
religious terms.
To Marx (a German who had long ago abandoned his own Jewish
heritage), the continuation of the Jews for nearly two Millennia after the fall
of the Jewish state was a political aberration growing out the need of powerful
Christian elites for a class of moneylenders, rent collectors and economic
middlemen to do their financial dirty work.
This allowed kings and clerics to gather their rents and borrow the cash
needed for their lifestyles and wars.
And when their own loans came due, they could always sick the mob on these
despised Jewish landlords and "loan sharks," and begin the cycle anew
with a new set of Jews ready to play the game of politically powerless
financial middlemen.
This novel description of Jewish history was fleshed out in
Marx's famous essay On the Jewish
Question, a work that today seems rife with anti-Semitic stereotypes,
portraying Jews as congenial "hucksters" whose One God is actually
Mammon. But when he wrote it, Marx had a
different agenda in mind. For, according
to the theories he was developing, the capitalist system was in the process of
replacing the Jewish middlemen of antiquity with a class of capitalist (consisting
of people of all faiths) which (according to Marx) meant the economic
deformities once managed by a persecuted Jewish minority was now becoming the
cornerstone of the modern political system.
Thus his call to free Europe from the Jew was really a call
to free society from the "hucksterism" represented originally by the
Jews but which now infested all of capitalist society. And what of actual Jews who (like Marx's
parents and grandparents) were not simply economic abstractions? As with most human beings, they had a role to
play within Marx's developing theoretical framework. In this case, they (meaning the Jews as a
distinct people) were meant to disappear once their economic role became irrelevant
as man passed into a new post-capitalist era.
To someone like Marx, this proposition was not entirely
fanciful. For hadn't many people born
into Jewish families (including Marx himself) shed their religious identity
once they encountered European enlightenment?
And if Marx and others he traveled with were able to successfully toss
aside their Jewishness, wasn't that the ultimate solution to "The Jewish
Problem" once a classless society freed from capitalism eliminated the
need for Jewish middlemen and Jewish "husksterism" (whether practiced
by Jews or Christians) entirely?
In one of his last works, From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the
Jews and Israel, Robert Wistrich uses "ambivalence" to
describe Leftist attitudes towards Jewish questions, given Marx’s predictions
of the historic inevitability of Jewish assimilation and disappearance. In theory, this meant outright hostility
towards Jews as Jews did not need to play much of a role in the political
movements inspired by Marx’s works.
But this also meant that actually defending Jews against the racism being directed against them (especially
by purely anti-Semitic political parties emerging in countries Germany and
France in the decades following Marx's death) was equally irrelevant to the
Marxist-informed Left. This is why you
began to see condemnations of anti-Semitism (insults and violence directed at
the Jews) balanced by equally vehement condemnations of
"philo-Semitism" (attempts to defend Jews from these racist attacks),
with arguments that Jews defending their own interests were guilty of
parochialism and selfishness echoing to today.
As already noted, Marx's theories about the redemptive power
of Jewish assimilation and disappearance were confirmed by his own experience,
as well as the experience of other hyper-assimilated Jews attracted to various
Socialist movements. But as these
"enlightened" Jewish and non-Jewish Socialist began to encounter
unassimilated Jews (especially those of Eastern Europe) and as Eastern and even
Western Jews began to advocate for distinct Jewish political and even national
rights, ambivalence turned to hostility which became more and more virulent as
the "inevitable" world revolution never materialized, shaking
Communist faith to its core.
Like so many disappointed millennialists, the revolutionary
Left had someone to blame and a new cause to believe in (hostility to the Jews
and their state) once their original Messiah failed to appear. How this played
out will be covered next.
To be continued…
