Social Justice and supersessionism ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Wednesday, March 26, 2025

Social Justice and supersessionism

The idea of social justice began as a Christian concept, coined by Jesuit Luigi Taparelli in his 1840s Saggio Teoretico di Diritto Naturale, but took modern shape in Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 Rerum Novarum, critiquing capitalism’s exploitation while echoing Hebrew Scriptures' concern for the poor.

In the 1930s, a popular magazine named Social Justice appeared on the scene. While it had plenty of differences from today's social justice movement, its principles included that every working citizen gets a just, living annual wage, the sanctity of human rights over property rights, and responsibility of the government to take care of the poor. Other echoes of today's social justice warriors was its demonization of "international bankers" and similar people who oppressed the have-nots.

The person who founded this magazine was Father Charles Coughlin, the infamous antisemite who spread his hate to 30 million listeners on his radio show.

In some ways, Coughlin was the perfect specimen of antisemitism. He held opinions that are now considered both on the right and the left. He was a Christian who promoted concepts more associated with atheistic socialism. He accused Jews of being both capitalists and communists. He was originally a strong supporter of FDR, later ran against him from the Left, and later still became a Nazi sympathizer. Social Justice reprinted parts of both the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and an English translation of a speech by Joseph Goebbels. (The magazine insisted that while the Protocols may not be actual, they were factual.)

His magazine and radio show were obsessed with Jews, accusing them of being the major force behind communism, and constantly complaining that American Jews were spending more time on anti-Nazi activities than anti-Communism, and that they were anti-Christian.

Coughlin couched his hate in the language of morality and justice. He insisted he wasn't antisemitic, saying there were some Jews he didn't have a problem with. Yet he insisted that Jews were guilty of deicide, that they were trying to turn the United States into an atheist, Communist country.

This quote from Social Justice, quoting another magazine, indicates his antisemitism under the guise of anti-Zionism:

The masses of the lower class Jews are not a nuisance to Christians. They are our poor, and we should look after them with Christian charity. But they are a nuisance to their prosperous co-religionists, and these are the real anti-Semites, who yield to the very natural propensity of getting rid of their poor relations.

Zionism is inspired by no sense of the ideal, but is essentially materialistic and based upon the desire of Jewish financiers to control what the far-seeing bankers among them recognized would become a very important link in the Imperial chain of communications. To achieve this they employ the poor Jew to do the rough work and to face the risk of death by riot, while they sit in comfortable offices of London, New York and Paris.

Coughlin fell from favor, but the idea of social justice continued to grow and morph.

The United Nations defined social justice in its 1969 Declaration on Social Progress and Development:

The immediate and final elimination of all forms of inequality, exploitation of peoples and individuals, colonialism and racism, including nazism and apartheid, and all other policies and ideologies opposed to the purposes and principles of the United Nations; [and] The recognition and effective implementation of civil and political rights as well as of economic, social and cultural rights without any discrimination.

Here we see a significant shift in the idea of social justice, from talking about the rights of the oppressed to emphasizing the evils of the oppressors. This may be the genesis of the current subversion of social justice from a force for helping the downtrodden into an excuse to feel morally superior to people you hate, by ascribing to them the worst attributes - colonialism, racism, Nazism and apartheid.

It can hardly be a coincidence that only six years later, the UN declared Zionism to be a form of racism. And of course today, as a collective of Jews, Israel is routinely accused of all four slanders.

This definition is not coming from a religious perspective, as previous social justice ideas were. This is political, and therefore it was quickly politicized. Yet is arrogates for itself a moral perspective. It is an early example of replacing religious-based morality with a purely secular one, and its change of emphasis from helping give justice for the weak to administering justice on those perceived to be powerful was tailor-made to lead to the next iteration of antisemitism.

Today's social justice warriors have perverted the traditional definitions of morality and justice into a secular version that has no objective source. As such, it can be twisted to turn these concepts into parodies of themselves. Righteousness is no longer helping the helpless; it is attacking the oppressors - and centuries of antisemitism makes it easy to paint Jews as oppressors and Israel as the ultimate evil.

An evil that, uniquely among all nations, must be destroyed. And replaced - superseded - with a Palestinian state.

How many of the "pro-Palestinian" protesters screaming about justice and resistance ever sent a dime to help the people of Gaza? How many protested when Palestinians are abused in Arab countries?

The major source of Western morality and justice comes from 3,000 years of Jewish tradition. This goes beyond the Jewish influence on modern jurisprudence. The Hebrew word for charity, tzedaka, shares the same root word as that of justice - Jews are obligated to help the poor, the widow, the orphan. That was the root of the early Christian concepts of social justice.

Today's social justice crowd want to replace these concepts with their own, superior, morality. Instead of centering helping those in need, it is all about entitlement for entire populations.

And who decides on which groups of people are entitled? What makes the Palestinians victims and not the Sudanese?

Today's social justice is not based on objective criteria nor on age-old traditions. It is arbitrary and capricious and based on fashion and which group aligns with the current political flavor of the week - and which group aligns with the "oppressed" narrative.

It is a form of supersessionism - it is a claim that today's self-declared moralists are superior to the backwards people of faith. It is self-righteousness that replaced righteousness. And righteousness is another meaning of tzedakah.

Without tradition, the very ideas of morality and justice become meaningless. Anyone and everyone can be an authority, and the people with the widest audience become the moral arbiters of the hour. Those who are blocking traffic, occupying college buildings, shouting for a new intifada, excluding Jews from public spaces, defacing synagogues with anti-Israel messages - these are today's moralists. They believe they are the new chosen people, tasked with bringing justice to the world.

Their idea of social justice is not to help people socially, but to administer "justice" to those they claim don't live up to their current idea of morals. They care a great deal about combating the supposed oppressors and very little for defending the oppressed. So we see absurdities where Hamas and Hezbollah are looked upon as progressive forces and where terrorist are extolled for their own social programs, and where truly oppressed Palestinians are made invisible.

While he was fervently anti-socialist, echoes of many of Father Charles Coughlin's ideas - his misuse of morality, his twisting of "justice" for his own politics, his hate of Jews masked as political, his insistence that he wasn't antisemitic by claiming that some Jews are sort of OK - live on with today's espousers of social justice.