Another great piece Mr. Gregg. You’ve become required reading for me. You provide moral sanity much better than our national op-ed icons and you write just as well. For me, this one is ‘I say f*ck you Jobu, I do it myself” (Israel to Biden admin).
Or better said, when did antisemitism become acceptable?
Why do Jews in the US overwhelmingly support the left - the same left who would cheer the destruction of Israel.
Why do so many gays support Palestinians (if they were ever under Palestinians control, they would suffer the same fate as Putin's enemies - defenestration)?
What we are seeing on the left is madness.
But more, it is a corruption of the soul of a large part of our population.
Jews are a market dominant minority. By leftist logic that makes them oppressors. Frankly, the amazing thing is how long it took the left to turn on the Jews.
The moderate liberalism of the New Deal era has vanished. "Left" now means the toxic poison emanating from certain campuses, funded by the big donors, crazy people with too much money, like George Soros.
The far left was *always* antisemitic. Just look at the history of antisemitism in the 19th century, especially in Germany. It's closely connected with secularization and Germany's chronic national identity problem. Then look at the Russian case from the late 1940s on. It was official policy under Brezhnev and early Gorbachev -- antisemitism at home in the Soviet Union and anti-Zionism abroad.
The relationship between Nazism and the modern left is complicated and can only be understood when you look back into the 19th century to figures like Bruno Bauer, Wilhelm Marr (who coined "antisemitism"), and Richard Wagner (a socialist revolutionary in his younger days).
In Germany, the French revolutionary tradition was transformed by Germany's "national problem" (lack of political unification) into a program of racial purity and unity of the Volk into a gemeinschaft -- terms hard to translate into English -- the mystical people (not individuals you meet on the street) into an involuntary racial community. It's related to Rousseau's romantic idea of the "people as one" and the General Will, but stripped of its rationalistic and universalist content born of Enlightenment. It was the German twist on 1789. (The American founders and their Scottish and English cousins had more individualistic, everyday ways of thinking of these concepts, free of Romantic mysticism.)
Anyway, the Jews of Germany and Europe did not fit into these scheme and became involuntary foils to everything German = good, with everything Jewish = bad. Ultimately, this shed its Christian background of theological hostility to Judaism and became a racial/national thing. Christian supersessionism (a matter of faith or belief) became social Darwinistic "extinction of the obsolete race" (genocide).
Mussolini is simpler. His parents were revolutionary leftists and named him for the Mexican revolutionary Benito Juarez. Musso was a left-anarchist (but not a Marxist) until 1911-14-ish, when he was swept away by Italian national feeling and a belief that Italy could recover Roman imperial glory, while at the same time implementing a semi-socialist program featuring the Fascist party forcing all Italian classes and regions to cooperate, or else. The "fasces" (which you'll find on the back of our US dime, 10-cent coin) represent the old Roman republic's conception of unity in time of war. Except Mussolini wanted to turn this wartime unity of purpose into a permanent way of life.
Mussolini's fascism was not antisemitic. There were Italian Jews in his movement as it coalesced in 1919-22, when he staged his first coup, forcing himself into the cabinet. (The second coup, in 1924, led to the banning of all other parties. The influence of Lenin's 1917-18 coup is plain.) Musso did on paper cave into Hitler's demands as concerned Italy's Jews in 1938, but nothing was done in reality. Italians thought the ideas preposterous. Only when the Germans invaded Italy in 1943, after Italy surrendered to the Allies and switched sides, did the SS come in and start deporting Italy's Jews to the gas chambers.
The father-in-law of Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, the father of his wife Laura, was an Italian Jewish admiral in the navy and part of Mussolini's Grand Fascist Council. Fermi, of course, was the first to construct a working nuclear pile at the University of Chicago in 1942, as part of the Manhattan Project. He was one of the last physicists accomplished in both experimental and theoretical physics. He and his wife escaped Italy in 1938, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work, traveling through Stockholm to the US.
The key, the master book, on German antisemitism, German national identity and political unification, and various forms of political radicalism is Paul Lawrence Rose's classic German Question/Jewish Question: Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner. He starts with Kant and the beginnings of Jewish emancipation just before the French Revolution and continues through the Hegelian radicals like Marx, Heine, and Bauer. German Jewish radicals were attracted to the universalism of the Enlightenment revolutionary tradition. But many other German radicals took a different lesson and construed antisemitism as a revolutionary ideology: German society's problems and political disunity could be solved by ridding the country of its Jews, in their view. Their racism was universally viewed as modern and "scientific" at the time. This fact poses a major obstacle for outside observers, because we think of Nazism as "right-wing" or "reactionary" and not what it was, a revolutionary movement, albeit of a very peculiar German kind.
Sadly, Rose passed away in 2017. He was a keen observer of far-left antisemitism, which was a staple of Cold War Soviet propaganda. It's a shame he's not here to provide historical perspective.
Another great piece Mr. Gregg. You’ve become required reading for me. You provide moral sanity much better than our national op-ed icons and you write just as well. For me, this one is ‘I say f*ck you Jobu, I do it myself” (Israel to Biden admin).
Thank you. That’s quite an accolade.
It is embarrassing, how easy it is to recruit agents of influence in the US. One need only pay for their recreational chemicals.
The only drawback is that you can’t get them to show up before noon.
How did the left become so antisemitic?
Or better said, when did antisemitism become acceptable?
Why do Jews in the US overwhelmingly support the left - the same left who would cheer the destruction of Israel.
Why do so many gays support Palestinians (if they were ever under Palestinians control, they would suffer the same fate as Putin's enemies - defenestration)?
What we are seeing on the left is madness.
But more, it is a corruption of the soul of a large part of our population.
Does not bode well for the US.
> How did the left become so antisemitic?
Jews are a market dominant minority. By leftist logic that makes them oppressors. Frankly, the amazing thing is how long it took the left to turn on the Jews.
The moderate liberalism of the New Deal era has vanished. "Left" now means the toxic poison emanating from certain campuses, funded by the big donors, crazy people with too much money, like George Soros.
The far left was *always* antisemitic. Just look at the history of antisemitism in the 19th century, especially in Germany. It's closely connected with secularization and Germany's chronic national identity problem. Then look at the Russian case from the late 1940s on. It was official policy under Brezhnev and early Gorbachev -- antisemitism at home in the Soviet Union and anti-Zionism abroad.
It really depends on how you define the left.
Both Mussolini and Hitler can be seen as left leaning. Both wanted the state to control all the resources and to divide them between their subjects.
In that respect the left was always antisemitic but here in the US had other issues to work on.
The relationship between Nazism and the modern left is complicated and can only be understood when you look back into the 19th century to figures like Bruno Bauer, Wilhelm Marr (who coined "antisemitism"), and Richard Wagner (a socialist revolutionary in his younger days).
In Germany, the French revolutionary tradition was transformed by Germany's "national problem" (lack of political unification) into a program of racial purity and unity of the Volk into a gemeinschaft -- terms hard to translate into English -- the mystical people (not individuals you meet on the street) into an involuntary racial community. It's related to Rousseau's romantic idea of the "people as one" and the General Will, but stripped of its rationalistic and universalist content born of Enlightenment. It was the German twist on 1789. (The American founders and their Scottish and English cousins had more individualistic, everyday ways of thinking of these concepts, free of Romantic mysticism.)
Anyway, the Jews of Germany and Europe did not fit into these scheme and became involuntary foils to everything German = good, with everything Jewish = bad. Ultimately, this shed its Christian background of theological hostility to Judaism and became a racial/national thing. Christian supersessionism (a matter of faith or belief) became social Darwinistic "extinction of the obsolete race" (genocide).
Mussolini is simpler. His parents were revolutionary leftists and named him for the Mexican revolutionary Benito Juarez. Musso was a left-anarchist (but not a Marxist) until 1911-14-ish, when he was swept away by Italian national feeling and a belief that Italy could recover Roman imperial glory, while at the same time implementing a semi-socialist program featuring the Fascist party forcing all Italian classes and regions to cooperate, or else. The "fasces" (which you'll find on the back of our US dime, 10-cent coin) represent the old Roman republic's conception of unity in time of war. Except Mussolini wanted to turn this wartime unity of purpose into a permanent way of life.
BTW, a couple more addenda.
Mussolini's fascism was not antisemitic. There were Italian Jews in his movement as it coalesced in 1919-22, when he staged his first coup, forcing himself into the cabinet. (The second coup, in 1924, led to the banning of all other parties. The influence of Lenin's 1917-18 coup is plain.) Musso did on paper cave into Hitler's demands as concerned Italy's Jews in 1938, but nothing was done in reality. Italians thought the ideas preposterous. Only when the Germans invaded Italy in 1943, after Italy surrendered to the Allies and switched sides, did the SS come in and start deporting Italy's Jews to the gas chambers.
The father-in-law of Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, the father of his wife Laura, was an Italian Jewish admiral in the navy and part of Mussolini's Grand Fascist Council. Fermi, of course, was the first to construct a working nuclear pile at the University of Chicago in 1942, as part of the Manhattan Project. He was one of the last physicists accomplished in both experimental and theoretical physics. He and his wife escaped Italy in 1938, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work, traveling through Stockholm to the US.
The key, the master book, on German antisemitism, German national identity and political unification, and various forms of political radicalism is Paul Lawrence Rose's classic German Question/Jewish Question: Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner. He starts with Kant and the beginnings of Jewish emancipation just before the French Revolution and continues through the Hegelian radicals like Marx, Heine, and Bauer. German Jewish radicals were attracted to the universalism of the Enlightenment revolutionary tradition. But many other German radicals took a different lesson and construed antisemitism as a revolutionary ideology: German society's problems and political disunity could be solved by ridding the country of its Jews, in their view. Their racism was universally viewed as modern and "scientific" at the time. This fact poses a major obstacle for outside observers, because we think of Nazism as "right-wing" or "reactionary" and not what it was, a revolutionary movement, albeit of a very peculiar German kind.
Sadly, Rose passed away in 2017. He was a keen observer of far-left antisemitism, which was a staple of Cold War Soviet propaganda. It's a shame he's not here to provide historical perspective.
Very interesting. One thing that definitely unites the modern left and other fascists is self righteousness and unwillingness to compromise.