How Jewish Leftists May Unwittingly Arouse Contemporary Fascism
By
David Gottfried
Trump and the worldwide resurgence of fascism evidenced by, among other things, the reign of Viktor Orban in Hungary, the rise of Marie Le Pen in France and Georgia Meloni’s victory in Italy, have been accompanied by a predictable rise in anti Semitism. For example, in this country, the seething, freaky, political fabulist Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is a member of Congress, said that Jews, operating lasers from outer space, have been starting fires in the southwest. Why does she think we Jews want to start fires. And if we did want to burn down the southwest, why would we find it necessary to shine laser beams from Mars. Wouldn’t it be less expensive to send arsonists to the Southwest with a huge supply of Bic lighters. Bic lighters are cheaper than spaceships and lasers, and I thought you guys always said we Jews wanted to save money.
In any event, given the revival of anti Semitism and all of the febrile, delusional thought that it entails, we must determine what psychological problems, or habits of thought, induce hatred of the Jews.
1. Anti Semitism, for the most part, is not fueled by Jewish wealth and the consequent envy that such wealth might induce.
Many people who are not Jewish make a lot of money. Yes, there are some rich Jewish doctors and lawyers and merchants. But there are also a lot of Arabs who make a fortune not from anything they did but from the oil under their sand. And I grew up with plenty of Italians who made money too, and some of them made money by being loan sharks. And not so long ago press reports said that China was selling beef that had been frozen for thirty years. Also, in the beginning of the 20th century, all of America’s immigrants -- the Jews, the Italians, the Irish, the Slavs etc. – were exploited and oppressed by financial titans who were largely white Anglo-Saxon protestants. And white Anglo Saxon protestants in the form of England fought an opium war with China so England could continue to make a financial killing selling opium to millions of Chinese people. Nevertheless, I haven’t heard too many people say that Anglo-Saxons are a particularly rapacious bunch of thieving, money-grubbing bastards. But if a Jewish doctor lives well after saving someone’s life by excising an appendix that was ready to burst, he is considered a blood-sucking, duplicitous kike.
2. The Jews are in large measure hated because of their leftist inclinations. (Actually, on many issues I am very left wing, but unfortunately, our left-wing ideology often doesn’t go over well. In an earlier essay on substack, I identified 5 factors which give many Jews a left-wing outlook. Footnote 1)
The Jews were in the vanguard of the Left in the beginning of the 20th Century, and they were in the vanguard of the left, in the United States, in the 1960’s – and at many times before and since then. In the beginning of the 20th Century, a grossly disproportionate numbers of Jews were on the left, both the socialist and merely liberal left. The first third of the last century gave us Trotsky, Zinoviev, Emma Goldmann, Rosa Luxemberg, Leon Blum, Bella Moskowitz, Henry Laski (Right Wing Joe Kennedy wanted his children to be subjected to a variety of perspectives, and President John F Kennedy was tutored by Laski) and other gallant and brilliant Jewish Leftists.
In the 30’s and 40’s, the masses of Europe rewarded the Jews, for caring about their poverty and misery, by sending them to their deaths. And it wasn’t simply a German affair. It is not fair to blame the holocaust entirely on German. The Ukrainians, Poles, and Lithuanians were exceptionally anti-Semitic. (Poland even had pogroms after the holocaust. In 1945, when some Polish Jewish survivors of the camps tried to go back to their homes, 50 Polish Jews were killed in one town alone) Also, even nations such as France, who we thought were such staunch lovers of liberty, who gave us the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and which wanted to reconvene the ancient Sanhedrin in the time of Napolean, succumbed to racist barbarism. Thousands of Jewish children in Paris were brought to a sports stadium, and locked up, prior to deportation to concentration camps.
The Jews had spent decades bewailing the poverty of the masses, and struggling to effectuate a redistribution of wealth, and the people of Europe made it perfectly clear that they did not want our help. They wanted us dead.
In the 1960’s, Jews figured prominently in the civil rights and antiwar movements. Although Jews were about two or three percent of the American population, Jews made up one third of the freedom riders who journeyed to the South to try to desegregate buses. Many of them were beaten. Schwerner and Goodman were killed trying to help blacks register to vote.
In 1972, I went to a Mc Govern rally and met a black woman. The discussion turned to the Mideast. She wasn’t quite sure who she supported, claiming, within a span of about two minutes, that she favored the Egyptians, then she said she meant to champion “the Arabians” until she finally declared fealty and love for the “Saudi Arabians.” Quite frankly, it is quite likely that she did not know the difference between a kumquat and the Quran. We knew what she wanted: She just favored the side that wanted to murder the Jews.
Why do they hate us:
2) In large measure, they hate us for our liberalism or leftism, the very same politics that would enact policies to curb and restrain the excesses of the “rich Jews” whom they say is the cause of their animus.
(Many other factors may prompt anti-Jewish sentiments, but I will try to restrict my discussion, for now, to those factors which have some relationship to politics.)
Why do they hate our liberal or leftist point of view?
A)They believe that atheistic Jewish leftists, who are not uplifted by the “hope” of religion, want to make Christians as miserable as atheistic Jews.
Although various faiths often have many flashes of genius and beauty, the notion that some sort of immortal being created the world, hovers over it and cares for its billions of human inhabitants has always struck me as at best fanciful and at worst delusional.
However, many Christians seem to truly believe in the divinity of Jesus and that his goodness and limitless power will eventually overcome and negate whatever harm befalls them.
It is harder for Jews to believe Walt Disney fairy tales. We were continually murdered by the very same people, Christians, who fabricated unctuous fairy tells of easter bunnies, mistletoe and a human-interest story, cute enough for a Hallmark Greeting Card, of a darling mommie and her infant baby, the son of G-d, seeking shelter in a manger.
Some of my readers may suffer from the delusion that anti-Jewish feeling only exploded into rank and rabid genocidal hate in World War Two. Ergo, a very brief primer is in order: a) Almost all of the nations of Christendom, starting with England in the 11th century, evicted all of its Jews and made it a crime to be Jewish (As a consequence, most European Jews – with the exception of those that fled to Muslim lands -- ended up in Poland, which never evicted its Jews); 2) the crusaders, while on the way to the levant to kill Muslims, routinely killed lots of Jews, 3) many Europeans slaughtered Jews for allegedly causing the Black Plague by poisoning the wells, 4) During the Spanish inquisition, the Bishop of Barcelona said one third of the Jews must convert, one third must be put to death and one-third must be refugees, 5) Jews were forced to live in ghettos, 6) Jews were barred from most occupations and were, for the most part, only permitted to be buyers and sellers of goods, and 7) Gentiles routinely slaughtered Jews for allegedly using the blood of Christian children to make matzah.
As a consequence, we Jews were not apt to sport the sort of sunny dispositions that quaint Christians sometimes exuded. Some of us doubted the existence of an all-powerful and benevolent G-d not only because of our blood-drenched history but also because of our intelligence, which had been honed and augmented by our particular brand of scholarship which forever demands that we question, doubt and probe and is so unlike the intellectually enervating brand of scholarship that characterizes the Christan world, a mode of learning in which the student simply memorizes facts for exams and is never encouraged to THINK.
Atheistic secular Jews are often accomplished, intense, driven and brilliant. They furiously attempt to build a heaven on earth because they doubt the existence of a heaven in the hereafter. Sometimes my fellow leftist Jews remind me of Marx’s tribute to the Paris Commune of 1870, “Compare these Parisians, storming Heaven, with the slaves to heaven of the German, Prussian, Holy Roman empire, with its posthumous masquerades, reeking of the Church, of the barracks, of cabbage junkerdom, and above all the philistine.”
We Jews can think fast, and we can act fast. We are not the sort of people who like to stop and smell the roses.
Chrisitan Europeans may have perceived us as somewhat grim.
(We can be uproariously funny, but our humor is shot through with sarcasm and bitterness. One author whose name I don’t recall hypothesized that what we call Jewish humor is something that was borne of the disillusion and loss that Jews experienced, in the 19th century, when they increasingly believed that G-d did not exist and exchanged their pious lives, in the insular shtetls (small villages) of rural Europe, for the tumultuous and rough and ragged lives of industrialized slums. Is this something akin to black music going from gospel to Rap ???)
It is quite possible that Christians looked upon Jews, who preached the gospel of socialism, as a group of discontented people who wanted to deprive Christians of the solace they got from Jesus and replace it with the dreary and soul-denying life of perpetual class war.
B) Poor People Can Hate Reformers and Liberals because Charity, Atonement and a Redistribution of Privileges can Rob a poor man of his Valuable Rage.
A poor or aggrieved man may overcome his disadvantages by using his anger: Goddamn it, “They oppressed me, I will get back at them by succeeding.” When a rich man helps you, your anger toward the rich man is assuaged and you have less energy to succeed. The oppressed need their anger. Consequently, nothing may make them angrier than a rich philanthropic man saying, “I shall help you.”
Indeed, Bernard Lewis of Princeton said that American hostages were taken in Iran, in 1979, because of Carter’s efforts to mollify Iranian discontent. Supposedly, the Iranians were furious at the belief that they could be pacified by trite concessions at a late date. Supposedly, the very idea of being pacified was revolting.
It might seem peculiar for a student of history to consider rock and roll lyrics, but the lyrics from an old David Bowie Song seem apt: “The bitter comes out better with a stolen guitar.” (“The Spiders from Mars,” 1972) People who feel victimized don’t want compromises. They often don’t want equality and certainly not integration. They want revenge. For impoverished and embittered peons, a sedate and boring Democratic Party Platform paper is as nauseating as plaster of paris on the palette.
C) Hannah Arendt’s theory of ineffectual wealth, Norman Podhoretz’s revelation that in the Middle Ages gentiles thought that Jewish men menstruated and Anti Semitism as a manifestation of Castration Fear.
Hannah Arendt, in “The Origins of Totalitarianism, said that the ferocious anti-Semitism of Hitlerite Europe stemmed from the belief that the Jews had once had money and that now their money was totally ineffectual. I don’t know exactly what she meant to say, but perhaps she thought that the angry Fascist Viennese were manic and mad with the idea that a Jewish lady’s furs were meaningless, they could be ripped from her back, her pearls could be yanked from her neck, and she could be forced to wash the streets with toothbrushes.
The idea that Jews were ineffectual is akin to asserting that they were impotent and that is a hop, skip and a jump to asserting that they were somewhat weak or emasculated or, in the Freudian vernacular, castrated.
Interestingly enough, Norman Podhoretz wrote that in the Middle Ages some gentiles thought that Jewish men, as well as Jewish women, menstruated. (The gentiles believed that the constant blood loss, by both Jewish men and Jewish women, prompted an abiding and intense thirst for Christian blood). The idea that Jewish men menstruated is akin to the idea that Jewish men were not fully male. The idea that Jewish men were not fully male may have been prompted by the Jewish practice of circumcision.
If gentiles found the practice of circumcision abhorrent, I am not surprised. I find the practice abhorrent. In any event, circumcision may have made it appear as if Jewish men were compromised or suffered from a fractured or qualified version of masculinity.
When a man sees a man who he perceives as less than fully male, he is afraid as that man’s deficient virility may make him worry that his maleness may be deficient.
After all, why do so many straight men attack gay men ? In a gay man, a straight men may have a visage of adulterated manhood, and this terrifies him. He quickly performs an inventory of sorts to ensure that he has the requisite measure of manhood. To prove to himself that he is fully male, he may attack the gay man.
It is quite possible that anti Semitism is a consequence of castration fear aroused by circumcision. This idea might sound like reductivist, dated Freudian garbage, but as I said, in medieval times gentiles thought Jewish men menstruated. Accordingly, we would be foolish to discount the psychosexual components of anti Semitism.
HOW THIS TIES INTO POLITICS: Sometimes, Jews have tended to “bend over backwards” when dealing with their “leftist” antagonists (I put the word leftist in quotes for numerous reasons, the cardinal reason being that I do not think that either black nationalists or Arab nationalists can be considered genuine men of the left as the left has assiduously endeavored to rise above nationalist identities. Footnote 2
In New York City, I sensed that Jews were bending over backwards to mollify and pacify black radicals who, in the late sixties and especially the Seventies, seemed to make increasingly outrageous and illogical demands. Furthermore, the liberal Jewish willingness to listen to rabid and hateful Arabists, who have conveniently altered the history of the mid-east of the past 150 years to delegitimize the State of Israel, smacks of spinelessness and softness.
I submit that when Jews are excessively indulgent of their adversaries’ shortcomings, brittleness and downright belligerence, their adversaries see them as nothing but a crew of latter-day castratos (akin to the way in which gentiles in medieval times thought that Jewish men menstruated because they had been circumcised), smell blood and move in for the kill.
Of course, the shrewd psychoanalytic sleuth may see something else at work: Christians may have projected their fear of castration, engendered by the castratos of the church choirs and the Catholic Church’s hostility to male sexuality, onto the Jews. Incidentally, this will give me an excuse to post one of the few surviving recordings of a castrato as that loathsome practice stopped toward the middle or end of the 19th century. Some apologists for the Church have told me that the castratos sounded wonderful and were the life of the party. Listen to this clip and judge for yourself:
D) The Jewish Liberal’s Sermon for Equality seems to be a Patent Lie
We Jewish leftists seem to be lying through our teeth when we claim -- again and again and again -- that we believe in equality and seeks to inaugurate a revolution premised on equality. The Jew wants to believe in equality, but the more he knows of his people the harder it is for him to believe that he is equal.
The Jewish man, if he knows anything about his heritage, has strong intimations of innate superiority. And so he knows that he is lying at his liberal clubs when he speaks the blather of equality.
His holy books have told him that he is chosen, and this makes him feel guilty. He finds the bedrock of his background bigoted and chauvinistic. Therefore, he has concocted a myth of everlasting and universal sameness.
The catechism of New York Jewish Lefties left my mind impermeable to any suggestion that we were not equal.
It took a few non-Jews to make me realize that Jewish people were not just another “white ethnic” as demographers of American electoral politics would describe us.
An Irish Catholic politician gave me an inkling of Jewish awesomeness when he told me that the “whole world follows a Jew.” He said that the Christians follow Jesus, a Jew, the communists follow Karl Marx, a Jew, the natural scientists swoon to Einstein, a Jew, and many intellectuals and artists follow Freud, a Jew. Since he said that, Freud has lost of lot of influence but that has been more than made up for by the rise of feminism, which was in large measure created by three Jewish women in New York, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinum and Bella Abzug.
We are less than one tenth of one percent of the world’s population and look at what a spell we have cast.
When I was growing up, every single Jew in my neighborhood scored about 9th grade level or better, on standardized reading tests, when he was in the fourth grade. My Mother lived on black bread in the Great Depression, and she got the highest score, in all of New York State, on the New York State’s History Regents exam.
If we forgot our intimations of immortality between the French Revolution and World War One, when it seemed as if emancipation and liberalism (variously defined) would lead the Jews and gentiles to “sunlit uplands,” the spectral events of the mid 20 th century brought us back to that old time religion:
In 1948, the State of Israel was attacked by six Arab armies on the day Israel declared Independence. The Jews were outnumbered by about one hundred to one. Although America recognized Israel, it would not sell Israel arms. Ditto Great Britain. (And the “radical” rabble of this country imagines that Israel was built by the West.) By contrast, the British trained and aided the Jordanian army and when the Jews scored a series of victories at the expense of the Egyptians, the British air force bombed the Jewish soldiers. The Jews of embryonic Israel numbered 600,000, and half of them were the half-starved remnants of Europe’s crematoria, but the Jews won.
Put it this way: To arrive at the conclusion that the Jews have a special affinity and connection to the Divine is emotionally irresistible and intellectually perfectly plausible.
I can’t say that all Jewish radicals feel the way I do. I can’t read their minds. But it seems hard for me to see it any other way: Because of our achievements, I do not know how a Jewish radical can look you straight in the face and plead that he believes that we are all equal,
6 does not equal 3.
6 feet does not equal 3 feet.
Someone who is 6 feet tall would make a better security guard than someone who is 3 feet tall.
And one would be more likely to trust a gifted surgeon than a stupid surgeon.
And diversity and all that touchy feeling inconclusive and related gooey new age crap means absolutely nothing compared to scores on Standardized tests.
Because our professed ideology of egalitarianism is so painfully at odds with our sincere contrary belief, it is hard for our true feelings to find release.
Since we cannot say, “I don’t believe this equality bullshit,” our belief in hierarchy and our distaste for equality manifests itself in our sarcasm, belittling disregard for the “poor white trash, our skewering of religion, the uppity bicoastal elitism of New York and California, and the cabaret of our culture, which is a motley concoction of insults and sleights directed against the awkward old grumps of white, Christian civilization.
Footnote 1: This essay, enumerating 5 factors which make Jews gravitate toward the left, can be found at https://davidgottfried.substack.com/p/five-reasons-why-jews-gravitate-toward
Footnote 2: The modern left began with the French Revolution, and the men of the French Revolution sought to overcome petty national identities. Consider the metric system, which is a product of the French Revolution. It is based on the number ten as 10,000 kilometers is the distance from the North Pole to the Equator. The number 10 belongs to all men, as all healthy men have ten fingers. The number 10 is not something unique to any chauvinistic ethnic group, and the metric system was invented to unite mankind.