Class #3: Some More

 And now we come to imperialism. 

Rhodes vs. You Know Who

Let's start with something obvious:

The world is nearly all parceled out, and what there is left of it is being divided up, conquered and colonized. To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far. - Cecil Rhodes: Last Will and Testament

Now who the fuck does that sound like?...

In the 1890s, Cecil Rhodes was co-founder and chairman of DeBeers Consolidated Mines. He had a literal world monopoly of diamonds: controlling 80 to 85% of the world's diamond mines and could name any price in any country. Any purchaser who wanted even the smallest diamond would have to buy what he dictated. 

He was also, wait for it, the Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, one of Britain's four colonies that comprised what we now call South Africa. In order to stymie native black Africans from having a political voice in the Cape Colony he increased the from their land being worth 25 pounds sterling in order to vote to 75 pounds, and then he set limits on the amount of land black Africans could own. His view was that "Black people need to be driven off their land to stimulate them to labour. It must be brought home to them that in future nine-tenths of them will have to spend their lives in manual labour, and the sooner that is brought home to them the better." Ten years after his death, the now united South Africa implemeted a plan for which he was one of the chief architects: which allowed black Africans to only own land on 10 percent of the country's land while whites were entitled to the other 90 percent. It prohibited interracial marriage, created white-only spaces, and segregated bathrooms, fountains, parks and beaches. While the Apartheid era technically begins in 1948, many of its rules were already in place by 1913. 

From the beginning, modern imperialism has been so bound up with corporate partnership with governments that the border between state and business is often obliterated--one could almost call it corporate control of governments. Money can only be accumulated so much so long as the government regulates it, and the only option to stop government for regulating business is for business to regulate government. That's how we get lobbies, that's how we get unlimited campaign contributions and Super PACs, and most importantly, that's how we get the constantly revolving door between lobbyist and public servant--there is no better advocacy for a business than a public servant who has an extremely vested interest in increasing its income. That's how we get public funding being cut for foreign aid and social programs while simultaneously funding the world's richest man, some reports say his net worth could be close to 40 or 50% government funded. 

The same sick narcissism, and it is an illness, that makes people want to accumulate unlimited power makes people want to accumulate unlimited wealth, and so long as two archetypal narcissists beset by twin addictions can stay in the same room with each other, it's inevitable that they will try as hard as they can to become allies and friends, even though both of them are incapable of either. I can't do better than these two Arendt quotes: 

1: "Money could finally beget money because power, with complete disregard for all laws--economic as well as ethical--could appropriate wealth. Only when exported money succeeded in stimulating the export of power could it accomplish its owners' designs. Only the unlimited accumulation of power could bring about the unlimited accumulation of capital."'

2: At the close of the century the owning classes had become so dominant that it was almost ridiculous for a state employee to keep up the pretense of serving the nation."

So two questions now: 

1. Who is the more powerful partner in an imperium? Is it countries or corporations? 

2. How, if at all, can you tell the power of one from the power of the other?

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Rhodes vs. You Know Who Part 2

Alright, let's say his name... When dealing with the comparisons of Cecil Rhodes and Elon Musk, we m may be seeing the evolution of imperialism through the span of 125 years. Modern imperialism began long before Rhodes, but Rhodes the embodiment of its historical zenith. Everything that imperialism was, everything imperialism stood for, was Cecil Rhodes. 

Whatever stand one takes about how much 20th century America resembled the imperialism of 19th century Europe, it would seem that America is heading into a very different form of imperialism during the 21st; and for the moment you can, if you like, interpret Elon Musk's presence on the world stage as figure who acquaints the United States with much older notions of how the world should be run, and much as the older imperialists did, he brings us to this very old way of running the world by conquest by claiming that he is bringing the world very new things. 

However ambitious Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency seems, it could easily be much more ambitious. Musk and Trump do not want to remove the incompetent or superfluous from government, they want to remove all conscientious public servants so that their actions have no accountability. Once they're removed, their kleptocracy operates without interference, and it's only a matter of months before the kleptocracy turns its attentions abroad.  

I'm not good at predictions, but if the US fulfills Trump's threats to invade Canada and Greenland, I will eat my shoe. The US carries 26% of the world's gross domestic product, that may be half of what it used to be, but it's concentrated in the hands of 756 billionaires and roughly 20,000 corporations. If the United States government wants to dictate policy to a weaker country, it is so much easier to do it through economic leverage than go to the expense and frustration of an invasion. A country like Russia can only get its way through territorial expansion because, having only 3.53% of the world's gross domestic product, Russia does not have the economic power to dictate terms to anyone by business (and much more, of course, on Russian imperialism in a later class...). If America decides to territorially expand, it would only be if an American President was so in the pocket of his Russian counterpart that he would expand American territory as a means to normalize Russia's behavior...

21st century imperialism has little need of territorial acquisition. All it requires is to make submissive countries economically dependent on the companies of a dominating world power. So long as the companies are in control its own government's policies, that is empire in all but name. One could make a reasonably good argument that America was already that sort of neo-imperial power in the 20th century, but the controls on other countries are likely to seem very loose in comparison to the direction America seems to be taking under Trump. 

 Elon Musk began his life in South Africa, Cecil Rhodes ended it there, and Musk was raised in the conditions and worldview Cecil Rhodes provided: white nationalism, hostility to protests, hostility to labor unions, economic deregulation and most importantly, authoritarian control over the country's majority maintained by economic dependence of the poor on the rich--which also 'happens' to divide on racial, and given a figleaf of legitimacy by defending it as the results of 'free private enterprise.' 

Cecil Rhodes imported the archetypal form of imperialism to South Africa, and Elon Musk seems to be the historical figure to export it.  

So two questions:

1. From whatever you konw about imperialism, how was were foreign policies of 20th century America similar to 19th century European imperialism?

2. The opposite: How was 20th century America different from 19th century European imperialism?

--------------------------------------------

Shortly into the section on imperialism, Arendt makes a point that I somewhat disagree with, and that will lead us into a broader discussion of imperialism. She notes that imperialism was the first time that 'expansion became an end in itself and not a temporary means.' That can't possibly be true, can it? 

First of all, what kind of imperialism? We take imperialism to mean 19th century Europe, but does it really begin there? Isn't every military conquest some form of imperium? Isn't the plunder of tribute states the oldest dirty trick in politics? And looking at so many of the world's largest empires: Romans, Mongols, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, the Caliphates: what really was the difference between them and the Brits and French? Constant need for expansion? Check. Plundering conquered territories of their wealth and resources? Check. Exploitation of foreign workers? Check. Creating an empire that subsists on mass trade? Check. Indoctrinating the occupied countries into the culture of their rulers? Check and a half. 

And that leads to the ultimate question about imperialism. 

Is it possible to have a world without imperialism?

Over the last four-hundred years, parts of the world have been neatly divided into nations a number of times, borders usually determined by language, and it's usually resulted in a larger power subsuming the smaller countries into subservience. That obviously gets us to inter-European imperialism, which we'll discuss in a later class, but it can't be denied that there are ways in which imperialism has brought benefits: not equal to its horrors, but realistically speaking, the way the world evolves is a process not all that dissimilar from imperialism: a country with superior technology conquers another country, brings their developments into the new place, the new place struggles with a divided sense of identity these new technologies bring, and sometimes, the conquered country synthesizes these disparate conceptions of the world to create a new identities and new technologies, and they become the conqueror instead of the conquered. No one in 1648 would have predicted that Germany would become a functional state, let alone either a totalitarian imperium or the world's most reliable liberal democracy. Similarly, no one in 200 AD would imagine that Italy would spend the next 2000 years as the sick man of Western Europe. 

(keep going for a while)

---------------------------------------

Theft vs. Collapse

Another point Arendt makes is that imperialism delayed the inevitable collapse of Europe, and the governments of Europe knew perfectly well a collapse was coming even if the people did not. Britain and Germany, the two dominant industrial powers, came very close to war a number of times before World War I, political assassination was a colossal risk that every head of state simply had to accept, economic depressions equal to the Great Depression were a guaranteed event for one year out of every twenty, and organized labor caused mass civil unrest regularly. Perhaps what's more extraordinary than World War I was that a similarly deadly event hadn't happened already. The revolutions of 1848 almost made the governments of Europe go up in smoke at the same time, and after that, the upper classes feared a moment that would bring Europe to collapse for decades, until seventy years later, when it was the upper classes who facilitated European collapse by instigating World War I. 

What delayed the collapse for so long was imperialism: the relatively easy theft of goods and raw materials from parts of the world that often didn't know their own resources and couldn't defend themselves from countries with superior weaponry. Europe experienced no major wars between 1871 and 1914. They came close: countries always do, and there were plenty of conflicts in imperial colonies, but why go to war with an equally powerful country over resources when resources flowed in so easily from elsewhere? 

So two questions:

1. Would you support impoverishing another country to prevent the collapse of your own?

2. Would you support your country taking resources from a country that would have no idea how to extract them without your country's presence?

Arendt points to another problem: capitalism requires expansion, and by the 1880s, it was only through imperialism that capital would expand into new markets. Imperialism was not only a way to import goods, it was a way to export them. It was a means to create new markets by Westernizing the culture of native colonists, making them dependent on products of which they had no idea until the West controlled their countries. It would take too long to list all the products and where they were manufactured, but this was the period when global trade became a phenomenon on a truly mass scale. Everyone produced, and everyone consumed. 

-------------------------------------------

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Class 3 - A Very Litte More

 And now we come to imperialism. 

Rhodes vs. You Know Who

Let's start with something obvious:

The world is nearly all parcelled out, and what there is left of it is being divided up, conquered and colonised. To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far. - Cecil Rhodes: Last Will and Testament

Now who the fuck does that sound like?...

In the 1890s, Cecil Rhodes was co-founder and chairman of DeBeers Consolidated Mines. He had a literal world monopoly of diamonds: controlling 80 to 85% of the world's diamond mines and could name any price in any country. Any purchaser who wanted even the smallest diamond would have to buy what he dictated. 

He was also, wait for it, the Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, one of Britain's four colonies that comprised what we now call South Africa. In order to stymie native black Africans from having a political voice in the Cape Colony he increased the from their land being worth 25 pounds sterling in order to vote to 75 pounds, and then he set limits on the amount of land black Africans could own. His view was that "Black people need to be driven off their land to stimulate them to labour. It must be brought home to them that in future nine-tenths of them will have to spend their lives in manual labour, and the sooner that is brought home to them the better." Ten years after his death, the now united South Africa implemeted a plan for which he was one of the chief architects: which allowed black Africans to only own land on 10 percent of the country's land while whites were entitled to the other 90 percent. It prohibited interracial marriage, created white-only spaces, and segregated bathrooms, fountains, parks and beaches. While the Apartheid era technically begins in 1948, many of its rules were already in place by 1913. 

From the beginning, modern imperialism has been so bound up with corporate partnership with governments that the border between state and business is often obliterated--one could almost call it corporate control of governments. Money can only be accumulated so much so long as the government regulates it, and the only option to stop government for regulating business is for business to regulate government. That's how we get lobbies, that's how we get unlimited campaign contributions and Super PACs, and most importantly, that's how we get the constantly revolving door between lobbyist and public servant--there is no better advocacy for a business than a public servant who has an extremely vested interest in increasing its income. 

The same sick narcissism, and it is an illness, that makes people want to accumulate unlimited power makes people want to accumulate unlimited wealth, and so long as two archetypal narcissists beset by twin addictions can stay in the same room with each other, it's inevitable that they will try as hard as they can to become allies and friends, even though both of them are incapable of either. I can't do better than this Arendt quote: 

"Money could finally beget money because power, with complete disregard for all laws--economic as well as ethical--could appropriate wealth. Only when exported money succeeded in stimulating the export of power could it accomplish its owners' designs. Only the unlimited accumulation of power could bring about the unlimited accumulation of capital."'

1. Who is the more powerful partner in an imperium? Is it countries or corporations? 

2. How, if at all, can you tell the power of one from the power of the other?

----------------------------------------------------

Rhodes vs. You Know Who Part 2

Alright, let's say his name... When dealing with the comparisons of Cecil Rhodes and Elon Musk, we m may be seeing the evolution of imperialism through the span of 125 years. Modern imperialism began long before Rhodes, but Rhodes the embodiment of its historical zenith. Everything that imperialism was, everything imperialism stood for, was Cecil Rhodes. 

Whatever stand one takes about how much 20th century American foreign policy did or didn't resemble the imperialism of 19th century Europe, it would seem that America is heading into a very different form of imperialism during the 21st; and for the moment you can, if you like, interpret Elon Musk's presence on the world stage as figure who acquaints the United States with much older notions of how the world should be run, and much as the older imperialists did, he brings us to this very old way of running the world by conquest by claiming that he is bringing the world very new things. 

Class 3: Beginning

 So now we come to imperialism. 

Let's start with something obvious:

"Expansion is everything... these stars, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could." - Cecil Rhodes

Now who the fuck does that sound like?...

In the 1890s, Cecil Rhodes was co-founder and chairman of DeBeers Consolidated Mines. He had a literal world monopoly of diamonds: controlling 80 to 85% of the world's diamond mines and could name any price in any country. Any purchaser who wanted even the smallest diamond would have to buy what he dictated. 

He was also, wait for it, the Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, one of Britain's four colonies that comprised what we now call South Africa. In order to stymie native black Africans from having a political voice in the Cape Colony he increased the from their land being worth 25 pounds sterling in order to vote to 75 pounds, and then he set limits on the amount of land black Africans could own. His view was that "Black people need to be driven off their land to stimulate them to labour. It must be brought home to them that in future nine-tenths of them will have to spend their lives in manual labour, and the sooner that is brought home to them the better." Ten years after his death, the now united South Africa implemeted a plan for which he was one of the chief architects: which allowed black Africans to only own land on 10 percent of the country's land while whites were entitled to the other 90 percent. It prohibited interracial marriage, created white-only spaces, and segregated bathrooms, fountains, parks and beaches. While the Apartheid era technically begins in 1948, many of its rules were already in place by 1913. 

From the beginning, modern imperialism has been so bound up with corporate control that the border between the two is often invisible. 

Which do you think holds more power in an imperium? Is it countries or corporations? How, if at all, can you tell the power of one from the power of the other?

The Origins of Totalitarianism: Class 1 in its own post

     Class #1: 

   So this is the beginning of a fake class, seminar, 'colloquy' of some important books about authoritarianism, liberal democracy, and the condition of our future. It will not be delivered as live lectures, just texts. Nevertheless I'd like you to imagine that we're in a classroom setting where you can interpolate your own discussions. All throughout, I'm going to interrupt the text for classroom-type questions for you to ponder at your leisure. 

I'm mostly going to present this as commentaries on important quotes from the books, not summations of the books and their theses. The point of these 'talks' is not the books themselves but how they relate to the situations of our present and future: what insights we gain, how they may let us understand our current zeitgeist and future predicaments. In just one month we have been thrown into a new era, the likes of which most countries on earth have experienced many times, but the United States has experienced not even once. 

Thus, most of these books will be centered on the 20th century experience, the nearest experience of crisis to our own, and thus require the relative least amount of empathy to imagine ourselves in the place of those before us. As the preponderance of these books were written about the situation of Western countries, the majority of these books will concentrate on the situations of the West over the global East or South. Nevertheless, we will apply many of the insights of these books to the situation of other regions, which play an enormous, perhaps unprecedented role in modern global affairs. 

As there are a lot of points to get through, the prose will be largely unedited, conversational and free-flowing with an intent to convey information rather than readability. The teacher will do his best to keep his own biases to a minimum. He believes in 'value free scholarship,' that scholarship for its own sake has value in itself and is a more reliable route to the proper course of action than the deliberate advancement of a point of view. Nevertheless, as with any analysis, conclusions must be drawn, and all conclusions necessarily betray a certain bias. Perhaps all perceptions are ideologically based, but just as the human body has dozens of benign tumors, it is possible to hold an ideology that does not lethally refract one's vision. Even so a good teacher can try to present the full issue in all its sides, particularly because ideology is the subject of this class: understanding why people come to believe what they believe. Inevitably, there will be people who would read these talks and find many conclusions uncharitable, such sentiments can't be helped, but if this teacher is successful in his endeavor, it will say more about reader than writer.

Lastly, we will adopt a format for every talk I'm going to pretentiously call 'dualities' to help orient the reader/student about the subject being spoken. 'This vs. That.' The reason I call them 'dualities' is because I believe that more than anything else, it's the divided self, the tensions between our ideals and our realities, that break ground for insight.  Perhaps these new thoughts are no better than the thoughts before, perhaps they inadvertently create their own dualities, or perhaps these dualities lead us right back to where we were. And sometimes there are not two sides to every issue, but three or four, necessitating trialities or quadralities, and sometimes there is only one side to an issue because any argument against it come up with so far is nonsense, and so far as we know yet those are monalities. Nevertheless, I believe dualities is the best way to frame these discussions. 

There is no accurate way to read history. There is no 'monality' that explains how it all works, and one must always beware the ideologue who believes in any explanation that covers all with deep suspicion. Nevertheless, within our limited understanding, there are possibilities, percentages, causes and effects that are more likely than others, and those possible percentages are what we aim to entertain. 

The Origins of Totalitarianism is not a book about any one thesis. It's at once a work that purports to explain how totalitarianism works, the social history that led to its formation, the intellectual underpinnings of the totalitarian philosophy - such as they are, and the conditions which lead people to be particularly susceptible to it. It is both a difficult book and not particularly difficult. Hannah Arendt is a clear and quotable writer, but she is nevertheless long-winded and so full of references to historical figures that it can take twenty years of immersion in history to know her references. The insights of this book coruscate from the page, but like many of the best books, it is very difficult to take one over-arching insight from the whole thing. 

So that is why we must present the book in small, digestible parts, and relate them to our current realities. 

The book is divided into three parts: Antisemitism, Imprerialism, and Totalitarianism. We'll obviously start with the antisemitism chapters. And therefore, we're gonna start with a very bleak quote from early in the book.

Oppression vs. Use

'Neither oppression nor exploitation is ever the main cause for resentment; wealth without visible function is much more intolerable because nobody can understand why it should be tolerated. ... Antisemitism reached its climax when Jews had similarly lost their public functions and their influence, and were left with nothing but wealth.' 

In other words: Hitler stoked antisemitism by stripping Jews of their societal use, and the more he stripped them of means to prove their societal use, the more hated Jews became to Germany. We should specify immediately, this does not mean that the Trump administration will be as lethal as Hitler, though you can't help acknowledge that, given the unstable state of the world, there is a percentage chance they will be more lethal, and a small percentage chance that they mean to be exactly that. But that is not the point of why we mention this quote. 

The point is that in the midst of economic hardship, Germans saw that Jews were left with nothing but unaccountable wealth, and that caused more resentment than actual oppression from the government ever could. 

Here's Arendt again: 

 "What makes men obey and tolerate real power and, on the other hand, hate people who have wealth without power, is the rational instinct that power has a certain function and is of some general use. Even exploitation and oppression still make society work and establish some kind of order. Only wealth without power or aloofness without a policy are felt to be parasitical, useless, revolting, because such conditions cut all the threads which tie men together. Wealth which does not exploit lacks the relationship which exists between exploiter and exploited;..."

In your experience, in your perception, does this seem true? Does envy spur you to more immediate anger than suffering? 

I don't need to tell you what this points to in our current predicament. Everyone can see the writing on the wall and the ensuing hatred of liberals that will only increase as time goes on. Not just demographic minorities: all liberals, all 'blue staters.' If a major recession is coming, America's majority blue states still live in 71% of the American economy and can live on their savings long after the majority red states live in privation and hardship. Even if the flip side is true and Trump's proposal to increase drilling causes more prosperity in red America, the hatred will increase because Red America will see itself as earning its wealth while seeing Blue America's wealth as unearned, particularly if the government self-depletes an enormous amount of its workforce.  

The wholesale stripping of governmental experience and authority can easily ruin the American economy and therefore the world's, but even through that, it is easily possible that any oppression meted out by a new regime would be lapped up, even respected, by many of the oppressed, because people seem innately programmed to trust their surroundings until the threat against them is immediately present. 

This does not mean that the economy's about to plummet, or that liberals will be sent to concentration camps, or any minority, but it does mean that the current polarization is likely to be a weak brew next to what's coming and the tensions of our society will only ratchet up further. One needs to be mindful of the dangers.

Contrary to our current perceptions, societies have undergone tensions far worse than ours and come out the other side still standing: insurrection, riots, targeted violence for years and years. We're often told to think of the 1950s America as the ultimate time of peace and prosperity: yet it was a time that easily could have dissolved in a pool of nuclear ash. 

Still more in favor of liberals and left, the Trump administration has only begun. If disasters are to come, then the time for them to receive blame is ample. For better or worse, this is most likely to come about if a large number of journalists abandon the search for objective reporting in proportions similar to how right-wing journalism has, in favor of a nakedly ideological spin on all events: carrying the intersectional ideology prevalent in universities fully and unapologetically into politics, regardless of objective truth. This tactic would have the added benefit that most conservatives already believe liberals do precisely that and would be completely unprepared for an opposition that resembles themselves.

The consequences of such a metamorphosis for the next era could only be speculated about, but the future abandonment of objective truth by all political actors is a likely reality in our near-future, with the inevitable end result that objective truth in human events will be increasingly impossible to ascertain.   

I can't help but air an Arendt quote from much later in the book that we'll obviously get to in a later talk: 

- 'In an ever changing and incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point when they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing is true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.' 

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Bigotry vs. Use

So now we must come to an astonishing quote about antisemitism and the Holocaust. We will, of course, relate it to the current situation in Gaza, but also to questions of identity in modern America. This quote from Arendt was received with shock back in 1951, and it's no less shocking today. 

'The birth and growth of modern antisemitism has been accompanied by an interconnectedness with Jewish assimilation, the secularization and withering away of old religious and spiritual values of Judaism. What actually happened was that great parts of the Jewish people were at the same time threatened with physical extinction from without and dissolution from within. In this situation, Jews concerned with the survival of their people would, in a curious desperate misinterpretation, hit on the consoling idea that antisemitism, after all, might be an excellent means of keeping people together, so that the assumption of eternal antisemitism would even imply an eternal guarantee of Jewish existence. This superstition, a secularized travesty of the idea of eternity inherent in a faith in chosenness and a Messianic hope, has been strengthened through the fact that for many centuries the Jews experienced the Christian brand of hostility which was indeed a powerful agent of preservation, spiritually as well as politically. The Jews mistook modern anti-Christian antisemitism for the old religious Jew hatred--and this all the more innocently because their assimilation had bypassed Christianity in its religious and cultural aspect. Confronted with an obvious symptom of the decline of Christianity, they could therefore imagine in all ignorance that this was some revival of the so-called "Dark Ages." Ignorance or misunderstanding of their own past were partly responsible for their fatal underestimation of the actual and unprecedented dangers which lay ahead. But one should also bear in mind lack of political ability and judgement have been caused by the very nature of Jewish history, the history of a people without a government, without a country, and without a language. Jewish history offers the extraordinary spectacle of a people, unique in this respect, which began its history with a well-defined concept of history and an almost conscious resolution to achieve a well-circumscribed plan on earth and then, without giving up the concept, avoided all political action for two-thousand years. The result was that the political history of the Jewish people became even more dependent upon unforeseen, accidental factors than the history of other nations, so that Jews stumbled from one role to the other and accepted responsibility for none.' 

Can someone explain what this quote means in one sentence?

What people interpreted this quote to mean is that Jews bear some mark of responsibility for the Holocaust. 

How can Jews ever be said to be responsible for something so awful that befell particularly them?

What this proposition ultimately means is that by seeing antisemitism everywhere, popping up in every historical era, Jews did not give non-Jews the option to be anything but antisemites unless they behaved precisely as Jews wished them to behave, which both did not allow non-Jews to embrace Jews in any way but on Jews' terms, and also provoked non-Jews into further resentment of Jews that caused them to embrace more antisemitic beliefs. Which in turn doomed Jews to the worst results of antisemitism. 

I don't say I agree with this, I'm just presenting the argument. 

I think most everybody would see how this argument relates to the current situation in Gaza. I don't think I need to comment further on it, but I do want to ask you to consider a few questions, and if you think you have immediate answers, wait a few minutes and ponder them again: 

1. Many people see Israeli activities in Gaza as a genocide. But it's worth remembering that many Jews see a threat in Israel's neighbors that may be genocidal. Which if either perception is correct? Are both correct? Are both incorrect? 

2. Many Jews see antisemitism in the denial of genocide's likelihood against them, are they right? 

3. Does the accusation of antisemitism in many Westerners' denial make Westerners more likely or less likely to embrace antisemitism? 

4. Does the accusation make Israelis more doomed or less doomed to that likelihood of genocide?

And now I'm going to ask questions that are even more provocative. 

1. Is the proposition of the American left that there is bigotry in the denial of DEI's principals (diversity, equality, and inclusion) true? 

2. If it is, how is that different from the Jewish insistence that there's antsemitism in so many critiques of Israel?  

3. Regardless of whether it's true or or false that rejection of DEI's necessity is bigoted, does that accusation make people more likely or less likely to embrace bigotry? 

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Persecution vs. Prediction

'...the Jews, the only non-national European people, were threatened more than any other by the sudden collapse of the system of nation states. ... - 'It is... more than accidental that the catastrophic defeats of the peoples of Europe began with the catastrophe of the Jewish people. It was particularly easy to begin the dissolution of the precarious European balance of power with the elimination of the Jews, and particularly difficult to understand that more was involved in this elimination than an unusually cruel nationalism or an ill-timed revival of "old prejudices." When the catastrophe came, the fate of the Jewish people was considered a "special case" whose history follows no exceptional laws, and whose destiny was therefore of no general relevance.' 

In other words, the Jews were persecuted, and that was followed by the persecution of all of Europe. This provokes a few more questions: 

1. Was the persecution of Jews the cause of Europe's persecution during World War II?, Was it related? If so, how? Or are the two separate phenomena?

2. If, heaven forbid, a certain minority in the United States were to be persecuted on a level well past what they might be now, does that portend the persecution of all Americans? 

3. If it's true that the persecution of one group might portend the persecution of all, how might that happen?

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Unity vs. Division

'...the collapse of German Jewry was preceded by its split into innumerable factions, each of which believed and hoped that its basic human rights would be protected by special privileges... It looked as though the annihilation of all individuals of Jewish origin was being preceded by the bloodless destruction and self-dissolution of the Jewish people, as though the Jewish people had owed its existence exclusively to other peoples and their hatred.'

The persecution of Jews split Jews into many different groups: many upper-middle class German and Austrian Jews thought themselves above the rabble of other Jews, poor Austro-German Jews thought themselves better than immigrant Jews from Poland and Russia, even the Polish-Russian Jews thought themselves better than Romanian Jews, and everybody thought themselves better than orthodox Jews. 

There was a definitively calibrated hierarchy of privilege in Jewish life before World War II, and the oppression of Jews only brought it out further. World War II generally brought out a kind of hierarchy of privilege among European peoples - invasion by a totalitarian dictatorship usually does that. 

This sounds not too different from the very proliferent theory of intersectionality which holds that oppression and privilege is unevenly distributed due to an intersecting network of identities that are placed in a hierarchy of privilege, and creates a composite in which a person, depending on their identity, can be oppressed doubly, triply, or by multiples, or, if they win the identity lottery, can be multiply privileged. So this of course leads to further questions?

1. If various oppressed identities unite in a goal to overthrow this hierarchy of privilege, can it be overthrown?

2. If it is overthrown, what would have to happen in order for a new hierarchy not to emerge? Would it be impossible to stop?

3. Picture yourself as an oppressed individual rather than a member of the community of the oppressed. Wouldn't it be more likely for you and your loved ones to survive oppressive circumstances if you didn't worry about helping other oppressed people? Might it even help occasionally to actively sabotage them? 

3a. How do you convince oppressed people looking out only for themselves to look out for everyone? Is it even possible? 

4. How can you convince people who care about the oppression of one particular identity to care about the oppression of every identity? Particularly in those cases when one of those oppressed groups is in bitter conflict with another oppressed group?

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Government: Good Use vs Bad Use

Here's a point that Arendt makes that's too convoluted to quote: 

All through their history, Jews have always viewed the governments which protected them with gratitude and benefit, seeing government as what saves them from the violence of the common rabble. This proved to be an apocalyptic catastrophe in the 20th century. Each class of society which came into conflict with the state became antisemitic because the only social group which seemed to represent the state were the Jews - a process repeated in Germany during the Weimar Republic which existed between 1919 and 1933. So when the new regime seized power, the very levers of the state which once protected Jews were used to oppress Jews. And this is roughly the thousandth time this process was repeated in Jewish history. 

Whatever was true in the past for the American government's relation to them, most American minorities view governmental protection with some measure of similar gratitude. 

Gird your loins for these next two questions: 

1. If the new American administration turns revokes many governmental protections, will this spell catastrophe for certain minorities in the US? If so, what would the catastrophes be?

2. If the US government no longer protects them, what options, should they require them, do these minorities have for protection: to either provide it for themselves or through assistance from others? 

Class #2: Final Draft

 

The Monality of the Deep State

Here's an Arendt quote again:

"The antisemites' belief that their claim to exclusive rule was no more than what the Jews had in fact achieved, ... They could pretend to fight the Jews exactly as the workers were fighting the bourgeoisie. Their advantage was that by attacking the Jews, who were believed to be a secret power behind the governments, they could openly attack the state itself,"

The conflation of the state with minorities is exactly what we see in today's right wing: not just in America but in Europe. On both sides of the Atlantic, belief that an abundance of minorities should not be in society is embedded with frustration at governments for subsidizing their presence.

But even were minorities absent from the state, the Right would still make complaints about the state itself and what they take to be an overprovision of services and regulations. The modern Right has a deeper issue with government than minorities, and that is that they believe the government has no right to interfere in what they take to be their individual rights to prosperity.

There was a long time in history when the roles were reversed: in the eras of monarchy and ancient privilege, the Right used to be heavily on the state's side, while the left, at least the soft left, stood for independence from the state, free enterprise, and small government. But as memories of absolute monarchy grew more distant, it was small government that distributed inherited privileges more reliably, so the Right became parties of small government and wealth, while the Left became parties of government distributing wealth more equally.

So when the Right speaks of the state as overcontrolling the government, they conflate the two notions and mean that the state is comprised of very specific demographics: overeducated liberals and minorities of all stripes, but particularly African-Americans and the LGBTQ community. I'd imagine this allegation is genuine when populace of the Right speaks of it, but disingenuous when the Right's leaders speak of it because the state is clearly arranged to make exceptions for the financial gain of the leadership class. But however genuine the allegation, the Right alleges that the government favors demographics over them that lean left.

In recent years, the government's been referred to by a very specific term: the 'Deep State': which means unauthorized secret networks of power, pursuing a particular agenda independent of what the American people vote for--more specifically, a left wing agenda that subsidizes the special interests of minorities at the majority's expense. Don't misunderstand, the term 'Deep State' is used against governments all over the world and has been for a hundred years. It also relates to the 19th century term 'State within a State' used to describe Jews, which is both similar to the 'Deep State' conspiracy theory and also describes Jews' historic aloofness from wider communities.

All this means that the term 'Deep State' has some viability in countries that are clearly not democratic and it's obvious who's subverting elected officials. But use of the term 'Deep State' is impossible in a democracy, and the term's usually employed by exactly the people who want to subvert democracy.

But the fact that nobody can agree on a definition of something so powerful makes it all the less likely that it exists.

Get inside their heads though: if the deep state did does exist, who do you think would comprise it?

Even though the American 'Deep State' doesn't exist, and this is one issue where entertaining both side would be a farce, it's easier than you think to believe the theory that it does. We should note that 19% of federal workers are African-American, who comprise 14.4% of the population, and 13% are LGBTQ, who comprise 9.3%--but as more people reveal themselves to be LGBTQ, those last two figures will only grow. Among Presidential campaign contributions, roughly 95% of contributions by federal workers were to Hilary Clinton in 2016, 60% were to Joe Biden in 2020, and 84% were to Kamala Harris in 2024.

Two of those are obviously staggering percentages, so why do Democrats and minorities work for the government so disproportionately? The reason is that the 'Deep State' conspiracy is ass backwards. Obviously the vast majority of federal workers would be Democrats: Democrats are the party that believes in government's viability to solve problems; while minorities work for the government because they're less likely to encounter discrimination in the public sector than the private sector: the federal government is, by definition, supposed to serve the entire population.

It's not because they control the government. This is one issue where the other side of the argument can't get an inch.

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Internationalist Nationalism

'...they (the new antisemitic parties) started a supranational element, they clearly indicated that they aimed not only at political rule over the nation but had already planned a step further for an 'inter-European government "above all nations."'

One of our time's great ironies is that just as the worldwide right in the 1930s aimed for an inter-European government--and in many ways achieved it by having right-wing dictators in every country conquered by Germany; the worldwide Right today, for all their talk of nationalism, is extremely inter-coordinated, coming to each other's aid in foreign affairs at every opportunity. I'll leave the question of whether this is under Vladimir Putin's auspices up to you, but the irony of all this is that for all the nationalist particularism of the Right, right wing parties are no less internationalist in how they coordinate aims between countries than any internationalist movement. I was tempted to pose that a question rather than an answer, but with the re-election of Trump, his administration's loud backing of the AfD in Germany and referring to Ukrainian President Zelenskyy as a dictator, the evidence of it is much too visible to leave it as speculation.

But this comes with a question that seems easy to answer, but is actually very difficult.

1. What is it about antisemitism that clearly increases in times of authoritarianism?

You would think that the answer is clear, that antisemitism is an irrationality, and any irrationality would proliferate in times of authoritarianism, but this particular irrationality is not present sometimes in dictatorships. It's certainly present in the vast majority of them, but there are examples of dictators that were extremely accommodating of Jews.

Take this quote from Maximillian Robespierre, the proto-totalitarian dictator and executor of the Great Terror after the French Revolution:

"Things have been said to you about the Jews that are infinitely exaggerated and often contrary to history. How can the persecutions they have suffered at the hands of different peoples be held against them? These on the contrary are national crimes that we ought to expiate, by granting them imprescriptible human rights of which no human power could despoil them. Faults are still imputed to them, prejudices, exaggerated by the sectarian spirit and by interests. But to what can we really impute them but our own injustices? After having excluded them from all honours, even the right to public esteem, we have left them with nothing but the objects of lucrative speculation. Let us deliver them to happiness, to the homeland, to virtue, by granting them the dignity of men and citizens; let us hope that it can never be policy, whatever people say, to condemn to degradation and oppression a multitude of men who live among us. How could the social interest be based on violation of the eternal principles of justice and reason that are the foundations of every human society."

Or take the decrees from Napoleon Bonaparte, who, whatever his virtues, was the murderer of 5 to 7 million people. But for Jews in the early 19th century he abolished the laws restricting Jews to ghettos, designated a group of elected Jews the official representatives of the Jewish community to the French government, and even named Judaism one of France's official religions.

More than a century later, you could make the argument that Admiral Horthy was pro-Jewish--the right-wing dictator of Hungary for a quarter century. It wouldn't be a great argument, but it has legitimacy. Horthy may have set antisemitic policies for the first half of his reign, he even allowed most of Hungary's Jews to be transferred to the camps, more than 500,000 of them. But allegedly, when he found out what was happening to the deported Jews, he recoiled in horror and took a very risky stand against Hitler's orders. He refused to deport the country's remaining Jews, and in doing so he saved the lives of 250,000 Hungarian Jews.

I don't know if kings count, let alone ancient kings, but there were few kings as brutal or bloody as Cyrus the Great of Persia, who conquered more of the world than any king until his era. Yet he ended the Babylonian captivity of the Hebrews, authorized their return to Judea and permitted them to rebuild their temple in Jerusalem. There's also the example of England's William the Conqueror, the Norman who conquered Anglo-Saxon England in 1066, then invited a basically unlimited number of French Jews to settle in England under royal protection.

But today, we see the example of many far-right wing parties embracing Israel. This leads to the provocative question of whether far-right wing parties are authoritarian organizations: particularly the current Republican party. Even so, however distasteful they find liberal segments of the Jewish community, and there's ample evidence they do, the worldwide far right found a large and powerful segment of the Jewish community for whom they've leant their full support--maybe because they see similar goals in the Israeli right to their own, a movement that has exactly the stranglehold on the Israeli government these parties covet to implement in their own countries.

Now, for the people who tack left among you, I would institute a note of caution. If you think that these right wing parties are actually antisemitic and show their real colors when dealing liberal Jews, please remember, those who tack right think that leftists show their real antisemitic colors when dealing with Israel.

But questions of the far right are not what I want you to consider right now. There are four more questions I want you to consider:

2. Is antisemitism a particular threat in our time?

3. Is the antisemitic threat greater, as great, or lesser than the threat to other minorities?

4. If there is an authoritarian uptick, is it related to the increase in visible racism we see today for all minorities? If, in fact, racism is more visible today than it's been for a while.

5. Are racism and antisemitism the same phenomenon? Are they separate? Are they related? If they're related, how?

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Are Dualities a Thing?

The next quote is very simple, but I want you to take a few minutes to ponder the question it poses.

'The Jews very clearly were the only inter-European element in a nationalized Europe. It seemed only logical that their enemies had to organize along the same principle.'

As we said before, when one side organizes transnationally, it follows that their most strenuous opponents have to organize trans-nationally as well.

So my question is this:

Is it inevitable that populations basically coalesce around only two solutions to any problem?

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Which Side is the Dreyfusards?

So now we have to talk about L'affaire Dreyfus, the Dreyfus affair. I didn't write down many Arendt quotes about it because they were thick with social history and cultural references I'd have to explain, but Arendt believes that the Dreyfus affair was the true proto-formation of totalitarianism: a mass irrationality between 1894 and 1906 that coalesced around an organization that always found new reasons to justify their fictional belief that French army officer Alfred Dreyfus was guilty of espionage for the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Years after Dreyfus was exonerated, years after a conspiracy by the French General Staff was uncovered to frame Dreyfus, millions still believed Dreyfus was guilty. Why? Because he was a Jew, and Jews are always guilty. When the anti-Dreyfusards demonstrated, they often marched through Paris's historic Jewish neighborhood, Marais, shouting 'La Mort aux Juifs': 'Death to the Jews'! Occasionally they rioted and looted what they took to be Jewish businesses. It's often noted that from the younger anti-Dreyfusards came the ranks of the officials who ran Vichy (fascist) France.

This is another Arendt assertion that was controversial in its day, but it can't be denied, many of the elements of totalitarianism are here in embryo: the show trials for which citizens convince themselves to believe fiction against all evidence, the singling out of a convenient scapegoat that activates people's prejudices, and the mass demonstrations to perpetuate the fiction. Many anti-Dreyfusards believed that to be pro-Dreyfus was to be anti-France itself. It was much easier for them to believe a Jew capable of espionage than to believe the French army capable of a coverup.

For twelve years, the Dreyfus affair was all France talked about, it was all Jews talked about. It was what all Europe talked about. The trials and conspiracies gripped France like no trial ever gripped the United States. In order to understand the weight of the Dreyfus affair, you'd have to imagine a trial that so gripped a nation that friends and family falling on either side would have difficulty speaking to each other. Even marriages were said to break up.

From the vantage of a century and a quarter, there's something about L'affaire Dreyfus that seems a little trivial. As the trial of one man went on, Belgium slaughtered millions of Congolese, Britain expanded its empire to 25% of the globe, and all the European powers made decisions that brought about the most horrific conflict up to then in world history. But there has always been something about trials that elicits the passion of millions that more consequential events rarely do. As Stalin said, and I'm sure this quote will come up again, 'The death of one man is a tragedy, but the death of a million is a statistic.'

The Dreyfus affair literally split France down the middle. Marcel Proust, now regarded as 20th century France's pre-eminent writer, wrote recollections of how people would go to any length to justify their belief that Dreyfus was guilty. They would persist in their belief in spite of all appeals to logic, telling themselves that people believed in Dreyfus's innocence because it was 'fashionable.' Others objected to Dreyfus's strident tone his letters from prison, believing no innocent man would be so angry. If people did change their opinion, it was not because of any logic but due to matters of the heart. One character changes his view of Dreyfus because certain people in high society believed Dreyfus innocent, and surely people of high social standing can't be wrong.

This goes to show a truth more obvious than we ever want to admit. Politics is mostly not a matter of the head, it's a matter of the heart and nerves. Most of us don't have empirical evidence for what we believe. We put our trust in people who seem to know more than us whom we assume tell us the truth in good faith. We either believe them or disbelieve, but more often than not, our beliefs are conditioned by socialization. Political views are often predicated on acceptance of friends, or a family member's love, or advancement at work, and if people who matter so much in our lives believe something, we often come to believe it too without realizing why. Or we come to believe the opposite because we don't want to be like them.

So now we come to the present day: insofar as people know about the Dreyfus affair and care, I would think both sides of America would like to imagine themselves the Dreyfusards. One side absolutely right, one side absolutely wrong. Both sides can't be right.

I would ask you which side is right and which side is wrong, but that's much too simple a question.

I think the way to do this is to pose these issues as a series of nuanced questions, and as we're close to wrapping up a unit on antisemitism, a few of these questions will be framed through Jewish issues:

1. There are certain issues where the terms of the debate are so different from side to side that the arguments of either side are unrecognizable to each other. When speaking about gun legislation, one side usually speaks of gun deaths, the other side usually speaks of gun rights. How do you facilitate a dialogue between two sides that have priorities so different from each other that tone side's argument has nothing to do with the other side's?

2. Some issues have three sides. On issues of the economy, one side believes government has little-to-no right to intervene, one side believes government should interfere however much empirical evidence shows provides the best economy, and a third side believes government has a moral responsibility to its citizens to run the economy so that everyone gets income. Of course, all three sides believe the best results will come from their policies particularly. But two sides hold exactly opposite beliefs, the other has almost completely different concerns. How do you frame a dialogue in which each side makes sense to the others? Is it possible?

3. Regardless of any moral question on either side of the debate, evidence shows pretty well that society is better off, marginally richer, much safer from crime, when abortion is available. And yet there are men of bad faith who only care to support abortion because it enables their sexual freedom, and if a sexual partner gets pregnant, they heavily pressure the woman to have one. While there are many strongly anti-abortion people, even activists: nurses, nuns, and others, who minister to those who've had abortions with no argument, even provide emotional support to those who get one. Should someone doing the right thing for the wrong reason about this be fully censured? Should someone doing the wrong thing for the right reason be fully praised? If not, how do you praise or censure them in a way that allows for the nuances of their behavior?

4. There are certain issues on which the evidence for one side is so overwhelming: issues like climate change, the viability of vaccines, the results of the 2020 election, that you would have to believe in conspiracies and mass irrationality as big as the Dreyfus Affair to deny their authenticity. Is speaking doubt of them acceptable in polite company? Is it morally acceptable to judge the character or speak ill of those who insist on speaking skepticism?

4a. There are conspiracies that are equally well documented: Russian interference in the 2016 election, the Republican party's efforts at voter suppression: is it permissible to judge the character or speak ill of people who refuse to acknowledge the obvious?

4b. What ultimately constitutes a conspiracy? Does the White House and Democratic party concealing Joe Biden's condition from the American public constitute a conspiracy? Does it rise to the level of foreign election interference and voter suppression? Does the Biden administration's diversion of border security efforts to humanitarian relief for migrants rise to the level of conspiracy if they didn't tell congress what they were doing? Whatever you believe about this issue, articulate why.

5. There are certain issues for which unbridgeable divides prevent solidarity between peoples. For example: when the 2017 Women's March organized, they numbered among their chief organizers a Palestinian activist named Linda Sarsour, who like most Palestinians supports a one-state solution, but more notably has made incendiary statements online like 'it is not possible to be both a Zionist and a feminist.' Far more incendiary, Sarsour and two other chief organizers worked closely in the past with Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam. Next to the Million Man March, Farrakhan's greatest claim to fame is blaming Jews for everything from the slave trade to sharecropping to Jim Crow. He has repeatedly called Jews "Satanic." The Nation of Islam is a group with some following, but the African-American community has groups with far greater ones that would be far more benefit to work with. If they ignored Farrakhan, it wouldn't be a great loss. Many organizations involved with the Women's March advocated for the abolition of the State of Israel, which is not an issue involved with the experience of most American women. Obviously, this made it difficult for many liberal Jews to march in solidarity. So the questions are these:

5a: Should guilt by association prevent people from marching together for a common cause?

5b: If you believe the issues at stake are too important, what are the conditions by which would you put your differences aside?

5c: Picture four of the issues you care about most. What level of disaster would have to happen to make the issue important enough that you'd march with dubious allies unconditionally?

6. There are issues on which the traditional Republican party line may, I emphasize may, be more right than the Democratic. After 9/11, when the Bush administration issued warnings about the seriousness of terrorism, many Democrats refused to take measures from the new Department of Homeland Security seriously. They refused to believe the Bush administration could warn about terror in good faith, they believed that many of the notions in the Patriot Act were an unforgivable suspension of civil liberties, and could point to the Iraq War as proof that every Republican notion about saving lives was disingenuous. About twenty years later, when the COVID outbreak hit, many Republicans refused to take measures from the Center for Disease Control seriously. They refused to believe that unelected public officials could warn about the spread of disease in good faith. They believed that many of the CDC measures were an unforgivable suspension of civil liberties, and could point to the low priority of solving the opioid crisis as evidence that every Democratic notion about saving lives was disingenuous.

So the questions are these:

6a. Even if one side of an argument is definitively right and another is definitively wrong, when is it wiser to simply obey decisions you disagree with without a fuss? In doing so, you'll know that you have a greater moral right later to demand the other side give you the same respect.

6b. What level of mistake or malfeasance would ruin the credibility of close people you always disagree with to the point that you wouldn't have a guilty conscience about acting aggressively toward them?

6c. Picture yourself as a member of Congress or some European parliament: What happens when there are issues on which you could not disagree more with your own side and agree more with the other side? Would you work with the other side against your own? You know that by crossing that aisle, you would lend your opponents your credibility and prestige, you would make them seem less partisan as they work for goals you hate and make it harder to enact legislation you want the peers in your party to pass.

(And now, with apologies to journalist James Kirchik)

7. There is a Presidential candidate who is obviously a contemptible human being, clearly means to subvert the democratic process, consigns millions and millions of people to subhuman status, and may spell the end of democracy in your country. Here's the most important point:

Whether this candidate is of the right or the left should be immaterial.

7a. Do you write off, completely and totally, the character of people who clearly support him because they like that he gets away with being reprehensible? Would you write them off if these people have other great virtues.

7b. Do you write off, completely and totally, people you know that clearly support him because they sense an opportunity to increase their bank account or advance their career? They might be good contacts to help with your own presonal security.

7c. How much sympathy do you have for people who vote this candidate because they fall for internet conspiracy theories that wrongly accuse his opponents of horrific actions and motives?

7d. Do you have sympathy for people who support him who've clearly lived through an enormous amount of humiliation and sadness, and see in the candidate a kind of revenge against whatever disempowered them?

7e. Do you have sympathy for nice people of sterling personal character who vote for this candidate because they so hate the ideology of the likely alternative that they would vote any candidate against them, no matter how repellent?

7f. How much sympathy would you have for people who believe notions you find deplorable, but realize this candidate is bad news and wouldn't vote for him. Nevertheless, they appear to support him because they're under a lot of social pressure: risking violent fights with friends or family, or being cut off by them completely, if they don't demonstrate enthusiastic support.

7g. How much sympathy would you have for people who clearly support him because the candidate reminds them of abusive people they still love, or partners in abusive relationships they're still in?

7h. Do you have sympathy for decent people who support this candidate just because they think the candidate's policies are preferable to any other candidate?

7i. What personal quality would attract all these hypothetical people to the candidate?

8. The longer the Ukraine war continues, the longer the world runs the risk of Russia firing a nuclear weapon on Ukraine, and in demonstrating a willingness to use nukes, they can invade most any other European country they'd like to. However, if Ukraine loses, every small country in the world has justification to develop a nuclear bomb to deter larger neighbors from invading them. Which situation is easier to manage?

9. Israel/Palestine: Who's right?

Sometimes, there is an issue where one side is the Dreyfusards, and one side is the anti-Dreyfusards, but on most issues, whether there is a right or wrong, people will struggle terribly to come up with the right answer, maybe not in the way you struggle, but in their own unique way out of the circumstances of their lives.

So here's the hardest question of all, because it's really a paradox:

10. Whether another person is right or wrong, whether they decide in good faith or bad faith, is it generally wiser to trust that those who disagree with you come to their conclusions in good faith? You want them to do the same for you. But maybe they don't come to their conclusion in good faith. Maybe they think you come to your conclusions in bad faith, which makes them act in bad faith towards you. And once they're acting in bad faith, does it really matter why they are?

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Which Side is the Dreyfusards?: Part 2

There is another quality the modern US shares with the prewar France, and that is the absolute passion for trials. We may not have a single defining trial through the ages the way France has Dreyfus, but we have an endless litany of trials that gripped the public imagination from before the beginning of this republic to the present day. Fascination with trials seems to be in the American DNA from the Boston Massacre to Stormy Daniels.

On the one hand, trials are a terrible distraction from solving a country's problems. The time spent focused on trials involving a few people is time people could, maybe should, spend thinking about issues that matter to millions. In one way, the focus on trials is the ultimate indicator of a privileged society with so much affluence and leisure that we can be distracted by human interest stories at the expense of issues that matter to everyone in the country.

On the other hand, a passion for trials indicates a passion for justice and a desire to see society work well. The results of the trial may be devastating to people on one side or the other, but so long as there's a mass desire is there to see society work, regardless of the outcome, perhaps there's hope for a just civilization.

But trials also demonstrate societal fault lines, and often inflame them. Over the last ten years there have been so many trials that so divided society that people can be forgiven for sometimes wishing our country had a little less passion for justice. So many of these trials have centered on police brutality and divided America almost exactly along party lines.

It's not this class's business to assess the guilt or innocence of any policemen or the deceased. It is, however, our business to note something Arendt says much later in the book that we will probably note in a completely different context:

"Above the state and beyond the facades of ostensible power, in a maze of multiplied offices, underlying all shifts of authority an in a chaos of inefficiency, lies the power nucleus of the country, the superefficient and supercompetent services of the state police. The emphasis on the police as the sole organ of power, and the corresponding neglect of the seemingly greater power arsenal of the army, which is characteristic of all totalitarian regimes, can still be partially explained by the totalitarian aspiration to world rule and its conscious abolition of the distinction between a foreign country and a home country, between foreign and domestic affairs. The military forces, trained to fight a foreign aggressor, have always been a dubious instrument for civil war purposes; even under totalitarian conditions they find it difficult to regard their own people with the eyes of a foreign conqueror. More important in this respect, however, is that their value becomes dubious even in time of war. Since the totalitarian ruler conducts his policies on the assumption of an eventual world government, he treats the victims of his aggression as though they were rebels, guilty of high treason, and consequently prefers to rule occupied territories with police, and not with military forces."

Now, let's first note the obvious: few people ever look to the American police for supercompetence, and we can predict, with reasonable confidence, that if there ever were a secret police in America, it wouldn't evolve out of local police. It's would more likely evolve out of an intelligence organization like the FBI or CIA.

But local law enforcement is where local intelligence is gathered, it's where suspects are rounded up, it's who conducts interrogations and who investigates the little details of suspects' everyday lives. The point of mentioning this is not to talk about local police or whatever power the police currently holds in American life. The point is that a secret police would inflict the most brutal approaches of everyday local police compounded to the n and visited on nearly the entire population at some point.

In the worst neighborhoods, not just of American cities, but of most of the world's, police tactics have always been a bit like a foreign occupier's army. The army of a foreign occupier is basically a glorified police force. For a foreign conqueror, every native is a potential subversive, everyone is a potential suspect, everyone is a potential terrorist.

But that also describes the police in your run-of-the-mill authoritarian regime where a paranoid dictator has to constantly make sure every person isn't a threat to his power. What's the difference in a totalitarian regime? The difference is that every policeman knows you're innocent, or at least you might as well be. Your guilt or innocence doesn't matter to them. You are arrested not because of your actions but because they need to find a victim or quota of victims, and you're a convenient scapegoat. Then you're put through interrogation - we needn't describe what happens in an interrogation for the moment, just note that in the interrogation you're expected to confess to whatever accusation they throw at you, then they put you through the legal system and if you're given the luxury of going to trial, it's a show trial for which the verdict is obvious from the moment you're brought into court. If people are forced to watch, then they have to affirm the justice of the verdict in everyday conversation with people they know, especially if they're close to the accused.

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Racist from Ignorance or Racist from Experience?

So let's deal with a relatively simple series of questions now.

Arendt notes that antisemitism was often strongest in lands with no Jewish people.

1. Is that still true today?

Moreover, a double-headed question:

2a. Is racism and queer-phobia particularly present in lands where everybody's white, everyone on the queer spectrum is either in the closet or moved away, and immigrants are just a vague threat from afar?

2b. Is contempt and fear of poor whites particularly present in places of multicultural affluence?

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Which Comes First? Authoritarianism or Bigotry?

Here, for the first time in a little while, is another quote:

"Small as these first antisemitic parties were, they at once distinguished themselves from all other parties. They made the original claim that they were not a party among parties but a "party above all parties." In the class and party ridden nation state, only the state and government had ever claimed to be above all parties and classes, to represent the nation as a whole. .... The antisemitic parties claim to be 'above all parties' announced clearly their aspiration to become the representative of the whole nation, to get exclusive power, to take possession of the state machinery, to substitute themselves for the state. Since, on the other hand, they continued to be organized as a party, it was also clear they wanted state power as a party, so that their voters would actually dominate the nation."

I needn't point out the similarities to today's Republican party implicit here, to say nothing of so many popular parties of the European far right.

There is perhaps a difference in that antisemitism was the official priority of the party line, whereas Trump Republicans will never say outright 'our purpose is racism', but I think even many 'Never Trump' Republicans would agree that for the Trump-era Republican party, bigotry, or at least the suspicion that many minority groups mean to live at their expense, takes precedence over every other belief of theirs.

Once again, it seems that authoritarianism and prejudice went hand in hand. Long before there was a Nazi party, there were parties who meant to rule the nation as a party without conceding any power to another party, and antisemitism was the chief issue of their platform. You don't need to think Trump the equivalent of Nazis to speculate that the prejudice he inspires is a wide gateway to greater authoritarianism, whether now or in the future.

So is bigotry unrelated to authoritarianism, is it a symptom of authoritarianism, or is it a cause?

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Parvenu vs. Pariah

I'm going to end these two talks on the antisemitism portion of Arendt's book with two short but deeply disturbing quotes. And when I say deeply, I mean that their implications could not be more disturbing:

The first:

"The great challenge to the modern period, and its particular danger, has been that in it man has for the first time confronted man without the protection of differing circumstances and conditions."

The other:

"The more equal conditions are, the less explanation there is for the differences that actually exist between people; and thus all the more unequal do individuals and groups become."

Mull over these quotes for a minute and think about their implications, particularly the second quote:

When the oppressed are emancipated, when all hierarchies are removed and everyone is equal in opportunity and law, all the previous resentments remain. Those previously on top resent their lost status, all the more so when they see people previously beneath them rise past them in status and privilege, and they inevitably long to return to the days of yore when these upstarts 'knew their place.'

But what's done is done. You can't return the emancipated to their former status. You can slow their rise, as white America did to black America for a hundred-sixty years. But with every new emancipation, they climb higher and higher, while racists and sexists and homophobes can't take the humiliation of being equal to their supposed inferiors, particularly if they secretly believe in their own unworthiness and need to cover up their humiliation. For such people, the march of progress must be stopped, and if there's even a tiny chance they can turn back the clock they'll work every hour of every day to make it happen.

But eventually, the formerly 'inferior' rise to something resembling equality, and inevitably, so many people cannot accept this. What is option is left to stymie progress but eliminate those who rise?

What's implied in these statements is that the long delayed Jewish emancipation of the early 19th century was basically a death warrant for Jews to be collected at a time when Jews rose high enough to be something resembling equal partners in European civilization. It took roughly a hundred thirty years from Napoleon's emancipation to the Holocaust, but eventually, many Europeans would feel so threatened by the rise of Jews that they would have to eliminate the Jewish 'threat' to their dignity.

So what's going on in America? A place where blacks rose from slavery, women from servitude, queer identities from the closet, native Americans from centuries of mass murder, and immigrants from wherever they fled; and even if they're not yet quite equal, they're equal enough to be loudly proud of themselves and what they've accomplished. And many people view that pride as a diminishment and a threat.

If Arendt is right, and she well might not be, no marginalized group in America is safe from mass retribution: not immigrants, not African-Americans, not the LGBTQ community, not Latinos, not Muslims, maybe not even Jews, and certainly not women. And maybe not even poor white men!

That does not mean that any of these communities are threatened with an imminent apocalypse, but it does mean that so long as there is a United States of America, marginalized groups must be on guard against the worst fates. That fate might never be genocide, but it would be horrible as or past what you can imagine, and it's a fate that probably grows more likely with each new lever of power placed in the hands of one man. It might not be for another hundred years or more, but if Arendt is right, it's coming, and in whatever way you can, be prepared.

Even if such a horror happens, emancipation will not be in vain. Emancipation is never in vain, but it will be mostly for the gain of people elsewhere. Just as America's Jews enjoyed the liberty that was meant for Europe's, all of our struggle will have been for the benefit of some other group previously marginalized in some faraway country that is the new world power.

And the marginalization of faraway countries is what we'll deal with in Arendt's second section: Imperialism.

See you next class and go have a stiff drink.