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. Prehaps 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?
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Class #2:
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 in so many ways what we're seeing in today's right wing: not just in America but in Europe as well. On both sides of the Atlantic, belief that an abundance of minorities should not be present 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 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 time of monarchy and ancient privileges, the Right used to be heavily on the side of the state, while the left, at least the soft left, was for independence from the state, free enterprise, small government. But as memories of absolute monarchy grew more distant, it was small government that distributed inherited privileges more reliably, and so the Right became the parties of small government and wealth, while the Left became the parties of using government to distribute wealth more equally.
So when the Right speaks of the state as overcontrolling the government, they conflate the two notions and usually mean that the state is comprised by very specific demographics: overeducated liberals and minorities of all stripes, but particularly African-Amerians and the LGBTQ population. I'd imagine this allegation is genuine when populace of the Right speaks of it, but disingenuous when their leadership speaks of it because the State is clearly arranged to make exceptions for the financial profitability 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 is referred to in a very specific term: the 'Deep State': unauthorized secret networks of power pursuing a particular agenda independently of whether the American people voted for it: in the American case, a left wing agenda that subsidizes special minority interests at the majority's expense. Now 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' which was used to describe Jews, which is both similar to the 'Deep State' conspiracy theory and also describes Jews aloofness from the practices of governments in Central/Eastern Europe.
All this means that the term 'Deep State' has some viability in countries that are clearly not democracies and it's obvious who is subverting elected officials. But use of the term 'Deep State' is impossible to be true in a democracy, and the term is usually employed by the precise people who aim to subvert democracy.
Furthermore, when so many right-wingers speak of a secret 'deep state' that secretly controls the government, what and whom do they mean? Part of the problem with alleging a silent conspiracy of 'Deep State' in a democracy is that no one can properly define it. How do you define a secret network when you don't know what the network is? Is it a conspiracy of a few powerful people? Is it thousands of government workers? Hundreds of thousands? Maybe the 'Deep State' is not even people, maybe it's a systemic force, the basic way a government works and why, according to those who believe in it, government will always manage the State's problems dysfunctionally.
But the fact that nobody can agree on a definition of something so allegedly powerful it makes it all the less likely that it exists.
But get inside their heads: if the deep state did does exist, whom do you think would comprise it?
Even though the American 'Deep State' does not exist, and this is one issue where entertaining both sides of an argument 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%, as more people reveal themselves as LGBTQ, both figures will only grow for the. Among campaign contributions, 95% of federal worker contributions were to Democratic candidates, which is, admittedly, a staggering percentage.
Why do Democrats and minorities work for the government so disproportionately? The 'Deep State' conspiracy theory is ass backwards. Obviously the vast majority of federal workers would be Democrats: Democrats are the party that believes in the viability of government to solve problems; while minorities work for the government not because they control it, but because they're less likely to encounter marginalization and discrimination in the public sector than the private sector: the federal government is, by definition, supposed to serve the entire population.
This is one issue where no inch can be conceded to the other side of the argument.
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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 the great ironies of our time is that just as the worldwide right in the era of Hitler aimed for an inter-European government - and in many ways achieved it with 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 others' aid in foreign affairs at seemingly every opportunity. I leave the question of whether this is under the auspices of Vladimir Putin up to your own interpretation of worldwide events, but the irony of all this is that for all the nationalist particularism of the Right in every country, they are no less internationalist in the coordination of their aims than any internationalist movement. I was tempted to pose that a question rather than an answer, but with the re-election of Trump and 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 merely speculate.
But this comes with a question that seems easy to answer, but is actually very difficult.
1. What is it about antisemitism that clearly proliferates in times of authoritarianism?
You would think that the answer is clear, that antisemitism is an irrationality, and irrationalities proliferate in times of authoritarianism, but this particular irrationality is often not present in modern dictatorships. Certainly it's present in quite a majority of them, but there are examples of dictators that were extremely accommodating of Jews.
Just take this quote from Maximillian Robespierre, author of the Great Terror after the French Revolution. Remember, this is a quote from the proto-totalitarian dictator.
'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, whom, whatever his virtues, was the murderer of 5 to 7 million people. But for Jews in 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 designated Judaism one of the official religions of France!
Later on, take the example of Admiral Horthy, the right-wing dictator of Hungary for a quarter century. He may have set antisemitic policies for the first half of his reign, but he took a very risky stand against Hitler's orders and refused to deport most Hungarian Jews to the camps: in doing so he saved the lives of 250,000 Jews.
But today, we particularly 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. Nevertheless, however distasteful they may find liberal segments of the Jewish community, and there's ample evidence that they do, the worldwide far right has found a large and powerful segment of the Jewish community to whom they've leant their full support - perhaps because they see similar goals in the Israeli right, a movement that has a stranglehold on the Israeli government these parties covet to implement in their own countries.
Now, 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 minority groups?
4. If there is an authoritarian uptick, is it related to the increasingly visible racism we see today for all minorities? If, in fact, racism is more visible today than it was for a while.
5. Are racism and antisemitism the same phenomenon? Are they separate? Are they related? If related, how are they?
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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 particular 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?
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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 it was 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 forever found new reasons to justify the 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 to frame Dreyfus was uncovered, 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 Marais, Paris's historic Jewish neighborhood, 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.
One ought to note that Arendt's assertion 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 the fiction against all evidence, the singling out of a convenient scapegoat that activates people's innate 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 was capable of a coverup.
For twelve years, the Dreyfus affair was all France talked about, it was all Jews talked about, in fact it was what all of Europe talked about. The trials and conspiracies gripped France like no trial has ever gripped the United States. In order to understand the weight of the Dreyfus affair, you would have to imagine a trial that so gripped a nation that friends and family who fell on either side of the verdict would have difficulty speaking to each other. Even marriages were said to break up over it.
From the vantage of a century and a quarter, there is 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 a quarter of the globe, and all the European powers prepared for what was soon to be 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. 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 early 20th century France's pre-eminent writer, wrote some choice 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 the strident tone of his letters from prison, believing no innocent man could be so angry. If people did change their opinion, it was not because of any logic but because of the heart. One character changes his view of Dreyfus because other people in high society believed Dreyfus innocent, and surely people of such high social standing can't be wrong.
This goes to show a truth more obvious than we ever want to admit. Politics is not a matter of the head, it is 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, and more often than not, our beliefs are conditioned by our socialization. Political views are often predicated on the 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. Or we come to believe the opposite as a means to spite 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 American partisanship would like to imagine themselves the Dreyfusards. One side definitively right, one side definitively 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 simplistic a question.
I think the way to do this is to pose these issues as a series of questions, and as we're close to wrapping up a unit on antisemitism, a number of these questions will be framed through Jewish issues:
1. There are certain issues on which the evidence for one side is so overwhelming: issues like climate change, the viability of vaccines, the manner Republicans take away voting rights, that you would have to believe in conspiracies and mass irrationality as big as the Dreyfus Affair to deny their veracity. Are those people who accept the obvious truth within their rights to decide debate or doubt of these facts is not acceptable in polite company? Is it acceptable to speak ill of and to those who insist on speaking skepticism?
2. 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 of 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 completely different from each other that the argument of one side has nothing to do with the argument of the other side?
3. Some issues have three sides. On issues of the economy, one side believes government has little-to-no right to interfere, one side believes government should interfere however much will provide the best economy, and a third side believes government has a moral responsibility to its citizens to run the economy. Of course, all three sides believe that the best results will come from their policies particularly. How do you frame a debate between all three sides in which each side doesn't speak at cross-purposes with the others? Is it possible?
4. Regardless of any moral question on either side of the debate, evidence shows pretty well that society is better off, richer, safer, 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 simply 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 qualms, and even provide emotional support for those who get one. Should someone doing the right thing for the wrong reason be fully censured? Should someone doing the wrong thing for the right reason be fully praised?
5. There are certain issues on which unbridgeable divides prevent solidarity between peoples. For example: when the 2017 Women's March organized, they numbered among their chief organizers an activist named Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian who understandably supports a one-state solution but has made incendiary statements online like 'Nothing is creepier than Zionism.' Far more incendiary, Sarsour and two other chief organizers had worked in close association with Louis Farrakhan. Farrakhan is the head of the Nation of Islam, a group with some following but there are activist groups in the African-American community with far greater. Next to the Million Man March, his greatest claim to fame is blaming Jews for everything from the slave trade to sharecropping to Jim Crow. He has repeatedly called Jews "Satanic." Many organizations involved with the Women's March advocated for the abolition of the State of Israel, which is not an issue much involved with the experience of most American women. Obviously, this made it difficult at best for many liberal Jews to march in solidarity with their cause. The questions are these.
5a: Should guilt by association prevent people from marching together in common cause?
5b: If you believe the issues at stake are just that important, how would you put your differences aside?
5c: What would have to happen to make the issue important enough to put all concerns aside?
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