Your struggle is our struggle?
Alhamdala, it's more than you've ever gotten out of Trilling. If combovered monkishness doesn't lead to integrity, perhaps using sex to advance a political agenda can't get any worse. Isn't that what Leni Riefenstahl did?
I used to believe totalitarianism the worst of all possible sins. The work of Hitler and Stalin spoke for itself. I looked to Mao and thought there surely could be no exemption in ethics for the third world.
And in what I took to be need for explanation I looked to Isaiah Berlin and Reinhold Niebuhr to establish the essential dark nature of man: corrupted, fanatical, stewed in original sin and single-mindedly clinging to explanations that turn our complicated world into essentialist villains and heroes.
Then I met Hannah, who's what other Jews refer to as a farbissina: in so many words a reflexively mean cunt who ruins every room she walks into: New York drawing rooms where she always seems to be the guest of honor. If she defines anti-totalitarianism for the world, then what is the point of the fight for freedom?
Then I met Columbia faculty like Marty Lipset, I met Niebuhr and Edmund Wilson--more on him anon, and I met all those liberals like Trilling: Kazin, Glazer, Rahv (just listing them sounds like an Upper West Side law firm), and I saw very clearly, the ostensible broadness of mind, sympathy and reluctance to believe too deeply in any cause was a deliberate evasion of responsibility. Evasion of commitment was the well-kept secret of their success.
And yet for all their waffling weakness of belief, there is one belief for which there is no equivocation and for which they stand proud: I'll give you a hint what it is, it doesn't start with an A... This is what made Hannah's attack so bitterly unexpected. Arendt seems the only one among them with any sense that Zionism is connected at the umbilical to blood and soil nationalism they claim to excoriate. For me, it feels like an ultimate injustice: Hannah is the sole major anti-totalitarian thinker with any sympathy at all for Arabs and any unkind words to say about this Jewish ideology that has a totalitarian future burned into its arm.
The wooly minded will always be the wooly minded: but the best of them, the deepest and clearest of them: Niebuhr, Berlin, Wilson, they all leave their complexities at the wayside whenever Israel comes up. Reinhold Niebuhr, God's liberal explicator of man's tragic nature and forgiveness in the image of the divine, advocated nothing less than the forced displacement of the entire Arab population of what is now somehow termed Israel: doubtless he meant from all of Trans-Jordan too. Behold, the end result of accepting man's tragic nature. A Niebuhrian army would commit the first genocide during which the assassins apologize to every victim as they're disemboweled.
Meanwhile, Isaiah Berlin: the babbling fox, the Queen's Liberal, the Don of Logorrhea, would not deign compromise his social position to take a stand on Vietnam should the war go on another five years, yet for Israel, he would sacrifice it all: the endowed chair, the port at the private member's clubs, the seat at the Queen's dinner table, the opera box with society ladies with whom he carries on oh so exquisite emotional affairs for which he has no fortitude to consumate (so the rumor goes). He certainly looks like a man who finds his own voice sexy because he's never seen a tit.
All through college and doctoral work I was a good ADA liberal who knocked the doors for Stevenson and Kennedy and knew as everyone else did that this land of America ubermenschen was the world's force for good and justice. I rejected all utopias for the reality of original sin. I believed that pragmatism can be used to ensure a greater freedom and fairness without belief without the excuse of pragmatism corrupting the power of the pragmatist. I believed that there was no such thing as a positive liberty that does not oppress and that any monistic belief is a commitment too extreme. And then one sees their commitment to Israel: Israel? Afwan? How does one arrive at excuses for the blatantly obvious land grab of whites to which we all allegedly swore 'Never Again!'?
We won't even talk about Edmund Wilson, more on him anon... But in all three cases, everything my former heroes seemed to believe in is violated by their belief in Israel, and then one looks an inch beneath the surface and one finds not beliefs but excuses. Nothing about their beliefs is hypocrisy, their beliefs are cover for outright lies. They don't just absolve Zionism, they absolve imperialism itself! If you awoke Berlin or Niebuhr in the middle of the night and wouldn't let them sleep unless they chose one of their beloved lesser evils they would happily throw the entire third world into the sea rather than compromise the security of this tiny, insignificant corner of whites.
People say that the Jews have suffered so. Yes, they suffered: the Germans suffered, the Puritans suffered, the French, the Russians, the Mohammedans, Persians, Babylonians, Hebrews, even the Romans. Suffering is the pathology used to justify every single conquest, every single acquisition, every single further infliction of suffering.
There is no suffering that justifies suffering, and there is no choice but stop suffering at the root, and none of this obscurantist handwringing relativism of these New York Intellectuals can obscure this blatant truth so clearly burned into the corpses of billions. My people will no more allow themselves to be the collateral damage to Jewish prosperity than any German, any Ukrainian, any Spaniard.
Insofar as there is moral commitment, it is a declaration of deep love to the status quo.
Perhaps a thousand tiny racisms are what Jews like Trilling and Berlin endured in their early days too, but one would think that would make the cold war liberals a bit more conscious to not act the same way to their own juniors. But rather, man passes inhumanity to man,
No comments:
Post a Comment