Forget antisemitism, the problem is the corporate state

The problem is the corporate state, not how it should do its business of policing its population.
Jewish leaders have done so much to provoke anti-semitism. I think they welcome this because it fits their agenda.

I read in the NY Times that Harvard's president believes there is much harassment of Jews on campus. I wonder what he understands that to mean.

My experience in American society is that

(a) harassment is a common feature of our social life,

(b) attempts to prohibit it

(i) systematically overstate what constitutes it

(ii) become themselves forms of it and part of the general pattern

(iii) provoke more of it.

Should universities just try to prohibit stupid behavior? What should they prohibit and what allow? Is that the question? Liberals and conservatives argue about to police the behavior of students and faculty. The stupidity of those in positions power engaged in enforcing the demands of an institution is not easily challenged, and is apparently not being questioned. Instead, once again, bosses are debating what kinds of statements and behaviors to prohibit, just as public schools are objects of debate about what are the ‘truths’ to demand assent to on the part of their children (should it be the true beliefs of their parents grounded in their religious beliefs, or those the teacher acquired from studying the literature of a scientific discipline?).

Even outside the classroom (or office suite), if you can't step into someone's face and tell them they're wrong, then you have no liberty -- though they probably do.

I want to the University of California in the 1980s. I thought it was a culture of intolerance. I think the reason is that American universities are run on a corporate model. They are the keystone of the corporate state.

I was constantly harassed by functionaries, people in authority (not professors), and other students. It was not about my identity. Though I was once told I was too outspoken. The grounds used to harass people were often liberal political correctness, sometimes not, but it was always about enforcing a demand for conformity to behavioral expectations and the orders of people in authority, and towards these things there was zero tolerance. I was always made the bad guy. Throughout my years there I was repeatedly assaulted by university employees who, of course, would say that I assaulted them, knowing the company would back them as it did.

In fact, I believe I have learned in America that institutional life generally is like this. America is fascist.

Harassment in America is normally about obedience and conformity to the demands of working in a company. Harassment of others is the privilege of the empowered.

Forget about antisemitism. Fight fascism as fascism. Not because it targets this or that set of persons by way of a 'prejudice'. That is not the American problem. Liberals think it is and they are wrong.

The United States is a corporate state. That is the essence of fascism. Very often the face is ideologically liberal, though that may depend on where you are. It could also be conservative in its talk and censoriousness. Functionaries in institutions, of any kind, will enforce the demands on you of the corporate state, which are for obedience to command, conformity to their expectations, and absence of any dissonant or adversative speech, which they will call harassment. Typically the functionaries will claim, believing what they claim with all their heart, and backing the claims by every means necessary and any means possible and available to them, that it is they themselves, and their feelings and the comfort to them of their environment (as well as their power) that they are actually defending. It is the corporate state they are defending.

I see no reason why this system should not be an object of oppositional judgement. They will call this "hate." That is a matter of rhetoric. The corporate state is determined to suppress and if possible prevent all meaningful dissent.

That is important enough to those of us in the opposition that we should not worry too much about antisemitism. Intolerance and exclusion towards it will only serve the interests of the general repression of thought and dissent. Especially since it probably cannot really be defined. Though if you listen to many Jewish leaders, they don't care about that. That may mean they will define it in whatever way works for them, as lawyers prosecuting for their cause often do.