On being anti-fascist, angry, and against the "Jewish identity" industry

I am a visceral anti-fascist and anti-Nazi because I know from the past what fascism was. I remember the genocidal American war in Vietnam. I see that as a continuation of Nazism. I see these part of the same larger thing. This exterminationist colonialism and ethnic cleansing was not "about" "the Jews" in the way that the American myth has "established" in the public media discourse and, therefore, the popular imagination, including the American Jewish imaginary.

It would have killed lots of us.

Judaism won't save you now. It doesn't make any difference.

Politically, it is close to being irrelevant. Its continued political relevance in a good sense is (only, though this is very important) because it can motivate dissent and resistance.

That resistance can certainly be in the name of an idea of what is demanded by God or morality. It cannot be in the name of the Jewish people.

(Americans often want you to believe in God. The thing to understand about this is that your religious beliefs may authorize your political engagement, but your political engagement cannot really ground a religious belief. Worship of God may call for pursuing justice, but if you turn this around it ceases to make any sense because it’s backwards. Jewish identity/community “politics” (which is ultimately about Israel, and that is why it has been so strongly enunciated and enforced) functions similarly as a way of thinking. In America, “belief in God” is a prop of our semi-official national protestant culture, enforced in our courts and schools since the 1950s; the real cult is the national state, the real “higher authority” is the boss whose higher authority is associated with the idea of a divine one. Right-wing evangelical protestantism, funded after the war to buttress conservative forces in America, arose along with the Israel fetish as liberal Judaism that coalesced around it. Many people became willing pawns, and you saw them on college campuses promoting Zionism along with other far-right causes, and they certainly and clearly were part of the right-wing cause, as they still are. In reaction to this and hoping to save their identity, some people do work on their relationship to a familial superego by trying to find in their religious background some way to be more liberal. I think that is nice, if funny.

For the only possible meaningful role of Jewish leftists in the Jewish world is to argue against the misuse of Judaism as an ethnic nationalist identity politics which led to this debacle. Much as anti-Communism was used to justify the war against third world anti-colonial liberation movements, as in Vietnam. These arguments are important. But they are also defensive. This leaves me feeling in a funny when I'm around American Jews that there is no longer much they are doing that I could want to have any part of that seems positive and worthwhile. This thought is sad.)

Some people think they are friendly arguments between people who share a broader commitment. I don't see that. I see the need to affirm the obvious split and pursue it as a distinct faction opposed manifestly to the other faction, which not only favors the killing abroad, and now maybe a larger war, but which is certainly, absolute, and blatantly, for they say so, opposed to and interested in attacking those of "their own kind" who oppose the war and the killing. There is no community here, no common ground. If I were to share a text or prayer, I immediately leave without speaking to any of the people in the opposing faction. They oppose not only our cause but our persons. I do not oppose their persons, but I will not associate with them.

It's a great religion, I like it, have studied in it, it matters to me, and I think it helps people live a good life, be happy, and be morally rigorous at least privately. All ethical systems and procedures are good if they help avoid criminal barbarity, and they are not easily found helpful when your own government is organizing that barbarity and its religious leaders support it.

America's do as Germany's did.

The difference in this regard is that the Jews are more integral to the American establishment than they were in Germany, and it is not targeting them. I'm glad it isn't targeting them. This does mean, however, that complaints that Jews are vulnerable and that that is the most important thing to worry about, when not merely exaggerated, ring horribly hollow. This is ugly. The ugliness of speaking about it is due to what is, necessarily, being discussed, and not the wrong state of mind of the messenger.

So there is a fascism that kills lots of people, only they aren't Jews? What, you say, aren't Jews the essential or greatest or otherwise most important victims? Imagine if they aren't! That does give you a privilege, which you could just worry about losing (no one is advocating that, however, and no one is in a position to cause that to happen), or you could figure out what is the best way to use it.

Now what about a fascism that kills lots of people and does so in the name of these very "essential" victims? The (true, isn't it?) story is getting uglier still. Maybe we shouldn't talk about it. Maybe we should stay silent because they will lock us up?

They did it to me once before, and I had not done very much to antagonize them, but then they don't need much in the way of thought or reasoning.

Israel is not the answer but, as an Apartheid state, part of the problem. Carefully here: we are not against a Jewish presence in Palestine, we are against a Jewish military state at permanent war. That war is being fought, like so many wars, for economic and geopolitical interests, for power, and wealth. Not for people, not even the Israeli people, or "the Jewish people," whatever that means. And we must ask now what that means, and possibly can or could mean, since Israel has corrupted it horribly and perhaps beyond repair.

Jewish anti-anti-semites are primed to automatically say an angry ant-fascist (or angry radical of any kind) must be an anti-semite. That is a lie repeated by many people who believe it.

We are living under fascism. You will be hated if you resist.

I have no interest in, and only disgust and outrage in hearing about, the very idea that "the Jewish state" is "the" answer to fascism.

It is becoming blatantly obvious to more and more people that that simply makes no sense. The standard Holocaust narrative will have to be revised.

The Holocaust bothers me. I don't think it bothers most American Jews, since Israel is their answer. That's what they say.

The right's strategy is to use violence and repression and then blame it on the left.

As before 1933, the conflict is between left and right. The Jews of Europe were a casualty of that conflict.

A lot of things need to be rethought.

Maybe that's one reason they are also attacking universities and scholars.

"The Jews" is an idea, a representation. There are Jews, there is Judaism, there was and is much Jewish culture. The most interesting thing about it, and this is interesting, is that most of it cannot, possibly, be defined as something autonomous and like a bounded set such that it is even possible to ask or answer the question who or what is inside that set and what outside it. Certainly, the European/Jewish dichotomy is itself a meaningless one that only has existence within an exclusionary nationalist discourse that presumes the dichotomy in order to justify or establish it. Nazism claimed such a distinction; Zionism today also does, while liberal Europeans all agree in refusing it. Tell a German in Germany who is not a right-wing fascist extremist that you suppose they don't like Jews and they will, rightly, get angry. Americans often think this, but that's just because America won the war, and we have this awful popular media culture based on stupid myths. They also psychologized deviance and dissidence and created this narrative that fascism resulted from moral evil, or original sin. That is at best a wild distortion since it is a dehistoricized and depoliticizing claim, which deprives both fascism and whatever might be contrary to or at difference from it within the place and time where it arose of any intelligibility or meaningful existence at all. And the reason for that is simply the rhetorical force of a discourse imposed by the victors in a war, who reductively advertise to their populace that the enemy was, simply, evil. Sure, though fascism wasn't just that, and if it were the result of evil or mental illness, which seems to be the dominant American view, then it becomes curious to wonder why it is that the fascist right, like conservatives in general, waged its own battle against social deviance and dissidence partly conceived as an evil or an illness. Indeed, Nazism is impossible to explain apart from the uses of the discourse of mental illness to control a population. The Jewish people themselves were partly figured in such terms. Which also suggests that, as indeed was the case, it wasn't "essentially" about the Jews. The Americans wanted people to believe that because then they could pretend to have waged a holy war and liberated an oppressed people. That's not how and why the US entered the war, of course. The American popular consciousness, of which the Jewish American popular consciousness is an instance and aspect, does not understand the very "Jewish question" that American liberals and Jews ought to admit they have spent a great deal of time, energy, and resources advertising, promoting, and giving a certain interpretation of. But we are also witnessing the decline of the American empire and a vigorous effort on the part of its leadership to avoid or reverse that decline, much as happened in Europe between the wars. Who will be the victims? My preferred concept is "people." I side with the referents of that concept, if I must choose a concept when thinking of who "counts". as persons, though perhaps we need not.

But first tell me if you know why Jewish leaders in America use the same kinds of discourse and rhetorical strategies and tactics that were once used against them. But I know why: they are confident that they will not be among the victims. Just imagine if Hitler had been a less ambitious fascist, not actually an anti-semite, but only wanted to kill the handicapped and mentally ill, the old, the poor, the Gypsies or some other group of people who were not considered among the legitimate citizens belonging to the nation (because that was the issue, and the reason why Jews could be excluded and targeted), and ask yourself what if the some of these Jewish leaders were employed by or associated with, or their property interests protected by, the fascist government (as has happened elsewhere and is certainly possible), and imagine if they rounded up and murdered lots of people, perhaps while undertaking a horrible murderous war killing lots of people in some other country, might they have collaborated with it? Many do. They have treated me as an enemy of the state, does that mean I think of them as my enemies? No, because I don’t want them to be attacked; I want them to leave me alone - why we fight against not them as persons, but what they are supporting. Fat chance, I’m sure.