Is our culture of moralism without thinking a contributor to anti-semitism?

A principal cause of anti-semitic feelings is the (true enough) observable fact that many Jews are moralists, and in a manner that can easily seem not noticeably distinct from the way protestants usually are.  This means one may expects from them reproaches, but the trick is to realize that this is one way of learning from people in social life (in a culture that traditionally elevated lifelong study particularly for ethical purposes), and it might then be supposed that their secret at least amongst themselves is that the reproaches are not normally meant as punitive obstructions that operate (as they do in Christian culture) to exclude the less privileged from the opportunities that would facilitate the creative work they might want to get in on, and are susceptible of resenting those who could take those opportunities for granted, as the most privileged people regularly do.  In Christian culture, if you are found in the wrong, you are not to be taught about it but removed from the social space, and if something you are involved in appears odd, it is not interesting, perhaps as the beginning of some process of (e.g., artistic) inquiry, but likewise grounds for your punitive exclusion.  This is largely true of our social institutions. 

A happy culture that wants to be smart might be one in which people can criticize each other easily and without this being presumed either punitive or antipathetic.  A condition of this would be an intellectual culture that in the United States we do not have.  (Another condition would be the absence of a police state, meaning capitalism). We also have an affirmative culture, that even people who are educated and smart normally don’t criticize each other, even kindly and gently, as good friends might, but mostly just share enjoyments and signs and indications thereof, while flattering and supportively affirming each other, sometimes offering useful suggestions as to one you can get something you need or want.  

What is “oppression” and who is “oppressed”? Oppression is subjection. Today it is subjection to a governmental apparatus of management, or social control. A “society of control.” Liberals and conservatives in America argue first about the politics of distribution (some people are “oppressed,” but the society itself is a good one that must be defended), as well as about the form this should take, how resources and opportunities should be distributed, and how the corporate state apparatus should manage people. Psychiatry with its “bio-psycho-social” paradigm is a “science” of managing (all) people. It would be a silly paranoid hatred of elites, of which anti-semitism is one common form, to hate the elites who are the principal authorities, wielding the appropriate body of “knowledge,” among the functionaries or operatives who are employed, in the case of the more elite among them, very much believing in not only the justice but goodness and importance of what they do. Such collaborators with social subjection, which is a precise way to describe their role even if not only sounds ugly if you put it that way but more importantly entitles them in their eyes, along with all who support the system, which is most people, as in any society under normal conditions, they themselves are not the problem. It is obvious what the problem is: capitalism and its state. If you feel antipathy towards these people wielding authority over you, you are right, but of course you can’t let on that you don’t appreciate what they are doing, as then they will pretend to be personally offended and attribute to you a will to violence.

Antisemitism is on the left is the “socialism of fools” of those who hate those people who are visibly engaged in either performing the work of the authorities they feel oppressed by, or who legitimate it ideologically through their elite professional education. This means that either the sense many people have of being oppressed is false (and immoral since it can leads to hatreds), ot is it right, and mistaken can only be the object identified, methods chosen, or some other matter of tactics. The right and left differ (from the conservative and liberal center) in the objects identified. The left identifies a system, which it regards as unjust, given useful form to the intuition deriving from a lived experiences with social institutions that is unhappy. Conservatives, particularly in the Jewish world, have long made quite an art of showing that all of this means: there is no injustice, at least not fundamentally. “This is a good society,” the doctor in charge of the ward told me the last time I was punitively incarcerated on the absurd grounds of “mental illness.” Yes, I despise that ideology and those who believe in it. The second focus of spite is a potential problem at least since many doctors are Jews. The medical profession is in the highly exploitative service of a Pharaonic power and mostly of its practioners are ideologically committed to what they do, but of course the problem is not that they are Jews, though they may have used their religious education to legitimate their ideology. The first is because almost everyone in America, at least if they are white, believes in this ideology that society’s misfits and rebels are mentally ill. I think this is a form of Nazism, which is also my feeling about it, and it is one that was victorious long ago in much the same way it was in Germany, where most people went along. The American victory continued the destruction of culture that the fascists in Germany started (with the declared intent of preserving it) and the consequent triumph of commercialized mediocrity, liberal when the Americans took over, under the direction of a militarized state enjoying the consent of the vast majority of its citizens. The political activists I met being liberals, I knew what they do is promises nothing from my point of view, though it is true that the reformist political traditions of American thought can lead some well-intentioned professionals to make some improvements. They are improvements in the system of managing people on behalf of the corporate state. Antisemitism on the left or right is more interestingly seen as a mistake than an upsurge of original evil, which I think is an idea of Christian heritage that becomes a Nazi one as soon as this evil is attributed to a class of persons, which is why I believe, precisely speaking, Jewish anti-anti-semitism as I have heard it articulated (including by respected members of the “liberal” rabbinate who are Zionist), is itself an essentially Nazi way of thinking. I remain the anti-Nazi that I have been since my youth. When I encounter, as I often have, an American, Jewish or a liberal who sees this the way most liberal American Jews have, who asks if I am Jewish and seems to have a problem with the Germans and their culture, I am disgusted with a revulsion that makes me want to puke in their face. “That is your opinion” (which of course is means nothing and is wrong as far as we, the Chorus, are concerned) say the stupid American liberals. I think the lesson I needed to learn was that most speech touching upon any matter of public concern is little more than a social game whose functions are to promote Gemeinschaftgefühl, communal solidarity based on good feeling, and articulate what is the right opinion accord to the prevalent media-generated consensus.

If anti-semitism is an evil, which is to say a crime, it calls for war, whose domestic form is policing. If, in some theory, many people desire wrongly (meaning what?), the state is needed to police them. If anti-semitism is a mistake, as those susceptible to it will rightly recognize their desire as just, and pursue it in the most effective way, the important thing then is to find an effective politics that opposes oppression. Conservative anti-anti-semitism is directed precisely and essentially at those who would rebel against the forms of governmentality to which they are subjected. Anti-anti-semitism is a weapon of fascism.

There is in America one social demographic that does tend to understand this: black Americans. Unfortunately, their leaders have persuaded them that all of this is essentially about a social identity group: their own. That is both true and not true, which is also one of the problems so many people have had in making sense of the Holocaust, and why its legacy has been so misused. It was misused to promote the agenda of an elite. If race is the key to oppression, then surely promoting professional opportunities for black people, and punishing anyone who resists a punishing officer who happens to be black, since for liberals the privilege of identity in America confers impunity, is all that is needed, and that serves only to legitimate the system and keep it in place. Rebels usually make some mistake. Fascists blame them. But the rebels are rarely if ever wrong to hate their oppression. The United States is becoming fascist because that is a possibility of a corporate state, which it is what it is. The problem is capitalism.