Israel, Sweden, and the Modern Face of Anti-Semitism

If events in Sweden are any guide, European anti-Semitism is in the process of reverting from the coded “anti-Israel” version to the full blown “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” version that prevailed in the days before the Third Reich. The “anti-Israel” form of anti-Semitism has been the prevailing flavor on the left for some time. For example, one can usually find artifacts of it in the form of a grotesque double standard on any given day at the BBC’s “news” site. Now, at least one Swedish tabloid has decided to dispense with the mask and promote the “blood libel” version in unvarnished form.

It has been the unfortunate fate of the Jewish people to fit perfectly into the role of an “out-group” for many centuries (see my post on the Amity-Enmity Complex). Obviously, things haven’t changed. Hatred of the Jews, hidden beneath a thin veneer of “anti-Zionist” camouflage for the sake of political correctness, has been a defining characteristic of the ideological left for some time. An interesting expression of this phenomenon has been the wholesale adoption of leftist “anti-imperialist/anti-colonialist” rhetoric by right wing Islamists.

The lesson here is the same one that history has been beating our heads with for millenia, but that we still stubbornly refuse to learn. It is that the spinners of ideological utopias and the authors of the latest “modern morality” will, inevitably, fail as long as they continue to ignore the facts of human nature. Those facts aren’t going to change any time soon. In the meantime, we must understand and accommodate them. Human beings must have out-groups. They must hate. These things are as much a part of their nature as the “good” aspects of their behavior. Our predisposition to hate and despise an “out-group” must and will have an outlet. One can easily confirm this by visiting any political blog or forum on the ideological right or left and reading the comments posted there. Unless we finally accommodate ourselves to what we really are, we will continue to stumble from one holocaust to another, even as we chase after the latest chimerical ideals. Let us finally accept the fact that we must hate, understand the roots of that hate in our nature as a species, and try to find outlets for it that are not self-destructive. If we fail, self-destruction may well be our fate.

The “Pravda” of Nicholas I

Today’s lead article on the website of “Pravda” is entitled, “The Modern West, A Culture of Death.” Were a modern day Russian Rip van Winkle to read it after a catnap of 20 years, he would probably conclude it was just another one of his crazy dreams and go back to sleep. Here’s the lead paragraph.

From the early 1800s, the West, in an affront to God, has moved ever more rapidly into a culture of death and destruction, away from the teachings of Christ. At its present state, the most significant thing that the West is bringing to humanity is a culture of totalitarianism and death, one on such a nuanced level as would only be celebrated by the most brutal of Pagans and Lucifirians and would even be an affront to the most blood thirsty of the Islamic radicals.

Great shades of the Black Hundreds! Czar Nicholas I has come back to reclaim his own! The article comes complete with a picture of two “babushkas” seated at a McDonald’s to set the proper ideological tone, and is written in a style commensurate with Pravda’s current “National Enquirer” look. I am anything but an expert on the prevailing political nuances in the Russian media, but, if Pravda is any guide, the country has completed its Marxist somersault, and has now landed with both feet firmly in the past. Consider this remarkable line from a paragraph about the conduct of war by Orthodox soldiers:

Do not confuse this with the actions of the Red Army, in WW2, which was under the control of the Western Marxist import and its subsequent ideology of death.

One finds it somehow surprising that such a stunning volte face took place in Russia, and not China. There, in spite of the cultural pride expressed in the paradigm of the “Middle Kingdom” surrounded by unenlightened barbarians enshrined in the countries very name, the “Western Marxist import” still prevails. Indeed, the ruling oligarchy depends on it to establish the legitimacy of its rule.

Russia, on the other hand, seems to have completely shaken off alien ideologies and taken a Great Leap Backwards, if Pravda is any guide. The tone of the article would certainly have been familiar to the Marquis de Custine, who traveled through Russia in 1839 in the days of Nicholas I. Indeed, there is much in his description of the country that seems to transcend the ideological changes of later years, and would have sounded as prescient under Stalin as it did under Nicholas. For example,

In Russia, the government rules everything and vitalizes nothing. The inhabitants of this vast Empire, though not calm, are dumb. Death hovers over every head and strikes at random — it is enough to make one doubt divine justice. Mankind there has two coffins: the cradle and the tomb. Mothers must weep for their children at birth as much as at death.

and,

The people and its ruler are in harmony here. The Russians make themselves witnesses, accomplices and victims in these prodigies of willpower and would not repudiate them even to resurrect all the slaves whose lives are forfeited as a result. However, what surprises me is not that one man, nourished on the idolatry of his own person, a man described as all-powerful by sixty million humans (or near-humans) whould undertake such things and carry them through. What does surprise me is that among all the voices testifying to the glory of this single man, not one rises above the chorus to speak for humanity against the miracles of autocracy. You can say of the Russians, both great and small, that they are intoxicated with slavery.

Custine’s account of his travels is well worth the modern reader’s time. One hopes for the sake of Russia’s people that his words will not be as prophetic for her future as they have been for her past.