Andres Spokoiny at Fathom – No More Heroes: Contemporary Antisemitism and the West’s Culture of Victimhood:
There was a time, not long ago, when societies built their stories around heroes. Now, the victim has dislodged the hero as the center of society’s focus of admiration and desire. We dreamed of being heroes, now we yearn to be considered victims….
The Holocaust became, rightfully, the ultimate parameter of evil, and its casualties, the archetypical definition of the victim. Not all Jews were comfortable with that dubious honor; and while there’s a streak of victimhood in our national character, our sources eschew that notion. The stories of our oppression, like bondage in Egypt or Purim, highlight the heroic triumph. In those stories, victimhood bestows moral duties rather than rights (having been slaves is the underpinning of many ethical rules). In fact, there’s no word for ‘victim’ in the Hebrew Bible, and modern Hebrew uses for it the word ‘korban’ (the same word used for the objects of ancient sacrifices). Regardless, after WW2, an idealised construct of evil and its victims emerged. The Nazis on one side and the Jews wearing yellow stars on the other are now shorthand for absolute evil and absolute victims. And with the advent of the ideology of victimhood, the place occupied by the Shoah and its victims became the most coveted real estate in the world.
Another major contributor to the development of the victimhood ideology is the demise of Marxism. Or rather, the realisation that class warfare wasn’t on the cards following the unprecedented material progress the working classes enjoyed in the West. Unrepentant yet perplexed Marxists wondered how, ‘if Capitalism is working better than communism for the proletariat, and if people are risking their lives to leave so-called “communist paradises”, they could keep Marxist philosophy alive and in control?’ The answer: move from class to race and gender. Blame racism and sexism on White, Patriarchal Capitalism (ignoring, of course, the fact that non-capitalist societies tend to be even more patriarchal and racist than capitalist ones).
The most salient advantage to Neo-Marxists of race and gender over class is that those categories are (for the most part) permanent. Capitalists can erode our arguments by achieving class mobility and material progress, but they can never change people’s race. A construct based on racial oppression instead of class all but guarantees an eternal state of grievance.
Post-Colonial Philosophy and Critical Race Theory then joined the party. To be sure, the process that led to the independence of former colonies was one of the most inspiring movements in history. But what we understand as today’s ‘decolonisation’ has little or nothing to do with that epic movement. If one is to believe the ‘decolonisers’ of today (who live mainly in ivory towers in the West), the decolonisation never ends. There’s always something more to decolonise. All the problems of the ‘Global South’ are the fault of ‘The West’. Because if decolonisation ended, then the former colonies would need to take responsibility for themselves, which is a much more onerous proposition than blaming the old metropolis for all their woes.
The far left’s fascination with (and exculpation of) Islamic fundamentalist violence is part of this phenomenon. The same was true of the 1970s idealisation by ‘progressive’ academics of the genocidal violence of Pol Pot. Because Muslims now have attained a high place in the Olympus of victims, one can’t blame them for the violence they commit. Because everything is allowed to the victim, and because they have the same enemies, Judith Butler can, with a straight face, call Hamas ‘a part of the Global Left,’ as though a theocratic, misogynistic, homophobic, and deeply conservative movement can be called ‘left’ of any sort. After the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and more than two hundred years after their abolition, French left-wing intellectuals demanded the return of blasphemy laws, to protect the sensitivities of Muslims. Victimhood was the alchemy that allowed that reversal. In the past, they implied, blasphemy laws protected the powerful (the Catholic Church and the king), but now their absence damage the vulnerable (the Muslims). In the victimhood ideology mentality, all the ills of the Muslim World are the West’s fault, even and especially the violence Muslims perpetrate. In fact, the greater their barbarism, the bigger our blame….
But to take hold, the ideology of victimhood had one major condition to fulfill. One without which the whole edifice would collapse. For a new aristocracy of sacralised victims to emerge, somebody had to cede their place, cease being the model of the victim, and become the archetype of the oppressor. You guessed it: the Jew….
It’s not enough to merely replace the Jew in the victimhood food chain. Because the magnitude of the crime against them was so enormous, and the complicity in its perpetration so widespread, one needs not just a replacement but a reversal. Jews cannot be replaced as the ultimate and quintessential victim unless they are transformed into the new Nazis. And to do that, Palestinians fit neatly into the role of the new Jews….
This reversal works wonders in the Western psyche. As we saw, it leaves a place for ‘more deserving’ victims, and it frees the West from its guilt. The Holocaust is an enduring indictment of the West. But if we show that, after all, Jews are ‘worse than the Nazis’, then the West wasn’t wrong in persecuting them. Everything done to the Jews was and is justified. As philosopher Vladimir Yankelevich noted ironically (way back in 1964), anti-Zionism is a blessing for Europe, ‘The only thing we, Europeans, did is simply anticipate the metamorphosis of the Jews into Nazis and tried to avoid it.’
To paraphrase the genial phrase of Israeli psychologist Zvi Rex, ‘The world will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.’…
Zionism is despised for something else: it runs counter to the culture of victimhood. After the Holocaust, the Jews didn’t fall into the abyss of victimisation. They took their destiny into their own hands, becoming a culture of heroes who deployed agency and empowered themselves to recreate their state in their historic homeland. That attitude is what differentiates Israel and other former colonies. The former didn’t succumb to victimist temptation and became a first-world democracy and an economic miracle, while many of the latter continue blaming their former colonial masters, remaining in a state of chronic dysfunction, wracked by corruption, underdevelopment, and poverty.
Yes to all that. Excellent article.
Mick Hartley 