“Another factor affecting the nature of anti-Semitic manifestations is cultural in a deeper sense. Some societies value individualism more than communalism, some the other way around. In most Western societies and in American society in particular, the ethos at large sees each individual as a free and autonomous agent, so conformist behavior is less frequent and extreme than in societies in which hierarchy and communal norms prevail. On the other hand, communally oriented societies tend to have stronger control mechanism against antisocial behavior. The result is that individualistic societies tend to produce outlaws and one-off weirdoes, while hierarchical or communal -oriented societies are better at producing mobs. Mobs are better suited for enabling anti-Semitic policies and attitudes. It is no accident that fascism set deeper roots in more communally oriented European societies-Germany, Italy, and Spain- than in more individualistic ones like Britain, Holland, and the Scandinavian countries.”
Adam Garfinkle in “Jewcentricity”
HKO comments- our individualistic tendencies are not to be taken for granted. It is the reason, in my opinion, that the current administration is getting such strong push back from grand sweeping, seemingly anti-individual solutions. Ideas such as “It Takes a Village” run against the grain of the American culture.
Today and tomorrow is the anniversary of Kristallnacht (literally “Crystal night”) or the “Night of Broken Glass”. In 1938 “99 Jews were murdered and 25,000 to 30,000 were arrested and placed in concentration camps. 267 synagogues were destroyed and thousands of homes and businesses were ransacked. This was done by the Hitler Youth, Gestapo, SS and SA. Kristallnacht also served as a pretext and a means for the wholesale confiscation of firearms from German Jews.”
The premise was “the assassination of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a German-born Polish Jew.”
This pogram foreshadowed the German war against the Jews, though they had been stripped of common rights before this event. “Kristallnacht also marked a turning point in relations between Nazi Germany and the rest of the world. The brutality of the program and the Nazi government’s deliberate policy of encouraging the violence once it had begun, laid bare the repressive nature and widespread anti-Semitism entrenched in Germany, and turned world opinion sharply against the Nazi regime, with some politicians even calling for war.” The United States recalled its ambassador but maintained diplomatic relations.
November 10 was Martin Luther’s birthday. Martin Luther has called for the burning of synagogues hundreds of years before and some Protestant clergy use his writings to justify the horrendous action.
Some synagogues have been recently rebuilt.
quotes from Wikipedia
“..a dislike can be based on seeing and then judging, but real anti-Semitism- and all other forms of genuine bigotry- is based on first judging and then seeing.”
“If indeed, one is confronted with a case of bigotry, four phases or aspects of a bigoted narrative will usually follow. The first is selectivity: only “data” that are unfavorable to the targeted group will be acknowledged, and all other data will be ignored. The second is demonization: comparing the “guilty” to culturally embedded symbols of unarguable evil. The third is selective representation: finding the few members of the targeted group who are critical of their own and wildly exaggerating their relative significance. And the fourth is obsession: the idea that the targeted group is virtually everywhere and is responsible for virtually everything evil or troublesome or problematic in the life of the bigot.”
“It is thanks to the power of obsession that the anti-Semitism ascends into the ultimate abstraction, in which the medieval bias that what is Jewish is also evil gets inverted in more modern time to what is evil must be Jewish.”
From” Jewcentricity- why the Jews are praised, blamed, and used to explain just about everything” by Adam Garfinkle
