Racism is the belief that different groups of peoples have
different biological characteristics that explain not only their outward
appearance, but their individual and collective behavior and that, because of
this, different races are necessarily superior to others. This belief is held
by the Ku Klux Klans, neo-Nazis, and Black Muslims of the world, among many,
many other groups. The act of an individual is not reflective of his or her
individuality, but rather of his or her entire race. If a black man holds up a
corner store, what would you expect? After all, he and all other black people
are just “thugs.” Racists have an irrational, anxious fear, even hatred, of
other races and manifest it through disdain, poisonous language, and even
physical violence. The fever-brained fantasies of the KKK, with
knuckle-dragging, sex-obsessed black men lusting after and seducing young white
girls, is a very prominent example of such thought processes. The practices of
Jim Crow and Apartheid South Africa are demonstrations of such a thought
structure at the state level. Blacks were not just different, they were simply
intolerable to be around and to share with, and certainly could not mix with
good white folk.
Anti-Semitism is similar to racism, but it branches off from
your “garden variety” racism rather quickly. Yes, the Jews are different; yes,
they are scheming after white girls too; yes, we hate them; and, yes, we are
superior to them. But there is something altogether different about
anti-Semitism as a phenomenon. The conspiracism exhibited by anti-Semites is
breathtaking. It’s not just that Jews are different, and that one cannot trust
them: it is that they control finance, and the media, and the government. They
have a stranglehold on our very society. Capitol Hill is “Zionist-controlled”
territory. The Jews are capitalists and they are communists; they do not
assimilate enough and yet they assimilate too much; and so on.
The rabid anti-Semites don’t just believe that Israel
illegally kills Palestinians and steals their lands, or hold Israel to an
absurd double standard expected of no other nation (although they do); they
believe that Israel harvests the organs of Palestinians, that they poison wells
and hand out chewing gum that causes AIDs or cancer, that they created ISIS to
cause havoc in the Middle East and distract everyone from their perfidious
occupation, and that Jews in Israel and worldwide find Gentile blood simply
delicious and irreplaceable for their Passover matzo. The Jews fake the Holocaust in a grand swindle to
steal land from the Palestinians and form a state on their broken backs, or to
demonize Europe and Christians, or to demand that countries unjustly give them
compensation, because Jews are the ultimate swindlers. So literally the most-
and best-documented atrocity in the history of mankind is shooed away as a
hoax. “The Holohoax never happened. The gas chambers in Auschwitz were for
lice. The crematoria were for sick prisoners. Treblinka, Sobibór, and Bełżec
were just transit camps. The Anne Frank diary is a forgery, complete bullshit. Where is the Führer order?!” Yes, these
Neanderthals are among us. They are so clouded by their anti-Semitic hatred
that they are unwilling or unable to accept the truth that is right in front of
them.
The conflation of Hitler’s attitude toward the Jews with
that toward other groups never ceases to frustrate me. They are not different
in degree, but different in kind. Hitler did not just hate the Jews, or hold
them in contempt, the way that he did for Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals,
Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the other groups that his regime persecuted and
murdered. Hitler was, obviously, a fervent racist who believed firmly in a
hierarchy of different races. The Aryan was at the very top, then the Latin, the
Slav, all the way down to the Jew. Hitler certainly was furious that Jesse
Owens won his contests in the 1936 Olympics. But the Jews were not just an
inferior race: they were bacilli that needed to be removed from society, either
via quarantine or extermination. The Jews were hated, but they were also feared.
They were feared because Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, and the
rest legitimately believed in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy that, based in
London, New York, and Moscow, would throttle the German race and nation out of
existence. The Jews were not really an inferior race; rather, they were an enemy that deserved
a sort of inverted respect. Jews were wily and insidious, and Germany did not
just have to be on its guard; it had to slaughter them. All of them. The women,
the children, the elderly. Speaking to Wehrmacht generals in June 1944, Himmler
said (and this is worth quoting at length for the insight it gives into the
Nazi mindset):
It was necessary to resolve another
question. It was the most horrible task and the most awful assignment that any organization could receive: the solution of the Jewish question. I want to say
a few words on the matter to this group with complete candor. It’s good that we
had the hardness to exterminate the Jews in our territory. Don’t ask yourselves
how difficult it would have been to carry out such an order, even though, as
soldiers, I might say you would understand. But thinking critically as German
soldiers, you can see that the order was essential. Because we wouldn’t have
been able to withstand the aerial bombings if we had had the Jews in our
cities. I am also convinced we would not have been able to hold the Lemberg
front of the Generalgouvernement if the big ghettos in Lemberg, Krakau, Lublin,
and Warsaw had still been there. We cleaned out the last one, the big ghetto in
Warsaw, in summer 1943. In Warsaw there were 500,000 Jews [note: not by summer
1943 there weren’t]. I tell you this number confidentially. It took us five
weeks of street fighting. Just the same,
I want to answer a little question that surely you must have. The question is,
of course you had to kill the adult Jews, I understand that, but how could you
do the same to the women and the children? So I have to tell you something: The
children will be grown one day. Do we want to be so improper that we say, no,
no, we’re too weak to kill children. Our children can deal with them. Our
children will fight that one out. But the Jewish hate, small today, will be big
tomorrow, and the grown avengers will attack our children and grandchildren,
who will then have to deal with them. I am convinced that this will be the case
even if Adolf Hitler does not survive. No, we cannot shirk our responsibility
to kill all the Jews. That would have been cowardly and therefore we adopted a
clear solution to the problem, as difficult as it was.
Hitler, Himmler, and the Nazis were not about separating
themselves from (and ultimately killing) the Jews because the Jews were filthy
or because they were held in outstanding contempt for their different
appearances. These are true, and necessary elements, but not sufficient. The
Jews’ nefarious influence and their modernizing, liberal, communistic,
humanistic, urbanizing ways had to be ended, full stop. At first the Nazis were
content with deporting the Jews to get them away. Ultimately, they determined
that the Jews had to die.
The Nazis viewed the Final Solution not as the mass murder
of innocent people, but as a war against an enemy in which mercifulness would
be madness. The Jews were not just the ones being lined up at the edge of
ditches or shoved into the gas chambers: they were the ones controlling American,
British, and Soviet policy and thus fighting a world war against Germany and
National Socialism. Hitler hesitated to deport the Jews of Germany before
September 1941 not only because he was concerned about domestic opinion
(although this was very important in his considerations), but because he wanted
to hold them hostages to dissuade the United States from entering the war.
Hitler, in all seriousness (and he was not alone in the Nazi leadership in
thinking this), believed that the United States, being under the influence of
Jews, would not enter the war against him because he would be in a position of
committing violence against their German brethren. At the end of the war,
before a meeting with Norbert Masur, a representative from the World Jewish
Congress, in April 1945 (when he was frantically trying to burnish his image to
evade the hangman) Himmler told his masseur Felix Kersten, “I want to bury the
hatchet between us and the Jews.” As if the Nazis and the Jews were the Sharks
and the Jets, or the Hatfields and McCoys, or, more accurately, two warring
nations that needed to both lay down their arms for the good of both sides.
The war against the Soviet Union was seen as a war against
Judeo-Bolshevism, the construct in the Nazi imagination in which cunning Jews centered
in Moscow held a firm grip on the Slavs of the Soviet Union, who were too
stupid to realize they were doing the Jews’ bidding. Notice the difference.
Hitler’s view toward the Slavs was racist, it was contemptuous; but the
anti-Semitism was another thing entirely. In the words
of historian Richard J. Evans, “The Slavs, in the end, were for the Nazis a
regional obstacle to be removed; the Jews were a ‘world enemy’ to be ground
into the dust.” Hitler needed to crush
Poland to get at the Great Jew beyond, lying in wait in Moscow; but while he
was at it, the Jews in Poland and elsewhere would be slaughtered. If he could
not successfully conquer the Soviet Union, this was at least a victory of
sorts.
The Nazis had horrific things planned for the peoples of
Eastern Europe, who would have been shot, starved, and deported in the tens of
millions; some 31 million were slated to die to make way for German colonists.
But they did not plan this because the Poles, Ukrainians, or Belarusians kept
them up at night; they did it because they wanted their land, and because they had the dismissive feelings toward
them that one has toward cockroaches and spiders. You exterminate them, but you
do not do so out of hatred. Poland was to be utterly destroyed as a nation for
daring to step up to Hitler in the months of 1939 leading up to September –
before this, Hitler regarded the Poles with relative indifference. The
intellectuals had to be murdered en masse, not because the Nazis necessarily
feared them, but because they were the lifeblood of Polish leadership. In this
racist practicality, it made sense for them to go. But for the Jews, it did not
matter if they were intellectuals or dullards, rich or poor, young or old,
healthy or sick, skilled or unskilled – they all had to go: to the Lublin
district or to Madagascar, or, finally (and in reality, not in flights of fancy), to the pits and to the ash ponds.
Anti-Semitism is more similar to the language characterizing
ethnic disputes than that of, say, American racism, which is more colored by
sneering disdain and a false sense of superiority. The Serbs, Croats, and
Albanians; the Hutus and Tutsis; the Pakistanis and the Indians; the Greeks and
the Turks: the horrific bloodletting between these groupings has involved
caricatures of the “other” that are also conspiratorial and contain some of the
elements of Nazi anti-Semitism above. The difference, however, is that these
disputes are limited in space and time. They are usually over a patch of land.
The Jews, however, are hated by many peoples, in many times, and in many
places, in a way that is simply not comparable with any other group. The Hamas
fighter, the left-wing British academic, the right-wing Ukrainian nationalist,
and the passionate upholder of chavismo
in Venezuela can all agree on at least one thing: the Jew (or “Zionist”) is an
antagonist who can bend the media, and even the global powers, to his whim. So
the Iranian regime, which has no border dispute with Israel and is in fact
hundreds of miles away, uses the most brutal of language toward Israel and
threatens to destroy that nation. This rationally makes no sense. And while
both Arabs and Iranians can be brutally racist toward other ethnic groups (and
toward each other), they can always agree on the fact that the Jews are the
handmaidens of Empire and the malevolent actor of world history.
The language of Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, and Iran
is redolent with anti-Semitic imagery – Israelis and Jews are octopi, spiders,
and murderers of children who seek to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque and subjugate
Muslims to their will. The Jews are not just a hated enemy fighting to hang on
to a piece of land: they are something far, far more sinister, Satanic and
cosmic than that. This is not saying Jews are dumb, or inferior, or some other
dismissive caricature: it is saying that the Jew is the world enemy and the
poisoner of all peoples.
The Jew is everything for everyone: a Christ-killer, a
rootless cosmopolitan, a Bolshevik, a ruthless exploitative capitalist, a
fascist, a radical secularist, a mindless traditionalist, a puppet-master, a well-poisoner, a liar, a swindler, a bigot, and a
seducer. It is the obsessiveness and the universalism of anti-Semitism that
makes it a hatred apart.
