Wednesday, August 29, 2018

Blaming the victims

In Boris Pasternak's novel, Dr Zhivago, Zhivago's Jewish friend, Misha Gordon, has been thinking about anti-Semitism since he was a child. From his first appearance on a train, aged eleven, he raises the issue. It is only later in wartime after he has witnessed Zhivago stopping Cossacks harassing an elderly Jew, that he gives his considered conclusion.
Why didn't the intellectual leaders of the Jewish people ever go beyond facile Weltschmerz and ironical wisdom? Why have they not—even if at the risk of bursting like boilers with the pressure of their duty—disbanded this army which keeps on fighting and being massacred nobody knows for what? Why don't they say to them: 'Come to your senses, stop. Don't hold on to your identity. Don't stick together, disperse. Be with all the rest. You are the first and best Christians in the world. You are the very thing against which you have been turned by the worst and weakest among you. (Part 4, Chapter 12)
In this unpleasant, sneering post, Mike Sivier, blames accusations of anti-Semitism as the cause of anti-Semitism against Jewish Labour MPs. The MPs themselves "have created the fear of such attacks. Or, at least, they have made it possible ... to claim they fear such attacks." (Oh that last line. The accusation of dishonesty, of scheming ...).

They're the same thing. The victims brought it on themselves. Both examples use familiar formulations. They are persecuted because they had not recognised that the saviour was amongst them. They made themselves reviled by rejecting the true path. Embrace Christ or Corbyn and hostility will dissolve.

At least Pasternak's expression of Christian individualism has literary merit. Neither are true, however. The Nazis didn't care whether you were a convert, secular, or fully assimilated. Genealogy was enough to condemn you to an appalling death. Jew-hatred has longer, deeper roots.

Blaming victims is always a way to avoid moral responsibility. It is mental dishonesty and an excuse for inaction. The accusations of separateness and disloyalty here are common tropes that are levelled against the persecuted, especially by those doing the persecution.

This would be my three point plan to deal with Labour's anti-Semitism problem.
  1. Admit that it exists.
  2. Understand that in left circles it is expressed through an ahistorical and partisan account of the Israel/Palestine conflict.
  3. Bloody do something about it!

2 comments:

George S said...

The trouble is that Corbyn isn't just Corbyn: he represents a strand of party iideology once thought to have been lost. He represents Momentum and the reaction to New Labour. He is old time religion represented as a folk hero. If he fails then they all fail, and if saving him means facing charges of antisemitism then they are prepared to do it. As you know there have long existed two Jewish archetypes: the Bolshevik revolutionary and the all-controlling capitalist financier. The latter still has its, often unconscious appeal. You simply transfer it to Israel and feel virtuous.

The Plump said...

He is old time religion represented as a folk hero. If he fails then they all fail, and if saving him means facing charges of antisemitism then they are prepared to do it.

Yes, and the other argument is the Machiavellian one that the whole row is a useful polarising tool for factional control, splitting the true believer from the traitorous Blairite. None of this is healthy and it is extremely reckless.