There are so many forms of racism. Take for instance the history of swimming pools in the United States. As long as there was primarily a segregation between the sexes in public swimming pools, that is men and women bathing separately, in the big cities black and white people could swim together. This was a logical consequence of the idea that public swimming pools were to be a contribution to fostering public health and hygiene within working-class families. But as soon as cities permitted men and women to swim together, racial segregation superseded the one on the basis of gender – mainly because black men shouldn’t be allowed to approach white women in this rather intimate context of public bathing. Race, class and gender meet her in a mix of discriminations. Jeff Wiltse has written a book about it: Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America.
All over history this racism based on the idea of the superiority of one ‘race’ above all others has produced vehement forms of physical violence. Expulsion and displacement, mutilation and rape, persecution and incarceration, (mass) murder … they have always been the fate of ‘indigenous people’, lower castes, ethnic minorities, all groups of people that in one way or another could be constructed and redefined into a category of inferior beings – and that in all continents and all times. Today is in that sense not better than yesterday.
What keeps amazing me is the obstinacy with which Jews (with or without capital letter, and whatever that category might include) over all times and places and for whatever reason are considered as a race to be exterminated. Even today, when protesters in the US carry posters showing drawings of ‘jewish rats’ and the text The Real Plague. White-supremacist circles worldwide spread the idea that Jews control the Chinese labs that created the new coronavirus. Maybe this might have been expected, since anti-Semitic theories have always regarded Jews as poisoners and deliberate carriers of disease and as inveterate economic profiteers. So, though the creation of sars-CoV-2 and the spreading of covid-19 are supposed to originate from Chinese labs, the evil mind behind all this is jewish. Isn’t it true that the Jews are always pulling the strings but using proxies for deniability and to amplify their power? And so an internet cartoon holds this strapline: It’s not Chinese. It’s the JEW FLU! The purpose of all this manipulation? “To consolidate their gains. The red-pill movement is growing, and time is running out for the kikes. (((They))) must cement their power now, while they still have the upper hand.”
(I looked it up, for I guess there are more people not familiar with the idiom of the ones who really understand the mechanisms of world-ruling. The red-pill movement is in this context probably not the promotor of the manosphere, but an allusion to The Matrix, where Keanu Reeves pops a red pill to unplug his mind from a simulated world, freeing him to explore genuine reality; kikes is a derogatory term for Jews; the triple parentheses ((())) is used to identify Jews in written texts.)
Right. But how did the Jews then deserve this kind of seemingly perpetual and universal reaction – at least from a part of your fellow human beings? In The Origins of Totalitarianism (first published 1951) Hannah Arendt formulates a remarkable section on the Eastern-European anti-jewish fanaticism at the beginning of the twentieth century. (Yes, but she’s a jew herself; what does she really hide behind her assertions?) In writing about “one of the most logical and most bitter revenges history has ever taken”, she mentions “the Jews’ concept of chosenness, their identification of religion and nationality, their claim to an absolute position in history and a singled-out relationship with God”. This jewish self-confidence supposedly made it easier for mob leaders to drag God into their discourse about the discrimination against their own people and about the right they had to defend their inalienable rights with all means. Arendt writes:
The hatred of the racists against the Jews sprang from a superstitious apprehension that it actually might be the Jews, and not themselves, whom God had chosen, to whom success was granted by divine providence. There was an element of feeble-minded resentment against a people who, it was feared, had received a rationally incomprehensible guarantee that they would emerge eventually, and in spite of appearances, as the final victors in world history.
Seems all too recognisable today – not only in the US. Arendts seventy years old analysis fits quite well to the actual anti-semitism of the white-supremacists. Fear and hatred, nourished by the fact that the jewish claims about uniqueness and superiority are not so different from the ones expressed in Christianity (and islam).
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