Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Anti-Semitism as the Harbinger of Global Chaos
American Greatness ^ | 16 Mar, 2024 | Stephen Soukup

Posted on 03/16/2024 7:26:35 AM PDT by MtnClimber

The parallels between the rise of Nazism and the current global unrest and demonization of the Jewish people is largely incontestable.

On the off chance you hadn’t noticed, the world appears to be at an especially precarious moment presently. Obviously, war continues to rage in Ukraine and Gaza, with no end in sight to either conflict. Great Britain and Japan are currently in recession. Canada’s economy is an absolute disaster, with almost no hope of near-term recovery. Much of continental Europe and China are struggling economically, if not officially contracting. Some experts believe that the global economy more generally is sliding, slowly but surely, into recession. The only economic bright spot in the world is the United States, and even here we have our problems with consumer spending and sentiment, massive credit concerns, and inarguably sticky inflation.

Meanwhile, China is investing in and winning friends, and influencing people in the Global South. U.S.-backed Kurdish leaders are warning that ISIS is resurgent in Syria and Iraq. The Marine general in charge of U.S. Africa Command is warning of Russia’s increasing influence on that continent. Sudan remains mired in civil war. Nigeria is plagued by Islamist terrorism and mass kidnappings. Mexico is in the midst of a full-blown war with the drug cartels, who continue to grow bolder and more militarily sophisticated.

Everywhere one looks, chaos reigns—or, at the very least, bubbles just below the surface.

Perhaps most telling among the signs of disarray is the unnerving rise of antisemitism in the United States, Europe, and throughout the world. Antisemitism, in general, has been intensifying, slowly but surely, over the last decade or so. Over the last few months, however, it has emerged fully into the open, undaunted and unembarrassed. What was once considered shameful and disconcerting is now warmly welcomed as a “rational” response to American foreign policy, Israeli war practices, “colonialism,” and “white privilege.”

All of this is troubling, to put it mildly, both in and of itself and as a harbinger of greater and more deadly global unrest.

Hatred of and anger toward Jews is not the same as other forms of bigotry. In many ways, the history of Western anti-Jewish hatred mirrors the history of Western political chaos and collapse. Or, to put it another way, historically, Jews are not only the perennial scapegoats during periods of social upheaval and displacement, but resurgent anti-Semitism serves as the proverbial canary in the coal mine for the rise of revolutionary movements.

In his classic, The Pursuit of the Millennium, the British historian Norman Cohn argues that the Jewish diaspora generally fit comfortably, if tentatively into European society for most of the first thousand years or so A.D., and only became a hated and perpetually persecuted minority with the rise of utopian Millenarianism that accompanied and then outlived the Crusades. Beginning then and continuing for the next nearly a thousand years, Europeans came to associate Jews with the antichrist and thus to associate hatred and persecution of Jews with preparing the battlespace for the Second Coming. Many historians, including Hannah Arendt, believed that the anti-Semitism that was such an integral part of the West’s 20th-century collapse into totalitarianism was relatively new and, in any case, distinct from medieval anti-Semitism. Cohn’s history suggests otherwise, connecting the religious eschatology of medieval Europe to the quasi-religious eschatology of post-Enlightenment Europe, thereby connecting the persistence of Western anti-Semitism as well.

Cohn tells us that millenarian moments and the millenarian movements that capitalize on those moments all share a common group of characteristics. They all appear under certain social and economic conditions. They all appeal to a certain segment of the population at large, who then present themselves as economic, spiritual, and political leaders. They all utilize scapegoats, meaning that they all identify a different, usually much smaller segment of the population on whom they can blame all the world’s ills and then set about to cure those ills through the elimination of the scapegoat. And more often than not, that scapegoat tends to be Jewish.

In the conclusion to the second edition of Pursuit of the Millennium, Cohn notes that the millenarian fervor of the middle ages may have changed, but it never really died, and it maintained its common characteristics even as it became secular or “quasi-religious.” He wrote:

The story told in Pursuit of the Millennium ended some four centuries ago but is not without relevance to our own times. [I have] shown in another work [Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion] how closely the Nazi phantasy of a world-wide Jewish conspiracy of destruction is related to the phantasies that inspired Emico of Leningrad and the Master of Hungary; and how mass disorientation and insecurity have fostered the demonization of the Jew in this as in much earlier centuries. The parallels and indeed the continuity are incontestable.

The parallels between the rise of Nazism and the current global unrest and demonization of the Jewish people are also largely incontestable. The election that brought Hitler to power didn’t happen in a vacuum, after all. It happened in the midst of global chaos, namely the Great Depression. It also followed the decadence and distortion of the Weimer Era. As the New York Fed has shown, even a global pandemic—the 1919 Spanish Flu outbreak—contributed to the sense of discomfort and disconnect among the German population, prompting increased support for Hitler and his Nazis.

The present global chaos doesn’t have to end the same way the chaos of a century ago did. It doesn’t have to result in the ascension of millenarian ideologies and their totalitarian defenders. History has shown that extremism can be short-circuited and radical ideologies undone. The first step in doing so, however, must be to bring an end to the rationalization of the persecution of the world’s Jews. The second step is to end the persecution itself. Antisemitism is ugly and shameful, and it must be treated as such. For their sake and ours.


TOPICS: History; Society
KEYWORDS: egypt; gaza; globalism; hamas; iran; iraq; islamofascism; islamofascists; israel; jihad; jihadists; jordan; jordannotjordon; koranimals; lebanon; nonotglobalism; stephensoukup; syria; unitednations; unrwa; untiednations; unwra; waronterror; yemen
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first 1-2021-4041 next last

1 posted on 03/16/2024 7:26:35 AM PDT by MtnClimber
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | View Replies]

To: MtnClimber

The whole world seems to be shifting to the left which is never a good thing.


2 posted on 03/16/2024 7:26:45 AM PDT by MtnClimber (For photos of scenery and wildlife, click on my screen name for my FR home page. More photos added.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: MtnClimber

quotes:

In the first millennium of the Christian era, leaders in the European Christian (Catholic) hierarchy developed or solidified as doctrine ideas that: all Jews were responsible for the crucifixion of Christ; the destruction of the Temple by the Romans and the scattering of the Jewish people was punishment both for past transgressions and for continued failure to abandon their faith and accept Christianity.

In the tenth and eleventh centuries, these doctrines about Jews were hardened and unified in part because of the following: threat to the Church hierarchy from the impending split between Roman Catholicism and Greek Orthodoxy (1054); successive waves of Muslim conquest; end of millennium fervor; successes in converting the heathen ethnic groups of northern Europe; and military-spiritual zeal of the Crusades.

Seeking to retain their beliefs and culture, Jews became bearers of the only minority religion on a now Christian continent of Europe. In some countries, Jews were welcomed from time to time, but, at a time in which faith was perceived as the principal form of self-identity and intensely influenced both public and private life, Jews found themselves increasingly isolated as outsiders. Jews do not share the Christian belief that Jesus is the Son of God, and many Christians considered this refusal to accept Jesus’ divinity as arrogant. For centuries the Church taught that Jews were responsible for Jesus’ death, not recognizing, as most historians do today, that Jesus was executed by the Roman government because officials viewed him as a political threat to their rule.

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/antisemitism-in-history-from-the-early-church-to-1400


3 posted on 03/16/2024 7:35:49 AM PDT by Brian Griffin
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: MtnClimber; cowboyusa

It’s complicated, but basically because of $**tbags like Chuck Schumer, Zuck and the ADL, people like Seinfeld and Jewish college kids wind up getting hated on.

Wash, rinse repeat for 2,000 years.

Not sure what the answer is.


4 posted on 03/16/2024 7:36:23 AM PDT by AAABEST (That time Washington DC became a corrupted, existential threat to us all...)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 2 | View Replies]

To: MtnClimber

If you are losing your power and influence..start a war?


5 posted on 03/16/2024 7:40:18 AM PDT by Leep (Kill ALL Fakestinians!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: MtnClimber
When God told Abraham that He would bless those who bless your and your descendants, and curse those who curse them, still rings true today. For example, for years the Soviet Union treated Jewish people quite well, but the USSR began crumbling when Stalin decided that Jews were the problem with Soviet Bolshevism.

Prior to the rise of the national Socialists, Germany was very tolerant of Jewish people, and accepted them wholeheartedly if they converted to Christianity (which many did). When the national Socialists took over, they led Europe on the path to destroy the Jewish race. Where's Germany now? For 45 years, they were the playthings of obnoxious Americans and brutal Russians. Now they're unified, but they're a shadow of the nation they were before World War 1.

Look at all the African Islamic countries that oppose Israel- most all of them have crop failures and famine.

The US and Canada have honored Judaism for decades, and the Lord has blessed our nations with abundant wealth never seen before in history. However, the last 20 years we're beginning to see the Jew-hating that infected Europe and the Middle East. I can see our countries slowly being ground into the dustbin of history because of this.

6 posted on 03/16/2024 7:40:43 AM PDT by MuttTheHoople ( "Never thot I'd live to see the day when the right wing would become the cool ones"-Johnny Rotten)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: MuttTheHoople

Add in the OIC’s “UN”.
That’s a huge repository/ suppository of hate.


7 posted on 03/16/2024 7:46:15 AM PDT by himno hero (had'nff )
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 6 | View Replies]

To: MuttTheHoople

Add in the OIC’s “UN”.
That’s a huge repository/ suppository of hate.


8 posted on 03/16/2024 7:46:17 AM PDT by himno hero (had'nff )
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 6 | View Replies]

To: MuttTheHoople

Add in the OIC’s “UN”.
That’s a huge repository/ suppository of hate.


9 posted on 03/16/2024 7:46:19 AM PDT by himno hero (had'nff )
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 6 | View Replies]

To: MtnClimber

“the 1919 Spanish Flu outbreak—contributed to the sense of discomfort and disconnect among the German population, prompting increased support for Hitler and his Nazis”

I suspect that Hitler believed Germany was “stabbed in the back” by leftists and Jews inordinately backed leftists.

quotes:

On November 9, 1918, a mass uprising by the Berlin proletariat toppled Kaiser Wilhelm II and ended the war. The Hohenzollern dynasty had ruled Berlin, Prussia and the German Empire for almost 500 years. One bourgeois journalist described the revolution like a sudden collapse: The following day, Theodor Wolff wrote that before the uprising, “a gigantic military organization seemed to embrace everything, in public offices and ministries an apparently invincible bureaucracy was enthroned. Yesterday morning all this was still there. … Yesterday afternoon nothing remained.”

Ludendorff’s calculation was devious: Even though he had personally determined that they had lost the war, he could now create a legend that the German army was never defeated on the battlefield. He now claimed the German army had lost only because it was “stabbed in the back” by socialists who protested on the home front. This “stab-in-the-back-myth” became widespread in Germany for many decades.

https://www.leftvoice.org/100-years-ago-in-berlin-german-revolutionaries-step-on-the-grass/


10 posted on 03/16/2024 7:48:25 AM PDT by Brian Griffin
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Brian Griffin

You are obviously not a Christian. You must be a leftist college professor of theology or worse a Vatican cleric.

Do you not know that the Christian Bible includes the Old Testament, which is equivalent to the Jewish Torah.

Christians do NOT blame the Jewish diaspora for the death of Christ. Jesus himself was a Jew. Pontius Pilate (Roman governor) was the one who ordered the crucifixion of Christ when he offered the people who they preferred to be freed from prison. They chose Barabbas instead of Jesus, These people were equivalent to modern day deep state globohomo democrats. They were and are the scum of the earth.

Whenever you see anti-Semitism in America, it is coming from the left, NOT the right (and certainly not from true Christians).


11 posted on 03/16/2024 7:51:03 AM PDT by Flavious_Maximus (Tony Fauci will be put on death row and die of COVID!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3 | View Replies]

To: MuttTheHoople
The US and Canada have honored Judaism for decades, and the Lord has blessed our nations with abundant wealth never seen before in history. However, the last 20 years we're beginning to see the Jew-hating that infected Europe and the Middle East. I can see our countries slowly being ground into the dustbin of history because of this.

While I generally agree, there are certainly comparisons of "abundant wealth" where the nations did not honor Judaism or Christianity. Japan and China are just two of many examples.

There is more (much more) to the story of God's blessings on lands. The same is true for "abundant wealth." I'm afraid abundant wealth is not unique to only believers.

It's just not that simple.

12 posted on 03/16/2024 7:56:50 AM PDT by icclearly ( )
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 6 | View Replies]

To: MtnClimber

quotes:

As the revolutionaries were founding a new party, the Social Democrats focused on gathering bodies of armed men to defend “public order.” After peace was declared on November 11, the armies were melting away. The government ordered divisions to march to Berlin. Yet before they reached the city, half the soldiers had disappeared—by the next morning, only a handful remained. After four years of the most barbaric massacre that humanity had yet experienced, any person with a shred of sanity left wanted to return home as quickly as possible.

There were, however, small numbers of men who had grown accustomed to endless murder and had no other home besides the army. Under the command of right-wing officers, they joined paramilitary Freikorps (roughly “Free Companies”). These men received handsome salaries, paid from big capitalists’ donations to the Anti-Bolshevik Fund. They were right wing, but could not have coherently described their ideology. In an earlier times, they would have been monarchists, but after Wilhelm II’s flight, they had no use for the monarch. As Sebastian Haffner explained, “What they dreamed of and hoped for, what they fought and also murdered for, was something other than the Monarchy—something which would one day be put into words by a man who in those days was active as an obscure [army informant] in Munich.”

Haffner was referring to Adolf Hitler, who would build his fascist movement around nuclei of former Freikorps soldiers.

https://www.leftvoice.org/100-years-ago-in-berlin-revolution-and-counterrevolution-in-germany/

The Freikorps marauded through Berlin, invading one workers’ district after another. The fighting soon concentrated in the Newspaper Quarter, particularly around the Vorwärts building. Some 200 workers had been occupying the building and publishing the “Red Vorwärts” for a week. By January 11 they were surrounded by white troops with artillery, grenade launchers, flamethrowers and even a tank. The proud building, erected with decades of donations from Berlin workers, was heavily damaged by bombardments. The occupiers sent out a seven-person delegation with a white flag to negotiate surrender – all were taken to a neighboring military barracks and beaten to death. The other 200 gave up shortly afterwards, and only by luck avoided a mass murder.

Luxemburg and Liebknecht eventually went into hiding, first in the proletarian neighborhood of Neukölln, then in the more bourgeois Charlottenburg. A counter-revolutionary patrol discovered them in a friend’s apartment. They were arrested and taken to a Freikorps headquarters in the Hotel Edon opposite the zoo.

the Freikorps executed Luxemburg and Liebknecht. She was beaten to death outside the hotel; he was driven into a nearby park and shot. The murderers claimed that she had been dragged away by a mob, while he had been shot “attempting to escape.”

The defeat of the Berlin insurrection did not mean the end of the German Revolution. Mass struggles continued throughout 1919: in the Ruhr region, in Central Germany, in Berlin. There were short-lived Council Republics in Bremen and Munich. The Freikorps and the SPD were able to suppress each of these movements individually. Just in March of 1919, they massacred at least 1,200 workers in Berlin.

By 1920, the right-wing paramilitaries decided the workers’ movement had been completely crushed – therefore they no longer need their alliance with the SPD. The Kapp-Ludendorff-Putsch was their attempt to depose Ebert and take power themselves. They captured Berlin without resistance, with the old government fleeing to Leipzig, then to Stuttgart, unable to find troops willing to defend them. Desperate, Ebert and Co. called a general strike – the first and only national general strike in German history. Millions of workers heeded the call. The coup government, cut off from trains and telegraphs, collapsed after just three days.

The SPD government, saved by the strike, immediately decreed an amnesty for all the coup plotters. The very next day, the renewed SPD-Freikorps alliance was murdering workers from the Red Army of the Ruhr who had just defeated the coup. Struggles like this continued across Germany until 1923.

the German bourgeoisie had begun to draw lessons from the Russian Revolution one year earlier. They had realized that the Bolsheviks were more than a band of fanatics who would lose power after a few weeks. If the compact working class in Russia could take political power and expropriate capital, then the danger posed by Germany’s massive proletariat was incomparably greater.

There were not many Freikorps in Germany, in absolute numbers. Yet they had the decisive advantage that they were centrally organized. They could move from one city to the next, smashing the revolutionary movement wherever it raised its head.

https://www.leftvoice.org/100-years-ago-in-berlin-the-bitter-lesson-of-a-defeat/


13 posted on 03/16/2024 8:02:00 AM PDT by Brian Griffin
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: MtnClimber

Ending antisemitism (and other variations of blind hate and discrimination) .... YES!

But how?

The left has Institutionalized racist discrimination into our legal system. Great totals of our tax money is spent implementing discrimination via hiring, promotion, college admissions, college financial aid,”DEI” indoctrination and discrimination programs complete with their own Orwellian vocabularies and forced indoctrination sessions for all innocently caught working in such organizations, speech censorship, etc. There are now tens of thousands of people on the public payroll whose sole job duty is to promote more and more discriminatory “thought” and wider and wider discriminatory programs, activities — and to enforce it -—all at taxpayer expense.

Just How can we remove this sickening infestation from the American society?

anti-Jew bias (yes, it has always served as the canary in the cage warning signal), anti-Christian bias (is “quieter” but impacts many more people), anti-Caucasian bias, anti-Asian/Chinese bias ... anti-male bias, anti-”straight” bias, anti-life (pro-abortion, pro-euthenasia) bias... you name it... its all over ... where to begin? and how?


14 posted on 03/16/2024 8:04:03 AM PDT by faithhopecharity (“Politicians are not born. They're excreted.” Marcus Tillius Cicero (106 to 43 BCE))
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: MtnClimber

One shouldn’t put ‘endangered’ wolves [jahid worshipping Muslims] in the same enclosure [USA] as sheep [Jews].

Many Jews (and my mother’s parents) came here for asylum. The asylum previously granted should be respected. “Newcomers” in need of (or claiming to want) asylum should be directed to seek it in a country where they will not threaten others.

Any asylum applicant that doesn’t not formally acknowledge the borders of Israel as recognized by the US government should not be admitted or allowed to remain.

Any asylum applicant that doesn’t not acknowledge the rights of women to fully participate in society and to dress in typical western clothing should not be admitted or allowed to remain.

Any asylum applicant that doesn’t not acknowledge the rights of Christian, Jews and atheists should not be admitted or allowed to remain.

Any asylum applicant that doesn’t not acknowledge the rights of LGB people should not be admitted or allowed to remain.


15 posted on 03/16/2024 8:04:22 AM PDT by Brian Griffin
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: MtnClimber

Lots of rightwing parties are making headway in Europe along with Trump, a more rightwing alternative to the GOPe, in the US.


16 posted on 03/16/2024 8:05:43 AM PDT by who_would_fardels_bear (What is left around which to circle the wagons?action )
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 2 | View Replies]

To: MuttTheHoople
for years the Soviet Union treated Jewish people quite well, but the USSR began crumbling when Stalin decided that Jews were the problem with Soviet Bolshevism.

The Soviet Union was murderous toward Christians from the start. Trotsky burned nuns alive in churches during the Civil War. Christian clergy, especially Orthodox clergy, were massacred by the thousands from the start of the USSR.

You don't think any of that offended God? That only when Stalin turned on the Jews was God offended?

17 posted on 03/16/2024 8:09:20 AM PDT by Angelino97
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 6 | View Replies]

To: faithhopecharity

“Great totals of our tax money is spent implementing discrimination via hiring, promotion, college admissions, college financial aid,”DEI” indoctrination and discrimination programs complete with their own Orwellian vocabularies and forced indoctrination sessions for all innocently caught working in such organizations, speech censorship, etc. There are now tens of thousands of people on the public payroll whose sole job duty is to promote more and more discriminatory “thought” and wider and wider discriminatory programs, activities — and to enforce it -—all at taxpayer expense.”

quotes from the “International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights”:

Article 20

1. Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law.

2. Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.

https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/international-covenant-civil-and-political-rights

The United States is a state party to the Covenant.


18 posted on 03/16/2024 8:10:44 AM PDT by Brian Griffin
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 14 | View Replies]

To: icclearly

A lot depends on Christian virtues, which of course need not be solely possessed by Christians.

Christ is often described as a shepherd and as a savior, both for good cause.


19 posted on 03/16/2024 8:15:12 AM PDT by Brian Griffin
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 12 | View Replies]

To: MtnClimber

In 1872, Florida law required public schoolteachers to promote Christian virtues.


20 posted on 03/16/2024 8:16:51 AM PDT by Brian Griffin
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first 1-2021-4041 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson