Victor Davis Hanson: When I Was Young… (The world turned upside down)

VDH ^ | March 23, 2004 | Victor Davis Hanson

[quidnunc]

When I was young, my parents in the early 1960s told me to ignore stories about the “Jews.” Of course, out here in rural California, I never met such distant persons, but only heard about them from disgruntled farmers (who, I wager, had never met any either). These pesky “Jews” apparently in some secretive cabal controlled the entire fruit-market of the United States! “They” — not the paradoxes of interstate commerce and the cutthroat nature of American marketing — explained why we got $3 a box for plums while “they” took $20.

Middle men, market manipulators, and secret smart guys who trafficked in inside breaks and shady deals — all these right-wing farmers used to swear pulled the strings of the American fruit market. When I asked my mother if this could possibly all be true, she would sigh, and say, “No, no, no. You see when people fail, or when they are angry, or they become afraid and confused, they always blame those who are different or successful or confident. And often that means Jewish people, most of whom our neighbors have never met.”

And then I grew old, and learned that it wasn't any more reactionary men of the soil who evoked the Jews to explain why they were not listened to, or felt weak, or were frustrated, but rather often very liberal, and self-acclaimed progressives. Instead of Shylock fruit merchants, the new sneaky Jew was the neoconservative — with a funny-sounding name like Wolfowitz or Perle who, due to some sinister genius, had hoodwinked red-blooded Americans into fighting and dying for the Likud party in Israel. Not 9-11, not Saddam Hussein's horrific record of genocide, not some systematic effort to end rogue states and terrorist havens, and not an idealism to bring consensual government to the landscape of the Middle East explained why we went to Iraq. No, it was once again the Jews.

When I was young, my mother and father also lectured me about the paranoid style in American politics. “There will always be someone like a McCarthy waving papers and shouting conspiracies,” they preached. At the time, inasmuch as they were agrarian conservative Democrats in a sea of reactionary Republicans, I think they were telling me to watch out for phraseology from our politicians like “cooked up,” “treason,” “traitor”-and especially to be on the look-out when they screamed and frothed, and made all sorts of scary allusions like “some leaders have told me in private” or “the greatest example of (fill in the purported travesty) in American history.”

And then I grew old and listened to Howard Dean quote al Qaeda's about killing Spaniards as proof of our blunders and ponder the “theory” that George Bush knew in advance of 9-11; and Ted Kennedy refer to cabalistic meetings in Texas; and Al Gore scream, veins bulging and hair tossed, about the administration's treasonous war; and the Democratic National Chairman alleging that a President was AWOL while in the military; and John Kerry hinting at unnamed foreign leaders contacting him in secret — the conspiracists Chomsky, Gore Vidal, or Michael Moore no doubt all grinning off-stage.

-snip-

[quidnunc]

FYI

[stradivarius]

VDH BUMP!

[stradivarius]

That's why the term "liberal" is anachronistic. They're not "liberal" - they oppose liberty.

The proper term for these nuts is "Leftists".

[Jim_Curtis]

Wonderful work. You get the feeling that in a different age, when the truth didn't need to work overtime to battle lies, that this guy would have been a great artist.

[MEG33]

I wish we would all cease using the word liberal instead of leftist, socialist or communist.

Hanson is terrific.

[expatpat]

I agree completely with your first sentence. However, "Socialist" is just as good IMO as "Leftist"

[stradivarius]

Victor Davis Hanson Ping!

[dennisw]

great!

[lainde]

Bimp for the brilliant VDH!

[lainde]

Or bump.

[goldstategop]

Substitute "American" for "Jew" and you can understand why the rest of the planet thinks we're too ugly to share it with them.

[BigWaveBetty]

And when I hear anti-Semitism, hatred of Israel, warning about Jews in government, fury about foreign aid, visceral hatred and rude exclamations, sinister conspiracy theories, and racial separatism it usually has come far more often from someone on the Left than Right and from one educated and affluent rather than poor and ignorant.

Book Description
"Although our government hardly acknowledges the fact, and fails to orient its policies accordingly," begins Gabriel Schoenfeld in this profoundly disquieting book, "the United States is today locked in a conflict with adversaries for whom hatred of Jews lies at the core of their beliefs." To anyone with even a modest acquaintance with current events, it is clear that the Muslim world is today the epicenter of a particularly virulent brand of anti-Semitic hatred. But anti-Semitism has also reawakened dramatically in Europe, where it was long thought to be completely dormant if not entirely extinct. And as Schoenfeld shows, it is also making unprecedented headway in the United States, a country where it has never before found truly fertile soil.

"The Return of Anti-Semitism" traces the confluence of several lethal currents: the infusion of judeophobia into Islamic fundamentalism; the rise of terrorist movements (including al Qaeda) that are motivated in large measure by a pathological hatred of Jews; the deliberate and well-financed export of anti-Semitism from the Muslim world into Europe and from there into the United States; and the rebirth of older anti-Semitic traditions in the West that were thought to have ended along with Nazism.

Schoenfeld shows that the most vicious ideas about Jews today are not voiced by the downtrodden and disenfranchised fringe elements of society, but by its most highly educated and "progressive" segments. This is true in the Islamic world, and it is even truer in the West. One is less likely to find anti-Semites today in beer halls and trailer parks than among the mass media and in faculty lounges. And while yesterday's anti-Semitism appeared in periods of economic and political stress, its alarming return comes at a time when the Western democracies are secure and free from the social turmoil that contributed to the rise of fascism.

An old disease, one that many assumed was permanently eradicated, has reappeared in our world. "The Return of Anti-Semitism" is a profound analysis of a great and growing danger.

[NZerFromHK]

I don't know what to say but, according to this foreigner - myself, today's post-liberal Left looks a lot like the old Tories you see among the likes of Neville Chamberlain (who was BTW very anti-Americanism in his days), British Foreign Office establishments, or any of the old dandy Conservatives (with capital C) in continental Europe.

Sure, John Birch Society still exists and still promotes old paranoid right-wing ideas and Pat Buchanan is a contemporary example of "old Right", but more often than not they ended up quoted (and approved) by today's far left organizations like "People's Liberation League".

[Tolik]

Victor Davis Hanson moral clarity huge BUMP  

[please freepmail me if you want or don't want to be pinged to Victor Davis Hanson articles]

If you want to bookmark his articles discussed at FR: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/k-victordavishanson/browse

His NRO archive: http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson-archive.asp

His blog: http://victorhanson.com/index.html     BIO: http://victorhanson.com/Author/index.html

Yes, he is listened by the Bush Administration; they like him maybe as much as we do: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1085464/posts?page=6#6

[Rummyfan]

Bump!

[Tolik]

Thanks for the ping.

VDH BUMP!

[Dog]

that this guy would have been a great artist.

He IS a great artist. The best writer out there today.

[tpaine]

Your link doesn't lead to the rest of the article. -- Where is it?

[FreedomPoster]

The world has changed. What was once liberal is now illiberal, and the old progressivism has become mean-spirited and opportunistic. What was once idealistic is seen as calculating. When I read about the “Jews” now, it is almost always negative and emanates either from the European left or the so-called liberal university here in the United States.

VDH is a Zell Miller Democrat whose party has left him.