Jewlaks

Dostoevsky, literary poster boy of universal brotherhood and compassion, was also a really horrid antisemite.

Many other such bigots are perfectly happy to admit to the charge, but Fyodr was one of those, a bit like Gary Lineker, who vehemently denied it, even as he was ‘posting’ content which made it rather obvious.

Hatefulness goes against my profoundest principles, he would say, and in this he did seem to have a point. He also had his own version of the ‘some of my best friends’ get out clause. This is one the racist’s oldest subterfuges, whereby they highlight specific individuals they like, while demonising certain salient forms of the collective.

The recent online ‘faux pas’ involving Lineker hung not just on latent Nazi symbolism, but on a fanciful characterisation of Zionism, which has clear parallels with Dostoevsky’s ‘Jewish Idea’. 

 

In simple terms, Jews are just fine as long as long as they don’t go around being Jewish or attaching themselves to specifically Jewish aspirations or cultural patterns. If they do, they become a kind of existential threat to the wider civilisation.

Ultra-nationalism and Ultra-socialism were for a long time fairly compatible e.g. Vietnam, Cuba etc. But today Ultra Socialism seemingly rejects all expressions of Jewish post-colonial national aspiration, choosing to misrepresent it as the reverse phenomenon, a continuation of colonialism.

One can find some specific historical reasons for this, and others bound up with the complexities and absurdities of modern geopolitics, but deep down it is connected to one of the very oldest antisemitic tropes: the notion that Judaism itself presents a uniquely serious obstacle to most other forms of universal brotherhood and salvation. (For Dostoevsky universal meant Christian and Russian, but he would have barely understood the distinction. Some of the same civilisational violations he impersonalised via his ‘Jewish Idea’, he also fingered the ‘Turks’ (rather broadly defined) for in his novels.)

Lineker has thus been retreading ground that is essentially medieval, and this is one of the serious quibbles I have with the widespread 1930s Germany obsession, because the pathology has much deeper roots. In the Middle Ages every time Europe became obsessed with millenarian fantasies of worldly cleansing and the final imposition of Divine justice, there would be major pogroms.

One can see that the difficulty Dostoevsky perceived with the Jewish collective had analogues in other groups, notably the ‘commune-eaters’ referred to in The Brothers Karamazov by the Elder Zosima. These were the same Kulaks later exterminated en masse by Stalin: a group of people who seemingly lived by their own ‘selfish’ ideals within a romanticised rural society, and were thus like a tumour which had to be forcibly removed.

Corbyn is out celebrating Nakba Day today, pushing the loaded tale that 750,000 Arabs were forcibly evicted in 1947-8 by the dastardly Jews of Israel through no fault of their own, and of course no mention is going to be made of the even greater number of Jews who also had to up sticks at around the same time as they were driven out of assorted Muslim majority nations around the Middle East.

Within Corbyn’s worldview Israel now has to go for the same reason the Kulaks had to go in the USSR, yet the mental gymnastics involved are even more extreme, because achieving this involves a loose-ish alliance with Jihadists whose own ideal of brotherhood is about as ultra-exclusive and un-diverse as one could imagine. 

 

The South African Afrikaaner refugees showing up in Trump’s America are undoubtedly ludicrous, but there are certain parallels worth observing with Arab Muslims in the Levant: they are the descendants of a colonising culture which has consistently failed to accept or adapt to the 20th century post-colonial carve up as presented to them by the out-playing of history. They essentially desired to continue to run the whole show with the indigenous culture as, at best, second class citizens. (See also, Rhodesia.)

Being a substantial minority within a society run by peoples with an older claim was anathema to them, even though within it they’d enjoy more rights than they’d have ever given other ethnic groups if they’d held on. Time to play the victim.