Slinkyworld
History doesn't repeat itself; it compounds.
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Back when Stephen Bannon was riding Donald Trump’s coattails towards political relevance, he enjoyed riffing off the idea of the “fourth turning.” It’s the not so novel trope that history repeats itself — every 80 years or so, in fact. How convenient: Eighty-ish years ago, the forces of ethno-nationalism rose to geopolitical salience on the back of economic resentment and junk eugenics. Eighty-ish years later, here they are again thanks to many of the same factors.
If only it were so simple. If history really just repeated itself, it would be easy to nip bad actors in the bud. Look, a man with a funny mustache! Get ‘em! This tack overlooks the phenomenon of path dependency. What appears foregone in our present was just a past present’s vague future. Spotting the goodies and the baddies, who is becoming which and going in what direction, is never as obvious in the moment looking ahead as it is afterwards looking back.
History matters: Old inputs generate the outputs that become new inputs — so the very thing we are to watch out for morphs into something else as soon as it becomes the thing we are watching out for. A constant moving target.
The victims of past perpetrators can become, by way of their erstwhile victimhood, perpetrators of new ones. Up close in our present, their own victimhood may not appear as clean-cut as that of those forever pasted to their weaker status, far away from us now thanks to the stickiness of linear time. Hindsight is not 20/20, but monocular, flattening our view until everything collapses onto a single plane of righteousness. You’re either on it or you’re not.
That plane is merely one of perception, of course. The layers of reality are much less comfortable to contend with. Roman Polanski, to take an on-the-nose example, is both a Holocaust survivor and a convicted rapist of a minor. Does his macro persecution deserve the same collective sympathy despite the micro prosecution of his vile act? How many Polanskis are out there to muddy the clear waters with which history washes away the blemishes of human behavior?
Flipping the question to the present: To be worthy of such collective sympathy, is it enough to be collectively vulnerable or must each and every member of the collective also meet a subjective moral standard that the past does not have to fulfill and no person, fallible by mortal definition, could ever reasonably uphold?
To paraphrase Masha Gessen in Berlin last year, who was surely paraphrasing a much larger discourse, the only substantive difference between our moral certitude now and theirs then is Auschwitz. We can imagine it because it is there for us to conceptualize. They could not because it wasn’t for them.
That doesn’t make us better; it makes us lucky. As current events demonstrate, it surely does not make us smarter.
History, therefore, is not a cycle on repeat. The image is not of a circle waiting to meet up with itself, but a Slinky — moving continuously forwards as it simultaneously collapses in on itself, forever, amid a constant tumble down an unending staircase of time. The Slinky is the same, as are its motions, but the step it’s on is always different. However subtle the change, we cannot expect the coil to present itself on one step the same way it did on the step before or the one to come.
If Polanski is too individual of an example, the communists are not. They were hardly cuddly. In interwar Germany, they went toe-to-toe with the Nazis’ Brownshirts, bashing heads in and threatening public order. They also supported unions and worker rights. Whatever their condemnable excesses that fell outside the norms of democratic politics, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht probably didn’t need to get kidnapped by far-right lunatics, tortured, and executed — their remains dumped into Berlin’s canal.
Yada yada yada the communists were some of the first to get shipped to the camps. A lot of them were also Jews — double whammy. We know the rest.
We’re not there yet, but in Slinkyworld we don’t need to be. In polls and protests, millions of people are watching what’s happening in Gaza and saying I dunno … this maybe seems wrong? They’re looking at Ukraine and saying But, wait. What? The pro-Palestine voices outnumber the pro-Israel ones (imprecise designations, to be sure) by a long shot, which in a democratic context should count for something. Instead, many of those democracies are making ample use of their constitutional monopoly on the use of force to suppress them.
On this and other issues, that establishment liberal parties running them then bemoan the disillusionment many voters feel, either turning off or towards an alternative as a result, can only be some mix of ignorance, arrogance, and incompetence. The task of convincing wary voters to choose the “less bad” option to “stop authoritarianism” becomes that much more difficult when the philosemitism of the liberal class merges with the Islamophobia of the New Right, whose ethno-national zeal for Israel retools a more sinister antisemitism that never went away.
In Germany and the United States, given their long histories of state violence and trading ideas on racial segregation and repression, it’s a wonder no one’s been killed after months of street protest and weeks of campus escalation. Intimidation, police brutality, and travel bans will have to do for now. In a span of four years we’ve gone from “defund the police” to “send in the police.” Then, as now, most protests are peaceful. In 2020, several people still ended up dead. This election year, it’s not even summer yet.
Efforts to discredit demonstrators, as many mainstream political and media actors in the two countries have gone to great lengths to do, has a Trumpian ring to it. Writing people off as “outside agitators,” Jew haters, just there to hang with the cool kids, or simply too ill-informed to dare speak up about far-away events they couldn’t possibly understand (“It’s complicated!”) isn’t all that different from talk of migrant “criminals,” “real” Americans, or “finding” votes. From casting all those protesters as just a bunch of antisemites, it is not a long walk to buying the lie that the Biden ballots in 2020 were fake.
Democracies don’t pick winners and losers. That’s what Joe Biden’s “autocracies” do. Talk of “outsiders” may literally mean in relation to a college campus, but the subtext is one of legitimacy. If protest is “chaos" carried out by questionable actors, you can shut it down — and worse.
Protest is chaos. It is meant to disrupt. Biden’s position, now that he finally has one, sounds reasonable on the face of it, but is actually deeply cynical: Freedom of expression is your right, but please, do it in a way that complies with the forces you are protesting. By that measure Martin Luther King, Jr., would have died in the Birmingham jail. The entire civil-rights movement would have been reduced to black extremists seeking to violently destroy white America’s comfortable life. One must wonder what the path of human “progress” would look like if no one ever put any pressure on it to change.
Whether on the grass outside the Bundestag or on quads across America, all the above complaints surely apply to some extent. Protests can be annoying and those involved obnoxious — too blinded by an insufferable sense of self-righteousness to see their own classism and contradictions. They’re also, like, 20. Melodrama, overstatements, and dogmatism are par for the course, not some grave threat to social order in need of Congressional action or the National Guard. Like the ‘68ers before them, they too will one day tell kids to get off their normative lawn.
This is all besides the point. When the adults in the room have failed and dodged for decades, it’s disingenuous to blame students for the “gaping void of a humane, universalist, liberal movement to advocate for the cause of Palestinian freedom.” It’s also orientalist bromide. No one is asking where the humane, universalist liberal advocacy is as 2,000-pound bombs fall relentlessly on neighborhoods and humanitarian aid gets choked off. No one is demanding the “free them now” people to also say “ceasefire now,” as it is the other way around lest you be marked as a terrorist sympathizer.
Don’t hate the player, hate the game. Of the harassment and threats reported against Jews, some of it is just bad messaging falling prey to well-organized interest groups. Some of it is defensible arguments that dare offend untenable positions. (Too bad.) For whatever portion of it constitutes actual antisemitism posing a real threat to Jews for being Jews, organizers deserve at least as much plausible deniability for excesses on their “side” as Los Angeles-area Jewish groups do on theirs.
It would be useful to know what portion of it is actual antisemitism, but it’s unclear if those who most frequently wield the term really care to find out. If we need any further evidence that “antisemitism” has become little more than a xenophobic dogwhistle in the service of an increasingly theocratic geopolitical ally that doubles as a dumping ground for historical guilt, we need only to look to the political response to Charlottesville in 2017 and Pittsburgh in 2018 as a comparison. These were sites of a clear and present danger to Jews, but tellingly not to the state of Israel. If anything, the verbal and physical assaults on Jews that took place there, respectively, serve the hardline Zionist claim that Jews are only truly safe in Israel.
That means what’s good for Israel is, increasingly, bad for the Jews. If Jews don’t have reason to feel unsafe elsewhere, of course Israel can exist as the Jewish state, but does it need to? It is an awkward question that Jewish leaders and thinkers have grappled with since the inception of the Zionist movement, which the Holocaust further catalyzed. The Jewish diaspora is simultaneously Israel’s greatest asset and the evidence ruining its case, so conditions must be such to have your babka and eat it, too. As defending reproductive rights is for U.S. Democrats, so are the likes of Hamas and the scourge of antisemitism for Israel and its particularist allies: a problem better managed than solved.
A white supremacist left 11 Jews dead at the Tree of Life Synagogue and there was the usual performative outpouring of mourning and public condemnation. Yet there was no apparent need to strengthen laws or further crack down on domestic terrorism beyond warm-and-fuzzy messages of moral strength. Now, a right-wing Congress, full of Christian Zionist Republicans and blood-libel antisemites who think the Proud Boys-tinged storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to overturn a democratic election was kosher, is somehow the guardian of Jewish life against … encampment Passover seders? In their calculus, an overeager undergrad wearing a keffiyeh on campus poses a graver threat than a locked-and-loaded extremist, arising from their own ranks, gunning down Jews while they kibitz.
The lie is clear — as is for whom “safety” is really intended.
In passing H.R. 6090, with plenty of Democrats in-tow, the House of Representatives has managed the impressive hat trick of making life worse for Jews and Muslims/Arabs and everyone else’s fundamental rights all at the same time. The bill proudly advertises that it does not care much about Jewish safety, but rather shielding Israel from criticism. The bill’s sponsors clearly missed the irony of codifying the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which for all its flaws at least points out that global Jewry cannot be held accountable for the state of Israel, while it conceives Israel “as a Jewish collectivity.” The language approaches Elders of Zion territory, as tropes of antisemitism and philosemitism collapse into each other. For anyone with a grudge against Israel, targeting a Jew to express that ire is getting scarily simplified.
Many of those who comprise the Congressional majority may identify with the far-right aspirations of Israeli statecraft, but their German legislative counterparts should theoretically be at odds with it. It says so right on their campaign posters for June’s European elections. The Social Democrats’ message is somewhat confusing, however, in terms of its audience. Who else are you “stopping from drifting to the right” other than yourself — the ones currently in power? Those on deck to run things are already there.
German Officialdom may never escape its Leitkultur trap. It may never want to, content to project its Christianized Teutonic Imaginary on everything around it. Through that prism, all of Europe’s Jews are a monolith and Pinchas Goldschmidt their pope. We’d all have loved to have come by Aachen to pick up our prize, but you know, Ascension Day; we were at church.
In Slinkyworld, leadership is lacking and broken clocks are boundless. They’ll be right twice a day, but only by accident. Otherwise there’s no telling what the political time is. For the U.S. and Germany — the belated heroic vanquisher of genocide and the belatedly contrite perpetrator of it, respectively — it’s always Stunde Null. Unlike our post-history present, in which it’s just too complicated to know what’s right, the past is simple.
Never again “simply” means never forget. Nothing less, and more importantly, nothing more.