One of the signs spotted in the anti-Semitic mob at NYU on Monday read “Capitalism Is Deadly.”
Such a placard taking one side in an ethno-religious dispute over land strikes as a non sequitur (as does, perhaps, the intense interest here over a dispute so far away). The context of history shows that the linkage of these two seemingly disparate categories of ethno-religious, on the one hand, and economic ideology, on the other, though it may come across as out of place, occurs as anything but unusual. Demagogues over the decades use class resentments to stoke anti-Semitism and the seductive power of socialism to peg Jews as the bourgeoisie holding down the proletariat.
One need not operate as a modern-day Herodotus to deduce when in modern history did a movement meld anti-capitalism with anti-Semitism to gin up torch-bearing mobs as we saw Monday evening on cable news. This ideological/ethno-religious alchemy results in a fool’s gold in which Jews morph from people into dehumanized villains deserving of whatever provides catharsis to the angry mob. While invoking the imagery of yellow stars, gas chambers, and concentration camps falls on the side of hyperbole, one need not appeal to 80 or so years ago, but rather to seven or so months ago when Hamas slaughtered unarmed civilians to illustrate that ideas have consequences. Allowing bad ideas to go unchallenged, as sensible people have done on the campuses for decades, clearly unleashes consequences as well.
This ethno-religious/ideological combination seduced as far-left a figure as W. E. B. Du Bois when he traveled to Germany in 1936.
Ten years earlier, Du Bois went to the Soviet Union on a junket paid for, he suspected, by agents of the Kremlin. “I stand in astonishment and wonder at the revelation of Russia that has come to me,” proclaimed Du Bois upon his visit to “Holy Moscow” in 1926. “I may be partially deceived and half-informed. But if what I have seen with my eyes and heard with my ears in Russia is Bolshevism, I am a Bolshevik.”
Russia remained his true love. Ideological tourism in Hitler’s Germany nevertheless inspired similar half-baked proclamations.
In “The German Case Against Jews,” Du Bois ostensibly condemned anti-Semitism as he engaged in it. He wrote this article after he attended the Berlin Olympiad and characterized the German reaction to Jews as a “reasoned prejudice” based on “economic fear.” He relayed that Jews controlled the stock exchange, the legal profession, and business.
He described National Socialism as bringing about “a nation at work, after a nightmare of unemployment; and the results of this work are shown not simply by profits, but by houses for the poor; new roads; an end of strikes and labor troubles; widespread industrial and unemployment insurance; the guarding of public and private health; great celebrations, organizations for old and young, new songs, new ideals, a new state, a new race.”
Anti-Semitism manifests in various guises. The appeal to Du Bois then mirrors the appeal to the campus denizens now. This anti-Semitism relies most heavily neither on blood nor faith but the pseudo-intellectual idea that Jews fall into the oppressor class in the ideological obsession with hierarchies — economic, global, and otherwise. This tic owes to socialism, particularly of the Marxist variety and not, say, from Owenites or Noyesian Bible Communists — neither of which wished to kill their skeptics but instead to make house with them for the former and to make love to them for the latter.
The mob chanting, “It is right to rebel/NYPD, burn in hell!” near Columbia, and something other than “Boola, Boola” at Yale, gives hearers the sense that, provided the choice to kibbutz, copulate, or kill, many demonstrating would not pick A or B.
Of course, these discontents (like their heroes in Gaza) hold little power to effectuate the dystopian future they regard as utopian. They attend such institutions as Columbia, Yale, Harvard, MIT, the University of Michigan, and NYU. How long until they naturally ascend, as past graduates of their schools did, to power?
On this and much else, our universities are a time bomb.
READ MORE:
It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like 1938
Columbia University Turmoil Recalls the Hitler Youth
You Are Paying the Radicalization Machine
