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Denial Can Be Dangerous
Then on September 11, in the wake of rumors about a massacre in nearby Aran, a trustworthy Christian who had been sent there came back with firsthand confirmation; the entire community had been destroyed, and the streets were filled with the bodies of Jews. Rabbi Rozowski called a meeting to suggest buying ammunition in order to put up a fight and die with honor: Let us not go as sheep to the slaughter!” he proclaimed. “Let us die with the Philistines.” But still there were people who refused to believe the end was near, who were sure that the Germans were only after Jewish property and money, not Jewish lives, and the meeting ended in dissension. — Yaffa Eliach, There Once Was a World: a 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok*
This post is not written to elicit sympathy for the Jews of the shtetl of Eishyshok, which was part of various Eastern European countries at one time or another. Instead, I want to point out that it is dangerous to live in denial, to ignore the facts, to hide from the truth when your way of life is at stake.
Over and over again, the Jews of Eishyshok learned what was happening to Jews all around them; they knew of the history of anti-Semitism and had learned the value of living peacefully, when they could, with their neighbors. But acknowledging the barbarism that was taking place, and to which they were to fall victim, was simply too much to contemplate. The Germans had been kind to them during World War I; the Eishyshkians believed they would treat them as kindly this time. Until they didn’t.
To live in denial is a human trait. When we are directly at risk, we might tend to go in one direction or the other: we will either obsess about the dangers, or will hide in denial.
So, those lessons can be applied to today. We live in chaotic times, where we see violence, hatred, and destruction all over the country. I don’t believe that it is time for paranoia; instead, I think we must be realistic about the lawlessness that is going on, aided by the media, wealthy supporters, the radical Left, and disenfranchised citizens. Our citizens, through their words and deeds, who are stepping in to support these anarchists, are beyond foolish; they are a threat to our country, to the rule of law and to the Constitution. They think they are fighting for an important cause, but the cause is manufactured. They are planting the seeds of totalitarianism, dooming their children to a bleak future. They have no idea of what they are about to lose, and when they do lose their freedoms, they will deny responsibility. How long will it take before people are killed to justify “the cause”? What will the violence enablers say then?
We must find a way to drag them out of their denial and reticence before it’s too late. We must find a way to get out the truth. Otherwise, anarchy will reign, and we will be unable to find our way back to law and order and to a Republic.
That danger is not imminent, but I fear it is much closer than we think.
*On September 26, 1941, somewhere between 3,5oo and 5,000 people were killed and buried in mass graves.
My thanks to @ontheleftcoast for telling me about this tragic and informative book.
Published in Culture
Coolidge was pretty smart. I think Hoover was too, but he had a very bad hand dealt him. I don’t think Eisenhower was stupid; he just wasn’t really much on strategy. He held together the Brits and the Yanks long enough to take out Hitler. That took great diplomatic skill.
Of course, a person can be smart (and I agree re Coolidge) but people can decide he’s not smart. That’s a problem, too.
Hoover was dealt a bad hand, but he also played it very badly. He convinced companies not to lower wages even though prices were dropping, with the result that far more people lost their jobs than would have otherwise. He tried various means to keep prices high including having farmers slaughter livestock and plow crops under, even while people were going hungry. He also raised taxes near the end of his term as President. Much of FDR’s New Deal was little more than a continuation of Hoover’s failed policies.
This. Hoover was not stupid, but he turned out to be foolish. Coolidge was still alive in 1929 and should have been consulted. He had been faced with an earlier economic shock (1920-1922) that had lasted for a short period because Coolidge let the marketplace work it out. In many ways FDR ran on just doing a lot more of what Hoover had tried unsuccessfully.
Hoover didn’t have enough time to see that his policies were failing. FDR did have the time, but he turned the policies all the way up to eleven, where they continued to fail.
The guy who did it was responding to the great replacement. Anybody who gave that theory any credence in the public square enabled him, imho.
More broadly, people who give credence to, or amplify, garbage theories like that which lead logically to violence against a person or group of people, are enablers.
”I’m just saying” are weasel words.
What is the great replacement? I’ve never heard the term.
Last night my husband and I watched the early 1980s production of The Scarlet Pimpernel (Anthony Andrews and Jane Seymour). I was struck by the scenes of boisterous crowds cheering the work of Madame La Guillotine. It was just too close to Antifa crowds in our progressive cities (CHOP, anyone?).
I never imagined I would find familiarity in the Reign of Terror. God help us.
Chilling, @suspira. It’s so close to home that we will probably be seeing more and more parallels. Not good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement
That ‘Jews will not replace us’ crowd was one iteration.
I guess they’ll get rid of all of us, huh? These people are despicable. Thanks for adding to my vocabulary, @zafar. I think.
I think it’s more about *credentials* than it is about intelligence.
This is an excellent post. I share with you, Susan, the sense that the bottom has dropped out somehow, and that things we have taken for granted are no longer certain. I am nearing 60 years old, and I have never seen such uncertain times. My father is 93, and also senses that we are in unprecedented times. This is a guy who grew up in the Great Depression.
What can we do? Prepare in every way we can: Materially, financially, and most importantly, spiritually.
I keep thinking of 1 Peter 5:8: “Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.”
There seems to be some unholy spirit, some spirit of unreason, that has grabbed hold of people. It’s the only way I can express it. It’s terrifying, to tell the truth.
There are a lot of people who cannot be reached, because living in intellectually closed systems. Arthur Koestler, himself a former Communist, explained the nature of such systems very well:
(The closed system) is a system which cannot be refuted by evidence, because all potentially damaging data are automatically processed and reinterpreted to make them fit the expected pattern. The processing is done by sophisticated methods of causistry, centered on axioms of great emotive power, and indifferent to the rules of common logic; it is a kind of Wonderland croquet, played with mobile hoops. In the third place, it is a system which invalidates criticism by shifting the argument to the subjective motivation of the critic, and deducing his motivation from the axioms of the system itself. The orthodox Freudian school in its early stages approximated a closed system; if you argued that for such and such reasons you doubted the existence of the so-called castration complex, the Freudian’s prompt answer was that your argument betrayed an unconscious resistance indicating that you ourself have a castration complex; you were caught in a vicious circle. Similarly, if you argued with a Stalinist that to make a pact with Hitler was not a nice thing to do he would explain that your bourgeois class-consciousness made you unable to understand the dialectics of history…In short, the closed system excludes the possibility of objective argument by two related proceedings: (a) facts are deprived of their value as evidence by scholastic processing; (b) objections are invalidated by shifting the argument to the personal motive behind the objection. This procedure is legitimate according to the closed system’s rules of the game which, however absurd they seem to the outsider, have a great coherence and inner consistency.
The atmosphere inside the closed system is highly charged; it is an emoional hothouse…The trained, “closed-minded” theologian, psychoanalyst, or Marxist can at any time make mincemeat of his “open-minded” adversary and thus prove the superiority of his system to the world and to himself.
I think your choice of the young German is apropos. It expresses the corruption and exploitation of innocence that happens in the most dangerous of times. The Germans weren’t just killing Jews, they were sending their own children to their deaths. Genocide becomes national suicide. The ultimate death cult. We aren’t there yet, but at this point I for one am not putting limits on how bad things might get.
That’s a great explanation! Did that come from The Ghost in the Machine or another one of Koestler’s books?
It’s from his collection of essays, Bricks to Babel.
Thanks. Just ordered a copy.
There’s an interesting and unpleasant book by a German woman who became a Nazi operative at a fairly high level. (Account Rendered, by Melita Maschmann) Her initial attraction to Naziism was based on their stated intent to help the ordinary people; to her, this was a refreshing contrast to her mother’s snobbism. After going through a bad breakup with a boyfriend at age 17, she threw herself into her political work.
Her identification with Nazi ideology was so complete that even after the war, even when her American captors showed her pictures of the concentration camps, she asserted and believed that the photos were fake.
Brilliant and fascinating.
I believe the ‘Great Replacement’ thing originated as a response to certain political commentators who asserted that the American white working class was largely lazy, useless and dysfunctional, and that we would be better-off if we could replace them with hard-working immigrants.
Don’t have time to hunt for links at the moment, but IIRC these commentators were mostly but not exclusively on the Left.
I am not sure about the whole “Great Replacement” theory that wiki is discussing but the fact that the governments of the world are working to replace their traditional white Jewish/Christian population with non white, non Jewish / Christian populations seem to be pretty obvious.
Susan,
You are right to make this point. Jews must put pressure, especially on our own Jewish organizations. Only ZOA can be trusted when the chips are down to stand tall. The other organizations are at best fair-weather friends and sometimes our own worst enemy. The movie Defiance did a good job of dramatically telling the story you are interested in.
There are many other people who should learn from this lesson. Christians in the middle east have been subject to genocide many times, the Armenian Genocide only being the most notable. Right now the Marxist Chinese have shown their modern version of the final solution with their treatment of the Uyghurs.
We all wish not to think about this kind of horror but it is quite real and far from over.
Regards,
Jim
I don’t think it’s so much a conscious effort by governments as an emergent phenomenon driven by a combination of:
–employers seeking low-cost labor
–people who put a high value on their Empathy, and want to display it
–people who are themselves of immigrant descent & believe it would by hypocritical to keep others out
–politicians seeking votes from immigrant communities
–the contempt and fear that many educated/urban/upper-middle-class people feel toward non-college-educated working people, especially those who are rural, southern, and/or Christian…as discussed in my post here, which I believe I linked earlier in this thread.
Regarding this last point, see this twitter thread. These two individuals are an MSNBC anchor and a writer/journalist.
Okay, the image I just posted is pretty much unreadable, even when zoomed in, so here’s the summary:
Dave Weigel: I keep trying to make this point but don’t want to be patronizing. The Florida man with a HS degree and a pile of disposable income really is a perfect Trump supporter.
Chris Hayes: correct: white men without a four-year degree, and disposable income enough to buy a boat are genuinely the Trump base.
Some of the wisest people I know are those white men; some of the most ignorant are intellectuals.
The Democrats say how much they care about ‘working people’, but the contempt keeps leaking through.
Also, it is amusing to see people in the entertainment business…which is what a TV anchor basically is…considering themselves as intellectuals.
MSNBC is owned by Comcast, the operations of which are largely dependent on employees without college degrees…some but by no means all of them white? Does Comcast CEO Brian Roberts feel this way about his employees? If not, does he like having one of his *other* employees talking this way about them?
Now, David, there’s no point in sensible questions! Far too complicated for that group. [sarc off]
I wonder if you made the Aggrieved Group Studies graduates, plus the sociologists, English majors, et. al. into a separate group, how that would affect the numbers.
It is much worse than that- in late 1940 AFTER the fall of France, the Wehrmacht expelled (IIRC) 100,000 veterans who had proved their loyalty for being half Jewish. These were experienced, proven soldiers who would have been invaluable in Operation Barbarossa- but they were thrown out of the army just before they were needed most. In this, Hitler showed he was much less shrewd than Stalin- Stalin always placed those he didn’t trust in the front lines- thereby increasing the odds that their deaths would benefit him. There were many half Jewish officers- including Field Marshalls in the Luftwaffe (Milch).