First Principles

Antisemitism is different from most other forms of racism. In order to combat it, we need to understand what is a conspiracy theory.

New York Times Opinion @nytopinion

“Ye, Irving and the rest of us would do well to remember that African Americans and Jews are passengers on the same ship facing the ferocious headwinds of bigotry and hatred,” writes @MichaelEDyson.

nyti.msOpinion | Blacks and Jews, AgainBlacks and Jews have competed, quarreled, and jostled with each other to gain attention and empathy for our struggles and the injustices we confront.

It's customary to hear well-meaning people intone something along these lines: "Antisemitism and anti-black racism are part of the same fight.” In a basic sense, this is true: they are both odious forms of hatred that endanger people and corrode society. Diminishing them as much as possible is part of the same overarching defense of our civic health.

But it’s a platitude that papers over essential differences between two opposite forms of racism. Few human phenomena can be described with an algorithm. There are always ambiguities and exceptions. Nevertheless, it’s heuristically valid to arrange racism into two categories: a caste-oriented, “down-punching” form and a conspiracist, “up-punching” form.

By and large, anti-black racism constructs an underclass that the racist regards as inferior, to be segregated, plundered, and exploited. In the main, Antisemitism views the Jews as a preternaturally powerful, evil elite that plunders and exploits the Antisemite—and the broader society he seeks to awaken to the struggle. In the ugliest of ironies, however much he rails about Jewish degeneracy, the Antisemite invests the Jews with traits and abilities that make them seem diabolically superior.

Violence—often sexual violence, as the scourge of lynching in America shows—is the force for cohering a social order founded on caste-based racism. Step out of line and violence is guaranteed. Sometimes it’s the extranormal violence of terrorism, which could assume an orgiastic character in grotesque galleries of cruelty in the Deep South—gleeful mobs of white people torturing and mutilating Black people and harvesting souvenirs from their ravaged bodies to share among the town.

Violence, of course, is also a feature of Antisemitism, but it has a different ultimate purpose. All conspiracy theories are based on the same premise—history and society are made and remade through cosmic struggle between the forces of Good and Evil. If not in name, these contending forces are in substance: God, the Angels, and the righteous on earth versus the Devil, demons, and the Devil’s helpers on earth. Antisemitism, in its historically salient form, is a conspiracy theory. And like all conspiracy theories, Antisemitism seeks to identify the Devil’s helpers.

The purpose of violence in caste-based racism is to maintain the social order. The purpose of violence in conspiracist racism is to identify a group of people who will serve as a kind of burnt offering—a scapegoat to be purged in a spectacular display of salvationist violence. The goal—as with the Holocaust—is to destroy the social order in order to save those who are worthy of deliverance.

In this fundamental set of opposites, you can begin to see why the experiences of Blacks and Jews, who have been drawn to each other’s struggles, are more illuminating in their differences than similarities.

In order to combat Antisemitism, we need to understand conspiracism and the conspiracy theories it generates. In order to do that, we need to get down to first principles. Perhaps most pressing is a matter of definition—what is a conspiracy theory?

It will be a major endeavor of this newsletter to answer that question.