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Toppled gravestones at Jewish cemetery in Missouri
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Sever Plocker

Hate crimes: With opinions comes responsibility

Op-ed: Sartre’s warning against seeing the anti-Semite solely as a person who ‘has opinions against Jews’ rather than as a person who has chosen to hate Jews, and is therefore mentally and morally willing to murder them, rings true today.

At the end of World War II, Europe found itself asking the following question: How did it happen? How did a remarkably civilized nation like Germany enthusiastically embrace a murderous Nazi ideology? And the equally troubling question: How did other nations devote themselves to the idea from which Nazism developed—fascism? 

 

 

The enigma of the spreading of fascism burdened the Europeans’ conscience even more than Nazism, which could have been labeled as an exclusively German phenomenon.

 

The Europeans gave themselves a calming answer: It wasn’t fascism that conquered our hearts and consciousness but a different feeling—conformism. The highly understandable human desire to be like everyone else, to do what everyone else does, to give up on an independent opinion and go with the herd. 

 

Graffiti on NYC subway. Whoever writes ‘Jews belong in gas chambers’ may, under certain circumstances, murder Jews (Photo: Gregory Locke) (Photo: Gregory Locke)
Graffiti on NYC subway. Whoever writes ‘Jews belong in gas chambers’ may, under certain circumstances, murder Jews (Photo: Gregory Locke)

 

This perception was expressed in art and literature. For example, in Alberto Moravia’s novel “The Conformist” and in Eugène Ionesco’s play “Rhinoceros.” When our family members and friends become raging rhinoceros, who are we to remain human? We are allowed to be like them, because there is no urge which is more natural than conformism.

 

The latest reincarnation of that thesis is embodied in Jonathan Littell’s novel, “The Kindly Ones”—an imaginary journal of a mentally disturbed SS officer, who participates in the most horrible killings of the war out of indifference and conformism rather than out of a strong faith in the Nazi idea.

 

The theory of passive acceptance of fascism and Nazism is also backed by social sciences. Sociologists wrote about the improved, modern and bureaucratic German annihilation machine, which turned the collaborators into grey executors. Intellectuals wrote about the “banality of evil.” Psychologists drew profiles of leading Nazis and fascists as rejected sexual perverts. The crowd was just drawn in by them. 

 

The perception of fascism—and in Germany’s case, Nazism—as a sort of contagious disease, streptococcus pyogenes which many people are infected with unwillingly, has infiltrated the popular culture as well.

 

Its most common image is the zombie, the walking dead. It’s a convenient image: The bloodthirsty zombie is not responsible for being like that. The adult Europeans who marched in the fascist/Nazi procession saw themselves, after its fall, as temporary, dormant zombies, who core no responsibility.

 

The first essays rejecting the conformism fable were published in the late 1940s. In his article about the Jewish question, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre defined the common anti-Semite as a person who has willingly chosen to hate Jews and is capable, therefore, of choosing to be a murderer as well.

 

Jewish German philosophers who immigrated to America published the findings of groundbreaking research about the authoritarian personality and its dangers (a study which has been forgotten due to being politically incorrect). 

 

Even the historians, gradually, removed the mask from the argument of the “silent majority,” which allegedly only nodded in agreement with the fascist and Nazi regime but actually did not left a finger. As more and more documents were revealed, it turned out that millions of Europeans were “willing executioners” in Hitler’s service, as defined by historian Daniel Goldhagen.

 

Fascism and Nazism were restudied not as a modern phenomenon but as anti-modernism. These ideologies were based on chaos, on superstitions, on mystical ceremonies, on the cancellation of rational thought, and primarily on racial hatred.

 

The hate, not the conformism, is what led and legitimized the murders, even of close neighbors, as Jan Tomasz Gross proved in his books about the murder of Jews by their polish neighbors. The horrors committed by the Hungarian and Croatian willing fascists, to mention but a few, were not inferior in any way to the Germans horrors. They may have even exceeded them.

 

The era of being relieved of any responsibility is over. Sartre’s warning against seeing the anti-Semite solely as a person who “has opinions against Jews” rather than as a person who has chosen to hate Jews, and is therefore mentally and morally willing to murder them, rings true with increasing relevance today.

 

Whoever writes “Jews belong in gas chambers” may, under certain circumstances, murder Jews. And whoever was raised on the slogan “death to the Arabs” and has adopted it as his world view may, under certain circumstances, murder Arabs—without any pangs of conscience, because according to his perception, they deserve to die.

 

A society that wishes to live and preserve its democracy must, therefore, punish him to the full extent of the law, and make an example of him for all to see. There are no extenuating circumstances for a murder committed out of faith or ideology. Forgiveness legitimizes the next murder, the next murders.

 


פרסום ראשון: 03.03.17, 15:16
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