The Fascist Propagandist Is At Least Honest

On the Guernica meltdown.

(source)

A truism commonly credited to Robert Conquest that should be ascribed to John O’Sullivan says, “All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.” It needs a corollary: All organizations that are not expressly pro-Jew over time become anti-Jew.

Alert reader James Croak, whose Backseat Driver is the first publication of Dissident Muse and which you should acquire without delay, sent in an LA Times story, “After a writer expressed sympathy for Israelis in an essay, all hell broke loose at a literary journal.” In summary, the magazine Guernica published an essay by “Joanna Chen, a liberal writer and translator who is Jewish and lives in Israel,” in which she explored “her struggles since Oct. 7 to connect with Palestinians.” Condemnations rained upon the magazine. More than a dozen staff quit, one of whom, erstwhile co-publisher Madhuri Sastry, called Chen’s essay “a hand-wringing apologia for Zionism and the ongoing genocide in Palestine.” Guernica retracted the essay from publication. As political author Lahav Harkov remarked, “God forbid someone might think Israelis are complex human beings, and not just demons.”

There’s a question as to what degree the writers who called Chen “a settler who has settler genocidal friends and raised settler genocidal children” and her essay a “rank piece of genocide apologia” are Jew-haters. We can explore it more thoroughly after Hamas, an actually racist, actually genocidal regime, returns the 135 Israeli hostages still in its talons. (The provisional answer is “total.”) As Bernard-Henri Lévy put it yesterday,

Never mind that a fifth of the population of this country “under apartheid” is made up of Arabs, Muslims, and Palestinians, who (without mentioning the Christian, Druze or Bedouin minorities) enjoy the same civil rights as their fellow Jewish citizens.

And let’s not mention the astonishing role reversal that has those crying out against genocide are the same people who call for the birth of a Palestine from the Jordan River to the sea that would involve an ethnic cleansing purging the entire region of all Jewish presence. (Apparently, pure genocide is OK, where imagined genocide is worthy of an impassioned outcry!)

This is where we are.

Indeed. Of note is the concluding remark about Chen’s essay from “an independent filmmaker from L.A.” as the LAT called Tim Nicholas, someone with Production Designer credits on a couple of tiresome-looking 6/10-rated movies.

I find open warmongering less nauseating than this sort of self-pitying faux-bleeding heart claptrap. The fascist propagandist is at least honest. The liberal propagandist never shuts up about how tormented they are by the terrible complexity of it all. Get over yourself.

There continue to be socialists who, whether out of dedication or lack of imagination, regard liberals as traitors for their incrementalism and accommodation, and divide humanity into the hoary trichotomy of socialists, liberals, and fascists. Nicholas may be such a person. The revealed worldview is also of a piece with the pathological incuriosity of contemporary identity politics in the arts and letters.

It furthermore reinforces a commonality I drew between postliberal progressives and postliberal conservatives in Art After Liberalism in 2021. To summarize, imagine an axis with Progressive and Conservative as poles. It expresses whether one prioritizes the defense of the oppressed or the defense of civilization. Imagine a cross-axis with Liberal and Postliberal as poles. It expresses whether one prefers the means of tolerance, individual rights, equality, and markets or their opposites, remedial intolerance, collective obligations, remedial inequality, and command economics.

Postliberal progressives and postliberal conservatives have opposite ends but common means. Hence the socialist can admire, however grudgingly, the fascist’s candor. It’s the liberal progressive’s tolerance that disgusts him. Imagine believing that the line between good and evil runs through all human hearts, as Solzhenitsyn put it, when the line is so clearly over there and we’re on the right side of it. Revolting.

This is where the Jews come in. We made the same deal in every nation in which we’ve lived, save for Israel. That deal says that we will be excellent and peaceful citizens, contributing to the prosperity of all if allowed. But there are three things we will not do. We will not worship the sovereign as a god. We will not worship the god whom the sovereign worships. And we will not regard the regnant ideology as if it were spiritually superior to Judaism. The country that most thoroughly accepted the deal, the United States of America, prospered for it. George Washington addressed the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island in 1790. “The reflection on the days of difficulty and danger which are past is rendered the more sweet, from a consciousness that they are succeeded by days of uncommon prosperity and security,” he noted, and continued:

The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

Washington closed with a reverent citation of Micah 4:4. The “enlarged and liberal policy” was a success not only because it was good for the Jews, but because it was right. We are the Eastern source of the Western idea of tolerance. Hence the Nicholases of the world despise us. He is an eternal type.

We made a different deal in Israel. As Israel opposition leader Yair Lapid explained in December, “The State of Israel wasn’t founded with the belief that antisemitism will disappear. It was founded so that we can tell antisemites that they can go screw themselves.” The Nicholases hate that even more. Better Hamas should prevail, they say, even if Hamas would establish a regime in which the making of films like Nicholas’s would be punishable by death.

Washington’s policy remains worthy of imitation, as does his example to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport. Proclaim your love of liberalism, and proclaim your love of the Jews. Let they who reply to such proclamations with biting and hissing be damned. They’re worse than useless to the oppressed and they blight civilization.

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