More Jewish Stuff

[nancylebov]

There's more discussion of Why There Is No Jewish Narnia at osewalrus and ashnistrike.

A eulogy for Philip Klass (William Tenn), an excellent science fiction writer who did the sort of classic satire which seems to have fallen out of the field. It includes a link to him reading his "On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi", which is very sad, funny, and intelligent-- and hopeful from a certain angle. There's an interview for the first 40 minutes of the interview-- you could skip it, but where else are you going to find out that John Cage was a very good poker player? [1] Also, I'd say that Tenn was one of the best talkers in sf. One of my favorite programs items was just Tenn by himself talking for an hour.[2]

Sooner or later, every Jewish community hangs by nothing [3]. Jews are moving out of a Swedish town because of a combination of violence from Muslim immigrants and a left-wing Mayor who says that the violence is simply a natural reaction to Israeli policies. News story from interactiveleaf.

[1]Well, here, but I'm not going to transcribe the whole interview for you. The experimental composers of the era tended to like science fiction. There's probably a dissertation in there for someone.

[2] I've seen a discussion on rec.arts.sf.fandom of what program items people remember most fondly, and I think there was a consensus that they consisted of one or two well-chosen people who could just talk about whatever they wanted.

[3]A quote from the Tenn story. I hope a day comes when this doesn't make emotional sense any more.

Addendum:More discussion of "There Is No Jewish Narnia" at here, mostly listing more writers, but also with a discussion of whether Jewish symbols are as good fantasy fodder as Christian symbols.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

Jews are moving out of a Swedish town because of a combination of violence from Muslim immigrants and a left-wing Mayor who says that the violence is simply a natural reaction to Israeli policies.

Sickening. The connection between Nazism and the hatred of Jews which is found in too many Muslims is well-established, though not often mentioned. This hatred is based on twisted modern teachings, not the Quran.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

It would be nice if religions gave better resistance to bad ideas, but that might be too much to ask. I'm quite willing to say that modern Islam has a cultural problem that isn't based in its scriptures.

I'm working on a theory that even though religions give a lot of ethical advice, much of it good, getting ethical behavior isn't what religion is for. They might mostly exist for the emotional consolation which is gotten by group services-- I'm reading Pagel's Beyond Belief, which is about what Christianity was doing for the first 300 years. It didn't have creeds, and yet it was attractive enough to get a lot of converts.

You might be interested in this.

[avram]

The connection between Nazism and the hatred of Jews which is found in too many Muslims is well-established

Er, what?

Are you saying that Jew-hating Muslims are like Nazis because both groups hate/hated Jews? If so, to what end are you drawing this comparison?

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Don't both use The Protocols of the Elders of Zion?

madfilkentist may be talking about Occidentalism, a complex of ideas which portray an ideal past and potential future that's agricultural, military, obedient, and purified of the complex decadence of the city. It presents Jews, trade, cities, modern art, rights for women, homosexuals, religious and cultural tolerance, and probably a few more things as the enemy.

I'm not sure how old the anti-modern/anti-freedom and weirdness meme is-- but I've seen a claim that the virulent form is fairly modern and Western.

[avram]

I'm having trouble sorting out the actual ideas here.

Assuming that both the Nazis and al Qaeda (or whoever it is that we're assuming is described by Gary's "too many Muslims") both used/are using The Protocols -- so what?

Look, here's my concern: We're got two wars going right now, and a significant chunk of our political class is pushing for openly expanding things into Iran. (Covertly, we're already involved.) And some of the propaganda used to justify these wars is based on portraying this as another World War 2, with our enemies as new Nazis. Much of the pro-war propaganda leading up to our invasion of Iraq was very explicit on this point -- "Axis of Evil", Saddam Hussein as a new Hitler, the war's opponents as Chamberlain, etc.

The Protocols were originally published in Russia in 1903. So if use of The Protocols proves some kind of similarity, than logically both the Nazis and al Qaeda must be similar to Tsarist Russia. Right? But you don't generally hear anyone making this claim, not because it's any less logical than the argument that uses The Protocols to tie al Qaeda to the Nazis, but rather because it doesn't carry the same propagandistic payload. Modern Americans have all been trained to reflexively hate the Nazis (which isn't to say that the Nazis weren't extraordinarily hatable), but don't have any particularly strong emotions about Tsarist Russia. (Or even know anything about it, as shown by the anti-Obama protestors who seem to believe that the Soviet Union was characterized by a large number of czars.)

(Actually, there's a funny bit to that comparison, too. The most obvious thing held in common by al Qaeda, the Nazis, and the Russians who initially made The Protocols popular is that they all fought against the Russian Communists.)

Getting back to my point, it doesn't suffice (if your aim is rational argument, and not emotional propagandizing) to just say "Bob wants to ban smoking -- just like Hitler!" It's necessary to point out how Bob's desired smoking ban will (or at least could) lead to death camps, or the annexation of the Sudetenland, or the Autobahn, or whatever.

As far as "occidentalism" goes, I think it's a terrible name for a real phenomenon that isn't limited to eastern perceptions of westerners. As Jim Henley once wrote:

One of my regular correspondents today was complaining about the war being supported by "Red Staters." The irony is that most of the world consists of "Red States." They just don't happen to have Americans in them.

So "occidentalism" strikes me as a terrible name that implies that a worldwide phenomenon is characteristically Asian.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I was thrashing a little, trying to make sense out of what madfilkentist wrote.

My point about the Protocols was just that some fraction of Muslim anti-Semitism has a western source rather than being innately Muslim.

As for Occidentalism, I wouldn't mind a different name for the idea that virtue consists of obedience and simplicity for the vast majority of people, and only strong leaders and unthinking enforcement of tradition can keep the corrupting influences away.

IIRC, there was some of the "the only good people are soldiers and farmers and their leaders" attitude in the Classical era, so it isn't just Asian.

Let me know if you come up with a better name for it.

[avram]

Well, yeah, I suspect that there wasn't much sense there to be had, which is why I asked what he meant.

As better terms for that particular memeplex goes, how about calling it right-wing authoritarianism?

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

you could call it that, but there are a lot of people in the US who consider themselves to be on the right who are aren't deeply involved in that memeplex, and some Communist governments went in for it.

You could just call it authoritarianism, but that doesn't seem to have the depth of connotation we're looking for.

I'm tempted by "top-down neophobia", but that probably won't do it.

[avram]

but there are a lot of people in the US who consider themselves to be on the right who are aren't deeply involved in that memeplex

Yeah, but lots of Americans think "right-wing" means "opposed to big government". (Which it doesn't.)

some Communist governments went in for it

Which ones?

If you check out that "right-wing authoritarianism" Wikipedia link above, you'll see mention of the work of Canadian psychologist Robert Altemeyer. He developed a scale for measuring susceptibility to authoritarianism, and it turned out that there really is a correlation between that and right-wing political beliefs.

Altemeyer also put together a test to measure left-wing authoritarianism -- people like the Weathermen and revolutionary Maoists of the '60s and '70s. But when he looked for them with his test, he couldn't find any.

A few years ago, John Dean wrote a book called Conservatives Without Conscience which drew upon Altemeyer's research. Austin Bramwell wrote a critical review of it for American Conservative magazine, and the magazine gave Altemeyer space for rebuttal, in which he talks about the details of his work. He also wrote a general-audiences book, available free in PDF format, but the magazine rebuttal is much shorter.

[avram]

Actually, I've allowed myself to become distracted from the point. I think Altemeyer's research applies only to North America in the 1990s and early 2000s. Obviously, left-wing authoritarianism has existed in other times and/or places, and may come to exist again here.

The point I should have made: sexism, racism, homophobia, excessive nationalism, and hatred of innovations in art are all right-wing phenomena, by definition. Anti-Semitism and anti-urbanism are right-wing phenomena by association -- over time, those associations will fade, or perhaps already have. An authoritarian movement that encourages right-wing phenomena is a right-wing authoritarian movement.

A left-wing authoritarian movement would encourage (some) different behaviors, although I have a tough time imagining a non-nationalistic authoritarianism. Maybe some kind of United Nations black-helicopter thing, like the militia types fantasize about -- dissolving national borders by force, relocating everyone randomly to break up ties of nation, race, and religion.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I'd been meaning to bring up the changes in who's likely to be authoritarian, and not getting around to writing it.

If we take Communism to be left-wing (I'm capitalizing it to distinguish the kind that actually managed to be in charge of governments from the voluntary commune sort), then at least the Khmer Rouge and the Cultural Revolution were anti-urban.

I don't know if you'd count it as excessive nationalism, but both the USSR had and China still has policies intended to weaken minority cultures.

That kind of thing wasn't, afaik, part of the theory of Communism, but the strength of nationalism and ethnic identification were wildly underestimated by the original batch of idealists-- who also probably didn't realize how tyrannical those governments would turn out to be.