Jun 16, 2023 07:52 PM
https://mosaicmagazine.com/response/poli...-semitism/
EXCERPTS: [...] This Traditionalism was deeply rooted in the tensions of the 19th century. ... As liberal democracy, political equality, and industrial urbanization transformed the European landscape, those most ill-at-ease in the changing social order often sought refuge in an atavistic conception of the imagined past ... in visions of (what they saw to be) pre-Christian or pagan mythologies that celebrated natural and spiritual hierarchies. Such visions centered around the person of a heroic (and usual Aryan) warrior whose strength and inborn position in the dominance hierarchy would be a vital counterweight to the faceless throngs of the modern urban crowd, in which everybody and every community is identical, exchangeable, and indistinguishable.
[...] this ideology had both an implicit and explicit villain: the Jew. The Jew was coded as the “rootless cosmopolitan,” the disloyal outsider who controlled not things-in-themselves—not land, not rivers, not farms, not even, as John Ganz notes in his recent excellent essay on reactionary modernism, machinery—but instead only something magical and disembodied: capital itself. The Jew was in this schema the ultimate modern man, whose trade was not in the earth, or indeed in anything material, but rather in the realm of speculation: in money, in ideals. And so the Jew became the scapegoat for a century’s worth of frustration with Enlightenment modernity, with democracy, and with what was seen as a society uprooted.
For denizens of the long 19th century, the name historians give to the period running from the French revolution to the outbreak of World War I, the “Jewish question” was inextricable from these fomenting problems of both national identity and spiritual alienation. ... the figure of the Jewish person was culturally understood as being the primary beneficiary, if not the outright manufacturer, of this new post-Enlightenment age...
[...] In more than a few regards, the cultural chaos of our own era—its decadence, its spiritual restlessness, its pursuit of transgression for transgression’s sake—seems to map perfectly onto the anxieties of the 19th century. And the anti-Semitism of today’s far right is no less deeply rooted in a neo-pagan obsession with rootedness than that of their Wagnerian forebears. There are of course, as Berens notes, the obvious examples: neo-Nazi groups like the Wolves of Vinland that explicitly celebrated their pagan forebears. But then, she argues, it is with Christian nationalism, rather than modern paganism, that contemporary anti-Enlightenment anti-Semitism finds its natural home.
I’m less sure. Certainly, when it comes to the official stated affiliations of many of today’s most prominent and vocal anti-Semites—from Kanye West to Marjorie Taylor Greene—this is true. And the most explicit pagan white nationalists have since the 2017 Charlottesville attacks largely receded from public view.
But, in the realm of today’s “redpilled” Internet culture, religious identification is perhaps a far more slippery proposition than once it was. And what I call Nietzschean pagan atavism—involving an obsession with secret wisdom, with primal and supposedly evolutionary dominance hierarchies, with physical strength and paleo diets as integral to a revived heroic masculinity, and with a shuddering disgust at all things coded as effeminate and, inevitably, as “Jewish” (soy, for instance, or electric rather than gas stovetop burners)—is an integral part of the implicit ideology and metaphysics of today’s far right.
Wokeness—the new target for sometimes reasonable anxieties about equality, democracy, and urbanization—is to today’s pagan atavists what Judeo-Christianity and its inherent “slave morality” were to Nietzsche and Evola. And the language of culture-war-as-cosmic-battle can be found in several of today’s most prominent right-wing thinkers, including Jordan Peterson and Peter Thiel, both of whom profess Christian affiliation while hoping that Christianity can be instrumental in the restoration of pre-modern virtues... (MORE - missing details)
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On the flip-side, however, far-left movements like decolonality and decolonization of knowledge also return to the cultural views and values of a pre-modern or non-Western era. Which in turns foments nationalism itself as those indigenous beliefs of the past reassert themselves and secure their power.
EXCERPTS: [...] This Traditionalism was deeply rooted in the tensions of the 19th century. ... As liberal democracy, political equality, and industrial urbanization transformed the European landscape, those most ill-at-ease in the changing social order often sought refuge in an atavistic conception of the imagined past ... in visions of (what they saw to be) pre-Christian or pagan mythologies that celebrated natural and spiritual hierarchies. Such visions centered around the person of a heroic (and usual Aryan) warrior whose strength and inborn position in the dominance hierarchy would be a vital counterweight to the faceless throngs of the modern urban crowd, in which everybody and every community is identical, exchangeable, and indistinguishable.
[...] this ideology had both an implicit and explicit villain: the Jew. The Jew was coded as the “rootless cosmopolitan,” the disloyal outsider who controlled not things-in-themselves—not land, not rivers, not farms, not even, as John Ganz notes in his recent excellent essay on reactionary modernism, machinery—but instead only something magical and disembodied: capital itself. The Jew was in this schema the ultimate modern man, whose trade was not in the earth, or indeed in anything material, but rather in the realm of speculation: in money, in ideals. And so the Jew became the scapegoat for a century’s worth of frustration with Enlightenment modernity, with democracy, and with what was seen as a society uprooted.
For denizens of the long 19th century, the name historians give to the period running from the French revolution to the outbreak of World War I, the “Jewish question” was inextricable from these fomenting problems of both national identity and spiritual alienation. ... the figure of the Jewish person was culturally understood as being the primary beneficiary, if not the outright manufacturer, of this new post-Enlightenment age...
[...] In more than a few regards, the cultural chaos of our own era—its decadence, its spiritual restlessness, its pursuit of transgression for transgression’s sake—seems to map perfectly onto the anxieties of the 19th century. And the anti-Semitism of today’s far right is no less deeply rooted in a neo-pagan obsession with rootedness than that of their Wagnerian forebears. There are of course, as Berens notes, the obvious examples: neo-Nazi groups like the Wolves of Vinland that explicitly celebrated their pagan forebears. But then, she argues, it is with Christian nationalism, rather than modern paganism, that contemporary anti-Enlightenment anti-Semitism finds its natural home.
I’m less sure. Certainly, when it comes to the official stated affiliations of many of today’s most prominent and vocal anti-Semites—from Kanye West to Marjorie Taylor Greene—this is true. And the most explicit pagan white nationalists have since the 2017 Charlottesville attacks largely receded from public view.
But, in the realm of today’s “redpilled” Internet culture, religious identification is perhaps a far more slippery proposition than once it was. And what I call Nietzschean pagan atavism—involving an obsession with secret wisdom, with primal and supposedly evolutionary dominance hierarchies, with physical strength and paleo diets as integral to a revived heroic masculinity, and with a shuddering disgust at all things coded as effeminate and, inevitably, as “Jewish” (soy, for instance, or electric rather than gas stovetop burners)—is an integral part of the implicit ideology and metaphysics of today’s far right.
Wokeness—the new target for sometimes reasonable anxieties about equality, democracy, and urbanization—is to today’s pagan atavists what Judeo-Christianity and its inherent “slave morality” were to Nietzsche and Evola. And the language of culture-war-as-cosmic-battle can be found in several of today’s most prominent right-wing thinkers, including Jordan Peterson and Peter Thiel, both of whom profess Christian affiliation while hoping that Christianity can be instrumental in the restoration of pre-modern virtues... (MORE - missing details)
- - - - - - - - -
On the flip-side, however, far-left movements like decolonality and decolonization of knowledge also return to the cultural views and values of a pre-modern or non-Western era. Which in turns foments nationalism itself as those indigenous beliefs of the past reassert themselves and secure their power.
