"I misunderstood you correctly the first time."
- Tommy Smothers (1937-2023)
The year is ending...
Israel continues to reduce Gaza to rubble and the UN votes almost unanimously to call for a 'humanitarian' ceasefire, without holding the terrorist group Hamas responsible for the catastrophe in the first place. It was a shameful vote, and you know how I know this? The next day the political leader of Hamas publicly thanked the government of Canada for their support. [What is the surest quickest and most humane way to make this tragedy stop? For all the nations of the planet to demand, in one strong unanimous clear voice, for the terrorist organization Hamas to release the hostages and surrender, not to side with the terrorists and gang up against Israel - in other words, when hell freezes over.]
The Presidents of Harvard, MIT, and University of Pennsylvania testified before Congress refusing to say whether calling for the genocide of Jews constitutes harassment according to their school codes of conduct. The President of UPenn and Chair of the Board of Governors were forced to resign, after major donors came out publicly against them. The President of Harvard received the support of her Board of Governors to stay on, of course.
Congressional Republicans were congratulated by Vladimir Putin for blocking further funding to Ukraine.
14 students and faculty members in the Department of Philosophy were murdered (25 more were injured) at Charles University in Prague. Were this in the United States, it wouldn't be much of a surprise. In the Czech Republic it's the worst mass shooting in its history, and not something often seen in Europe. We don't know much at this point about the killer's motive (he was a 24-year old Masters student in History), but the symbolism is unmistakable.
Is this what the collapse of western civilization as we know it looks like? Or this all just symptomatic of shifting political alignments? Maybe both?
To me it feels different from the usual social or political re-alignments. We've lived through regional conflicts before, especially in places where there was poverty and political instability. Perenially that's been in post-colonial Africa and the Middle East, but in the last few decades we've also seen it happening in parts of Europe, particularly in the Balkans, and former Soviet Union.
The greatest difference of the last 20 years has been the internal political division and instability of the United States, which sends shockwaves around the world. We've seen that happen before. Perhaps the most domestically turbulent decade of the 20th century in the United States was the 1960s, marked by political assasinations, social unrest, mass protests against war and civil rights riots. And yet, in spite of that turbulence, public confidence in the institutions of government and authority remained high. The social contract remained relatively strong and intact. The Cold War with the Soviet Union and the pride of the space race ending with the Americans planting a flag on the moon played a role. What we're witnessing today is deeper and more fundamentally threatening; the fraying of the social fabric. Trump did not initiate it. He took advantage of a process that began in the late 1990s and early 2000s which exacerbated fragilities and vulnerabilities of American democracy, including the economic stagnation of the middle classes and growing disparity of wealth between the top five percent and the bottom ninety-five percent.
As the sole true global superpower (political, military, economic, cultural), the United States has been the guarantor of international stability since the end of World War 2. For the last 20 years or so, America seems to be questioning that role. It's this turning inward, increasing isolationism, doubting itself and becoming consumed with its own insecurities, that has precipitated the current situation. Some commentators point to the advent of social media, in the first decade of the 21st century, as a key contributing factor. Undoubtedly it has played an important role, making many of us impervious to facts, doubtful of expertise and authority, and politically apathetic. We are less engaged in honest, meaningful relationships and conversations, and more interested in having our predispositions, biases and prejudices reinforced. This has led to the greatest crisis of our age: A crisis of trust, in ourselves, in each other, and by extension in our institutions, be they governmental, regulatory, educational, and even faith-based.
Yesterday I watched an interview with historian Timothy Snyder on his new book called Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. Essentially, as I understand it, not having read the book, it's about resisting the western tropes we have imbibed about the Holocaust and the necessity of re-visiting it for new prescient lessons. The one that resonated with me is an observation he makes about where most Jews were murdered. It was in the countries where the local population could be counted on to participate (either actively or passively). These were countries where there was a complete absence of institutional authority, countries like Poland and the German-occupied parts of the Soviet Union, that had already been essentially wiped off the map as political and legal entities even before the Nazis invaded. The lack of authority provided by an institutional presence unleashed lawlessness that could be taken advantage of by the Germans. This was not the case in German-occupied France, for example, and French Jewry largely survived the war. His point for us, is that we rely on institutions for life and death. Not just because institutions enforce the rule of law. But more importantly because they provide us with a moral framework of values and attachment to community and to each other as citizens and neighbours. As Snyder puts it, the Nazis discovered that the easiest method to get rid of Jews was to make them stateless. It's why, they were mostly deported before being killed, instead of just killed on the spot. It's why Jews who were saved in numbers, were saved by government officials and diplomats who could issue to them papers that allowed them to escape to other countries (Wallenberg, Sugihara, de Sousa Mendes, Lutz, among others.)
Which is also why Israel is such a necessity. Why "From the River to the Sea" chants is such an affront to many of us. Why Israel is not just the front line of a war against the Jews, but the front line of a war on civilization and western values. Why the over-educated intellectual dupes who publicly attack Israel, and their morally-deficient, guilt-ridden, justice-warrior student underlings, who vocally support Palestine under the guise of free speech, don't understand how they are being manipulated by the very radical authoritarians who silence their opposition by killing them, and would do the same to them if they dared to speak 'freely' against them. This is what institutional rot looks like. They've latched on to a 'cause' that makes them feel good and important, without seeing the obvious: it's actually self-defeating. For 2,000 years Jews were targeted and scapegoated because we were weak. Today Jews are targeted and blamed because we are strong. If we've learned anything, if we can teach the west anything in 2023, it's to recognize who your enemies are, and to never believe what they say, except when they tell you who they are.
[Postscript: Harvard's Gay resigned amid claims she was found to have plagiarized in her academic work.]
