Daniel, let me apologize in advance for an overly long comment. Read it at your leisure.
I’m sorry to hear that the situation in Spain has become so dire. It does indeed feel like the 1930s. Good luck getting your new house in Berkshire. Though I fear that the UK, with its growing, radicalized Muslim population, is drifting in Spain’s direction. And I don’t think “Neville” Starmer will do anything, other than asking nicely, to stop it.
You’re spot on about Franco being an ultra-right traditionalist Catholic conservative and not a fascist. A distinction many historians fail to make.
Yesterday, on the two-year anniversary of the October 7th Mini-Holocaust, there were pro-Hamas demonstrations in New York City. The “Flood New York City for Gaza” rally. I expect they will become even more common once the Jew-hating Zohran Mamdani is elected mayor. At least Mamdani, as a local official, can be held in check to some extent by President Trump, who, unlike Starmer, is determined to control the streets of America’s cities. And since Mamdani was born in Uganda, Thank God he can never run for president!
In the US, the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms, is the ultimate safeguard against government tyranny.
Liberalism has worked for Jewish Americans, unlike for Jews elsewhere, at least until recently. Franklin Foer, writing in “The Atlantic” last year, finds that antisemitism is making a comeback in America, especially on woke progressive intersectional Left. The pro-Hamas campus and street protests, with their harassment of Jews, their pure hatred of Jews, and their hatred of America, are one consequence of the unholy red-green alliance between the woke, illiberal, intersectional Left and radical Islamism. It’s a sign of possibly worse to come: 1930s Germany in 2030s America. Foer fears that a golden age of assimilation, acceptance, and prosperity for American Jews is coming to an end. I hope he is wrong.
NYU, where I got my PhD., is as much a center of pro-Hamas agitation as Columbia, which I take as a personal affront. So, I have stopped giving money to my graduate school alma mater. Remember, German academics and university students were among Hitler’s most enthusiastic supporters. Higher education, instead of helping people become more enlightened, often just makes them more vulnerable to totalitarian ideologies like fascism and communism, and to intellectual mind viruses like antisemitism.
Sadly, when it comes to Israel and the Jews it is just not possible for most people to be fair and balanced, or engage in calm, reasoned discourse. Myself included, even though I try.
Israel and the Jews push too many hot buttons for too many people – religious, historical, cultural, psychological, and political – for Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. Friends and foes of Israel, living in alternate realities, committed with passionate intensity to uncompromising positions, engage in take-no-prisoners ideological jousts that inevitably devolve into incoherent paroxysms of righteous anger and rage. And yes, most of the anger and rage against Israel, these days largely on the Woke Intersectional “globalize the intifada” Mamdani/AOC Left, but also on the Paleoconservative Israelophobic Buchanan/Carlson Right, is driven by antisemitism. Walter Russell Mead called this new incarnation of Jew-hatred the “Israel Outrage Industry.”
Jew-hatred seems to be encoded in the cultural DNA of the Christian and Post-Christian West, and in Islam: the Jews rejected Christ and the Jews rejected Muhammad. With the decline of Christianity in the post-Enlightenment West, religious Judeophobia was transformed into race-based antisemitism which culminated in Nazism and the Holocaust.
That is why so many people in the world are obsessed with a conflict over a tiny sliver of land that has no direct impact on their lives. Yuval Noah Harari writes that Judaism played a minor role in history, other than giving birth to the ethical monotheism universalized by Christianity and Islam. One that certainly does not justify antisemitic obsessions about Jews secretly controlling the world. But proclaiming yourself the enemy of those who rejected Christ and Muhammad, and are “settler-colonialist” oppressors to boot, is a great way to virtue signal.
The late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once told an Israeli journalist that the only reason the world pays any attention to the Palestinians is because the Jews are their enemy. There is simply too much historical and emotional baggage for all involved.
You point out that “it is Anglo Liberty, and not European civil law, that stands between a world of civilization and a nightmare of barbarism.” This is what I tell my students on the first day of an American history class:
The Madisonian sweet spot is the ideal of Liberal Democracy: government is strong enough to defend liberty, promote economic growth and prosperity, and provide key social services, but does not repress its own population. Government is both effective and constrained. In Hobbes’s metaphor, a “shackled Leviathan.”
Liberal democracy was not an inevitable historical development. Winston Churchill famously said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.
Consolidated Liberal Democracy has been the rare exception in world history. Various forms of oppressive, hierarchical societies and authoritarian or despotic governments have been the normative lot of mankind. And it is the nature of all governments, including democratic governments, to drift toward tyranny, unless there is strong pushback from an engaged civil society.
For most of history governments and their ruling elites have been despotic, rapacious, repressive, and malevolent. Outside of the Consolidated Liberal Democracies of North America, Western Europe, and parts of East Asia, this is still true today.
Most governments and ruling elites don’t want to improve the lives of their people. They want to exploit and rob their people. And if the people resist being robbed and exploited, the ruling elites will use the iron fist -- the coercive power of government -- to pound them into submission.
Democracy is a rare occurrence. There is no set of structural conditions that foreordains democratic outcomes. Luck, even good and bad weather, has played a decisive role. Had there been calm, clear weather in the English Channel in that crucial August of 1588, there would have been no “Protestant Wind” to destroy the Spanish Armada, and Anglo-American Liberal Democracy would have been strangled in its cradle.
Anglo-American Liberal Democracy is the ONLY HUMANE FORM OF GOVERNMENT mankind has ever developed.
American exceptionalism rests on British exceptionalism. America was born into the right traditions, at the right time, and in the right place. America could not have come into existence except when it did, where it did, and how it did.
It was little more than a chance of history that the offspring of Anglo-Saxon liberalism would sprout on the other side of the Atlantic, institutionalize its heritage with an independent constitutional republic, expand across one of the most habitable and thinly populated territories in the world, feed off massive immigration from the Old World, and so create on a continental scale what is by far the world’s largest concentration of economic and military might. And liberty.
Contingency—dumb luck (or Divine Providence, the Hand of God)—played a large role in the United States’ emergence in the New World and for its later ability to rescue the Old World.
Had it not been for the United States and its vast human and material resources, and its commitment to liberty, Consolidated Liberal Democracy may well have lost the great struggles of the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries to the tyrannical ideologies and regimes of Fascism/Nazism, Soviet Communism, Islamic jihadism, and now the authoritarian state capitalism of a revived Communist/Imperial China, with its nightmarish Orwellian surveillance state. I sincerely hope and pray that America remains an exceptional nation committed to liberty, the City Upon a Hill.
Apologies again for the long comment. Happy Sukkot and good luck with the house buying.
I'm also a Jew living in Spain and it is really disheartening that you see the UK as safer than Spain for Jews. Not judging your decision in any way -- it's just I follow English-language news more closely and so am more aware of Jew-hate in the UK (e.g. last week's Manchester terror killing) than here in Spain. I of course know of the near-unaninous anti-Israel attitude here, but daily life has always felt safe. It hit home recently with the Vuelta -- the glee with which they attacked the Israeli cycling team -- Sanchez's insane comments about wanting to nuke Israel, and the Spanish Navy escorting the Greta Flotilla.
Heartbreaking. Wishing you a safe move and fresh start in the UK.
Great article, Daniel. The only real difference between Hitler and Stalin was the definition of whom the victims and victimizers were. For Hitler the Victims were the Volk, or native Germans, who were subject to the victimizers, Jews, and other races not deemed Aryan (Roma, Slavs); for Stalin, it was a class-based system, but because Marx defined the characteristics of Jews as the oppressor within his ideology, Stalin attacked the Jews, too. (Real Socialism sucks.)
Thanks Michael. Nice to see you back! I agree that there are differences between the two, including their approach to internationalism, although this is overstated. In the end Stalin reverted to Russian nationalism while Hitler allied himself with international fascists like Il Duce as well as Arab, non particularly Aryan, allies in Iraq and Palestine. Ultimately, the main difference between extreme right and extreme left is radicalism v conservatism. The extreme right has the very, very mild advantage of stability: Extreme conservatives like Franco and the Al Sauds outlived by a mile the Nassers and Hitlers of this world because stability of a sort was their calling card. Radicalism brings extreme pain and then dies dramatically.
Martyrs? According to ex-Hamas Mosab Hassan Yousef, his former religion is all about martyrdom which is elevated to the most noble place in the hearts of some mothers . . . This is nothing but an act of bloody (literally) self-promotion which makes a mockery of real martyrs.
This is heartbreaking. The arc is pushed back toward darkness, deliberately, to make life impossible for an already pressed people.
Thanks for your support Khaled. How's Portugal?
Thank you. Portugal is still warm (we had 23C today with beautiful sunshine. Hope your move back to England goes smoothly.
Daniel, let me apologize in advance for an overly long comment. Read it at your leisure.
I’m sorry to hear that the situation in Spain has become so dire. It does indeed feel like the 1930s. Good luck getting your new house in Berkshire. Though I fear that the UK, with its growing, radicalized Muslim population, is drifting in Spain’s direction. And I don’t think “Neville” Starmer will do anything, other than asking nicely, to stop it.
You’re spot on about Franco being an ultra-right traditionalist Catholic conservative and not a fascist. A distinction many historians fail to make.
Yesterday, on the two-year anniversary of the October 7th Mini-Holocaust, there were pro-Hamas demonstrations in New York City. The “Flood New York City for Gaza” rally. I expect they will become even more common once the Jew-hating Zohran Mamdani is elected mayor. At least Mamdani, as a local official, can be held in check to some extent by President Trump, who, unlike Starmer, is determined to control the streets of America’s cities. And since Mamdani was born in Uganda, Thank God he can never run for president!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ap9xum-2AnY#:~:text=Anti%2DIsrael%20Protesters%20in%20NYC,%2D%20/%20nypost%20Facebook%20%2D%20/%20nypost
In the US, the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms, is the ultimate safeguard against government tyranny.
Liberalism has worked for Jewish Americans, unlike for Jews elsewhere, at least until recently. Franklin Foer, writing in “The Atlantic” last year, finds that antisemitism is making a comeback in America, especially on woke progressive intersectional Left. The pro-Hamas campus and street protests, with their harassment of Jews, their pure hatred of Jews, and their hatred of America, are one consequence of the unholy red-green alliance between the woke, illiberal, intersectional Left and radical Islamism. It’s a sign of possibly worse to come: 1930s Germany in 2030s America. Foer fears that a golden age of assimilation, acceptance, and prosperity for American Jews is coming to an end. I hope he is wrong.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/04/us-anti-semitism-jewish-american-safety/677469/
https://archive.ph/mFH0h
NYU, where I got my PhD., is as much a center of pro-Hamas agitation as Columbia, which I take as a personal affront. So, I have stopped giving money to my graduate school alma mater. Remember, German academics and university students were among Hitler’s most enthusiastic supporters. Higher education, instead of helping people become more enlightened, often just makes them more vulnerable to totalitarian ideologies like fascism and communism, and to intellectual mind viruses like antisemitism.
Sadly, when it comes to Israel and the Jews it is just not possible for most people to be fair and balanced, or engage in calm, reasoned discourse. Myself included, even though I try.
Israel and the Jews push too many hot buttons for too many people – religious, historical, cultural, psychological, and political – for Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. Friends and foes of Israel, living in alternate realities, committed with passionate intensity to uncompromising positions, engage in take-no-prisoners ideological jousts that inevitably devolve into incoherent paroxysms of righteous anger and rage. And yes, most of the anger and rage against Israel, these days largely on the Woke Intersectional “globalize the intifada” Mamdani/AOC Left, but also on the Paleoconservative Israelophobic Buchanan/Carlson Right, is driven by antisemitism. Walter Russell Mead called this new incarnation of Jew-hatred the “Israel Outrage Industry.”
https://archive.ph/1bblV
Jew-hatred seems to be encoded in the cultural DNA of the Christian and Post-Christian West, and in Islam: the Jews rejected Christ and the Jews rejected Muhammad. With the decline of Christianity in the post-Enlightenment West, religious Judeophobia was transformed into race-based antisemitism which culminated in Nazism and the Holocaust.
That is why so many people in the world are obsessed with a conflict over a tiny sliver of land that has no direct impact on their lives. Yuval Noah Harari writes that Judaism played a minor role in history, other than giving birth to the ethical monotheism universalized by Christianity and Islam. One that certainly does not justify antisemitic obsessions about Jews secretly controlling the world. But proclaiming yourself the enemy of those who rejected Christ and Muhammad, and are “settler-colonialist” oppressors to boot, is a great way to virtue signal.
https://archive.ph/TeINS
The late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once told an Israeli journalist that the only reason the world pays any attention to the Palestinians is because the Jews are their enemy. There is simply too much historical and emotional baggage for all involved.
https://www.democracynow.org/2008/8/11/mahmoud_darwish_poet_laureate_of_the
https://youtu.be/RfT9gMFLPLc?si=HB91gcRR08N2kdoU&t=2373
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrvzKOYeQZY&t=190s
You point out that “it is Anglo Liberty, and not European civil law, that stands between a world of civilization and a nightmare of barbarism.” This is what I tell my students on the first day of an American history class:
The Madisonian sweet spot is the ideal of Liberal Democracy: government is strong enough to defend liberty, promote economic growth and prosperity, and provide key social services, but does not repress its own population. Government is both effective and constrained. In Hobbes’s metaphor, a “shackled Leviathan.”
Liberal democracy was not an inevitable historical development. Winston Churchill famously said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.
Consolidated Liberal Democracy has been the rare exception in world history. Various forms of oppressive, hierarchical societies and authoritarian or despotic governments have been the normative lot of mankind. And it is the nature of all governments, including democratic governments, to drift toward tyranny, unless there is strong pushback from an engaged civil society.
For most of history governments and their ruling elites have been despotic, rapacious, repressive, and malevolent. Outside of the Consolidated Liberal Democracies of North America, Western Europe, and parts of East Asia, this is still true today.
Most governments and ruling elites don’t want to improve the lives of their people. They want to exploit and rob their people. And if the people resist being robbed and exploited, the ruling elites will use the iron fist -- the coercive power of government -- to pound them into submission.
Democracy is a rare occurrence. There is no set of structural conditions that foreordains democratic outcomes. Luck, even good and bad weather, has played a decisive role. Had there been calm, clear weather in the English Channel in that crucial August of 1588, there would have been no “Protestant Wind” to destroy the Spanish Armada, and Anglo-American Liberal Democracy would have been strangled in its cradle.
Anglo-American Liberal Democracy is the ONLY HUMANE FORM OF GOVERNMENT mankind has ever developed.
American exceptionalism rests on British exceptionalism. America was born into the right traditions, at the right time, and in the right place. America could not have come into existence except when it did, where it did, and how it did.
It was little more than a chance of history that the offspring of Anglo-Saxon liberalism would sprout on the other side of the Atlantic, institutionalize its heritage with an independent constitutional republic, expand across one of the most habitable and thinly populated territories in the world, feed off massive immigration from the Old World, and so create on a continental scale what is by far the world’s largest concentration of economic and military might. And liberty.
Contingency—dumb luck (or Divine Providence, the Hand of God)—played a large role in the United States’ emergence in the New World and for its later ability to rescue the Old World.
Had it not been for the United States and its vast human and material resources, and its commitment to liberty, Consolidated Liberal Democracy may well have lost the great struggles of the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries to the tyrannical ideologies and regimes of Fascism/Nazism, Soviet Communism, Islamic jihadism, and now the authoritarian state capitalism of a revived Communist/Imperial China, with its nightmarish Orwellian surveillance state. I sincerely hope and pray that America remains an exceptional nation committed to liberty, the City Upon a Hill.
Apologies again for the long comment. Happy Sukkot and good luck with the house buying.
I'm also a Jew living in Spain and it is really disheartening that you see the UK as safer than Spain for Jews. Not judging your decision in any way -- it's just I follow English-language news more closely and so am more aware of Jew-hate in the UK (e.g. last week's Manchester terror killing) than here in Spain. I of course know of the near-unaninous anti-Israel attitude here, but daily life has always felt safe. It hit home recently with the Vuelta -- the glee with which they attacked the Israeli cycling team -- Sanchez's insane comments about wanting to nuke Israel, and the Spanish Navy escorting the Greta Flotilla.
Heartbreaking. Wishing you a safe move and fresh start in the UK.
The people behind this “movement” learned everything from the “movement” in the 1930’s.
Great article, Daniel. The only real difference between Hitler and Stalin was the definition of whom the victims and victimizers were. For Hitler the Victims were the Volk, or native Germans, who were subject to the victimizers, Jews, and other races not deemed Aryan (Roma, Slavs); for Stalin, it was a class-based system, but because Marx defined the characteristics of Jews as the oppressor within his ideology, Stalin attacked the Jews, too. (Real Socialism sucks.)
Thanks Michael. Nice to see you back! I agree that there are differences between the two, including their approach to internationalism, although this is overstated. In the end Stalin reverted to Russian nationalism while Hitler allied himself with international fascists like Il Duce as well as Arab, non particularly Aryan, allies in Iraq and Palestine. Ultimately, the main difference between extreme right and extreme left is radicalism v conservatism. The extreme right has the very, very mild advantage of stability: Extreme conservatives like Franco and the Al Sauds outlived by a mile the Nassers and Hitlers of this world because stability of a sort was their calling card. Radicalism brings extreme pain and then dies dramatically.
@Daniel. Thank your for a well scripted summary of the current climate.
Wishing you every success with the purchase of your property in Berkshire.
🎗️🎗️🎗️
My pleasure Nathan. Please spread the article.
Huh. Kinda sounds like Israel has fucked the world’s opinion of… Israelis. But go ahead and try to turn this into an assault on world Jewry. S’funny.
Martyrs? According to ex-Hamas Mosab Hassan Yousef, his former religion is all about martyrdom which is elevated to the most noble place in the hearts of some mothers . . . This is nothing but an act of bloody (literally) self-promotion which makes a mockery of real martyrs.