"White on white crime"

I once wrote that I regard decent treatment of Jewish people as a good test for the decency of any gentile society. I stand by what I said there - click the link if you're interested.

This test is one of the reasons that the USA can claim to be a decent society. Of course, these things are relative. I am aware of the former caps on Jewish admittance to Ivy League universities and the anti-semitism of, for example, the KKK. There is no doubt much more of which I am unaware. But, equally, we all know much about the appalling treatment of Jewish people in so many other societies. The Magistrate of History will punish the anti-semitic offences of America with gentle admonishment and a slap on the wrist, before turning her attention to numerous European countries with fury and awful punishments.

So it was with some sadness that I read this piece, entitled "Stop Being Shocked", by Bari Weiss. I recommend it to you. Weiss writes about a worsening in the climate for American Jews and, as her title proposes, suggests that now is the time to accept that there is nothing surprising about that development. 

Weiss' piece lists many unfortunate incidents and I was reading through them with a resigned sense of deja vu - until I came across this: "Jews are flattened into “white people,” our living history obliterated, so that someone with a straight face can suggest that the Holocaust was merely “white on white crime.”"

"White on white crime"! I had to follow that up. It seems that it is real: indeed, it happened "multiple times", I read at the link that Weiss provides. 

Well, perhaps using the phrase "white on white crime" to refer to the Holocaust is a 'clever' phrase that some undergraduates picked up, used for shock value, and now feel rather embarrassed about. Let's hope so. Let's hope all these straws in the wind are nothing more than straws in the wind.

But one should not be surprised if many people are worried. A society in which educated people speak lightly of the Holocaust is not the kind of society we knew in the West a generation ago. A lot can change in another generation.

In Joseph Roth's book The Radetsky March (recommended), I read that one of the titles of Emperor Franz Joseph was King of Jerusalem, the "highest rank that God had to offer a crowned head". In the book we see the Kaiser taking his duties to his Jewish subjects seriously. And we know (as the author did not - the book was published in 1932) what was to happen to those subjects when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was no more. 

I am not for one moment suggesting that anything remotely similar will happen in America. It is not simply a case of putting a Sousa march in place of the Strauss one. All I am saying is that the history of the Jewish people includes too many instances of societies becoming unwelcoming to them for anyone to read the evidence Weiss marshalls with equanimity.

An apology

Several links that I have posted recently have not worked. I apologise. I am going back to fix them, so far as I can.

Some interesting links

These are meant to be some examples of the importance of balance.

1. Genuinely interesting piece about the Trump administration behind the scenes.

2. Interestingly well-balanced piece from the BBC about the risks of nuclear power. I have noticed a few examples recently of the BBC making a real effort to look at both sides of an issue. They proved with Brexit that they are capable of this, unlike so much of the rest of the media.

3. Car seats as contraception: a third child means a third child seat, and that means a new car, and that means no third child. An example of the need to balance the different effects that government policies can have.

4. A good letter in the LRB: "A bummer, I know, but we have to entertain the possibility that there is no neat lesson from the pandemic". (Also here.)

5. Does it surprise you to hear that "people are more positively disposed toward women than men — the so-called “women-are-wonderful effect” — and research into people’s attitudes toward things as diverse as criminal sentences, academic hiring, essay grading, and research into sex and gender differences bears this out"? I doubt it. The quotation comes from this piece, reviewing Entitled from a left-of-centre perspective (but very aggressively - must have been written by a man), perhaps injecting some balance into a debate. 

6. Well, this, about the potentially culturally-determined experience of emotions, is interesting. "Barrett’s point is that if you understand that “fear” is a cultural concept, a way of overlaying meaning on to high arousal and high unpleasantness, then it’s possible to experience it differently." This is an idea that I independently developed as a child. If you find yourself in a stressful or worrying situation it is (to some extent) possible to re-interpret it to yourself as an exciting or fun one. Think about what happens to you on a rollercoaster. But perhaps one can take it too far: "Barrett tells the story of a date she reluctantly agreed to go on, which took an unexpected turn as her stomach flipped while she was having coffee with the guy. “OK, I realised, I was wrong,” she writes. “I must be attracted to him.” A few hours later she found herself in bed with ... the flu. What had happened over coffee was that her brain had made a prediction of “infatuation” based on sensory information from her gut combined with her culture’s understanding of that emotion and how it is supposed to unfold."

7. The Spectator in defence of 'wokeness'. And quite right too. Gove, with his Gramsci references, would never make the mistake that Leith ascribes to others. 

8. Women don't like to compete ... against men. But against women? A different story. But still, don't extrapolate to the workplace too quickly: "Gender wage gaps appear even in markets where workplace discrimination is impossible or unlikely. Uber driver’s for example are assigned trips using a gender-blind algorithm and earn according to a known formula based on time and distance of trip. Yet, a small but persistent gender gap of about 7% exists ...", it says here, giving reasons for the gender gap (e.g. men drive faster).