On fascist radicalism and the moral privilege accorded the "oppressed"

The fundamental mistake of the liberal left is to think that because some people are oppressed, that you have to like them. The liberal left really does believe this.

The Protestant Reformation said that people are "justified" (before God, that is, made holy) by "faith" and not also "works" (what one does or does not do); the new dispensation is that people are justified by being oppressed. This view is fascist.

It is held partly because it usefully overstates the claim that the oppression suffered is caused by the prejudices of neighbors or fellow citizens. Most of it is caused by capitalism. But there is also a religious belief that people are ennobled or made holy by being oppressed. It is not true.

If Jews divested themselves of this notion, the end of the oppression of the Palestinian people would be much easier to bring about. If American blacks did, their culture would involve less violent crime.

It is not poverty that is the cause of violence among the urban poor, since we know that many subcultures have experienced dire poverty without succumbing en masse to personal violence. The cause rather is the violence of the society and, in America, its extreme form of capitalism.

The moral obligation people have in the Judeo-Christian tradition to love their neighbor - becomes, with fascistic pseudo-left radical social movements, a demand to love the members of your own tribe or particular community, defined as ethnic or religious group or whatever - a nation within a larger state that redirects citizenly fraternity onto only one's own people - and so legitimates hatred against others. The obligation to respect and be considerate to neighbors and fellow citizens is an important one, but it can and should be treated as separate from a politics.

The consequence of the failure of this is that, in fact, murderous or hateful prejudices are most strongly felt and expressed in societies like ours among the most oppressed -- and directed at those they believe responsible for their oppression, basically out of envy.

That is why there is so much left-wing anti-semitism.

Racism and similar prejudices are treated in opposite ways by the liberal corporate and government elites. Prejudice of the "privileged" against the "oppressed" is believed to be pervasive but subtle. It has to be wrested out of people through acts of hermeneutical creativity, targeting the latency of things like "micro-aggressions," which without a special labor of interpretive declaration on the part of authorities is hard to recognize because it is expressed with much less intensity and more ambivalence. Not so the hatred of the "oppressed" for the "privileged." This is obvious, and it is everywhere tolerated and even encouraged by liberals and left-liberals.

The anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian left, the tradition one that alone I recognize, operates quite differently. Its ideas not only are not, but cannot, be taken up in corporate diversity trainings and by social justice warriors on the lookout for subtle violations of propriety to be made an issue of. This is because the concerns are of a very different kind and are basically systemic rather than individual. In systemic approaches to social oppression and injustice, politics is separated from morals, and the former cannot be furthered by enforcing the latter.

The left-liberals and liberal leftists do not want to eliminate policing as we know it and prisons. More than that, everything that they do, which is all about attacking persons for lapses of moral propriety, is designed to further strengthen our police state and its punishments.

I don't want the police to kill me or other people in the places I inhabit or work in, and I don't want those who identify with the victims to blame and kill me, either. The two seemingly opposite groups here are sometimes more similar to one another than they are different because opposed in some contexts. Social power does not operate today primarily through the direct causal authorization of people in superior authority. It operates through ideology and a functional logic. By virtue of this, prisons, for example, are places where the enormous violence carried out in ways that functionally support and benefit the system, are more often than not performed by persons who presumably count themselves among the oppressed. Just as sexual violence against women defends and promotes patriarchy, so too the violence in prisons and places like them is conducted for sundry personal motives but functions as part of the punishment directed at the individuals who are victimized by it. Conservative social norms are routinely enforced by ordinary people who have far less of a stake in them than other people who are very much removed from the situations and personally will be horrified that such things happen.

Social movements that operate partly by affirming the subjectivity and identity of a group of people united by a shared oppression, do not always work to end the oppression they oppose. They succumb to religious and moral thinking which is not scientific nor properly political in the modern sense (which dates from Machiavelli). They do this by positing something like the holiness of the people being targeted by demagogic leaders. Sometimes this has good effects, sometimes bad ones. We need to think in more impersonal terms. Anything that should not happen to members of a particular social group should not happen because it should not happen to anyone. That is why Hannah Arendt emphasized that the crimes against the Jewish people were crimes against humanity. Only partisans of a belligerent identitarian nationalism could suppose otherwise. I know that your life matters because I know that mine does, and we are both equally persons and members of whatever society exists in the place where we find ourselves.