Note on Jews, blacks, and liberalism

The police state is an instrument of capital. It is not an instrument in the hands of "white people" against black people. It may appear that way, because it is used disproportionately against them. But liberals, including black liberals, want the big state and they want it coercive and do not mind it being violent; they only want it to work for their benefit and not against them. If a black cop or security guard violates you, and you're white, it is NOT about race. But he or she, and the organization that employs, will surely say it is if you complain. It's vital that people on the left begin to see that identity politics quite rapidly becomes a pack of lies. The state is capitalist, and it is the left alone that is against it, and championing particular identities may win votes or even gain memberships in lobbying and protest organizations, but otherwise has little value. What matters most about the "Black Lives Matter" cause is that it's against the police state. Unfortunately, American black culture, while highly political, is pretty heavily soaked now in reverse racist hatred, linked to liberal representational hopes, not any more truly progressive ones. Most people who feel on the outside just want to be included in the workings of power. They don't want to dismantle the system. They are not against it, not really. Most oppressed people are ideologically wedded to ideas that don't help any cause that would really change things for them, and this has always been true. The exceptions are just that, and they are needed. People are kept in line by all kinds of things, including features of social life and personality. These include the authoritarian personality. Liberals are not against it, they cannot be. Most of politics is bipartisan in the worst sense, and is about policies, often figured by the so-called left in us vs. them terms. Authoritarian liberals and "leftists" are busily reproducing the same social values and system that those among them who complain about injustice ought to see that their interests call for being against. But struggling with existing tendencies that structure personalities is a very hard thing to do, and usually can only be done well in art.

It's easier to see what is bad in a society than who is good. But is that even the question? It isn't. People want to feel validated, and may demand that other people respect them, demand this on the threat of violence. Thus, "oppression" becomes equated, falsely, with insult. The consequence of this may be generalized hatred and thuggery.

The surest way to become a convinced hater is to tell yourself, or tell your children and others around you, maybe over and over, that they hate you. But the truth is, oppression and hated are not the same thing. Black people in America are often oppressed without being hated; what corporate office or military outfit would want to offend them? Jews were often hated without being oppressed, at least in material or economic terms, often even in political terms. The idea that a hatred is what underlies oppression can be misleading. The Holocaust was not a pogrom; most of the German people could not have been persuaded to engage in one, not having that kind of hatred; rather, they were largely indifferent.

The myth has spread that the Holocaust is the consequence only of anti-semitism, which reduces to prejudice. This is what the Jewish bourgeoisie, especially German and among German Jews in America, sought in the 19th century: Reform Jews wanted to be accepted as normal American bourgeois who were worthy of honor for their success in business and the professions, and only different in what house of worship they went to. It was thoroughly bourgeois. Obviously, the struggles of black people are more than bourgeois, and in many ways not at all. But America continues to uphold variations of bourgeois values, including the equality and liberty of members of the commercial and now professional classes. Americans thus want to be successful, respected, and have their identities affirmed. While the greatest moral evil was always the violent crime that is always imagined way out of proportion but associated everywhere with property and its rights and what it fears, the great political evil was always "prejudice." This could be used to suggest that if Nazi Germany had had liberal diversity trainings, so that the Aryan Germans could learn about their Jewish neighbors and be better disposed to welcome them because they knew enough to not have the false opinions that are prejudices, then the Holocaust would not have happened. But that conclusion is perfectly absurd.