Components of the Phenomenon
Lately I have come across quite a few essays by otherwise seemingly
intelligent and normal people who, when confronted by the acts of unspeakable
brutality and inhumanity by Boko Haram and similar terrorist groups, try to
explain, rationalize and even justify such collective performance of abduction,
rape, slavery and murder. As in cases of
liberal (so called) arguments to see in Hamas, Hisbolah and other fanatical
gangs of thugs political reasons, such as asymmetrical warfare (hence to call
terrorist groups “militants” or somewhat less rarely these days “freedom
fighters”), with blame going on “the state terrorism” of Israel or some
worldwide Jewish conspiracy, these essays repeatedly point to the endemic
poverty, disenfranchisement and colonized status of the perpetrators. Not only are the crimes against humanity seen
as the natural or logical outcome of the oppression of these nasty collections
of violent men, but they are essentially seen as victims of imperialist,
capitalist or statist elites.
But when the leader of Turkey, for instance, confronts grieving and
angry relatives of miners killed in Soma and they shake their fists at him,
bang on his car, and call him a murderer, he responds—not just as one of his
minders did by kicking one of the protesters who had been forced down already
by military police—by calling them “Israeli sperms,” we know something is going
on which long precedes the immediate crisis.
When, too, the blame for the accident down in the mines and other
difficulties in the economy of Turkey is blamed on Zionist and Jewish
instigators, provocateurs and agents, the very sanity of the leaders and others
in such a nation comes under suspicion. The leader calls his opponents "Israeli scum (or sperm)."
Then we have to see if there is a connection between rebel nationalist
armies, terrorist bands causing havoc and mayhem and suicide bombers, on the
one hand, and the rogue leaders or leaders of rogue states superficially and
egregiously acting as “legitimate” governments—when what motivates them is
something they articulate in the language of anti-Zionism and
anti-Semitism. While the active
operatives may have a variety of mental illnesses that make them susceptible to
the pressures of powerful men, groups and institutions, so that seek to relieve
horrible pains within, escape from haunting memories of abuse, and act out
bizarre mythical roles assigned to them by the society they belong to, the
larger configuration of the world-wide phenomena associated with this attempt
to annihilate the Jewish homeland and the Jewish people wherever they happen to
live cannot be diagnosed or treated in terms of their single experiences.
Something deeply twisted occurs in the minds over a long period of time
to nations. The deformation occurs in
the foetal stage, in the process of birthing, and in the earliest months and
years when the child is integrated into society, beginning with the home
environment. How the pregnant mother is
treated—what she eats, what she does, and how she feels about herself in
response to how others relate to her—shapes the conditions in which the
incipient human child grows up,. Putting
aside all the genetic flaws, illnesses and possible accidents that occur, the
mothering body provides the hormonal signals that stimulate and inhibit the
ontological emergence of the foetal body and mind. The fears, anxieties, wants and joys are
articulated in her person and thus on to the growing being in her womb. The child within may also be responding to
the movements, sounds and social atmosphere outside in the domestic and
communal environment the mother passes through.
These phenomena form part of the historical matrix of the foetus. Similarly the process of birthing sends all
sorts of signals to the emergent infant, with the stresses and strains of the
mother’s labour, the hormones released and the other electro-chemical changes
that occur at this time. The ambient
environment—the people present, the interactions between them, the noises,
smells, physical and emotional conditions, the historical matrix—supplements in
a significant way the natural unfolding of the drama. Then the earliest experiences of the neonate,
its warm or cold attachments to the mother and other care givers, supporters or
hostile agents, real or imaginary that determine the maternal attitude, its
continuing release of triggering hormones—these all provide the emotional and
physical environment. In particular, the
infant-mother gaze operates to stimulate and inhibit the neuronal activity of
the young brain, with the deep and unconscious unresolved tensions of her own
intra-uterine and birthing experiences.
In short, it is not so much some
later intellectual or political crisis that brings out anti-Semitic attitudes:
but rather long-term propensities towards victimizing others—socially and
historically coded into the language, images and gestures of Judeophobia—that
provide whole age-cohorts to share in an acceptable and temporary comforting
release from the tensions and anxieties of dysfunctional national
development. The articulation appears in
group fantasies (shared waking dreams) and collective trance (or trance-like) events.
Now this leaves two important questions to be answered, since this basic
psychohistorical premise is set forth.
On the one hand, the question is where and how does the myth of hatred
of Jews arise, since it appears not only where there are no Jews present both
geographically and historically, and when it does have some oblique pertinence
to real living persons, their culture and history, it has been noted long
before any of the supposed economic, religious or social conditions supposedly
given as causal arguments exist. On the
other hand, granted those same psychohistorical processes at work both causing
anti-Semitism and creating the personality structures, communal institutions
and intellectual traditions that make Jews stand out as different—to some
degree or other, or just enough to stimulate the abhorrence and fear by
others—how is, particularly in our own day, that so many nominal Jews
themselves believe in and act in ways that are anti-Semitic?
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