Sunday 9 September 2012

Nightmares and Fairy Tales

DRAFT


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EVERYONE LOVES A FAIRY TALE

Do I seriously accept the diagnosis and cure that author below gives? Breivik seems to have a reasonable understanding of antisemitism. He can see Nazism from outside.
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How Do We Handle the Hate?

https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/2012/04/17/dealing-with-opchanacanoughs-and-breiviks-hate/

 .........it is important to remember that Anders Behring Breivik is not only a super-racist, vicious Neo-Nazi devil who crawled up out of Hell’s bowels,----- 


I note, relieved, that the Norwegians (God bless them) handle Norwegian right-wing extremism in the same way as Chief Eagle-With-the-Correct-Views handled Powhatanian right-wing extremism. If you come in contact with a person who shares Breivik’s conspiratorial worldview of “a Nonwhite Colonization of Europe”, you should inform the security authorities about his or her existence, so that the individual in question can be identified and forbidden to speak out, forbidden from spreading HATE. In exactly the same way as the young racist in the above conversation, who shared Opchanacanough’s conspiratorial worldview of “a European colonization” was treated, that is.
This is how we should deal with right-wing extremism and HATE. Learn from the Native Americans.

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I cannot counter what Breivik stands for. Who better than Orwell for that !

http://hatehaterhated.blogspot.in/2012/06/orwell-on-roots-of-anti-semitism.html


...there is widespread awareness of the prevalence of antisemitic feeling, and unwillingness to admit sharing it. Among educated people, antisemitism is held to be an unforgivable sin and in a quite different category from other kinds of racial prejudice. People will go to remarkable lengths to demonstrate that they are NOT antisemitic. Thus, in 1943 an intercession service on behalf of the Polish Jews was held in a synagogue in St John's Wood. The local authorities declared themselves anxious to participate in it, and the service was attended by the mayor of the borough in his robes and chain, by representatives of all the churches, and by detachments of RAF, Home Guards, nurses, Boy Scouts and what not. On the surface it was a touching demonstration of solidarity with the suffering Jews. But it was essentially a CONSCIOUS effort to behave decently by people whose subjective feelings must in many cases have been very different.

...This feeling that antisemitism is something sinful and disgraceful, something that a civilised person does not suffer from, is unfavourable to a scientific approach, and indeed many people will admit that they are frightened of probing too deeply into the subject. They are frightened, that is to say, of discovering not only that antisemitism is spreading, but that they themselves are infected by it.

.....If, as I suggest, prejudice against Jews has always been pretty widespread in England, there is no reason to think that Hitler has genuinely diminished it. He has merely caused a sharp division between the politically conscious person who realises that this is not a time to throw stones at the Jews, and the unconscious person whose native antisemitism is increased by the nervous strain of the war. One can assume, therefore, that many people who would perish rather than admit to antisemitic feelings are secretly prone to them. I have already indicated that I believe antisemitism to be essentially a neurosis, but of course it has its rationalisations, which are sincerely believed in and are partly true.

... To study any subject scientifically one needs a detached attitude, which is obviously harder when one's own interests or emotions are involved. Plenty of people who are quite capable of being objective about sea urchins, say, or the square root of 2, become schizophrenic if they have to think about the sources of their own income. What vitiates nearly all that is written about antisemitism is the assumption in the writer's mind that HE HIMSELF is immune to it. "Since I know that antisemitism is irrational," he argues, "it follows that I do not share it." He thus fails to start his investigation in the one place where he could get hold of some reliable evidence–that is, in his own mind.

It seems to me a safe assumption that the disease loosely called nationalism is now almost universal. Antisemitism is only one manifestation of nationalism, and not everyone will have the disease in that particular form. A Jew, for example, would not be antisemitic: but then many Zionist Jews seem to me to be merely antisemites turned upside-down, just as many Indians and Negroes display the normal colour prejudices in an inverted form. The point is that something, some psychological vitamin, is lacking in modern civilisation, and as a result we are all more or less subject to this lunacy of believing that whole races or nations are mysteriously good or mysteriously evil.

it would probably be best to start not by debunking antisemitism, but by marshalling all the justifications for it that can be found, in one's own mind or anybody else's. In that way one might get some clues that would lead to its psychological roots.



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