Copy of Scapegoat - Andrea Dworkin - pdf

slaughter Jews. ”21 Attacking (perhaps unknowingly) the ontological abyss
between words and action that now predominates in thought and common
understanding in the United States, Goldhagen roused anger when
he claimed that “ [n]ot economic hardship, not coercive means of a totalitarian
state, not social psychological pressure, not invariable psychological
propensities, but ideas about Jews that were pervasive in Germany and
had been for decades, induced ordinary Germans to kill unarmed, defenseless
Jewish men, women, and children by the thousands, systematically
and without pity. ”22 “Decades” is perhaps judicious understatement:
genocidal Jew-hate was slow-cooked in rhetoric, propaganda, and the sorcery
of wordsmiths for closer to centuries. (See John Weiss, Ideology o f
Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany. )
In current reckoning, the vileness and normalness of anti-Semitism in
Austria and Germany before the Nazi genocide is often minimized, since
this real history conflicts with the absurdities of free-speech and libertarian
absolutes. Even if premillennial U. S. citizens live in a Panglossian
world in which speech cannot cause harm, the Jews of sixteenth-, seventeenth-,
eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and pre-1933 twentieth-century Germany
(in its various configurations) did not. What distinguished
genocidal anti-Semitism from what had gone before it was precisely how
rabid and how commonplace it was. It became an ordinary truth, an unexamined
premise of ordinary as well as intellectual, cultural, militarist,
and political-party life; it was a familiar truth to the man in the street; its
barely challenged legitimacy was ubiquitous; it was mean; it was cruel; it
dehumanized; it threatened; it was meant to intimidate; it established “the
Jew” in the popular mind as vicious and depraved; it lowered “the Jew” so
low that eventually “[t]here were many bodies found along the river in the
mornings, because to kill a Jew was no crime. . . ”23 There were many
rivers, many mornings.
The key to the potency and staggering half-life of anti-Semitism is in its
irrationality. Despite efforts to make it scientific and intellectually substantive,
it was inherently paranoid, a persecution anxiety; fouling perception,
it lived in the minds shadows. Dynamic, sadistic, envious,
characterized by greed and sexualized fear, anti-Semitism was the antiimagination,
cognition ruined by hate, a kind of fecal fantasy. “It is a way
of imagining Jews, ” writes Anthony Julius in 275. Eliot, Anti-Semitism,