Wisdom Is In the Details

Contemplate the Details To Explain Holocaust, Israel, Clinton, Wall Street:

I rarely mention Israel. Not just because the country has suffered enough already. Not just because the situation is not interesting. But mostly because Israel is such a special case that it is hard to extract generalities from it. Also its fate is mostly controlled by external factors. However, something important happened there recently: not just the commemoration of the Holocaust of the Jews by the Nazis, but how deputy chief of staff Yair Golan, the second in command of the Israeli army chose to kick it off by comparing today’s Israel with Nazi Germany.

I salute the following comment, which has long been pretty much at the core of my own philosophy, for decades. IDF Major General Yair Golan, reading from a prepared text:

“The Holocaust in my eyes must bring us to deep contemplation of the nature of man, even when that man is myself. The Holocaust must bring us to deep contemplation on the matter of the responsibility of leadership, on the matter of the quality of a society… Shoah [Holocaust of the Jews by the Nazis] must impel us here and now to reflect fundamentally on how here and now we take care of the stranger, the widow and the orphan.”

Morality, like logic, can be anything. This being said, the IDF has not been too immoral yet…

Yair Gollan went all out in warning Israel: “If there’s anything that frightens me in the remembrance of the Holocaust, it is identifying some horrifying processes that took place in Europe in general and in particularly Germany up to 70, 80 and 90 years ago, and finding evidence of their repetition here in our society today in 2016. It is easier and simpler to hate a person. It is easy and simple to arouse fear, to scare-monger. It is easy to become dehumanized, callous, sanctimonious.”

90 years ago brings us back to 1926. But actually, Nietzsche was denouncing strident tribal anti-Judaism in Germany in the 1880s. Inspection of the historical record shows that state legislated anti-Judaism originated in Prussia in the eighteenth century. As a British ally against France, anti-Judaism thus became something that Great Britain condoned, and even outright supported. After the French were defeated in 1815 CE, Anti-Judaism became the law in German-speaking land (Jews could not be doctors and lawyers, etc.)

Yair Golan is a proven hawk in matter of defense, although he started the practice of treating Syrians wounded in the Syrian civil war in Israeli hospitals. Like all the leadership of the Israeli army and the Mossad (Israel CIA, complete with assassinations in what became also the French way, and also, more recently, learning from example, the US way… That the Jews and French decided that to become way nastier, in some circumstances, was more moral, after their experiences with Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini should surprise no one…), Golan sees the present situation as an opportunity to make a real peace with the Palestinians. (An assessment that neither the Likud, Hamas or Hezbollah share, as it would undermine their reasons for being…)

How did the whole anti-Jewish madness start? It was a long story, started in Pagan Rome. It should be its own essay. The evolution of a lucrative madness always presents many twists and turns…

The worst part of anti-Judaism is not that it happened, but that, sometimes, and for centuries, it did not exist, at all. This means that something terrible, only founded on the admittedly very satisfying urge to hate somebody, or an entire category of people, can be reborn after centuries of eradication. In other words, the rebirth of fanatical anti-Judaism from its ashes show that cannibalism and slavery as an industry could well reappear in the future. Let alone strict laws enforcing state sexism, etc.

Speaking of evil reborn, Wall Street has raised already $23 million for Clinton in this election cycle. At least $4.3 million from Wall Street has gone directly into Clinton’s presidential campaign, and another $18.7 million has gone to the super PAC backing her, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.

Wall Street is a vast army, and its morality is greed. It’s not about orphans.

One third of financial executives’ donations went to Clinton in 2015 and the first quarter of 2016. Now Wall Street donors to (ex) Republican presidential candidates Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush have thrown their weight behind Clinton. Trump received less than 1% of Wall Street donation, and the best financed “candidate” until now has been that of rich Republican donors, AGAINST Trump. (This means that the hysteria against Trump is financed by bedfellows who want to devour each other.)

So how did one get to “The Holocaust”? First “The” Holocaust was part of a much more general, and older pattern: Auschwitz was initially created for Poles, for exterminating Poles, not Jews (although no doubt they were thinking about Jews). And that, in turn was part of a program of extermination of Poland which was at least two centuries old, and itself motivated by greed and world domination: hence the deliberate attack on the world on August 1, 1914.

All this could develop because, all too few saw it for what it was: although Nietzsche condemned the system of thought which would come to be called “Nazism” a generation later, his voice was lonely. Let me notice in passing that the Will To Extermination is the ultimate expression of the Will To Power.

Thus Yair Golan is right: One “must bring us to deep contemplation of the nature of man, even when that man is myself. The Holocaust must bring us to deep contemplation on the matter of the responsibility of leadership, on the matter of the quality of a society.”

After World War Two, the Germans, that is, the German intellectual leadership denied responsibility, as usual. That was an egregious lie. Yet, anxious to fend off Stalin, the Western democracies acquiesced to this fiction. In truth, most of what came to be known as Nazism was the significant essence of (a very significant part of) German society, before Adolf Hitler was even in diapers.

Today’s Israel is in not in such situation, by a very long shot. However, one could imagine that it could well get there if the Jewish “Orthodox” fanatics keep growing in power: they are the ones who had brought the mood conducive to first, and completely pointless Judean War of 66 CE (Greeks had sacrificed birds in front of a synagogue). (The Orthodox Jews escape the military draft, thus don’t intersect with the IDF!)

By, the “leadership” one should not just understand elected politicians. “Leadership” does not mean just elected puppets such as Obama, or the Supreme Court and their meager contributions to the debate. It means mostly the Main Stream Media and the intellectual leadership: those who are viewed as wise, from Paul Krugman to the likes of Bill Gates, or popular authors.

To change minds, we have to change moods and the first mood to change is attention to significant details.

The easier way to destruction of an evil go through its explanation, and that starts with its contemplation. Lack of contemplation gives diabolization an election.

Wisdom is in the details. It may make it sometimes a bit too diabolical, but the ways of goodness are mysterious.

Patrice Ayme’