Friday, March 3, 2017

Leftist Victimization Narrative, Anti-Zionism, and the Alt-Right

Like my father before me, I have been a registered Republican for a number of years. Though I should specify, the second half of my life. Till the day he passed, my father was fond of telling friends who inquired if his son was as right-leaning as he was, that "my son is just slightly right of Genghiz Khan". Perhaps a humorous over-simplification, but effective in relaying the crux of the matter. Now, I know there are those that upon reading that assessment of my political stance will be outright revolted, or dismiss it as unbelievable, since I do not match their "image" of who "those sort of people are". As I have made no secret of some of my positions, I thought it might be a good point to put this personal shift in perspective, lest errant perceptions precede me, and any analysis I might make herein be discounted due to a lack of clarity.

Of course, like he, I didn't start out leaning right. Quite the contrary. In my youth I too was seduced by the normative message of the left, and sided with their over-arching belief system and their rendering of reality. How could I not? I grew up in New York City. It was / is a bastion of elitist culture, liberalism, SJW virtue signalling, and frustrated nanny-state social engineering devotees. It was they who defined what was real, what was legitimate, what was credible, and what was "cutting-edge". Anyone who disagreed with "their" media hegemony in the slightest was clearly either a conspiracy nut-case, or they believed in what now tends to be called "alternative facts" by those who want their version of history to be the one credited as the "definitive truth". It should have been easy to mock the partisan bantering of mega-institutions like the god-like New York Times, or even the smug Village voice, but very few people had the audacity to do so.

In my teenage years I briefly flirted with Communism, and probably more cogently, with Anarchism. This was true Anarchist theory, not just anger for anger sake. I pondered how to limit representational government in order to expand personal liberty. Not surprising I guess. After all, I was an Existentialist artist and musician, and like the good Punk-Rocker I was, I gnashed my teeth at the establishment, and at those who I believed were holding "us", that is, the world, back from our great future with their excessive greed and love of authoritarianism. Most, if not all of my educators, Baby Boomers to a T, who probably were all once civil rights period Hippies, would freely back up this assessment, and tell me that it was the evil fat cat Republicans who were the ones to blame, for, well, literally everything. They were winning, or rather, had won, the Culture War.

This Culture War extended out of political affiliation to religion and race of course, and people of specific groups were expected to vote in a very specific way, regardless of what that party or candidate had done or said about those specific groups. It was almost like a mores that had become a tradition without it ever being agreed upon. There was no vote. No referendum. Just conformity. And conformity as we all know, is the dog-bone of complacency. I realize now that the catch is that democracy requires vigilance, and complacency tends to interfere with that.

But, getting back to the tale at hand. I belonged to one of those groups who were, and are, expected to vote straight Democrat. To not would just be crazy! Poor Whites, All Blacks, All Latinos, All Jews, All Immigrants, and all "educated persons" were to vote along the party line. The only people who didn't must be super rich, super uneducated, and lived in super-isolated rural communities. From that stereotype one would imagine that these countless citizens of the United States were Billionaire Amish Folk. Who were these rich, uneducated country bumpkins who were so vexing, and kept voting Republican? Who were these people who hated all things sane and for the benefit of mankind? 

As a person who grew up in a non-Christian corner of America, the dependent waltz that the mainline Republican party and Conservatives were engaged in with the Evangelical Front (i.e. The Moral Majority and Right-To-Life parties) through my college years, just served to solidify my opinion all the more. Republicans seemed to want some retrogressive return to the pre-civil rights "Leave It to Beaver" era, if not further into some sort of faux-medievalism. I imagined they were the Renaissance Faire Larpers of the American political spectrum, and worse, I suspected that many were borderline white supremacists as well.

I think that this operative thinking still stands as the psychological infrastructure of leftist thought, though I believe that the infrastructure over the last decade has come to rely so heavily on emotion rather than substance, and in some cases logic has been completely abandoned to alarmist rhetoric. This is evident in the ample meltdowns we have seen across the social media platform over the last few months alone. Frankly, one would be hard pressed to find a parallel in the reactions of persons beholding to other ideologies when the tide of voting turns against them. But in this unfurling of "undue emotion" one can see the societal disconnect for what it is. 

The left championed a world of larger and larger government, more "free stuff", and excessive regulation, in both the municipal code sort, as well as the philosophic variety. This was to be a world where everyone was, is, an island unto themselves. Islands of over-educated, Third-Stream feminist dominated, racially guilty, politically correct "Yes Men". They had everyone on-board, or at least the people that mattered, and eventually, the rest would fall in line. If they didn't they just needed to be "re-educated" - maybe in camps, as Rosie O'Donnell recently suggested, along with her endorsement of martial law, and extending Obama's term illegally, all because people on the left were upset because their incredibly horrible candidate lost.

You may have noticed that I use terms like "championed" and "was" in the past tense, when speaking of leftist beliefs and desires. This is because I see their crushing defeat not just as a political one, but as a global philosophic one, and it is one that will place them firmly in the past. That is, if they do not revise themselves as the Republicans did with the Tea Party Movement. America is not isolated. The world as a whole has continually moved further and further away from the Socialist-Globalist Agenda, and nations who flirted with Socialism, or were full Communist, have embraced Capitalism, more and more every year. The European Union will collapse shortly, and in its wake we may see the Europeans wake up in time to halt their own demise. Though they may require our aid by then. But, this is another issue, for another post.

Anyway, so Zionism. In concord to my shift to the right in my college years, I also gravitated to Zionism, and it grew larger on my philosophic palette through those years. At first I wasn't sure if these belief systems were capable of being synchronized. I personally didn't need non-Jews to understand what Zionism was about, nor to care about Jewish concerns in the least. Why should they? I didn't require a non-Irish American to care about Ireland, democracy or not. I had always heard the "Israel's the only true democracy in the Middle East, so we must support her!" trope, but that wasn't the selling point to me.

Often people, and when I say people, I mean 1. liberals, 2. self-hating Jews, and 3. closeted or overt anti-Semites, try to make a distinction between Jews and Zionism, as if they are notions which are easy to separate. Politically, culturally and religiously, the notion of Jews returning to their ancestral homeland works for Jews on all three levels. Can I find a Jew who feels that Israel should not exist? Sure. There are crazy folk everywhere. Can I find a Jew for who this issue is not primary in his or her life, and is comfortable distancing him or herself from the premise. Surely. Can I find an anti-Semite who feels Israel, or even Jews, as an identity group, shouldn't exist? Certainly. They have all kind of "ideas" about Jews they inherited from their family history and / or from their religious baggage by which they can justify that stance. But what of the liberal? How do they work this out? Easy. It's all about the "Victimization Narrative", and when the Jews are losing they are awesome victims, but when they are winning, liberals must chose their opponents over them, especially if they hail from a competing "Victim" category. The left, drawing from Marxist principle is powered by class warfare, race warfare, and gender warfare. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise. If you lined up all the Marxists, all of BLM, and most of the Feminists, do you think any would, if they could, vote Republican? Nope. Not a chance.They only vote Democrat because the Democrats have increasingly embraced Marxist dogma.

So here I was a serial contrarian who realized that these philosophies of global conformity lacked the one thing I needed - an acknowledgement of innate human nature and behaviors. I had no lack of critical thinking imparted to me through Jewish culture, and the more I read the various "Utopia Systems" that denied basic features of human nature, the more I realized that these were designed to take people's hearts and minds down a rabbit hole. In principle I am opposed to any "plan" that states it is capable of "fixing" the world. Contributing to making the world a better place. Sure. Waiting for a form of government to eliminate human avarice, or a Messiah to descend from the heavens to slay evildoers and bring world peace to those he doesn't slay, just goes against my nature. The world is what it is to me. It is not broken, not only is it not fixable, I think it's not meant to be fixed. Believing in any of these systems invariable leads to turning over your fate, and individual rights to either a religious theocracy or to elitist oligarchs. You chose. Either way, we all lose. Thus, I embraced the smaller government and non-interference stance of the Republican Party and the Socially liberal Constitutionalism of the Libertarians, and I switched my party affiliation to, gasp, a registered Republican. I probably let the ship sail on the immigrating to Israel Zionism train at this point, and as a Civic Nationalist, I am a fairly strong proponent of "Americanism".

Since the Tea Party I have seen many Jews swing to the right, as well as friends of mine who are women, or are part of the African-American, Asian, Latino, or LBGT, communities, etc. The leftist media will persist in spouting their message that this is an illusion, and that anyone who voted for President Trump is a White-Anglo-Saxon-Male-Uneducated-Rich-Christian who is racist and sexist, etc., etc. Yawn.

Are there racists and anti-Semitic people on the Alt-Right fringe of the Conservative movement in general. Certainly. Are there anti-Semitic people on the Antifa Anarcho-Fascist left, and even the left leaning segments of the Democrat Party majority? I don't see how there could not be. Do I disagree with their assessment? Surely. I don't really want to tackle them one by one and explain what they are not understanding, and in many respects, I don't really care. 

It is ironic though that Jews, who only account for a fraction of a fraction of the worlds population take up so much of the thought processes of people with this "issue". Perhaps they should wonder why thoughts about Jews or Judaism occur to them so often, and are so out of proportion to Jewish  population level. When they find one Jew in an organization they feel the whole group must be controlled by some secret organization of Jews, somewhere, hidden, of course. Do they equally suspect Greeks guilty of pervasive influence for being over-represented in field of diner ownership? Probably not. Conversely, I could understand a typical white American thinking about Blacks fairly often. Theoretically, 1 in 10 persons one can meet in the US is African-American, and they are over-represented in comparison to their population on television series, professional sports teams, and music celebrities, so it makes total sense that thoughts might cross someone's mind about them as an identity group. However, excluding persons living NYC and maybe some other denser concentrations of ethnic enclaves, the chance of actually encountering a Jew in America is statistically a 2 in 100 chance. Yes, there are famous actors, the majority of noble prize winners, and Israel's domestic exchanges with their Arab citizens on CNN, but, really, if you are on the Alt-Right, and you can't see the strategic reasons for America's alliance with Israel, and you can't find yourself thinking about Jewish issues, unfavorably, more than a couple of times a year, I suggest serious psycho-analysis...yet another Jewish invention.

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