ד. Case Study: The Yids in Berlin and the Birth of the Zionist Übermensch
Germany suffered such a blow at the vindictive hands of Versailles that the path to an austere ethno-nationalism was laid with oil awaiting a spark. Nazism was that spark, and Jewry was the mythic villain against which the blaze was set, its villainy the ultimate justification for the fire. For Ernst Cassirer in The Myth of the State, the Nazi consciousness is a mythic consciousness, wherein the division between the divine world and the physical world does not exist. In the mythic age, gods didn’t simply descend to Earth—they literally lived on Earth, at the top of Mount Olympus. This lack of division between the earthly and the divine also informed the production of Western epistemological consciousness: if there is no separation between the earthly and the divine, there is no difference between appearance and reality.[1] For Plato and his innumerable successors, a critical examination of the relationship between appearance and reality formed the foundation for what remains the dominant Western method of critical thought. Under a mythic consciousness, where hallucination is revelation, what appears to be the case is really the case. Under a cynical appropriation of a mythic consciousness, which is what Cassier claims Nazism is, a fleshed out state apparatus with a fully functioning propaganda organ appears to be exactly what it declares itself to be: a heroic body which fights and governs for the benefit of all, which tends to the garden of the nation and pulls the appropriate ethnographic weeds. For Cassirer, the division of appearance and reality in our consciousness, instituted by the Ban on Idolatry (Moses’ doctrine upon his return from Sinai and discovery of the Golden Calf that God and Truth are not physical or of the Earth[2]), is what creates the conditions for the possibility of critical thought. Nazism, for Cassirer, is a cynical appropriation of the life-world of myth that precludes the possibility of critical thought—the performance of rites (attending rallies, praising the Führer, participating in being the model Nazi citizen) became, through repetition and inculcation, what was right. This appropriation[3] was cynical in nature because it was a resurrection of those aspects of mythos which could be manipulated in order to institute a system of indoctrination and control, rather than the ancient, organic mythic mode of imaginative free-play (narrativized above):
Myth was no longer a free and spontaneous play of imagination. It was regulated and organized; it was adjusted to political needs and used for concrete political ends. What formerly appeared to be an ungovernable unconscious process was subjected to a severe discipline. It was brought under control and trained to obedience and power. Myths were brought into being by the word of command of the political leaders. They could be made at will, becoming an artificial compound manufactured in the great laboratory of politics. The twentieth century is a technical century. It invented a new technique of myth and this invention proved to be decisive in the final victory of the National Socialist party in Germany.[4]
The State became synonymous with the Divine because there was no distinction between what was and what ought to be, thereby casting the State into a position of moral authority and supremacy, a morality synonymous with and inseparable from legality and the machinations of juridical sovereignty. The Word of the Führer, like the Word of God, becomes truth itself upon dictation. In Lissa Skitolsky's words,
[...] for Cassirer the Jews were not merely the scapegoat for Germany’s ills. Instead the Holocaust was the product of the historical battle between the mythic and the ethical forms of collective life, the battle between rite and right[...]. When political leaders self-consciously devise new rites in order to manipul ate masses, when they take for themselves god-like powers over entire populations, when they proclaim the real to be the ideal, they harness the power of myth for the sake of wealth and power.[5]
This is a symbolo-ceremonial means of indoctrination and manufacturing consensus, wherein ritualistic repetition of rites institutes an exclusionary cultural identity and fanatic fidelity:
The effect of these new rites is obvious. Nothing is more likely to lull asleep all of our active forces, our power of judgement and critical discernment, and to take away our feeling of personality and individual responsibility than the steady, uniform, and monotonous performance of the same rites.[6]
The Jews, therefore, that race whose supremacy lies precisely in their incessant interrogation of “appearance,” the apparent world, and even of the Word of God itself, that culture which gains definition by its lack of national fidelity, presents a unique ideological challenge to the mythic consciousness of Nazism, and so requires extermination,[7] or at the least makes for a very convenient enemy—and fascisms like the German, Polish, Israeli, and American varieties always require such an enemy, one which is Within but which has infiltrated from Without.
Yet why was Nazism appealing? For its appeal was indeed what secured the victory of the Nazi Party in Germany, as Cassirer rightly notes. What was the Eros of National Socialism? For Emmanuel Levinas, in Some Thoughts on the Philosophy of Hitlerism, Nazism is a misplaced revolt against the excesses of German Idealism, Christianity, and Western philosophy at large, which deny embodiment its intrinsic value. Levinas writes,
The whole philosophical and political thought of modern times tends to place the human spirit on a plane that is superior to reality, and so creates a gulf between man and the world. It makes it impossible to apply the categories of the physical world to the spirituality of reason, and so locates the ultimate foundation of the spirit outside the brutal world and the implacable history of concrete existence. It replaces the blind world of common sense with the world rebuilt by idealist philosophy, one that is steeped in [...] and subject to reason.[8]
In classifying reason and Mind as the locus of philosophical significance, and as having radical agency over the body, the tradition of Western thought devalues phenomenological relevance/revelation, and in many cases induces shame in embodiment itself, or explicitly condemns propositions arrived at through the consideration of embodiment. The larger part of traditional Christian thought works to devalue the body, sensuality, embodiment, and the physical world through a negative valuation of sensual pleasure and a glorification of the next life, which is reached through an ascetic rejection of all things bodily. For an explanatory example, consider Kant’s categorical imperative: for Kant, the sole source of valuation is Mind and its reason. Emotions ought to be ignored as distractions, and consequence upon the bodies of those affected by a given decision ought not factor into the ethical equation at all. What matters is only rationale, reason, the mind, and the inviolable categorical imperative. Appreciation of beauty, even, is always mentally “disinterested” for Kant, intellectual and mentally specious. For the history of the Western conceptualization of the self, the body is to be overcome, transcended, and is thereby devalued, derided, and, when you get down to it, hated by these ascetic priests which “ha[ve] functioned as the repulsive and gloomy caterpillar-form in which alone philosophy was allowed to live and in which it crept around...”[9] For depressive, lonely Kant and his austere, priestly fellows, the body is a prison of flesh, a hated limitation to the otherwise unlimited flight of Mind. In response to this inculcated shame comes the Nazi revolt, an uncritical and indulgent positive valuation of physicality and materiality. Whereas before the Ego was horribly trapped within a body which did not define its truth, now the Ego becomes its body, is glorified in its very embodiment, in a crude rejection of idealism which institutes a violently exclusionary racialism. Nazism affirms the absolute value of the (Aryan) body in the face of its utter devaluation:
The importance attributed to this sentiment of the body, which never satisfied the Western mind, is the basis of a new notion of man. The biological, with all the fatality it entails, becomes more than an object of spiritual life; it becomes its heart [...] the mysterious voices of the blood, the calls of heredity and the past, lose the nature of problems submitted to a supremely free ego for solution.[10]
Nazism becomes a rejection of these humanistic, liberal ideals which form the foundation of Western democratic ideology: “The forms of modern society based on the accord of free wills seem not only fragile and inconsistent but false and deceitful [and] loses the grandeur of the triumph of mind over body[…]. A society with a consanguine base follows directly from this concretization of the mind.”[11] In attempting to escape from the obstacles of history, biology, and nationality, these facts with which the detached Western ego has always struggled, the Nazi revolt embraces Germanic, “Aryan” history, biology, and nationality, elevating it to the most high and supreme. The pattern of history becomes genetic warfare, and so the existential threat to this newly created Volk is discovered by these avaricious scientist-devils in genetic and physical impurity, in ‘degenerate,’ democratic ideology and those ‘misled’ governments and peoples which prize it so highly. Value is now found in blood: it no longer has anything to do with escaping corporeality through flights of Mind—Aryan blood grants value, as does Germanic nationality and soil. For Levinas,
In [Hitlerism] the Germanic ideal of man comes as a promise of sincerity and authenticity. Man no longer stands before a world of ideas where he can choose his own truth by a sovereign decision of his free reason; he is already bound to certain truths, as he is bound by birth to all men of his blood[…]. [Ideals] come from his concrete being, are anchored to his flesh and blood and share their gravity.[12]
The appeal of Nazism is that we are free to honor our embodiment, so long devalued. The desire to succumb to such a value system of crude embodiment is what powers the belief in the mythos. The desire not just to value oneself in terms of one’s embodiment alone, but that embodiment as in-itself special, as in-itself superior, as in-itself destined to a mythic greatness. The mythic consciousness of the ancient world is summoned by the occultist propaganda machine of Hitlerism, reformatted and weaponized for nationalistic warfare. Nazism functions as a lure because, following Whitehead and Thomas, it expands and reorients feeling by encouraging an anti-production that liberates one from the Christian and German idealist devaluation of the body while instigating a novel connectivity through an exclusionary positive valuation of the Aryan body. It allows one to feel, sense, experience, and conceptualize themselves and the world in new and brazenly attractive ways. Libidinal desiring spins up and races down the ducts laid by Nazi engineers of desiring, the Nazi subject gets liberated from the shameful devaluation of his past (inaugurated in part by Versailles),[13] and is welcomed into a bright future in which he, and he alone, is destined to inherit the earth. Aryan mastery is assured, written, secure: so long as those others which threaten the Aryan race are dealt with—for the valuation of the body is here the valuation of the Aryan body, of Aryan blood, which is under de facto, a priori constant threat. The disabled, the Jews, the Poles, and the Roma infect, dilute, and threaten the purity of Aryan blood. Mythic history, re-instantiated, summoned back from the past as a twisted golem, becomes a history of genetic warfare, one which must be taken up anew: root out these plague-rats, this contagion, this Jewish poison and Hebrew corruption. Embrace vitality, pride, and strength, and eviscerate this sniveling, low-born, infected virus which threatens you, your family, your blood, and above all your Fatherland.
Now the culture of European Jewry at this time is informed by still other violences: pogroms, expulsions, and inquisitions have scattered them since the days of Herod, atomizing the ancient nation into so many molecular shtetls. In urban centers they practice mobile, nomadic trades—fine metalwork, jewel cutting, tailoring, and other burger mercantile crafts. In short, businesses which can be picked up and moved with little notice. Or they perform the tasks traditionally forbidden to Christians by their messiah: money loaning, lawyering, and etc. which for fairly obvious reasons become looked upon as manipulative and deceitful. Along with the Jews’ lack of national fidelity, this renders an untrustworthy people, one not appropriately integrated or meaningfully understood. Myths of Kabbalistic witchcraft haunt the goyische mythos of the outskirted shtetls, and accusations of blood libel are sometimes whispered, sometimes shouted.
The contingency of cultural arising becomes visible, reliant upon environment, location, access to resources including land for residence, etc. Jewish culture is no different and follows the same materialist laws of contingent arising, and it becomes observable precisely why those characteristics make them an easy and obvious enemy for the Nazi regime. In the Crusades, in the Pogroms, in the Inquisition, in the relegation to “sinful” occupations, in the creation of a diffuse culture of textual criticism following the fall of the Temple and the scattering of the tribes and the diffusion of the Judaic, Galileean, and Babylonian Sanhedrin, one truth is clear: culture proceeds, in part, by way of violence. Input and output vectors become trackable: fallen from the position of kingdomhood, the expelled lose their skill for warcraft and majoritarian rule. Without a Temple and the official production of scripture, interpretation of what to do with commandments which require a Temple to be followed form the basis of a new culture of hermeneutics and scriptural re-interpretation. Environmental change causes the machine to break down, which is part of the process of its functioning: it adapts, patching over the wound and by so doing creates something novel, growing a new organ in the place of the old. Consistent expulsion renders an insular culture, one which moves from province to province without full integration. A nomadic and insular People of the Book is born—culture has evolved, proceeded by way of violence, expelled its vestigial organs and grown for itself new ones, better suited for its precarious and constantly changing environs.
German culture, its ancient Gothic and Prussian pride badly wounded by the Great War and the bayonet of Versailles, proceeds by way of violence from a point arrived at by way of violence: it strikes back, reaffirms the value of its body, so shamed by the excesses of German Idealism and Saxon disdain, and purifies its line through the elimination the Pole, the Jew, the Rromani, and even its own blood if found physically defective or homosexual. Addicted to speed, its methed up soldiers blitz east and west seeking triumph and Lebensraum. Finally it falls by the violent and impractical excesses which fueled it, into defeat and long partition.
The Jew, halved and decimated, proceeds by way of violence. An old wish, the subterranean wish of any nomad, seated deep in the blood, seeks an ancient homeland. Herzl inspires many men, from Eichmann to Ben-Gurion, but his wish cycles uselessly without libidinal-material fuel.[14] Posthumous fuel arrives: driven by their guilt and their wish to avoid accountability, Europe does many things in the aftermath of the Nazi genocide. One is Nuremburg, another is Israel. The colonial situation in Palestine has become inconvenient, unprofitable, and the indigenous tension unmitigable. An influx of Jewish refugees from Europe (some smuggled there before the implementation of the Final Solution by Eichmann himself!) and the formation of the Haganah lends a quasi-European successor to British colonial rule: the European Jew. The British openly arm the ‘moderate’ Haganah and subtly arm the radical Irgun and make their swift exit. The newly formed United Nations rends the land in two in a liberal and doomed compromise, and on the day of ratification sparks a Holy War, the continuation of a single Crusade which has raged since the Canaanites longed for home and the Word of God sent them from Egypt back to the walls of Jericho.
In 1948 the Jew changes. Homeless no more, thoughtful no more, victim no more—he becomes the Arbiter of War. The culture-machine once again functions by breaking down; the pre-frontal interpretative organ is reformatted as a wargame calculator. The scholar-commander reads The Nomadology and blasts a hole in the wall behind the enemy,[15] eviscerating the insurgent, his family, his home, and the next seven generations of his line. The culture of wist and grace under persecution becomes the culture of national security and predation, as it adapts to its new and ancient environs.
“Next year, in Jerusalem!” turns from wish to vicious promise, as the lesson of Exodus is turned on its head and forgotten—the myth now serves an inverse function, as it morphs via a breakage into a tale which justifies the violence by which it transforms. A new mythic consciousness is born, in the land of Joshua: the gods have come back to earth! There is Mount Tabor, over those hills and beyond that cell tower, where the armies of Hazor met the Israelites in battle! There is Masada, where the Sicarii Jews martyred themselves in dirt and blood and wailing! Here is Hezekiah’s Tunnel, the waterways which the Israelites traversed to defend the City of David from the Assyrians! There is Caesarea, where the body of the great Akiva, who screamed the Shema as he was skinned alive, was borne by Elijah himself! “And blessed are you, Rabbi Akiva, that your life expired with ‘Echad!’” And there is the Mount of Olives, where the dead will rise—t’khiyat hameitim—with the coming of the Melekh Mashiakh and the ushering-in of Olam Ha-Ba! This is the sacred land of the Covenant, promised to us by this fearful God who strides at our backs into heat and war.
So goes the myth: "the Zionist has exceeded mankind—he has gone beyond man! The beast of prey roams the chaparral, stretching his lank over the hillside. His augmented arms can see around corners,[16] slice down an incoming missile from 75,000 yards.[17] The Zionist is the Superman, going beyond man by augmenting himself with sat-coms and high-tech armaments. The sergeant stands at the ridge of a hillside at Khirbet Khizeh above a sea of fog,[18] looking out across this land which he secures for himself and the future of his people, swelled with pride. “I hate them because they make us kill their children,” says Ariel Sharon. Is this not the realization, after so many centuries, of a race freed of ressentiment? Of an aristocratic Übermenschen? That race of ascetic jurist-priests of ressentiment, the Jews, those most unlikely of candidates, are indeed become Zarathustra's successors. What need have they of humility when their destiny is supreme? It is the Philistines who now rave in the ranks of slaves, born and driven by hatred and a vicious ressentiment." So goes the myth.
The Haganah is reborn in the IDF and Mossad, the Irgun becomes the pall of state-sanctioned vigilantism which continues unabated. That ancient enemy, the Philistine, now sits beyond the walls of Jerusalem. The Jew who dwells once more in the Promised Land, who for two-thousand years has wandered, has become once again a race of conquerors and warriors, in the land of David and Solomon and Judah the Maccabee. In 1948 and again in 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, 1985, 1987, 2000, 2006, 2008, 2012, and 2014, the remilitarized Jew, armed once again for the first time since the days of Zedekiah and his doomed prophet Jeremiah, wages war against its enemies, now with two-thousand years of vengeance to exact. The maxim “blood & soil” once again haunts the legacy of the Jewish race, now unuttered, just below the surface, but wreaking the same violence. Security, homeland—Lebensraum! now dictates the policy of the Jewish theocracy, and the Jews, once weeds, now become the weeders tending to their garden, defending it from the enemy which is Within but which has come from Without—the Palestinian Arab. Jewish culture in the Holy Land[19] becomes vindictive, offensive, reactionary, hot and quick, and loses all of its ancient sagacity. The People of the Book have rearmed, augmenting themselves with cybernetic limbs, with cell phones and assault rifles and airspace defense missiles.
Jewish culture has proceeded, from the waning days of Moses to the never-ending political reign of Netanyahu and the Likud, by way of violence. The machine has shuddered, broken down, and re-awoken to a red sun and the brazen notes of the Hatikvah.
[1]This is not to be confused with the attempt to dissolve the distinction between appearance and reality I partially make in my “Becoming-Jaguar” post: the dissolution I support is a pragmatic one, one which recognizes that deceit is not “fake,” but itself productive of the Real: when you act “fake,” you are being “real,” in that you are performing something which is productive of reality. The Platonic distinction between appearance and reality is the one I wish to vacate. (And perhaps this distinction is more confusing than it’s worth, but I find some value in Cassirer’s formulation at least for the purposes of this post, as idealist and conservative as it is.) However, there might be a further way to distinguish appearance and reality. To be sure, when someone who has eaten your candy says “I did not eat your chocolate bar,” they are producing reality (or rather a virtuality)—this (real/virtual)ity, the one in which they are lying to you by discursively presenting a version of events; yet they are misrepresenting another reality, the one in which they in fact ate your chocolate bar. Being unable to distinguish a claim to truth (the Word of the Führer) from truth itself (that Jews do not in fact “control the world”) is characteristic of the mythic consciousness which I am attempting to elucidate. [2] Scripture certainly written by later priests—Exodus, including Sinai and the story of the tablets and the Calf, almost certainly never happened. The only evidence that Judaism at all came from Egypt is the theory that the splinter Cult of the Sun God fled Egypt and the Pharaoh and went north. It is also theorized that this cult additionally influenced Zoroastrianism (despite my polemicizing above), though there is still less evidence for that. At any rate—Judaism as a move to unite disparate indigenous tribes under the Yahweh god, much less the point at which it was canonized, certainly post-ceded the mythical date of Moses' ascension up Sinai (a physical place, you'll note, where Hashem physically was). [3] It is perhaps more constructive to conceive of this movement as a sort of return to, rather than cynical appropriation of, a past form: the evolution of gods and the divine myths follow structures of power in the societies where they form. The divinity of kings evolves into the divine right of kings, which proceeds to the Magna Carta and the democratization of western governance, itself based upon a Protestant derivation of divine sovereignty. So, Nazism’s return to myth is not merely a “cynical appropriation” of, but a cynical return to the concentration of divine mythos in the leader of the nation, as found, notably, in Akhenaten’s Kemet, wherein Akhenaten himself was seen as avatar of Aten-Ra, the one God. (Thanks to Michael Thomas for his critical contribution regarding this distinction here.) [4]Cassirer, Ernst, The Myth of The State, (1946), 116. [5] Skitolsky, Lissa, Cassirer’s View of the ‘Meaning’ of Nazism, 1. [6] Cassirer, 124. [7] This casual explanation of the Shoah is undeniably idealist and a bit conservative. Emmanuel Levinas (below) presents a more compelling, libidinal case for the embracing of fascism. Still other hypotheses have formulated materialist accounts (Mark Levene seeks a causal narrative in the stated goal of some of the Nazi cadre of free labor in the camps, for e.g.) of the phenomenon of Nazi anti-semitism, but these typically have the inverse problem of Cassirer’s (no accounting of the forces of desiring at play). [8] Levinas, Emmanuel, Some Thoughts on the Philosophy of Hitlerism, 15. [9]Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morality, Trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen, (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998), 82 [10] Levinas, 18-19 [11] Ibid., 19 [12] Ibid., 20 [13] And in the present by the violent shame of Germany’s genocidal past—who have we but ourselves to blame for the rising popularity of neo-fascism in Germany? Again have we shamed the German for the crimes of their fathers, and again they react with a cynical valuation of body and country! [14] Wikipedia, Theodor Herzl, (Wikipedia.org). [15] Weizman, Eyal, The Art of War: Deleuze, Guattari, Debord and the Israeli Defense Force, (Metamute.org, 2006). [16] Wikipedia, CornerShot, (Wikipedia.org). [17] Wikipedia, Iron Dome, (Wikipedia.org). [18] Friedrich, Caspar David, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, (Wikipedia.org). [19]The Jew outside the Holy Land is a confused creature, with a mixed-up legacy. In America there are the socialist Jews, kibbutzniks who take after the humanism of khesed, loving-kindness, and tikkun olam, and who reject the New Myth of the Return. Trotskyites and Luxemburgians following from Brooklynite radicalism to Californian luxury socialism. And there are those laissez-faire Hebrews who have not even the Israeli’s admirable will-to-power, who push Zionism with a deep ressentiment, levelling bitterness and accusations of anti-Semitism to work their way deeper into the political machine. Then there are those Protestantized Jews who might be of any type, whose God has been subtly replaced by the Christian's God of Love, who have lost their distinctiveness and who host pine trees in their living rooms on the winter solstice. Tensions between these groups abound—the tension between the assimilated suburban Jew and the neurotic Brooklyn Jew, the Yiddish hoi polloi and cultured German Jew, Sephardim and Ashkenazim, Zionist and anti-Zionist, etc. (Of course these are broad, and cannot capture the fecundity of American Jewry, much less the rest of global Jewry, but for our purposes these are hopefully illustrious enough to provide a sense of scope.)
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