CRITICAL MASS

From Haskala to the Holocaust… Once again, how could that happen? And we are not talking here about some backward Ukrainians or Poles, but about one the most civilized nations in human history: Germany!

…Something did happen, however, to which, as I pointed out in the last entry, Lessing and Mendelssohn, in an allegorical phrase, of course, opened the door. Not to keep the reader in unnecessary suspense about my intended surprise, it was the rich and powerful Jew, who was now stepping into the limelight of the world stage, assertively taking charge of the events on the wreckage of the old caste system, from which the Jews of yore had always been excluded.

They may always have enjoyed a disproportionate access to the riches of the nations, but they never enjoyed the other component of success: political power. The 1180 Law of Edward the Confessor in England says it all in one sentence: “The Jews themselves, and all that is theirs, belong to the king.” Just imagine how this royal property claim was, in fact, protecting the Jews and their fragile belongings from otherwise inevitable seizures by the perennially impoverished peers of the realm!

The powerful poor versus the powerless rich, a political balance of sorts, but beware when this balance has been broken! A new explosive balance of a powerful rich minority versus a powerless poor majority is now on the ascendance, and, with it, Marxism is also at hand.

It was only with the collapse of the caste system, a direct consequence of the Enlightenment with its motto of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, that the previously separated complementary components of a nuclear explosion, the money and the power, found each other in an unprecedentedly powerful, and just as deadly, when mishandled, fusion into a critical mass.

One of the greatest historical ironies of all time reveals itself when we realize that in the surging tide of an all-new type of class struggle of the poor against the rich, the Jews are sure to find their own in both camps, and whichever camp wins, they are destined to become both winners and losers in this conflict. Their task is therefore not just to win or to avoid losing, but to learn how to minimize the losses. Alas, too often they have been far more interested in maximizing their gains, following the formula of Larry “the Liquidator” Garfield (Danny DeVito’s character), in the movie Other People’s Money: “We just try to make as much as we can for as long as we can, and then… we adapt.” Such precisely must have been the general attitude of the enterprising Jews of Germany, making huge profits off the post-World War I German national misery, thus tragically foreshadowing Hitler’s Holocaust…

Returning to the question of the two distinctly different groups of German Jews: the conservative rich, and the revolutionary poor, there is a familiar historical argument blaming Germany’s “Marxist” Jews for her sudden and totally unexpected collapse at the end of the Great War. This is what the outraged generals were alleging, and the nation supposedly believed them.

My take on this does not buy such an explanation. Rank and file Germans during the war had been unhappy with it already, for which reason so many of them had actually bought the “Jewish communist agitprop.” It is ridiculous to even suggest that the Jewish radicals could on their own have brought about the collapse of Germany without a massive, disproportionately large Gentile support. The fact that, later on, most of those who had actually followed the Marxist cue reversed themselves (most of German Gentile Communists later joined the Nazi Party!) and struck against the Jews must be attributed, in my opinion, to their class struggle of the poor against the rich, where the Jews were identified as the rich, and the backlash against the other kind of non-wealthy Jews developed along the recognizable anti-Semitic lines, treating all Jews collectively guilty of the guilt of a few. (In order to understand what I am talking about, when I mention the wealth of German Jews sharply contrasted against the extreme impoverishment of ordinary Germans, prior to Hitler’s ascent to power, one can ask himself this simple question: how many priceless works of art and other such treasures have been claimed in the past decades by the heirs of the victims of the Holocaust, as the private property of their tragically perished relatives?! On the other hand, millions of the hapless Jewish poor, the object of derision and contempt on the part of their affluent brethren, would share their common tragic fate, on their account. For more on this, see my entry Yom Kippur.)

Thus, paradoxically, blaming the Jewish Marxists for Germany’s collapse in WWI, and for her subsequent deep humiliation, was an effect of a classic “Marxist” revolutionary rebellion of the poor against the rich…

In conclusion, I am asking the readers of this, especially those who vehemently disagree with me, to take my argument with all necessary philosophical seriousness. It is not too late still to learn from the history of which everybody knows the effects, but few are aware of the causes.