Blaming the Jews. Bernard Harrison
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as expressions of beliefs or attitudes held by their authors.
On the other hand, After Strange Gods is precisely that: a manifesto. Here, Eliot is talking about actual Jews and their impact on society as he conceives it. We are here, then, entitled to read him quite straightforwardly as contending that the activities of “free-thinking Jews” are inimical to the life of the kind of conservative Christian commonwealth that Eliot wishes to see restored. The reason, according to Eliot, is that the presence of “any large number of free-thinking Jews” is inconsistent with the (non-Jewish) cultural and religious homogeneity that must be preserved if there is to be any return to a society soundly based on conservative Christian values. To which, I suppose, a natural skepticism must in all honesty return the answer: “What homogeneity?” The passage echoes, that is to say, with the hollow clap of stable doors closing a century and a half too late, long after the horses of cultural and religious homogeneity in the non-Jewish Western world have definitively fled. The opponents Eliot’s ideas have actually to confront, in other words, are not free-thinking Jews, whose numbers in proportion were very far from large even in the 1930s, but the inconceivably greater numbers of free-thinking ex-Christians who, following Hume and Voltaire, will accept neither Eliot’s politics nor his Christianity and whom it is far too late to cow into silence, let alone submission, merely by the avoidance of “excessive tolerance.”
The function of Jews per se in Eliot’s discourse, as in that of Shaw, Luther, or the philosophes, is in other words to create a delusive appearance of non-Jewish unity in support of certain ideas by exporting, or in Freudian terms projecting, a disturbingly domestic disunity onto a reassuringly external and putatively alien source. If—if only—the Jews were the problem, then the politics of Eliot and those of his political mentor Charles Maurras would be assured of success. That, I submit, is what explains the presence of “free-thinking Jews,” otherwise hardly rationally explicable, in the passage cited above.
Now for one final example of the technique of neutralizing the threat to entrenched theoretical positions posed by inconvenient facts about the non-Jewish world, by exporting, or projecting, those facts onto the shoulders of the Jews. This one concerns Holocaust denial—known in French as négationnisme—on the part of elements of the French left in the concluding quarter of the twentieth century. The best-known figures here are Paul Rassinier (1906–67), whose widely influential writings were instrumental in making Holocaust denial a live political issue in France, and later in the period, Robert Faurisson, a former literary scholar at the University of Lyon, famous for having attracted ambiguously phrased support from no less stalwart a pillar of the American left than Noam Chomsky. Faurisson received support in publishing and popularizing his views from La vielle taupe (The Old Mole—the name comes from Hamlet’s remark concerning his father’s ghost, as recycled by Hegel to refer to the “underground” progress of Spirit), a Parisian bookshop and publishing firm run by one Pierre Guillaume, for whom it represented a continuation of his involvement in the French political upheavals of the 1960s, culminating in the “May events” of 1968.
A fascinating report on this obscure movement based on, among other things, a lengthy interview with Guillaume himself was recently published by the Israeli philosopher Elhanan Yakira.42 I shall concentrate here on what Yakira has to say about the ideological and (in a certain sense) moral considerations motivating Rassinier.
Yakira notes that Rassinier held throughout his life “pacifist and proto-anarchist views.”43 As a young man, he joined the Communist Party. As a member of the Resistance during the early stages of World War II, he was captured by the Gestapo, tortured, and sent first to Buchenwald and then, along with thousands of other slave laborers, to Dora, a work camp for the construction of the V1 and V2 rockets. At the end of the war, he enjoyed a brief political career as a member of the Socialist Party in which capacity he was elected for a time to the National Assembly. From 1948 onward, however, he began to publish a series of books whose object was to deny that the Holocaust had taken place. What Yakira makes clear is that this project was motivated directly by Rassinier’s lifelong anarcho-pacifism.
Rassinier was particularly opposed to efforts to present a Manichaean view of the modern world, to depict Nazi Germany as the incarnation of absolute evil and what had been done in the concentration camps as uniquely wicked.44 … According to him, Nazi concentration camps were not really a unique historical phenomenon. Not only did they not differ from Soviet camps; they did not differ from French penal institutions either: a camp is a camp, as we were to hear fifty years later from various self-styled progressive writers. It is merely an expression, more or less severe according to circumstances, of the essence of the state as such, not just of the Nazi SS state or even the totalitarian state. For Rassinier, the underlying logic of the essence of the state is the logic of war and enslavement. The task of the intellectual of the left, especially one who himself as witnessed such events, is, on the one hand, to warn against the Manichaeism that places all the blame on one side, thus provoking war, and, on the other hand, to strip the other side of its claim to moral superiority. It is war itself that is the absolute evil, not one warmongering party or another.45
Plainly, the facts concerning the near extermination of the Jews of Europe between 1933 and 1945 are incompatible with this account, both as an account of reality and as an assessment of the duties of the intellectual. But the response of the likes of Rassinier, Faurisson, and La vielle taupe is not to modify their position but to attempt to neutralize the threat to their ideological stance posed by the Holocaust by recasting the latter as a tissue of Jewish lies. As Yakira justly observes, “Reflecting on the story of Rassinier’s life and reading his writings are a lesson in the genesis of a perversion and in the mechanisms by which ideology can triumph over reality.”46
What I have been attempting to show in this chapter is that the entire history of political antisemitism consists of a series of such “triumphs,” achieved through the operation of just such mechanisms. In the next chapter, I shall return to the second main question before us: What is it about the Jews, of all the nations of Europe, that has made them so fatally convenient as a means to such triumphs?
NOTES
1. The present version of this chapter has profited greatly from comments on an earlier draft by Cynthia Ozick and Professor Alvin Rosenfeld.
2. Arendt 1976.
3. Nirenberg 2013, 463.
4. Laqueur 2008, 110.
5. Laqueur 2008, 157.
6. Arendt 2007, 463.
7. Arendt 2007, 95–99.
8. Nirenberg 2013, 463.
9. Prager and Telushkin 2003, 7.
10. Prager and Telushkin 2003, 6–7.
11. Prager and Telushkin 2003, 7.
12. Prager and Telushkin 2003, 7.
13. Nirenberg 2013, 464.
14. Nirenberg 2013, 263f.
15. Nirenberg 2013, 264.
16. Nirenberg 2013, 267.
17. Prager and Telushkin 2003, 11.
18. Prager and Telushkin 2003, 8.
19. Prager and Telushkin 2003, 8.
20. Prager and Telushkin 2003, 8–9.
21. Prager and Telushkin 2003, 9.
22. See, e.g., Elhanan Yakira, “Virtuous Antisemitism,” in A. H. Rosenfeld 2015. Yakira (2010) is excellent on this phenomenon in postwar intellectual life in France, while encyclopedic studies of its influence in British intellectual circles can be found in Julius (2010) and Cheyette (1993).
23. Heinsohn 2000.
24. Heinsohn 2000, 412. The citation is H. Trevor-Roper and A François-Poncet, eds., Hitlers politisches Testament: Die Bormann Diktate vom Februar und April 1945 (Hamburg: Albrecht Knaus, 1981), 66, 68, 69. The italics are Heinsohn’s.
25. Harrison 2013.
26.