ALEXANDER KIMEL - HOLOCAUST UNDERSTANDING & PREVENTION

There is no doubt that the Jews are the main victims of anti-Semitism. Throughout the ages, the Jews were locked up in ghettos, ridiculed, expelled from their homes, killed and raped. But, in my opinion, the Jews are not the only victims of anti-Semitism. The whole western world pays a price for this aberration.

The western civilization rests on three pillars: quest for knowledge and beauty inherited from the Greeks; the sense of law and order inherited from the Romans and the search for justice and social conscience contributed by Judaism. Anti-Semitism removes one of the pillars causing he collapse of the whole structure. .

Man is a social animal, who must constantly curb his instinctual drives. Religion, tries to achieve this by developing a conscience, what Freud called the superego. Anti-Semitism let's hatemongers bypass the conscience appealing directly to the irrational. It creates true believers, to whom facts do not matter. In Poland the Jews were blamed for meat shortages, and in the US they are blamed for financing the African slave trade. In Germany they were blamed for the defeat of the WWI and for the outbreak of WWII. Facts don't matter for true anti-Semites.

The danger of anti-Semitism lies in the fact that it facilitates demagoguery. Latent anti-Semitism is like a weed seed that lies dormant in the soil, until watered and fertilized by incendiary oratory, it grows rapidly and chokes all other life, with disastrous consequences.

In Germany, latent and overt anti-Semitism enabled Hitler to gain power. Without anti-Semitism, the Nazis would have been a marginal extremist group, appealing to a small minority on the fringes of the society. Anti-Semitism was Hitler's best selling point. Without anti-Semitism WWII would have been impossible. The Germans paid for their anti-Semitism with twelve millions of dead and wholesale destruction, and so did the whole Western world. Let's take another anti-Semitic country - Russia. At the turn of the century, the peasants lived in appalling, serf-like conditions. Social reforms were badly needed, but instead of reforms the Tzar unleashed a series of pogroms, directing the rage of the peasant against the Jews. "Beat the Jews and save Russia," became the call of the day. The Jews were beaten, but Russia was not saved from the Stalinist terror and madness, caused by a lack of reforms.

In 1492, Spain expelled the Jews and despite of all the gold and riches plundered in the Americas, Spain remained for 500 years the poorest country in Europe. In 1968 Poland expelled the remainder of the Jews, and soon afterwards the Polish economy took a nose dive.

The anti-Semitic oratory is a dangerous tool in the hands of aspiring hatemongers like Farakhan in the USA, or Zhirinovsky in Russia.

kimel@systec.com