Identity Politics: Same Gift, Different Wrapping
“Why then did the Jews provoke the war?” - Adolf Hitler, January 25, 1942
According to the Nazis, the genocide of the Jewish people in Europe was a catastrophe of the Jews’ own making. They brought it on themselves. They deserved it. They were guilty, according to the Nazi leadership, of betraying the German people at the end of the Great War and plunging the world into another, of the Great Depression, of threatening the world with the rampaging onslaught of Bolshevism emerging out of the USSR and of “destroying the cultural traditions of human society.”
Jewish citizens who fought proudly for Germany in World War I were still considered traitors. Jews who lost everything in the collapse of the stock market and didn’t know a single banker were held responsible for the Depression. Jews who didn’t even live in the Soviet Union and renounced communism on its face were seen as part of the Bolshevik conspiracy to overthrow civilization.
In short, all of Germany’s problems, along with all of the reasons Germany wasn’t at the forefront of Western and global progress, were laid at the feet of a particular ethnic group and individuals within that ethnic group were all lumped in together, regardless of their personal beliefs or actions.
On March 27, 1942, Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary:
“The Jews are being punished barbarically, to be sure, but they have fully deserved it. The prophecy that the Leader issued to them on the way, for the eventuality the they started a new world war, is beginning to realize itself in the most terrible manner. One must not allow any sentimentalities to rule in these matters. If we did not defend ourselves against them, the Jews would annihilate us. It is a struggle for life and death between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus. No other government and no other regime could muster the strength for a general solution to the question.”
(The prophecy referred to here was from Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, when he said, “If international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”)
The Nazis believed that what they were doing was what was best for Germany and the rest of the world. They saw the Final Solution as the answer to a real problem that was plaguing mankind and holding it back from its genuine attempts at peace and order. They believed in a Jewish conspiracy against Western civilization and that the lives of untold millions would be lost because Jews were allowed to live and exist in their territories.
They thought what they were doing was the right thing to do. And they thought they were the only ones who were capable of doing it.
How much evil is wrought “for the good of the people?” How much of the totalitarian impulse is derived from a belief that we are intrinsically good people who can trust our own instincts and intentions? How willing are we to trespass boundaries and violate individual rights in the name of equality, peace or progress?
In our current climate, whiteness has been blamed for everything from disparities in education, income, and criminality to pollution to the amount of minorities who have died from COVID-19. Just as it became fashionable for the Jews to receive blame for every conceivable problem or inequality in Germany in the 1930's and ‘40s, so also are we toying with the idea that whites are the reason America isn’t the grand, equitable utopia some of us wish it to be.
And, just like then, individuality is ignored in exchange for the simplistic view that whiteness is itself the problem.
Racism in this society is kept alive by those who claim most vociferously to be fighting it. And just as before, they seem to sincerely believe that what they are doing is the right thing. Their proposed solutions are nowhere near as murderous, but they are likewise unjust: forcing modern day whites to pay reparations for crimes they didn’t commit to people against whom they were not committed; unbalancing the scales and tilting the fields of play in the name of Affirmative Action or diversity quotas; insisting both that whites are racist by simple virtue of their existence and that, conversely, blacks and other minorities are not even capable of being racist because they do not control the cultural levers of power.
Imbram X. Kendi, author of the popular 'How To Be an Antiracist,' writes:
“Since the 1960s, racist power has commandeered the term “racial discrimination,” transforming the act of discriminating on the basis of race into an inherently racist act. But if racial discrimination is defined as treating, considering, or making a distinction in favor or against an individual based on that person’s race, then racial discrimination is not inherently racist. The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist.
“The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”
Discrimination in the name of anti-racism is the new clarion call of those who would have us believe they are interested in racial justice. Gone is the way of Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of individuals judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. Here now is the new solution: active and enthusiastic discrimination based on immutable characteristics regardless of individual beliefs or actions in order to make right some perceived past injustice.
(Notice too, Kendi’s use of the term “equity” instead of “equality”. The concern of the new Left is not equal opportunity but equal outcome, and any system that does not produce equality of outcome is deemed inherently racist. And so the civil rights crusaders came to be communists.)
Just as before, entire groups of people are lumped into categories and judged according to the errant ideology of those who insist they are doing the right thing for society and mankind. And, just as before, the supposed complicity of everyone in the group coupled with the severity of the offenses justifies the use of objectionable means to reach a desired end. When it comes to identity politics, it is never the gifts that change, only the wrapping.
When you hear the racially charged rhetoric of the intersectional left, it should remind you of the totalitarian screeds of Germany’s infamous National Socialists. The refusal to deal with people as persons, but instead to insist that group characteristics are what define a person’s beliefs, motivations, hopes and destinies, is as unjust now as it was then. Inane theories about “the worship of whiteness,” (this one from Georgia Democratic congressional candidate Raphael Warnock, for example), ought to strike you in the same way as conspiracies of Jewish usurpation and domination of world power because they are essentially the same: projections of frustration onto a group that is other than you for the purpose of assigning blame. Instead of dealing with the hard truths of the unending corruption of human nature, the impossibility of utopia and the burden of responsibility for one’s own choices, it is much easier to identify a villain and then dedicate yourself to besting them.
If you are white, you need not apologize or feel guilty for it anymore than a Jew ought to have for his Jewishness in Europe in the ‘30s. You are no more responsible for the sins of 18th or 19th century slaveholders than German Jews were for their country’s defeat in World War I or for the rise in Bolshevism in Russia. Your sins and your responsibilities are not defined by your skin tone or ethnicity. And when tempted to join the ranks of the intersectional and aggrieved and to participate in their brand of identity politics in the name of social justice or equity, remember the words of God to His people Israel in Ezekiel 18:
“Yet you say, ‘Why should not the son suffer for the iniquity of the father?’ When the son has done what is just and right, and has been careful to observe all my statutes, he shall surely live. The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself.
“But if a wicked person turns away from all his sins that he has committed and keeps all my statutes and does what is just and right, he shall surely live; he shall not die.
“Yet you say, ‘The way of the Lord is not just.’ Hear now, O house of Israel: Is my way not just? Is it not your ways that are not just? When a righteous person turns away from his righteousness and does injustice, he shall die for it; for the injustice that he has done he shall die. Again, when a wicked person turns away from the wickedness he has committed and does what is just and right, he shall save his life. Because he considered and turned away from all the transgressions that he had committed, he shall surely live; he shall not die. Yet the house of Israel says, ‘The way of the Lord is not just.’ O house of Israel, are my ways not just? Is it not your ways that are not just?
“Therefore I will judge you, O house of Israel, every one according to his ways, declares the Lord GOD. Repent and turn from all your transgressions, lest iniquity be your ruin.Cast away from you all the transgressions that you have committed, and make yourselves a new heart and a new spirit! Why will you die, O house of Israel? For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Lord GOD; so turn, and live.”
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