Ideas54:00Writer Adam Gopnik on the evolution of anti -Semitism to anti -urbanism
The New Yorker writer and former CBC Massey Docent Adam Gopnik argues that there is a connection between contemporary anti-elitism, which is represented by authoritarian leaders and their supporters around the world, and historical anti-Semitism.
In the second annual Irving Abella lecture, which he gave anti-urbanism in the autumn 2024 at Massey College in Toronto.
For example, Hitler’s original destinations were not the impoverished Jews of Eastern Europe who suffered immeasurably during the Holocaust. It was the class of educated, educated and established Jews in urban centers – the elites of their place and their time.
“We can see how closely the elimination of the Jews was not only tied to a hatred of Jews, but to a broader hatred of cosmopolitanism,” Gopnik told the audience.
Here are some excerpts from his conversation Confront hatred.
The debt template
“There is no more insidious form of transferred anti -Semitism than accused the opponents of authoritarianism, for the rise of authoritarianism, which refers the finger of the guilt to the Nazis, but to their social democratic opponents because they had somehow created the fact that Nazis allows to bloom the Nazis.
“This is a familiar trop the authors of authoritarianism, every time we listen to someone who begins with the hatred of the Jews, a twist that contains its roots and branches in the ugliest of all modern tropics.
“To relentlessly, to ensure that the education remains open as many as possible, is as cheap as possible and is so widespread that it has never been before.”
Anti -Semitism as anti -urbanism
“When you read My fightWhat will occur for them is not in its original impulse, the idea is not that the Jews are terrible outsiders who try to break Germany. No, it is the case that you are insiders who already have. And they control the cultural institutions. In Hitler’s feverish imagination, the Jews controlled the drawing academy in Vienna, from which Hitler falls, excluded from his expectations.
“Arrogance, cunning skills and arguments, especially their skills to get places My fightSince people are particularly good at lubricating their way in institutions where they do not belong.
“Hitler was angry with the Jews in Vienna, not because Jews practiced the arts instead of agriculture, but because they would not let him go to the art school.
“Goebbels was a failed philosophical writer in a similar way, not a brilliant roser. Ready to study the history of anti -Semitism now.
“We see and dealers and small merchants, the main enemy, as the leaders of understanding, were always the educated Jews of Western Europe and always remained.”
Turning the victim script
“Those who fight against authoritarianism are responsible for their rise, while those who subject their flames are portrayed as pitiful victims without the ideologies that support them. The common sense, as I say, shows us that this makes no sense.
“The people who stormed the Capitol in 2021 and hated their ideological enemies.
“The same right -wing populist anti -authoritarian movements have risen in parallel in countries with types of pension states, of which I wish they had the United States, whatever happened in them, and the fact of immigration is clearly a mighty fuel.
“The Swedes and the French are well protected by their own social networks because they have withdrawn neoliberalism. To accuse people who try to stop the rise of fascism for the rise of fascism, there is the Social Democrats because they the indigenous anti -Semitism of the German people are not sufficiently sympathetic, as in the 1930s.
Patriotism against nationalism
“The jumping point of our social existence is to expand our circles of compassion. This is terribly difficult if the built -in trap has recognized too rarely or for our nation we are inevitably dangerous that we will be included in the same enlarged circle.
“This is exactly the trap of liberal nationalism of the 19th century, on which Canada is being built and the (Theodor) Herzl dreamed for the Jews … We enlarge our circles to build a country and the indigenous people who outside it is.
“In this way, nations are dangerous in this way. Nomads and tribes tend to fight each other against goods, but not to eradicate each other from the principle. So the struggle is first to increase our circle of compassion. And then not to become In order not to become in this expansion, the struggle of patriotism against nationalism is exactly
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*The transcript was processed for clarity and length. This episode was produced by Greg Kelly.
