Comments on: Melencolia I and the apocalypse, 1938

By: Wilsonian internationalism as Our Town « YDS: The Clare Spark Blog

Wilsonian internationalism as Our Town « YDS: The Clare Spark Blog — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 19:27:10 +0000

[...] http://clarespark.com/2009/11/17/melencolia-i-and-the-apocalypse-1938/ [...]

By: clarespark

clarespark — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 15:58:02 +0000

This blog was mostly about reactionary persons who blame the rise of cities and the emancipation of Jews and women as signs of decadence. These reactionaries are usually attracted to medievalism and the great chain of being (the organic society) that modernity has torn asunder. We don’t teach about antisemitism (often linked to misogyny) because it is useful for statists to maintain hierarchy in order to legitimate their bureaucratic rule. In the case of Jewish antisemitism, it is more about assimilation: making oneself agreeable to establishments.

By: stereorealist

stereorealist — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 15:07:50 +0000

As I understand you, in reviewing and interpreting history, anti-modernists have denied the power of anti-semitism, outwardly welcoming Jewish intellectualism in forming the modern world, yet inwardly blaming the Jews for creating a horrific, self-destructive world. History, in their eyes, is a process of cherry-picking “facts” to support their a priori conclusions; that civilization is collapsing, the industrial era is depleting resources — water, fuel, food, raw materials — at unsustainable rates, human overpopulation cannot be supported, and democratic institutions cannot make the “right” decisions. Worse still, as a subset of “natural history,” the collapse is interpreted as inevitable, like the death of a species denied its environment. In such a mindset, melancholia is the only response a person and society can have.

What is not yet clear to me is how understatement of anti-semitism (and feminist anti-imperialism, et al.) contributes to that negative interpretation of history. What I see in anti-semitism, particularly in Jewish anti-semitism, is a self-abnegation, a hatred in what the enlightenment has wrought, a movement intent on destroying itself and the world around it. Is the understatement of anti-semitism yet another layer of denial, an insulation against the reality of what is really happening in the mind of the anti-modernist?