Reply to Brian Leiter

Brian Leiter, who has defended Mearsheimer, admirably but a little less critically than I would prefer, from his ugly right-wing attackers, has linked to this blog with the following words:

Chris Bertram (Bristol) directs me to an anti-Zionist blog, which does have a somewhat more sober critique of Atzmon (though it is a bit thin on supporting evidence, and I think misunderstands both 19th-century anti-semitism and Atzmon's position--but read it for yourself and compare it with the linked interview, above).

I don't usually use the space here for one on one back and forth, but I'll break that habit for the occasion, and those not interested should skip.

First, "somewhat more sober" means that he considers what I wrote not sober. Since he has presented no basis for that, that is not serious, which is unfortunate given the context of trying to defend Mearsheimer against "hatchet jobs.". Degrading the discussion to the level preferred by Goldberg is not going to benefit either Mearsheimer, nor certainly the value of "honest intellectual discourse."

Now, he also makes three shorthand critiques, none of them, even if true, justifying describing me as lacking sobriety. The first, is that I am thin on supporting evidence. This is true only of the first half of the post, which indeed doesn't present much evidence, as all relevant evidence (which is tedious and repetitive, because Atzmon writes faster than I read, which isn't a compliment) has been presented by others and I don't feel the need to rehearse it. If Leiter wants to discuss examples of Atzmon's antisemitism, he could address directly, for example, the letter of Zero Books authors, none of whom qualify as right wingers by a long shot.

The second critique is that I misrepresent 19th century antisemitism. I focus on what is in my opinion the most relevant aspect of nineteenth century antisemitism, relevant because, first, it is undeniable that it developed politically as a self-conscious political tendency that had a huge impact on history, and second because it is quite often ignored by liberal and Zionist writers who (for different reasons) want to depoliticize antisemitism (and racism in general) and turn it into either a mere personal sickness, or a purely cultural phenomenon. Of course, there is a lot more, and my one sentence hardly does it justice. However, I compared Atzmon's hedging of his attack on "jewishness" to Marr's, who hedged his attack on the exact same concept, Jewishness, in pretty much the same way. I'm sure Leiter would agree that Marr was an antisemite.

The third critique is that I misrepresented Atzmon's position. I will deal with that later, because I am not particularly keen on representing Atzmon's positions either way. Leiter defends Mearsheimer, and my concern is that he does it with the requisite nuance and critical capacity, rather than merely circle the wagons. Usually, it is fair to assume that what Jefferey Goldberg says is the opposite of the truth. But once in a blue moon he strikes gold. Unfortunately, his ability to make the most damage with it depends on people refusing to believe that it could happen.

Here is what I said in criticism of Mearsheimer. He presented an article by Atzmon as innocently making the uncontroversial point that "jews have agency." I urge Leiter to read that article and form his opinion. I focused on a single issue from many present. The factual premise of the article is that Hitler was reacting to a coordinated Jewish attack on Germany when he ordered a boycott of Jewish businesses. As Leiter surely knows, that isn't just any accusation. In a generalized form, the claim that Germany was under a coordinated Jewish attack was one of the key points of Hitler's Mein Kampf, a staple of the "knife in the back" theory about the outcome of the First World War, and one of the justifications for the anti-Jewish policies of the Third Reich. In its restricted form, that was what Hitler claimed when he announced that boycott on March 28, 1933.

Therefore, when someone claims that this was indeed the case, both directly with regards to the boycott, and as a more general point that the boycott illustrates, she is saying that Hitler's explanation for why he called for a boycott of Jewish business was true and that this explains how the situation of Jews in Germany deteriorated. Of course, one would only be justified in saying this if it were indeed true. Now, it isn't true. It is a gross misrepresentation of both how Jews reacted to Hitler and of the inner dynamics of the NSDAP in relation to Jews. I'm not aware of any reputable historian who thinks it is true. Atzmon, as he is wont to say, isn't a historian. That means that when he makes a historical claim he either invents it or he relies on someone else. In this case, he relies on an article in The Barnes Review, a white-supremacist publication known for its holocaust denial (The Jewish Declaration of War on Nazi Germany The Economic Boycott of 1933 Article from The Barnes Review, Jan./Feb. 2001, pp. 41-45). He also covers his tracks by not citing that source directly, but referring to another site that cites it (but he does include assertions present only in the source article). I urge Leiter to examines that article and the quality of the primary sources and the "research" presented in it, as well as the fact that the article deals with "previous scholarship" by falsely accusing Friedlander of falsifying the chronology, a claim that Atzmon repeats as a generalized claim about "Jewish texts."

Now, my question is, should a Chicago University professor that teaches about the holocaust be able to smell something fishy when he encounters a false claim that effectively repeats Hitler's propaganda? Should he then be able to follow this claim to its sources and evaluate them, or not? Or should he ignore all that and strive to provide a lawyerly interpretation of the article's author's innocent attempt to argue the obvious? Is it possible to criticize Mearsheimer's poor judgement here without being called by Leiter for lack of sobriety?

Now we can go back to the third critique, that I misrepresented Atzmon's positions. Leiter argues this based on an interview with Atzmon. The underlying assumption is that Atzmon is a honest person advancing a fairly coherent argument, including representing his own positions with an accuracy consistent with intellectual norms. Since there is no agreement on that, presenting Atzmon presenting his positions as evidence that I "misrepresented his positions" is what logicians call petitio principii.

But since Leiter cites a specific interview, and since he teaches philosophy, I would like to engage him in analyzing thoroughly this nugget: ‘how can I tell the truth about Israel, the Lobby, and Zionism and still maintain my position as a humanist’? What conception of humanism, truth and the relation between them can make this sentence make sense? Does Leiter agree that telling the truth about Israel, or challenging AIPAC's actions, or explaining why Zionism is wrong, poses a particular difficulty for a humanist but is quite unproblematic for an anti-humanist? Does that mean that Israel, Zionism, and the Lobby have a particularly affinity to humanism? What is that affinity? Of course Jeffrey Goldberg would agree that there is. Does Leiter agree? Has he ever felt that tension? (I haven't.) Does it mean that truth is not on the side of humanism? Is there a similarity in this statement to those liberals who were "mugged by reality" and who have been leading the imperialist right in the US? Or is it a version of Karl Schmidt's "state of exception" argument, in which in order to maintain humanism as a universal law one must suspend it in the case of the Jews. I don't understand what this sentence means other than Atzmon feeling the need to transform humanism into its opposite in order to rehabilitate a particularly anti-humanistic attack on his pet peeve, Jewishness.

A few points for the occasion of the Atzmon saga going mainstream

Of course Atzmon is antisemitic. I think a lot of people who steered clear of him, including yours truly, have been loath to say that because of the way this accusation has been weaponized by Zionists, and the desire not to give them any credibility. But that kind of circumlocution quite often has a price. Had people been less circumspect, the implosion of Mearsheimer might not have happened. It takes a unique kind of genius to cede the moral high ground to the denizens of Harry’s sewer, where every kind of bigotry is acceptable except antisemitism, or the concentration camp volunteer guard Jeffrey Goldberg.

One doesn’t need to parse Atzmon’s most hateful words, or identify his most egregious falsifications, such as asking whether the Nazis wanted to kill Jews, blaming the holocaust of “Jewish pressure”, etc., to show his antisemitism. These are but manifestations. That confusion is the result of not having a clear idea of what antisemitism is. Antisemitism is fundamentally a political analysis that explains social and political pathologies as effects of some essential Jewish attributes. This is Atzmon’s core idea, which he keeps touting as his big contribution. Atzmon’s reflection on why he isn’t antisemitic itself shows that he is, as As’ad Abukhalil called him, not merely antisemitic, but “one of those classical anti-semites.”

Atzmon's key defense is that he speaks neither of Jewish religion nor of Jews, but of Jewishness, which he defines as “Jewish ideology". This distinction precisely repeats the two gestures that establish nineteenth century antisemitism as a political tendency. Wilhelm Marr coined the term Antisemitismus to distinguish his political analysis of Western societies in terms of Jewish pathology from the old anti-Jewish prejudices based on the denigration of Jewish religion. In his programmatic pamphlet, Marr also takes care to dissociate himself from less sophisticated Jew haters, specifically writing, “Not individual Jews but the Jewish spirit and Jewish consciousness have overpowered the world.” (Victory of Jewishness over Germanity) Compare that to Atzmon:

You may note that I neither refer to Jews as a racial or ethnic group; nor am I directing my critique towards Judaism, the religion. And whilst Jews can indeed succumb to what I define as 'Jewish ideology', (and many of them do) it is valuable to bear in mind they can also be its most virulent enemies.

Substituting "Jewish ideology" for "the Jewish spirit and Jewish consciousness" is all what makes Atzmon's take on Jewishness "ground breaking." Everything else is derivative.

Another point about Mearsheimer's implosion.

As the authors of Zero books have noted in their protest letter about Atzmon, it is easy to be fooled by Atzmon's convoluted and pretentious claptrap. Mearsheimer could have extricated himself from his self-inflicted fiasco with little effort, at most a little uncomfortable 'oops'. Instead, he decided to stand his ground in the most obtuse way, defending an article in which Atzmon effectively plagiarizes white supremacist fabrications as example of Atzmon’s not being an antisemite. All he had to do to find out where Atzmon gets his knowledge of history was click on a few links Atzmon provided, and find the source from which he lifted the claim that

Jewish texts tend to glaze over the fact that Hitler's March 28 1933, ordering a boycott against Jewish stores and goods, was an escalation in direct response to the declaration of war on Germany by the worldwide Jewish leadership.

It doesn’t take a sleuth to determine that the source of this fabrication is an article of writer who advocates something called "ethno-nationalism," published in the holocaust denial publication, The Barnes Review, the brainchild of Willis Carto, an American white-supremacist and a former affiliate of David Duke. The article, linked indirectly by Atzmon, is hosted on a site whose political flavor can be easily gauged by this enthusiastic introduction to another article:

Entire books have been written on the topic of "why Germany lost the War" - or, conversely, "why the Allies won". This booklet exposes a vitally important, but often underestimated factor: the German traitors who worked to destroy the German Reich from within. Their attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler on July 20, 1944 was only the tip of the iceberg. More and more, it appears that the Allies would not have been victorious without their help - and that, in fact, the war might never even have come about without their machinations!

But let alone that Mearsheimer, despite being a political science professor, has a tin ear, and a not very scholarly attitude to checking sources, even more disturbing is the incongruity between his attitude and the fact that he “taught countless University of Chicago students over the years about the Holocaust and about Hitler's role in it.” It is preposterous to accuse Mearsheimer of holocaust denial, and the mainstream people who attack him now have very little integrity. But that is not enough. How does someone who teaches history at Chicago University defends the integrity of an article that is based on a fabricated historical claim, in the area of his teaching, without noting that the core claim is a fabrication? There was no “declaration of war on Germany by the worldwide Jewish leadership.” First, there was no worldwide Jewish leadership (it’s an antisemitic and nazi boogeyman), and, second, as Saul Friedlander writes (and as Lenni Brenner fleshes out in detail) :

most of the Jewish organizations in the United States were opposed to mass demonstrations and economic action.

Atzmon, one can be sure, hasn’t read any “Jewish text” (his racializing code word for competent history) on the matter. He apparently read one article in The Barnes Review, and from this article he took, and made his own, the (yet another) false claim that

Not even Saul Friedlander in his otherwise comprehensive overview of German policy, Nazi Germany and the Jews, mentions the fact that the Jewish declaration of war and boycott preceded Hitler's speech of March 28, 1933. Discerning readers would be wise to ask why Friedlander felt this item of history so irrelevant.

In fact, Friedlander includes the story of the organizing among Jews during the first months of Hitler’s rule in the first chapter, pages 6-11 of the abridged edition of Nazi Germany and the Jews. It is available on line, so it is easy to check. Here is Friedlander actually setting the sequence of events:

Much of the foreign press gave wide coverage to the Nazi violence [from early March]. American newspapers, in particular, did not mince words about the anti-Jewish persecution. Jewish and non-Jewish protests grew. These very protests became the Nazis’ pretext for the notorious April 1, 1933, boycott of Jewish businesses. In mid-March, Hitler had already allowed a committee headed by Julius Streicher, party chief of Franconia and editor of the party’s most vicious anti-Jewish newspaper, Der Stürmer, to proceed with preparatory work for it. (Ibid. my emphasis)

It is funny in a not funny way that a professor of political science would describe a writer who draws his "knowledge" of history quite exclusively from far right white nationalist publications as a “universalist” who “is the kind of person who intensely dislikes nationalism of any sort.” What is not funny in a not funny way is how Mearsheimer managed to destroy his own intellectual standing for defending an insignificant blurb. (And just to be clear, the implosion of Mearsheimer does not mean that AIPAC is any less nefarious an organization than it was last week.)

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[ADDED]
urls not linked in this article:

1. http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/judea-declares-war-on-obama-by-gilad-atzmon.html
2. The Barnes Review, "The Jewish Declaration of War on Nazi Germany", The Economic Boycott of 1933" archived at http://www.wintersonnenwende.com/scriptorium/english/archives/articles/jdecwar.html
3. http://www.wintersonnenwende.com/scriptorium/english/archivesindex.html
4. http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20Editorials/2011/January/3%20o/Jews,%20Judaism,%20and%20Jewishness%20By%20Gilad%20Atzmon.htm