Victim envy
Jillian Becker writes of a phenomenon she calls Leidensneid. It’s a word she made up, one of those composite German terms that combine two other words, in this case “leiden” (to suffer) and “Neid” (envy).
Leidensneid is a part of virtue signaling and is particularly rampant on the left these days. But it’s been around for much longer than that. Becker, who previously wrote a book about German leftist terrorists of the 1960s, writes that back then:
… [M]ost of the tens of thousands who marched with anti-West banners in West Berlin—or the hundreds of thousands in all the university cities of Western Europe—were not ideologically Marxist, nor wanting victory for the Communists in the Cold War. What those well-off, well-fed, well-educated sons and daughters of the free world wanted was to be seen as voluntary co-sufferers with the wretched of the earth; to qualify by their gestures for membership of an imagined community of underdogs.
These young leftists had already turned somewhat away from the working classes in the 1960s. Even back then, the class struggle of older Marxists was being replaced by anti-colonialism and identity groups:
Not only in West Germany but in all the developed countries, they believed, the working-class had been bought off with material plenty. So revolutionary hope was placed instead in the Third World, in the “victims of imperialism,” particularly the Vietnamese who were being subjected to “American aggression,” the Iranians under the Shah, and the peasants of Latin America.
As the self-styled vanguard of “the revolution,” the student protestors marched for world peace and Western nuclear disarmament—hosts of pacifists, armed with banners on stout staves, bags of paint, custard-pies, cobblestones and petrol-bombs. In their regular clashes with the police, blood was spilt, protestors were arrested, tried, and sometimes sentenced to short terms of imprisonment: which only went to prove, they argued, that the police and the courts were agents of “authoritarianism.” “To provoke the fascist out of the police” was one of the declared purposes of the West German protest movement; and though most of its members had been born after the Second World War, they were, they maintained, still having to combat Nazism. As evidence that the liberal democracy of the Federal Republic was not very different from the Third Reich, they pointed to the many persons in positions of authority who were erstwhile Nazis, and claimed that they, the young protestors of 1968, were “up against the generation of Auschwitz.” In crowded public meetings and in interviews with the press they would often say, “We are the Jews of to-day.”
And yet these German terrorists of the 60s had little use for the Jews either, foreshadowing our present union of left and Jew-hatred:
The notorious terrorist Ulrike Meinhof, when she herself was in custody and giving evidence at the trial of a comrade, declared that the Nazis had been right to kill the German Jews because they were capitalists (“were that which was maintained of them—Money-Jews”). She insisted, however, that she was anti-Nazi and had fellow-feeling for the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto. In sum, she considered it wrong to kill Jews genocidally as a “race enemy,” but not wrong to kill millions of them as “class enemies.”
The first paragraph of the following passage contains what I consider the most important points in Becker’s essay. I think she is absolutely correct about the European and American left, which since the 60s have been predominantly movements not of the poor and uneducated but of the comfortable and academically inclined, with the motive of showing virtue and absolving their own feelings of guilt [emphasis mine]:
[Meinhof’s] passionate, confused statements made only one thing clear: she and her like-thinkers hoped that by identifying themselves with victims — of the Nazis, of the present social order in the First World, of “colonialism” and “imperialism” in the Third World — they could free themselves from guilt; or, more accurately, protect and preserve themselves from accusation. It was a way of asserting a moral superiority over their own nation and their own class. None of them really wanted to be poor, or oppressed, or hurt, or deprived of liberty, or killed, or compelled to do manual labor. What they wanted, what they envied, was not what victims had to endure, but the supposed esteem in which victims are held, their freedom from culpability, their high moral status. To be a victim—they seemed to believe—was to be innocent. And to be innocent was almost the same as being heroic.
It was not only the young Germans who felt a need to escape from guilt or accusation. Everywhere in Western Europe the rebels of the New Left found cause to be ashamed of their own countries.
Americans also felt a need to evade accusation, and America had its own anti-Vietnam-war anti-America student protest movement, and its own affluent terrorists. The United States was, as much in the eyes of its own protestors as in those of the European New Left, deeply guilty: of the war in Vietnam, of opposition to Communism in general, of ‘dollar imperialism,’ of internal racism, and of Third World deprivation.
In the early 1970s an American student told me that after being enrolled in a Californian university in 1968, she had suddenly left and gone to Calcutta “in order to share the suffering” of the multitudes who had to live on the streets. I asked her how she had thought this would help them. She replied that the whole point was not to help them but to save herself from being “one of the privileged of the earth.” She “stuck it out,” she said, for three weeks, after which the American embassy had arranged for her to fly home.
It is quite obvious that this applies to the current sympathy of Western leftists for Palestinians and Hamas and for other jihadi terrorists as well. As I indicated in my essays about terrorists and romanticism, the intensity of the horror terrorists perpetrate only makes their Western sympathizers regard them as all the more dedicated and long-suffering; why else but from justified rage at oppressors would people labeled as “oppressed” be so cruel? So identifying with the perpetrators who are defined as victims – and who seek to increase the number of their casualties at the hands of their more well-to-do oppressors, the Israelis/Jews, the better to become more numerous victims – seems a good way of shedding one’s own detested privilege.
In other words, the Palestinians envy the Jews the Holocaust and seek to appropriate it and convince the world that the Jews are the real Nazis vis a vis the Palestinians who are today’s Jews. Then the Western leftists buy the Palestinians’ reframing and in turn envy Palestinian victimhood and sympathize with it. It’s victim envy all the way down.
[NOTE: See also this.]
The Germans have a word for it; even if it is a new word.
Affluent people experiencing victim envy makes sense from a psycological perspective. As you approach the apex of the pyramid of Maslow’s “Hierarchy Of Needs” you have “love and belonging” then “self-esteem” and finally “self-actualization”. So the more affluent a person becomes, the more they’ll put primacy on emotional fulfillment. This means that assuaging any feeling of guilt that one may have about their circumstances becomes more and more important. And the emotionally immature and inexperienced are more likely to idealize victimhood under such circumstances rather than understanding that victims are just people and being a victim does not necessarily make a person (or group of people) always in the moral right, nor does it absolve them of any wrongdoing that they themselves may have committed.
One could argue that elevating victims to some lofty status of moral superiority is actually dehumanizing them. Eternally innocent beings can never be held accoutable but can never have true agency in their own lives.
I’m reminded of a recent film about entebbe, where rosamund pike played one of the red army faction, they made her seem a little nervous about dealing with jews,
(revisionist history) going back further, bill ayers and his paramour diana oughton, he trained in cuba, under dgi auspices, she was in peru, but they have made films about them, in different ways, one starring henry winkler, and sissy spacek, called the rebel, they are never painted as evil, no matter how much damage was incurred by them, of course, bernadine doehrn, taught community organizing after she was released,
Miguel-
Ayers and Doerhn both became professors of education at U of IL-Chicago. They led the subversion of education, both public and private, into disgusting, revolting Leftism, though they remained fat on their tenured salaries at a public university.
Fortunately there is still home schooling, though that is under attack by the Obamaphiles, who seek to regulate that into mandatory Leftism.
I suspect a good beating would cure most of them of their envy. Sort of the modern version of the old parental “stop crying or I will give you something to cry about”.
true but ‘he was guilty as sin, free as a bird’ partially because of disclosure that came out of the Media Pennsylvania raid, this sad bushnell creature, who seem people are starting to notice, is another one, who seems to be oikophobic, hating his own people, yet he had a security clearance at Lackland AFB and had ties to Ft Meade’s air wing,
The ego knows no bounds…
btw they recently uncovered a Red Army faction leader, after 35 years, living quietly in Germany,
Self delusion of youth, some outgrow it. And then there are the Ayers and such who use it for their own evil ends, clear eyed monsters until they die (or DEI?).
Saint Rachel of Pancake and Airman Ronson. Martyrs to idiocy.
They accuse others, constantly, of unearned privilege.
A well known psychological phenomenon familiar to all here, is a component of the project of them expiating their own guilt.
Sometimes it is, as shown here, by doing pretend penance. Usually it is in the form of them beating the chest of another and incanting. ” Through your fault, through your fault, through your most grievous fault”
They could actually go to work in a Renault auto factory and share the toils and then starve themselves to death if they were serious.
And to be innocent was almost the same as being heroic.
Well, no. This is just stunningly stupid. There is nothing heroic about being a poor passive innocent slob waiting for the world to hand you something better.
I think one of the pervasion misperceptions about this topic, and possibly Marxism in general, is the fallacy of zero sum thinking. “They” think that affluence exists like some finite and fixed quantity in the world. If the 1% increase their affluence substantially, then necessarily the 99% must have their affluence reduced accordingly.
This also connects to short term thinking and actions vs. long term thinking and actions. Short term actions are largely zero sum. But longer term, wealth and affluence is created out ambition and work, and progress in the form of “increased productivity,” as well as the leverage provided by capitalism.
They could actually go to work in a Renault auto factory and share the toils and then starve themselves to death if they were serious.
DNW:
Have I got the gal for you!
Simone Weil.
__________________________________________
In 1942, Weil travelled to the United States with her family. She had been reluctant to leave France, but agreed to do so as she wanted to see her parents to safety and knew they would not leave without her. She was also encouraged by the fact that it would be relatively easy for her to reach Britain from the United States, where she could join the French Resistance. She had hopes of being sent back to France as a covert agent.[56]
Older biographies suggest Weil made no further progress in achieving her desire to return to France as an agent—she was limited to desk work in London, although this did give her time to write one of her largest and best known works: The Need for Roots.[57] Yet there is now evidence that Weil was recruited by the Special Operations Executive, with a view to sending her back to France as a clandestine wireless operator. In May 1943, preparations were underway to send her to Thame Park in Oxfordshire for training, but the plan was cancelled soon after, as her failing health became known.[58][59]
The rigorous work routine she assumed soon took a heavy toll. In 1943, Weil was diagnosed with tuberculosis and instructed to rest and eat well. However, she refused special treatment because of her long-standing political idealism and her detachment from material things. Instead, she limited her food intake to what she believed residents of German-occupied France ate. She most likely ate even less, as she refused food on most occasions. It is probable that she was baptized during this period.[60] Her condition quickly deteriorated, and she was moved to a sanatorium at Grosvenor Hall in Ashford, Kent.
–https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_Weil
__________________________________________
Weil was an intellectual Jew turned ardent leftist turned Christian mystic. A very strange breed of cat.
I still don’t know what to make of her, but she’s close to my heart.
From the symptoms described by the Archbishop, what can be diagnosed is not, in fact, a victims’ competition for the honor of being “more persecuted than thou” (no case is presented that Jews intend any such thing), but envy felt by (some) Poles of the Jews’ degree of suffering.
If one is secure in the knowledge that Jews suffered most, it will look that way, but if there is disagreement about that, it could like a competition, especially to outsiders.
Why? It can be understood perhaps in the light of the Christian idea of suffering as a redeeming experience. Jews victimized by Christian nations can appear, afterwards, in the eyes of their victimizers, to have been not punished but exalted—even sanctified.
True, but isn’t redemption and sanctification through suffering also a part of Jewish tradition?
huxley:
I was thinking of Weil, too, when I read that comment of DNW’s.
By the way, Weil was indeed born Jewish but to a secular family, and so I doubt she had any instruction in Judaism itself. Her tendencies towards self-denial appeared very early:
Simone de Beauvoir reports on the following conversation with Weil:
That link has a lot of interesting stuff about Weil’s philosophy.
Analyzing the causes and sources of victim envy is an exercise in a species of psychoanalysis, a Freudian endeavor if you will, and thus, in the end, and like Freudian analysis, really of little significant value. I do appreciate neo’s efforts and the posts of all who contribute to the comment threads for the knowledge and insight they provide. As for me, however, I’m done with in-depth analysis. About the furthest I’ll go anymore in that direction is to say that militant leftists — the activists, the true believers — are afflicted with a very profound and dangerous form of romanticism. They are romantics to the core. Paul Johnson, writing about Mao, observed something to the effect that deep down inside that monster’s psyche there was a blazing romantic struggling to get out. I agree with this assessment about Mao, and about leftists in general. I leave it to you, dear readers. to puzzle out what it means for such people to gain power over us.
IrishOtter:
It’s psychological and it’s analysis, but there’s nothing Freudian about it.
Sometimes understanding the roots and function of something can help you fight it.
Abraxas:
As far as I know, “redemption and sanctification through suffering” is not a part of Jewish thought or belief and certainly not mainstream Jewish belief. That is one of many differences between Christian belief and Jewish belief.
Fascinating, and drilling down a bit further, this basically explains the white, educated, liberal obsession with virtue signaling in all forms.
the same type the premature social justice warriors, were the jacobins, they were abolitionist, suffragists, (although the term hadn’t been invented yet) all sorts of causes, marat corday danton, and of course robespierre, they cannibalized themselves in some fashion or another, a century thereabouts the people’s will was driven by similar impulses, ironically they killed their best change at reform Alexander 2nd
and Russia went into a deep freeze, under the
influence of Pobestedenev, friend of Dostoeveski, and tutor to both Czars the Social Revolutionaries were partisans of direct action as well, their second in command was an agent in concert with the Okrana, this is why Soltzhenitsyn though they were the worst enemies of the regime, wiping out their most talented servants like Stolypin, he had a lot of time to ponder this reality, in prison and in exile, the Okrana, seems to be the model for our current security organs,
Lenin whose brother was a failed SR, realized direct action was not sufficient, political action, indoctrination, is key to create a new consciousness, because people won’t go there on their own, Fidel himself couldn’t topple Batista directly by seizing a military barracks, he seized upon a discontented class
many of the useful idiots some of whom eventually ended up in exile,
Rebecca West, in “The New Meaning of Treason” speculated about the upper class twits who went all Moscow during and after WW II.
She thought they were envying the moral superiority of those who, in effect, socialized the UK, except of course for their own families’ assets. The folks like Shaw and the cloth-capped lower classes duking it out with the cops in the streets.
How to gain that moral high ground. Couldn’t go socialist. The coal mines were already satisfactorily unproductive and we had old age pensions. What to do? Further left was the only road left open That led to Moscow, not because Moscow was, objectively, wonderful. But the yearning to be heroic made Moscow wonderful because it had to be. Had to be.
So those people betrayed, or tried to, their own people to a stalinist future in order to feel good about themselves. Nothing new….
“I think she is absolutely correct about the European and American left, which since the 60s have been predominantly movements not of the poor and uneducated but of the comfortable and academically inclined, with the motive of showing virtue and absolving their own feelings of guilt…”
What in the hell did they have to feel guilty about? They’ve substituted guilt for gratitude. Their ancestors worked their butts off creating the world they inherited. Gratitude, properly expressed would be to work just as hard so that future generations inherited even more ‘privilege’. A world in which a greater and greater percentage of the public inherits ‘privilege’. That’s what the “American Dream” is really all about.
Which is what liberty, basic western cultural values and a capitalist market system brought to first world countries. Not ‘first’ as in inherent racial superiority but rather the first cultures to embrace what leads to great societal prosperity.
Instead they’re busy tearing it all down to create another feudal dark age.
In the ’70s, ’80s ’90s(?) there was an emphasis on personal development and personal responsibility. Look at the TV shows and movies; even those that centered on a victim showed that victim taking personal responsibility for his or her self improvement to overcome his or her disadvantages.
There is the cliche of the montage set to upbeat music; the protagonist determines to start a difficult, rigorous, monomaniacal path towards self-improvement and weeks/months/a year… flash by, set to a 3 minute rock song where the protagonist comes out the other side physically, mentally and spiritually stronger. That’s what my culture was showing me and my peers, and it was inspirational.
I pity young people. It’s all derision, snark, cynicism and victimology. I wouldn’t be surprised to see life expectancies plummet 10 years for the generation that are in their 20s now.
Christianity built on ideas of suffering in the Hebrew Bible, and later Jewish thinkers drew from Christian ideas. There are certainly differences in thinking between the two religions, but also a degree of overlap and reciprocal influence. From the Suffering Servant of the Bible to the various martyrs over time, there is a connection between suffering and redemption in Judaism, though it isn’t expressed in the terms of Pauline Christianity.
A term for another, adjacent condition is “Selma envy.”
Courageous heroes fought and won the battle to end segregation, so new, aspiring heroes find lynchings and firehoses in a child’s face paint at a sporting event, or a college girl’s spring break dreadlocks.
cont, Fanya Kaplan, succeeded in striking Lenin, but not killing him, and hence the red terror commenced in earnest, as Stalin was the beneficiary, the Sicari on a smaller scale, struck at Rome, and hence the 10th Legion, made Jesus’s prophecy manifest ‘not a stone will remain’ re the Temple, the whole delta house seems to be a macabre charade of this, five innocents were killed, five have committed suicide, yet ocasio cortez, imagines she faced certain death, conversely the molotov throwing lawyers got a cozy deal the J 20 rioters got their charges expunged,
Abraxas:
Here is the Jewish interpretation of the passage. Here’s another website saying much the same thing.
All one needs to know is what are the best selling blue jeans and who wears them. We are living at an end of an age, the Post WWII age.
atlas shrugs is not supposed to be a how to manual
https://piqsuite.com/reuters/lawyers-who-voided-elon-musks-pay-as-excessive-want-a-6-billion-fee
Call me insensitive, but I grew up in a time and place when outhouses were still common, pumped well water was common, and people had to work like Trojans just to live a lower-class life.
I worked manual jobs as early as thirteen, and worked my way through college doing hard, menial types of work. I don’t know why, but I believed that eventually, by getting educated, I would work my way into something better. And lo, it came to pass.
I managed to save some money, create a comfortable retirement, and had enough to do some traveling during retirement.
I never had anything given to me. No free liches, no easy, cushy jobs, no estate to inherit. My attitude is that, if I could do it, most anyone ought to be able to improve their standard of living. At least here in the U.S. Travel has showed me that our system, while not perfect, works far better than most at creating prosperity.
So, I feel no guilt when I see those less materially well off than I am. I got to a middleclass life the old-fashioned way.
I don’t envy those with wealth, either. My assumption is that they mostly worked hard and maybe invented a better mouse trap – that’s the way most people get rich.
I have a niece who has got a bad case of economic guilt. Her (now ex) husband is a very successful oil drilling engineer. They lived an upscale life. She somehow began feeling guilty and unfulfilled. She divorced her husband and is now living in downtown Denver where she works at a place that feeds the homeless. At least she’s on the front lines of trying to help others, but when I ask her how many people she has seen who have actually been able to move on and get off the streets, she doesn’t want to talk about it.
Our society has issues but lack m of opportunity and lack of help for the downtrodden are not part of them.
Life isn’t fair, and there is injustice and bad luck everywhere. Count your blessings, work hard, be kind to others, and don’t give nor expect free lunches. Thus ends the sermon.
Exactly. Most of the rabbis weren’t applying the passage to a single messianic individual, but to the the Jewish people as a whole (or the righteous among them as a whole). Still the connection between suffering and redemption or sanctification is there.
I remember an old leftist, probably Communist, in the 60’s trying to make friends with the new left. Oil and water, it was a different movement by then. It was sad in a way, they had nothing to say to each other, the old left was dead.
There is the cliche of the montage set to upbeat music; the protagonist determines to start a difficult, rigorous, monomaniacal path towards self-improvement and weeks/months/a year… flash by, set to a 3 minute rock song where the protagonist comes out the other side physically, mentally and spiritually stronger. That’s what my culture was showing me and my peers, and it was inspirational.
Rufus:
Amen. That stuff saved my life and I still live by it.
I too pity the young who live in a victim culture. Victimology kills.
Happy Belated Birthday, Tony Robbins!
Re: Simone Weil
neo:
Thanks for the link and comment.
Likewise, Weil’s self-denial always struck me as questionable. More routed in deeper psychology, maybe even biology, than her concern for the poor and hungry.
Nonetheless, Weil was a deep, questioning, compassionate person, who backed it up with action — she wanted to be a covert agent for the French Resistance and came close.
I respect her. She pointed me to this metaphysical poem by George Herbert. I’ve quoted it here before, so here’s just the link:
–George Herbert, “Love (III)”
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44367/love-iii
Spoiler Alert: Love is Jesus Christ.
Weil encountered this poem and became obsessed with it. The poem turned her into a Christian. It became a poem which changed my life too.
huxley, Vaughn Williams’ settings (Five Mystical Songs) are great favorites of mine, and Shirley-Quirk particularly: no. 3, Love Bade Me Welcome – https://youtu.be/Xn9vo82lXh4?si=5o56eO9P8QJECc7M
no. 1, Easter – https://youtu.be/QKGLvRPe_V0?si=MkkxtomRhXNq_5OP
TommyJay on March 1, 2024 at 3:57 pm and
Geoffrey Britain on March 1, 2024 at 6:48 pm and
J.J. on March 1, 2024 at 7:52 pm
all great comments.
“absolving their own feelings of guilt”…I question how many of them really *personally* feel a sense of guilt. I’m sure that some do, but more common, I think, is a feeling that *the rest of us*, who lack their moral sense and insight, should feel guilty.
CS Lewis made a similar observation about something called the National Repentance Movement in 1940 Britain.
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/50094.html
huxley, that is an interesting poem. Thanks for pointing it out.
Holocaust envy… I read through O’Neill’s article to which the Hostess linked above and found it a very worthwhile read. The cheapening of the Holocaust is something worth paying heed, and being wary of.
This puts me in mind of two things that I recall: one, a conversation with an elderly German man whom I knew in the nineties, who clearly sympathized with neo-Nazi views along with his wife – he read neo-Nazi periodicals, this kind of thing. This was when I was living in Germany, so it came as a bit of a shock to me… okay, maybe more than a bit. (Begging your pardon, but to explain exactly why it shocked me would be a long story.)
At one point, when I was asking him about this one newspaper that I had seen in their living room, we got into a conversation about the whole Nazi thing; and I made some remark about the Jews having been the main or primary victims of WW2. (The word I used was ‘hauptsächlich’, probably the only time in my life I can remember specifically employing that word in conversation.) He took issue with this – I forget most of the rest of the conversation, unfortunately, brief though it was, but I think his view was that the Germans themselves were the greatest ‘victims’ of the whole thing. I came away from that discussion rather troubled.
The other thing in my mind at the moment is that, in the world of here-and-now, I know of a good acquaintance at a certain company who told me of a pair of seminars or presentations that were due to be given in the very near future on consecutive days, in the context of some DEI activities at this company. One was to have as its subject something along the lines of recognizing and addressing anti-Semitism in the workplace, while the other on the following day was to be similar, but focused on ‘Islamophobia’ instead. My acquaintance tells me that, rather suddenly, both of these were postponed and would be rescheduled due to “feedback” from employees.
The immediate and rather obvious conclusion is that someone (or several someones) in the company decided to throw a fit about Gaza and, rather than take the bull by the horns and brave it out, the powers that be decided to chalk off the whole thing. But even before that, the thing that struck me was the symmetrical pairing being posited of “anti-Semitism” on the one hand and “Islamophobia” on the other. As has been commented numerous times elsewhere, these two things are not at all equivalent in fact, but again, the agenda is to try to force them to seem so. I found that interesting, just as I found the decision to scratch the pair of seminars interesting.
This is a fascinating post with so many wonderful comments it’s difficult to single any one out. An invigorating reminder of why we all spend so much time here.
Leidensneid has become incredibly prolific as of late. “Oppressed, oppressed, (what can I imagine that makes me) oppressed!”
That and virtue signalling are tightly intertwined.
And the officially oppressed can play the wannabes like a fiddle.
Or, no. That is too much work. Play them like a player piano or jukebox.
I also wonder about the contribution of the KGB to the Sixties Kidz. In Kissinger’s “Displomacy” he says nothing about this. Any comments Vlad?
Philip Sells,
I have had some similar experiences with Germans freely explaining how they are past all this “holocaust stuff” and feel they’ve more than paid their debts to the Jews. As insane as that attitude is, those Germans are mostly dying off and hold little to no sway in politics or policy.
But the Turks and other Muslims Germany has been importing for 50 years… They’ve got some very “interesting” views on the Jewish people and, unlike National Socialists, their movement is growing.
Turning people into perpetual victims is soul-killing, either done to oneself or to others, individually or as groups.
It’s victim envy all the way down.
Rush Limbaugh nailed that one decades ago.
It’s psychological and it’s analysis, but there’s nothing Freudian about it.
I disagree. But we needn’t argue the point.
Sometimes understanding the roots and function of something can help you fight it.
Well, only sometimes. I’m not a “root causer.” Trying to understand root causes is an undertaking for historians, not people under attack.
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“…but I think his view was that the Germans themselves were the greatest ‘victims’ of the whole thing.”
Ah, so THAT”s why the fellow was so into Neo-Nazi publications?
Got it(!)….
In any event, not as uncommon a view as one might think.
Recall the comment that Reagan was somehow persuaded to insert in his speech at the Bitburg military cemetery in 1985…
(And then there were Erica Jong’s observations of German undercurrents during her sojourn there…in the 60s IIRC…strange as it might be to believe that she could have been shocked by anything….)
Dear Neo, this is a fine post for German-history purposes, and understanding present-day anti-semitism on the left. However, I hope you are aware that liberal democracy in Germany is swirling down the toilet as we speak. See some of the recent posts on the Eugyppius substack. Eugyppius is probably the top Covid/Vax Disaster dissident from Germany who writes in English, though i guess expat CJ Hopkins is more famous.
“Victim envy?” Perhaps, but as someone who lived through those days of shame during which cowardice became the handmaiden of treason — the Vietnam War era–I saw something deeper and darker. The fools running the country had tried to fight a Kiplingesque war of policy with draftees, and it blew up in their faces. It had been like that commonplace of watching a train wreck. They didn’t have the nerve to win, and they didn’t have the nerve to quit.
Today’s “victim envy” is similar. We can see the train wreck shaping up as the World shambles into a “Camp of the Saints” scenario. In that prophetic ’70’s fable, the literal “wretched of the Earth” drown humanity in masses of the “all too many” by simply showing up of the doorsteps of Western civilization. Coming generations must decide whether to resist or to give it all up.
Perhaps ‘”victim” manipulation’ would be more accurate….
– – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Related….
“The left’s deathly embrace of Islamic identitarianism;
“The Rochdale by-election confirms that the working classes lose out when identity politics rules.”—
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/03/01/the-lefts-deathly-embrace-of-islamic-identitarianism/
H/T Blazingcatfur blog.
Boy, that’s one fancy German word for “these guys are sick puppies!”
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