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.]
