Premium Episode 215: Structural Antisemitism feat Sean KB (Sample)
Premium Episode 215: Structural Antisemitism feat Sean KB
When it comes to the market, you need to trust the plan. We explore how capitalism mystifies itself by generating alternate explanations for our steady immiseration. Perhaps the most popular among them? Antisemitism. Sean KB from the Antifada podcast guest writes an episode about Canadian historian and social theorist Moishe Postone’s theory of Structural Antisemitism.
Thanks for supporting us on patreon!
Sean KB: https://twitter.com/as_a_worker The Antifada Podcast: http://fans.fm/theantifada
Music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
http://qanonanonymous.com
Moishe Postone's Structural Antisemitism and National Socialism: https://critantisemnetwork.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/postoneclassic.pdf
Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 215 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Structural Antisemitism episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Julian Field, Sean KB, and Lynn Vagar.
If you're a long-time listener, you've probably noticed that many of the conspiracy theories we explore end up revealing a molten, undercurrent, if not a powerful geyser of antisemitism.
In the past, we've explored a few reasons for this tendency to exclusively blame Jewish people for the ills of our world, but this week we're aiming to go deeper into the structural aspects of modern antisemitism.
Our guest writer is journeyman, carpenter, and co-host of the Antifada podcast, Sean KB, who you may remember from our episode on New Chronology and Flamencoism.
So, first off, Sean, hello, how you doing, and do you expect us to ignore that you're in the same trade as Jesus?
How are we supposed to trust a carpenter on antisemitism?
Listen, as somebody who's on the inside of this whole thing, all I gotta say is it was the Romans, okay?
That's true.
Judas helped, but it was the Romans, okay?
You can blame them.
That would be amazing if, like, you know, the entire kind of Judeo-Christian affair of being paranoid at each other for various reasons was solved by just blaming Italian people entirely.
Guys, it's Italy!
Let's stop fighting each other!
We're brothers!
Yeah, that would be great.
I mean, it's never too late, I guess, to start.
It's never too late to switch from anti-Semitism to anti-Italian sentiment.
Yeah, how are you?
How are you doing, man?
Glad to have you back and excited to explore something.
I mean, kind of grim, but I think that this is some fresh angles.
This is obviously a really fraught topic and we're going to deal with it respectfully and be sure, you know, to Acknowledge all the shittiness that goes on with this stuff.
In terms of how I'm doing, I'm doing well.
I realized that the last time that we recorded together on the new chronology and Fomenko stuff was before the war broke out, you know?
The war between Ukraine and Russia.
So we were like, oh wow, we were focusing on something that was, we didn't even realize how topical it was going to be when we were talking about historical revision.
We were talking about like new Russian historiography, talking about greater Russia and the way that like they There's gonna be a lot of they in this episode when we talk about antisemitism.
The way that they have been burying the true glory of the Russian people.
So part of me hopes that this isn't as topical as that episode, to be honest with you.
Yes, let's hope this doesn't, you know, act as a kind of prologue for anything bad.
Yeah.
Yeah, but I don't know.
Maybe you do have that sickly touch, you know?
Maybe everything you touch does wither.
I don't want it.
I don't want it.
The lathe of heaven.
No, I don't want the lathe.
You don't want the lathe in my hand.
Nobody wants the lathe.
Nobody wants the lathe.
That's part of the lathe, though.
The lathe of heaven idea, though, right?
Is that nobody really wants it and it's given to you like a burden.
Yeah.
I think.
Spoil the child, spare the lathe.
I don't know.
Is that anything?
All right.
Well, folks, let's get into it.
Capitalism, modernity, and structural antisemitism.
There was already, by the 1890s, a phrase going around Austrian-German Marxist circles, widely attributed to the famous Social Democratic Party of Germany theorist and politician August Bebel, that quote, anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools.
You'll still hear this phrase bandied about sometimes, but with the recent rise of explicit and implicit anti-Semitism, I'm thinking of David Icke and his all-powerful scheming interdimensional lizard cabal or truthers who believe that international bankers did 9-11.
It seems like it makes sense to pose the question again.
Why do critiques of modernity and capitalism so often include a healthy dose of hatred of Jewish people and their alleged centrality to social change and economic exploitation?
This is a question we must ask carefully.
Modern antisemitism led to the destruction of more than 6 million lives in the mid-20th century.
To explain the material or ideological origin of such an immense crime always risks the charge that one is justifying it or that its execution is understandable in some way.
Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Still, if we intend to understand the workings of history, we have to try to explain the emergence of the worst, most bloody ideas, lest our politics continue to suffer from them.
One of the more compelling theories for why modern antisemitism takes such a systemic and virulent form comes from the late Canadian social theorist and historian Moyshe Postone.
In 1980, he wrote a short article called Antisemitism and National Socialism.
This text was controversial because it argued that there was something deeper to the Nazi project than near prejudice or ethnic hatred.
That something about the specific social structures of capitalism and how they appear lead to the sort of ideologies that attribute vast powers to a minority group that seems to be at once inside, outside, and above the rest of society.
As he says in his text, quote, No functionalist explanation of the Holocaust and no scapegoat theory of anti-Semitism Can even begin to explain why, in the last years of the war, when the German forces were being crushed by the Red Army, a significant portion of vehicles was deflected from logistical support and used to transport Jews to the gas chambers.
Once the qualitative specificity of the extermination of European Jewry is recognized, It becomes clear that attempts at an explanation dealing with capitalism, racism, bureaucracy, sexual repression, or the authoritarian personality remain far too general.
The specificity of the Holocaust requires a much more determinate mediation in order even to approach its understanding."
For Postone, it's not just a question of what happened, but what sort of social structures led to modern antisemitism gaining such a popular hold over European politics and society.
For Postone, it was not just racism or prejudice, though it was that, of course.
It was, on a deeper level, the product of an everyday mystification of the economy and how it works.
To follow Postone's arguments, I'm going to have to present listeners with some pretty advanced Marxist theory, but I'll try my best to break it down into popular terms as much as possible.
We'll hopefully walk away understanding the deep structural ways that capital itself distorts our own understanding of the world and how, within the particular historical conjuncture of Germany in the early 20th century, it led to mass murder on an industrial scale.
This is more than just a historical question, though.
Even without a full return to Nazism, Which may be an open question at this point, the way things are going.
Are we destined always to have to confront the proposition that some great they want to use the hidden levers of power to make us live in the pod and eat the bug?
What is it about the way that capitalism operates that tends towards conspiracy theories around powerful international cabals controlling human events?
Why is it that anti-Semites can blame covert Jewish power for both the Federal Reserve's interest rate policies and the social policies of secret communist Joe Biden?
How is it that every right-toid theory, from cultural Marxism, or the woke mind virus, or the Rothschilds, or commie scientists putting fluoride in the tap water as a brainwashing device, always seem at least tacitly anti-Semitic?
Or at least use the same patterns of thoughts and assumptions of how power works, Modern antisemitism.
Moshe Postone argues that antisemitism in the 19th and 20th century was qualitatively different from the ancient religious hatreds that came before.
Whereas medieval antisemitism was prejudiced against Jews because of the particular economic roles they were pushed to or their religious difference with the Christian majority, modern antisemitism is a secular theory that purports to encompass a systemic analysis of all sorts of social problems that arise in modernity.
There's a huge difference between these two historical types of antisemitism.
How do we account for the shifting terrain of ideology over the last few hundred years?
The truth, as we'll see, is that capitalism, by its very nature, poses a series of real material paradoxes that all of us live with every day.
It is at one time an incredibly productive system, leading to the creation of untold wealth of commodities for sale, but at the same time one that brings vast inequalities in its wake.
It sets human beings free from servitude to individual rulers, yet demands all of us be at work for an employer in the morning or be homeless.
It operates through the purposive activity of individuals to buy, to sell, to save, to accumulate wealth.
Yet the mechanism it does this through, the market, is beyond the control of any one person or group, even the capitalists who benefit from it.
Capital at once appears as an infernal machine for financial speculation on all aspects of human life,
while at the same time as the motor which drives industrial progress forward.
The commodity form of wealth at the center of this system makes the things we produce and consume
at once both a concrete use value we can eat or build with, but also an abstract entity that only finds its reason for
being on the market.
As this economic dynamism encompasses more and more of social life,
this social logic becomes a battering ram that overthrows all ancient traditions,
power relationships, cultures, and modes of thought.
The 19th and 20th century reactionaries who birthed modern antisemitic ideology into the world were reacting to epochal shifts in human civilization And enter the Cosmopolitan Rootless people.
Yeah.
As they like to put it.
of all these things. There had to be some group that was doing all this in society,
not some blind, acephalous logic that tore asunder the "natural, organic" ways of life
under assault by the profit system.
And enter the "cosmopolitan, rootless" people.
Yeah.
As they like to put it.
Rootless and cosmopolitan. Something that could be used by Stalin and Stalinists as well.
So you see a little crossover appeal to this concept.
As you see on Twitter, if you're too online.
Unfortunately, yeah, we're all too online, but if you think we're getting out of this episode with large swaths of the left safe from accusations of tacit anti-Semitism, you might be surprised, but we'll get there.
You have been listening to a sample of a premium episode of QAnon Anonymous.
We don't run any advertising on the show, and we'd like to keep it that way.
For five bucks a month, you'll get access to this episode, a new one each week, and our entire library of premium episodes.
So head on over to patreon.com slash QAnonAnonymous and subscribe.
