It’s hard to know what to say in the wake of the sickening horror in Pittsburgh today. Evil is real, and it is always at large in the world.
Eleven years ago, in the wake of the Virgina Tech massacre, I wrote this:
When this sort of thing happens, the natural reaction here in the U.S., where we are able to live our lives at a level of safety and comfort that is unparalleled in the history of the world, is to ask how we can prevent it from happening again. This isn’t some horrid Third World backwater, after all, where life is cheap; this is America, and if something is broken, we want the government to fix it. But underlying this attitude is the assumption that everything can be fixed; that we have an inalienable right to live tranquil and sheltered lives, and that what we get for living here and not, say, Darfur, or East Timor, or Baghdad, is that our children will be safe. And the amazing fact is that generally, they are.
But we should take a step back from our indignation to realize that we live brief and precarious lives on a speck of dust in a vast and indifferent Cosmos, and that despite our very best efforts the chaos, the blackness, the uncaring and infinite Wild that we so effectively manage to keep just beyond the gates is going to creep in now and then, and pick some of us off. We live in a firelit glade in the forest, and sometimes we forget how recently the ground was cleared, and how small a place we occupy in the wilderness all around us.
The madness that took those infinitely precious young lives was not a localized instance, nor is it “fixable’ by legislature. It was an eruption of a molten pool that lies beneath us all, and while our species passes through its awkward and painful adolescence ”” as the world is compressed ever more tightly, and as more and more of us are brought, willy-nilly, into random and kinetic interaction with one another ”” that heat and pressure will find its way to the surface again and again, until we transform not our governments, not our laws, but ourselves.
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JOHN PODHORETZ ON THE SLAUGHTER IN PITTSBURGH:
“In every generation they rise up against us to destroy us. In a classic act of anti-Semitic violence, which is what this is, Jews hear the echoes of every violent anti-Semitic act that has preceded it in history. And we hear those echoes because they are there. That which motivates Jew-hatred today is what has motivated it from time immemorial–the poisonously attractive idea that Jews need to be extirpated because our existence is an offense or a threat to an existing larger order. The blessing of Jewish life in America is that this notion has largely been consigned to the dregs from which today’s human malignancy rose. Despite the fact that most hate crimes in America are aimed at Jews, the actual number is vanishingly small–especially compared to France, from which Jews are now fleeing, and England, whose Labour Party is in the hands of an actual Jew-hater.”
His piece is much longer but this is the hard-to-understand truth. It must be a defect in human nature?
“…this is the hard-to-understand truth.”
Sadly, it isn’t hard to understand. The Jews are a tiny, distinct, proud, and self-encapsulated minority who, wherever they go, prodigiously overachieve. Jews are both robustly tribal and inordinately gifted; this is a reliable recipe for awakening the darkest resentments.
In every generation they rise up against us to destroy us.
Well, the wolf’s at the door in some fashion for all of us.
America has done plenty to succor and support Jews. One reason Podhoretz complains is that it will find some sympathy here, unlike in Europe.
I would hope he and his will make some effort to maintain some vestige of a philo-Semitic America. Maybe cool the importing of a not particularly friendly demographic.
bomag is right.
As I understand it the shooter was angry about Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. They _do_ seem to be awfully intent on filling up the US and every other western nation with endless millions of parasitic and anti-social foreigners, even as they self-righteously defend Israel as an ethnostate and homeland.
Organized Jewry is at the forefront of the struggle to take away basic rights of free expression and association in the west. While never criticizing Jewish hatred or violence against others. Of course there are many individual exceptions, often Jews on the far left. But these are tendencies we notice. People like Podhoretz make it sound so mysterious. If we just look at the behavior of so many obnoxious powerful Jewish individuals and groups, it sure does like they are “an offense” and “a threat” to society.
If they were just “gifted” and “tribal” that alone would not provoke such strong feelings.
Podhoretz and so many of his co-ethnics remind me of Bush, when he said Muslims “hate us for our freedom”.
My late friend Larry Auster, who was himself born to a Jewish family, took up the issue of Jews and multiculturalism in great detail, here.
The notion that we should seriously de-scale an atomized and atomizing society will never be considered, of course.
AG,
Ah, but how?