The nature and persistence of antisemitism on its own terms, its intellectual and theological content (such as it is), is properly a topic for others, who have engaged it in ways I never have. I have been satisfied merely to know the history in outline, and that has been sufficient to warn against it and its advocates. What I can offer is an interpretive framework or two for understanding its abrupt resurgence now, rooted not in the thing itself, but in the nature of history — and of man.
The first is fairly simple: the generation that experienced antisemitism’s most-horrific episode in the Holocaust is now mostly gone, and so the social prohibitions upon its expression are concurrently lessened. This is also partially explanatory as to why Western societies are increasingly tolerant of migrant cohorts that never had any such prohibition, most notably those from the Muslim world, who will now express openly their loathing of the hated Jew. In a single lifetime we have gone from a society in which this was unthinkable — because nearly every parent or grandparent had played some part in a great World War against the operators of the hideous camps — to one in which very few feel a direct and living connection to what they see as yesterday’s fight. When my grandmother was a child she knew veterans of the American Civil War, and it shaped her society and personal perceptions powerfully — especially in east Texas, where the defeated and their descendants gathered. A similar role is played by the Second World War in the civic memory and values of every generation born clear through the close of the last century: the major difference being that, as Americans, we were all heirs to the victors.
That time is over. The last veterans approach centenarian status, and the last time Americans elected a Second World War-veteran President was thirty-six years ago. The proportion of the American population that has no meaningful experience of that generation in public life approaches sixty percent of the whole. The proportion of the American population that is actually in that generation is under one percent of the whole.
There is an argument that this passage offers a chance to reassess the war and its history in the absence of civic pieties influenced by genuflection — or in cases condemnation — toward those who were in it. That remains to be seen: some of you reading this now will be alive for the war’s centennial in a mere fifteen years, and then one may begin the assessment. Those who remember the flourishing of new and frequently very interesting First World War revisions and revisitings of the past decade know how genuinely fruitful that was, and so we may be excited for what’s to come in the study of its world-war successor. But it won’t be the same, because the nature of the second war was not the same. The First World War arguably made the world in which we live — there’s a strong case that, like Rome, all that follows is mere reaction — but the Second World War made the world in which we think and believe, and that has a very different set of consequences. The first war is done and over and none need fear its menaces returning. The second one on the other hand reads like unfinished business, like a chasm of bloodletting that ended with the expectation of a recurrence, and therefore a succession of bulwarks against it.
For generations unto generations the surpassing question in society and policy was whether any given thing properly reflected the lessons of the Second World War. There was much debate over specific cases, and considerably less debate over what the lessons were. This absence was not neglect, but a signal of general consensus. One of the assumed prohibitions consequent to the war was against racial, ethnic, or religious bigotry. (By Westerners, that is: the other peoples of the world more or less continued in their depravities as before.) When the memory of the war is revised or forgotten, so too is that. In the case of the revival of the antisemitic impulse, it is a species of stupidity doubled over: both morally and programmatically, because all that happened before may happen again.
One thing we’ve heard in the discourse across the past two days is that what happened in the second war was a failure of planning rather than — or, charitably, as much as — intent. We know this to be untrue, in no small part because the world’s foremost practitioners of records and memoranda in the Germans were the major (though far from the sole) perpetrators. The planning and purpose is available, and so too are the records of the execution: a word used here with deliberation. They retain their power to disturb, and in the face of apologia for them, however oblique, they must be faced. For example, Timothy Snyder, who was once an excellent historian, records this in his 2015 Black Earth:
To shoot Jewish babies in Mahileu was, as one German (Austrian) explained to his wife, to prevent something worse: “During the first try, my hand trembled a bit as I shot, but one gets used to it. By the tenth try I aimed calmly and shot surely at the many women, children, and infants. I kept in mind that I have two infants at home, whom these hordes would treat just the same, if not ten times worse. The death that we gave them was a beautiful quick death, compared to the hellish torments of thousands and thousands in the jails of the GPU. Infants flew in great arcs through the air, and we shot them to pieces in flight, before their bodies fell into the pit and into the water.”
To imagine that this is now impossible is to deny the nature of the human heart, through which the line between good and evil runs forever. It becomes impossible only to the extent that it is remembered, and understood — and positively rejected. Those outcomes are powerfully aided by the presence of those who fought. But the fighters are mostly gone now, and it is up to us to transform remembrance into history: not the dead letter of records, but the living tales of caution and atrocity and heroism alike. The tragedy of the moment is that there is some doubt that we will do it. It is up to us whether this becomes the foundation of a larger tragedy to come.
The second interpretive framework is less empirically grounded and more an observation on anecdote than an ironclad argument. If the world wars together slipped Western humanity out of its protective superstructure of religion and allegiances — which is overstating the case but still properly characterizes some of their major effects — then we live at an endpoint of those processes, in which those qualities are at last gone, vanished at the same moment as that fighting generation. In the stead of the old faith comes the old monsters. (The works of John Daniel Davidson and Erick Erickson both apply here.) In my work in Mexico, I see it in the revival of the blood-soaked worship of the Aztec pantheon and its adjacent demons, mostly in cartel circles, obscured hitherto but increasingly visible. In broader society, you can see it in a variety of forms, mostly centered upon the worship of appetites that were once considered vices. And you can see it in old hatreds, great successes for the malign powers that reemerge into the void of belief, among them the exterminating hatred of the Jews.
It is a dreadful passage, and its immensity demands that we know that line within our hearts and stand to the proper side of it. Once a great man warned his people that victory was only the beginning:
I wish I could tell you to-night that all our toils and troubles were over … But, on the contrary, I must warn you ... that you must be prepared for further efforts of mind and body and further sacrifices to great causes if you are not to fall back into the rut of inertia, the confusion of aim, and the craven fear of being great. You must not weaken in any way in your alert and vigilant frame of mind ... It is the victors who must search their hearts in their glowing hours, and be worthy by their nobility of the immense forces that they wield.
This is what history is. It is neither impersonal forces nor inexorable events. Once it was them, those who are gone. Now it is us.