In Europe, ghosts have an impolite way of muscling their way into times and places where they are unexpected, which is why, for example, the cultural emblem of the first great industrial society in the world, Victorian Britain, imprinted on railway-station designs and museums of arts, crafts, and science, was the medieval pointed arch. It was, to be sure, an emblem of resistance as much as validation. So the pointiest of the champions of Christian perpendicular, England and Scotland, Thomas Carlyle, unsurprisingly turns out to be the fiercest in his hatred of—his words—“niggers and Jews.” The great and the good of Victorian Britain could take both the friends and the enemies of the machine age in its stride, so the age which fetishized rooted-ness, Victorian Britain again, while at the same time making fortunes by displacing mass populations, made, as it thought, the willfully deracinated, le juif errant, the special target of its disingenuousness. Bonjour, Monsieur Melmotte; hello, Henry Ford.
TO GROW UP British and Jewish is by definition not to be especially confounded at the obstinacy of atavisms refusing to lie down in the tomb of their redundancy. The protean persistence of anti-Semitism came home to me early. I think I was seven when I first saw the writing on the wall. The wall in question was one of those crumbling redbrick affairs, blocking off a view of the tracks on the Fenchurch Street line connecting London with the Essex villages which lie in the north banks of the Thames Estuary, where my family lived. They were not quite suburban, these places, though Jewish businessmen, like my father, had moved there out of the burnt-out wreckage of the city in the East End, where they still kept warehouses and offices. They were part fishing villages, part dormitory suburbs, part seaside towns: yellow broom in the spring, blowsy cabbage roses in the summer, the smell of the unloading shrimp boats, the laden winkle carts—dangerously, excitingly treif— drifting over the tide. But every morning those Jewish businessmen would take the Fenchurch Street train—and one morning my father took me as far as the station—and there on that wall, in white letters faint and fugitive, but since the day was cloudy and gray as they always are on the Estuary, it seems, livid in the light, were just two cryptic letters.
P.J. Nothing more, not P.J. LOVES S.T., just the letters alone. So of course I asked my father, and remember him reddening briefly and telling me it was just some chazerei, old chazerei, and to forget about it; it didn’t matter. Which of course made me more determined to decode the crypt. And it was, I think, my cheder teacher, Mrs. Marks, the same teacher who got me to dress up in miniature tuxedo as Mr. Shabbes (the eight-year-old bride was, of course, Mrs. Balabooster), who looked me in the eye and told me, “P.J. was ‘Perish Judah.’ ” And that was a relic of some bad old days in the thirties, when the union of fascists and Arnold Leese’s Britain had marched—not just in Stepney and Whitechapel and Mile End but right down to the end of the line, to where the Jews had dared penetrate the sanctum sanctorum of Englishness: pebble-dashed, herbaceous-bordered, tea-pouring Westcliff and Leigh-on-Sea.
P.J. SCARED THE HELL out of me, and not because it smelled faintly of Zyklon B. I’m not sure I knew much about that in ’52, despite the missing relatives on my mother’s side. My generation, born in the last years of the war—I was born in ’45— would only get their crash course in Holocaust a little later: in the London shul library, where Lord Russell of Liverpool— Scourge of the Swastika, with its obscenely unsparing photography of bulldozed, naked bodies—opened and shut our eyes. But I had read Ivanhoe—indeed, I’d seen Elizabeth Taylor’s Rebecca—and so the archaic, declamatory quality of P.J. spoke to me of the massacres at York, the canonization of Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln, Richard I’s coronation pogrom in London, 1199. The persistence of the ugliest strain of medieval paranoia in my island culture seemed, while not exactly fish and chips, not something wholly alien from British tradition, notwithstanding Disraeli, Daniel Deronda, and the Victorian high hats and morning coats, which for some reason marked the official Shabbes morning dress of the notables of our synagogue. Some of the same writers I most enthusiastically read as a child— Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesteron, John Buchan, all of them armored warriors for holy tradition and for the sceptered isle—of course turned out a bit later, on closer inspection, to be the most relentless perpetuators of anti-Semitic demonologies.
There was, however, a moment of innocence when the cheerfully technocratic Festival of Britain in 1951 did seem to announce the exorcism of barbarian phantoms. Never mind it coincided with the first panicky revival of racist fascism in Britain, mobilized against Caribbean immigration. We were told that technology, and especially new kinds of communications technology, would diffuse knowledge and that knowledge would chase away superstition, destitution, and disease. It would fall to our generation, the most confidently booming of the baby boomers, to make good on the promises of the Enlightenment of Voltaire, Franklin, and, above all, the cheerfully ill-fated Marquis de Condorcet. Modernism, started in the first half of the twentieth century, had somehow fallen foul of redfanged tribalism, but we were the children of techne, of the dream machines of the philosophes. Not that anything like this was as yet either on our lips or our minds. I remember one of our history teachers at school, secondary school, who in fact bore a rather startling resemblance to Voltaire, say to our class of thirteen-year-olds, “Well, lads, we don’t know what the rest of the twentieth century has in store, but I guarantee that two of the old bugbears are finally done for—revealed religion and ethnic chauvinism.” So much for history’s predictive power.
Looking so much like Voltaire as he did, he should perhaps have known better, since Voltaire, as we know from Arthur Hertzberg, Peter Gay, and many other scholars, was a prime case of a philosophe who thought one way and felt another, who positively nursed the worm in the bud; who believed in the transformative power of reason up to a point, and that point was where it concerned Jews. It was not just that Voltaire believed the condition of being able to treat Jews humanely was the mass abandonment of Judaism and his understandable pessimism this would ever happen. It was that, au fond, he believed that even if the Jews could be persuaded to discard what made them culturally Jews, there would always still be some sort of insuperable racial or even biological obstacle to true assimilation.
The notion that the benevolent illuminations of the Enlightenment would in due course be bound to eradicate superstition and prejudice—both those said to be held by the Jews and those undoubtedly held against them—was compromised, not just by the disingenuousness of some of its apostles but by the slightly mechanical nature of their prescience. What failed them was their dependence on wordiness, their belief in the inevitable and permanent supremacy of textual logic, their faith in the unconditional surrender of fables to the irrefutably documented proof. He who could command critical reading, and critical writing, would in such a world of logically driven discourse command the future. And that future would be one in which rational demonstration would always prevail over emotive spectacle—just as, the same epistemologists thought, the Protestant logos had vanquished Catholic charisma. But of course it hadn’t. Nor did the Enlightenment banish the fairy tale so much as become, in the hands of the Brothers Grimm, its most psychologically aggressive reinventor. What would unfold in the age of the industrial machine which ensued was precisely, as Walter Benjamin accurately diagnosed, the astonishing capacity of technology to promote and project fantastic mythologies rather than banish them.
From the outset, of course, the machinery of sensationalist stupefaction—the dioramas and panoramas and Eídophusikons— were the natural handmaid of the sublime and terrible. As Victorian Britain became more colonized by industry, so its public became greedier by spectacles of disaster, brought to them as visceral entertainment: the simulacra of Vesuvian eruptions, the collapse of the Tay Bridge, an avalanche in the Simplon. More ominously, the paradox of a modernist technology, co-opted to attack modernism, came at the hands of its most adroit practitioners, no longer so paradoxical. The D. W. Griffith who specialized in the manipulation of
immense crowds and the apocalyptic collapse of imperial hubris was all of a piece with the chivalric romancer of the Ku Klux Klan. Mussolini could simultaneously embrace the piston-pump ecstasies of Marinettian futurism and the most preposterous Cinecittà-fabricated colossalism of Roman nostalgia. Ultimately, of course, Albert Speer would deliver for Hitler a cathedral of light where annihilationist rant would be bathed in arch of refulgence and Leni Riefenstahl would begin her epiphany with a kind of aerial cinematic annunciation: the angel of the Totenkopf moving through the skies, casting an immaculately shadowed simulacrum down on the ancestral sod.
From which it is surely just a hop, skip, and a click to the consummation of cyber-hatred, to the welcoming page of the Czech-based “Jewrats,” where its designers, appreciative of their predecessors’ knack for cutting-edge media, proudly declare, rather as if they were offering a year’s warranty, that “National Socialism was always known for its all-round quality propaganda.” At “Jewrats,” you can not only download the old favorites Der Ewige Jude, Triumph of the Will, and The Turner Diaries and elegiac interviews with George Lincoln Rockwell but also try your hand at games like “SA Mann,” “Rattenjagd,” and “Ghetto Blaster.”
Or try the homepage of “Resistance Records,” if you’ve got a strong stomach, featuring a video game called “Ethnic Cleansing,” whose champions, Terminator-style, are garbed as gladiators, whose targets, helpfully visualized at the top of the page lest casual visitors confuse them with Bosnian Muslims, are Julius Streicher caricatures of Jews, complete with standard-issue Der Stürmer extruded lips and hooked proboscis.
Just as Romantic Gothic Sensationalism fed on the victories which the optical scored over the textual, so the creative forte of the digital media has been the projection of electronic violence and encrypted runes. The most archaic motives of human culture, manichean battle, objects of occult veneration, ecstatic occasionally hallucinatory vision, all delivered in liquid crystal readouts, one kind of elemental plasma translated into another. The online game “Nazi Doom” is in fact just an adapted and slightly pirated version of the emphatically nonscientific Gothic space-fantasy games “Doom,” “Final Doom,” and the deliciously oxymoronic “Final Doom 2.” The optimistic dream of the Enlightenment that technology and addictive fantasy would be in some sort of zero-sum-game relationship turns out, as Benjamin predicted again, to be precisely the opposite case.
I don’t mean of course to say that the digital world is typified by the engineered delivery of the irrational, only that it is not exactly inhospitable to its propagation. Cyberspace is, of course, itself the work of much cerebration, but its most elaborate fabulists are devoted to the primacy of the visceral over the logical. They know their market. Against instantly summoned electronically pulsing apparitions, the Celtic crosses of the white power organizations like Aryan Resistance or Stormfront—the mid-’90s creation of the ex-Klansman Don Black, who hooked it up in federal prison and who created a digital thirteen-year-old wide-eyed boy as his ideal teenage apologist and recruiter. Against that, the patiently discursive modes of recent argument are handicapped, especially in competition for the attention of alienated adolescents, for whom the appeal of barbarian symbolism and occasionally barbaric action is precisely the rejection of bookishness. The ultimate Gothic fantasists, the murderers at Columbine, are known to have been visitors to these websites.
It’s a commonplace now to observe with Jay Bolter that the triumph of the Web represents the overthrow, for good or ill, not just of linear narrative but of the entire system of Baconian inductive reasoning, with its explicit commitment to hierarchies of knowledge, tests of proof, and so on. The universe of deep cyberspace is akin to whatever lies way beyond the reassuringly orderly alignment of the planets in our own relatively parochial solar system. Instead, it launches the traveler along a pathway of links to indeterminate destinations, the wormholes of epistemology; and along the routes, the digital argonaut is exposed to a furiously oncoming welter of incoherently arrayed bodies of information. The engineers of hate sites know this, and depend on capturing the aimless surfer who might, for example, stumble on an ostensibly Orientalist health site called “Bamboo Delights”—including “The Skinny Buddha Weight Loss Method” and—be directed through a single link to the neo-Nazi “Police Patriot” site, both designed by “Jew Watch” and “Stormfront.”
The Web is by its nature uncritically omnivorous. All it asks for is to be fed with information. It has the capacity to monitor its input only through the clumsy and ethically controversial means of censorship, so that, I’m told, in Germany when asked for sites responding to the word “Mengele,” the Web will refuse to deliver them to the user. But the notion that any sites can somehow be scrutinized—much less policed for misinformation, fraud, and lies—is already both electronically and institutionally impossible. If you search Google or www.alltheweb.com for The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, you’ll be greeted on the first page with many hundreds of entries, many of which are now devoted to reporting or debating the Egyptian television series Horse Without a Rider, which notoriously treated the Protocols as an historical event; not by the Anti-Defamation League or by YIVO or any other critical historically informed repudiation of the forgery, but by Radio Islam’s invitation to download the entire foul and forged text, along with The Jewish Conspiracy Against the Muslim World and Henry Ford’s (there he is again) The International Jew, or the anti–new world order ravings of Henry Makow, Ph.D., inventor of the word game “Scruples,” as he tells us—his website is www.savethemales.com—and who regards Judaism as a mask to disguise the international hegemony of the Khazars. All of these will line up for the unwary, long before any sort of critical or historically responsible commentary is reached.
Nor could anything possibly be further away from the epistemological conventions according to which arguments are tested against critical challenges than the Net’s characteristic form of chat, which overwhelmingly takes the form of call and response, to which there is never any resolution nor conclusion, merely a string of unadjudicated utterances and ejaculations. Digital allegiances can be formed there not through any sort of sifting of truth and falsehood but in response to or in defense against a kind of cognitive battering. And the virtual reality of the Internet, as Sherry Turkle, Les Back, and others have pointed out, has been a gift to both the purveyors and the consumers of paranoia. It offers an electronic habitat which is simultaneously furtive and exhibitionist, structurally molecular but capable, as the user is emboldened, of forming itself into an electronic community of the like-minded. It is perfectly engineered, then, for leaderless resistance and the Lone Wolf—the recommended model for zealous racists, neo-Nazis, and white-power warriors, hunting, like Timothy McVeigh, in solitude or small or temporarily linked packs. Instead of slogging up to the camp in Idaho or Montana, digital stormtroopers can assemble in their very own virtual Idaho, download the “Horst Wessel Lied,” and electronically bond.
The Web is also, of course, a mine of useful information for the aspiring neo-Nazi, not just in the selection of human and institutional targets but about the resources needed to strike them. Everything from artisanal ammonium nitrate to the much more wired offensives against the race enemy, involving intensive electronic jamming known as “digital bombing,” to targeted systems of electronic virus contamination and sabotage. Taken together, the five hundred or so websites in the United States built to proselytize for anti-Semitic and racist causes constitute a virtual universe of hatred, protean enough to hunker down or reach out as the moment and the need require, encrypting, when necessary, their most bilious messages so that they become accessible only to those with decrypting keys, a tactic of course adored by secrecy fetishists, or aggressively and openly campaigning when that seems to be the priority.
Once inside this net, you can log on to “Resistance Records” and download white-power music like Nordic Thunder, order CDs from the online catalog; you can link to the ostensibly more mainstream racist o
rganizations, like the British National Party, who have just trebled their representation in British local government elections. You can reassure yourself that the “Holo-cost,” as it’s called, or the “Holo-hoax,” never happened, and it’s just another disinformation conspiracy designed to channel reparations to the ever-open mouth of the international conspiracy of Jew bankers. You can browse the Christian Guide to Small Arms, order up Nazi memorabilia or your Aryan Nations warm-up jacket, with all the ease of someone going shopping for Yankees souvenirs. And most ominously of all, out there in cyberspace you can act out games of virtual annihilation with none of the risks or consequences you might incur in the actual world of body space.
In the circumstances, it is perhaps reassuring that according to the best and most recent estimates of regular visitors and inhabitants of these kinds of sites, these may amount to no more than maybe 50,000 or 100,000 at most. It’s possible to argue it is better that the paranoids lock themselves away in the black holes of cyberspace than act out their delusions in the world of real humanity. But that is of course to assume that “Stormfront” troopers and Aryan crusaders will never make the leap from clicking to shooting. And if there’s anything we’ve learned from this peculiarly delusional moment in our history, it is that today’s media fantasy may indeed turn into tomorrow’s cultural virus. And in the world of wired terror, head counts are no longer any guide to the possibility of trouble, which comes, as we’ve learned to our cost, very much in single spies rather than battalions.
However abhorrent, I suspect the real threat posed by electronic hatred may not be in the hard core of rabidly delusional anti-Semites, who may, alas, may always be with us. It is rather from the electronic extension of the paranoid’s style out to much bigger constituencies of the aggrieved, who see in its basic worldview—a global conspiracy of money, secularism, and sexual corruption—a perennial explanation for their own misfortune, for their sense of beleaguered alienation. The trans-positions then become easy. For the Rothschilds, read Gold-man Sachs and the IMF; for the Illuminati, read the Council on Foreign Relations. Henry Ford said of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: “All I know is that it fits events.” Nor is this habitual imprinting of the old template onto contemporary events a monopoly of Left or Right. In fact, les extrêmes se touchent: antiglobalizers meet the anti-immigrants; anti-Americanism meets America First; America First meets America Only.
Those Who Forget the Past Page 38