GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

August 24, 2006

The Anti-White Guilt Coalition

Filed under: GA — ericgans @ 2:09 am
Speaking intuitively rather than statistically, one effect of the recent fighting that gives me some ground for hope is that is has inaugurated a new sense of community among those who become aware of the immense damage wrought by White Guilt’s mindless moral narcissism. It is interesting to see Shelby Steele’s far more widely publicized use of the term come to coincide with my own: “White guilt in the West — especially in Europe and on the American left — confuses all this by seeing Islamic extremism as a response to oppression” (“Life and Death,” Wall Street Journal, 8/22/06).
No doubt Generative Anthropology provides the most comprehensive and parsimonious framework for understanding White Guilt, but in the present moment this strikes me as less important than that GA is part of this community, which is only one step from a coalition. White Guilt, as is increasingly obvious, is complicit with Hezbollah and Ahmadinejad in its desire to destroy Israel, and (why not) the Jews in general, not to speak of the United States. The West, and now the entire world that derives from Western civilization, is still working out the paradox raised by the Hebrews in 1800 B.C. or so by being the first to have the chutzpah to claim that “their” God is the only God, the God of everyone.
A further point to consider is the modern, market version of firstness: economic productivity. Because Nazi Germany was a “productive” state, in the victimary mindset productivity itself is not only not admired, it is reviled. Thus a comparison one never sees between Israel and Hezbollah is that Israel has a modern economy that doesn’t just “produce” but creates new products, notably in high tech fields, whereas Hezbollah and Hamas live on charity, which they redistribute to create good will, and basically produce nothing. (When was the last time you used a piece of Hezbollah software?) Considering that our entire social order would fall into disorder absent the kind of economic productivity that Israel, the US, and the “West” in the broad sense embody, it is striking that the only presence of this comparison in the world press is as a demonstration of the terrorists’ moral superiority as “victims” of Israel’s “war machine.”
What goes for Israel goes for us. It’s not the “Israel lobby” that links the US and Israel in the hatred of the jihadists; it’s their common firstness.
-eric gans

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