White Christian supremacism

I do not understand racism, it seems like incoherent gibberish to me. Why should I care if someone's ancestors are mostly European Christians? Why are my interests somehow aligned with people of European Christian ancestry and somehow opposed to people with African or indigenous American or Jewish ancestry? My interests are defined by the social, economic and environmental circumstances in which I find myself, and the moral values I cherish. If my neighbors, coworkers, friends, colleagues, family members (by marriage or adoption) have different ancestry we still have interests in common. 

 

If people immigrate to the U.S. from places other than western Europe, and eventually some of them, or at least their children, become voters, why is that bad for me? Who knows how they'll end up voting, but there's no reason to think they'll take anything away from me. They'll have the same need to make a living, educate their children, breathe the air and drink the water -- we'll all be part of the same society and we'll all need for it to succeed.

With that as broad context, I do want to say a bit about antisemitism, which suddenly seems to have acquired respectability among Republican politicians, along with a whole lot of batshit insane conspiracy theories and blatant lies.* This is a particularly egregious form of bigotry because it incorporates an entirely fictitious understanding of the world. Jews are like everybody else -- they have their local communities, a great diversity of religious practices or none at all, a full range of political and philosophical beliefs and allegiances, some political advocacy organizations representing diverse points of view and concepts of their interests. They do not have a secret international conspiracy that controls world finances, aspires to secretly manipulate global politics, or uses orbiting lasers to start wildfires. There are rich Jews and poor Jews, liberal and conservative, gay and straight, honest and dishonest, friendly and unfriendly -- just like everybody else.

Why this bizarre, paranoid and false conspiratorial view of the world is so deeply embedded in European culture is not entirely clear. Of course the Jews in medieval Europe were a minority in a political culture dominated by the Catholic church, and the protestant revolution fully inherited the Catholic prejudice. Martin Luther was as bigoted as they come. But that's ancient history now. We should have been over it long before Nazism, and that should have finished it forever. It hasn't, and that's just appalling. But make no mistake -- the Christian supremacist forces are allied with one and only one party, and politicians of only one party decline to renounce them.

 

 *I don't particularly like the term antisemitism, because the Semitic people are a much broader category than the Jews, and for that matter Jews nowadays aren't necessarily particularly Semitic in ancestry -- Judaism is an ethnic rather than a racial, or even religious category -- but that's the common term for prejudice or discrimination against Jews so we'll go with it.