[lbo-talk] Gerhard Hanloser Critique of Moishe Postone on Antisemitism

[Carrol Cox]

On 7/18/2011 1:50 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Jul 18, 2011, at 2:10 PM, Angelus Novus wrote:
>
>> A recent heated debate with a friend of mine about the recent social movements in Greece prompted me to translate this article.  I argued that the attacks upon financial institutions and "foreign powers" do not constitute Antisemitism, as Antisemitism necessarily entails some targeting of Jews. Furthermore, unlike Antisemitism, the Greek protestors are not delusional: part of the current misery in Greece is **indeed** the result of international financial institutions and foreign powers (namely Brussels and Berlin).
>>
>> Anyway, I think this is a valuable corrective to the hasty accusation of Antisemitism whenever the role of international finance is brought up:
>>
>> http://communism.blogsport.eu/2011/07/18/attac-the-critique-of-globalization-and-structural-antisemitism/
>
> Good points, but I've noticed myself that there's an affinity between critiques of finance and a history of right populism, which has roots in a provincial petty bourgeois dislike of the big and rootless. It's amazing how often that sort of thing has a kind of anti-semitism as a traveling companion. I noticed this in a lot of the crappy video premiums that my former radio station, WBAI, used to offer. Jewish names were always prominently listed in these critiques. It's not a great distance between these and the critique of stock exchange capitalism in Mein Kampf.
>
> Doug

Well, as  a reader of Pound I've certainly noticed this. But the 
connection partly depends on the existence of active anti-semitism 
within the culture from which the political movements emerge. It can't 
(or at least is less apt to) spring directly from the politics in 
isolation from such a culture. Has anyone done a historical study of 
small-town merchants in the midwest and west in the late 19th-c?  The 
kind of situation I'm thinking  of was sometimes (often?)  involved in 
lynchings of blacks in the South. The events that triggered Wells's 
anti-lynching campaign and eventually the NAACP was a lynching organized 
by merchants who resented competition from Black merchants. If anything 
like that occurred in small towns in the midwest and west involving 
Jewish merchants, etc, that could  have helped created the 'climate' I 
hypothesize. This is pure sepculation because I don't know the history.

Any populist movement has always been subject to 'conspiratorial' 
infection, or to various types of fears. Consider wide-spread teror of 
"illegal migration" in the UJ.S. today.

Carrol