The Jewish skinhead in all of us
A tease of my new essay for Flaming Hydra, on 2001's "The Believer."
Greetings. Josie here. Hope you’re well.
I was recently welcomed into the incredible worker-owned writing collective known as Flaming Hydra, and I just published my debut piece there. You can read it here:
https://flaminghydra.com/the-believer-and-me/My topic is the forgotten 2001 Ryan Gosling vehicle The Believer — a truly brilliant film about a semi-fictional Jewish Nazi named Danny Balint. But really, it’s about a question that is far more relevant now than it was when the movie was unceremoniously dumped onto Showtime: When the oppressed throw off their chains, how will they avoid the seductions of the old oppressors’ tools?
An excerpt:
Danny exists in a post-Holocaust landscape, one in which all Jews — Zionists, anti-Zionists, and outright lunatics alike — have to reckon with the fact that six million of us were slaughtered, with minimal resistance, between 1939 and 1945. No one knows what to do with this fact. Did we bring it on ourselves? If so, what were our sins? Was it only done _to_ us? If so, why didn’t we fight harder? And, most importantly, which is the lesson to be learned: “Never again” for anyone, or “never again” only for us?
The film offers no answer, but it forces every Jew to see themselves in Danny Balint. An anti-Zionist can relate to his disgust with what he sees as Jewish perfidy and hypocrisy. A Jewish Republican can relate to his palling around with the “intellectual” white-supremacist right. And a mainstream Zionist, whether they know it or not, is buying into Danny’s lesson for the Holocaust survivors: “Kill your enemy.”
Contemporary Zionism, at its core, is a declaration that a second Holocaust must be prevented through strength and preemptive violence. It holds that Jews will never be safe unless we defend ourselves in a country that primarily serves our ethnic interests. Zionism is obsessed with birth rates and purity. It is a reminder that “self-determination” is often just another word for supremacy.
No, Zionism is not Nazism — but it exists in our world, where every dimension of politics has been infected by Nazi ideology. Hitler’s visions of mass destruction in the name of renewal and rebirth are bred into the bones of every nationalist movement, be it one of the oppressed or the oppressor. Genocides are now just the background hum of daily life. What the politicians call “realpolitik” is often just a fancy word for acting like a Nazi.
“Now an implacable age looms over the world,” said Borges’ fictive Nazi, in 1946. “What matters is that violence, not servile Christian acts of timidity, now rules."
The Nazis may have lost the war, but their mindset — a zero-sum ethnic war of all against all — has infected the whole planet. There are Danny Balints in every ethnic group. Their pain is real, and historically situated. They’re asking the right questions, but their answers are dreadfully wrong. They imagine that the only way to cast off persecution is to become a persecutor yourself.
The carnage in Gaza is not the result of a uniquely Jewish problem, nor are the Jewish anti-Zionists who spout blood libels uniquely perverted in their self-hatred. The global Jewish community’s problems today are, at the root, simply the logical outcome of a Western society that never completed the work of de-Nazifying itself.
Click here to read the whole thing.
I encourage you to subscribe to Flaming Hydra, not just so you can read my essay, but to get access to writing by a huge deck of ridiculously good writers!
That is all! Thanks!
J