this Edwardian eugenicism to the rise of Nazi Germany. In a letter to Beatrice Webb in 1938, Shaw declared that:
We ought to tackle the Jewish question by admitting the right of states to make eugenic experiments by weeding out any strains they think undesirable, but insisting that they should do it as humanely as they can afford to, and not shock civilization by such misdemeanours as the expulsion and robbery of Einstein.
Shaw’s letter, rather worryingly, constructs Jews as a potentially “undesirable” “strain” who might, at any time, be thought to be outside of established nation states.39
A couple more cases may suffice to exemplify the extraordinary degree of presence, amounting in effect to near omnipresence in intellectual debate concerning the redemption of society from this or that social evil, both of the disease metaphor itself, and of the characteristic devices of projection and self-deception that the metaphor both dominates and serves.
The first of these cases concerns a well-known passage, italicized below, in After Strange Gods, a book that the poet T. S. Eliot published in 1934, but unsurprisingly, refused to republish, at least as a whole, after World War II. The book discusses the prospects for a society based on the Christian and Catholic orthodoxy that Eliot had long embraced. “The population should be homogenous; where two or more cultures exist in the same place they are likely either to be fiercely self-conscious or both to become adulterate. What is still more important is unity of religious backgrounds; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable. There must be a proper balance between urban and rural, industrial and agricultural development. And a spirit of excessive tolerance is to be deprecated.”40
Much ink has been expended over the question of whether Eliot was an antisemite.41 That question, for better or worse, I propose to leave on one side. The question that interests me here is a different one—namely, what could have induced a man of Eliot’s intellectual capacity to imagine for a moment that the words italicized above could constitute a remotely sensible addendum to the sentence that contains them?
A number of references in Eliot’s poetry of the period—“Sweeney among the Nightingales,” “Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar,” “Gerontion,” and “The Waste Land,” among them—combine to create the impression that for Eliot at the time, images of the Jew functioned as a powerful poetic image of the destructive forces of materialism and religious and cultural confusion that that poetry locates at the heart of contemporary Western civilization. An obvious way of exonerating Eliot from the charge of antisemitism would be, indeed, to point out that we are dealing here merely with poetic imagery and hence only with culturally embedded images of “the Jew” rather than with real Jews. Poems, that is to say, being poems and not manifestos, cannot be read straightforwardly as expressions of beliefs or attitudes held by their authors.
On the other hand, After Strange Gods is precisely that: a manifesto. Here, Eliot is talking about actual Jews and their impact on society as he conceives it. We are here, then, entitled to read him quite straightforwardly as contending that the activities of “free-thinking Jews” are inimical to the life of the kind of conservative Christian commonwealth that Eliot wishes to see restored. The reason, according to Eliot, is that the presence of “any large number of free-thinking Jews” is inconsistent with the (non-Jewish) cultural and religious homogeneity that must be preserved if there is to be any return to a society soundly based on conservative Christian values. To which, I suppose, a natural skepticism must in all honesty return the answer: “What homogeneity?” The passage echoes, that is to say, with the hollow clap of stable doors closing a century and a half too late, long after the horses of cultural and religious homogeneity in the non-Jewish Western world have definitively fled. The opponents Eliot’s ideas have actually to confront, in other words, are not free-thinking Jews, whose numbers in proportion were very far from large even in the 1930s, but the inconceivably greater numbers of free-thinking ex-Christians who, following Hume and Voltaire, will accept neither Eliot’s politics nor his Christianity and whom it is far too late to cow into silence, let alone submission, merely by the avoidance of “excessive tolerance.”
The function of Jews per se in Eliot’s discourse, as in that of Shaw, Luther, or the philosophes, is in other words to create a delusive appearance of non-Jewish unity in support of certain ideas by exporting, or in Freudian terms projecting, a disturbingly domestic disunity onto a reassuringly external and putatively alien source. If—if only—the Jews were the problem, then the politics of Eliot and those of his political mentor Charles Maurras would be assured of success. That, I submit, is what explains the presence of “free-thinking Jews,” otherwise hardly rationally explicable, in the passage cited above.
Now for one final example of the technique of neutralizing the threat to entrenched theoretical positions posed by inconvenient facts about the non-Jewish world, by exporting, or projecting, those facts onto the shoulders of the Jews. This one concerns Holocaust denial—known in French as négationnisme—on the part of elements of the French left in the concluding quarter of the twentieth century. The best-known figures here are Paul Rassinier (1906–67), whose widely influential writings were instrumental in making Holocaust denial a live political issue in France, and later in the period, Robert Faurisson, a former literary scholar at the University of Lyon, famous for having attracted ambiguously phrased support from no less stalwart a pillar of the American left than Noam Chomsky. Faurisson received support in publishing and popularizing his views from La vielle taupe (The Old Mole—the name comes from Hamlet’s remark concerning his father’s ghost, as recycled by Hegel to refer to the “underground” progress of Spirit), a Parisian bookshop and publishing firm run by one Pierre Guillaume, for whom it represented a continuation of his involvement in the French political upheavals of the 1960s, culminating in the “May events” of 1968.
A fascinating report on this obscure movement based on, among other things, a lengthy interview with Guillaume himself was recently published by the Israeli philosopher Elhanan Yakira.42 I shall concentrate here on what Yakira has to say about the ideological and (in a certain sense) moral considerations motivating Rassinier.
Yakira notes that Rassinier held throughout his life “pacifist and proto-anarchist views.”43 As a young man, he joined the Communist Party. As a member of the Resistance during the early stages of World War II, he was captured by the Gestapo, tortured, and sent first to Buchenwald and then, along with thousands of other slave laborers, to Dora, a work camp for the construction of the V1 and V2 rockets. At the end of the war, he enjoyed a brief political career as a member of the Socialist Party in which capacity he was elected for a time to the National Assembly. From 1948 onward, however, he began to publish a series of books whose object was to deny that the Holocaust had taken place. What Yakira makes clear is that this project was motivated directly by Rassinier’s lifelong anarcho-pacifism.
Rassinier was particularly opposed to efforts to present a Manichaean view of the modern world, to depict Nazi Germany as the incarnation of absolute evil and what had been done in the concentration camps as uniquely wicked.44 … According to him, Nazi concentration camps were not really a unique historical phenomenon. Not only did they not differ from Soviet camps; they did not differ from French penal institutions either: a camp is a camp, as we were to hear fifty years later from various self-styled progressive writers. It is merely an expression, more or less severe according to circumstances, of the essence of the state as such, not just of the Nazi SS state or even the totalitarian state. For Rassinier, the underlying logic of the essence of the state is the logic of war and enslavement. The task of the intellectual of the left, especially one who himself as witnessed such events, is, on the one hand, to warn against the Manichaeism that places all the blame on one side, thus provoking war, and, on the other hand, to strip the other side of its claim to moral superiority. It is war itself that is the absolute evil, not one warmongering party or another.45
Plainly,
