10 Nov Wrecking Things and People
Note: I know you’ve had a LOT of me this week, but today (last night into today) is important. I wrote this exactly two years ago today — just before the new website went live, so it’s not in the archives. Given the forecast near the end, I thought it was worth resharing.
Today – or, rather, last night into today (the night of the 9th, into the day of the 10th) – is the anniversary of two rather infamous events in Western history. The first of these was a manmade catastrophe, while the second was God-made, a “natural” disaster, if you will. Both should serve as reminders to us about the fragility of life and civilization.
We’ll address these events today in reverse chronological order and in ascending order of importance.
On the afternoon of November 9, 1975, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, captained by Ernest McSorely, left Superior, Wisconsin, fully loaded with taconite iron ore pellets, on its way to a steel mill at Zug Island, not far from Detroit. The ship, Captain McSorely, and the 28 crew members never made their destination for reasons explained most famously by Canadian folk singer Gordon Lightfoot:
The wind in the wires made a tattle-tale sound
and a wave broke over the railing.
And ev’ry man knew, as the captain did too
’twas the witch of November come stealin’.
The dawn came late and the breakfast had to wait
when the Gales of November came slashin’.
When afternoon came it was freezin’ rain
in the face of a hurricane west wind.
When suppertime came the old cook came on deck
Sayin’ “Fellas, it’s too rough t’feed ya.”
At seven P.M. a main hatchway caved in; he said,
(**2010 lyric change: At 7 p.m., it grew dark, it was then he said,)
“Fellas, it’s bin good t’know ya!”
The captain wired in he had water comin’ in
and the good ship and crew was in peril.
And later that night when ‘is lights went outta sight
came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
The lesson of this story is that sometimes bad things happen and it’s no one’s fault. As they say, He moves in mysterious ways.
For years, various investigations of the wreck have attempted to show that McSorely screwed up or that the National Weather Service made a terrible mistake not forecasting the storm earlier or that the ship itself was damaged and therefore should not have made the trip. None of these investigations has been able to prove a thing or to implicate anyone. Indeed, in the past decade, Lightfoot has altered some of the lyrics that he thought might have suggested crew members were to blame, when, in truth, the available evidence suggests otherwise.
In the original lyrics, Lightfoot asks, “Does anyone know where the love of God goes, when the waves turn the minutes to hours.” The clear implication here is that bad sh*t happens, and it happens for no good reason at all. As we, as a nation, prepare for bad things that might happen, this is a lesson worth keeping in mind.
The other event that occurred on these dates – the manmade event – teaches a corollary lesson, one that we will also need to keep in mind.
As many of you may have guessed already, the other event was Kristallnacht – the Night of the Broken Glass – which took place throughout Germany on November 9 and 10, 1938 and marked the unofficial start of the Holocaust:
Just before midnight on November 9, Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller sent a telegram to all police units informing them that “in shortest order, actions against Jews and especially their synagogues will take place in all of Germany. These are not to be interfered with.” Rather, the police were to arrest the victims. Fire companies stood by synagogues in flames with explicit instructions to let the buildings burn. They were to intervene only if a fire threatened adjacent “Aryan” properties.
In two days and nights, more than 1,000 synagogues were burned or otherwise damaged. Rioters ransacked and looted about 7,500 Jewish businesses, killed at least 91 Jews, and vandalized Jewish hospitals, homes, schools, and cemeteries. The attackers were often neighbours. Some 30,000 Jewish males aged 16 to 60 were arrested. To accommodate so many new prisoners, the concentration camps at Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen were expanded.
After the pogrom ended, it was given an oddly poetic name: Kristallnacht—meaning “crystal night” or “night of broken glass.” This name symbolized the final shattering of Jewish existence in Germany. After Kristallnacht, the Nazi regime made Jewish survival in Germany impossible.
The cost of the broken window glass alone came to millions of Reichsmarks. The Reich confiscated any compensation claims that insurance companies paid to Jews. The rubble of ruined synagogues had to be cleared by the Jewish community. The Nazi government imposed a collective fine of one billion Reichsmarks (about $400 million in 1938) on the Jewish community. After assessing the fine, Hermann Göring remarked: “The swine won’t commit another murder. Incidentally…I would not like to be a Jew in Germany.”
The Nazi government barred Jews from schools on November 15 and authorized local authorities to impose curfews in late November. By December 1938, Jews were banned from most public places in Germany.
The obvious lesson here is that sometimes, bad things happen, and it IS someone’s fault. Sometimes evil people do evil things.
But there’s more to it than that. As we said, the lesson of Kristallnacht is a corollary to the lesson of the Edmund Fitzgerald. What we mean by that is that sometimes, bad things happen and no one is to blame, and sometimes, that doesn’t matter. Sometimes, people choose to exploit tragedies, catastrophes, and hard times for their own purposes. Sometimes, people identify “scapegoats” – usually social, political, or cultural outsiders – whom they can blame for otherwise blameless incidents. Sometimes people use those incidents as a pretext to commit violence against those outsiders, those scapegoats.
And often times, those outsiders are Jewish.
As we have noted before in these pages, anti-Semitism represents something completely unique among the prejudices that afflict the Western world. Hatred of and anger toward Jews is not the same as other forms of bigotry. In many ways, the history of Western anti-Jewish hatred mirrors the history of Western political chaos and collapse. Or to put it another way, historically, Jews are not only the perennial scapegoats during periods of social upheaval and displacement, but resurgent anti-Semitism serves as the proverbial canary in the coal mine for the rise of revolutionary movements.
In his classic The Pursuit of the Millennium, the British historian Norman Cohn argues that the Jewish diaspora generally fit comfortably, if tentatively into European society for most of the first thousand years or so A.D., and Jews only became a hated and perpetually persecuted minority with the rise of utopian Millenarianism that accompanied and then outlived the Crusades. Beginning then and continuing for the next nearly a thousand years, Europeans came to associate Jews with the antichrist and thus to associate hatred and persecution of Jews with preparing the battlespace for the Second Coming. Many historians, including Hannah Arendt, whom we cite repeatedly in these pages, believed that the anti-Semitism that was such an integral part of the West’s Twentieth-century collapse into totalitarianism was relatively new and, in any case, distinct from medieval anti-Semitism. Cohn’s history suggests otherwise, connecting the religious eschatology of medieval Europe to the quasi-religious eschatology of post-Enlightenment Europe, thereby connecting it to the persistence of Western anti-Semitism as well.
Whatever the case, resurgent anti-Semitism has, inarguably, played a role, throughout Western history, in the rise of movements that threaten violence against the existing regime and seek to bring order to political and social chaos.
We find it troubling when, for example, Kanye West or Kyrie Irving rant against the Jews or promote anti-Semitic conspiracies. We don’t believe that they have the intention of hurting our Jewish friends and family, nor do we believe that they have the power to do so. Yet their anti-Semitism serves as a warning, as a portend of things to come.
Likewise, we find it deeply distressing when Members of Congress – members of a “squad” in Congress, you might say – engage in anti-Jewish stereotypes and language. Again, we don’t think that they have the power to move legislation that might harm the Jewish community, but then, that’s not really the point.
The point is that rising anti-Semitism is almost always a harbinger of political upheaval that, in time, will wreak havoc on nations, governments, and people, especially on Jewish people.
We don’t suppose that we’re telling you anything you didn’t already know, but the next couple of years are likely to be pretty tough and pretty ugly. If we don’t address growing anti-Semitism now, when it is still mostly (but not entirely) rhetorical, then, as times get tougher, it will grow uglier and more substantive. By the time we realize that it has moved beyond the mostly rhetorical stage, it will be too late, and Jews worldwide will again be imperiled.
Sometimes bad things happen. And sometimes bad things are allowed or encouraged to happen by bad people.
If the phrase “never again” means anything, then we should be aware of these lessons and should be prepared to act accordingly.
