THE TOXIC NATURE OF ENVY! THE HOLOCAUST AND BEYOND!

 THE TOXIC NATURE OF ENVY!

THE HOLOCAUST AND BEYOND!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© December 26, 2014

PREAMBLE

A Christmas vacation while a student at the University of Iowa, it was common for me from Monday to Friday to spend part of my day at the Clinton County Public Library.

On one occasion I recall my mother asking me, concerned that I was studying too much, “Jimmy, do you find any of your college classmates at the librDuring ary?”

I answered, “Only my Jewish friends, mother.”

At the time, as you might suspect, I saw no significance in my comment.  Earlier, at the end of my junior year in high school, having been elected to attend Iowa's Hawkeye Boys State along with 739 other Iowa high school juniors from Iowa’s 99 counties, I found myself campaign manager of the Federalist Party, running for the office of the Secretary of State, and managing the campaign for governor of candidate Ralph Petersberger of Davenport, Iowa, whom I had just met. 

I was awed by my candidate as he was so knowledgeable in civics, politics and governance, while I was a complete novice in all these areas and close to totally ignorant.  He already envisioned himself changing the world.  I, on the other hand, although a good student, was primarily known as an athlete, was worried about being able to afford a college education.  I learned a great deal from Ralph Petersburger although he, too, was only a boy. 

Every night, I would be on the stage with the campaign manager for the Nationalist Party, as the two candidates for governor would speak.  My responsibility was to give something of a sales pitch for my candidate, and then introduce him to the assembled group.

Every night was one of living terror.  Although we would have sporting events and other recreational activities during the day, I felt I would die every night before getting on stage.  Ralph, on the other hand, thrived in this setting, failing to be intimidated by either his fellow students or a US Senator, US House of Representative, or the Governor of Iowa, one of whom each night was likely to be on stage with us. 

Remembering how I hugged the rostrum for dear life, I can imagine how I must have looked.  Despite this, I was elected Secretary of State, and, alas, I failed to succeed in getting Ralph Petersberger elected governor.  After Hawkeye Boys State, Ralph and I would never meet again, but I am confident he has done very well in life. 

When I returned from Hawkeye Boys State, dressing in the locker room for a track meet, a teammate went into a wild harangue shouting and cursing at me, “Fisher, you get everything!  Everything goes your way!”  Obviously, that was not true, but I met the charge in silence.  

It was my introduction to envy, which was not jealousy, but nonetheless equally toxic.

TOXIC ENVY BEHIND THE HOLOCAUST

Academics and historical revisionists have been known to ferret out provocative morsels for intellectual relevance and academic retention.  But if so, I think in the case of envy they may have a point.   See if you agree in this missive.

We are told by some that love makes the world go around, by others that it is power and money, and still others that it is jealousy and envy.  Whatever the person’s predilection, we know from experience that whatever it is it can be unsettling if not toxic.

Envy and jealousy are often treated as synonyms, which clearly they are not.  Envy concerns what you would like but don’t possess, whereas jealousy concerns what you have and do not want to lose (a loved one, job, reputation, possessions, etc.). 

Shakespeare's Othello is the archetype of jealousy.  Iago, his lieutenant, is envious of Othello’s power.  He crystallizes his envy by exploiting Othello’s morbid jealousy as opposed to normal jealousy.  Usually, the morbidly jealous person needs visual evidence to confirm his jealousy.  Iago provides this by planting the handkerchief of Othello’s wife, Desdemona, in Cassio’s room to confirm her adultery.  This discovery leads to Othello’s jealous rage and to the murder of his bride.     

While jealousy often leads to violence, usually this is not the case with envy. 

However, envy not jealousy led to the Holocaust according to Gotz Aly in “Why the Germans? Why the Jews? Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust” (2014).

Historian Aly attempts to make a case that economics not blatant hatred was behind Germany’s “Final Solution” for the Jews, claiming the Nazi’s “New Order” was designed to break the cycle of poverty, low economic productivity and rural overpopulation that afflicted Eastern Europe. 

In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, no matter the wild economic swings in Europe, Jews were always the ethnic group left standing when the music stopped in Germany’s escalating game of demographic musical chairs.

Aly argues that rather than an ideological vision from the beginning, political and economic decisions of the Nazis were based on concerns for the welfare of Germans that resulted in terrorizing, enslaving and exterminating enemy groups, which were largely designated to be Jewish.

Historical revisionists downplay Nazi ideology and anti-Semitism in particular as mere propaganda and rhetoric.  Instead, they attribute causation to such factors as Nazi “rational” or “logical” calculations about material and demographic factors, in other words, “things” rather than people as persons.

[Before the reader becomes aghast at this description, economic holocaust has been going on in the United States for decades wiping people out of their jobs and security by hostile takeovers of companies in the interest of the ghost of capitalism.]

In this Information Age in which zeros and ones dominate, and cipher management is often the prescription, self-proclaimed apolitical technocrats downplay the significance of underemployment, unemployment, or existential schizophrenia by pointing out that the Dow Jones Industrial Index has broken through the ceiling of 18,000, but for whom?

What the reader is asked to consider in this commentary is what went on in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945.  

Was the “Final Solution” done with a modicum of complicity and tacit approval of the German rank and file, or not?  Historian Aly suggests that it was done with the full knowledge of the educated elite of German society, and that the scapegoat for all the blame and shame was saddled with distant aliens and fanatic ideologues.    

ENVY, THE CRUX OF THE MATTER

Aly anchors his thesis in the incremental process of Jewish emancipation during the fragmented years of Germany in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.  This was initiated by German elites, but opposed by much of the population.  It literally transformed Jewish life.

Armed with a culture of education and freed from past restrictions, Jews quickly seized the economic opportunities offered by the window of increasing modernization, urbanization, and industrialization.  Meanwhile, most Germans, educationally unprepared to take advantage of this windfall, tied nostalgically to traditional ways, were reluctant even resentful to take up new occupations or embrace new challenges. 

Consequently, spectacular Jewish advances continued unabated contrasted to the lethargy, resentment and disorientation of most Germans.  This produced an envy of Jewish wealth, power, success and influence that couldn’t be cut with a metaphorical saw, along with an inferiority complex vis-à-vis Jewish competence, confidence and competition. 

This set of factors produced an insecure national identity that seeded the future Nazi combination of anti-Semitism and distrust of liberal causes or liberating policies.

Aly says that the “Revolution of 1848” famously called “Germany’s turning point” that didn’t turn.  “Boom and bust” followed Germany’s unification in 1871, which resulted in an intensifying of social tension aggravated by the already existing dynamic of Jewish betterment and Gentile envy. 

The author claims this was ripe for anti-Semitic agitation with the “Jewish Question” being seen behind all of Germany’s modern social and economic ills or the German society’s“ social question.” 

The Germany “boom” of the 1920s was followed by the “bust” of 1929 (The Great Depression) with Hitler able to combine the boom celebration and the bust humiliation into ethnic unity and the national recovery anthem of “the Aryan Race ascending,” transcending class, religion and region into a common “Aryan population.”

To achieve this remarkable transformation, Hitler had to manage thought to make it psychologically attractive.  This required the development of a race theory to conceal the embarrassment of Germans who envied Jews but were ashamed to admit it.

For those suffering a deep inferiority complex about Jews and their accomplishments, race theory inverted success into failure, turning Jewish accomplishments into evidence of vice and corruption.   

For those troubled by the large difference between Jews they knew and the Nazi stereotype, race theory allowed individual experience to be ignored.

Race theory turned Jewish persecution and murder into self-defense. 

Race theory disguised hatred of Jews into insight and made one’s own shortcomings seem like virtues in comparison.

It also provided justification for acts of legal discrimination against Jews, allowing Germans to delegate their own aggression, born of feelings of inferiority to their state.

With a blanket of passivity expressed in anti-Semitism, it gave the German government the latitude it needed to press forward with its murderous campaigns.

This work by Gotz Aly suggests that envy was the chief motive behind Germany’s anti-Semitism.  In the subtitle of this missive, “The Holocaust and Beyond” is meant to give the reader pause when judging Germany and Germans too harshly, or, indeed, anyone.

We as individuals and as a nation harbor envy in our hearts, and can be found to play this rationalism game of turning the assets of those we envy into liabilities, reducing their accomplishments to mere connections, their obvious competence to a shield for what they are hiding, and the game goes on. 

The nature of hate crimes have envy in common, illustrating more of what the hater lacks than what the hater hates.  Not only Jews but people of accomplishment of all endeavors are likely to be the subject of schadenfreude, as a way to compensate for a closeted sense of inferiority or inferiority complex. 

It is why I have never liked small talk.  As soon as a husband or wife belittles a mate, sibling, kin, friend, coworker, someone of an ethnic group, or personal orientation who is not present, I wish to have no more to do with them, hold them forever in low regard and avoid them if I can.

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