One of the most insightful books I read during my graduate
work at Florida State was Richard Rubenstein and John Roth’s seminal work on
the Holocaust, Approaches
to Auschwitz. Amidst the
many provocative understandings offered by these authors was the concept of “the
disconfirming other.”
According to the authors, the Jews were seen as embodying
an ongoing disconfirmation of the ultimate truth of the Christian religion
simply by their continued presence and practice. But while that understanding
came into its sharpest contrast in the events of the Holocaust that these
scholars were analyzing, to put it into perspective one needs to consider the
roots of the Holocaust.
Practicing a “Sharp Mercy“
Martin Luther had optimistically predicted at the beginning
of what would become the Protestant Reformation that now that the Catholic
accretions to what he saw as “the one true faith” had been dispelled, the Jews,
the other children of Abraham, would come streaming to the light - and into the
doors of the reformed churches. Several years later when that had not happened,
Luther would become deadly in his rage, publishing a screed entitled “On the
Jews and Their Lies” which essentially argued for ethnic cleansing.
Among his other fulminations, Luther would exhort his
fellow Germans as follows:
What shall we Christians do
with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews? Since they live among us, we
dare not tolerate their conduct, now that we are aware of their lying and
reviling and blaspheming. If we do, we become sharers in their lies, cursing
and blasphemy. Thus we cannot extinguish the unquenchable fire of divine wrath,
of which the prophets speak, nor can we convert the Jews. With prayer and the
fear of God we must practice a sharp mercy to see whether we might save at
least a few from the glowing flames….
First to set fire to their
synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn,
so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them.
[Consider Hitler’s erasure of
the Warsaw ghetto which included removing Jewish gravestone from cemeteries to
be used for paving stones in the street]
Luther continues:
Second, I advise that their
houses also be razed and destroyed. For they pursue in them the same aims as in
their synagogues…. Fifth, I advise that safe conduct on the
highways be abolished completely for the Jews….. This is to be done in honor of
our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians….
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| Judensau (Jewish pig) relief sculpture, Luther's chapel, Wittenberg |
Luther would stop just short of advocating genocide. Four
centuries later, his German successors would feel no such constraints. But even
in Luther’s time, without homes to live in and the ability to safely travel,
the well-being of the Jews surely would have been in doubt. Moreover, for a people
who defined their religion by praxis, the prohibition of its expression would
render them as a people effectively erased.
There is always more than one way to kill a people. (Think
forced conversions. Think Reservation Schools. Think “reparative therapy.”)
While the Reformation era, the wars of religion in western
Europe and the pogroms of Eastern Europe that followed would prove deadly for
Jews, they would persist. By the time of the Third Reich, their ongoing existence would
be constructed as a “problem” to which the Nazi regime would seek to provide a
“Final Solution.”
Rubenstein and Roth spoke of the very presence of the Jews
as a problem for insecure Christians. Their distinctive dress, their
persistence in lighting of candles on Sabbath eve, their observations of the
Passover Seder, their use of Yiddish all spoke a tacit but powerful message of
rejection:
You have not converted us. You have not erased
us. We are still here. And we are still Jews.
The Jews by their very presence were seen by their
Christian fellow residents as the disconfirming other, those whose very lives
came to be seen as an ongoing refutation of the only true religion,
Christianity. As a result, they became the targets of attacks designed to put their
antagonists out of their own misery.
Coming to a Country Near You
The phenomenon of attacks on the disconfirming other by
those unable to handle that which they find existentially threatening is hardly
a mere historical phenomenon. Indeed, it is perhaps more observable today than
ever before.
The stock in trade of the rise of Trumpland has been the
use of a strategy featuring an exaggerated forced dichotomy of us and them, the
elect and the damned, patriots and enemies, fostered first by the candidate and
later the electoral college victor himself. The campaign was marked by
pugilistic exchanges at rallies on the floors of convention centers and
auditoriums, many encouraged by the candidate himself, once offering to pay the
bail for those who beat up protesters.
But it was the subtext of the campaign rhetoric that
signaled to authoritarians everywhere that the Shadow heretofore concealed in
polite company had been given permission, indeed, encouragement, to come out
and play.
And come out and play it has.
Antisemitic attacks on Jewish institutions were 99% higher
in 2018 than in 2015, the year Trump began his campaign for the White House.
That included deadly attacks on the Jewish Community Center in Los Angeles and
on a synagogue in Pittsburgh.
While attacks on the Muslim community were already
occurring prior to the rise of the Trump candidacy, those attacks skyrocketed
with the election in 2016 ranging from legislation singling out Islam to opposition
to Muslim community centers to arson committed against mosques.
On our southern borders, the children of asylum-seeking
immigrants separated from their parents and placed into cages are dying. They
are the collateral damage (in what ethical world are children collateral to any
concern of merit?) of a Know-Nothing style of anti-immigrant fervor which has
played out in draconian policies on the border. At the same time, across the nation, crimes
targeting Latinos has soared, rising 21% from 2017 to 2018.
Executive orders ending protections for transgendered
persons in the armed forces were announced shortly after the rise of Trumpland
to power. This coincided with a skyrocketing increase in attacks on
transgendered persons, many resulting in fatalities.
The climate for this rise in hate crimes was set by a campaign
which featured attacks on immigrants (“they’re not sending us their best…”),
women (“I like to grab them by the pussy…”), and mimicking of a disabled man
from the stage of a political rally. Once in the White House, that pattern of
self-aggrandizement through the deprecation of others continued with a
non-response to a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in which one woman
was killed (“There were some good people there…”). One could almost hear the
call from our childhood games of those who hid in the game of hide and seek, “Ollie
Ollie Oxen free….”
With the exception of Trumpland’s cherished base of oil
barons, businessmen, white evangelicals and Know-Nothing style anti-immigrants,
Trumpland has been an ongoing display of equal opportunity misanthropy. It has
set a climate that has emboldened those willing to move from hateful words to
destructive acts aimed at a plethora of targeted disconfirming
others. Im Trumpland, our culture’s Shadow has been called out to play and its bearers have responded
with gleeful abandon.
The Disconfirming Other at the Big Game
One of the more ironic recent expressions of violence
toward the disconfirming other occurred at a recent football game in Alabama. A grudge
match between Southeastern Conference behemoths Alabama and L.S.U., the winner
of this matchup was fairly assured of winning one of the four coveted slots in
the national football championship playoffs.
But there would be an unexpected attendee at this year’s
game at Tuscaloosa.
A group of Trumpland resisters would be picketing the game
complete with their own version of the Baby Trump balloon. The balloon has
become a fixture around the world at rallies and marches. Its penetration into
the very heart of Dixie, as Alabama has long described itself (though one
wonders what the marchers on the Pettis Bridge in Selma in 1965 might say about
that), suggests how deep the resistance to a Trumpland increasingly looking at
the very real possibility of impeachment has become.
The appearance of Baby Trump marked the third time in as
many weeks that the demagogue who inspired it had faced conspicuous opposition
at a sporting event. At the initial game of the World Series eventually won by
the host Washington Nationals, Trump was booed and endured chants of “lock him
up,” an ironic reversal of the chants directed at Hillary Clinton that he had
led at campaign rallies. A similar response occurred the following week at
Madison Square Garden in NYC at an Ultimate Fight Championship martial arts
competition.
These had been seen as safe venues for a Trump regime fighting
for its life in an impeachment investigation which reached a vote in the U.S. House
of Representatives this week. Yet protesters raised the $4000 needed to rent one of the
four balloons from Baby Trump Tours to make that appearance at the game. At a
very basic level, this reveals the dissatisfaction with Trumpland for those outside
the Fox bubble.
But Baby Trump would have a rough day in Tuscaloosa.
According to a Washington Post reporter, “’The event
had been going smoothly before the balloon slasher arrived,’ Robert Kennedy,
one of the organizers, told the Associated Press. Some people shouted ‘Trump
2020,’ he said, while others posed for selfies. Then the balloon was slit open.”
Kennedy added that he had accompanied Baby Trump to other events and has never
seen anyone attack it before.
“It is rare to get that kind of anger,” he said.
Hoyt Hutchinson, a 32-year-old self-described bricklayer from
Tuscaloosa, told reporters that he bought a red Alabama tee shirt to appear to
be one of the attendees of the game to allow him proximity to the balloon. At
that point he whipped out a knife and slashed the balloon. Hutchinson would
later tell a talk radio station “It comes a point when you gotta take a
stand" adding that he would “do it again if given the opportunity.”
Charged with a Class C Felony under Alabama’s criminal
code, Hutchinson immediately appealed to the Trumpland echo chamber on social
media, creating a GoFundMe account to pay for his legal fees. Within hours he
had raised $40,000, well beyond the $6000 goal he initially set, promising to
donate the remainder to the Republican Party, a party that increasingly
demonstrates its willingness to affiliate with those involved in criminal
activities in this country and outside it.
Of course, it’s not difficult to style oneself as a hero - if
not a martyr - when you remain with the confines of a tightly controlled
ideological bubble. Hutchinson said he watches Fox nightly. “I see this
stuff going on out west and up north and all other places. I get so mad about
people not taking a stand.”
It’s also not difficult to see how such delusional thinking
exchanged only between fellow true believers with no countervailing voices could
erupt into attempts to rub out the disconfirming other. Best to simply rid oneself of the one who serves as
living evidence that one’s ideological inclinations are not the only possible
understanding, that everyone does not worship the tribal god: “The left wants to kind of use
religion against you like you shouldn’t act like this and stuff, but I’ll tell
you this — the Devil knows the Bible as good as we do.”
When the only voices you hear reaffirm your foregone
conclusions and the gods themselves are seen as sanctioning your aggression,
it’s not hard to imagine how such violence occurs. It’s also not difficult to
see how readily it can escalate from individual acts to its logical conclusion
in genocide when given power.
Ironic Self-Revelation
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| Gainesville Pastor Terry Jones burns copies of the Koran (July, 2013) |
In my years as a college instructor, when my classes would discuss
Luther’s vitriolic screed against the Jews or the Inquisition or even events
closer to home such as the Wounded Knee Massacre, my line of questioning with
my students was always this:
If one truly believes their understandings of
the world are superior, why the need to shut down the disconfirming other? Does
such violence not inadvertently reveal doubt - not confidence - about one’s
position? If it cannot even countenance the very presence of holders of
contrary views, do not these views ultimately reveal themselves to be rather
brittle and weak, perhaps even indefensible?
Hoyt Hutchinson’s misdeeds reveal him to be a rather
pathetic man. He appears to have limited intellectual capacities, poor impulse
control and a great need for affirmation of his manhood from his tribe. As an
isolated case, he is more to be pitied than censured.
But the pattern of attacking the disconfirming other has a bloody
history of marshalling the intellectual and cultural power of a dominant group
within societies. Consider the Holy (sic) Office of the Inquisition within the
Roman Catholic hierarchy. Consider the House UnAmerican Activities Committee of
the paranoid ideologue Joseph McCarthy. Now consider that far too often this pattern
makes itself known by virtue of the legal and coercive power fearful ideologues
are able to muster within those societies they come to dominate. At that point
the disconfirming other comes to be in mortal peril.
For thoughtful human beings, the recognition of a rage
strong enough to erupt into physical attack against others simply because their
very presence draws your beliefs into doubt ought to signal a need to look at
oneself and one’s beliefs. The tagline I have used for my blog for several
years makes that assertion:
If the unexamined life is not worth living,
surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth
holding.
Our Shadow is often easy to recognize by the level of
energy we feel around our own responses to the other. Actually looking at that
Shadow, on the other hand, is much more difficult. “What in myself am I
reacting to here?” is a question rarely asked by any of us and when it is,
it most often is answered with projection: “He made me do it. She deserved
it. I had no other choice.”
Few of us are conscious enough to recognize - and even fewer
willing to confront - our Shadow content. It’s a lot easier to project our Shadow
than to own it. Consider the qualities of your worst enemy. Then take a hard
look at yourself.
If I am being honest with myself, I will readily admit that
I am quite capable of being sarcastic, condescending and childish, even a
little paranoid at times, much like Baby Trump. And I can recall that there
have been more times than I would like to remember that I have treated others
without respect, manipulated others for self-gain and lied to save my own hide,
just like the Donald and his minions.
I am working very hard at owning my Shadow and integrating
into my Self. To say it is a work in progress is an understatement.
On the other hand, I do not consciously embrace my
individual and collective Shadow qualities and engage them with abandon, as
this long nightmare of Trumpland has sanctioned. Even so, that does not mean
they have gone away or could not reveal themselves without warning. One of my
favorite maxims from the 12 Step Movement is “Instant Asshole. Just add
alcohol.”
If the Alabama justice system is finally willing to do its
job (and, again, the events on the Pettis Bridge make that questionable) Hoyt
Hutchinson is about to learn a hard lesson about projection. But the more
important question here is whether we as a people are willing to learn from
this example.
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| Medicine Man, Wounded Knee, South Dakota, 1890 |
The Disconfirming Other is always in the greatest
danger when power comes into the equation. A virulently xenophobic tribe possessed
of brittle, self-serving beliefs, self-assured of its exclusive claims to righteousness
and divine favor, talking only to those within the circled wagons, almost
always proves deadly, even genocidal, when it gains power.
Ask those accused of witchcraft in Salem. Ask the Gypsies
in the Third Reich. Ask the Tutsis in Rwanda. Ask the Lakota at Wounded Knee. Ask
any Transgendered anywhere in Trumpland.
We all have the luxury of shaking our heads over the Hoyt
Hutchinsons of the world. At some level, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.
But we must remember that the Shadow which may seem so
obvious to us is also borne by each one of us. Even as we gaze into the darkened
mirror of critical self-reflection to discern what it is we see in the other
that we find so unacceptable in ourselves, we must always be aware of how disconfirming
others from religious minorities to sexual minorities to immigrant minorities come
to be seen as fair game for violence.
A mature, ethically responsible people simply do not have
the luxury of simply looking away from this picture, disturbing as it may be.
Harry Scott Coverston
Orlando, Florida
frharry@cfl.rr.com
hcoverston.orlando@gmail.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.
For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)
Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)
© Harry Coverston 2019
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