Bari Weiss: you are the last line of defense

[cellio]

I just came across a speech that Bari Weiss recently gave for the Federalist Society, specifically for their lawyers' convention. She starts by talking about how surprising a choice she was for that; she's not exactly their type.

I found this worth my time to read. Choosing concise excerpts (to stay within the bounds of fair use) is hard, but here are some bits to give the flavor. I read the transcript; there's also a video if you prefer to listen.

By the time Americans woke up on October 7, 2023, it was clear that what had unfolded while we slept was not like previous wars or battles Israel has fought in its 75-year history. This was a genocidal pogrom. It was a scene out of the many places Jews had fled—a scene from the history of the Nazi Holocaust and of the European pogroms before that and of the Farhud, the 1941 massacre of Jews in Baghdad, a city that, it’s hard to believe now, was 40 percent Jewish at the beginning of the twentieth century—all of which remind us of Israel’s necessity. [...]

These Cossacks had smartphones. [...] Others filmed the slaughter with GoPros. [...] In all of this, the terrorists are euphoric. No one who has watched the unedited footage fails to note the glee of the butchers. [...]

The difference between 9/11 and 10/7—two massacres of innocent people, symbols to their killers of Western civilization—was the reaction to the horror. The difference between 9/11 and 10/7 was that the catastrophe of 10/7 was followed, on October 8, by a different kind of catastrophe. A moral and spiritual catastrophe that was on full display throughout the West before the bodies of those men and women and children had even been identified. [...]

What could possibly explain this? The easy answer is that the human beings who were slaughtered on October 7 were Jews. [...] But that is not the whole answer. Because the proliferation of antisemitism, as always, is a symptom. When antisemitism moves from the shameful fringe into the public square, it is not about Jews. It is never about Jews. It is about everyone else. It is about the surrounding society or the culture or the country. It is an early warning system—a sign that the society itself is breaking down. That it is dying. [...]

[This new ideology] seeks to upend the very ideas of right and wrong. It replaces basic ideas of good and evil with a new rubric: the powerless (good) and the powerful (bad). It replaced lots of things. Color blindness with race obsession. Ideas with identity. Debate with denunciation. Persuasion with public shaming. The rule of law with the fury of the mob. [...] This is the ideology of vandalism in the true sense of the word—the Vandals sacked Rome. It is the ideology of nihilism. It knows nothing of how to build. It knows only how to tear down and to destroy.

So what do we do? First: look. We must recover our ability to look and to discern accordingly. We must look past the sloganeering and the propaganda and take a hard look at what’s in front of our eyes. [...] I do not need “context” to know that tying children to their parents and burning them alive is pure evil, just as I do not need a history lesson on the Arab-Israeli conflict to know that the Arab Israelis who saved scores of Jewish Israelis that day are righteous.

Look at your enemies and your allies. [...] For many people, friends and enemies are likely not who they thought they were before October 7. [...] The other thing to look for is the good. Look hard for the good and don’t lose sight of it. [...]

But nothing is guaranteed. The right ideas don’t win on their own. They need a voice. They need prosecutors. [...] We have let far too much go unchallenged.

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Comments are moderated. Disagreement is fine; incivility isn't. There's a lot of the latter out there and I can't monitor 24/6 let alone 24/7, so I need to add this speedbump.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

Yes, what we're seeing is the "powerless" vs. the "powerful," but we have to put those words in quotes. When A is killing B, it's hard to call B the one with more powerful, except by using the logic of group identity. Because you belong to a certain group, you're considered automatically to be at a certain power level.

That's why people who think this way admire authoritarian, violent Muslims but not authoritarian, violent Christians. Muslims are put into the "powerless" category, regardless of the facts in specific cases. The president of Hamline University had an instructor's position terminated because she had violated a rule of a certain faction of Islam, claiming that religion trumps academic freedom; at the same time, Hamline teaches evolution in its biology courses. The Islamic sect is deemed "marginalized" and thus entitled to have its way, while Christian creationists are "privileged" and thus don't get the same privilege.

The outright applause we've seen for brutal mass murder took me by surprise, but it follows the same logic Garry Trudeau used when he accused the Charlie Hebdo murder victims of "punching down." Right and wrong have nothing to do with it; everything is about power dynamics, and anything members of "victim" groups do to members of "oppressor" groups is automatically approved.

[cellio]

Yes, "power" is defined by categories, not instances. Increasingly in this country we are seeing the notion, the implicit assumption, that members of marginalized groups can do no wrong and members of majority groups can do no right. The Hamline University case is a good example: the issue was a professor in a course about renaissance art showing an image that depicted Muhammad, which he warned students about in advance, but according to the university he was Islamophobic and had to go. (I know you know this because I learned about it from you. This is for the benefit of other readers.) Your point about Christian creationists is one I hadn't thought of.

This "power" meme operates at the small scale too and is insidious. I didn't realize it in 2019 when it was happening to me. I suspect that most people don't notice it at all, and then don't notice how deep it goes, until it affects them or "their group" personally, at which point it's often too late.