Kanye, the framing of history, & the never-ending carousel of bourgeois performance
Oct 24, 2022
This week, our collective national attention has once again leveled on Kanye West, a troubled, inconsistent circus act of an individual (we relate), and by proxy, given his statements about Jews, we have experienced a flood of liberal outrage and public statements against Anti-Semitism.
Antisemitism, like any other form of chauvinism, is of course inherently wrong. It has historically been empowered by state and economic mechanisms, and taken an extreme human toll on Jewish people, for millenia, as a result.
In fringe, primarily rural corners of the imperialist west, it still holds a bit of theoretical sway, and it is never fully cleared from the cultural repertoire of the European bourgeoisie, both in Western Europe and in Europe’s settler-colonies (the US, Australia, etc).
And, there are about 50,000 very real threats which are present in the context of the modern United States, all of which are materially more relevant than what has become a western liberal straw-man of anti-semitism.
Anti-semitism is real, but it is not institutionally and economically empowered in the United States; quite the opposite. Basic demographics show us that like almost all white European groups, Jewish Americans enjoy undue socio-economic position and political influence.
If you’re from the big coastal cities, you know damn well that the elite Anglo-Saxon and Jewish communities enjoy the highest per capita status. A Pew Research poll conducted in 2016 underscores this reality:
Of course, we understand that there are many Jews who aren’t white Europeans, just like there are hundreds of millions of Orthodox Christians on earth who are basically ignored by western Christians.
But the majority in this country are of white European origin, like most of the people here who weren’t indigenous or enslaved, and like most Christians here are some kind of Protestant…the point is, we can analyze prevailing trends in this country, and that’s our primary task as revolutionaries in the United States.
Mizrahi and Ethiopian Jews are deeply opressed by imperialism and white supremacy, most often by the very European settler Jews who go around screaming “Anti-Semitisme!!!” at every turn.
Anti-semitism is opportunistically overblown in relation to other issues, because this helps muzzle criticism of the Israeli occupation, because this implicitly generates hostility towards certain Muslim groups, and because this evokes feelings of 20th century fascism (the Third Reich), which deflects attention on the actual rise of 21st century fascism in the bourgeois state and its political centers in the West (Washington, London, Brussels, etc).
Anti-semitism is reprehensible, and yet relatively impotent in the modern day West. This is not simple “whataboutism;” this is materialist analysis of global struggle, and determining which contradictions ought to be prioritized, especially in the shoes of a US citizen in 2022. My entire argument can be fairly well summed up ion one sentence: Oppression of any white, European settler group in the United States in 2022 is not a political priority for a revolutionary.
Even in a nation like Ukraine, which openly honors Nazi collaborators with monuments and state holidays, and has openly Nazi battalions officially in its armed forces, the primary targets of racial hatred, in the modern day, are Russians and Roma people, mostly because the majority of the Jewish community fled Ukraine after the USSR fell, and because of shared interests with Israel (as they are both vassal states of the United States).
By the way, yes, I do have a child with Jewish heritage, and a Jewish partner, but that *doesn’t actually make any difference about my right to speak objective truths.* What’s vaguely more relevant is that my analyses of these questions are largely rooted in the political education I have received from lifetime friends who are anti-Zionist, anti-imperialist Jews, but again, the concrete facts are what matter, never anyone’s anecdote or perception; these are simply trappings of liberalism.
Anti-semitism is also often presented, in European pedagogical circles, as the greatest form of historic oppression, and this is flatly wrong. Africa, Asia, South America and Oceania have all experienced dozens of holocausts at the hands of the Imperialist West, and they don’t have museums in every major city in the United States. Perhaps they should, but of course, we understand that only substantive political action, like Putin’s laws which made displays of Nazis symbols/defending Nazism criminal offenses, Stalin’s institution of the death penalty for Anti-Semitism, or direct assaults on Neo-Nazi groups, can ever change cultural contradictions, not performative displays of “awareness.” Of course, we could always dismantle the U.S. empire, destroy bourgeois property relations, and establish a workers’ state, and this would have a far greater effect on all forms of empowered chauvinism, in this country and elsewhere, than arguing over which crumbs of residual oppression still exist for some white Americans, or how many super effusive awareness posts we can make about it.
U.S. Napalm falling on a Korean factory during the Korean War; the United States killed at least 2 million Koreans during the Early 1950’s, and this is one of the lesser-known instances of genocide committed by the Imperialist West
Kanye West has zero political education, like most Americans. He correctly has the instinct to completely distrust the system of liberal respectability and politics which surrounds all of us; sadly, he, like so many of those other Americans, falls into a pit of reactionary, right-wing nonsense and conspiracy theory, because this is the only alternative political ideology which the bourgeoisie allows to flourish, knowing that it poses zero threat to their power.
How awfully convenient to create a new flare-up around the issue, aim it at an “angry black man,” and wrap it up in the bogeyman of Trumpism, the only acceptable enemy in bourgeois society.
Get angry at Jay-Z…
He’s the one advancing a dangerous politik which actually holds institutional power:
Capitalism