Psychology and Psychoanalysis tend to be retrospective sciences and arts; we are often fairly good at teasing out the multiple strands of tendencies/wishes/impulses/inhibitions/ego controls that contend with each other and from which emerge symptoms and actions, but we are not very good at predicting actions. One of the reasons it is so easy to caricaturize Psychoanalytic ideas is that we can often construct perfectly reasonable sounding post hoc explanations for often completely contradictory behavior. I would like to suggest two competing narratives and two competing explanations and see which one fits Occam's Razor better.
My starting point is Dennis Prager's article Jews who aid those who hate Jews (and America) in which he tries to make sense of self-hating Jews:
Jews siding with the Jews' enemies or even actually fomenting Jew-hatred has a history that long predates Chomsky, Finkelstein, leftist Jewish professors and the Neturei Karta. Karl Marx, though baptized a Christian, was the grandson of two Orthodox rabbis but wrote one of the most anti-Semitic tracts of the 19th century, "On the Jewish Question." In it he wrote, among other anti-Semitic charges, that "Money is the jealous god of Israel, beside which no other god may exist."
How is one to explain these Jews who work to hurt Jews?
I think the primary explanations are psychological. As I wrote in a previous column, it is almost impossible to overstate the pathological effects of thousands of years of murder of Jews — culminating in the Nazi Holocaust, when nearly all Jews on the European continent were murdered — have had on most Jews.
Prager goes on to explain (part of) the concept of Identification with the Aggressor in clear and understandable layman's terms:
One way to deal with this is to side with the enemy. Consciously or not, the Jew who sides with those dedicated to murdering Jews feels that he will be spared. He becomes the "good Jew" in the anti-Semites' eyes. How else to explain the visit of a Jew named Noam Chomsky to Lebanon to support Hezbollah or the fact that Chomsky wrote the foreword to a French book denying the Holocaust? How else to explain Norman Finkelstein telling cheering German audiences that the Jewish state is morally the same as the Nazis? How else to explain rabbis visiting Tehran to extol the Holocaust-denying regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran that seeks to exterminate Israel?
The other psychological explanation is related. The Jew — specifically the radical Jew — who sympathizes with Jew-haters wishes to announce to the world that he is not really like other Jews. While the other Jews are moored in provincial Jewish ethnic or religious identity, he is a world citizen who no more identifies with the Jews' fate than with the fate of Iroquois Indians.
He finds this of significant importance far beyond the fate of the Jews and Israel because so many people seem to use the same Psychological defense mechanism when opposing the United States efforts against the Islamic fascists.
Interestingly enough, those who oppose the war are perfectly consistent when they contend that it is not they who are "Identifying with the Aggressor" but it is the supporters of the Bush Administration who are the ones doing just that. After all, the Bush administration has been quite aggressive, the American military is the most powerful force on the planet, and all those Americans who were terrified by 9/11 have taken refuge in identifying their interests with those of an American administration that is not above bending the rules and using excessive force to get its way.
AJ Strata helpfully supplies the link to the key point of demarcation between the two opposing camps with his discovery that We Are Not At War!
Democrats have crafted a new plan - call it Kerry Konfusion 2.0. They are going to claim there is no reason to be infringing on civil liberties because, catch this, there is no war!
In the article AJ links to, There is a war on, Frank Gaffney describes the disconnect:
In response to a video clip of Senator Jon Kyl (Republican of Arizona) making the sensible point that it is "nuts" in a time of war to be disclosing our intelligence sources and methods, former Carter National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski declared that "we are not at war." While he acknowledged that there are serious threats, he suggested that it was fear-mongering to talk about being in a war, a practice used to justify otherwise insupportable infringements on the privacy and equanimity of Americans.
If we are at war with Islamic fascists, then those who oppose many or most of the Bush administration's efforts to use our full armamentarium against the Islamist enemy, including the ACLU, parts of the Democratic party, much of the MSM, almost the entire political and media establishment of Europe, and millions of people throughout the West, would be most charitably described as using the defense of denial to avoid knowing what the danger is and a small but influential sub-set would be employing "Identification with the Aggressor" in order to minimize their feelings of vulnerability and threat. Those people would be consciously aiding and abetting our enemies out of an unconscious process which includes "Identification with the Aggressor."
On the other hand, if we are not at war, then the argument that this is a highly aggressive administration waging violent attacks on people who have never done us any wrong out of misguided, fear induced, and incoherent rationalizations, becomes more tenable. Those of us who support the war would then be the most likely to be using "Identification with the Aggressor" in order to mitigate our own feelings of weakness and fear.
I would add another sub-set; there are many who might agree that we are at war, but have never actually considered the possibility that we could lose this war. I suspect this is the majority position of those who have been in opposition to the Iraq war from the beginning. This could include many people who take positions that are operationally supportive of the enemy (ie exposing the NSA program of creating data banks for analyzing networks clearly could help al Qaeda for an incremental improvement in American's privacy) but do not see themselves as doing something that could harm our war efforts.
[I also suspect much of the growing opposition to the war has more to do with a disconnect from seeing the Iraq war as being related to the war on Islamic fascism, which is a different though related, discussion.]
Since such wise men as the aforementioned Zbigniew Brzezinski do not believe we are at war, perhaps it is worth returning to basics and further exploring the question.
Are we at war with Islamic fascism? (This would include Europe, Israel, Kashmir, Chechnya, Iraq, Iran, and many other areas as fronts in the global war.)
Any commenters who would like to offer a reasoned response "proving" that this is not a war we are in, should feel welcome to lay out their reasoning. I would be happy to try my hand at it but could all too easily be accused of unconscious bias since I think we are at war.
If we can't agree on this most basic fact, then the odds of ever finding common ground diminish markedly.
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