Grasping the Whirlwind

After October 7, a left-of-center British reader despairs over his former allies

Whirlwind over London. Produced by R. F. Graboyes at Midjourney.com.

Bastiat’s Window is a journal of economics, science, and culture. If you’re not already a subscriber, please sign up. (Free subscriptions are deeply appreciated, but paid subscriptions really help!) Also, share the site and its articles with friends.

I’m thrilled to report that the number of subscribers rose by over 20% in December alone, bringing the total to just shy of 3,200 today. The Bastiat’s Window fundraiser for Magen David Adom (Israel’s Red Cross) is now concluded, and the total funds raised should be around $3,500. Thanks to all who contributed—and those who cheered the effort on.

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A British reader who goes by “Matthew” has posted what may well be the most poignant, meaningful comment any Bastiat’s Window essay has received since my e-journal launched in August 2022. Subsequently, Matthew expanded his thoughts in his own Substack essay. Below, I’ll re-post his comment and provide excerpts from his essay. First, however, a bit of background:

The 143 Bastiat’s Window essays published in 2022 and 2023 have received hundreds (thousands?) of comments—and I’m always struck by the near-uniform thoughtfulness of the commenters. This was especially true for three extraordinarily heavily-read December essays:

1. “The Jew-Movers Are Back: ‘We put 'em in the wrong place, so let's move 'em again!’”, now the most-read BW essay ever, described the desire of some pundits and activists to send Israel’s seven million Jews into an impoverished exile.

2. “Antisemitism's Sharp Left Turn: An Open Letter to My Left-of-Center Friends” asks those on the left to recognize what has become clear since Hamas’s bestial October 7 attack on Israel—that left-wing antisemitism is far more prevalent, virulent, and influential than any equivalent danger posed by contemporary right-wing antisemites.

3. “Antisemitism, 20% Allies, and Colonel Nicholson: An Open Letter to My Right-of-Center Friends” asks those on the right to be gracious and welcoming to those on the left who have come to recognize the dangers of left-wing antisemitism. “Colonel Nicholson” refers to Alec Guiness’s character in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) who suddenly realizes the moral blindness that has defined him throughout the film.

The plea encompassed by that third essay did receive some pushback from right-of-center friends—in comments below the article, in discussions on other websites, and in private correspondence. Why, some asked, should we welcome and forgive people who have hated us or who, at the very least, have consorted with those who hated us? The essay offered my own reasons for doing so, which I summed up as:

“Hamas’s brutality, university administrators’ fecklessness, and protestors’ avarice has handed opponents of antisemitism a great gift. My right-of-center friends would be utter fools to waste this opportunity in the interests of stoking the polarization that characterizes our era. ‘Owning the libs’ must take a back seat to combating antisemitism.”

I have also noted to some that in the past three months, many on the left have begun to understand the dangers inherent in identity politics—Diversity/Equity/Inclusion (DEI) programs, Critical Race Theory, “antiracism,” “oppressor/oppressed” dichotomies, etc. But Matthew’s comment on the essay and his own subsequent essay demonstrate more clearly than I can hope to do why graciousness and pragmatism are called for. Here’s the comment that Matthew posted on Bastiat’s Window:

“One of those ‘Colonel Nicholsons’ here. Ever since October 7th, I've been watching in increasing horror as those here in England whom I formerly considered comrades have collectively lost their fucking minds. Now they're out on marches chanting in support of the Houthis (who reinstated slavery and sex-trafficking in Yemen), calling for boycotts of Jewish businesses, engaging in rehashes of Holocaust denial about October 7th, simultaneously calling for a ceasefire and to ‘globalise the intifada’.

And they genuinely don't seem to understand the danger of what they're doing, the harm and fear and torment they're inflicting on Jews. They seem not to care—after all, I suppose from their point of view, Jews are not just ‘white’ but powerful, privileged, control the government etc., etc., so who cares how they feel?—which just places them even further down the far-left to far-right pipeline.

There is a rot that goes deep on the contemporary left. I consider myself, still, a social democrat—I believe in a balance of power between capital and workers, universal healthcare, a state that looks after the poor, that prevents vast excesses of wealth and inequality between the rich and the poor, and that takes our responsibilities to the planet and to tackling climate change seriously. But since [October 7th] I have been in a continuous process of self-criticism and unlearning/relearning what I thought I knew in many other areas regarding what I would call (for lack of a better word) the ‘progressive’ element of social justice etc. Thank you for both of these articles.”

(I presume that “both of these articles” refers to articles #2 and #3 above.)

My response to Matthew included the following:

“Your comment reminds me of the re-evaluation that George Orwell went through. He, too, was always an unabashed social democrat, but one who saw the rot that hard-line Marxists were bringing to the mix—and who enunciated that rot better than anyone else before or since.”

Now, on to Matthew’s own essay.

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But Not Like This

This week, Matthew launched his own Substack, titled But Not Like This, and his first essay is “The Moral Catastrophe of the post-7/10 Left: The shame of a moral rot which must be torn out by its roots.” I immediately subscribed to this new e-journal and look forward to further posts. (For any confused American readers, British writers abbreviate “October 7” as “7/10,” rather than the American “10/7.”) A self-described “Social Democrat,” Matthew defines his Substack as “Notes from a former leftist academic who's spent the past year watching the left go utterly mad and trying to come to grips with it.” I highly recommend that you read Matthew’s essay in its entirety, but I’ll offer six pull-quotes here:

On Identity over Economics

“For a long time … I had been growing increasingly disillusioned with the left on a range of topics … [I had] come to the more general view that large parts of the radical or ‘revolutionary’ left had in fact given up on any real attempt at a meaningful transformation of the economic systems in which we live, instead devolving into a mixture of online LARPing and post-modern pick-and-choose political identity construction; that they were increasingly obsessed with discourse and identities, and outright hostile to the views and beliefs of actual working people struggling every day to put food on the table for their families.”

On the Magnitude of October 7

“What took place … was the most horrifying, depraved orgy of violence in modern history … the most lethal day of Jew-killing since the Holocaust. It was systematic, as Hamas death-squads moved from house to house with military precision, timings and locations planned weeks and months in advance (thanks to the help of the Gazan Palestinians the Kibbutzim had hired and even invited into their homes), killing, maiming, torturing and raping every person they found. Grenades used to blow children to pieces, mothers raped and tortured in front of their children, bound with wire to their babies and set on fire. Hundreds of Israelis—men, women, children, the elderly, the disabled—kidnapped, taken back to Gaza, beaten, paraded through the streets to jeering mobs, only to be taken into the tunnels beneath the city.

The Left’s Reaction

“And the left laughed. It cheered. It howled with joy as the Jews (uh, sorry, ‘Zionists’) ‘finally got what was coming to them.’ They delighted at the sight of hundreds of teenagers at a music festival celebrating peace and love running for their lives, gunned down as they fled, hunted down in the forests, butchered as they hid in portcabins, in freezers. Gang raped. After all, ‘this is what decolonization looks like.’”

The Left: 1936 versus 2023

“Something in me snapped that day. The left is supposed to stand for peace, justice, solidarity with the victims of violence and hate, and who in 1936 stood shoulder to shoulder with British Jews and chased out Oswald Mosley and his blackshirt fascists. And at the sight of Jews slaughtered in their homes, much of the left celebrated. Before Israel had retaliated, before the pogrom had even finished, they were marching down the streets of London to wave Palestinian flags outside the Israeli embassy. I’ve heard it said that ‘people love dead Jews’; well, the bodies of these dead weren’t even cold when the activist left spat on them. … What this has exposed is a deeply and fundamental moral rot at the heart of the current activist left. … Here’s a rule of thumb for evaluating your moral position on any given issue, because ethics can often be a complicated and messy thing: if you find yourself screaming condemnations as The Auschwitz Memorial Museum, it might in fact be a moment to take a huge fucking step back and re-evaluate whose side you’re on.”

Spawn of David Irving

“It has occurred to me that what we are now also seeing is the development in real-time of a new mode of Holocaust denial. The denial of the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7th match precisely the form taken by the deniers of what took place in deathcamps and work camps under the Nazi regime: ‘the numbers were exaggerated’, ‘the eyewitnesses are fake/untrustworthy’, ‘the Jews are just saying this for their own interests’, ‘the Jews deserved it.’ This isn’t helped by TikTok, which appears to be radicalising a new generation of David Irvings.”

The Majesty of Introspection

“I feel ashamed that it has taken me so long to see this. I feel ashamed that I have, in all likelihood, been a participant in cultivating an atmosphere in which these vile, vicious ideas could take hold, despite my efforts over the years to fight against antisemitism within my own political party. … We on the left have failed, badly.”

Matthew’s comments on Bastiat’s Window and his own essay are among the most moving pieces of writing I have read in a long time. I hope that my left-of-center friends will listen carefully to what he says and that my right-of-center friends will applaud and welcome all who do. I’m certainly proud to count Matthew as an ally.

LAGNIAPPE

The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness

by Simon Wiesenthal

As noted above, my recent essay, “Antisemitism, 20% Allies, and Colonel Nicholson,” prompted a number of readers to ask, in different ways, why they should forgive and ally with those who have vilified them in the past—or those who tolerated such vilification from others. It’s a worthy question, and I don’t pretend that answers come neatly or easily.

In addressing the question of forgiveness, the most important resource I have ever encountered is Simon Wiesenthal’s book, The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness. As described on the Amazon site:

“While imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, Simon Wiesenthal was taken one day from his work detail to the bedside of a dying member of the SS. Haunted by the crimes in which he had participated, the soldier wanted to confess to--and obtain absolution from—a Jew. Faced with the choice between compassion and justice, silence and truth, Wiesenthal said nothing. But even years after the way had ended, he wondered: Had he done the right thing? What would you have done in his place?

In this important book, fifty-three distinguished men and women respond to Wiesenthal's questions. They are theologians, political leaders, writers, jurists, psychiatrists, human rights activists, Holocaust survivors, and victims of attempted genocides in Bosnia, Cambodia, China and Tibet. Their responses, as varied as their experiences of the world, remind us that Wiesenthal's questions are not limited to events of the past.”

Respondents to Wiesenthal (53 at last count) came from Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and more. The names were almost shockingly broad, including The Dalai Lama, Theodore M. Hesburgh, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Harold S. Kushner, Primo Levi, Deborah E. Lipstadt, Herbert Marcuse, Albert Speer, and Desmond Tutu. Wiesenthal addresses forgiveness in an extreme situation—a Nazi concentration camp—but the questions in the book apply to the question of forgiveness in any circumstances.

Robert F. Graboyes publishes Bastiat’s Window, a Substack journal of economics, science, and culture—with an emphasis on healthcare. He is a health economist, journalist, and musician in Alexandria, Virginia, and holds five degrees, including a PhD in economics from Columbia University. In 2014, he received the Reason Foundation’s Bastiat Prize for Journalism. His music compositions are at YouTube.com/@RFGraboyes/videos.