by Simon Schama
And looking so much like Voltaire as he did, he should perhaps have known better, since Voltaire, as we know from Arthur Hertzberg, Peter Gay and others, was the prime case of a philosophe who thought one way and felt another; who positively nursed the worm in the bud; who believed in the transformative power of reason up to a point, and that point was where it concerned Jews. It was not just that Voltaire believed that the condition of being able to treat Jews humanely was the mass abandonment of their Judaism by the Jews, and that he was understandably pessimistic that this would ever happen; it was also that au fond he believed that, even if the Jews could be persuaded to discard what made them religiously and culturally Jews, there would always be some sort of insuperable racial or even biological obstacle to true assimilation.
The notion that the benevolent illuminations of the Enlightenment would in due course be bound to eradicate superstition and prejudice – both those said to be held by the Jews and those undoubtedly held against them – was compromised not just by the disingenuousness of its apostles, but by the feebly mechanical nature of their prescience. What failed them was their dependence on wordiness; their belief in the inevitable and permanent supremacy of textual logic; their faith in the unconditional surrender of fables to the irrefutably documented proof. He who could command critical reading – and critical writing – would, in such a world of logically driven discourse, command the future, and that future would be one in which rational demonstration would always prevail over emotive spectacle; just as the same epistemologists thought that the Protestant logos had vanquished Catholic charisma. But of course it hadn’t. Nor did the Enlightenment banish the fairy-tale so much as become, in the hands of the brothers Grimm, its most psychologically aggressive reinventor. What would unfold, in the age of the industrial machine that ensued, was precisely the astonishing capacity of technology to promote and to project fantastic mythologies, rather than to dispel them.
From the outset, of course, the machinery of sensationalist stupefaction – the dioramas, and panoramas, the Eidophusikon – was the natural handmaid of the sublime and the terrible. As Victorian Britain became more colonised by industry, so its public became greedier for spectacles of disaster, brought to them as visceral entertainment: the simulacra of Vesuvian eruptions; the collapse of the Tay Bridge; an avalanche in the Simplon. More ominously, the paradox of a modernist technology co-opted to attack modernism became, in the hands of its most adroit practitioners, no longer so paradoxical. D. W. Griffith, who specialised in the manipulation of immense crowds and the apocalyptic collapse of imperial hubris, was all of a piece with the chivalric romancer of the Ku Klux Klan. Mussolini simultaneously embraced the piston-pumped ecstasies of Marinettian Futurism and the most preposterous, Cinecittà-fabricated colossalism of Roman nostalgia. Ultimately, of course, Albert Speer would deliver for Hitler a Cathedral of Light, where annihilationist rant would be bathed in arc-lit effulgence; and Leni Riefenstahl would begin her epiphany with a kind of aerial-cinematic Annunciation, the Angel of the Totenkopf moving through the skies and casting an immaculately shadowed simulacrum down on the ancestral sod.
From which it is surely just a hop, a skip and a click to the consummation of cyberhatred – to the welcoming page, for example, of the Czech-based Jew-Rats, where its designers, appreciative of their predecessors’ knack for cutting-edge media, proudly declare, rather as if they were offering a year’s warranty, that ‘National Socialism was always known for its all-round, quality propaganda.’ At Jew-Rats you can download not only the old favourites, Der Ewige Jude and Triumph of the Will, and elegiac interviews with George Lincoln Rockwell, but also try your hand at games such as S. A. Mann, Rattenjagd and Ghetto Blaster. Or try the home page of Resistance Records, which features a video game called ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ whose champions are Terminator-style armoured gladiators and whose targets, helpfully visualised at the top of the page (lest casual visitors confuse them with, say, Muslims or Bosnians) are Julius Streicher caricatures of Jews, complete with standard-issue Der Stürmer-ish extruded lips and hooked proboscis.
Just as Romantic-Gothic sensationalism fed on the victories that the optical scored over the textual, so the creative forte of digital media has been the projection of electronic violence and encrypted runes, the most archaic motifs of human culture – Manichaean battle, objects of occult veneration and ecstatic, occasionally hallucinatory vision – all delivered in liquid-crystal read-outs. One kind of elemental plasma is translated into quite another kind. The online game Nazi Doom is, in fact, just an adapted (and slightly pirated) version of the emphatically non-scientific Gothic Space Fantasy Games, Doom, Final Doom and the rather oxymoronic Final Doom II. The optimistic dream of the Enlightenment that technology and addictive fantasy would be in some sort of zero-sum game relationship turns out, as Walter Benjamin predicted, to be precisely the opposite case.
I do not mean to suggest, of course, that the digital world is typified by the engineered delivery of the irrational; only that it is not exactly inhospitable to its propagation. Cyberspace is itself the work of much cerebration, but its most elaborate fabulists are certainly devoted to the primacy of the visceral over the logical. They know their market. Against instantly summoned, electronically pulsing apparitions – the Celtic crosses of the White Power organisations such as Aryan Resistance, or Stormfront, the mid-1990s creation of the ex-Klansman Don Black – reasoned argument is handicapped, especially in any competition for the attention of alienated adolescents, for whom the appeal of barbarian action is precisely its violent rejection of bookishness. The ultimate Gothic fantasists, the mass murderers of Columbine High School, are known to have been visitors to these websites.
It is a commonplace now to observe, with Jay Bolter, that the triumph of the Web represents the overthrow – for good or for ill – not just of linear narratives, but also of the entire system of Baconian and Cartesian systems of classification, with their explicit commitment to hierarchies of knowledge. The universe of deep cyberspace is akin to whatever lies way beyond the orderly alignment of the planets in our own relatively parochial solar system. Instead it launches the traveller along pathways of links to indeterminate destinations, to the wormholes of epistemology; and along the route the digital argonaut is exposed to a furiously oncoming welter of incoherently arrayed bodies of information. The engineers of hate-sites know this, and they depend on catching the aimless surfer who might stumble, for example, on an ostensibly orientalist health site called Bamboo Delight, including (really) the Skinny Buddha Weight Loss Method, and be directed through a single link to the neo-Nazi Police Patriot site designed by Jew Watch and Stormfront.
The Web is, by its very nature, uncritically omnivorous. All it asks is to be fed with information. It has the capacity to monitor its input only through the clumsy and ethically controversial means of censorship, so that (I am told) in Germany, when asked for sites responding to the search ‘Mengele’, the Web will refuse to deliver them to the user. But the notion that any sites can somehow be adequately scrutinised, much less policed for misinformation, fraud and lies, is already both electronically and institutionally impossible. If you search Google or www.alltheweb.com for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, you will be greeted on the first page by many hundreds of entries (many of which are now devoted to reporting and debating the Egyptian television series called Horse Without a Rider, which notoriously treated them as an historical event), not by the Anti-Defamation League, but by Radio Islam’s invitation to download the entire foul and forged text, along with The Jewish Conspiracy against the Muslim World and Henry Ford’s The International Jew. The Church of True Israel, and the anti-New World Order ravings of Henry Makow, Ph.D. (inventor of the word game Scruples), website www.Savethemales.com, regard Judaism as a mask to disguise the international hegemony of the Khazars. All these will line up for the attention of the unwary long before any sort of critical commentary is reached.
Nor could anything possibly be further away from the e
pistemological conventions, according to which arguments are tested against critical challenges, than the Net’s characteristic form of chat, which overwhelmingly takes the form of mere call and response to which there is never any resolution, or conclusion, merely a string of unadjudicated utterances and ejaculations. Digital allegiances can be formed, then, not through any sort of sifting of truth and falsehood, but in response to, or in defence against, a kind of cognitive battering. And the virtual reality of the Internet, as Sherry Turkle, Les Back and others have pointed out, has been a gift to both the purveyors and the consumers of paranoia. It offers an electronic habitat that is simultaneously furtive and exhibitionist; structurally molecular but capable, as the user is emboldened, of forming itself into an electronic community of the like-minded. It is then perfectly engineered, in other words, for Leaderless Resistance and the Lone Wolf, the recommended model for zealous racists, Neo-Nazis and White Power warriors who are hunting, like Timothy McVeigh, in solitude or in very small and temporarily linked packs. Instead of slogging up to the camp in Idaho and Montana, digital Stormtroopers can assemble in their very own virtual Idaho, download the Horst Wessel Lied and electronically bond.
The Web is also, of course, a mine of useful information for the aspiring neo-Nazi, not just in the selection of human and institutional targets, but also in the resources needed to strike them: everything from artisanal ammonium nitrate to the much more wired offensives against the race enemy, involving intensive electronic jamming known as ‘digital bombing’ to targeted systems of contamination and sabotage. Taken together, the 500 or so websites in the United States built to proselytise for anti-Semitic and racist causes constitute a virtual universe of hatred, protean enough to hunker down or to reach out as the moment requires, encrypting, when necessary, its most bilious messages so that they become accessible only to those with the decrypting keys (a tactic adored by the secrecy fetishists), or aggressively and openly campaigning when that seems to be the priority. Once inside the net, you can log on to Resistance Records and download White Power music or order CDs from the online catalogue; you can link to the ostensibly more mainstream racist organisations like the British National Party (who have just trebled their representation in local government elections); you can reassure yourself that the HoloCost or the Holohoax never happened and is just another disinformation conspiracy designed to channel reparations to the ever-open maw of the international conspiracy of Jew Bankers. You can order up your Nazi memorabilia or Aryan Nation warm-up jacket with all the ease of someone going shopping for Yankee souvenirs. And most ominously of all, out there in cyberspace you can act out games of virtual annihilations, with none of the risks or consequences you would incur in the actual world of body space.
In the circumstances, it is perhaps reassuring that, according to the best and most recent estimates, active regular visitors and inhabitants of anti-Semitic and racist websites may amount to no more than 50,000 or 100,000 at most. It is possible to argue, I suppose, that it is better that the paranoids lock themselves away in the black holes of poisoned cyberspace than act out their aggressions and delusions in the world of actual flesh-and-blood humanity; but that is to assume that Stormfront troopers and crusaders of the Church of True Israel will never make the leap from clicking to shooting. If there is anything that we have learned from this peculiarly delusional moment in our history, surely it is that today’s media fantasy may turn into tomorrow’s cultural virus. And in the world of wired terror, head-counts are no guide to the possibility of trouble, which comes, as we have already learned to our dreadful cost, very much in single terrorists rather than in battalions.
However abhorrent, the real threat posed by electronic hatred may not in fact, I suspect, be the hard-core of rabidly delusional anti-Semites and racists, who may, alas, always be with us. It is rather from the electronic extension of the paranoid style to much bigger constituencies
of the aggrieved, who see in its basic world view – a global conspiracy of money, secular and sexual corruption – a perennial explanation for their own misfortune, for their own sense of beleaguered alienation. The transpositions then become easy. For the Rothschilds, read Goldman Sachs and the IMF; for the Illuminati, read the Council on Foreign Relations. As Henry Ford said of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, ‘All I know is that it fits events.’ Nor is this habitual imprinting of the old template on contemporary events a monopoly of the left or right. In fact, les extrêmes se touchent: anti-globalisers meet the anti-immigrants; anti-Americanism meets America First; America First meets America Only.
What they share is a freshening and quickening of the rhetoric of violence, the poisoning of the airwaves as well as cyberspace. Ultra-chauvinist blow-hards habitually demonise on air those whom they take as insufficiently patriotic as ‘scum’ or ‘vermin’, who need in whatever manner to be locked up, deported or generally done away with. ‘Who are these contaminating aliens lodged in the bloodstream of the body politic?’ Lovers of multilateralism or the United Nations, and any sort of faggoty liberal intellectual who professes a self-evidently diseased scepticism and exercises a disguised but claw-like grip over the media. Jews? Goodness no. Just people who happen to talk too much and think too highly of reason.
Talking and Listening
TBM and John
First published in Peter Mandler and Susan Pedersen’s,
Private Conscience and Public Duty in Modern Britain, 1994
You always remember where it was that you first read the books that changed your life.
I first read Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian in September 1976 in rocky, Medusa-infested coves on the Aegean islands of Hydra and Spetsai. While Macaulay was storming the Whig citadel of Holland House, Mavrocordatos and his fellow pan-Hellenes were launching armed fishing boats from those thyme-scented bays against the Turkish fleet. But such was the spell cast by John Clive’s book that my imagination did not drift towards Missolonghi or Navarino. It was elsewhere, in virtuous Clapham, industrious Leeds and pullulating Calcutta. Later, John would give me a respectable cloth-bound signed edition of his book. But it is the dog-eared, suntan-oil-stained paperback hauled around the islands that I truly cherish. For it was in its pages that I first began to comprehend the deep wells that produced the glorious gush of Macaulay’s famous vehemence. And it was in its pages that I first encountered John Clive.
It is the mark of a truly powerful biography to leave the reader vexed with the author for ending it, robbing him of a companion with whom he has become easily familiar. And by the time I reached ‘In more ways than one, Zachary had cast a long shadow’ I was all the more sorry to have Macaulay abruptly removed after a mere 500 pages of close acquaintance, especially since I longed to dog his footsteps through Italy; eavesdrop on his Cabinet gossip in 1840; commiserate with his electoral defeat in Edinburgh; sample his rich satisfaction at the record sales of the History; listen as he recited his rhymes to his niece Baba Trevelyan and marched the children past the giraffes of Regent’s Park, the waxworks of Madame Tussaud’s or (to little George Otto Trevelyan’s bored dismay) the masterpieces of Eastlake’s National Gallery.
I consoled myself with the knowledge that before too long I would meet the famous National Book Award-winning author whom I supposed I already knew pretty well. The jacket carried no photograph, but from the elegant, penetrating prose, the controlled sympathy shown towards Macaulay, the rigorous analysis of his intellectual formation, the shrewd delineation of his life as a political and social animal, I assumed that John Clive would turn out to be an understated, impeccably turned-out Harvard professor. His sense of humour, I thought, would be gentle and loftily Jamesian; someone who carried his colonial name with an air of Brahminical Bostonian savoir faire. The biographer’s relationship with his subject, whose public mask he had removed to expose the conflicted, passionate and often troubled private man beneath, had to be, I supposed, that of a sympathetic doctor who would calmly listen and offer spoonfuls of cool understanding to
his distracted patient.
So much for my powers of literary deduction. Two months later, John knocked (or rather pounded) on the doors of my rooms in Brasenose, tripped over the door-sill and fell spread-eagled on my couch. After we had exchanged flustered apologies, it took about five minutes and a cup of tea (which John drank as if it were a famous vintage, enquiring after brand, store of origin, length of brew) for me to see how spectacularly wrong I had been. The name ‘Clive’ remained mysterious (as it did for many years), but it didn’t take a genius to see that my rumpled guest, who was enjoying his tea and cake so visibly, was hardly a representative of the Boston class, famous for its cool detachment and sensuous self-denial. By the end of an hour I was in a state of delighted amazement that the historian whose extraordinary work I had so admired had also become an immediate friend. After John departed (without further hazard) I ran through the character description which now replaced my hopelessly misjudged extrapolation from his prose style. The historian I had met was warm-hearted, affectionate, voluble; mischievously hilarious, gossipy; clumsy, and self-indulgent. His speech moved from embarrassed stammering to flights of eloquence, the sentences broken with puns and rhymes and even snatches of song performed with exaggerated operatic trills. In the mouldy dimness of the Oxford room his large eyes sparkled with pleasure at a well-taken idea or a well-turned phrase and, at the delicious prospect of routing a common enemy, he would smack a fist into his palm with boyish exultation.
