Consider this:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

You are living in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Genetics has not yet come along, so you have no means of knowing that all humans across the world have more in common with each other than two chimpanzees living in the same troop do. You know only that every state needs a nation and every nation needs a state. Then there are these Jews, who live in all states but have no state of their own, and who say that they're loyal members of your state. Keep in mind that at this time you're raised in an environment where every single Mass celebrates victory over the Perfidious Jews and where people like that Lueger Fellow and Wilton Stewart Chamberlain are advocating the superiority of the White race over all inferior outgroups.

How are you to know this is false? Would someone who advocates against Jews and Judaism on this premise be a hateful bigot? It's a different time, so we can't judge the past on the merits of the future, and something happening 100/50 years ago is a magic absolution pill because bigotry always exists in a vacuum unhindered by the context of anything in its time, having a total and unchallenged monopoly on the imagination of its own time. How can we call anti-Semites bigots? They didn't know any better and it's not like there were anti-defamation leagues at the time or proudly assimilated Jewish people or anything. Indeed, Jews were even open, proud terrorists of the Bolshevik variety, so there was actually a *reason* to loathe them for those so inclined.

So, would you call these people hateful bigots?

The answer of course is that yes, they are hateful bigots and bigotry does not get a pass in the past simply because it was a different time and people did things differently there. A historian should strive for objectivity in covering historical events, but objectivity does not mean that evil should get a pass and be called good.

Comments

[blondebaroness.livejournal.com]

C.S. Lewis tells us that we do not now burn witches because we don't believe they exist. If they did exist, and had the ability to curse crops and livestock and spread disease, no one should deserve to die more than such quislings. You can not judge people of the past by our standards of knowledge. You can however learn from their mistakes.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Except that the verse used to justify this referred to people who poisoned wells, not people who read from grimoires to summon demons. We damned well should judge the past on that standard, and it's worth noting that the medieval Catholics didn't believe in witchcraft. Believing in it was a heresy that gave the devil greater power than was rightfully his. It was Protestants who popularized that particular barbarism.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Learn from their mistakes. Yes. Like believing in supernatural entities without sufficient evidence.

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

Wehey! We've got a series of inter-related posts now! Hadn't had those for a while :)

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

I was kinda expecting a post of this nature. But I thought it would be muslims instead of nazis.

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

Refering to the previous post, who's creator will no doubt show up any time now, I'd say successful troll is successful.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

As I said before, today's good is tomorrow's evil, but yesterday's evil stays evil.

If we don't acknowledge the imperfections of past society, what's the point of history? In no way should they ever get a pass. It doesn't mean we should hate them, only that we should understand that what they did was wrong.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Exactly. Acknowledging the evils of the past does not mean that they should be held to be non-existent, but it also requires (and this is where objectivity comes in) noting that people in the past actually did oppose these kinds of things then as well as now. If we discussed bigotry with recognizing that it's had opponents in every era, the idea that its triumph was 'just how people were then' proves to be hollow.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

It has been said that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, but those who learn from history are destined to repeat it differently.

[mutive.livejournal.com]

I'll let others point out the other flaws in your line of thinking. But an obvious historical one is that the Catholic Church recognized all humans as human (and deserving of certain human rights) waaay back in the 15th century. (This was done mostly in debates as to whether Native Americans were human or not. But the Catholic Church came down on "yes" - if they converted.)

So genetics would have nothing to do with it. Religion does. (Something which the Catholic Church did - and does - see as mutable. People can convert to being Catholic, even if they started as Jewish. Or Muslim. Or Pagan. Or Protestant. Or just about anything. Hence all the converts from both religions - and sometimes to Islam - to avoid the problems of being Jewish or Muslim in a Catholic area. Incidentally, Islam had similar rules during the same historical period. More than a few Christians converted to avoid being enslaved or to be able to marry.)

Lots of problems, obviously, with this idea. Also obviously lots of problems that happened historically even after people converted. (i.e. the fear that they might be secret Muslims or, particularly, Jews.) But...the historical line of thinking wasn't "OMG, you're Jewish, you're genetically *wrong*!" (At least not until fairly recently.) It was more along the lines of "You have not embraced the true faith. You are WRONG." (Your last argument also had historical problems. I'd recommend reading up a bit prior to posting.)

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Sure, except that what the Church said was never all that relevant to the people pushing racial anti-Semitism which is the focus of the OP. Racial Anti-Semitism was in fact decidedly secular and the Church opposed it, as it just wanted the Jews to all become good little Christian boys and girls, not viewed as racially inferior. Perhaps when you're trying to refute an argument you might want to actually address the argument made, which is in relation to racial anti-Semitism, not the religious variety that led to the expulsion of the Jews of Western Europe.

The argument that conversos were accepted also has a thin historical validity to it. Just ask Karl Marx, whose father converted and this was never accepted, and of course there's the whole expelling Jews from France, England, Spain, Portugual, and the like thing. Including a fair number of Christians in this, I might add, whose only theological crime was having ancestors who went to Shul.

TL;DR: That's nice dear, but it has nothing to do with the people mentioned in the OP or the mentality being address.

[dexeron.livejournal.com]

the historical line of thinking wasn't "OMG, you're Jewish, you're genetically *wrong*!" (At least not until fairly recently.

William of Norwich would like to have a word with you.

[dexeron.livejournal.com]

I agree with you, but I think jonny9fingers summed it up perfectly in the other post: "I am a man of my time. And as such, my sins will be those of a man of my time. But they will still be sins."

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

He certainly put it well, yes.

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

All I know is the only time I can control is the present not the past. So my concerns lie with that.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

How long have you had the belief that you can control the present? BTW, I believe they have a drug for that.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

There were plenty of people who recognized the bigotry of their peers during the 19th century. One of my favorite quotes is Henry David Thoreau on religious bigotry:

that the humble life of a Jewish peasant should have force to make a New York bishop so bigoted

It is taken from his travel writing A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Let us not forget that the original authors of the Constitution had to fend off proposals for religious citizenship tests from their peers that were meant to exclude Jews and "Turks."

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Let's also remember that they fended off this request when the USA was at war with the Barbary Pirates, the 18th Century version of Al-Qaeda. Just because the Founders were reactionary landowners doesn't mean that they didn't in some ways have a superior ability to remember how to fight a war than we did

[kayjayuu.livejournal.com]

I think the whole problem with the "hateful bigots" theme is that, just as nearly any label in the 21st century, it allows those who use it to easily and without regret discard the rest of the person whole cloth. The same as "Muslim" or "Jew" or "Black" or "Tiger Mom" or "WASP" or "poor" or "one percent" or "welfare queen" or "helicopter parent" or.... I need not go on.

There are people who are hateful. There are people who are bigots. The point is: there are people.

I know far too many ideologues of all viewpoints who smack a label on someone and can dismiss anything else about them, ever, because "LABEL". It does nothing for civil discussion or compromise. In fact, it simply polarizes each side until there's nothing left to say but shouting and name-calling and then the shooting starts.

:/

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Meanwhile the actual hatred and actions motivated it should be left to fester lest someone's feelings by offended by accurate application of a term.

[dexeron.livejournal.com]

Do you ever read Crommunist's blog? He's discussed this topic, the idea of the use of the label racist to describe a behavior or attitude, as opposed to a person. There was even a discussion between him and Amanda Marcotte on Twitter yesterday debating just that point: he was arguing calling out actions for what they are, that calling someone racist is counterproductive. She took the opposite tack, that for there's no practical reason to differentiate.

Not sure I agree 100% with you, but I hear what you're saying, and get the point you're making.

[bailzzararco.livejournal.com]

This post sounds familiar.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

It's a satire of another post which goes for both humor and for serious commentary.

[root-fu.livejournal.com]

If indeed those of past eras were completely unaware & ignorant of evolution as many claim...

One might wonder how humans engaged in forms of genetic engineering in creating distinct and individual breeds of dogs, crops, horses and other livestock for thousands of years before Darwin was born.

The thing most seem to miss in terms of bigotry is that it is present to a degree in every generation and era of human history.

No one in any era has ever managed to conquer their bigotry, it may be deemed a virtual impossible. There is no existence on earth without bigotry only varying degrees of it in various incarnations.

Those in successive years will look back on us and point out our bigotry in ignoring american imperialism and how our standard of life and luxuries are often built upon workers living in poverty, slaving away in foxconn worker concentration camps. The fact that majoritywise we turn a blind eye upon such things in ignoring our own bigotry doesn't allow us the moral high ground necessary to look back on prior eras of human history and judge others who were as blind to their own bigotry as we are to our own.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Bigotry is a constant, yes, but it's not been constant in its form or in how My Gang Yay, Your Gang Boo has been rationalized. The problem is that bigotry in a democracy leads to policies that are rooted in a fundamentally anti-democratic principle, and as such it has no place in democratic politics.

[peamasii.livejournal.com]

"they are hateful bigots and bigotry does not get a pass in the past"

Of course not. We are quite capable of moral superiority, when we live in democratic societies, have food on the table and money in the bank. Come a day in which we are faced with tough choices I doubt we would act so magnificent towards our fellowmen.

*see Robbers Cave experiment, Stanford prison experiment, etc.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Yep. Though it's worth noting that the people doing the experiments also noted this about the people making the choices. Just because people are bigger dicks when authority gives them license to be is not in itself a handwave of the issues with those actions.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

The victims always know better. The oppressors just make up excuses. There is no great education in history. We are no more moral or better than people in the past. Keeping it religious, I'm pretty sure economic slavery was well understood by the vassals of Babylon. I mean, it isn't like the oppressed just shrugged their shoulders and said, "Oh well they don't know any better, hence I will live happily and ignorantly in my status as a slave, because I do not know enough to understand if I'm suffering or not." And so it was that the oppressed were happy, because they did not know they were suffering, until Modern People came along and told them the truth. They didn't mind when they were forcibly relocated across hundreds or thousands of miles away from their only home, because after all "that was just the way of things", so they went happily along with the programs of conquest and power.

This is why historical apologism is a joke. People know better. They see and hear the suffering of their victims, and simply turn a blind-eye to it. They know. They understand as much as every other human being understands these things. The idea that people in the past lacked the same basic brains as we do? What a load of utter shit.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Well, not only did they have the same brains but there were people at the time who said that these things were wrong then just as there are people who object to it now. Just because people didn't and don't listen doesn't mean they didn't and don't exist.