Two of the most powerful polemical pundits we have on the left, Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, have turned their sights on Goldman-Sachs in the past few days, and with it, they've conjured up some controversy. Most of it undeserved, but some of it deserved.
As Goldman-Sachs becomes elevated in their writing as a singular focal point of the Wall Street meltdown, these rants are also forcing a critical engagement with a growing issue on the left in the past few years vis a vis the Israel question as well as the financial meltdown, and that is the role of anti-Semitic narratives within some of the most powerful populist narratives of the liberal punditry.
I've felt for some time that this historical ignorance is the achilles heel of our side, and the amount of rage and anger I've seen directed at me when I raise it (I've been labeled a secret Neo-Con, a traitor for Israel, etc.) only further convinces me that these issues not only aren't going away, they're going to get worse.
It was Taibbi's blog post today that really struck me. Taibbi wrote about the excesses of Goldman-Sachs a few weeks ago in Rolling Stone, and then posted a blog entry about how flabbergasted he was that anyone would raise the issue of anti-Semitism after he used words like "tribal" and, of course, targeting the Wall Street firm with the most Jewish-sounding name.
Taibbi's defense, like Glenn Greenwald's, is of course, the lack of conscious intent and the facts of the case. The facts of Goldman-Sachs are undoubtedly true. But is that the end of the argument? Is this "just the facts"? Or are there narratives at work that both Taibbi and Greenwald hope will inspire a revolt? As Greenwald writes:
If sequences of events like these don't cause mass citizen outrage, then it's hard to imagine what will.
What will inspire "mass citizen outrage"? Not AIG. Not the very clearly articulated Wall Street meltdown, brought about through deregulation in 1999 by Phil Gramm and the republican desire to massively deregulate Wall Street.
No. There has to be something else at work. Something we can't see. Something "hidden." A deep conspiracy of power players in smoky back rooms at work aiming to take down the country.
This is where the historical narrative kicks in. This is where the mythical "Jew" is always conjured up.
For Taibbi and Greenwald, if they themselves are not aware of any heightened attenuation to Jewish sounding "Others" involved in banking/power schemes, then no anti-Semitism can possibly be present.
Taibbi writes:
A few points in response to this preposterous argument. Firstly I’m going to make a blanket denial and just say that the question of religion was so far outside my thinking while writing this piece that I never even considered it. If this issue had even entered my head so much as once, I probably would have been more careful, and it is remotely possible that I might not then have used a distantly suggestive word like "tribe," if only to avoid having to answer charges like this. But I didn’t consider it, for the simple reason that it’s completely ridiculous and not at all relevant.
There are two basic flaws in Taibbi's defense.
The first is that anti-Semitism, like any racism, is rarely found in the consciousness of the person espousing it. In fact modern racism is defined precisely by the lack of awareness on the part of the racist that he or she is being racist in the first place.
As we watch right now with the racists on the right attacking Sotomayor, they genuinely believe (for the most part) that this is not about anxities about an "Other" sitting on the Supreme Court and disrupting the normative white-male-Christian hierarchies, but about "fairness" or as the delusional John Roberts put it, "calling balls and strikes."
We on the left are quite attuned to the fact that the children of American privilege, the rich white men on the Christian right, never see their own racism.
They can't.
What they do is apply the limits of their subjectivity to the world around them to construct the narrative that fits their predetermined conclusions.
This is the core underpinning of institutional racism.
The institutional racist is never aware that they are buying in and perpetuating age-old racial narratives.
Like calling Barack Obama "articulate." He may actually be articulate, but embedded in that language is a historical narrative of condescension towards the ability for African-Americans to be articulate. To observe Obama's "articulate" ability with language it to imply surprise that a black person can speak so well. The statement is meant as a compliment, but it carries with it a racism.
Yet with Jewish narratives, some on the left like Greenwald and Taibbi not only demand a different standard, they scream about it. How dare anyone imply anti-Semitic narratives at work in their writing if they did not consciously think of such things?
The very critiques we bring to right wing attacks on Obama, on Sotomayor, on Hillary Clinton's lack of "femininity," we refuse to allow for the Jews.
In this sense, the left tends to exclude Jews from groups who can be linguistically attacked under the rubric of good intentions by the critic. Jews are different than blacks, latinos, women, Mexicans, gays and other groups marginalized by the dominant power structure.
This is, of course, nothing new.
Jews are seen as the "powerful" minority. This, in and of itself, is one of the most dangerous and damaging anti-Semitic narratives precisely because its structure draws a distinction between Jews and other ethnic or religious minorities. It places Jews into an "Other Other" group, the "Other" who is not "Other" but is "white." Except, of course, when Jews are Jews.
But back to Taibbi.
Taibbi's defense is that his critique of Goldman-Sachs can't possibly be anti-Semitic because Matt Taibbi himself was not consciously aware that Goldman-Sachs was a Jewish founded Wall Street investment bank, and didn't consciously think the word "Jew" when he was writing his article.
This defense is, of course, as ludicrous as when any of the right wing good ole' boys make cracks about Barack Obama's "articulate" impressiveness.
Taibbi continues:
For one thing, while Goldman’s founders a gazillion years ago were apparently Jewish, I seriously doubt that religion plays any role at all in the makeup of the modern Goldman. I don’t have any way of knowing this, but I would be shocked if it weren’t true that a majority of Goldman’s current employees were not Jewish. And whatever the reality is, I don’t care; it’s not a concern of mine and we didn’t make it a concern in the article.
Taibbi's second defense is that Goldman-Sachs may not even be run by Jewish people. This, of course, is also irrelevant, because anti-Semitic narratives never require actual Jews to be present, only the suggestion of Jewishness.
Taibbi's defense continues by equating anti-Semitism with literal, practicing Jews:
If anything it seems to me that what defines these Wall Street characters is not religion but the absence of it: even a hardened atheist like myself comes away from the experience of reading about the last two decades of Wall Street history shocked by that community’s complete and utter Godlessness and moral insanity.
A common defense among those perpetuating myths of Jewish power is that they're not speaking of "religious Jews" (the good Jews) but of the secular Jews who just happen to be Jewish (the bad Jews). Thus, their defense is it's not about Jews at all, since the Jews in question don't go to synagogue. This was the defense of the McCarthy with-hunts of the 1950s and is often used to attack the "secular Jews" who "run Hollywood" by those on the right convinced hidden Jewish power is corrupting Christian youth through movies and TV (see Tom Donohue).
None of this is to say Taibbi is anti-Semitic, or that his piece on Goldman-Sachs was. Only that for Taibbi to dismiss criticisms over picking out Goldman-Sachs as the "face" of the Wall Street criminals who secretly worked to destroy America from within is also unwarranted.
Whenever populist screeds desire to stick a "face" onto the evil, hidden "Other" with too much money and power in a culture, and that face happens to be Jewish or Jewish sounding, questions of anti-Semitic narratives are not only worth exploring, but demand to be explored.
Not just because it was Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent and Father Coughlin in the 1920s and 1930s blaming the Great Depression on Jewish power.
Not just because it was the 1950s McCarthy and Senator John Rankin reading off Jewish sounding last names of "Hollywood Communists" at work destroying America.
Not just because the wingnuts today use the Holocaust survivor and "money lender" George Soros as the face of the "liberal elites" to whip up their populist rage.
And not just because the "Rothschild" bankers were used by anti-Semites in Europe for two hundred years to fuel pogroms, conspiracy theories and, ultimately, the Holocaust.
But because the Jewish face used to inspire the masses to revolt against hidden power at work destroying a country from within is the most potent and dangerous myth of certainly the last century, and intermittently, the last thousand years or so.
Taibbi's good intentions do not excuse historical ignorance.
As George Orwell (my moniker's namesake creator) realized in 1948, Big Brother didn't need an actual "Emmanuel Goldstein" to focus the populist rage on. It just needed the name "Emmanuel Goldstein," and images of a big nosed Jewish "intellectual" to flash on the screen to cause the masses to scream during the two minutes of hate.
"Goldman-Sachs" has, of course, an extremely Jewish sounding name. It is far sexier than "AIG" or any of the dozens of Waspy sounding Wall Street firms (Chase, Morgan, Stanley, Smith, Barney, Merrill, Lynch, Dean, Witter, etc.)
So why is any of this relevant?
If, as Taibbi insists, the crimes of Goldman-Sachs are true, then why worry about using words like "financial elites" "tribalism" "hidden power" "control of Washington" and other narratives of hidden power and covert control?
The answer, of course, is that if we are to parse the avalanche of embedded racism that emits from the ooze of the right wing on a daily basis, if we are to pick apart their language systems for xenophobia, fear of the "Other" at work in their hysterical rantings about Sotomayor ("wise Latina"), Barack Obama (hidden Muslim, foreign born, etc.), then we cannot simply dismiss, as Taibbi hopes to do, these sorts of embedded narratives on our side of the table.
And yes, anti-Semitism is present on the left, just as it is on the right. Liberals are not automatically granted exemptions from the abuse of language to perpetuate racist stereotype. Just as racism can be found on the left, and just as homophobia can (albeit in far less amounts than in the toxic cesspool of the modern conservative movement). In fact a case could be made that anti-Semitism is the one safe bias still allowed on the left, and not only allowed, but actively championed as a form of speaking "truth to power."
This, of course, has a grain of truth. The shamelessly corrupt Neo-Conservatives, who would sell out their mother if they could, have tried to use "anti-Semitism" as a defense from their noxious and toxic policies and agendas.
However this has emboldened the ability to rant against Israel and come up with PNAC and AIPAC conspiracy theories on the left with impunity. Glenn Greenwald's blog frequently descends into a fever swamp of conspiracy theories about Jewish "influence" in Washington as secretly behind the Iraq War as a secret tool to manipulate America for Israel's sake.
To anyone with even a minimal awareness of how un-Jewish the Bush movement, and movement Conservatism in general is, is a ludicrous thought. The zealotry of Bushism, the "Crusade" in Iraq, and the cult of Sarah Palin, is about as anti-Jewish as it gets. Palin's "real America" in the heartland is positioned exactly in opposition to the queered and ethnic America of the urban environment, and Jews are of course lumped right in with Latinos, blacks, gays and immigrants, as dangerous "Others."
But somehow on the left, there is a refusal to even consider the power of the anti-Semitic narrative on the left.
This is the danger that concerns me. That people like Taibbi laugh at and dismiss. In the always troubling Glenn Greenwald's conspiracy theory yesterday, Goldman-Sachs has uniquely ripped off the American public by positioning its own people in key jobs on Wall Street.
Greenwald's snippets of news articles over the past two years shows that executives from Goldman-Sachs and Tim Geithner (gasp!) met with each other. Greenwald's picking and choosing of snippets of association, particularly in the notion of Israel-AIPAC is becoming legendary.
But the question isn't if Goldman-Sachs is guilty. As with the rest of Wall Street, they've attempted to game the system as much as they can.
The question is why is GOLDMAN-SACHS suddenly the headline that jumps out of the rest of the Wall Street quagmire?
As far as I can tell, it's apparently because they've paid off the TARP funds, they're making a record profit right now, and they may have received passive payments as part of the AIG bailout. And a lot of former execs from Goldman-Sachs are working in Washington.
All of these are undoubtedly true.
The question is what narrative do Greenwald and Taibbi think they're creating? What is this grand conspiracy to inspire the populist rage that they seek? Who are these hidden forces at work in Washington secretly working to destroy America from within?
And have we seen similar narratives like this in the past?
This diary is not meant to accuse Greenwald or Taibbi of anti-Semitism, only to point out that to not examine these sorts of narratives, why they're so popular, why they hit us on a gut level we're not always conscious of, is to bring the very double standard to historically racist narratives that we slam the republican party for all the time.
Greenwald and Taibbi are not exempt from perpetuating anti-Semitic narratives simply on the grounds that they are not conscious of them.
The larger question not only can be asked, but must be asked: Why do the stories of rage meant to inspire populism always settle on a Jewish face/name? Why is it always Orwell's "Emmanuel Goldstein" who gets the population enraged? Is it coincidence?
Are Jewish institutions the secret fifth column at work in America destroying it from within? Or does this narrative have potency for other reasons?
The conservative propagandists use the evil "moneylender" George Soros, the "War on Christmas" and the "Hollywood Elites." Yet Taibbi and Greenwald scream like banshees if anyone dares to ask why their grand narratives of hidden power settle on Jewish figures and Jewish last names.
Did we execute the Rosenbergs in 1953 simply because they "sold secrets to the Russians?" Or were Julies and Ethel Rosenberg the "face" that the government needed to print as the dangrerous "Other" threatening the country from within?
As with all racist narratives, the author does not know they're perpetuating an historically racist meme. These memes live for decades and centuries. The rants of Henry Ford, Father Coughlin and Bill O'Reilly about a "war on Christmas" in America are nearly identical.
Do we excuse Bill O'Reilly because he doesn't literally mean "Jewish influence" via the ACLU (and that Ruth Bader-Ginsberg) to wipe out Christian America? Of course not. We pillory his historical ignorance and dangerous demagoguery, and rightly so.
Even if it's true that the ACLU is working to ensure that public spaces don't favor Christianity.
The truth of O'Reilly's anecdotes do not change the dangerous demagoguery of his narrative.
The defense offered by Greenwald is that such questions are an "attempt to silence" him. That he's being shouted down by hidden power structures because he dares to out the truth of hidden AIPAC-PNAC funding mechanisms meant to help Israel by corrupting the American government.
That excuse is disgraceful.
No one is trying to shout down anyone.
But just as we probe the right wing racist language structures that ooze from frauds like O'Reilly ("get me a Motherf@#kin iced tea!"), Glenn Beck, or good ole' boys like Tom Delay and Trent Lott with their longing for the days when black people appreciated all that the South did for them, so must we critically examine why words like "tribal" pop up in a Matt Taibbi column about Goldman-Sachs.
These are not ancillary questions.
If we are to be the side that liberates language, discourse and society from the dangerous racist patterns of the past that we see in the attacks on Sonia Sotomayor, we cannot slip into dangerous populist conspiracy theories about Jewish power without first examining how and why these narratives are so primally potent and viscerally appealing.
The present cannot be disentangled from the past. Greenwald and Taibbi are not excused when they accidentally perpetuate age-old narratives by weaving together snippets and quotes culled from so many disparate sources.
This is not a defense of Goldman-Sachs. It is a call for an awareness that we cannot purge racist narratives of black people, Latinos, gay people, immigrants, Asians, Indians, Muslims and other ethnics, and then demand the freedom to bark age-old Jewish narratives without examining those language structures as well.