Morgenbladet's Alf van der Hagen suggest Gypsies today face the same situation as Jews in the 1920-ies
In the editorial of this week’s Morgenbladet, editor Alf van der Hagen quotes a philosopher on how the situation for the Gypsies today is not unlike the situation Jews were facing in the 1920-ies. This is wrong on some many levels that it is difficult to know where to begin.
What we are seeing in France today is that Gypsies who are illegally residing in France are being repatriated to Bulgaria and Rumania. In order for it to make any sense to compare this situation to be similar to that of the Jews in the twenties, we first and foremost need an impending Holocaust. Since we are unable to look into the future, we need a pattern of developments similar to that faced by the Jews in the twenties. Alas, neither Morgenbladet’s editor nor the philospher he quotes, Axel Honneth, provides us with any such similar pattern except for the rather vague: “They fulfill our need for an internal enemy who can confirm our own superiority“. With this definiation virtually anybody and everybody can be, and is, in a situation similar to that of the Jews in the twenties. Hence the claim is as unverifiable as it is imprecise and therefore useless. In order to illustrate just how ludicrous van der Hagen’s and Honneth’s claim is, let us look at the situation of the Jews in twenties.
The first problem in this exercise of course, consists of identifying exactly which Jews Alf van der Hagen is referring to. Is it the Jews of the USA? The Jews of Eastern Europe? The Jews of Timbuktu? We have no way of knowing precisely since van der Hagen does not care to tell us, but when we speak about the persecution of Jews in the twenties we mainly mean the Jews of central Europe. If we specify our search to the German Jews, we find the following telling excerpts in Jeffrey Herf’s “The Jewish Enemy”:
“From 1919 to January 30, 1939, Hitler hurled terrible abuse and threats of violence at the Jews (page 1)… in a speech to a Nazi party meeting of April 6, 1920, when Hitler said “We don’t want to be emotional anti-Semites who seek to create a mood for pogroms. Rather, we are driven by a pitiless and fierce determination to attack the evil at its roots and to exterminate it root and branch. Every means is justified to reach our goal, even if it means we must make a pace with the devil (page 3)… In 1923, Alfred Rosenberg, known as one of the leading anti-Semitic ideologues in the Nazi party, became its (Der Völkische Beobachter, national daily of the NSDAP) editor (page 26)”…
Now that is just some of the relevant excerpts from the first 26 pages of Herf’s book, with the search being restricted to the 1920-ies in Germany. What happens if we look at the situation for the Jews in twenties’ Norway? Here is some of what we find in Håkon Harket’s “Jødehat”:
“… doctor David Abrahamsen found anti-Semitism so obvious that any Norwegian Jew retains “a bitter, inner memory” (page 401)… In an editorial in Nationen in 1923 referral was made to for example “certain and reliable information” in American industrialist Henry Ford’s book The International Jew: “The socalled dictatorship of the proletariat, where the proletariat does not have the slightest thing to say, constitutes the Jewish rulership” the newspaper concludes (page 405)… In his reportage from the ghetto in Warsaw in April 1917 Kjær graps after characteristics which do not stand bakc in the least for the lewdest continental anti-Semitic hatepropaganda: “This population appear to emit filth as snails emit slime… The streets are teeming with people as if they were sewers filled with rats… A Jew and a Goy can understand eachother if need be, but the better they understand eachother, the more openly they express their mutual hatred”
Now the excerpts above are just some of the relevant findings from the first six pages of a twenty-page long chapter of a tome weighing in at a full 600 pages. Does any of this sound even remotely descriptive of the situation facing the Gypsies today?
Morgenbladet’s editor Alf van der Hagen has gleaned no insight, has understood nothing profound, has observed no important pattern. What he has done is mainly to fail to hide his own ignorance of European history. As it happens, this does not really matter as Alf van der Hagen’s readers have no knowledge of history either.
Ah, the beuty of Norwegian intellectuals.
