University of Chicago political scientist John J. Mearsheimer is widely derided as an “anti-Semite”, a characterization I do not accept. What I find fascinating is that 15 years before he got into trouble with the Jews for his 2007 book The Israel Lobby, Mearsheimer led the charge against a Germany academic who wrote for a Nazi newspaper during WWII.
I do not believe there is any such sin as racism, bigotry, or anti-Semitism. Different groups have different interests and these interests clash. It is usually in a group’s self-interest to have negative views of outsiders. The more closely a person identifies with an in-group, the more likely he is to have hostility towards outsiders, whether that person is black, Jewish or German. I expect a healthy self-interested Muslim or Arab to have negative views of Jews. I expect Christians to at least have ambivalence about Jews. I expect healthy self-interested Jews to have negative views of Christians and Muslims. I don’t think any of these groups are more hateful than the others.
Until the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the average German was better off under the Nazis than he was before the Nazis. Until Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939, he was wildly popular with Germans but after the invasion, Hitler was not popular with Germans, who did not want another war and never celebrated it en masse.
In 1991, Leo Bogart criticized Noelle-Neumann, accusing her of anti-Semitic passages in her dissertation and articles she wrote for Nazi newspapers. As a young woman, she had “superb credentials as an activist and leader” of Nazi youth and students’ organizations, he wrote.[2] In fact, when she published her 1940 dissertation in Germany, entitled “Opinion and mass research in the USA”, having spent a year at the University of Missouri researching George Gallup’s methodology, Joseph Goebbels called the 24 year-old woman as an adjutant and intended her to build up, for the ministry of propaganda, Germany’s first public opinion research organization. She declined, having fallen ill, which angered Goebbels; she later became a newspaper journalist with Nazi publications where she wrote some articles on Jewish influence over U.S. news and elite opinion.
Bogart’s article appeared just weeks before Noelle-Neumann took up a visiting position in the Political Science Department at the University of Chicago, where she had held similar appointments since 1978. Michael Kochin, a graduate student at the university, noticed the article and circulated it on campus prior to her arrival,[3] igniting a vigorous debate on Noelle-Neumann’s past.[4] While the administration and students at the university,[5] the local Jewish defense groups,[6] and Chicago newspapers[7] remained disengaged from the issue, John J. Mearsheimer, then chairman of the university’s political science department, spoke with Bogart, met for over three hours with Noelle-Neumann,[8] and called a departmental meeting about her on October 16.[9] Some at the university claimed Noelle-Neumann was being slandered, and Mearsheimer’s colleagues were not of one opinion about the case. Mearsheimer, however, widely publicized his views concerning the allegations themselves and as they related to academic freedom and opposition to bigotry. “I believe Noelle-Neumann was an anti-Semite,” Mearsheimer stated, “and was not forced to write the anti-Semitic words she published. Moreover, I believe that the anti-Semitic writers and publicists of Germany – to include Noelle-Neumann – jointly share some responsibility for the Holocaust. For this she owes an apology.”[10] “The thing to remember about the killing of the Jews,” he said, “is that it was not done by a handful of people. … It was also a result of the Reich of normal – or of average – German citizens. Like Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann.”[11]
In private letters and in written responses, Noelle-Neumann acknowledged being in a Nazi student organization but denied being a Nazi. “I am anguished by the suffering of Jews in Nazi Germany,” she wrote.[12] Bogart, Mearsheimer and others remained dissatisfied with her response.[13]
Noelle-Neumann completed her visiting position in Chicago in mid-December 1991 and returned to Germany. When some University of Chicago students learned that she was to return there on March 13, 1992, they called a rally to protest against her return.[14] Reached by telephone at her office in Allensbach am Bodensee, Germany, on March 10, Noelle-Neumann told a reporter she was unaware of the proposed rally but intended on coming to the university as planned.[15] That day, her hosts at the National Opinion Research Center announced that she had cancelled her appearance “in light of serious threats”.[16]
Several years later, Noelle-Neumann’s Nazi connection came under scrutiny from another American academic,[17] but she never explicitly apologized for her past.[18] Interviewed on the subject in 1997, she said, “I did my duty and would do my duty again in a second life. I’d even say I was proud of what I did back then because I opposed the Nazis by working from within.”[19]
John Mearsheimer, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago wrote in The New York Times on December 16, 1991:
“She has admitted she was not hostile to the Nazis before 1940. She says she was anti-Nazi after 1940, but has produced no evidence that she criticized the Nazis then. She wrote anti-Semitic words in 1938–41, and there is no evidence she was compelled to write them. Queried on her anti-Semitic writings, she told me: “I have never written anything in my life that I did not believe to be true.”
I am not an expert on Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, but it seems to me that her greatest crime was to be on the losing side of WWII. I do not find compelling the 1991 Commentary article against her by Leo Bogart:
“Although only 37 percent of the electorate had voted for the Nazis, the rest were intimidated into acquiescence, which was rapidly converted to active support.”
Yes, until the invasion of Poland, after which the Nazis were increasingly unpopular with Germans. German support for Nazis was roughly in proportion to how good the Nazis were for the interests of the average German.
“…how a people that prided itself on its high level of civilization could be transformed within a few years into accomplices to unprecedented barbarities.”
You could say the same thing about the thousands of Jews who played a key role in the rise of the Soviet Union and the execution of its genocides. In short, Jews in Russia were often Stalin’s willing executioners.
One of the supposedly horrible things Noelle wrote in 1940 was this: “Since 1933, the Jews, who have monopolized a large part of America’s intellectual life, have concentrated their demagogic capacities on anti-German agitation. . . . The treatment of the Jews in Germany is portrayed by the American press in a completely distorted manner.”
It is true that by the 1930s, Jews had monopolized a large part of America’s intellectual life and that they did concentrate their rhetorical capacities on anti-German agitation. I don’t know to what extent they may have distorted the treatment of Jews in Germany, but I suspect they did not give much sympathetic attention to German nationalism and the pro-Zionism (Haavara Agreement) of the Nazis.
Bogart writes:
Returning to Germany from the U.S. via Japan and the Siberian railroad, Noelle embarked on a career as a journalist. She found employment with Das Reich, a slick weekly newspaper for which Goebbels personally wrote editorials. Aimed at intellectuals, the journal carried articles on music, theater, and such cultural items as the “German baroque” cupolas of churches in parts of Poland that had already been incorporated into the Third Reich.
On June 8, 1941 (two weeks before the invasion of the Soviet Union), Das Reich carried a two-page spread under the heading, “Who Informs America?,” in which Noelle drew on her observations of this country. The sources of American public opinion—the press, radio, and movie newsreels—were, she wrote, in the hands of individuals obsessed with hatred of Germany. Leading the pro-Allied interventionist pack were such columnists as Dorothy Thompson and General Hugh Johnson (“a friend of the Jew Bernard Baruch”). There were a few noble exceptions, like Westbrook Pegler (“a son of the Middle West with Mark Twainlike features”)—though it was nowhere indicated that his column was distributed by what Noelle referred to elsewhere as “the Jew-loving Scripps-Howard concern.”
Illustrating the article was a cartoon from the Chicago Daily News, about which Noelle had this to say:
“In gruesome distortion, symbols of National Socialism and signs of death are bound together. To grasp suddenly in the dark for the Jew who must be hiding himself behind the Chicago Daily News means sticking one’s hand into a wasp’s nest. When one gets forty stings at the same time, one stops being interested in a single wasp. Jews write in the newspapers, own them, have virtually monopolized the advertising agencies and can therefore open or shut the gates of advertising income to individual newspapers as they wish. They control the film industry, own the biggest radio stations and all the theaters.”
There is no need to trace the thread that connects these words to the broken shop windows and burning synagogues of Kristall-nacht—already two years in the past when the words were written—or to the millions of individual acts of sadism and murder that made up the Nazi war against the Jews.
I don’t see how noting the disproportionate role Jews have played in the American media leads straight to Auschwitz. Many Jews have noted the same thing and this did not lead to Kristallnachts. There is no link between pointing out the disproportionate role Jews have played in various endeavors and slaughter of Jews. To argue to the contrary is to argue that speaking the truth leads to mass murder.
Based on my cursory survey of Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, I see no reason why John J. Mearsheimer should have come out and attacked her as an “anti-Semite” and it is delicious that he later got impaled on the same bogus charge.
Germans and Jews have often had clashing interests that led to conflict. Germans directed a Holocaust of European Jewry and Jews played a major role in the rise of Soviet communism, its accompanying genocides, and the defeat of Nazi Germany.
Japan and Germany pursued their interests in WWI and WWII and almost achieved them. The United States pursued its interests when it subjugated its natives, went to war with Mexico, and dominated its hemisphere. The U.S. succeeded while Japan and Germany failed. I guess that makes America the good guy.
As Robert D. Kaplan wrote in The Atlantic in December of 2011:
Tragedy begins with a forceful denial of perpetual peace in favor of perpetual struggle, with great powers primed for offense, because they can never be sure how much military capacity they will need in order to survive over the long run. Because every state is forever insecure, Mearsheimer counsels, the internal nature of a state is less important as a factor in its international behavior than we think. “Great powers are like billiard balls that vary only in size,” he intones. In other words, Mearsheimer is not one to be especially impressed by a state simply because it is a democracy. As he asserts early on, “Whether China is democratic and deeply enmeshed in the global economy or autocratic and autarkic will have little effect on its behavior, because democracies care about security as much as non-democracies do.” Indeed, a democratic China could be more technologically innovative and economically robust, with consequently more talent and money to lavish on its military. (A democratic Egypt, for that matter, could create greater security challenges for the United States than an autocratic Egypt. Mearsheimer is not making moral judgments. He is merely describing how states interact in an anarchic world.)
…During the buildup to the Iraq War, Mearsheimer and Walt began work on what would become a London Review of Books article and later The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. (The Atlantic had originally commissioned the piece, only to reject it owing to a profound disagreement between the editors and the authors over its objectivity.) In some respects, The Israel Lobby reads as an appendix to The Tragedy of Great Power Politics—almost a case study of how great powers should not act. Many of those loosely associated with the lobby supported the Iraq War, which Mearsheimer saw as a diversion from the contest with China. The so-called special relationship between the United States and Israel, by further entangling the United States in the problems of the Middle East, contradicted the tenets of offshore balancing. And proponents of the special relationship have routinely justified it by citing Israel’s status as a stable democracy in the midst of unstable authoritarian states—but that internal attribute, in Mearsheimer’s view, is largely irrelevant.
John J. Mearsheimer got attacked for blurbing a book by Israeli ex-pat Gilat Atzmon, who has said some interesting and some horrifying things. Overall, Atzmon seems much harsher about the Jews than Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, who Mearsheimer attacked as an anti-Semite.
Jeffrey Goldberg wrote for The Atlantic Sept. 23, 2011:
Gilad Atzmon is a jazz saxophonist who lives in London and who has a side gig disseminating the wildest sort of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. He is an ex-Israeli and a self-proclaimed “self-hater” who traffics in Holocaust denial and all sorts of grotesque, medieval anti-Jewish calumnies. Here is a small sample of his lunatic thoughts (bold text is mine):
I think that 65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, we must be entitled to start to ask the necessary questions. We should ask for some conclusive historical evidence and arguments rather than follow a religious narrative that is sustained by political pressure and laws. We should strip the holocaust of its Judeo-centric exceptional status and treat it as an historical chapter that belongs to a certain time and place.
Sixty-five years after the liberation of Auschwitz we should reclaim our history and ask why? Why were the Jews hated? Why did European people stand up against their next door neighbours? Why are the Jews hated in the Middle East, surely they had a chance to open a new page in their troubled history? If they genuinely planned to do so, as the early Zionists claimed, why did they fail? Why did America tighten its immigration laws amid the growing danger to European Jews? We should also ask for what purpose do the holocaust denial laws serve? What is the holocaust religion there to conceal? As long as we fail to ask questions, we will be subjected to Zionists and their Neocons agents’ plots. We will continue killing in the name of Jewish suffering. We will maintain our complicity in Western imperialist crimes against humanity…
…The Holocaust became the new Western religion. Unfortunately, it is the most sinister religion known to man. It is a license to kill, to flatten, no nuke, to wipe, to rape, to loot and to ethnically cleanse. It made vengeance and revenge into a Western value.
Atzmon also believes that the Jews persecuted Hitler:
Not many people are aware that in March 1933, long before Hitler became the undisputed leader of Germany and began restricting the rights of German Jews, the American Jewish Congress announced a massive protest at Madison Square Gardens and called for an American boycott of German goods…
….Jewish texts tend to glaze over the fact that Hitler’s March 28 1933, ordering a boycott against Jewish stores and goods, was an escalation in direct response to the declaration of war on Germany by the worldwide Jewish leadership.
He has also suggested that Jews specialize in the trafficking of body parts:
Fagin is the ultimate plunderer, a child exploiter and usurer. Shylock is the blood-thirsty merchant. With Fagin and Shylock in mind Israeli barbarism and organ trafficking seem to be just other events in an endless hellish continuum.
Atzmon is quite obviously a twisted and toxic hater. His antisemitism is so blatant that activists of the so-called BDS movement (boycott, divestment and sanctions), which seeks the elimination of Israel, refuse to have anything to do with him. But Atzmon still has at least one friend among anti-Israel activists: The R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and co-author of “The Israel Lobby,” John J. Mearsheimer.
Rather unbelievably (or believably, depending on where you sit) Mearsheimer has written an endorsement of Atzmon’s new book, “The Wandering Who?” Here is what Mearsheimer says about Atzmon:
Gilad Atzmon has written a fascinating and provocative book on Jewish identity in the modern world. He shows how assimilation and liberalism are making it incredibly difficult for Jews in the Diaspora to maintain a powerful sense of their ‘Jewishness.’ Panicked Jewish leaders, he argues, have turned to Zionism (blind loyalty to Israel) and scaremongering (the threat of another Holocaust) to keep the tribe united and distinct from the surrounding goyim. As Atzmon’s own case demonstrates, this strategy is not working and is causing many Jews great anguish. The Wandering Who? Should be widely read by Jews and non-Jews alike.’
In this new book, Atzmon suggests, among other things, that scholars should reopen the question of medieval blood libels leveled against Jews– accusations that Jews used the blood of Christian children to make matzo, and which provoked countless massacres of Jews in many different countries.
Gliad Atzmon, by the way, is also on record saying this:
“I believe that from certain ideological perspective, Israel is actually far worse than Nazi Germany.”
Gilad Atzmon strikes me as a provocateur who says some stupid things and some valuable things. I don’t think “Hitler apologist” and “Holocaust denier” and “twisted hater” are his distinguishing characteristics. Like I do with every other thinker, I take what is valuable and discard what is not.
