Comment: A young, fashionable, rootless cosmopolitan from Russia who seems to be the media go-to girl in Berlin when it comes to questions of German identity:
Ioulia Isserlis, in July 2014 telling the Times of Israel why she won’t be rooting for Germany.
“As a Jew, you cannot fully support them,” she says.
Yet, Isserlis is also an avid soccer fan.
“Germany is one of the best teams nowadays, of course if they win, they deserve it. If they win, I won’t have negative feelings.”
And which team would Isserlis support, if not Germany?
“If I were to choose a country to support, it would be Israel. But unfortunately Israeli soccer is not there yet,” says Isserlis.
Ms. Isserlis, quoted in a New York Times October 2015 article about Germany, post-unification:
“On adapting to a New Life” …
We could decide Israel or Germany, and my parents finally decided that for Jews, Germany is the safest place.
“On being German” …
Right now, it’s about being European, not German. I think you can’t really divide being German from being French. I don’t think there is so much difference. Being Jewish I guess is No. 1, then comes Berliner.
The term (((rootless cosmopolitan))) is considered to be dastardly and bigoted, so it’s amusingly revealing when an actual rootless cosmopolitan blithely dismisses the ethnic/racial (self) identity of others, while in the next breath declares one’s own Jewish identity to be of ultimate importance.
To any smarties who would claim she is talking about religion rather than blood… she doesn’t seem to have very Orthodox concerns:
There were no hard parts [to becoming a Berliner]. You just have to know … to go out late.
Most young people hang out in the eastern part of Berlin — it’s more hipsterish and the Western part more posh. Right now there is this wall between being hipster or posh, between no brands, looking cool and skinny, and wearing brands. That’s the war right now.
* The argument, which they cannot state, which is why you never hear it, is that nationalism will be VERY bad for elite pillaging and prestige. They are correct about this. Many people have built whole careers off progressive signaling and narrative enforcement. If a nationalist regime manages to take power, it will have a new narrative, which will not be kind to the constituents of its predecessor, and it won’t be shy about bringing their many crimes to light.
* It is not fashionable to say much nowadays of the advantages of the small community. We are told that we must go in for large empires and large ideas. There is one advantage, however, in the small state, the city, or the village, which only the wilfully blind can overlook. The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us.
Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique. The men of the clan live together because they all wear the same tartan or are all descended from the same sacred cow; but in their souls, by the divine luck of things, there will always be more colours than in any tartan. But the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell. A big society exists in order to form cliques.
A big society is a society for the promotion of narrowness. It is a machinery for the purpose of guarding the solitary and sensitive individual from all experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises. It is, in the most literal sense of the words, a society for the prevention of Christian knowledge.
Of course, this shrinking from the brutal vivacity and brutal variety of common men is a perfectly reasonable and excusable thing as long as it does not pretend to any point of superiority. It is when it calls itself aristocracy or aestheticism or a superiority to the bourgeoisie that its inherent weakness has in justice to be pointed out. Fastidiousness is the most pardonable of vices; but it is the most unpardonable of virtues.
* Since I was young, I assumed “cosmopolitan” just referred to people who have travelled about the world, with enough money to create a bubble of safety for themselves.
I never thought of nationalism as its opposite, as I considered the former to be a temporal state, while nationalism, with exceptions, rings eternal. Cosmopolitanism last as long as your bank account holds out. You can be a dead broke nationalist, no problem.
* Douthat is spot-on. Cosmopolitan implies weak attachment to any particular view, but today’s elites are very much attached to one view. That view is to destroy all traditional ways of life and sources of authority in order to convert people into American-style consumers. The means: open borders, trade agreements, and stirring up trouble abroad to generate streams of immigrants and refugees (invade/invite). These look like cosmopolitan and progressive ends, but in fact they are merely means to a reactionary end.
* Ross Douthat really nails the pro-nationalist backlash sentiment. He explains it extremely clearly and articulately and he does so from the authority of the New York Times. It is weird that he is so completely against Trump. I don’t recall him ever even trying to explain why he articulates Trump. He just states as assumed that Trump is unfit, etc.
David Frum is similar in that he is a highly respected figure that quite articulately explains reasonable opposition and backlash to mass immigration, yet he also abhors Trump.
I wonder if Douthat and Frum both secretely want Trump to win but want to deflect from his bad sides.
* This was mainly a Soviet thing. Since the Soviet Union was officially atheist and multi-ethnic, it wasn’t possible to directly criticize Jews as Jews, so they had to come up with a new critique and euphemism that fit Soviet ideology. So they came up with “Eskimos”. No, sorry wait, that’s the alt-right. The Soviets came up with “rootless cosmopolitans”. During WWII, Stalin shifted the emphasis of Soviet propaganda from love of Communism to love of country, which more people could unite behind. Jews were said to be insufficiently rooted in, and lacking love for, Russia and its people. To be honest, a lot of the alt-right criticism of the Jews resembles the Stalinist view.
But I would guess that most American Jews have only a vague understanding of the inner workings of Soviet antisemitism and perhaps rightly so because it was just a thin ideological veneer on top of (deeply rooted) Russian antisemitism. “Rootless cosmopolitan ” doesn’t particularly register at all, given how poorly history is taught in America. You can imagine that Soviet anti-Jewish purges are not something that is emphasized heavily in American “liberal” education – if Americans learn anything about the ’50s, it’s more about Emmett Till and McCarthyism. If you were doing a word association test, the first thing cosmopolitan would bring to mind is not a magazine or a Soviet epithet but a cocktail.
