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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 25 Dec 2022

Taken: 25 Dec 2022

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OF FEAR AND STRANGERS •
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George Makari •

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Xenophobia

Xenophobia

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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
. . . . I traveled to London in late May 2016. I had come to promote my new book. Unbeknownst to me, the country was about to vote on leaving the European Union. . . . In a sweat shop near the British Museum, the clerk talked excitedly about protecting Britain from an impending invasion of Turks.. . . I returned to New York, and soon thereafter the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. A few months later, the United States elected a new president, Donald Trump. All at once, a word came to many minds. It was a terrible, somewhat bewildering world, and so many sought to understand it at that same moment that an outline dictionary dubbed it the “word of the year.” ‘Xenophobia.’ It sounded vaguely “other mind-y” and psychiatric. . . . xii

Of Fear and Strangers’ concludes with a consideration of the “new xenophobia” that suddenly seemed to confront us. Global technological and economic integration, the 2008 economic crash, the European migrant crisis from the middle East and North Africa, and immigration from Central America to the United States : all these hae placed Western advocates of globalization on the defensive. Blood-sustained rhetoric has targeted Turks, Arabs, Jews, Africans, Blacks, Mexicans, and Muslims, to name a few. With Trump and his white nationalist allies, Brexit, and the rise of an emboldened far right in places like Hungary, Poland, Germany, Switzerland, France, Italy, and Sweden, we can no longer ignore the fact that xenophobia, that tribal curse, has returned. Xxii
(Prologue)
2 years ago. Edited 2 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
The culture that had given the world Kant, Beethoven, and Goethe had been overcome by an evil commitment to annihilate millions of strangers. If the Black Legend of Spain and Leopold’s Congo Free State once served as cautionary parables for mass murder, this twentieth-century infamy would now eclipse them. The nearly unimaginable crimes of the German National Socialists were Carl Schmitt’s politics gone insane. The facts alone beggared description. To grotesque were the crimes, so immense that to categorize them seemed tepid, a dishonour to the dead. Was this xenophobia? That term -- with its nonspecific object, its depersonalizing of victims, its broad range from minor prejudices to ethnic cleansing -- seemed to fail to do those events justice. The Nazis’ crimes seemed to have broken the back of language itself. “Xenophobia,” snorted Alvin Johnson the director of the new York’s New School for Social Research, in 1945, “what a word, to cover next to nothing.” ~ Page 118

What makes a man phobic of strangers? In the 1880s, when xenophobia first appeared in a clinic, the doctors who observed this fear had little to offer by way of explanation. For most of them, heredity provided a one-stop solution. To explain phobias, models of inheritance could be deployed, including Herbert Spencer’s model of Social Darwinism, in which human life was geared for the survival of the fittest; the French biologist Jean Baptiste Lamarck’s view that learned experiences could be inherited; and Ernst Haeckel’s contention that the life of the individual recapitulated the life of the species. Mix and match these speculative theories and almost anything could be given a supposed reality, a biological cause, and an essence that required no further explanation. ~ Page 131

To pursue {such} a synthesis, let’s start with what xenophobia is not. It cannot be reduced to some genetic defect or neural pathology. Xenophobia is not hardwired in some subset of the human population. If only. Hanna Arendt and, more recently, Sander Gilman and James Thomas have demonstrated that while it would be comforting to think of virulent racists as insane, that would only defame the mentally ill. Normal specimens of our biologic kind commit most hate crimes; they pulled the switches at Auschwitz. While toxic leaders may be ill, xenophobia is not literally and illness. More disturbingly, it is a part of the psychic violence of everyday life. ~ Page 237

OF FEAR AND STRANGERS
2 years ago. Edited 2 years ago.

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