Another round in the "Lord of the World" War.


Owen Hatteras says:

`Anti-Catholic'--a once-valid phrase--has by now almost completely degenerated into a stick employed by scoundrels to beat those who see through them. The overwhelming bulk of Catholics in the United States are even less prone to harbor animosity towards minorities--including Jews--than the U.S. population as a whole, as voluminous survey data plainly attests. In spite of this however, some conservative Catholics are not above attempting to chum the waters with apocalyptic paranoia--including promoting such high-toned examples as "Lord of the World". These facts--including the rejection by most Catholics of incitements to racial, religious, or moral panic--are consistently noted in my postings here. The reviewer, evidently unable to dispute any of this, can only satirize it instead.

My comparison of theoconservatives to Islamists appears to have struck a nerve. Islamists do not all fly airplanes into buildings; most seek to advance their cause through peaceful means. Unfortunately, they share with U.S. theoconservatives a bitter hostility to American liberty and pluralism. Unlike `integrist'-type reactionaries, who could barely stand to be in the same country--much less the same room--with such folk as evangelical Protestants; theoconservatives are more prone to attempt coalition-building with other groups whose politico-religious goals may align with theirs. Even those Jews who share these (and who are evidently willing to serve as `beards') may be allowed to tag along. While I do not think that such attempts to gain political power will succeed, the bitterness of failure may well prompt free-lance terrorism by some of the movement's more unbalanced adherents. After all, will they not--encouraged by theoconservative propaganda--see themselves as battling (the Great) Satan? The reviewer and others of like mind can perhaps haw-haw over that one.

Peter S. Bradley says:

To the reader,

I have this philosophy: book reviews should be about the book being reviewed.

I extend this philosophy to comments: comments should be about the thing being commented upon.

In this case the comment was on a book review, which would seem to suggest that the comment ought to have something to do with the book or book review or the book by way of the book review.

Mr. Hatteras' comments subscribe to none of these common sense ideas. They are instead long-winded, and yet flatulent, screeds that boil down to Mr. Hatteras idee fixe with respect to "conservative Catholics" who "chum the waters" with "apocalyptic paranoia."

Mr. Hatteras has a right to his idee fixe, just as he has a right to wear a tinfoil hat in order to protect himself from the mind-control rays emanating from the Vatican. But what does any of this have to do with the book or my review of the book?

Not a thing.

Nothing in my review "chums" any "water" with "apocalyptic paranoia." I nowhere suggested that I thought that we were looking at an imminent apocalypse.

As for paranoia, I note that conventionally that term connotes a person with an obsessive fixation about a person or group that the person believes wields an unhealthy power over their good or the common good. Hitler was paranoid about Jews. 19th Century liberal Germans were paranoid about Jesuits. See The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany).

Mr. Hatteras is similarly paranoid about "conservative Catholics." Witness for example his attempt to equate "conservative Catholics" - whoever they are - with Islamofascists, "not all of whom fly planes into buildings."

True, not all fly planes into building; some issue fatwahs, others behead journalists, still others blow themselves up with civilians, while others have engaged in a great ethnic cleansing of Christians from the Islamic world, and yet still others are actively seeking nuclear weapons for the avowed purpose of destroying all the Jews in the Middle East.

Catholics, on the other hand, have anti-Catholic screeds printed in the New York Times, which won't run an identical screed about Islamofascist Mulsims. See this.

Hmm...maybe the reason is that Catholics don't issue fatwahs, wear suicide belts, fly planes into buildings, seek suicide weapons, etc., etc.

Maybe "conservative Catholics" are in no way comparable to Islamic terrorists.

Unless, of course, you think you have to wear a tinfoil hat to protect yourself from mind-control rays from the Vatican like some pretentious, flatulent reviewers seem to think.

Draw your own conclusions.

Another Round of the "Lord of the World" War.


Owen Hatteras says:

"The Satanizing of the Jews" is the phrase used by historian Joel Carmichael to describe what he calls "mystical anti-Semitism"; i.e., traditional Christian anti-Judaism that viewed Jews as the murderers of Christ, acting in league with the Devil. Descriptions of Jews as being coarse-looking, or money grubbing typically belonged to later nationalist or racialist varieties of anti-Semitism.

I made it quite plain that these are not all the same thing, although the first quite naturally feeds into the second.

During the Second World War, those (few) Polish Gentiles who offered refuge and hiding to Jews not only had to keep this a secret from the German authorities; they had to keep it a secret from their Christian neighbors as well. I doubt that Polish peasants acquired their hatred of Jews from a reading of "Mein Kampf". It more likely came from the 'teaching of contempt' absorbed at their mother's knees and from their priests.

I have repeatedly made it plain that the anti-Semitism of Msgr. Benson's time and place was not that of Houston Stewart Chamberlain or Hitler--i.e., based on race-hatred--but originated in age-old religious hostility.

Msgr. Benson's book partakes fully of the attitudes of its time; the trouble is that such attitudes helped set the stage for horrors wholly unimagined by the book's author. Those who later devised and implemented such horrors found plenty of ready helpers from the ranks of ordinary Christians--including Roman Catholics--not only in Germany itself, but far beyond. This was due to many factors, traditional anti-Jewish teachings by the Catholic Church being only one of these; but the age-old animus was definitely part of the mix. The intellectual honesty and presumed good faith of those who ignore, deny, or minimize such plangent facts is plainly in doubt.

The overwhelming bulk of American Catholics reject anti-Semitism of any sort. Some conservative Catholics however seem to want to conserve only the worst legacies of the past. They may find--as did their predecessors--that they get a good deal more than what they bargained for.

In Hungary, the ruling conservative coalition's leading party, 'Fidesz', has now rammed through changes in the country's constitution that have ended free elections and stripped the nation's judiciary and media of their independence. The ruling coalition's 'Jobbik' party conducts close-order drills of uniformed paramilitary on town squares. And once again, time-honored rhetoric is aired in Parliament and the media blaming the country's economic problems on Jews and Roma.

Did I note that all of this is being done in the name of restoring the country's 'Christian values'? But this is "a small, faraway country, of which we know nothing".

There is little further that can be said in the face of ongoing and deliberate obtuseness--except again to note that theoconservatives' wistful longings for Franco-style authoritarianism, and indulgence in racial or religious paranoia, may bring in a good deal more besides.

Peter S. Bradley says:

To the reader,

It should be painfully clear by now that Owen Hatteras can offer not a scintilla of evidence from the actual book he purportedly read and reviewed, to support his claim that "[Lord of the World] traffics in some of the hoariest anti-Semitic stereotypes imaginable."

Thus, I pointed out that Jews are mentioned only three times in contexts that are not anti-semitic. I actually quoted the excerpts for the reader to judge for himself.

Mr. Hatteras implicitly conceded the point, but decided that the problem was that Benson dared - dared! - to give his anti-Christ figure a non-Jewish name! The dastardly Benson was therefore responsible for something he had not written and for readers who may not associate either "burgh" or "berg" as being Jewish.

In response to that non-argument, I again quoted from the book to show the absence of anti-semitic tropes.

Now, Mr. Hatteras decides to drop any attempt to associate his claim that "[Lord of the World] traffics in some of the hoariest anti-Semitic stereotypes imaginable" by not even attempting to loosely attach his claim to anything even nebulously and imaginatively found in the text. No, now Mr. Hatteras points to things that happened thirty years after Benson died far outside of the England where Benson wrote and to "theocons" and American "conservative Catholics" living in 21st Century America as evidence in support of his thesis.

The only possible response is -

*Snort*

Seriously?!?!?!?!?!?!?

Mr. Hatteras obviously has "issues" - to put it gently - with American Conservative Catholics that for all we know he believes are tunnelling under his house, but what does Mr. Hatteras' idee fixe have to do with Benson's book?

Clearly, not a thing.

Mr. Hatteras is simply using his review of Benson's book to savage a group he obviously doesn't like through the deployment of rhetorical fallacies which could receive an honorable mention in "The Big Guide to Making Ridiculously Bad Arguments."

But this has nothing to do with Benson, who, whatever his faults - such as using "Edwardian-era references" (something which is clearly unexpected of, and inexcusable for, someone who was writing during the Edwardian era) - Mr. Hatteras has offered no justification of his base slander of, and false witness against, Benson based on what Benson actually wrote in this book.

At this point, an attentive reader begins to suspect that Mr. Hatteras is actually reviewing a book he never read.

"Lord of the World" Wars.

Further from the comments to a review of Robert Hugh Benson's "Lord of the World."

Owen Hatteras says:

Perhaps stung at being caught out lavishing inapt praise upon a novel trafficking in some of the worst of anti-Semitic tropes; Peter S. Bradley appears incapable of taking note of what I actually wrote.

The central figure of the novel is a palpably Jewish anti-Christ named "Julius Felsenburgh". What sort of name might that be? (Other reviewers have consistently misspelled the last name as 'Felsenburg'; apparently one of the novel's subtexts is coming through loud and clear to them.) I thought I had made it plain in my review (and subsequent comments here) that the novel is indeed not defaced by anti-Jewish tirades. Rather, it implicitly partakes of age-old Christian demonizing and scapegoating of Jews. This was not firmly and finally repudiated by the Roman Catholic Church until the Second Vatican Council. Evidently some Roman Catholics have been slow to get the word.

Christian anti-Semitism and Nazi anti-Semitism are not the same thing, and I do not conflate them--but the second could not have existed without the first. Honest Christians must face up to this fact; not lose themselves in daydreams that decorously elide it.

Unfortunately, in our time as much as Msgr. Benson's; some conservative Catholics view Jews as the carrier of the virus of modernity, also as frustrating the realization of their beau ideal of the 'sacral state'. Msgr. Benson can scarcely be blamed for something as vile as "Der Stürmer"; although his Edwardian sensibilities might have been more shocked at its obscenity and violence, then at its anti-Jewish animus per se. The innocence of Msgr. Benson's day might by countenanced, but after World War II and the Holocaust, not the pretended innocence of some readers of "Lord of the World".

That, I think, is the guilty secret of this book's renewed appeal to Catholics of a certain cast of mind; it allows them to relive the genteel prejudices of a bygone day--while ignoring the less-pleasant consequences of them.

Peter S. Bradley says:

To the reader,

Mr. Hatteras has demonstrated how tenously he has tied reality to his attempt to smear Benson's book through "guilt by association."

Mr. Hatteras doesn't dispute that Jews are mentioned only three times in contexts which display none of the classic tropes of anti-semitism.

Now, it seems that the book and author are to be condemned for something that is never found in the book and which the author didn't write.

The character's name is "Felsenburgh," not "Felsenberg," no matter how much Mr. Hatteras wishes it were so, in order to fit his potted, distorted, anti-catholic worldview. The fact that some reviewers get the name wrong is not evidence of Benson's subtle attempt to project anti-semitism; it's evidence that a lot of reviewers do not associate "berg" or "burgh" with any particular ethnic or religious group, and so attach no significance sufficient to remember to the final syllable of Felsenburgh's name.

But if one was to make an authentic inquiry into Benson's alleged project of projecting a coded anti-semitism into his book one would look at classic anti-semitic tropes.

For example, how about physical appearance? Prior to World War II, anti-semites classically traded in describing Jews in coarse physical language.

Well, that won't work because Felsenburgh is described as the twin of the priest who gets elected as the final pope.

So, maybe the pope is Jewish?

How about the classic anti-semitic trope of describing Jews as coming from diseased, decaying large cities?

Oops, Felsenburgh comes from Vermont.

How about the classic anti-semitic trope about Jews having control over banking or newspapers and doing their dirty work through underlings?

Well, here's what Benson writes:

He tried to remember what Mr. Varhaus, the American senator, had told him of Felsenburgh; yet it did not seem sufficient to account for the facts. Felsenburgh, it seemed, had employed none of those methods common in modern politics. He controlled no newspapers, vituperated nobody, championed nobody: he had no picked underlings; he used no bribes; there were no monstrous crimes alleged against him. It seemed rather as if his originality lay in his clean hands and his stainless past--that, and his magnetic character. He was the kind of figure that belonged rather to the age of chivalry: a pure, clean, compelling personality, like a radiant child. He had taken people by surprise, then, rising out of the heaving dun-coloured waters of American socialism like a vision--from those waters so fiercely restrained from breaking into storm over since the extraordinary social revolution under Mr. Hearst's disciples, a century ago.

Benson, Robert Hugh (2007-09-21). Lord of the World (Kindle Locations 930-936). Evergreen Review, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

"Chivalrous?" "Stainless?" "Radiant?" "No bribes?" "No underlings?"

How very un-anti-semitic.

If Mr. Hatteras' thesis is true, Benson has managed to achieve a new level of obscurity in terms of subtle anti-semitic coding since he seems to be describing someone who appears to have the Christian virtues, and who looks like the final leader of Christianity.

Also, what's with all the subtlety? Was anti-semitism something that was viewed as being "politically incorrect" in 1907?

Certainly, if someone with an obsessive-compulsive need to sniff out anti-semitism from any work written by a Catholic, then they could concoct feverish arguments based on things the author never wrote to support that conspiratorial view.

Or one could actually, you know, think about the text, and ask what what the author was getting at?

Could it be that Benson was picturing his anti-christ as a mirror image of a true Christian? A person, perhaps, with the apparent Christian virtues, but lacking the love of God?

Ah, if one thinks about that, then one says, "Hmmm....maybe that's why Julius Felsenburgh has a Christian name and is identical in appearance to the priest who becomes the last pope."

But never mind all that. Mr. Hatteras wants to vent about anti-semitism in this book. Let him spin his fantasies.

Just realize, please, that his comments do not reflect what is actually in the book.