The G-d of History
A Rumination of the Prophetic Powers of the Past
As I lay in bed last night convulsing with the fear of one who knows his history all too well, I found myself compelled to pray. This prayer was unlike my usual prayers because it was not offered out of love: it was offered out of desperation.
Since May 12th, 2021, I have been racked with visions of the rise of the American Hitler. While over the past month and a half, the main antisemitic threat in America has been from the left, I do not believe they represent the real danger to American Jews, just as it was not the leftist government of the Weimar Republic which was dangerous to Jews: it was their incompetence.
Incompetence is the greatest political sin because it leads to anarchy and anarchy creates a power vacuum which can only be filled by violence. Italy, Spain, and Germany all had extremely progressive governments before the rise of Fascism. These governments, though, focused more on their beautifully progressive ideas than on the realities of running a country.
While these progressive governments were posturing as the future of humanity, their citizens were languishing. We see this today – while California postures as the most progressive state in the union, Californians are leaving it in droves.
Why? California has everything a person could possibly want. Sadly, as the history of Venezuela, once the most prosperous country in Latin America, shows, no amount of natural bounty can account for the damage done by political incompetence. And, you may find it interesting that the advocates of incompetent progressive governments always seem to ignore the destruction of Venezuela.
Last weekend, in San Francisco, Governor Gavin Newson cleared out the homeless people for Xi Jinping’s visit. Putting aside the fact that the California governor cares more about the Chinese Premier than his own constituents, let’s talk about what this might mean for California’s homeless policy in general.
In the last L.A. mayoral election, Rick Caruso ran on a platform of cleaning up the streets. In a lot of ways, Rick Caruso is like Donald Trump-light. He’s a real estate mogul with basically no political experience who ran on a campaign of law and order. He lost the election, but the support for him showed the beginning of a dangerous trend in California politics: as much as no one wants to admit it, Californians are tired of political mismanagement.
I cannot imagine California voting for a traditional conservative, but I can see California voting for an antisemitic “progressive” who promises to solve all of our economic problems by going after the people responsible for creating them: the Jews.
The reason I was so racked with convulsions last night is that this did not come to me as a thought; it came to me as a vision. It is only a matter of time.
The people in Gen Z who have been radicalized by antisemitic progressive ideologies are now coming to terms with the economic realities of the world. Namely, that no matter how hard they work, they will never be able to buy a house. Of course, there are hundreds of reasons for this, but it is easiest to just blame Blackrock for buying up all of the single-family homes in America to turn us into renters.
Of course, these young people never took any economics classes, or, if they did, they were probably taught by Marxist economists, but they have no idea about how the world works. The people who complained that Biden did not give enough money in stimulus checks are now complaining about inflation. I am sorry, but, duh? Where did you think that money was going to come from?
The same thing was true in Germany in 1923. Remember, there were still millions of European Communists who believed that the global marxist revolution would happen in their lifetime. Unfortunately, Marxism turned out to be a bad investment of their time and money. Inflation was through the roof, and there was no hope for young Germans to ever be able to be financially independent.
Against this backdrop, a young Bohemian Corporal steps up to the podium and says that he knows the source of the world’s problems. The progressive Weimar Republic is too weak to stop him, and they lack the political will to do so. They are paralyzed by political idealism, and in their paralysis they let the young corporal rise almost completely unopposed from 1923 to 1933.
The agony of history is that there are certain forces which simply cannot be stopped. The rise of fascism in a politically incompetent country is a historical inevitability.
However, so is the fall of fascism. Political ideologies do not last in the world of political realities. Pragmatism, more than anything, is the force of nature which ought to guide governments. But, for progressive thinkers, there is a higher power: the idea.
Progressive thinkers, both Marxists and Fascists, serve a false G-d: their own egos. The ideology that we see from these groups is one of self-satisfaction and self-aggrandizement. There could be nothing more egotistical and naive than thinking that you will be the one to move human politics outside of the realm of history. Karl Marx described a historical dialectic in which the economic classes struggled with one another for 4000 years. But, for some reason, he and his apostles thought that they could, through their theories, end that 4000 year long historical struggle.
History is unforgiving. There are laws that govern the states of men just as there are laws that govern the state of nature. We can learn its lessons to avoid its scourge, but we cannot avoid it all together.
After I began praying, calm came over me. Because, just as much as history is filled with the dark and dangerous failures of mankind, it is also filled with its light. As terrifying as the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, might have been, they ended. They ended with the death of European fascism and the creation of the State of Israel. The Third Reich lasted for 12 years; The State of Israel has been here for 75.
The G-d of the Old Testament is the G-d of History. The Jewish bible tells a historical story from the beginning of the Jewish people in Ancient Mesopotamia, through the Egyptian Bondage, the triumph of the Jewish people over the Canaanites, the creation and destruction of the Davidic Monarchy, the Babylonian Captivity, and, eventually, the return of the Jews to the Land of Israel.