The Religious Origins of Globalism:
An Interview with Hervé Ryssen, Part 5

William Holman Hunt's "The Scapegoat" (1854 - 1856) (detail)

From Mechanopolis, February 24, 2009

Translated by Greg Johnson

Read Part 1 here.
Read Part 2 here.
Read Part 3 here.
Read Part 4 here.

Mechanopolis: Isn’t the desire to found a world government one of the delusions of the “enlightened,” as Taguieff would say?

Hervé Ryssen: It is quite clear that all this is being done to make us disavow our roots, our traditions, our history, our families, and our fatherlands, in order to make us more receptive to the “open” society dear to cosmopolitan hearts and to the idea of a world government. Alain Finkielkraut insists on this point: “Evil,” he writes, “enters the world with fatherlands and patronyms [par les patries et par les patronymes]”(Alain Finkielkraut, L’Humanité perdue [Lost Humanity], p.154.). The post-modern man must cease “pursuing traces of the past in himself as in others.” His claim to fame “is to be cosmopolitan, and to make war on parochialism” (Alain Finkielkraut, Le Mécontemporain [Paris: Gallimard, 1991], pp. 174-77).  From there, one can finally admit the idea of a “planetary confederation,” as advocated by the sociologist Edgar “Morin” in all his books, or better yet, to work for the introduction of world government, as Jacques Attali expresses it: “After the installation of European continental institutions, the urgent need for a world government will appear” (Dictionnaire du XXIe siècle [Dictionary of the Twenty-First Century]). All that, obviously, will still not prevent the famous anti-fascist trapper Pierre-André Taguieff from being indignant at the wild imaginings of anti-Semites and to claim that the idea of world domination is an aberration or a “deception.”

Mechanopolis: One cannot deny however that the Jews experienced atrocious persecutions down through the centuries. How do they themselves explain their misfortunes?

Hervé Ryssen: It is probably the most stunning question of all. On this point as well, the explanations are all concordant and are usually based on the theory of the “scapegoat”: in difficult times the government or the people turn against a specially designated victim who is charged with “all” faults “past, present, or future.”

Those who should be most concerned to understand anti-Semitism often express a total incomprehension of the phenomenon. Thus for Clara Malraux (the wife of the writer) anti-Semitic hatred “is less hard to bear when one knows that it is totally and absolutely unjustified and that, by this fact, the enemy is transformed into the enemy of humanity” (Clara Malraux, Rahel, Ma grande sœur . . . [Rahel, My big sister . . .] [Paris: Editions Ramsay, 1980], p. 15.). The enemy of the Jews is the enemy of all humanity. This is also what Elie Wiesel means when he writes in volume 2 of his Memories: “Thus it is and cannot be otherwise: the enemy of the Jews is the enemy of humanity. . . . By killing the Jews, the killers undertook to assassinate all of humanity” (Elie Wiesel, Mémoires, vol. 2, [Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1996], pp. 72, 319). Indeed, to kill a Jew who is, so to speak, innocent by nature, is inevitably to attack every innocent person and every other community. Thus one is correctly defined as the enemy of humanity. But there is also another interpretation, more classical, which is based on the idea that the Jews alone are defined as humanity, the other nations deriving, according to a so-called formula of the Talmud, from “the seed of cattle.”

In his  2004 book Le Discours de la haine [Hate Speech], the philosopher André Glucksmann maintains that “hatred of the Jews is the enigma among all enigmas. . . . Jews are not at all the source of anti-Semitism; it is necessary to consider this passion in itself and by itself, as if the Jews which it hounds . . . did not exist.” (André Glucksmann, Le Discours de la haine [Paris: Plon, 2004], pp. 73, 86, 88.).  You have to understand:  “the Jew” is always innocent. These too are not isolated testimonies, and this attitude seems to be that of a majority of the Jewish intellectuals. Emmanuel Lévinas also expressed this opinion, just like another Jewish philosopher, Shmuel Trigano for whom the phenomenon of anti-Semitism “remained unexplained in spite of an immense library on the subject” (Shmuel Trigano, L’Idéal démocratique… à l’épreuve de la shoah [The Democratic Ideal . . . the Test of the Shoah] [Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 1999], p. 17).

Mechanopolis: One also often hears that anti-Semitism is a mental illness.

Hervé Ryssen: Since anti-Semitism is unexplained, and the Jews are innocent, logically the problem can come only from the goys. Consider the testimony of Yeshayahu Leibowitz, philosopher of religions, found in the book entitled Portraits juifs: “It is a phenomenon which is historically incomprehensible. Anti-Semitism for me is not a problem of the Jews but of the goyim” (Herlinde Loelbl, Portraits juifs, 2003). In the first volume of his Mémoires, Elie Wiesel writes: “It is their problem, not ours” (Elie Wiesel, Mémoires, vol. I [Paris: Le Seuil, 1994], pp. 30, 31).

The explanation of anti-Semitism as mental derangement is very frequently found in the writings of Jewish intellectuals. Le livre de Raphaël Draï, Identité juive, identité humaine, publié en 1995, reprend cette idée : The 1995 book of Raphaël Draï, Identité juive, identité humaine [Jewish Identity, Human Identity], takes up this idea: “The anti-Semite attributes to the Jew the intentions that he himself nourishes. . . . The psychopathological dimension of such a construction cannot be ignored. . . . The presented Jews are really projected Jews; the “Judaized” image belongs to the delusions of anti-Semites” (Raphaël Draï, Identité juive, identité humaine [Paris: Armand Colin, 1995], pp. 390-92).

The Russian writer Vassili Grossman expresses the same idea: “Anti-Semitism,” he says, “is the mirror of the defects of a man taken individually, of civil society, of official systems. Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, and I will tell you what you yourself are guilty of. National Socialism, when it attributed to the Jewish people traits that it itelf had invented, like racism, the will to dominate the world, or the cosmopolitan indifference to the German fatherland, had in fact given the Jews its own characteristics” (Vassili Grossman, Vie et destin [Paris: Ed. Julliard, 1960], pp. 456-58). In sum, the anti-semite rejects in the Jews his own tares. On this level, it does indeed fall into the realm of psychotherapy. But it remains to be seen whether it is really the goyim who need it most!

The End

Read Michael O’Meara’s review of Ryssen’s Les Espérances planétariennes.