The famous German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, wrote and directed Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. In the original German, the word is not fear, but rather anxiety (angst). We want to argue that the corrosiveness of powerlessness in world society destroys minds, hearts and souls that has never been explored in the depth it deserves.
History books usually talk about the rise of empires, Assyrian, Spanish, British, etc. and the conquests of famous military leaders. It’s also true that fiascos and defeats are mentioned (e.g., Napolean at Waterloo).
The brilliant American writer James Baldwin, said when a people is either marginalized for a long time (including self-marginalization), slowly goes insane and begins to step off the edge of the world (most famously in the documentary, I Am Not Your Negro). Baldwin’s insight illuminates a nation having a nervous breakdown.
Three examples of powerlessness eating the soul come to mind:
- The Germans after World War I sleepwalking into Nazism.
- The black population of America today.
- Israel and the right-wing Zionists currently going into a destructive fantasy.
All of these behaviors are social, psychological pathologies with roots in a long exposure to powerlessness. By contrast, Napolean’s defeat at Waterloo is a single instance in time, not an extended period of crushing mental defeatism. This becomes a haunting ghost that never really goes away.
There are nuances to be explored here, for example the Civil War defeat of the South as expressed in A Stillness at Appomattox. Resentments festered in the South’s psyche, and could be argued to linger to this day.
Thinking of this as the field of powerlessness studies, a central classic is Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History by David Biale.
The Jews have chosen the modern nation-state in the form of the state of Israel or American democracy, as the best guarantee for their survival. That they have identified with the nation-state is no surprise, for they have always demonstrated a shrewd understanding of the political forms of each age, from partial sovereignty in imperial antiquity to corporate power in the Middle Ages. Identification with the state is the modern version of Jewish politics; different strategies pertained in the past. To suggest that modern Jews should adopt some other strategy for survival-to argue that nationalism or democratic pluralism are foreign to Judaism—is to ignore the political legacy of Jewish history, a persistent tradition of political imitation and accommodation, but never of passivity or retreat from politics. Zionism and Diaspora nationalism in their modern forms may be new in Jewish history, but they represent no more and no less than the latest incarnation of this political tradition.
These contemporary strategies for survival, for all their limitations and failures to fulfill messianic expectations, have still proven to be largely successful. The Jews of Israel and the Western Diaspora face less of a threat to their physical survival than at any other time since the end of the Holocaust and certainly less in comparison to the Jews of Europe before the Holocaust. To say that these Jews are secure would be foolhardy in light of Jewish history, but they are certainly more secure than many allow themselves to believe.
The discrepancy between contemporary Jewish power and the insecurity many Jews feel owes much to the inverted image that modern anti-Semites have of Jewish power. If Jews typically see themselves as less powerful than they really are, anti-Semites, since the nineteenth century, portray them as much more powerful: a secret cabal in control of the world. The state of Israel has not diminished this paranoia; on the contrary, anti-Semites now see Zionism as a force equal to twentieth-century imperialism. Afraid of feeding these bizarre delusions, many Jews shrink from acknowledging the actual power they possess. The reality, as I have argued throughout this book, lies somewhere between Jewish fear and anti-Semitic fantasy.
Traumatic historical memories play as great a role in the Jews’ misperception of their contemporary power. Every nation labors under the burden of its own history, caught in the tensions between its understanding of history and current political realities; these tensions are often the cause of misguided political decisions. The United States, torn between conflicting legacies of isolationism and interventionism, and fearful of being perceived as a “paper tiger,” became entangled in Vietnam. The Soviet Union, invaded repeatedly by the West, holds tenaciously to the countries of Eastern Europe as a buffer against imagined Western threats. The Germans, fearful of their neighbors and obsessed with national unification, repeatedly launched wars against the rest of Europe, only to hind themselves after World War II permanently divided and the most likely battlefield for a war between East and West; by succumbing to paranoid tears and messianic appetites, the Germans brought down on themselves exactly the situation they most dreaded.
None of these examples sheds direct light on the dilemma of the Jews, for no other nation has a history analogous to theirs. But each of these cases suggests that the burden of history is a problem common to all nation-states, even as the shape and content of the burden differs. For Jews, contemporary political problems return inevitably and fatefully to the Holocaust, the final denouement of European Jewish history.
The Jews have classically defined their history as unique, and in many ways it is. Their victimization by the Nazis revived anew this sense of uniqueness, at a time when ideologies of “normalization” had begun to undermine the concept of a Chosen People. For many, the return of the Jews to sovereignty could be understood only against the backdrop of the Holocaust, the epitome of the powerlessness of a powerless people: the Holocaust became a metaphor for the special character of all of Jewish history, and only Jewish sovereignty could be a response to this condition of impotence. I have argued that the extremes represented by the boundless terror of the Holocaust and by the victories of the state of Israel should not distort our perception of the Jews’ relationship to power throughout Jewish history; neither should they blur our vision of politics today. To see both past and present realistically without forgetting or suppressing the memory of the Holocaust remains the Jews’ particular burden from history.
When they consider their past, the Jews have no choice but to grapple with the Holocaust. But the Holocaust may also convey a different message with respect to the future: it may signify that the fate of the Jews is no longer unique, becoming instead a symbol for the fate of all mankind. In the twentieth century, the promise of the nation-state, which the European Enlightenment believed would free mankind, has been irrevocably compromised. With the murder of the Jews, the nation-state went mad, reducing some of its subjects to powerless pawns and, finally, corpses. The Nazis were by no means the only twentieth-century rulers to terrorize and murder those they ruled, but they did so with a systematic efficiency and industrial rationality never imagined before.
The total deprivation of human rights and utter degradation suffered by the Jews are not a closed chapter buried in history. Throughout the world today, dictatorships of widely different ideological persuasions have remembered the lessons of the totalitarian regimes of the 1930s and 1940s. In the atrocities committed by governments against their own citizens, the terrifying legacy of the Holocaust lives on. The very powerlessness of the Jews under the Nazis is a warning of the possible fate of human beings anywhere in the world.
The powerlessness of the Jews during the Holocaust also points to the fate of all humanity in the face of nuclear war. It is now possible for governments to deliver the ovens of Auschwitz to all corners of the earth, to make a holocaust of all mankind. Like the Jews of Nazi Europe, the people of the world will be utterly impotent in such a war, neither soldiers nor even innocent bystanders, but, again like the Jews, intentional victims.
As a metaphor for a new politics of irrationality, the Holocaust contains a message of inescapable relevance for a nuclear world. For the first time in human history, a government sought to eradicate a whole people from the earth for reasons that had nothing to do with political realities. In a similar way, the idea of nuclear war lacks the most elementary political rationality, for it would necessarily destroy everything it meant to save: it would take genocide, invented in its most systematic form by the Nazis, to its global and ultimately suicidal conclusion.
Post-Holocaust Jewish nationalism—the accepted ideology of many of the world’s Jews—derives its logic and its legitimacy from both the modern history of the Jews and the modern history of the world. From this point of view, Jewish nationalism is the irrefutable answer to the powerlessness of the holocaust. At the same time, as a prefiguration of the terrors of contemporary politics, the Holocaust has thrown a dark shadow over the future of the nation-state as such, diminishing the promise of modern nationalism for the Jews as for all other peoples.
The urge toward a normal existence in a Jewish state grew out of a profound desire to escape the “unique destiny of a unique people.” Yet, if a “normal existence” today means confronting the terror of global nuclear genocide, then instead of the Jews escaping their historical destiny, it is the world that has become Jewish; the Jews have entered the world of nations only to discover that all mankind faces the holocaust they themselves already suffered. In this world, power is no longer a complete antidote to powerlessness. Possessed of the power to destroy this world, the nations of the earth have become the prisoners of their own might, limited in their sovereignty by forces of their own making: power has created its own vulnerability.
In this dialectic between power and vulnerability, the long history of the Jews may unexpectedly serve as a beacon to the nations. From biblical times to the present day, the Jews have wandered the uncertain terrain between power and powerlessness, never quite achieving the power necessary to guarantee long-term security, but equally avoiding, with a number of disastrous exceptions, the abyss of absolute impotence. They developed the consummate political art of living with uncertainty and insecurity; their long survival owes much to this extraordinary achievement. Jews today must struggle to come to terms with this history in light of their present power, to see both past and present through a realistic lens, neither inflating their power nor exaggerating their powerlessness. The lessons this history can teach are necessary for their own continued existence and are equally relevant to the continued existence of mankind.
David Biale, “Epilogue: The Political Legacy of Jewish History”, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History, Knopf Doubleday, pages 206-210.
If you combine Fassbinder’s notion of fear eating the soul with Baldwin’s warning against chronic marginalization, we begin to see the phenomenon of powerlessness as an under analyzed variable in world history.