Claudius said he’d never met one person in his entire life who liked Jews as a collective or as a group, himself included. However, he and many of these others he quoted all said that they liked individual Jews, often very much, depending on their behavior of course.
I’d concur, except like an idiot, I was a Judeophile for the first 43 years of my life until I started researching the Palestinian issue in 2001 in the first Intifada, and I figured out those Hebrew fuckers had been lying to me my whole life, and I got pissed.
Then I went into some Jewish newsgroups and found that not only were the stereotypes true, but they were true in belligerent spades. I was nearly knocked out of my chair for weeks on end by how outrageously the Jews in those acted out the very worst anti-Semitic stereotypes. They could have strolled right out of the pages of Der Strumer, and perhaps some of them did.
Because you see, I had been taught my whole life that all of those ugly anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jews were complete lies made up by evil Nazi anti-Semites who hated Jews for absolutely no good reason at all. Like an idiot, I had believed that, and here was this newsgroup full of Jews, dancing right off the pages of the Protocols. Color me shocked, to say the least.
After my Pauline Demascene road conversion from Judeophilism to sanity, I still didn’t really hate them per se, more like I became Jew-wise or Jew-cynical, which probably the best attitude to take towards any ethnocentric human tribe of bastards and sonsofbitches.
Wait. I actually did go through an anti-Semitic phase, sadly enough, and I must report that obsessive and conspiratorial anti-Semitism is most definitely a mental disorder. Because when I was an anti-Semite, I was definitely crazy. It’s odd how it creeps up on you like that. I suspect that’s true of most any passionate ethnic or group hatreds unless you’ve got a good reason to hate ’em based on personal or group history or as it usually is, both.
My longest relationship – 5 1/2 years – was with a Jewish woman. Granted she was kind of a bitch (stereotype again), it was my longest. I was even going to convert to Judaism just for her. Mostly I just to be one of those Chomskyan self-haters and stick my finger and in their Hebraic eyes and say neener neener, but also because a part of my spirit, alas, is Jewish, having been born and raised a Jewish country – the United States – and not just a Jewish country but the largest one of that.
And there was always that faint hope that I could slide my way into some of that legendary tribally-distributed loot of theirs.
As far as the religion itself goes, it blows of course, like most shitty religions, and in fact, it might just be one of the worst ones of all. But you can always just go Reform, bake your own cake, and create a nice little religion out of it by throwing out all the bad parts and keeping all the good parts. Or go Left and become a guiding light unto the Gentiles, leading the way to a better world. Many leftwing Jews have taken this route, from Marx to Sanders. It sure was nice of the Jews to give themselves an out like that. Well, God bless em.
Hate the collective, love the individual.
This probably applies to lots of things – a number of other races, Bronies, trannies, gay men, lesbians, rednecks, Muslims, pitbulls, Republicans, Gypsies, and feminists, except there probably aren’t any good Gypsies or feminists, so you may as well go ahead and hate ’em all. We hate the collective because we stand back and look at the collective forest from the nearest hill, and as a whole – holistically – it simply sucks, or worse, blows to the high heavens. But then when we hike down into the woods, and we peek at the individual trees in the forest, we find that a lot of them are ok.
Also, most group members act better as individuals than as a collective. Something about the madness of crowds I gather. Or human tribalism itself.
