Antisemitism: The Attribute of Crystallizing Fascism
The comfortable way to talk about the Russian state’s antisemitism is to treat it as a series of accidents. A foreign minister blurts out something monstrous on Italian television; a spokeswoman invents Israeli mercenaries on a battlefield; a ministry moves to expel a Jewish charity. Each episode is filed under embarrassment — a slip, a gaffe, an isolated lapse of a regime otherwise busy with other crimes. I want to argue that this reading is not merely too kind but diagnostically wrong. These are not accidents. They are the surfacing of a single structural attribute, and that attribute is one of the most reliable signs we possess that a fascism has fully crystallized. As Russian power hardens into one of the most obscurantist forms the century has seen, it acquires antisemitism the way the most rabid regimes of the last century acquired it — not as a flaw but as a working part. The once-isolated moves are merging into a coordinated whole. To see it clearly is to stop asking why does this keep happening and start reading it as a symptom that tells you exactly how far the disease has progressed. ...