Left Is Not Woke by Susan Neiman

Author:Susan Neiman [Neiman, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509558315
Published: 2023-05-19T00:00:00+00:00

Had he confined his depiction of Jews as enemies to texts he wrote during the Third Reich, one might argue – albeit not very plausibly – that he was under political pressure. That would make him a world-historical coward, but it could ground a claim that his famous friend/enemy distinction was something more abstract, and less vulgar, than anything the Nazis had in mind. Unfortunately for the Schmittians who make this argument, his pre- and post-war diaries display noxious antisemitism in vulgar and high-flown terms. Both biological and religious antisemitism played a role here, but antimodernism was even more important. Like Heidegger’s notorious Black Notebooks, Schmitt’s diaries treat Jews as emblems of everything he hated about the modern world.20 So it’s no surprise that his post-war diaries were full of comments like “Jews always remain Jews … precisely the assimilated Jew is the true enemy.”21

In Germany there were Nazis, and there were Nazis. Some were committed to the ideology, most went along with the regime to advance their careers. Very few of either kind were genuinely contrite after 1945. They had lost the war, some seven million citizens and a third of their territory. Their cities were in ruins and occupied by foreign armies. Some of them, like Schmitt, were barred from practicing their professions, or even briefly jailed. The deaths of millions of civilians, they insisted, were just part of the tragedy of war. Human beings were born to sin. What about the firebombing of Dresden or the atomic Holocaust at Hiroshima?

Pernicious attitudes like these were very widespread, but rarely publicly defended. And though it took decades, many who held such views came to see they were, well, lacking in perspective. Carl Schmitt never did. He called denazification “terror” and demanded an amnesty in which Nazi crimes would not only be forgiven but forgotten. He wrote an essay called “The Tyranny of Values,” which argued that values are entirely constructed, citing Heidegger, who dismissed values as “positivistic ersatz for the metaphysical.”22 Echoing Thrasymachus, he argues that values are inherently engines of political violence. Schmitt’s goal in that essay, as historian Samuel Zeitlin has shown, was hardly a general defense of legal positivism, but a defense of the Nazi propagandist Veit Harlan. If values are empty positivistic categories, on what basis could Nazis be condemned? “The crimes against humanity are committed by the Germans. The crimes for humanity are committed against the Germans. That is the only difference.”

It’s been argued that Celine’s literature can be dissociated from his support of fascism. It’s been argued that Heidegger’s Nazism should play no role in evaluating his metaphysics.23 I don’t agree with those arguments, but they are at least coherent. It’s much harder to contend that we should take seriously the ideas of a political theorist who defended his commitment to Nazism forty years after the war was over, particularly when those ideas are congruent with, perhaps foundational to, Nazi ideology.

Harking back to the Christian doctrines of original sin which he never abandoned, Schmitt wrote that “all genuine political theories presuppose humankind to be evil.

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