The Tyranny of Victimhood

How Progressives Turned Regressive

“I had reduced everything to the simple theory that the oppressed are always right and the oppressors are always wrong: a mistaken theory, but the natural result of being one of the oppressors yourself.” (George Orwell)

“It depends on the context.” With these five simple words, uttered during a hearing in the U.S. Congress in December last year, the former president of Harvard University Claudine Gay secured her place in history books. It was her answer to a question just posed to her by Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik: “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your university’s codes of conduct?” Two academic colleagues sitting next to her, the presidents of MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, had been roasted with the exact same question. All three, with a contemptuous smirk on their lips, refused to give a simple affirmative answer, instead repeating the same evasive and lawyerly phrases they had clearly rehearsed beforehand. Calling for the extermination of the Jews on our campus? Well, sometimes you can, it depends, you see.

In defense of her answer, Claudine Gay boasted that her university is “deeply committed to protecting free expression” in the spirit of the U.S. First Amendment. I wish that were true, but it shows a breathtaking level of hypocrisy. This is the same university where students and staff risk disciplinary sanctions if they address someone using the wrong pronouns or make derogatory comments about another one’s weight. ^[1] When some Harvard students shared some off-color jokes and memes — not on campus, but in a closed Facebook group — they were immediately suspended. A professor of evolutionary biology faced an internal investigation and was eventually bullied off campus because she said on television that there are only two sexes in nature (a correct biological observation).^[2] Even the former president of Harvard, the economist Larry Summers, was forced to resign in 2005 because he had dared to raise the hypothesis (at a conference behind closed doors) that male overrepresentation in STEM fields may result partly from higher variability in male aptitude (meaning more geniuses and more 'idiots'), in addition to discrimination and gender stereotypes. A perfectly legitimate hypothesis backed by some solid statistics, but it was enough to force Summers to resign.^[3]

In fact, the vaunted “freedom of expression” at Harvard is in such a deplorable state that, in the index of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the university received the lowest score ever recorded, coming in dead last out of 203 elite schools surveyed.^[4] Statistical analysis reveals that, the more prestigious and more progressive a university, the worse the protection of free speech.^[5] If you were to so much as dream about uttering the n-word on campus at an Ivy League university, even in an educational context, you would be immediately hounded off campus and expelled.^[6] Let alone that you would call for the 'genocide of Black people' and that your university president would defend your free speech in Congress.

Ideological rot

This hearing in Congress provides the most incontrovertible evidence to date (with three sworn testimonies under oath) of an ideological rot that has been spreading for decades in our most prestigious institutions. Except now the festering sore is exposed for the entire world to see—including to the wealthy donors whose money provides the lifeblood of universities like Harvard.

The moment the sore burst open was on October 7, 2023, or very soon thereafter. Just a quick recap. Just days after Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel, before the country returned a single shot towards Gaza, countless student groups and academics at Western universities had already rushed to condone, downplay or even glorify Hamas’ massacre.^[7] The day after the attack, more than 30 student groups at Harvard wrote a joint statement holding Israel’s “apartheid regime” “solely responsible” for the massacre.^[8] Pro-Palestinian demonstrators aggressively harassed Israeli and Jewish students on several campuses, including Harvard, usually without facing any disciplinary sanctions. No fewer than 120 departments of gender studies around the world felt compelled to condemn Israel in the wake of the largest anti-Semitic massacre since the Holocaust, but none of them had a single word to spare for the female victims of sexual violence by Hamas and other jihadist groups. Not just sexual violence but sickening sadistic torture that almost defies description: genitals stabbed with knives or riddled with bullets, severed breasts, broken pelvises, families burned alive. ^[9]

At my own alma mater (Ghent University), hundreds of academics signed an obscene open letter that explicitly refused to condemn Hamas, shifted all blame to "Zionists" and praised Palestinians for their “tenacity and fierce resistance to racism and settler colonialism,” which the signatories found immensely “inspiring”. An open letter at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) a week after the bloodbath, again signed by hundreds of academics, exulted that 2023 “will no doubt be the year admired, recorded and studied for the way in which Palestinians steadfastly resisted colonialism, occupation and survived genocide”. The letter even called for the abolition of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at UvA, because the program was deemed “complicit in remaining silent on the unfolding genocide of the Palestinians.”^[10]

And the insanity was not limited to academic institutions. The official U.N. body for women’s rights, U.N. Women, dragged their feet for almost 50 days before finally condemning one of the most brutal violations of women’s rights in modern history, in a tweet that they deleted a few hours later, hiding behind a pathetic excuse (that they wanted to focus on a truce between the warring parties instead).^[11]

Oppressors and Oppressed

Like the Greek hydra, the ancient monster of antisemitism has multiple heads. There is the Christian ‘head’ that regards Jews as murderers of Christ and which inspired bloody pogroms in the Middle Ages, based on libelous rumors that Jewish communities poisoned the drinking water and drank the blood of Christian children. There is the racialized version of antisemitism on the Far Right, which regards the Jewish people as a parasitic life form that poisons the healthy body of society. Yet another ‘head’ is the Islamic tradition of antisemitism, which, much like the Christian variant, ultimately stems from the resentment and frustration about the Jews’ refusal to accept the latest divine revelation. And then there is the anti-Semitic tradition on the Far Left, which portrays Jews as an evil cabal of rootless and money-grabbing bankers and capitalists, outstretching their tentacles like an octopus around the world.^[12]

In short: there’s no dearth of possible historical roots for animus against the Jewish people. And yet it would be too simple to interpret the demonization of the only Jewish state in the world at our universities—and the support for its genocidal enemies—as just the hoary old monster of antisemitism rearing its ugly head.^[13] Antisemitism surely plays some role in campus protests, but the real explanation lies deeper. In a sense, the Jews and/or Zionists are merely collateral damage of a different and underlying ideology.

The intellectual roots of this ideology are complex, but the conceptual framework is easy to summarize. First you divide up the world into two mutually exclusive categories: the oppressors and the oppressed. These two groups are locked in a zero-sum struggle where one group's gain can happen only at the expense of the other's loss. There can be no middle group: either you are an oppressor or a victim. Next, you apply two completely different moral standards to those groups: those who belong to a victim group are innocent by definition and incapable of doing anything wrong. If they seem to do some horrible things, that is only because they are responding to the grave injustices to which the oppressors have subjected them. This victim group enjoys protection, compassion, the privilege of low expectations, and preferential treatment by way of compensation for their long history of suffering and oppression. As for the oppressor group, they get none of that. The only good thing the oppressors can do is to humbly acknowledge their collective guilt and unearned privileges, and to show that they are good allies of the victim group by unconditionally supporting their noble struggle (although that does not absolve them).

The dichotomy that I discuss here is the one between Western and non-Western, and by extension white vs. black. In recent years, similar victim vs. oppressor dichotomies have cropped up in other kinds of progressive discourse, and their combined approach has become known as “intersectionality”. In this intersectional framework, each dimension of sexual, physical and cultural identity has its own victim/oppressor binary (male/female, straight/LGBT, cisgender/transgender, slim/fat, and so on), each corresponding to its respective system of oppression (sexism, heteronormativity, transphobia, fatphobia, and so on). The psychologist Jonathan Haidt has used the image of a cake that is being sliced up along different axes.^[14]

From Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s The Coddling of the American Mind

Still, these binary divisions have different intellectual roots and manifest in different ways, so it’s not always enlightening to lump them together in the way activists tend to do. In fact, classical Marxism provides another example of such an oppression binary (bourgeois/proletarian), but of course Marxism long predates the rise of modern intersectionality. In any event, I think the division between Western and non-Western is the dominant and most important one, which, as we will see, takes precedence over the others in case of conflict.

Now there is only one element missing in  understanding the charade in the American Congress and the apparent outbreaks of vicious antisemitism in the most progressive bulwarks of our society: Jews are perceived to belong to the oppressor group. The prime reason is that Israel, the world's only Jewish state, is seen as the last surviving project of European settler colonialism, in which white Westerners expel, oppress or exterminate indigenous populations. Another reason is that Jews (in the US but also in Europe) are regarded as a successful “model minority” against which other minorities are often judged, with many holding positions of influence and prestige. Public surveys bear this out: Among Generation Z (ages 18 to 24), 67% agree with the statement that “Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as such.”^[15]

In this binary framework, the ultimate enemy is not so much Israel, but Western civilization, with its long history of imperialism, colonialism and white supremacy. Islamists and jihadists often proclaim that Israel is merely “little Satan,” the squire and helper of “big Satan”, which of course is the United States, Israel's loyal ally. Something similar applies to the virulent hatred of Israel in progressive circles. The small Jewish nation of less than 10 million inhabitants is targeted only insofar as it serves as a proxy for the West.^[16] Similarly, the astonishing support for Hamas and Israel's other enemies has little to do with any genuine ideological affinity but everything with the old maxim: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The paragliders on October 7 were lionized as noble warriors not for what they were standing for, but what they were construed as fighting against: Western colonialism, racism and imperialism.

According to historian Jeffrey Herf, this shift in the (academic) Left towards seeing Jews and Israelis as oppressors occurred after Israel’s spectacular victory during the Six-Day War in 1967.^[17] After originally supporting the establishment of Israel in the post-war years and heralding Zionism as a liberation movement for the Jewish people, leftist academics began to turn against Zionism in the 1960s, equating it with racism and colonialism, and thus anti-Zionism with anti-racism. This was partly under the influence of Soviet propaganda, but as we will see, there were other ideological reasons not directly related to communism. In any event, by the time of the infamous “Zionism is racism” resolution adopted by the U.N. in 1975, endorsed by a coalition of communist and Arab nations, the volte-face was already more or less complete. From then on Jews were perpetrators rather than victims, and Israel represented racism, colonialism and white supremacy.

Never mind that there are hundreds of thousands of Sephardic and Black Jews living in Israel, as well as hundreds of thousands of Arab Israelis who practice Islam, that Jewish “colonizers” have no homeland to return to at all, that Jews are just about the most hated group in the world (comprising just 2.4 % of the U.S. population, they bear the brunt of 60% of all religious hate crimes)^[18], that Jews have been persecuted almost to annihilation precisely because they failed to pass as “white,” that Israel is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East and was founded with a U.N. mandate, that Palestinians and Israelis are ethnically indistinguishable—none of this matters in the slightest. In this infantile binary worldview, Jews and Israelis as a class are “white,” hence colonizers, hence racists. As some protestors have delicately put it on their placards: “IDF = KKK.”

How progressives became reactionaries

The demonization of Israel and reflexive sympathy for its genocidal enemies is not the only harmful result of this neat division of the world into perpetrators and victims locked in an implacable zero-sum struggle. By presenting Western civilization as the root of all evil, this ideology ultimately ends up with a wholesale rejection of everything Western civilization stands for—science, modernity, progress, freedom of expression, human rights—viewing all of these things as a cynical cover for imperialism, oppression, exploitation and racism. Worst of all, it devolves into the most reactionary form of racist essentialism: the view that democracy, rationality, logical thinking, and secularism are exponents of 'whiteness', not suitable for people with dark skin.^[19]

How is it possible that progressives, of all people, have embraced such reactionary nonsense? It is easier to understand why there is a long history of far-right ideologues in the West cozying up to foreign dictators, from the fellow travelers of Mussolini and Hitler in the 1930s all the way up to Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson.^[20] If you are nostalgic for the old days, when strong leaders, churches and traditions still commanded respect, it’s not so surprising that you develop a soft spot for someone like Vladimir Putin or Viktor Orban (even fundamentalist Muslims and Christians got along pretty well before 9/11). The same goes for the belief that white people are somehow endowed with a proclivity for rationality, individualism and logical thinking. It’s one thing to find such noxious ideas in extreme right-wing circles. But that progressives, of all people, have started to warm to such racist essentialism requires a slightly more convoluted explanation.

The backdrop for this progressive betrayal of Enlightenment values is the history of Western colonialism. After the Second World War, the Western powers were exhausted from the war and increasingly unable to hold on to their overseas possessions. Independence movements were springing up everywhere, trying to throw off the yoke of colonial rule. Like a series of dominoes, the Western colonies began to topple, with one success inspiring another. Some of these decolonial movements found inspiration in Western intellectual traditions—such as socialism and communism, Arab nationalism, or Enlightenment universalism. But there were more radical thinkers who saw an implacable struggle between colonizers and colonized, and who wanted to radically break with Western civilization. Or at least, in the words of one of these thinkers, to wield Western thinkers such as Marx, Freud and Hegel “to incriminate the very civilization producing all of them”.^[21] The most influential expression of this Manichean worldview of the West versus the Rest emerged in Algeria, not coincidentally one of the bloodiest anti-colonial battlegrounds. But it was not developed by an Algerian, but by a Black psychiatrist born in the West Indian French colony of Martinique: Frantz Fanon.