CAN EVERYONE BE WRONG?
ONLY THE HISTORICALLY ILLITERATE COULD UTTER THIS QUESTION.
In 2002, the UN’s then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan said of an Israeli military action in the West Bank: “The whole world is demanding that Israel withdraws — I don’t think the whole world … can be wrong.”
This implied question — Can the whole world be wrong? — is essentially the justification for the global mob attack we are seeing today against Israel and Jews.
It implies that herd mentality is, by definition, always right.
If the United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and marching millions globally accuse Israel of war crimes, “genocide” and all sorts of falderal, it must be true.
Can the whole world be wrong?
This is the title of a magnificent book by Richard Landes, who I was fortunate to spend time with during my visit to Israel last year. He explores the mob mentality that drives our antizionist and antisemitic moment.
The groupthink and collective hysteria we are seeing on this topic are self-validating because, well, if everyone is agreed, then they must be right.
Here’s a different question: Could the whole world be historically illiterate enough to ask such a profoundly preposterous question?
Human history is an endless chronicle of colossal numbers of people being profoundly wrong.
Mass hysteria, collective irrationality, crowd contagion — these are core characteristics of human existence.
Off the top of my head, I’m thinking of witch hunts from Medieval Europe to colonial America.
Pogroms against Jews in Kishinev and lynchings of African-Americans in the Old South, driven by falsified allegations against the targeted populations, and endorsed by vast majorities.
Genocides from Armenia to Rwanda spurred by hysterical xenophobia.
Revolutionary “purity” and political terror driven by mass adherence to new ideologies from the Reign of Terror in France to Stalin’s purges to the Khmer Rouge in our lifetimes.
Disasters and stampedes that happen occasionally today — literal herd movements — that mirror “intellectual” or social mob mentality.
Then there is the case probably most familiar to us. We can visualize the thousands of automatonic German citizens “heil”ing Hitler.
Scarier still is the knowledge that it was the intellectuals, the academics, the doctors, the lawyers, the civil servants, the police, the judges, the clergy, the industrial and business elites, with some exceptions, who most enthusiastically and early on facilitated the Nazis’ successes.
Because, we can imagine them thinking, if everyone is doing it, can they all be wrong?
Of course they can be. Only an idiot would assume otherwise.
History is filled with maniacal millions jumping on board deeply disastrous trends.
More relevant than this general history is the specific application to Jewish history.
Antisemitism, including antisemitic violence, has always been justified by circular, tautological reasoning.
If everyone hates the Jews, the Jews must deserve it. If everyone is antisemitic, the antisemites must be right.
Can the whole world be wrong?
It is deeply unenlightened to ask this question on any topic.
To ask it on a topic relating to Jews, after history has already answered this question with the blood of millions, is an act of staggering blindness, of obscene moral and intellectual failure.
If there was ever a litmus test for the failure to learn from history, it is the question: Can the whole world be wrong?
George Orwell, in one of his too-little-known but most brilliantly succinct axioms, stated, “[O]ne of the marks of antisemitism is an ability to believe stories that could not possibly be true.”
This is what is happening today.
People who are malevolent and/or ignorant, accuse Israel of “genocide” and millions fall for it, repeating the lie and baying for Jewish blood in retaliation for a crime Israel never committed.
And in a perfect illustration of the madness of crowds, millions look at what is happening and ask: Can the whole world be wrong?
Far from being proof of principled righteousness, this unanimity is evidence of exactly the opposite.
The whole world is headed for a moral precipice. And seeing they are in the company of so many others, they mindlessly and sanctimoniously proclaim this as unassailable evidence they are on the right path.
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I am most amazed when people of African heritage ask this question. For centuries "the whole world" thought that they were barely more than animals, that they couldn't feel pain the way white people do, that enslaving them was helping them become civilized. My father was a Jew of color and so I am very aware that these grotesque lies were believed by millions of white people up to and throughout the 1960s. In many countries and regions of the USA the consensus among the white majority was hardly different than it had been before the Civil War. Can everyone be wrong, I would often be asked when we lived in the Jim Crow South. YES!
Excellent article!