h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi Cass,
There is so much in this wide ranging analysis but I'll start my critique with a comment of yours right at the end:

"the Jewish story was a story of Holocaust and extermination"

Failed extermination would be a more accurate way of putting it. It would be interesting - if controversial - to look at the influence of "the Jewish story" in each of the following phenomena two of which you have alluded to in earlier paragraphs:

1. The entertainment industry both in England and in Hollywood
2. Banking/Finance

and one you haven't

3. The "middle East conflict" that has raged more or less continuously since WW2.

In doing so you might consider is it "anti-semitic" to even mention such things and was Virginia Woolf being (subliminally?) anti-semitic in her criticism of the "middle brow"?

Plotinlaois

I mention the experience of the Jews merely as a possible avenue that someone might wish to explore if they wished to assert that Britain was wrong in making a success of its Nation State solution married to limited monarchy/ executive power and representative democracy, because this was inferior to another option.

I did not analyse that position because I thought that what I had written was long enough. Moreover, it was not my argument- and it is not one that I feel equipped to develop. Quite the reverse. The Statelessness of the Jews was directly related to those two bursts of mass killings undertaken by massive new states just formed in order to unite what could be called Nations- the Christians of Iberia and the Germans of Nazi Europe...

Of course there is a whole Jewish story, and there is a long history that could be developed through some of the areas that you have mentioned. None of it suggests a superior way of surviving in challenging times- apart from as refugees. And significantly, in those tubulent times preparing for the struggle for the survival of the fittest from the late 1860's Samuel (?)Hertzog decided that in fact the statelessness of the Jews was at the root cause of the problems that Jewish people were encountering- pogroms etc..

Not all Jews agreed with the Zionists and many regarded themselves as legal citizens within the non-"Societies" of the modern state; but the maltreatment of Jews preceded the creation of the "Great Britain" project and if anything anti-semitism like other forms of religious bigotry declined in intensity generally in "Great Britain". Britain did have a Christianised Jew as a Prime Minister and then Jewish-Jews as MP's .

But as I have tried to point out the postives were balanced by negatives. Was it Bernard Shaw who said that everything that was not forbidden should become compulsory?

The social and the voluntary dynamics were being increasingly by-passed towards the end of the nineteenth century, and the present situation in Israel and the Middle East would appear to be based upon the idea that the State solution is THE ONLY One and that both Jews and Palestinians have learned this by hard experience. Any school-child could tell you the answer to the problem of Jerusalem; adults have got to learn to be as "grown up" as children and learn to share: but that would be social and dynamic- and States can not do that.


As for Virginia Woolf she was married to a Jew, and killed herself [she wrote] to free Leonard Woolf from the burden that her illness imposed upon him,and I find it very difficult to see her position as in any way anti-semitic. The fact is that she had grown up in a highly specialised and creative environment. Her Father's first wife had been the daughter of W.M. Thackery; and on her mother's side her cousins included the historian H.A.L. Fisher and the composer Vaughan Williams. These were her Highbrows the people who were constantly pushing back the frontiers of human understanding of the universe and everything- into that infinite space of our human imaginations that is the ultimate frontier.

Regards

Cass