Names—Like ‘America First’ or ‘Progressive’—Have Histories Neither Donald Trump nor anti-Israel boycotters can duck the political origin of their campaign slogans. By Cynthia Ozick
http://www.wsj.com/articles/nameslike-america-first-or-progressivehave-histories-1472598153
It was recently revealed that Donald Trump’s family, immigrants from Germany, chose early on to live a lie: They called themselves Swedes. There is more pathos than blame in this deceit. After all, they were by then established Americans residing in Queens, N.Y., far from the venomous swastikas of Munich. Understandably, they were in fear of stigma, much as today a Muslim immigrant from, say, Sri Lanka might dread being associated with the Islamists of Hamas.
Yet Mr. Trump’s heritage of self-conscious deception discloses something else. His choice of “America First” as a slogan to inspire is unlikely to have been made out of innocence, and still less out of ignorance. Historical amnesia—a later generation having forgotten the Lindbergh era and its prevailing nativism, including anti-Semitism—in this instance cannot apply. He knew the phrase well. Responsibility for the baleful implications of Charles Lindbergh’s cry of “America First” was exactly what those fake Swedes were hoping to evade.
Names, like families, have histories. Academics, particularly the historians among them, and writers (not omitting the journalists) who term themselves “progressives” are hardly invoking the admirable but nearly eclipsed Robert La Follette, the Wisconsin reformer of the early 20th century who founded an ephemeral American party of that name. Not unlike Mr. Trump when he pretends that “America First” is an expression new-born and pure, they mean to offer the label they flaunt as altogether free of the impress of the past.
It cannot be done, at least not naively. No name is a vacant well. For thinking citizens who are reluctant to toss history into Orwell’s memory hole, these self-defined progressives carry, willy-nilly, the tainted name of those earlier progressives, Stalin’s fellow travelers, who were willfully blind to the reality of the Great Promise and its gulags and show trials. What’s in a name? The date and place and meaning of its birth. And as a German is not a Swede, so is a progressive not a La Follette.
As for the unlucky descendants of Captain Charles Boycott, the ostracized Irish land agent known for the cruelty of his summary evictions, perhaps, like the Trump family, they have sought other identities and are nowadays mercifully concealed under Smith and Jones. Boycott was a vile fellow, and the legacy of his name reflects the indecency it evokes.
The term “boycott,” currently one-third of an infamous and shamelessly accelerating trio—boycott, divest, sanction—is designed to harm the Jews of the state of Israel and to extinguish a living nation. And more. So energetic a will to boycott Jews instantly exposes its source and inspiration: the Nazi “K auf nicht bei Juden” campaign—Don’t Buy From Jews—which led directly to the smashing of glass and the burning of synagogues and ultimately to the extirpation of the Jews of Europe.
That repugnant movements repeat themselves is unsurprising; when depravity is unopposed, permission is tacitly granted to do it again. An unmistakable spawn of the German boycotts is the activist fiefdom headed by Riham Barghouti and brazenly known as “The New York Campaign for the Boycott of Israel,” an entity dedicated to defamation, canard, dishonest sloganeering and the fomenting of hatred. Its progenitor may be the blatantly crude Big Lie of the 20th century, but its language is a sophisticated masquerade in the idiom of human rights, with the aim of duping the guileless, chief among whom are writers, artists, intellectuals, the touted cream of the crop. It is this nobly seductive idiom that, with malice aforethought, has been schooled in the means to turn the Jewish state into an international pariah.
And beyond denigration and calumny, what is the underlying intent of the boycott of Israel? Beneath an ostensibly weaponless crust, it brings no critical inquiry to the ethos it silently and unblinkingly validates—a predatory ethos that justifies the continued siege and bloody ambush of random civilians, a boy on his bike, a girl asleep in her bed, rabbis at prayer, passengers in a bus, families in cars, celebrants at a Seder, city folk in pubs. It is, besides, an officially sanctioned ethos that lauds teenage stabbers, car-rammings, kidnappings, a school curriculum instilling hatred of Jews from kindergarten on, children’s summer camps training for the killing of Jews, proud mothers celebrating their murdering sons as heroes and patriots and servants of God.
There is a commonplace word for these depredations: It is anti-Semitism, and what a pity, and what a scandal, and what a dirty display it is, to conflate, as the boycotters do, open Jew-hatred—the wish to destroy an entire nation of Jews—with the sublime notion of human rights.
Slogans and names—America First, progressive, boycott—tell their own stories; they confess their origins. And when their origins are grim, we know them for what they are.
Ms. Ozick is a short-story writer, novelist and essayist.
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