The best way there is to know how someone grew up is to
listen to them tell how a third party should be treated. If you get acquainted
with someone, and you detect in them a definite attitude as to how other people
should be treated, you know this is the treatment they have themselves received
while growing up.
It applies whether you work with someone; whether you just
met someone socially, or even if you're a teacher and have a student or two
constantly passing judgment on other students, and telling you how you should
treat them. What is also true is that individuals of a certain culture have
tendencies of varying degrees to advocate how someone else should be treated.
If you see that the same tendency is repeated in a number of them, you can be
certain this is a trait of their culture.
I have lived in Canada
for half a century, and the most powerful influence here has been the culture
next door; that of the United
States of America . And as the culture down
there kept transforming, so have the winds of change blown the evolving
tendencies in our direction. But while most people interpret what comes from
south of the border as being simply American, the more attentive minds can
discern which developments are caused by what segments of the American culture.
Given my personal circumstances and what I have encountered
since early on during my stay in Canada , the influence of one
particular segment of the American society has been of interest to me more than
any other. That was the Jewish influence. It happened because the work that the
Jewish organizations were doing in America was not restricted to that
country but was systemic at its core and global in nature. Thus, the work that
was done in America was done in Canada – sometimes a little differently to suit
a slightly different circumstance – and
echoes of it was reverberating everywhere else in the world that I was able to
study.
The one thing that was pronounced and remained constant
throughout the time that I have been studying the Jewish phenomenon in America
is the role that fear has been playing in that culture. From a confident America where
people walked with their heads high because of who they were, they have
transformed into fearful little things running around accusing each other of
not repeating often enough that they are exceptional. It is as if the
repetition of the word – like the recitation of the rosary – was going to take
them closer to the heavens where they will sit with the gods of admiration and
world respect, thus become one with them.
Inciting America
to use fear as a tool of foreign policy has been almost everywhere that a Jew
put pen to paper, and I discussed several such instances on this website. But
nothing has been as powerfully expressive of that tendency as the editorial of
April 28, 2014 published in the Washington Post under the title: “Obama's
half-measures give Vladimir Putin little to fear”. As far as I know, this is
the first time that an iconic American publication has used the word fear in
the title of an editorial concerning a country that may no longer be a
full-fledged superpower but remains one militarily.
After the introduction and after telling what they have
observed, the editors of the Post get to deplore what they see; they get to
lament what they dislike, and get to make recommendations as to what ought to
be done next. They deplore this: “the [Obama] administration did not want to
act without the European Union, which announced its own minimalist sanctions.”
They lament this: “the U.S.
sanctions policy is 'calibrated' less toward rescuing Ukraine than toward … set back U.S. economic
growth.” And they tell what must be done now: “Those motives ought to be
trumped by the imperative of standing against forcible change of borders in Europe .” In other words, they say that Obama must choose
to frighten Putin even if he must further starve the unemployed Americans and
their families.
And the Post editors finally express their frustration at
the fact that things are not going their way – the Jewish way. This is how they
do it: “By choosing not to use the economic weapons at his disposal and
broadcasting that restraint to the world, Mr. Obama is telling Mr. Putin as
well as other[s] ... that they continue to have little to fear from the United States .”