Bob Moore, the Persecuting Society and the Jews

I have long been a fan of the work of a medievalist named Robert Moore (or Bob Moore as he likes to be called) and in particular his work on the framework that he refers to as the 'Persecuting Society'. (1) Since his work has recently been in my mind quite a lot: I thought it would be appropriate to briefly write something on this framework and its utility in relation to the understanding of 'persecutions'.

Now the concept of the 'Persecuting Society' is simple enough: a society is subject to collective beliefs and prevailing ideological systems through which individuals and groups filter their life experience through in order to - shall we say - make sense of it. A more appropriate term would be the rationalization of experience and use of that rationalized experience to develop actions and policies which seek to deal with the root cause (identified through that ideological system and rationalized experience) of the innumerable social, economic and political issues that plague every society.

These prevailing ideological systems act - as we have said - as a kind of filter through which experience passes. Ideological systems always have an 'other' group to whom they ascribe - wholly or in part - the evil that afflicts the wider society. This is so because no society is ever perfect and as soon as the society concerned suffers a state of significant uncertainty or severe flux then it tends to focus its repressive attentions upon the 'other' group.

In the bad times the ideas of wider society about a given 'other' group that found formation and acceptance in the good times are amplified by the disquieting situation and radicalize quickly. This in turn leads to a form of Janisian risky shift whereby as the bad times get worse: the society adopts ever more radical means to deal with the 'other' group as well as spreading wider acceptance of these more radical positions across the society.

This often leads to prosecutions and persecutions as well as an increasing and evolving picture of the 'other' group and the nature of its influence and crimes. Even when the good times return after a spate of bad times: it has already - in the words of popular authors on this subject - poisoned a generation. This generational poison is very difficult to erase and is usually only removed by the passing of time and the death of those who were convinced (during the bad times) of this radical negative picture of the 'other' group they have been presented with.

Only with a new generation is this picture likely to be questioned, but while it can be questioned and abandoned by a new generation: it can also be expanded, evolved and deepened by it. This means that hatred and prejudice - in liberal speak - does not die and that it is next to impossible to 'educate it away' except for by controlling the education of the young.

If you think about: it was this strategy - to abandon the former generation and focus on the youth - that was so successful for the (heavily jewish) liberals and left in the 1920s/1930s when they began taking over the school and university system. This only bore fruit some forty years later in the 1950s/1960s when the students of those earlier times were respected pillars of the community: teachers and academics.

They formed the minds of the young and they created a new 'other' group: the racist anti-Semitic conservative.

It was no longer the case that the young saw other races, communists and jews as their enemies: as their parents had. Instead these same forces who their parents regarded as the 'other' group seized the initiative and turned children against their parents on an intellectual level. Thus when the children became parents themselves they passed along their new biases and prejudices to their children.

However these prejudices and biases were the hatred and prejudice of those who they claim to be prejudiced and biased. The grandchildren of those original conservatives then came to see their own grandparents as the embodiment of ignorance and evil. They have created a kind of pseudo-narrative akin to that they claim that their enemies have made about 'minority groups' in relation to this 'other' group that comprises those who roughly hold the beliefs of their grandparents and their conception of the 'other' group.

In essence: the racist anti-Semitic conservatives of this world have become the new jews. If by jews we mean those who (as the conventional narrative of jewish history holds) are eternally and irrationally persecuted by those who do not want to understand them and instead seek to harass and discriminate against them.

It is interesting to note this juxtaposition in that the jews of history have now become those who persecute those they claim have persecuted them for millennia. I - and many other historians - disagree specifically and/or broadly with many of the victim hood claims put out by jewish historians, but this is immaterial to my point: they believe it and so frequently do those who are educated and trained by them.

The jews by becoming 'pillars of society' have created a 'persecuting society' against those they believe have wronged them and thus have inverted the very idea of the Protocols of Zion - according to Cohn's theory (which I should add is both plagiarised and widely discredited) - of them as a 'conspiracy against the jews'.

Essentially the jews have taken the recommendations and ideas of those who they claim have sought to persecute them and put them into action, while claiming the absolute opposite.

References

(1) The work of his that principally deals with this is Robert Moore, 2006, 'The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe 950 - 1250', 2nd Edition, Wiley-Blackwell: London