Pogrom is here defined as virulent persecution of Jews to the point of extermination. It is virulent because a pogrom is infectious in a society. It goes to the point of extermination because it belongs to the mad ethics of revolution. The word is a Russian one meaning destruction and it has been adopted into European languages. As such it is a semantic reminder of Russian treatment of Jews under the Empire and during its collapse at the time of the Revolution; it is also a witness to the tradition of destruction of things Jewish in Western Europe.1
Not all persecutions are bad; some of them are necessary and good; but there is danger in all of them. The danger is twofold. In the first place the energy to persecute often comes from coiling the springs of violence. The genuine evil that has to be eradicated sometimes becomes subordinated to the animal thrill of the witch-hunt. In the second place most persecutions take place against minorities and these become the target in the popular mind for frustrations and dissatisfactions which are experienced rather than understood. One of our dissatisfactions lies in our limited capacity to integrate well with our fellows. Good fellowship of a fleeting kind is born when the hungry pack thunders after the fox. Communist and Nazi thought-controllers have shown themselves well aware of the value of scapegoats in forging tribal unity.
Persecution is the last but one refuge of the majority mind. The last refuge is pogrom. The first method of dealing with a minority is integration. If the minority is troublesome the majority may try segregation. The next phase is persecution, whose aim—often forgotten in the sound and fury—is forced integration. After this there is left only elimination of the alien and deviant group.
In our post-Christian day when no values are absolute (except freedom of thought) persecution passes more easily into pogrom. In pre-Reformation days when an absolute value was given to objective truth and there did exist sacramental brakes on our animality there were pogroms, but they were less than persecutions. Sometimes the latter were necessary. Here is an example.
A well-organised twelfth-century movement called Albigensianism declared that matter was evil and marriage and procreation should be forbidden. If society had tolerated this opinion in our benevolent and muddled modern way grave consequences would have ensued. The logical end-result to society would have been its non-existence. The Albigensians were accordingly persecuted. The mode and manner of the persecution is another matter. To some Albigensians who died at the stake their death was a martyrdom to principle. They were fanatics. Some who hunted them down were fanatics as well. It is one thing to have a good reason for suppression of false and dangerous doctrine, and another to allow oneself to be carried by enthusiasm across the borderline of reason and of humanity.
Herein lies the repugnant thing in religious persecutions of the past. Their instigators appear incapable of distinguishing between hatred of heresy and love of the heretic. Religion naturally enough is blamed for these excesses—the thumb-screw, the rack, the stake—particularly by scientific humanists. There is an equally plausible explanation, however, and this states that the fault does not lie in religion but in human nature. Too often “religion” was the blanket excuse and vehicle for excesses and cruelties that belong to the being of men whose animality was dominant over their reason. The Holy Inquisition was not holy at all. It was a blanket name for the nationalism and sadism in the Spanish character.2 The exploitation of the poor by Liberals during the Industrial Revolution was justified by a Calvinism which promised the fruits of the earth to the predestined. Exactly the same Calvinism under a Puritan mask blessed the high days of imperialism when Britain was given dominion over palm and pine by an Empire-loving Yaweh. Humanity is simply not human enough. Leave it to itself and the beast conquers the angel. It is no use then appealing to religious faith as Luther did—and some before him and many after him—in the hope that malice is thereby cloaked. You simply whitewash the Augean stables. On the contrary Divine Grace must work on humanity from within, for, as Paul would put it, the law of the members is stronger than the law of the mind.
The kind of animality we receive from our human endowment does not appear to be so different from that of lower animals. Using the Pavlovian technique Russian mandarins brain-wash men as thoroughly as Pavlov conditioned his dogs. The sciences of comparative physiology and biology emphasise the similarities of human and animal reaction to stress. The differences are indeed more important than the similarities in the two kinds of behaviour, but at least we know that we share with mammals a similar kind of chemistry and physiology. But the differences are such that while men sometimes act as if they were only animals, animals never act as if they were men. It is in this reverse Orwellian world that pogroms take place.
This world I shall call a phantom world. In this world the animal has dominated the spirit. It is not the normal world in which men and women live. It is that world into which they go individually or collectively when they are burdened with severe stresses which they cannot or will not resolve. Let us call their state—at least where a group is concerned—one of temporary madness in which they cease to be a group and lose their identity in a herd. The herd has usually a leader and he is often permanently mad—a paranoiac masking as a prophet, a megalomaniac posing as a Führer, a sadist pretending or believing that he is a Flagellant, a Caesar believing he is a god—all those grandiose dreamers who are only found among warm-blooded mammals with souls. Normally he would be recognised, but in the phantom world he is taken at the valuation he puts upon himself, until sanity seeps back into the herd and they become a group, and then individuals and wreak upon him a vengeance as savage as the judgments he meted out in his brief drunken reign on the throne of power. As we shall see, the leaders of pogroms are their own executioners.
Pogroms against the Jews have nearly always a religious aspect to them. This is not primarily because all persecutors had religious motives, real or apparent. Some pogroms were carried out by neo-pagans like the Nazis; some by religious pagans such as the Pharaohs; some by atheists like the Communists. But in every case the Jews themselves, sometimes without wishing to, have introduced a religious note into the affair. They cannot help this, since their culture was conceived and born of the direct wish of God. Unlike so many other nations their culture grew out of religion. For other nations the culture was there and religion was either its product or was imposed upon it by captors or missionaries. That is why none of the pogroms described in this book are without meaning to Christians. They have a meaning to the Jews also, but they must find it out for themselves. This book is simply evidence that the victim of pogrom is the mirror of Gentiles.