Competitive Victimhood 101
(BRENTON SANDERSON) Despite being the wealthiest, most politically well-connected and influential group in Western nations, Jews have assiduously (and successfully) cultivated the notion they have always been, and remain, a cruelly-persecuted victim group deserving of everyone’s profound sympathy. The “Holocaust” narrative has, of course, been central to this endeavor. The entire social and political order of the contemporary West — based on the alleged virtues of racial diversity and multiculturalism — has been erected on the moral foundations of “the Holocaust.” White people cannot be recognized as a group with interests because “never again.” Western nations have a moral obligation to accept unlimited non-White immigration because “never again.” Whites should meekly accept their deliberate displacement (and ultimate extinction) because “never again.”
Numerous studies have demonstrated the power that can accrue to individuals and groups who successfully cultivate their status as victims and underdogs. Social psychologists have labelled the tendency to see one’s group as having suffered more than an outgroup as “competitive victimhood.” While conflicting groups have engaged in competitive victimhood for centuries, this is largely a modern phenomenon that should be understood against the backdrop of contemporary culture. Friedrich Nietzsche remains the first and best theorist of competitive victimhood, proposing that historical developments in Western culture, ranging from Christianity to the Enlightenment, led to a reversal of values where old notions of “might makes right” were transformed. Today, our knee-jerk reaction to powerful groups is to assume they are immoral and corrupt, while members of victimized groups are assumed to be innocent and morally superior.
Activist Jews are acutely aware of the power of competitive victimhood in contemporary culture, and much of the research into the subject has been carried out in Israel. A study by Schnabel and colleagues found that groups are motivated to engage in competitive victimhood for two reasons: the need for moral identity and the need for social power.
With regards to the first motivation, people generally associate victimization with innocence. Therefore, if one’s ingroup ‘wins’ the victim status, it means that it is also perceived as moral. With regards to the second motivation, people generally view victims as entitled for compensation. Therefore, if one’s ingroup ‘wins’ the victim status, it means that it is entitled to various resources such as policies to empower it or higher budgets. Groups struggle over both power (budgets, influence, etc.) and moral identity (i.e., group members typically see themselves as ‘the good guys’ and members of the other group as ‘the bad guys’). This struggle makes them engage in competitive victimhood.[1]
These studies, often framed around the difficulties presented to Israel by the victim status of the Palestinians, shed light on the psychological motivations behind attempts to gain acknowledgement that one’s ingroup has been subjected to more injustice than an adversarial social group. The findings show that desire for power plays a key role, and that victimhood experiences (real, perceived or fabricated) have far-reaching consequences for the relations between groups, and “especially in contexts where material and social resources are scarce, group members actively attempt to affirm that one’s own group has been victimized more than the other.”[2]
Given the group evolutionary stakes involved, it’s unsurprising that discourse in many countries is often characterized by competitive victimhood—of different social groups competing over who suffers more. Young and Sullivan note that competitive victimhood is an adaptive behavior through which “groups can unilaterally achieve greater group cohesiveness, provide justification for violence performed in the past, reduce feelings of responsibility for harm doing, increase perceived control through the elicitation of social guilt from the outgroup, and elicit support from third parties.”[3]
The political and economic (and therefore biological) benefits derived from competitive victimhood account for the ubiquity of Jewish victim narratives in contemporary Western culture, and why Jewish historiography is replete with exaggerated accounts of historical calamities, persecution, exile, deportations, and pogroms. According to the standard Jewish account, the biblical Pharaoh, Amalek, and Haman of Persia all attempted to annihilate the Jews, followed by a long sequence of enemies, massacres, deportations, inquisitions, and pogroms. Through this lachrymose Jewish victimhood prism, “the Holocaust” is just the latest in this series of recurring victimizations.
Competitive victimhood is built into the liturgical fabric of Judaism through observances like the fast day of Tisha B’Av (the tenth day of the Hebrew month of Av, usually in the middle of August) when Jews reflect on the history of Jewish trauma from the destruction of the First and Second Temples to the medieval expulsions, the Spanish Inquisition, through to “the Holocaust.” One Jewish source notes how “references to the Holocaust, Nazis, Hitler, WWII, Germany etc. seep into the conversation amongst Jews, regardless of age, religious observance, or political affiliation.” Ashkenazi Jews in particular “continue to internalize and carry the trauma of the Holocaust in a way that shapes how we think and behave as Jews in America (and maybe throughout the rest of the world).” Carrying such feelings while comprising an ethnic ruling elite means Jews often feel “both entitlement and victimhood at the same time” which “can become unsettling and paradoxical.”
This Jewish victimhood mentality is nourished by socialization processes that teach Jews “that victimhood has potential gains, and that aggressiveness can be legitimate and just if one party has suffered from its adversary.”[4] In Israel, victimhood-oriented socialization begins as early as kindergarten and Israeli children are taught that Israelis suffer more than Palestinians, and that they have to protect themselves and fight for their very existence.[5]
Research has found the presence of the Holocaust in Israeli school curricula, cultural products, and political discourse has increased, rather than decreased over the years, and that Israelis are increasingly more preoccupied with the Holocaust, constantly dwell on it, and fear that it will “happen again.”[6] One study, moreover, found that:
Jewish Israelis tend to harbor a “perpetual victimhood” representation of their history, as a group that has suffered persecution, discrimination, and threats of annihilation throughout generations, culminating in the Holocaust. Today the presence of the Holocaust in Israel is pervasive, and most Jewish Israelis acknowledge the Holocaust as part of their collective identity and have internalized this victimization as a core feature of their Israeli identity. Thus, Jewish Israelis are raised in a culture that emphasizes the continuity between past suffering and present suffering.[7]
Studies have found that a focus on an ingroup’s victimization (real or perceived) reduces sympathy toward the adversary allegedly responsible for this victimization, as well as toward unrelated adversaries.[8] A group completely preoccupied with its own suffering can develop an “egotism of victimhood” where members are unable to see things from the perspective of the rival group, are unable or unwilling to empathize with the suffering of the rival group, and are unwilling to accept any responsibility for harm inflicted by their own group. Researchers questioned Israeli Jews about their memory of the conflict with the Arabs, from its inception to the present, and found their “consciousness is characterized by a sense of victimization, a siege mentality, blind patriotism, belligerence, self-righteousness, dehumanization of the Palestinians and insensitivity to their suffering.”[9] They found a close connection between that collective memory and the memory of “past persecution of Jews” and the Holocaust. That is, the more deeply Israeli Jews have internalized a narrative of historic Jewish persecution, the less sympathy they have for Palestinians. It was this victimhood lens that led Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, on the eve of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, to declare “The alternative to this is Treblinka.’”
Jewish Indifference to Harming Whites
The harm done to White group interests by Jewish activism in the post-World War II era has been enormous. Jews have used their domination of the commanding heights of Western societies to effectively sabotage the successful biological and cultural reproduction of White people, whom they regard, based on their ethnocentric and jaundiced reading of history, as their foremost ethnic adversaries. This sabotage takes many forms, including: lobbying for mass non-White immigration into Western countries; the entrenchment of multiculturalism and diversity as central and unchallengeable pillars of social policy; the hypersexualization of popular culture and championing of sexual and gender non-conformity; the deplatforming and censoring of all dissident opinion; and, lately, the diffusion and mainstreaming of Critical Race Theory through all sections of society, and the designation of any pro-White advocacy as a form of terrorism. The net result of these policies has been the rapid demographic and cultural decline of White people in countries they founded and dominated for hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of years.
All of these policies, so zealously supported by Jewish activist organizations, and reinforced by the Jewish-dominated education and media sectors, have their ultimate conceptual basis in the Jewish intellectual movements chronicled by Kevin MacDonald in Culture of Critique. These movements were preoccupied with undermining the evolutionarily-adaptive precepts and practices that had historically dominated Western societies, with the implicit objective being to render White Europeans less effective competitors to Jews for access to resources and reproductive success.
Boasian anthropology, for example, overturned established notions regarding the importance of racial differences, and the need to maintain immigration restrictions and instill a strong racial identity in White children (and a strong aversion to miscegenation) as part of their socialization. The ideas of Boasian anthropology were infused (through the determined efforts of by Ashley Montagu) into the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race (which contributed to the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education in Topeka).[10] This Statement (and later UN statements based on it) was described by Robert Wald Sussman (The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea, Harvard University Press, 2014, 207), as “the triumph of Boasian anthropology on a world-historical scale.”[11] This is because of its role in providing an intellectual justification for pressuring the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to abandon their policies favoring their founding racial stock and ending racial restrictions on immigration.
Equally damaging to White interests was the assault on the family from the 1960s onwards—part of a great cultural shift from the affirmation to the repudiation of inherited values. The familial, religious and ethnic ties of White people were presented as an oppressive burden imposed by the past—a way in which parents encumber their offspring with an inheritance of dysfunctional norms. Frankfurt School intellectuals insisted the traditional European family structure was pathogenic and a breeding ground “for the production of ‘authoritarian personalities’ who are inclined to submit to dominant authorities, however irrational.” This view echoed Jewish post-Freudian intellectual Wilhelm Reich, who insisted the authoritarian family is of critical importance for the authoritarian state because the family “becomes the factory in which the state’s structure and ideology are molded.”[12] Crucial for Reich was the repression of childhood sexuality, which, in his view, created children who are docile, fearful of authority, and in general anxious and submissive. Reich claimed the role of traditional “repressive” Western sexual morality was “to produce acquiescent subjects who, despite distress and humiliation, are adjusted to the authoritarian order.” Herbert Marcuse agreed, insisting that the “liberation of sexuality and the creation of non-hierarchical democratic structures in the family, workplace and society at large would create personalities resistant to fascism.”[13]
Such ideas motivated the Jewish hypersexualization of Western culture from the 1960s onwards—which led to a revolution in Western sexual mores, family structure and child-rearing practices that have had dire consequences for White group interests. Kevin MacDonald notes that: “Applied to gentile culture, the subversive program of psychoanalysis would have the expected effect of resulting in less-competitive children; in the long term, gentile culture would be increasingly characterized by low-investment parenting, and… there is evidence that the sexual revolution inaugurated, or at least greatly facilitated, by psychoanalysis has indeed had this effect.”[14]
While denouncing the traditional White family as proto-fascistic, Frankfurt School intellectuals also championed radical individualism as the quintessence of psychological health for White people. The “sane” individual was promoted as someone who had broken free from the pathogenic norms of Western culture, and realized his or her human potential without relying on membership in collectivist groups. Jewish Frankfurt School theorist Erich Fromm argued, for instance, in his book The Sane Society (1956) that: “Mental health is characterized by the ability to love and create, by the emergence from incestuous ties to clan and soil, by a sense of identity based on one’s experience of self as the subject and agent of one’s powers, by the grasp of reality inside and outside of ourselves, that is, by the development of objectivity and reason.”[15] The embrace of radical individualism by White people, promoted by the likes of Fromm, was, not surprisingly, conducive (through inhibiting anti-Semitism) to the continuation of Judaism as a cohesive group.
Ethnic Defense or Attack?
Jews, to the extent they admit their involvement in these and other damaging intellectual movements and social policies shaped by them, often portray them as a necessary ethnic “defense” against anti-Semitism. Jewish movie director Jill Soloway claimed, for instance, that Hollywood’s Jews were “recreating culture to defend ourselves post-Holocaust.” From the perspective of White people, however, this “defense” is an incredibly aggressive ethnic attack that threatens our very biological survival in the long term. Research has found that aggressiveness toward outgroups is more likely to be considered legitimate and fair if one’s ingroup is believed to have suffered. For instance, Jewish Canadians who were reminded of the Holocaust accepted less collective guilt for Jews’ harmful actions toward Palestinians than those not reminded of it.[16]
Individuals who identify more strongly with their ingroup engage ever more fiercely in competitive victimhood. As Jews are an extremely ethnocentric group, it is unsurprising that they are particularly prone to engage in competitive victimhood. This behavior is also self-reinforcing in offering psychological payoffs: safe explanations about who is responsible for inter-group conflict and clear boundaries between good and evil.[17] Moreover:
Perceiving one’s own group as the primary victim of the conflict can reduce feelings of guilt that arise when people witness misdeeds perpetrated by ingroup members. By the same token, it may help to rationalize and legitimize acts of revenge against rivals, especially in the post-conflict era. Finally, portraying one’s own group as the “real” victim of the conflict may also serve material purposes, as it frames the group the worthy recipient of sympathy and assistance. Thus, encouraging the perception of one’s own group as the victim may enhance the possibility of receiving moral and practical support from the international community. For all these reasons, it is no wonder that each of the parties involved in a conflict makes great efforts to persuade themselves, rivals, and third parties that their suffering has been the greatest.
A strong sense of collective victimhood (such as that possessed by Jews) is associated with a low willingness to forgive and an increased desire for revenge. The research shows that people with heightened victimhood express “an increased desire for revenge rather than mere avoidance, and actually were more likely to behave in a revengeful manner.” Such individuals and groups “tend to see their use of violence and aggression as more moral and justified, while seeing the use of violence of the outgroup as unjustified and morally wrong.”[18]
Activist Jews well know the policies they espouse for Western societies harm the group interests of White populations (that’s the whole point). Thus, while the stated mission of the Australian Anti-Defamation Commission (ADC) is to make Australia a “better place” by “promoting tolerance, justice and multiculturalism,” when it comes to the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians this supposed commitment to “inclusion,” “diversity” and “multiculturalism” suddenly gives way to hardnosed biological realism. The problem with Israel adopting the diverse, multicultural approach to nation-building so zealously advocated by the ADC for Australia (and the entire West) is that while it may sound “simple and fair,” it is actually “code for the destruction of Israel and its replacement with a majority Palestinian state.” The ADC insists “It is naïve and dangerous to believe such a situation will not occur if Israel is taken over by a growing Palestinian population.”
This rank hypocrisy (and barely-concealed malice) is standard across the gamut of Jewish activist organizations in the West. While promoting pluralism and diversity and encouraging the dissolution of the racial and ethnic identification of White people, Jews endeavor to maintain precisely the kind of intense group solidarity they decry as immoral in Whites. They have initiated and led movements that discredit the traditional foundations of Western society: patriotism, the Christian basis for morality, social homogeneity, and sexual restraint. At the same time, within their own communities and in Israel, they have supported the very institutions they attack in Western societies.
Competitive Victimhood through the Construction of Culture
In their quest to outcompete their ethnic adversaries (i.e., White people), diasporic Jews have poured enormous energy into competitive victimhood. Jewish historian Peter Novick has described how today’s culture of “the Holocaust” emerged as part of the collective Jewish response to the Eichmann trial in 1961–62, the Six-Day War in the Middle East in 1967, and, in particular, the Yom Kippur War in 1973. While the foundation was laid at Nuremberg in 1946, it was with these later events, and the anxieties they engendered among Jews throughout the world, that “there emerged in American culture a distinct thing called ‘the Holocaust’—an event in its own right,” and with it a term that entered the English language as a description of all manner of horrors. From that time on, he notes, “the Holocaust” has become “ever more central in American public discourse—particularly, of course, among Jews, but also in the culture at large” and has since “attained transcendent status as the bearer of eternal truths or lessons that could be derived from contemplating it.”[19]
Throughout the West, the proliferating “Holocaust” memorials and museums are lavishly funded by taxpayers, and study of “the Holocaust” in schools is mandated by law in many jurisdictions. As well as serving to morally disarm Whites concerned about their own immigrant-led displacement, the culture of “the Holocaust” is a key part of Jewish efforts to prevent intermarriage in the diaspora. Eric Goldstein, for instance, notes how “Jews discuss, read about, and memorialize the Holocaust with zeal as a means of keeping their sense of difference from non-Jews alive.”[20] “The Holocaust” has become, in the words of Nicholas Kollerstrom, “an ersatz substitute for genuine metaphysical knowledge,” with Auschwitz now serving as the spiritual center of a new religion and a place of awed pilgrimage for millions of penitent Europeans. The narrative has also unleashed an endless flow of money from Germany to Israel and to compensate more “Holocaust” survivors than there were ever Jews in countries under German control.[21]
Novick made the point that that the ubiquity and metaphysical pre-eminence of the Holocaust in Western culture is not a spontaneous phenomenon but the result of highly focused, well-funded efforts of Jewish organizations and individual Jews with access to the major media:
We are not just “the people of the book,” but the people of the Hollywood film and the television miniseries, of the magazine article and the newspaper column, of the comic book and the academic symposium. When a high level of concern with the Holocaust became widespread in American Jewry, it was, given the important role that Jews play in American media and opinion-making elites, not only natural, but virtually inevitable that it would spread throughout the culture at large.[22]
Establishing and maintaining the narrative of pre-eminent Jewish victimhood is supremely important for the cadres of Jewish “diversity” activists and propagandists throughout the West, given the status of the Holocaust as the moral and rhetorical foundation of today’s White displacement agenda. Invocation of this narrative is reflexively used to stifle opposition to the Jewish diaspora strategies of mass non-White immigration and multiculturalism.
Suppressing Counter-narratives
The flipside of this constant invocation of the Holocaust as a testament to unsurpassed Jewish victimhood are efforts to suppress discussion of the unsavory Jewish role in the Bolshevik Revolution and communism. This is because free discussion of the Jewish role in communist crimes undermines Jewish pretentions to moral authority grounded in their self-designated status as history’s preeminent victims. For Jewish academic Daniel Goldhagen, for example, any claim Jews were responsible for the Bolshevik Revolution and its predations is morally reprehensible because “If you associate Jews with communism, or worse, hold communism to be a Jewish invention and weapon, every time the theme, let alone the threat, of communism, Marxism, revolution, or the Soviet Union comes up, it also conjures, reinforces, even deepens thinking prejudicially about Jews and the animus against Jews in one’s country.”[23] It is therefore imperative the topic remain taboo and discussion of it suppressed—regardless of how many historians (Jewish and non-Jewish) confirm the decisive role Jews played in providing the ideological basis for, and the establishment, governance and administration of, the former communist dictatorships of Central and Eastern Europe.
Jewish competitive victimhood accounts for the fact that, since 1945, over 150 feature films have been made about “the Holocaust” while the number of films that have been made about the genocide of millions of Eastern Europeans can be counted on one hand—and none have been produced by Hollywood. Those Jewish intellectuals who are willing to admit the obvious—that Jews played a large (probably decisive) role in the Bolshevik Revolution and at its bloody aftermath—rationalize this by claiming this involvement was an understandable response to tsarist “anti-Semitism” and “pogroms.” Andrew Joyce has explored how Jewish historians and activists have systematically distorted and weaponized the history of “pogroms” in the former Russian Empire.
Uncritically drawing on this bogus narrative, establishment historians typically ascribe the pogroms to irrational manifestations of hate against Jews, tsarist malevolence, the pathological jealousy and primitive barbarity of the Russian mob, and the “blood libel.” The real underlying causes of peasant uprisings against Jews, such as the Jewish monopolization of entire industries (including the sale of liquor to peasants on credit), predatory moneylending, and radical political agitation, are completely ignored, despite tsarist authorities having repeatedly expressed alarm over how “Jews were exploiting the unsophisticated and ignorant rural inhabitants, reducing them to a Jewish serfdom.”[24] Initiatives to move Jews into less socially damaging economic niches, through extending educational opportunities and drafting Jews into the army, were ineffective in altering this basic pattern. With this in mind, the revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin concluded that Jews were “an exploiting sect, a blood-sucking people, a unique, devouring parasite tightly and intimately organized … cutting across all the differences in political opinion.”[25]
Rather than seeing Jewish communist militants as willing agents of ethnically-motivated oppression and mass murder, Jewish intellectuals, like the authors of the book Revolutionary Yiddishland Alain Brossat and Sylvie Klingberg, attempt to depict them as noble victims who tragically “linked their fate to the grand narrative of working-class emancipation, fraternity between peoples, socialist egalitarianism,” and that the militancy of Jewish communists “was always messianic, optimistic, oriented to the Good—a fundamental and irreducible difference from that of the fascists with which some people have been tempted to compare it, on the pretext that one ‘militant ideal’ is equivalent to any other.”[26] In other words, millions may have died due to the actions of Jewish communist militants, but their hearts were pure. Kevin MacDonald notes how Jewish involvement with Bolshevism “is perhaps the most egregious example of Jewish moral particularism in all of history. The horrific consequences of Bolshevism for millions of non-Jewish Soviet citizens do not seem to have been an issue for Jewish leftists—a pattern that continues into the present.”[27]
Jewish Competitive Victimhood on Behalf of Non-Whites
Jewish activists not only engage in competitive victimhood on behalf of their ingroup (while suppressing all counter-narratives), but wage competitive victimhood on behalf of other non-White groups (except, of course, for the Palestinians and other groups opposed to Israel). This is plainly motivated by the desire to harm White interests. Through founding and promoting intellectual movements like Critical Race Theory, funding anti-White activism, and deploying anti-White media narratives, Jews stoke non-White grievance and physically endanger White people.
An instructive example of Jews engaging in competitive victimhood on behalf of non-Whites concerns Australia’s Aborigines. Jewish intellectual activists Tony Barta and Colin Tatz, for example, originated the “genocide charge” against White Australians, and have largely succeeded in ensuring that “genocide is now in the vocabulary of Australian politics.” Barta insists that “all white people in Australia” are implicated in a “relationship of genocide” with Aborigines even if they (or their ancestors) lacked any such intention, had only benevolent interactions with Aborigines, or no contact with Aborigines at all. When colonial, and later state and federal governments implemented policies designed to protect Aboriginal people, “genocide” was, for Barta, still “inherent in the very nature of the society.” He advocates this be the “credo taught to every generation of schoolchildren—the key recognition of Australia as a nation founded on genocide.”[28]
Barta’s activism inspired Colin Tatz who, embracing and weaponizing the bogus notion of the “Stolen Generations,” claimed that as a result of “the public’s first knowledge of the wholesale removal of Aboriginal children, the dreaded ‘g’ word is firmly with us,” affirming that the “purpose of my university and public courses” is “to keep it here.”[29] The Sydney Jewish Museum is proudly playing its part in training Australian teachers “not only about the Holocaust” but also about “the Australian genocide.” Inevitably, Barta and Tatz liken rejection of, or even ambivalence toward, their assertion that “Australia is a nation built on genocide” to “Holocaust denial.” In deploying the “genocide” charge against White Australians, they seek to exert the same kind of psychological leverage used to such devastating effect against Germans, who, as Tatz notes, are “weighed down by the Schuldfrage (guilt question)” to such an extent that “guilt, remorse, shame permeate today’s Germany.”[30]
Jewish activists like Barta and Tatz have dedicated their professional lives to ensuring an analogous guilt permeates and becomes indissolubly linked with White Australian identity. In keeping with the exigencies of competitive victimhood, they are, however, careful to not thereby detract from the pre-eminence of the Holocaust.[31] One Jewish source notes how “painful memories of the Holocaust still resonate and make us sensitive to comparisons,” emphasizing the supreme importance of ensuring that “recognising the genocide of the Aboriginal inhabitants of Australia does not diminish the horror of the Holocaust.” To mitigate this danger, Tatz insists that, in discussing other putative genocides, scholars have a moral obligation to never “ignore, or evade, the lessons and legacies of the Holocaust in pursuit of other case histories.” The Holocaust must forever remain “the paradigm case, the one more analysed, studied, dissected, filmed, dramatized than all other cases put together.” It must endure as “the yardstick by which we measure many things” and be the highest point on “a ‘Richter Scale’ that can help us to locate the intensity, immensity of a case so that we don’t equate all genocides.”[32] This statement is the embodiment of competitive victimhood.
Conclusion
“Competitive victimhood” is a useful intellectual framework for conceptualizing a key strand of Jewish ethnic activism and can be viewed as an important aspect of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. This strategy is multipronged: promote Jews as the world’s foremost victims (despite their status as an ethnic ruling class in Western societies); aggressively suppress all narratives that challenge this status (particularly those that accurately represent Jews as victimizers); and, finally, engage in competitive victimhood on behalf of non-White groups against Whites—while simultaneously seeking to deny the latter any positive collective identity. This multi-layered strategy ultimately conduces to the same overriding goal: to deprive White people of moral authority, confidence, political power, economic resources and reproductive opportunities. While many Jews regards this as a necessary ethnic defense, from the perspective of White people this an aggressive (and intensifying) attack that threatens our long-term survival as a people.
Brenton Sanderson is the author of Battle Lines: Essays on Western Culture, Jewish Influence and Anti-Semitism, available here and here.
Notes
[1] Eric W, Dolan, “Study finds the need for power predicts engaging in competitive victimhood,” PsyPost, February 6, 2021. https://www.psypost.org/2021/02/study-finds-the-need-for-power-predicts-engaging-in-competitive-victimhood-59552
[2] Luca Andrighetto, “The victim wars: How competitive victimhood stymies reconciliation between conflicting groups,” The Inquisitive Mind, Issue 5, 2012. https://www.in-mind.org/article/the-victim-wars-how-competitive-victimhood-stymies-reconciliation-between-conflicting-groups
[3] Isaac F. Young & Daniel Sullivan, “Competitive victimhood: a review of the theoretical and empirical literature,” Current Opinion in Psychology, 11, 2016, 31.
[4] M. Nasie, A.H. Diamond & D. Bar-Tal, “Young children in intractable conflict: The Israeli case,” Personality and Social Psychology Review, 20, 2016, 365-92.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Y. Klar, N. Schori-Eyal, N. & Y. Klar, “The ‘never again’ State of Israel: The emergence of the Holocaust as a core feature of Israeli identity and its four incongruent voices,” Journal of Social Issues, 69, 2013, 125-43.
[7] Johanna Ray Vollhardt, The Social Psychology of Collective Victimhood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020) 372.
[8] See: S. Cehajic & R. Brown, “Not in my name: A social psychological study of antecedents and consequences of acknowledgement of ingroup atrocities,” Genocide Studies and Prevention, 3, 2008, 195-211 and M.J. Wohl & N.R. Branscombe, “Remembering historical victimization: Collective guilt for current ingroup transgressions,” Journal or Personality and Social Psychology,” 94, 2008, 988-1006.
[9] D. Bar-Tal, L. Chernyak-Hai, N. Schori & A Gundar, “A sense of self-perceived collective victimhood in intractable conflicts,” International Review of the Red Cross, 91, 2009, 229.
[10] Anthony Q. Hazard, Postwar Anti-Racism: The United States, UNESCO, and “Race,”1945-1968 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 38.
[11] Robert Wald Sussman, The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 207.
[12] Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (London: Penguin, 1970) 64.
[13] Douglas Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) 111.
[14] Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth‑Century Intellectual and Political Movements, (Westport, CT: Praeger, Revised Paperback edition, 2001), 151.
[15] Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (London & New York: Routledge, 1956/1991), 67.
[16] M.J. Wohl & N.R. Branscombe, “Remembering historical victimization: Collective guilt for current ingroup transgressions,” Journal or Personality and Social Psychology,” 94, 2008,
[17] M. Noor, N. Schnabel, S. Halabi & A. Nadler, “When suffering begets suffering: The psychology of competitive victimhood between adversarial groups in violent conflicts,” Personality and Social Psychology Review, 16, 2012, 351-74.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), 144.
[20] Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2008), 211.
[21] Nicholas Kollerstrom, Breaking the Spell: The Holocaust, Myth & Reality (Uckfield: Castle Hill, 2014), 133.
[22] Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory, 12.
[23] Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, The Devil That Never Dies (New York NY; Little, Brown & Co., 2013), 291; 126.
[24] John Klier, Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-2 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 5.
[25] Robert Wistrich, From Ambivalence to Betrayal: the Left, the Jews and Israel (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 186.
[26] Alain Brossat & Sylvie Klingberg, Revolutionary Yiddishland: A History of Jewish Radicalism (London; Verso, 2016), 56.
[27] MacDonald, Culture of Critique, xl.
[28] Tony Barta, “Realities, Surrealities and the Membrane of Innocence,” In: Genocide Perspectives: A Global Crime, Australian Voices, Ed. Nikki Marczak & Kirril Shields (Sydney: UTS ePress, 2017), 174.
[29] Colin Tatz, With Intent to Destroy: Reflecting on Genocide (London; Verso, 2003), xvi.
[30] Colin Tatz, Australia’s Unthinkable Genocide (Xlibris; 2017), 3009.
[31] Tatz, With Intent to Destroy, xiii.
[32] Colin Tatz, Human Rights and Human Wrongs: A Life Confronting Racism (Clayton, Victoria; Monash University Publishing, 2015), 261.
(Republished from The Occidental Observer by permission of author or representative)
