DISRAELI

It is one of the better-established findings in psychological research that the relationship between attitudes and behaviour is not at all straightforward. That is particularly true when it comes to predicting behaviour from a person's racial attitudes and beliefs. For instance, Left-influenced psychologists long thought that a person who was very attached to his own group (race, nation etc.) would thereby automatically be hostile to outgroups (minorities etc.). It is however now well established that there is very little relationship between the two at all. One of my own papers on the subject is here and a review of the academic literature is here.

So you can get "racists" who are hostile to other races and "racists" who are benevolent to other races. Hitler is an obvious real-life example of the former and the 19th century British empire -- with its conception of duty as embodied in Kipling's poem "The white man's burden" -- is a notable example of the latter.

History is generally taught with such a Leftist bias these days however that it takes a lot to undermine the demonized conception of the British empire that people have in their heads. To make it clear how different the Conservative "racists" of the 19th (and earlier) century British empire were from the socialist racists of Nazi Germany, therefore, I often mention the case of Benjamin Disraeli, a Jew who was installed as Prime Minister of Great Britain by the British Conservative party and subsequently by the British voters. He was hugely influential and died among great expressions of national loss in 1881.

British Conservatives who believed that the English were a superior race made a Jew their Prime Minister. German socialists who believed that Germans were a superior race murdered Jews by the millions. Is THAT contrast stark enough? Does THAT show that racism is not monolithic? Racism per se need not be destructive at all. But when it is combined with the hatreds of Leftism, it certainly is.

Leftists however sometimes quibble with my history lesson by saying that Disraeli was not in fact a Jew. They have obviously not read Disraeli. The very name "Disraeli" (d' Israeli, meaning "of Israel") might have alerted them to something but there are none so blind as those who will not see.

The tiny hook upon which Leftists hang their quibble is that British law of the day said that a Jew could not enter parliament. So Disraeli's father wisely had young Benjamin Christened as an Anglican at age 13. Everybody understood this as largely a formality however and Anglicanism then, as now, asked little of its adherents. So how did his "conversion" affect Disraeli? Very little. He in fact often flaunted his Jewishness. He was not so unwise as to speak ill of Anglicanism -- he was a great lover of all things British in fact -- but he often pointed to his Jewish origins and Jewish traditions as major influences on his thinking and on what he was. He was notorious for NOT "fitting in" with English ways of the day, in fact. He would have fried in Nazi Germany.

Perhaps the most telling indication of how Disraeli was perceived at the time can be found in Bismarck's famous admiring comment about Disraeli. Did Bismarck refer to Disraeli as "The old Englishman" or as "the old Anglican"? No. What Bismarck said was: "Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann" (The old Jew. THAT is the man). Everybody knew what Disraeli really was and it was simply not held against him. Though it would blow the mind of any Leftist to think such a thought, racists can in fact be very tolerant.

Footnote: This is strictly irrelevant to what I have written above but the historian in me impels me to note that, given Bismarck's own coruscating political brilliance, his tribute to Dizzy's political brilliance that I have noted above shows just how outstanding Dizzy was. And even though he was not one of them, British Conservatives had the good sense and flexibility to recognize and accept Dizzy for what he was as an individual.

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