There's a crucial distinction between victimisation and “being” a victim
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The Labour party leader, Sir Keir Starmer, has got himself into trouble over slavery. Commonwealth leaders have demanded that the UK make reparations to countries that were historically affected by slavery and colonialism. After first rejecting such a demand and then desperately trying to change the subject, Starmer weakly conceded that Britain would discuss it next year.
The reparations demand is obviously preposterous. Slavery has existed across the world in society after society, perpetrated for centuries across Africa, Asia and elsewhere by their indigenous peoples. Britain was the first country to end its participation in the slave trade and encouraged others to do so.
In addition to these obvious objections, however, slavery also raises the issue of victimisation and victim status. Like slavery itself, “victim culture” is being used to demonise the west and fry its collective brain.
There is an enormous difference between victimisation and “being” a victim. Failure to appreciate this distinction has led in some cases to the former being denied, while those who make victims of others are excused or ignored.
Victimisation occurs when an aggressor attacks someone. That someone is therefore inescapably a victim. They don’t choose to be a victim. They simply are by virtue of being attacked.
“Being” a victim, by contrast, is a matter of choice. It means someone chooses to think of himself or herself as a victim, or behave as one.
In cases where they really have been victimised, this deepens the damage that’s been done. Victimised people may feel beaten and powerless. They may become demoralised and demotivated, giving up on life. They become losers.
It doesn’t have to be like this. Many people are the victims of circumstances. They may be abused as children, suffer the fallout of family breakdown or grow up in poverty or other kinds of disadvantage.
However, they have a choice. They can either think of themselves as victims, in which case they may well turn themselves into losers. Or they can decide to overcome their disadvantage and accordingly discipline themselves to do so.
The difficulties they may face are often formidable. That’s why those who have the interests of such people at heart have a duty to help them help themselves by encouraging and supporting them to think and act positively, to be active rather than passive, to stop dwelling on the past and focus instead on making a better future for themselves. Treating them as victims — encouraging them to “be” a victim, to react rather than to do, to receive rather than to give — is just about the worst thing such “helpers” can do to them.
Unfortunately, western society has made a fetish out of “being” a victim. This has absolutely nothing to do with compassion. It has everything to do instead with a denial of objective truth and a negation of individual conscience and personal responsibility.
This “victim culture” derives from the Marxist view that all relationships are based on power. Either you wield power over someone who therefore becomes your victim, or you are the victim of someone with power.
This is a ruthlessly distorted view of human nature and the world. Its appeal in this godless age is that it provides a free pass for misdeeds committed by anyone identifying as a member of a designated victim class, and it enables bullies from such a victim class to intimidate and harm others while virtue-signallers roar their approval.
Anyone from a “powerless” class is deemed to be incapable of doing anything wrong, while anyone from a “powerful” class is deemed incapable of doing anything right. This enables actual power to be abused, with groups accused of being victimisers even when this is untrue or unfairly decontextualised.
Accordingly, it’s a way of demonising all white people on the grounds that they are the “colonialist oppressors” of people in non-European countries. Hence the false accusation that the west is guilty of slavery while all dark-skinned people are the exploited victims of colonialism.
By trading in false accusations, avoidance of responsibility and abuses of power, “victim culture” has helped destroy the west’s moral compass. It also turns into double victims some who really have been victimised. For those pushing a false status of victimhood often seek to deny the reality of true victimisation, because the sharp contrast between actual victims and “victim culture” reveals the latter to be a manipulative sham.
The principal group targeted for denial in this way is the Jewish people.
Jews — grotesquely designated in “victim culture” as an oppressor class — are the most victimised people on earth. Jew-hatred through the centuries has led to the persecution, attack and murder of millions. Today it continues at epidemic levels which are out of control throughout the west as well as in the Islamic world.
Antisemites deny this victimisation. They claim that the Jews invent it, “playing the victim card” to conceal their assumed misdeeds and exploitation of others. They believe that Jews use the claim of antisemitism to enable them to “get away with it”. And what exactly do they believe Jews thus “get away with”? Why, that the Jews are a powerful and sinister cabal with global power which they use to further their own interests and harm others — in other words, all the antisemitic canards about the Jews that are a vicious lie but which antisemites believe to be true.
Such people also resent any evidence of antisemitism because they want to hate the Jews without being prevented from doing so by social opprobrium. They cannot tolerate the truth about Jewish victimisation because that would reveal themselves to be the disgusting people they are. They want to be able to hate the Jews while continuing to drape themselves in the mantle of moral virtue.
Proponents of “victim culture” have a further problem with the victimisation of the Jews. Using their own “victim” status as a social and cultural weapon, they can’t tolerate the fact that the Jews never play the victim card.
Despite the ever-ending persecution the Jews have suffered, they have always picked themselves up and sought to transcend their pain and distress by making the best out of their lives and the lives of others.
The only reparations they sought after the Holocaust were to secure the return of what was rightfully theirs and had been stolen from them. They have never demanded that the Catholic church, the British ruling class or the continent of Europe pay reparations for the centuries of persecution they inflicted upon the Jews. They have never assumed that the appalling way the world has treated them means that the world owes them a living.
They just got on with building positive and productive lives. From the ashes of the Holocaust, they created the spectacularly thriving, life-affirming State of Israel. And in the war that has followed the barbaric atrocities of last year’s October 7 pogrom in Israel, where a terrible toll has been taken of the best and bravest who are still steadily falling in battle, a grieving and traumatised people under constant attack is continuing to display astounding levels of heroism, steadfastness and resilience.
