Oh, What a Concert

My closest colleague is Jewish. Strasbourg has the second-largest Jewish community in France, after Paris. Today my colleague is afraid, for her safety and the safety of those closest to her. Every evening, before leaving the office for home, she hides her necklace with the Star of David under her clothes so that no one on the street will recognize her as Jewish.

I know her unease, experienced in a relatively safe European country, cannot be compared with the hell the Palestinians are living through in Gaza. Where people die every day. Where a few days ago fifteen Palestinian children died in an attack on a group waiting for a food distribution. Oops, said the Israeli army, we were targeting a Hamas terrorist. We apologize. My colleague is well aware of this too and does not compare her situation with theirs. But she is afraid nonetheless.

Antisemitism in Europe has a long history. It never disappeared, and today there is more and more of it. Partly, true, because some, in their justified outrage at Israel’s rampage, get carried too far, but it would be very wrong to link and explain the rise in antisemitism solely by ill-considered and sweeping reactions to the bloodshed in the Middle East. Antisemitism in Europe is not imported but homegrown. And among those who flirt with this echt traditional European antisemitism are many who, amid the bloody rampage in Gaza, uncritically and enthusiastically cheer for the Israeli side. And call anyone who dares to condemn blatant violations of international law and crimes against humanity an antisemite. That is not just cognitive dissonance; it is moral collapse.

How much latent antisemitism there is in our societies was shown by the recent “correction” of the system prompt used by Musk’s in-house AI chatbot Grok. Elon Musk announced plans to fix Grok by adding “missing” information in order to get rid of the “garbage” and “woke bias” supposedly stemming from the underlying data. The result was what one might have expected. The “correction” of garbage, political correctness and wokeness turned Grok into an antisemite. Asked who could save us from hatred of white people, it answered: Adolf Hitler, without a doubt; he would spot the pattern and act decisively, every time, without exception.

Musk’s elimination of political correctness is instructive from several perspectives. First, it gives us insight into the “state of mind” prevailing on social media. When you remove the filters that try to ensure at least minimal standards of protection against the worst forms of hate speech, you get a “corrected” Grok: an antisemite, a white supremacist and a glorifier of the life and work of Adolf Hitler. I would not count too much on the wicked bots being solely to blame; I think the “content” saturating social media is largely not the product of artificial intelligence but human hatred. People’s loathing of their fellow human beings.

Second, it is symptomatic that in the antisemitism Grok began spewing after Musk’s corrections there were very few, if any, references to events in Gaza; it was above all “traditional” antisemitism, which hates Jews simply because they are Jews.

Third, we got convincing confirmation of where “wokeness” and “political correctness” on the one hand, and the response to “liberal extremism” in the name of “traditional values etc.” on the other, sit on the spectrum of the most basic civilizational and human decency. Grok’s “correction” showed unequivocally who the extremist is in this relationship.

This last lesson is important for understanding what recently happened at the Zagreb Hippodrome. Let us recall that in this case too, the gathering of several hundred thousand black-shirts with nationalist insignia was presented as a response to “liberal and left-wing extremism” in the name of traditional values, to which, in the words of the evening’s main protagonist, Europe should return. Thompson’s concert was simply an attempt to correct the “system prompt” in the analog world, an attempt to remove the “garbage” and “woke bias” from society. And the result was what one could and should have expected. A new slide toward reshaping a Europe that since the end of the Second World War has been built on anti-fascism, but whose civilizational foundations some are now trying to replace with their opposite. With anti-anti-fascism. I know, it’s a clumsy term; perhaps in time it should be simplified, so that it is clearer what we are talking about.

Besides the massive turnout of people who evidently lack a minimum of critical knowledge of their own history, or couldn’t care less about it, particularly worrying was the attention and participation of politicians at the recent “concert.” In the attempt to legitimize the unacceptable, some were smarter than others. While the Croatian Prime Minister, by attending “only” the dress rehearsal before the concert, avoided the risk of photographic evidence of flirting with nationalist and Ustaša symbols, his former Slovenian colleague walked happily into that trap. His party colleague and MEP sank even deeper, proudly posting pictures in a T-shirt on which the Croatian state emblem began with a white rather than a red square in the top left corner. Oh, what a mistake. Or perhaps not. We heard that the salute Thompson used at the concert is not an Ustaša one, since it is part of Croatian cultural heritage from some 19th-century opera. That is, of course, in the same category as explanations that the swastika is just Hindu folklore. We also heard explanations that this was not about glorifying the Ustaša, but merely about expressing love of God, family and homeland. Because it is well known, after all, that the Ustaša never invoked God and homeland while carrying out their Ustaša deeds and duties. If anything, mentioning these values in the context of what we witnessed at the Zagreb Hippodrome is an insult to believers and to all of us who sincerely love our families and our homeland but do not prove our love through hatred of other people.

The reaction of the Croatian Prime Minister, a politician who—unlike his former colleague from the neighborhood—has a recognizable role and influence in Europe, was also worrying. To criticism of the salute, he said he saw nothing wrong with it, since it is simply “an integral part of Thompson’s repertoire.” That is true, just as it is true that the same salute was also an integral part of the Ustaša repertoire with which, and to the sound of which, the crimes at Jasenovac and Stara Gradiška were committed.

Such mass and politically backed glorification of the darkest and bloodiest periods of European history would be frightening anywhere in Europe, but it is particularly worrying that it happened precisely in Croatia. Two days after the “concert” in Zagreb, I visited the memorial center by Lake Wannsee near Berlin, where at the end of January 1942 Nazi grandees adopted the protocol that staked out the “final solution of the Jewish question.” The fifteen pages of the document, prepared with traditionally impeccable German bureaucratic pedantry, also include statistics on the number of Jews by country. The architects of the “final solution” were evidently aware of the logistical complexity of implementing the decisions taken on the fate of eleven million European Jews, but they noted with relief that in “Croatia (and Slovakia) the task is no longer so difficult, since the most important problems in this respect have already been nearly solved.” At Jasenovac and Stara Gradiška they did not wait for Wannsee; they had already been carrying out the “final solution”—for the vast majority of Croatian Jews and several hundred thousand Serbs, as well as members of other nations, including Slovenians—as an integral part of their repertoire, saluting with quotations from old Croatian operettas and in the name of God, family and homeland.

More than eighty years later, it seems we are returning to where we once were. “It happened, therefore it can happen again,” said Primo Levi, who survived the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps. I hope the horrific bloodshed in Gaza ends as soon as possible, although it is clear that the Palestinians—those who survive—will suffer the consequences for a long time. I am equally worried that my colleague will have to hide her Star of David under her clothes for a long time to come. Not so much because of outrage at the horror we are witnessing in Gaza, but above all because of people who, without shame or embarrassment, lay yet another “never again” wreath at Auschwitz one day and the next put on a black T-shirt with a white square in the top left corner of the checkerboard and march briskly off to Thompson’s “concert.” Oh, what a concert …