Welcome to the Nazi Bar

Emerging from a dissociative hibernation. Stirred by the ghost of Sophie Scholl.

I've had quite a hiatus from publishing here. I have had a few humiliating processes slow me down.

One of them is the persistent, horrific fact that Substack hosts accounts that promote hatred of my family, as we are Ashkenazi Jews. I will not link to those accounts, but I did confirm for myself by searching for the material on Substack. Welcome to the Nazi Bar.

The Nazi Bar is an illustration of the implications of Karl Popper's famous Tolerance Paradox. A sketch of it goes: a normal (liberal democratic) bar is visited by a Nazi customer. Patrons and staff go, sure the guy has 'extreme belief', but hell none of us are directly threatened, he seems 'nice otherwise', so we can tolerate him. But then he starts showing up with friends, and next thing you know, enough of the crowd is fascist that it isn't reasonable for the 'normal people' to pretend it's not a Nazi bar.

The road from tolerance to authoritarianism can be paved with tolerance of intolerant ideologies. Point being, Popper was right.

One can criticize my cartoon of Popper's argument as slippery slope reasoning. But the reason why the logic is fallacious is that it can lead to false inferences from true premises, not that there are no true examples of slippery slopes. Hanging out with Nazis is a true slippery slope scenario. You have to kick that first Nazi out, right away.

One can object that describing Substack as a once-liberal-democratic place is obtuse. It is! But if you imagine a pristine Substack minus Nazis, we can entertain Popper's analogy.

I will continue anyway. I am proud of some of my company here. Some of my favourite Canadian journalists publish here, like Aaron Maté, Rachel Gilmore, and Jeremy Appel. The reason they write here, the reason I started writing here, was to get paid better for publishing online. I am not a bar owner tolerating (or condoning) the Nazis, more like all of us are beholden to the same master. You've probably heard of Mr. Market.

Another source of humiliation is the fact that a large subset of my friends and family support the project of modern Zionism. Perhaps you’ve heard that Israelis and their backers are indiscriminately mass-murdering Palestinians. If so, good: your news diet is not entirely coprophagical.

At this point, conservative estimates put the death toll at over ten Palestinian children for every Israeli death blamed on the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023. The fraction of Israeli deaths from ‘friendly fire’ on October 7, 2023 is apparently zero because our media and politicians spread Israeli propaganda. The genocide-inciting claims of mass rape and infanticide (from Hamas upon Israelis on Oct. 7, to be clear, as the previous clause is unfortunately ambiguous) apparently contain no false reports, because our media and politicians will not correct themselves in line with international investigators.

In service of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, in service of Zionism, our media and politicians will happily accelerate the growth of antisemitism worldwide. Truly, this is antisemitism in motion, as in treating Israel’s actions as reflecting a worldwide Jewish consensus, as treating the criticism of Israel as antisemitic in itself, these choices will only make more people negatively stereotype Jews.

As well, the consensus is treating this primarily Arab group as expendable. As Arabs should not have been excluded from their identity as Semites in the first place, which is a consequence of the current usage of the term ‘antisemitism’ to refer to the hatred of Jews, the promotion of Palestinian genocide is antisemitic in the etymologically literal sense. Semites of all skin colours are seen as human sacrifices, justified by haters of Jews and Palestinians alike.

Jews were forever relieved of the requirement to offer human sacrifice with the Binding of Isaac, an event itself bound to the story of the first Jew, Avraham. As a Jew I refuse to worship idols, not even the Kotel. I will dismantle the whole Wall to save a single human life, and not feel the slightest bit sacrilegious.¹

Jews can continue to pray for the restoration of their Kingdom if they want to, holding onto the idea that it was wrong to get expelled by the Romans. Zionists cannot mass-murder their way into the restoration of the Holy Temple. They may follow the recipes in Leviticus. They can say a magical incantation as they slaughter an "unblemished" cow. But Messianic Jews, and Christian Zionists who think they can resurrect Jesus, again, need to be politically checked by the majority opposed to war.²

Our media and politicians have created and sustained this 'holistically antisemitic' bubble, largely fueled by Jewish and Christian messianism, Jewish paranoia (no matter how justified), and a general disdain for colonized peoples by white supremacist societies. Welcome to the Nazi Bar.

The third source of embarrassment is far more petty, what could be called entrepreneurial humiliation. I became a scientist to make positive contributions to the world. That is also why I attempted to make a living as a Feldenkrais Practitioner. I thought, naively, that the quality of my work would solve the problem of whether or not there was a market for what I do.

My naivety was built on at least three bases of ignorance. I did not understand what marketing is, and how it is different than salesmanship. I did not understand the crisis of self-identity I brought with the assumption of entrepreneurship. And I did not understand the market economics I was attempting to perturb towards our collective benefit (taking me along as a big hero, of course).

As a graduate of a Practitioner training, I had known that Feldenkrais Method was mostly marketed as alternative medicine, even from the senior leadership of the profession. I thought that the clarity of our Standards of Practice would, along with my nascent economic success, would help me find a silent majority of Practitioners that wanted Feldenkrais Method to be understood along the lines of its creator.

I filtered my understanding of Moshe Feldenkrais’s teaching through my own person. I was uninterested in correcting my biased understanding of Feldenkrais as a cultural leader because I was so much closer to understanding the payload of his writing than most of my peers.

I ignored how Moshe played the part of a guru to his North-American students. They were sycophants, I thought, no need to blame the man for courting them.

I tolerated how pretty-much everyone ascribes to him a DSc in Physics that he did not earn or receive. People don't know the difference between Engineering and Science, I thought, and the word "docteur" in his actual degree from the Sorbonne, "Ingénieur-Docteur", is confusing.

This inability of Moshe Feldenkrais to disabuse his followers of inflated scientific and educational credentials betrays a motivation to power that exceeded his scruples.

In pursuit of economic success and worldwide acclaim, Feldenkrais helped to undermine the legitimacy of formal education in the sciences, and in biomedicine. A community of Zionists sprang up around him, ready to uncritically celebrate his life in whole, and to attack anyone noticing the warts.

Instead of whole-heartedly embracing the naturalistic worldview, which includes a foundational acceptance of objective facts, a community instead presented Moshe's religious background as essential to his thinking, True, his family was respected for its Hasidic scholarship, but Moshe was transparently and explicitly working from the scientific worldview and Japanese martial arts.

Instead of acknowledging and tolerating their namesake-founder's history of participating in ethnonationalistic responses to Jew-hatred, the community of Feldenkrais Practitioners is largely engaged in philosemitism and the broad acceptance of the Zionist program.

Instead of accepting a man's whole life with its moral tensions, the community of Feldenkrais Practitioners wanted and stil wants a guru that will overturn the perceived domination by oppressive authorities -- not the parents and teachers of children Moshe actually focused on, but the biomedical establishment that is perceived as an economic competitor.

Instead of growing a movement called Somatic Education, this community chose (and still chooses) attention-grabbing and hero worship. Hence the widespread fixation the Neuroplastic Revolution.

In such a milieu, the thriving of people comes secondary to the success of a mission dictated by the market. In such a market, filled with military contractors and rentiers, the blood of innocents buoys the hopes that Somatic Education and Zionism can grow together.

Soma will not and cannot be nationalized, however. Soma is not just your person, it is the embodiment of life itself. Any nation-state will either cohere with life, or it will destroy it in the service of empty visions of purity and permanent domination. Pretending that one can label such phenomena as "political" or "negative", and thereby bypass an acknowledgement of the world to "productively" focus on their good self-integration, only shifts the perceived locus of control in the Somatic Crisis.

Human dignity and thriving, if these notions prevail at all, will include the dismantling of the Zionist project that Moshe Feldenkrais and myself contributed to. The Feldenkrais profession itself is in a similar position. The right thing to do is to unmake the institutions I have mindlessly contributed to. How embarrassing.

1. Although I will feel nostalgic for the practice of offering prayers at a special retaining wall, something that predated Israel and was harmless in itself.

2. When Feldenkrais Practitioners sing Hatikvah, they add the connotation of more comfortable desk-work to the hopes of "two thousand years".