“The Jews provoked this one.”
This was the response of one X user to the attacks upon Jewish football fans in Amsterdam last week. The man posting it did not have, as we have come to expect from such martinets, the Palestinian flag in his bio. Nor was there any trace of Nazi nostalgia. No, what this man felt was contempt. He resented what he could only see to be the unfurling of a foreign conflict on European streets.
It is not that this was a “clash”—a bit of disorder—between football fans, as some of the mainstream news publications have reported to the public, for the Tel Aviv team were playing against a Dutch club. In the same apologist vein, others have attempted to explain away the assault upon Jews by referencing the actions of Israeli fans pulling down Palestinian flags and chanting offensive songs. The proportionate response to the offence is thought to be kicking all Jews—any Jews—in the face, hunting them through the streets, beating them unconscious, and shoving them onto live railway tracks.
No. This was a targeted attack, a pogrom, upon Jews and Israelis by “pro-Palestine” activists and Arab Muslims.
Those who were attacked recount the demands made upon them to show their passports—to confirm their Jewish ethnicity—before they were then beaten. Some of those attacked will have never been to Israel. Yet, to attackers and onlookers, their Jewish status is enough. Enough to implicate them in Israel’s war efforts, and enough to beat them. This is to say that, once again on the streets of Europe, Jews are being looked upon as a monolith, as a hive mind, such that the thoughts and actions of one are the thoughts and actions of all.
Members of the mob posted their assaults on social media. One captioned his handiwork, “Asking random people where they’re from because we are cleaning the area.” Another wrote, “WHAT HAPPENED IN AMSTERDAM IS JUST THE BEGINNING. GOD SAID KILL JEWS WHEREVER YOU FIND THEM.”
It appears in some instances that one did not even have to be Jewish to be hunted and beaten. One need only be a friend to a Jew. One passer-by—a British man—was hospitalised after intervening in an attack. When one of the gang members warned his friend off, stating that the man they were beating was not a Jew, the friend replied, “Yes, but he helped a Jew.”
This was unimaginable only five years ago.
Since the Holocaust, Europe has become unique in the world in its ability to look upon a person and see them as an individual distinct from their social and ethnic group. Whilst their skin colour, accent, facial features, dress, or religion might have been remarked upon as an interesting feature, the emphasis was on the soul of the human being who performed these cultural rituals rather than the culture from which they originated.
In Western Europe, confidence in this colour-blindness bloomed to the point where meritocracy seemed self-evident as a value framework. The sheer ‘common sense’ of this position was dazzling, and those living in the West assumed that, out of the ashes of the Second World War, everyone but the Communists had made the same discovery. The individual was sacrosanct, and the relative ease and joy with which immigrants to Europe seemed to assimilate to this notion only corroborated in the Western mind that their values were universal.
From the Amsterdam attacks, it is clear that Europe is breaking with its philosophy of individualism. In understanding the West’s failing relationship with individualism, one must look to the West itself.
Identity politics—as emerging from post-modernism and Critical Theory—has played a significant role in reconstituting the individual within the framework of a group. One must be conscious of the ‘categories’ from which a person emerges and recognise their sex, sexuality, and ‘gender expression,’ along with their race, their nationality, and their disabilities, as exercising meaningful influence, and sometimes control, over their perception, impulses, and relationship to society.
The perception of group membership, whatever form it might take, is prioritised over individual character as displayed in one’s interpersonal relationships, employment, education, social security, and justice system.
Under this collectivist framework, the actions of any one individual might be reasonably attributed to or considered representative of a whole. When a Just Stop Oil activist throws a can of soup over a Van Gogh, they are understood to represent the group’s views before their own (perhaps more nuanced) views. The same can be said of a pro-Palestine activist who chants “From the river to the sea.” At that moment, they claim to be speaking with more than their voice but the voice of thousands of others who share their opinion.
Subscribing to this school of thought has certain ramifications. Namely, the sanctity and autonomy of the individual can become lost, and an individual is at risk of being implicated in every thought, word, and deed of a group to which they are perceived to belong. This is how all white people become complicit in the transatlantic slave trade, all men become rapists-in-waiting, and, in the case of Amsterdam, all Jews become Israeli.
Individualism advocates for the polar opposite perspective. Whilst a person might have the physical features, education, or cultural ties of a certain demographic, these characteristics are regarded as bearing little to no relevance in the words and deeds of the individual.
Proponents of individualism refuse to concede to the determinative significance of place in personhood. A person is an avatar lacking history and cultural orientation. Their physical attributes and behaviours emerge out of a stream of genetics, but this is mere raw material, customisable via education and hair dye. Within this framework, it becomes unsavoury to assert that ideas (and the people from which they originate) are culturally contingent and that, say, crime, as a result, can follow a pattern.
This is unambiguous when it comes to school shootings carried out by young, white, American males, but controversial when it comes to, for example, beheadings exacted by males in their 20s originating from the Muslim diaspora. For someone who subscribes to the tenets of individualism, such attacks are not committed by a religion or a race or an ideology, but by a subset of individuals who are united in being misguided and wrongheaded.
More often than not, these visible patterns are deliberately ignored or overlooked in the name of tolerance—tolerance for other people’s autonomy, tolerance for different cultural practices, and tolerance for smoother cohabitation.
The ramifications of this framework include atomisation, cultural homelessness, and moral relativism. There is a reluctance among those proponents of individualism to advocate for the virtues of their own culture and to concede to the existence of race-based crime or religious vendettas. To be more explicit, there is an unwillingness to identify those who attacked the Jewish people in Amsterdam as Arab Muslims and pro-Palestine activists, lest a Muslim innocent of such violence and hatred be embroiled in a backlash.
To this end, the philosophy of individualism that has made Europe unique in the world, both in its attitudes and its trajectory, is the mechanism by which, without serious revision, it will be eradicated.
Europe finds itself at an impasse. Without reembracing a sense of peoplehood—a group identity, ambition, and culture founded on national, religious, and other forms of collective heritage—Europeans will continue to concede ground to their enemies with relativistic statements about ‘values’ and struggle to identify hostile outgroups. Yet, without holding fast to its achievement of individual liberty, freedom of conscience, and private life, Europeans risk crushing out variation and density and succumbing to rigor mortis.
This problem is not intractable. But it does require rapid and decisive choices. About borders. About immigration. About religion. About art. About charity. About sexuality. About the currency of life. About the purpose of death. About war and about family. Europe can rekindle its ancient spirit without surrendering its belief in the human being with the sovereign soul. Indeed, any renaissance without this component would not be European in nature.
The European body with this hard skeleton can afford to be subtle, soft, and sensual. Safe within its walls, play, debate, and adventure will once again be possible. But its immune system must be solid. Any foreign fruits with which Europe chooses to nourish itself must be cultivated and ripe, and its lovers jealous.
When one values tolerance above all things, one fails to value anything at all.
