The few remaining souls who survive that most recent chapter in the long cavalcade of Anti-Semitic Holocausts have long since come to terms with it in their own minds. As a people already beset by obsessive introspection, Jews seem enthralled at the task of fanning its embers endlessly; hopefully, they believe, to impart enough guilt to the Gentiles to defer its next recurrence for as long as possible. Some of them have even carved out careers for themselves as "Professional Victims", seizing the spotlight and beating the drum endlessly to urge the creation of bigger and better Holocaust Memorials.
They ignore the reality that the world's attention span and sensitivity to the suffering of others, has already been depleted by an overload of communication stimuli; and that each successive recounting of their tale - however grisly - serves only to desensitize and wear thin the patience of a humanity that shares neither their professed faith in the coming of a Messiah, nor in the perfectibility of the human spirit.
At the other extreme stand the revisionists who deny that Hitler's Holocaust ever happened, and who appear to be increasingly annoyed at the delay in getting on with the next wave of Anti-Semitism. At this writing the latter group seem to be gaining in the contest to attract media attention.
Through a lifetime of questioning and hoping, and with more than a few lapses into self-delusion, I have groped for an answer to the pendulum-like regularity of the selective persecution of the Jewish people. By now this has become hopelessly obscured by layers of folklore and emotion, far beyond any ability to explain it away by the Christ-killing legend, or by the irksome tendency of Jews to refer to themselves as the Chosen People (unfortunately it does not seem to be the Almighty who does the choosing; but rather Haman, Pharaoh, Tiberias, Torquemada, Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, Zhirinovsky, Farrakhan, and others too numerous to list here).
I keep returning to the conclusion that this endless cycle of persecution of the Jews can only represent the existence of a Human Pecking Order, within which each member of Sapiens occupies a fixed position on the scale of aggressiveness. This behavioral pattern has been so constant as to suggest strongly the operation of a genetically imprinted mechanism.
Entire libraries of books have been dedicated to furthering the vanity that humans constitute a "higher" form of life, one that is presumably capable of rising above such demeaning biologic imperatives, and of mastering such niceties as ethical behavior. In reality, however, we are dominated by forces that are no less compelling than those governing the behavior of chickens; with the strongest and most aggressive at the top of our Pecking Order (The Master Race?), and the weakest ones always at the bottom. It is the need for a regular reassertion of the integrity of this Order that ignites every pogrom, Holocaust, genocide, or "ethnic cleansing."
