Western civilization’s latent antisemitism can industrialize into mass murder even from a minority base

Evidence

If only a minority of the Germans had been anti-Semitic (as the report emphasized), if latent, smouldering anti-Semitism formed part of Western civilization, if the anti-Semitic minority in Germany had been able, within a few years, to push forward anti-Semitism to the stage of industrialized mass murder, must it not be feared that in the USAwith its far more advanced capitalist structures, which had not been called into question by any socialist labour movement, with its much more all-encompassing and frustrating culture industry, with its more pronounced ethnocentrism and with its history marked by open violencea far more extensive and severe anti-Semitic potential might already have become capable of suddenly turning into open, violent anti-Semitism, under far less critical political and economic conditions than in Germany? — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 389

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The exact causal inference linking a minority’s antisemitism to industrial murder without a mass base, and locating America as the more vulnerable case.
• XREF: Feeds directly into the Frankfurt School’s later thesis on the ‘elements of anti-Semitism’ and civilization’s regressive potential.