“The panicked republic.”

The wages of American indifference.

Lost in the malls. (Warren LeMay, cc by SA 2.0/ Wikimedia Commons.)

29 APRIL—Americans, to state what must be obvious even to those who dwell across one or the other ocean, are highly susceptible to panics. Panics of various kinds have periodically overtaken Americans even before, roughly a century before, America the English settlement became the United States. An early example involved the Boston Martyrs, 1659–1661, when the Massachusetts Bay Colony hanged four Quakers because they were not Puritans. Three decades later, 1692–1693, came the infamous Salem Witch Trials, during which hundreds of colonists were accused of witchcraft and twenty of these were hanged.

Later on you have the Red Scare just after the Bolshevik Revolution, when immigrants, anarchists, trade unionists, and others considered to be dangerously unpatriotic came in for years of harassment, and the more notorious Red Scare of the late 1940s and 1950s, when “un–American” was the common charge. In the 1980s and 1990s there was the very odd Recovered Memory Movement, during which zealous psychotherapists, paranoids in their own right, got millions of Americans to believe they were victims of childhood abuses, satanic cults, and what have you but needed help remembering such horrors. All manner of people—fathers, husbands, aunts, uncles, teachers—suffered during the years of this hysterical paranoia. After Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election—a trauma in itself for American liberals—the frenzy we call Russiagate poisoned the nation (and has done so ever since).

Americans are again in the grip of a panic. This may not be detectable from across the Atlantic, and, as I will shortly explain, this panic is very different from the other cases I note. It is Israel’s genocidal aggression in Gaza that appears to prompt this panic—this and America’s official support of the Zionist state’s campaign of terror. In its effect and its consequences, I would say, the panic that now besets Americans will rank high among the pockmarks of derangement that mar this fraying republic’s story when historians with sufficient detachment get around to recording it.

But we must be crystal clear about this panic: Its true cause, I will say, lies in the reaction—or non-reaction, better put—of most Americans to Israel’s countless crimes against humanity and America’s support of them. This is a very different matter. There are the indecencies and the brutality, and there is the indifference that is abroad among people who refuse to accept their responsibility to act against the barbarities perpetrated in their names. Callous insensitivity becomes a mirror, and it is when Americans see their reflections in it that they panic, suddenly aware that they are other than who they have long told themselves they are.