The Postmodern Secession from Reality

Outside epistemology there is no salvation. --Dávila

Records indicate that I posted once before on this cryptic aphorism, and it seems I will do so again today. It will probably approach the aphorism from a different angle, but let me check, so as to not repeat -- or contradict -- ourselves.

[.........]

Interestingly, it looks as if the present post will pick up precisely where the previous one left off: 

Of the modern substitutes for religion, probably the least heinous is vice.

What would be the most heinous? No doubt whatsoever: ideology. Why?

The revolutionary does not hate because he loves but loves because he hates.

But what does he hate: in a word, reality. The progressive is always running from a reality that his metaphysic denies a priori. Having denied reality at the outset, there can be no reality at the end: rather it's unreality all the way down.

With that in mind, let's continue unpacking the aphorism. It seems it's a bit like saying the "truth will set you free," in that both statements posit a link between knowledge and our proper end; come to think of it, truth, freedom, and soteriology must be interrelated, because no one is saved by a lie, nor is anyone free in any meaningful sense if he has rejected truth.

Some cases in point:

Would The ‘Woke’ Movement Please Hurry Up And Die Already?

In short, it [wokeness] is an anti-Constitution philosophical and political secession movement, just as the Civil War was, before morphing from cold war to hot war, with 620,000 killed and 1.1 million wounded or maimed.

A philosophical and political secession movement. This is the Secession alluded to in the title, and as we shall see, the Reality from which they are seceding includes the common sense realism of the founders. 

How DEI Inspires Jew Hatred

At the heart of DEI is a simple binary: the world is divided between oppressors and the oppressed. Proponents of DEI cast white people as oppressors and black people as the oppressed. While they apply this frame primarily to America, they often apply it to Israel, too. Apparently, Israel is a bastion of Jewish whiteness, with a racist commitment to shattering the lives of nonwhite Palestinians. In fact, a colleague of mine -- a former collegiate DEI director, no less -- was told that Jews are “white oppressors” and that it was her job to “decenter whiteness.” 

Then there is

White Coats for Black Lives, which I encountered at Penn’s medical school. The group, which serves effectively as the medical-student offshoot of Black Lives Matter, has as its mission to “dismantle racism and accompanying systems of oppression.” Apparently, that means supporting terrorists who beheaded Jewish babies and raped Jewish women on October 7. In the wake of those atrocities, White Coats for Black Lives proudly declared that it “has long supported Palestine’s struggle for liberation.”

Liberation. To what, exactly? Hint: it is not reality.

Will universities clean house of antisemitic profs? Don’t bet on it

Ohio State’s English Department is seeking a scholar who will work on “settler colonialism, decolonization, genocide, Indigenous epistemologies, sovereignty, social movements and activism.”

Epistemologies? Which implies that there is more than one reality, which obviously means no reality at all. 

Finally, an example from Ace of Spades:

Not a joke: claiming that there is only one right answer (or "right" answer) to a math problem is white supremacy.

Minorities have "different ways of knowing" which must be respected. Wrong answers to math questions must be accepted as valid.

As reported by The Center Square, the consulting group states that its workshops teach "antiracist math" and will help equip teachers with tools to "identify, disrupt and replace" practices that perpetuate White supremacy.

"The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so," a document for the "Equitable Math" toolkit reads. "Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict."

I apologize for all the extra reading, but if there is no salvation outside epistemology, and these are all examples of the insane epistemologies that rule the day, then we've got to do something about it.

Is there a pnemaceutical cure for this cognitive pandemic? Yes, and we began discussing it in the previous post:

Man differs from the animals first of all because the object of his intellect is not limited to the mere sensible phenomenon but, rather, is intelligible being, because he knows the meaning of this little word, "is," and quickly grasps that the verb to be is the root of all the others....

the first demonstrable principle is that we cannot simultaneously affirm and deny the same thing of the same subject in the same respect, which is founded on the notion of being and non-being...

The postmodern secession from reality is nothing less than a frantic and incoherent escape from The Land of Is.

Remember: 

The principle of identity affirms, "That which is, is; that which is not, is not."

Is that so difficult? It's not a prison, rather, the means of our escape -- the escape from imprisonment in unrealities such as 

--That the concept of mathematics being objective is unequivocally false.

--That the world is (objectively!) divided between oppressors and oppressed.

--That fighting for the "liberation" of terrorists and tyrants isn't a self-contradiction.

--That epistemology is a function of accidents such as race, such that one man's is is another mans is not, with no objective way to adjudicate between them.

-- That physics is not ordered to the natural world but to race and other contingencies.  

--That believing there is a "right answer" is again a function of race, gender, and other accidents.

Each of these statements attacks even the possibility of epistemology at the foundation, even while arguing that they are true. For if we cannot know what actually is, then that's the end of it.

We're out of time, but Garrigou-Lagrange writes that if we abandon the real ontological value of the principle of identity (or non-contradiction), it results in the suppression of: all language, of every essence and substance, of all truth, of all opinion (since opinions are no longer grounded in an appeal to truth), and even to any form of desire, aversion, and action, since one thing is no better or worse than any other.

Ultimately we agree with the Padre that "The choice between God and absurdity is inexorable," but we still have a lot of dots to connect. 

Cure for Postmodern Nihilism Announced by Obscure Blogger

It seems to me that Thomism is the worst philosophy, except for all the others. Let's find out why.

Just to set the stage, yesterday a commenter who calls himself "Gagdad Bob" linked to an article called Epistemic Nihilism Leaves Only Brute Force. I just skimmed it, but this caught my attention:

The postmodern cynic makes a false epistemological claim indicating epistemological skepticism and nihilism.... If there is an objective reality, we have no access to it.... This means that there is no way to settle debates by appeal to the evidence. Whose point of view prevails will thus be a matter of violence and power since there is no legitimate way to judge between perspectives. In this way, epistemic nihilism leaves only brute force. 

This chain of reasoning contains a contradiction and is thus false. The postmodernist claims to know that epistemic nihilism is true and thus that all agreement about how to interpret the world seen as a text can only be a matter of one person or group imposing its will on to another. But, if epistemic nihilism is true, they cannot possibly know this and thus they can have no justification for their imposition of force.  

If we do know that epistemic nihilism is true, then it is in fact possible to distinguish fact from fiction, text from reality, and truth from lies, and thus epistemic nihilism must be incorrect. The person promoting it is throwing sand in people’s eyes, shutting down debate or differing points of view, and sees no reason to confine himself to reason and logic, nor to avoid contradiction. He is a power-hungry psychopath. Reason and logic can only hurt him, so he disparages them. Why limit yourself to what is rational and logical? If power is everything, then I will shut you up. That is how they have decided to win a debate. By not having one in the first place.

By the way, I've been experiencing a marked case of Baader-Meinhof focused on the word "nihilism." It keeps coming up in a variety of contexts. Must be a reason. Unless nihilism is true, in which case there can be no reason.

Meanwhile, I've been rereading Garrigou-Lagrange's Philosophizing in Faith: Essays on the Beginning and End of Wisdom, and the word also popped up there. We'll discuss the wider context below, but he says that "by denying the principle of non-contradiction," one arrives at a

complete nihilism in the order of being, as well as the order of becoming and in the orders of thought, truth, error, opinion, desire, and action.

AKA everything. All due to one tiny error. But you know what Thomas says about a small error in the beginning growing enormous at the end.

Well, we're living in a world of Ginormous Error. For example, "my truth" instantaneously reduces to no truth, period, for it violates the principle of non-contradiction just mentioned by G-L. If my truth is true, and your contradictory truth is true, then anything and everything is equally true and false, with no objective way to adjudicate between them.

Which, among other catastrophes, is the death of the intellect.

Which for the left is not a bug, for reasons alluded to in the passage above:

The person promoting it is throwing sand in people’s eyes, shutting down debate or differing points of view, and sees no reason to confine himself to reason and logic, nor to avoid contradiction. He is a power-hungry psychopath.

Is it going too far to say satanic? Or not far enough? At the very least they are doing Satan's heavy lifting, and journalism takes care of the rest.

The Thomistic view is at antipodes to the postmodern, affirming the thesis "that our intellect can, by its natural powers, come to have metaphysical certitude concerning extra-mental being and its immutable laws" -- in other words, valid and true knowledge of reality.

I know. Crazy! Contra Kant, "The Truth is not merely the conformity of our judgment with the subjective laws of our mind," but "conformity with extra-mental reality."

Either the intellect can conform itself to the real, or it can't; but if the latter were true, we could never know it -- any more than an animal can transcend the closed circle of instinct and neurology. To be perfectly accurate, the animal is open to a world restricted by instinct and neurology, whereas the

man who is endowed with intellectual knowledge is opened up on the intelligible world, and will be able to become, in some way, everything that is intelligible.

The Kantrary view actually goes back a long way, appearing "in Heraclitus and in the Sophists," and later in the Skeptics. "It can be found once more in various forms of modern subjectivism," according to which the cosmos is turned upside down and inside out, such that knowledge is a function of the knower or of other knowledge. Thus,

I can make only one kind of judgment concerning a thing, namely, whether my knowledge of the object is in agreement with my knowledge of the object. Therefore, man is enclosed within himself and cannot escape from the self-enclosed state. He knows only phenomena, all in accord with the subjective laws of the mind (emphasis mine).

The whole idea of the intellect as an open system -- open to intelligible being -- seems to me rather important, not just for its own sake, but for what it says about the human being per se. It's a very strange situation that is either assumed and taken for granted, or denied, mostly by people with too much education and too little common sense.

Nevertheless, there it is: "the first object known by our intellect is the intelligible being of sensible things." Look around at the range of objects that communicate their intelligibility to your intelligence. What do they have in common? Not to insult your intelligence, but that they are; and are intelligible. To the intellect.

"Just as sight naturally knows color and hearing sound, so too the intellect naturally knows being" -- which includes the real being of the first principles of thought, such as the principle of non-contradiction.

Importantly, this principle is not merely a rule of logic confined to our heads, but an ontological principle applying to the extra-mental world. Again, unless you are a postmodern relativist, in which case contradictions can truly exist: a thing and its opposite can be equally true.

Which is like saying that "is" and "is not" are equally the case.

But this question of isness is incredibly important -- in fact, it is everything. If something is true, then it is the case; if it's not true, then it is not the case. Thus, "is" is the very soul of judgment.

Now, what is is?

Just kidding. Or maybe not. But let's stay focused:

Man differs from the animals first of all because the object of his intellect is not limited to the mere sensible phenomenon but, rather, is intelligible being, because he knows the meaning of this little word, "is," and quickly grasps that the verb to be is the root of all the others.

Verb? Yes: be is not a static noun, but rather, always be-ing, and this at both ends. Not to jump ahead, but the intelligibility of being could not occur at our end unless it were first the manifestation of the divine Intellect (i.e., a creative act). Otherwise there would be no intelligibility -- no essences -- there for us to extract.

G-L speaks of "the ontological riches virtually contained in the verb to be," the larger point being that these are not merely epistemological riches confined to our heads; rather, to say that they are ontological is to say that these riches -- the conceptual cash -- are backed by the full faith and credit of the First Bank of Reality. They're not just funny money, or checks that bounce when, say, you compare models of the climate with the climate.  

Our ideas are fungible to reality. If not, then they are known as "false":

the first demonstrable principle is that we cannot simultaneously affirm and deny the same thing of the same subject in the same respect, which is founded on the notion of being and non-being...

For example, what is a woman? A woman. Or nowadays, a man. In which case, is is deprived of any extra-mental reality. If both are true then neither is true. For "The principle of identity affirms, 'That which is, is; that which is not, is not.'"

So, this little matter of men pretending to be women, or of two men pretending to be married, or of morality being relative, or of all cultures being equally valuable, is no small thing. Or rather, they're all rooted in that small error regarding the isness of extra-mental reality.

There are many more deadly consequences to the denial of the principle of non-contradiction, but let's save something for the next episode.

My Nihilism Can Beat Up Your Nihilism

What is the Evil One up to? That's a question I often ask myself, but again, since the Devil is himself absurd and promotes absurdity in his friends and sympathizers, it can be a fruitless exercise. 

In an article in Tablet called France’s Nightmare Is Yours Now: How the Oct. 7 Massacres in Israel Gave Birth to a Global Pogrom, in which the author asks,

What am I watching?

I was staring at my phone in blank incomprehension watching the worldwide demonstrations of enthusiasm that followed the bloodiest pogrom since World War II -- the “gas the Jews!” of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Sydney, the “fuck the Jews!” in London, the Nazi salutes in Paris, the Nazi flags in New York. 

I was scrolling through footage from some of the most prestigious universities in America sinking further every day into their own shit -- the Washington University pro-Hamas students yelling “fuck Israel!”

Moreover, there were the

Columbia students gathering to celebrate the massacre in Israel one day after a Jewish student was beaten with a stick outside the main library; the Cherry Hill East high school student who screamed his hatred to his Jewish fellow classmates in the hall; the antisemitic demonstrations at UCLA. There was the Stanford professor who forced his Jewish students to identify themselves before grouping them in a corner so that they could feel “what the Palestinians feel,” the UC Davis associate professor who warned the “Zionists journalists” that they should “fear us” (whoever that “us” is) because “we can find their addresses and their children’s schools,” and who ended her post with hatchets and blood-drip emojis....

Etc., etc., yada yada.

It made no sense.

Except for a nihilist, in which case making no sense is the sense. As Michael Walsh wrote a couple of days ago, "In the wake of my 2015 book, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace,"

I was often asked what, exactly, did the Frankfurt School and its spawn in academe and its fellow travelers in the media desire in the wake of the collapse of Western civilization? What would follow the triumph of “Critical Theory”? A new communist paradise? The teleological resolution of their imaginary “arc of history”? The sunny uplands of “fairness,” “equality,” and even “equity”? None of those things, I replied. What they want is… nothing.

To assume that our ideological opponents want something is to play the game on their turf. It’s a mistake we make constantly. We imagine that words mean the same thing when they use them as when we use them. We have accepted their protestations that they “only” want a new, post-revolutionary Brotherhood of Man when they speak glowingly of the future, when instead they’re happy to stop with the destruction of the past two thousand years of history, and call it a job well done. We mistakenly assume that they want the same world that we do, only different, when in fact nihilism is their goal. To put it in contemporary terms, they are Jokers, the kind of men who only want to watch the world burn.

One of the first books I pulled out to in order to review what the Devil might be up to was Fr. Rose's Nihilism. In it he traces a fourfold and seemingly inevitable path from the classical liberalism of the founders to our contemporary illiberal leftists and their openly genocidal sympathies. Rather than starting from scratch, I searched some old posts, and here are some highlights: "the desire for revolution"

is what distinguishes the left from classical liberalism. It "has a theological and spiritual foundation, even if its 'theology' is an inverted one and its 'spirituality' Satanic." The revolutionary impulse is destructive and nihilist at its core, although always disguised as a desire for "change."

Destruction, of course, must precede the change, but it turns out that destruction is the change....

Now, "construction" is not possible in the absence of truth. This is as true on the material plane as it is on the abstract/metaphysical. Just as you cannot build, say, a functioning airplane without knowing about the laws of nature, you cannot have a functioning civilization without knowing about the nature of man....

Rose alludes to the nihilist "revelation" that "there is no truth," which is functionally equivalent to the death of God. For if one is intellectually honest -- and cognitively adequate -- one understands that the choice is between God and Nihilism. There can be no third, except in an imaginary or magical sense....

Formal atheism is merely "the philosophy of a fool," whereas "antitheism is a profounder malady." While the former "errs through childishness" and "plain insensitivity to spiritual realities," the latter "owes its distortions to a deep-seated passion that, recognizing these realities, wills to destroy them."

"It may be doubted, indeed, if there exists such a thing as 'atheism,' for no one denies the true God except to devote himself to the service of a false god." You gotta serve somebody, as the Poet said.

It is important to note that these hyperkinetic zombies are anything but spiritually "lukewarm." Rather, they are on fire for the Evil One, a truth easily discerned in the demented faces of their howling mobs....

Fr. Rose quotes the anarchist Proudhon, who wrote that "The first duty of man, on becoming intelligent and free, is to continually hunt the idea of God out of his mind and conscience. For God, if he exists, is essentially hostile to our nature.... Every step we take in advance is a victory in which we crush Divinity.

.... the left's spiritual illness revolves around "envy, jealousy, pride, impatience, rebelliousness, blasphemy -- one of these qualities predominating in any given personality." (He left out raw stupidity and refusal to learn -- or more generally, refuse to submit to, or even recognize, one's superiors -- which is often mingled with the others.)

"This rebellion, this messianic fervor that animates the greatest revolutionaries, being an inverse faith," is driven to destroy its "rival faith." Thus, we commonly see how "doctrines and institutions" are "reinterpreted" by the left, "emptied of their Christian content and filled with a new, Nihilist content" (ibid.).

And lately I've been wondering if anti-theistic nihilism is one of those inverse vertical analogies of the proper kind of nihilism. Is there a theistic or even "Christian nihilism" on which progressive nihilism is parasitic? Toward the end of the book, Rose has this to say:

And indeed the Christian is, in a certain sense -- in an ultimate sense -- a "Nihilist"; for him, in the end, the world is nothing, and God is all.

However, this is

the precise opposite of the Nihilism we have examined here, where God is nothing and the world is all; that is a Nihilism that proceeds from the Abyss, and the Christian's is a "Nihilism" that proceeds from abundance.

Same word, totally different sense. And it is only the latter "who can squarely face the Abyss to which Nihilism has conducted men."

Then I thought of the Aphorist, who said it all before, in various ways:

An irreligious society cannot cannot endure the truth of the human condition. It prefers a lie, no matter how imbecilic it may be. 

Because he presumed he was capable of giving fullness to the world, modern man sees it becoming emptier each day.

History would be an abominable farce if it were to have a worldly culmination. 

If history made sense, the Incarnation would be superfluous. 

Hell is anyplace from which God is absent. 

Of the modern substitutes for religion, probably the least heinous is vice. 

Here begins the gospel of Hell: In the beginning was nothing and it believed nothing was god, and was made man, and dwelt on earth, and by man all things were made nothing.

Humanity is the only totally false god.

Can our nihilism beat up their nihilism? Rose ends on an uncharacteristically optimistic note: 

It is the great invincible truth of Christianity that there is no annihilation; all Nihilism is in vain. God may be fought: that is one of the meanings of the modern age; but He cannot be conquered, and He may not be escaped...

 Resignation, I guess. But

Resignation must not be an exercise in stoicism but a surrender into divine hands.

Spiritual Combat

What do I know about spiritual combat? Then again, having once been a psychologist, I was the man you'd see when the combat in your head was getting out of hand. Of course, I wasn't trained in "spiritual combat," but then again, everyone's head is a combat zone, more or less. 

Back in grad school, the idea of spiritual combat never came up except insofar as it was a primitive way of talking about "psychological conflict." Thus, it is as if the upper vertical was subsumed into the middle zone of the psyche. But what if this middle zone can't account for certain phenomena emanating from above -- i.e., those powers and principalities we've been discussing?

It's analogous to how a psychological explanation will mislead when the problem is completely biological -- say, hypothyroidism, which can cause symptoms that mimic any number of psychological conditions.  Likewise, is it possible that we are misdiagnosing conditions that are completely spiritual in nature, just because they resemble psychological conditions?

Another way of asking the question is, what did we lose when we jettisoned thousands of years of spiritual wisdom for a wholly secular psychology? To a certain extent, Jung attempted to at least recognize relations with the old spiritual world, and to maintain an embassy there. Nevertheless, he too tended to reduce the spiritual to the psychological. 

I just remembered that I applied for post-doctoral training at the Jung Institute back in the early '90s, because it seemed like the only option for a guy like me. Instead I decided to cut out the middleman and deal with the spiritual world on its own terms. This being in 1995. 

Which meant that I was essentially dealing with a kind of dual citizenship -- psychology by day, religion by... the rest of the day. I never worked full time. Or you could say left brain / right brain: as I've said before, I don't think the spiritual world exists because we have a right cerebral hemisphere, rather, vice versa. It's why all of us have the dual citizenship alluded to above. 

Come to think of it, it is why we are all conflicted, and not just in a bifurcated way, but trifurcated; again, at the very least, there is body, soul, and spirit, and each influences the others. For example, if your thyroid is off, it will have both psychological and spiritual consequences. And it works the other way around -- if you are psychologically off, it can and will have spiritual or biological consequences.

For example, over the years, there is no physical symptom I've seen that hasn't been produced by purely psychological causes -- even those of a heart attack, stroke, or seizure. I remember one lady who presented with seizures that turned out to be "pseudo-seizures." How could they tell? Because in the ER, when they attempted bladder catheterization, she voluntarily closed her legs. In other words, modesty overrode the apparent seizure.

I remember another guy who had episodes of chest pain and radiation down the left arm, but thorough testing revealed no evidence of heart disease. Unfortunately, I remember another patient who had pain radiating up into the shoulder, for which he was treated with vicodin, and dropped dead of a massive heart attack.

You may recall my own little overnight hospital stay six months ago, when I was having unexplained episodic nausea. They ruled out the heart or aorta, but no one has ruled out demons, least of all me.

To back up a moment, we left off the last post with the promise to "consider some practical advice on now to conduct spiritual warfare -- starting with ourselves." Which comes back to the first sentence of the present post: What do I know about spiritual combat? 

To back up even further, this is one of the reasons I entered the church: in a word, for protection. It's the same reason I take a statin and an ACE inhibitor to protect my heart and kidneys, respectively. Different means for different dimensions. Likewise, I exercise every day to benefit body and mind, and I medi-pray every day to benefit the spirit, although I'm sure it trickles down into the mind and body. 

It's all very confusing, then again, it's just common sense: we need to address our health on all levels of being, which are in turn interconnected in ways that are difficult to discern, but we ignore at our own peril.

At the moment, it seems as if the world is going crazy, similar to how it must have felt at the time of World War II. In an old post I reviewed what Carl Jung had to say about it:

As Jung said in a 1936 interview, Hitler was a sort of "medium" who had an uncanny ability to articulate what the nation was feeling at any given time: "German policy is not made; it is revealed through Hitler. He is the mouthpiece of the gods as of old. He says the word which expresses everybody's resentment." 

It is "rule by revelation": "He is the first man to tell every German what he has been thinking and feeling all along in his unconscious about German fate, especially since the defeat in the Great War." "All these symbols together of a Third Reich led by its prophet under the banners of wind and storm and whirling vortices point to a mass movement which is to sweep the German people in a hurricane of unreasoning emotion and go on to a destiny which perhaps none but the seer... can foretell -- and perhaps not even he."

Fuhrermore, in a 1938 interview, Jung contrasted Hitler with Mussolini, the latter of whom was still "human." But "with Hitler, you are scared. You know you would never be able to talk to that man, because there is nobody there. He is not a man, but a collective. He is not an individual, but a whole nation." Nothing Hitler said makes any sense to the non-German unconscious, with the interesting exception of the Islamic world, where Mein Kampf is always a huge seller.

With that in mind, I wonder if Jung's advice to America would be the same as it was in this 1938 interview:

"How to save your democratic U.S.A.? It must, of course, be saved, else we all go under. You must keep away from the craze, avoid the infection.... America must keep big armed forces to help keep the world at peace, or to decide the war if it comes. You are the last resort of Western democracy."

Keep away from the craze and avoid the infection.  

Which is precisely what we haven't done, what with the craze of wokeness and the spiritual infections of relativism, secularism, and ideological resentment in general. 

So, yesterday I consulted a number of books on spiritual combat, but was overwhelmed by the amount of material. Lotta ins & outs and what-have-yous, lotta strands in Gagdad's head, so I'll focus on just one. It's from Ripperger's Dominion: The Nature of Diabolic Warfare, and goes to the whole nature of victimology, and how it animates both Hamas and its useful idiots on the left:

Since demons are narcissists and they have contracted around the pain of their self-inflicted wound..., they desire to replicate that in human beings. They will pick constantly at the injustice in the person's mind, so that the person will become focused on the injustice and the pain of the injustice.

This is designed 

to block any type of healing process which could result in the person being able to be free and function properly.... if the demons maintain the person's focus on the injustice, the person's weakened state continues, and in fact, increases. 

What is this injustice the demon picks at?

Ultimately it is the same injustice the Serpent exploits in the garden: that there's a God, and you are not Him. There is also a chosen people, and you are not them.

Which, of course, does not mean what the enemies of the chosen people think it means. The Jews are just the proxies in a proxy war against God. 

In a recent editorial, Dennis Prager wrote that

There is no hatred like Jew-hatred. It is the longest ongoing hatred in history. It is the most universal. And it is the one exterminationist hatred: Those who hate the Jews want them destroyed. There is a Hebrew statement that is probably two thousand years old, and which is recited during the Passover Seder service: “In every generation, they arise to annihilate us.”

But why? Because  

Jew-hatred is largely a result of the Jews being The Chosen People. You can laugh at the idea if you are secular and inclined to do so. But those who hate the Jews have not laughed at the idea; they have hated the Jews because of it -- because they believed it and/or because it is true.

Why the Jews? Let us name the reasons: 

The Jews introduced to humanity the God in which most of the world believes; brought into existence the Bible that is the basis of the New Testament and the Quran; gave the Christian world its Messiah; and gave much of the world its morality through the Torah, the Prophets, and the Ten Commandments. Those who hate that moral code hate the Jews. The two groups who have tried to exterminate the Jews in the last hundred years, the Nazis and the Islamists (not all Muslims), hate that moral code. And they hate the Jews for embodying it -- compared to the Nazis and compared to Islamic regime of Iran, Hezbollah, ISIS and Hamas, Israel is composed of saints.

Again, the war on the Jews is a proxy war for a much larger war on God.