Full Fathom Five

Jackson Pollock, "Full Fathom Five" (1947)

Full Fathom Five is one of the earliest masterpieces of Pollock's drip technique. The actual origins and initial development of this technique have never been fully explained, except by reading back from fuller photographic evidence produced about 1950, two or three years after this work was painted. Like other practical breakthroughs in twentieth-century painting, 'creative accident' seems likely to have played an important part, as Pollock probed and tested methods of paint application which promote the continuousness of line rather than the broken lines inevitable in the constant reloadings and readjustments of conventional brushwork. His solution was to pour from a can of domestic paint along a stick resting inside the container, so that a constant 'beam' of pigment came into contact with the canvas (which he left unstretched on the studio floor). The character of the line was determined by certain physical and material variables that could be combined in almost infinite permutations: the viscosity of the paint (controlled by thinning and dilution); the angle and hence speed of the pouring; and the dynamics of Pollock's bodily gestures, his sweep and rhythm, especially in the wrist, arm and shoulder. 'Like a seismograph', noted writer Wemer Haftmann 'the painting recorded the energies and states of the man who drew it.' In addition, Pollock would flick, splatter, and dab subsidiary colors on to the dominant linear configuration.

The title, suggested by Pollock's neighbor, quotes from The Tempest by William Shakespeare, wherein Ariel describes a death by shipwreck: "Full fathom five thy father lies / Of his bones are coral made / Those are pearls that were his eyes."

Sylvia Plath, "Full Fathom Five"

Old man, you surface seldom.

Then you come in with the tide’s coming

When seas wash cold, foam-

Capped: white hair, white beard, far-flung

A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves

Crest and trough. Miles long

Extend the radial sheaves

Of your spread hair, in which wrinkling skeins

Knotted, caught, survives

The old myth of origins

Unimaginable. You float near

As keeled ice-mountains

Of the north, to be steered clear

Of, not fathomed. All obscurity

Starts with a danger:

Your dangers are many. I

Cannot look much but your form suffers

Some strange injury

And seems to die: so vapors

Ravel to clearness on the dawn sea.

The muddy rumors

Of your burial move me

To half-believe: your reappearance

Proves rumors shallow,

For the archaic trenched lines

Of your grained face shed time in runnels:

Ages beat like rains

On the unbeaten channels

Of the ocean. Such sage humor and

Durance are whirlpools

To make away with the ground-

Work of the earth and the sky’s ridgepole.

Waist down, you may wind

One labyrinthine tangle

To root deep among knuckles, shin-bones,

Skulls. Inscrutable,

Below shoulders not once

Seen by any man who kept his head,

You defy questions;

You defy godhood.

I walk dry on your kingdom’s border

Exiled to no good.

Your shelled bed I remember.

Father, this thick air is murderous.

I would breathe water.

Full Fathom Five Corporate Feudalism

Part of the Ship, Part of the CrewFull fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them,--ding-dong, bell.
- William Shakespeare, "The Tempest"

What Should a Federal Pandemic Prevention Policy Look Like?

Dave Roos, "Why the Second Wave of the 1918 Spanish Flu Was So Deadly"

The first strain of the Spanish flu wasn’t particularly deadly. Then it came back in the fall with a vengeance.
The horrific scale of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic is hard to fathom. The virus infected 500 million people worldwide and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million victims— that’s more than all of the soldiers and civilians killed during World War I combined.

While the global pandemic lasted for two years, the vast majority of deaths were packed into three especially cruel months in the fall of 1918. Historians now believe that the fatal severity of the Spanish flu’s “second wave” was caused by a mutated virus spread by wartime troop movements.

When the Spanish flu first appeared in early March 1918, it had all the hallmarks of a seasonal flu, albeit a highly contagious and virulent strain. One of the first registered cases was Albert Gitchell, a U.S. Army cook at Camp Funston in Kansas, who was hospitalized with a 104-degree fever. The virus spread quickly through the Army installation, home to 54,000 troops. By the end of the month, 1,100 troops had been hospitalized and 38 had died after developing pneumonia.

As U.S. troops deployed en masse for the war effort in Europe, they carried the Spanish flu with them. Throughout April and May of 1918, the virus spread like wildfire through England, France, Spain and Italy. An estimated three-quarters of the French military was infected in the spring of 1918 and as many as half of British troops. Luckily, the first wave of the virus wasn’t particularly deadly, with symptoms like high fever and malaise usually lasting only three days, and mortality rates were similar to seasonal flu.

Interestingly, it was during this time that the Spanish flu earned its misnomer. Spain was neutral during World War I and unlike its European neighbors, it didn’t impose wartime censorship on its press. In France, England and the United States, newspapers weren’t allowed to report on anything that could harm the war effort, including news that a crippling virus was sweeping through troops. Since Spanish journalists were some of the only ones reporting on a widespread flu outbreak in the spring of 1918, the pandemic became known as the “Spanish flu.”

Reported cases of Spanish flu dropped off over the summer of 1918, and there was hope at the beginning of August that the virus had run its course. In retrospect, it was only the calm before the storm. Somewhere in Europe, a mutated strain of the Spanish flu virus had emerged that had the power to kill a perfectly healthy young man or woman within 24 hours of showing the first signs of infection.

In late August 1918, military ships departed the English port city of Plymouth carrying troops unknowingly infected with this new, far deadlier strain of Spanish flu. As these ships arrived in cities like Brest in France, Boston in the United States and Freetown in west Africa, the second wave of the global pandemic began.

“The rapid movement of soldiers around the globe was a major spreader of the disease,” says James Harris, a historian at Ohio State University who studies both infectious disease and World War I. “The entire military industrial complex of moving lots of men and material in crowded conditions was certainly a huge contributing factor in the ways the pandemic spread.”

From September through November of 1918, the death rate from the Spanish flu skyrocketed. In the United States alone, 195,000 Americans died from the Spanish flu in just the month of October. And unlike a normal seasonal flu, which mostly claims victims among the very young and very old, the second wave of the Spanish flu exhibited what’s called a “W curve”—high numbers of deaths among the young and old, but also a huge spike in the middle composed of otherwise healthy 25- to 35-year-olds in the prime of their life.

“That really freaked out the medical establishment, that there was this atypical spike in the middle of the W,” says Harris.

Not only was it shocking that healthy young men and women were dying by the millions worldwide, but it was also how they were dying. Struck with blistering fevers, nasal hemorrhaging and pneumonia, the patients would drown in their own fluid-filled lungs.

Only decades later were scientists able explain the phenomenon now known as “cytokine explosion.” When the human body is being attacked by a virus, the immune system sends messenger proteins called cytokines to promote helpful inflammation. But some strains of the flu, particularly the H1N1 strain responsible for the Spanish flu outbreak, can trigger a dangerous immune overreaction in healthy individuals. In those cases, the body is overloaded with cytokines leading to severe inflammation and the fatal buildup of fluid in the lungs.

British military doctors conducting autopsies on soldiers killed by this second wave of the Spanish flu described the heavy damage to the lungs as akin to the effects of chemical warfare.

Harris believes that the rapid spread of Spanish flu in the fall of 1918 was at least partially to blame on public health officials unwilling to impose quarantines during wartime. In Britain, for example, a government official named Arthur Newsholme knew full well that a strict civilian lockdown was the best way to fight the spread of the highly contagious disease. But he wouldn’t risk crippling the war effort by keeping munitions factory workers and other civilians home.

According to Harris’s research, Newsholme concluded that “the relentless needs of warfare justified incurring [the] risk of spreading infection” and encouraged Britons to simply “carry on” during the pandemic.

The public health response to the crisis in the United States was further hampered by a severe nursing shortage as thousands of nurses had been deployed to military camps and the front lines. The shortage was worsened by the American Red Cross’s refusal to use trained African American nurses until the worst of the pandemic had already passed.

Medical Science Didn't Have the Tools

But one of the chief reasons that the Spanish flu claimed so many lives in 1918 was that science simply didn’t have the tools to develop a vaccine for the virus. Microscopes couldn’t even see something as incredibly small as a virus until the 1930s. Instead, top medical professionals in 1918 were convinced that the flu was caused by a bacterium nicknamed “Pfeiffer’s bacillus.”

After a global flu outbreak in 1890, a German physician named Richard Pfeiffer found that all of his infected patients carried a particular strain of bacteria he called H. influenzae. When the Spanish flu pandemic hit, scientists were intent on finding a cure for Pfeiffer’s bacillus. Millions of dollars were invested in state-of-the-art labs to develop techniques for testing for and treating H. influenzae, all of it for naught.

“This was a huge distraction for medical science,” says Harris.

By December 1918, the deadly second wave of the Spanish flu had finally passed, but the pandemic was far from over. A third wave erupted in Australia in January 1919 and eventually worked its way back to Europe and the United States. It’s believed that President Woodrow Wilson contracted the Spanish flu during the World War I peace negotiations in Paris in April 1919.

The mortality rate of the third wave was just as high as the second wave, but the end of the war in November 1918 removed the conditions that allowed the disease to spread so far and so quickly. Global deaths from the third wave, while still in the millions, paled in comparison to the apocalyptic losses during the second wave.

Bitten by a Muse!

Whate'er we leave to God, God does,
And blesses us;
The work we choose should be our own,
God leaves alone.

If with light head erect I sing,
Though all the Muses lend their force,
From my poor love of anything,
The verse is weak and shallow as its source.

But if with bended neck I grope
Listening behind me for my wit,
With faith superior to hope,
More anxious to keep back than forward it;

Making my soul accomplice there
Unto the flame my heart hath lit,
Then will the verse forever wear--
Time cannot bend the line which God hath writ.

Always the general show of things
Floats in review before my mind,
And such true love and reverence brings,
That sometimes I forget that I am blind.

But now there comes unsought, unseen,
Some clear divine electuary,
And I, who had but sensual been,
Grow sensible, and as God is, am wary.

I hearing get, who had but ears,
And sight, who had but eyes before,
I moments live, who lived but years,
And truth discern, who knew but learning's lore.

I hear beyond the range of sound,
I see beyond the range of sight,
New earths and skies and seas around,
And in my day the sun doth pale his light.

A clear and ancient harmony
Pierces my soul through all its din,
As through its utmost melody--
Farther behind than they, farther within.

More swift its bolt than lightning is,
Its voice than thunder is more loud,
It doth expand my privacies
To all, and leave me single in the crowd.

It speaks with such authority,
With so serene and lofty tone,
That idle Time runs gadding by,
And leaves me with Eternity alone.

Now chiefly is my natal hour,
And only now my prime of life;
Of manhood's strength it is the flower,
'Tis peace's end and war's beginning strife.

It comes in summer's broadest noon,
By a grey wall or some chance place,
Unseasoning Time, insulting June,
And vexing day with its presuming face.

Such fragrance round my couch it makes,
More rich than are Arabian drugs,
That my soul scents its life and wakes
The body up beneath its perfumed rugs.

Such is the Muse, the heavenly maid,
The star that guides our mortal course,
Which shows where life's true kernel's laid,
Its wheat's fine flour, and its undying force.

She with one breath attunes the spheres,
And also my poor human heart,
With one impulse propels the years
Around, and gives my throbbing pulse its start.

I will not doubt for evermore,
Nor falter from a steadfast faith,
For thought the system be turned o'er,
God takes not back the word which once He saith.

I will not doubt the love untold
Which not my worth nor want has bought,
Which wooed me young, and woos me old,
And to this evening hath me brought.

My memory I'll educate
To know the one historic truth,
Remembering to the latest date
The only true and sole immortal youth.

Be but thy inspiration given,
No matter through what danger sought,
I'll fathom hell or climb to heaven,
And yet esteem that cheap which love has bought.

________________

Fame cannot tempt the bard
Who's famous with his God,
Nor laurel him reward
Who has his Maker's nod.

- Henry David Thoreau, "Inspiration"

Full Fathom Five

DA
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms his prison
Only at nightfall, aethereal rumors
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus

DA
Damyata: the boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands

I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon--O swallow swallow
Le prince d'Aquitaine a la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.

Da. Dayadhvam. Damyata. [from a Hindu fable: 'Give, have compassion, have self control']
Shantih shantih shantih [from a Hindu mantra: 'Peace...peace...peace']
-T. S. Eliot, "The Wasteland"

The Difference between Doctors of Free Men, Doctors of Slaves, and Writers of Self-Help Books

 

Featured image: Arthur Garfield Dove. Sunrise III, 1936–37. Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of Katherine S. Dreier to the Collection Société Anonyme. Yale University Art Gallery (1949.3). CC0, artgallery.yale.edu. Accessed June 10, 2024.

Josh Cohen, 'Quiet Please: On Anna Katharina Schaffner’s “Exhausted” and Byung-Chul Han’s “Vita Contemplativa”'

IT’S HARD TO TALK about the everyday malaises of advanced consumer societies—“overwork,” “hyperstimulation,” “burnout”—without calling forth a critique of the explicit and tacit contracts governing our economic, cultural, and psychic lives. Don’t these words contain an implicit anatomy of neoliberalism’s discontents, its unrelenting instrumentalism, torn social bonds, and moral indifference?

And yet the same words are also ripe fodder for the perpetuation of existing arrangements, for the exploitation of our physical and mental vulnerability. Burnout, consumerism assures us, doesn’t require a new social order, just a new mattress, diet, fitness regimen, meditation program, or general attitude.

Writing about exhaustion is liable to become a symptom of these competing pulls between the polemical and the palliative—that is, to decry the illness and then look for remedies in the very forces (wellness consumerism, self-improvement, positive psychology, corporate yoga) making us ill.

Entering a chronically overcrowded market for the fickle and stretched attention of potential readers, a writer on exhaustion is all too likely caught between excoriating the society that threatens their survival and, well, surviving itself, which tends to mean not biting the cold, bony hand that barely feeds them. You can’t just lament how tired we all are, chides the superego of burnout society; you must give us practical prescriptions for feeling less tired, or at least feeling less bad about it.

One way of circumventing this dilemma, unfortunately not readily accessible to most of us, is to become a superstar in the firmament of social theory. Judging by Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity (2023), a philosophical meditation on the meaning of inactivity, the Korean German thinker Byung-Chul Han, who over the last decade has put out more than 20 such brief, urgently concentrated interventions into the state of psychosocial life under late capitalism, isn’t feeling undue pressure to offer hacks on carving out a little me-time from your busy day. Ironically enough, the status conferred by achievement and fame seems to earn its holder the right to eschew any obligations toward practical guidance.

The book makes a fascinating and telling contrast in this regard with Anna Katharina Schaffner’s Exhausted: An A–Z for the Weary (2024), a glossary of burnout that explores the possible remedies for exhaustion alongside its causes and vicissitudes. The author of the excellent Exhaustion: A History (2016), Schaffner used to be a cultural historian working a full-time job in a university English department that, like so many academic posts in the United Kingdom, had long been menaced by the threat of soul-crushing administrative burdens or even redundancy.

Schaffner’s way out of this trap was to train and start a practice as a coach specializing in “helping the exhausted.” Exhausted is something like the distilled wisdom of that practice, a short compendium of reflection and counsel on the various causes and cures for exhaustion from “Capitalism” and “Dante” to “Xenia” and “Yellow.” The book attests to the depth and breadth of Schaffner’s erudition and critical sensibility. You will not find many avowed self-help books rich in discussions of Friedrich Nietzsche, Herman Melville, and Walter Benjamin, or that ask us to take seriously the depredations of neoliberalism and corporate culture as a central source of physical and spiritual corrosion.

But it’s also here that the book comes to be entangled in the predicament it’s diagnosing. In order to conform to the terms of the self-help genre, Exhausted has to carve out shortcuts from sober pessimism to peppy affirmation. Apparently leaning into a critical politics, the “Burnout” entry notes that “the happiness industry pushes individual coping strategies, while research shows that in the vast majority of cases, it is our working environments that are making us sick.”

She returns to this observation five entries later, in “G Is for Ghosts,” invoking Bartleby, titular protagonist of Melville’s great story whose famous refrain, “I would prefer not to,” would become a key slogan of the Occupy movement and a byword for the impulse to refuse. The cadaverous young copyist who one morning abruptly stops working has been sapped of all life, Schaffner notes, by “his dull and oppressive working environment.”

The unsettling power of Bartleby’s refrain for so many generations of readers is that it shuts down the circuits of negotiation and exchange, cancels all shared rules of communication. Bartleby doesn’t say yes to the attorney’s request to copy a document, but neither does he refuse or defy it. He induces outrage in his colleagues above all because they cannot fathom what he’s trying to say or why.

Schaffner seems to recognize that the power of Bartleby’s refrain lies in its sabotage of functional discourse, and at the same time, she wants to restore him to it, effectively to bring him back to work. “What, then, can we learn from Bartleby?” she asks, and unlike the attorney and his fellow employees, for whom Bartleby is evidently a hole torn in the fabric of learning, she has an answer: he can teach us to be less negative. “Let us therefore counter Bartleby’s repetitive rejoinder with a question: ‘What would you prefer to do instead?’”

Can a writer as thoughtful as Schaffner really be commending us to read “Bartleby”—Bartleby!—as an object lesson in the virtues of a positive attitude? Seeing Melville’s story reduced to a cautionary lesson in the need to have “a positive vision of what we want to do with our life,” it is hard not to resort to weary snarl.

But before rushing simply to deride the platitudinous use of this great story, we might remind ourselves that against the more abstracted and sealed-off scholasticism of so much modern academic philosophy, Schaffner wants to recover a more venerable conception of philosophy as guided by the question of how one should live. It’s a sound impulse, if vulnerable to the temptation to offer easy takeaway reassurances.

In fact, Schaffner’s book is most interesting and surprising when addressing the privations and wounds of our contemporary cultures of work and leisure, conditions that surely defy any quick fix. She introduces us to Nietzsche as the great seer of modernity’s morose instrumentalism, quoting The Gay Science on the effective abolition of joy and the vita contemplativa. Already in 1882, Nietzsche was warning that “educated people” were increasingly able to understand rest only as a peripheral function of work and the “need to recuperate,” an insight whose salience today is painfully obvious.

Another entry, “C Is for Capitalism,” gives us a fine summary exposition of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), focusing especially on its adumbration of the Lutheran injunction against “waste of time” and unproductive activity, arguing that the same morality tacitly underwrites our own codes of living and working, and pushing us to subject those codes to “critical attention.”

But passages like these only accentuate the irresolvable tensions between such critical attention and the compulsory positivity of the self-help genre. These tensions lend Exhausted a peculiarly split quality. The book stirs in us a spirit of discontent and protest against the stifling pressures neoliberalism exerts on our minds and bodies, only then to enjoin us to an equanimous “acceptance” of our feelings of anger and loss.

The subject of the first entry (“A Is for Acceptance”) is also the presiding spirit of the whole book. Schaffner quotes the Daoist parable of the farmer who “accepts both what seems initially positive and negative with equanimity, refusing to make rash judgements.” Acceptance is the basis for Schaffner’s preferred therapeutic approach, as formalized in the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).

The basic thrust of this approach is to come face-to-face with our inner critic, “naming it, observing what it does without judgement and then letting it go.” ACT involves noting the ongoing broadside of the inner critic without “fusing” with it, thus turning negative thoughts “into objects of our critical discernment rather than accepting them as the truth about ourselves.” In other words, we must decline to take our superego too seriously, to be railroaded into buying its version of the truth about ourselves. In a comparison taken from ACT practitioner Russ Harris, the flow of our thoughts is likened to the rotating dishes on a “kaiten” or conveyor belt sushi bar—we simply let the unappetizing dishes or thoughts pass us by.

The comparison reveals an implicit model of the mind as commanded by a discerning consumer who knows what they like. On this model, the psychic ear hearing the negative thoughts is fully separate from the psychic mouth speaking them, notwithstanding their occupation of the same skull. It’s this kind of split that makes it possible to treat the superego’s punishing pronouncements as we might an unappetizing passing sando. But our relationship to our superego is not that of a choosy consumer. Even if we reject Freudian metapsychology, experience alone will show us that the power of the inner critic lies in our vulnerability to it, as well as in our availability to the bad news it tells us about ourselves. If simply ignoring the superego were enough to diminish it, we’d surely have tried that already.

All this may simply demonstrate an inbuilt limitation of the self-help genre: in the face of the self’s helplessness, it can only run aground. Schaffner’s appeal to acceptance feels like a way of acknowledging the chasm between the psychosocial burdens imposed by neoliberalism and the self’s capacity to bear them. It is a basic premise of her book, after all, that burnout is a structural effect of working environments that are making us poor, exhausted, and ill—conditions that severely restrict our capacity to help ourselves.

Han starts from the same premise, placing the emphasis more on the spiritual poverty of what he has famously called “burnout society,” for which inactivity can be perceived only as a deficiency, and not as the substantial “capacity in itself” it really is. As a region of experience that cannot be bought, sold, or otherwise put to work, inactivity is a cipher of utopia, of freedom from the tyranny of wage labor and the commodity. More radically still, Han follows Maurice Blanchot in conceiving the inactive as refractory to knowledge. Embodied in the figure of Eurydice, avatar of “night, shadow, sleep and death,” it is what cannot enter the daylit world without being instantly dissolved by it. In inactivity, the will abdicates its own sovereignty in the service of the higher state of “not-doing”: “Activity reaches perfection in inactivity.”

For Han, inactivity is not in a relation of opposition to activity but a permanent possibility within it, one to which our neurotically goal-oriented society is blind. As for Schaffner, Nietzsche is an essential thinker here. Han cites a late fragment on “inventive people” and their need for sufficient time to work without purpose or productivity. Only in such nonpurposive creativity is it possible for something authentically new to emerge, “something that has never been there before.”

Han’s praise for inactivity as midwife to the new doesn’t prevent him from using much of the second half of Vita Contemplativa to stage a sustained critique of Hannah Arendt’s advocacy for the “vita activa,” specifically what he sees as its fetish of novelty. Centered on the imposition of a sameness and conformity that blocked the birth of the new, Arendt’s midcentury critique of “mass society” failed to anticipate the emergence of a society of compulsory novelty, presided over by social media.

In this society, laments Han, “everyone thinks they are unique. Everyone has their own story to tell. Everyone is a performer of their self. The vita activa takes the form of a vita performativa.” In this world of singular selves competing for attention and status, of start-ups and new editions, meaningful novelty gives way to relentless iteration—the latest iPhone, food fad, or reality TV format.

By yoking the new to activity, Han argues, Arendt entrenches the rule of sameness, the repetitive cycle of business as usual. By disentangling us from the demands of the clock, inactivity extricates us from this cycle and creates the space for the new as a real event rather than a predictable iteration of the same. In Han’s formulation: “To oppose the compulsion of work and performance, we must create a politics of inactivity that is able to produce a genuinely free time.”

There is a palpable beauty, at once philosophical and aesthetic, to Han’s vision of the insinuation of a sabbatical time of freedom and purposelessness into the dominant time of productivity and work. This pure time, uncontaminated by the intrusions of need and obligation, makes a telling contrast with the moments of relief and amelioration snatched from the unforgiving flow of clock time by the exhausted imagined readers of Schaffner’s book.

Taken together, these two forms of time serve as an analogue to the two forms of culture (high and mass) famously described by Adorno as “two halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add up.” On Schaffner’s side, we have the precarious and short-lived freedom of “acceptance.” On Han’s, the ideal and impossible freedom of inactivity. Opposed to one another, these two conceptions of time are also phenomena of the same commodified logic they would each, in their very different ways, wish to oppose.

Kronos v. Kairos 

(躺平的韭菜不好割, Tǎng píng de jiǔcài bù hǎo gē)

BeLabouring Counter-Points...

Slavoj Zizek, "Big Capital will use every tool at its disposal to crush socialists like Corbyn"

The Labour Party’s election failure in the UK proves that, for the progressive left to succeed, it will have to become considerably more revolutionary. The ‘softly, softly’ approach isn’t working.
Since, in some sense, the election was about Brexit, the first thing that strikes the eye is the asymmetry in the position of the two big parties. The Tories constantly repeated their mantra of “Get Brexit done!”, while Labour’s stance was the worst possible.

Knowing well their supporters were almost symmetrically split between ‘Remainers’ and ‘Leavers,’ the party leadership was afraid to choose one side and thus lose voters opposed to it – but, as the saying goes, if you try to sit on two stools simultaneously you may well fall into the gap that separates them. What made things worse was how the true stance of Corbyn was more or less known: he wanted a Brexit, just a different one.

The now-outgoing party leader wanted the UK to get rid of EU financial, and other, regulations in order to pursue more radical Leftist policies. Whatever we think of this choice – there are good reasons for and against Brexit – the Labour party avoided an open debate about it and masked its indecision with a catastrophic formula: “We’ll let the people decide!”

Why was it catastrophic? Simply because people don’t want politicians to impose hard decisions on them. Instead, they demand political leaders show them a clear path, to tell them what choice to make. The Tories made their stance clear.

Playing with fire

The second reason for Labour’s failure was the well-orchestrated campaign of character assassination against Corbyn, who was even rated the Top Anti-Semite of 2019 by the Simon Wiesenthal Center (ahead of actual terrorists!). This was a case of foreign meddling into elections at least as strong as the alleged Russian meddling into the last US elections.

Gideon Levy correctly predicts that the precipitous conflation of critique of Israeli politics with anti-Semitism will give rise to a new wave of anti-Semitism, and one can clearly see where this path will eventually end. As Marxism taught us, anti-Semitism is a displaced anti-capitalism: it projects the cause of social antagonisms engendered by capitalism onto an external intruder (the ‘Jews’).

The temptation here is to make a fateful step further and to denounce any radical anti-capitalism as a form of anti-Semitism – signs of this are already multiplying all around the world. Can one imagine a more dangerous way of inciting hatred?

I find it especially worrying when this strong pro-capitalist stance is combined with the newly-discovered love among US Christian conservatives for Israel: how can the US Christian fundamentalists, who are by nature anti-Semitic, now passionately support the policy of the State of Israel?

There is only one solution to this enigma: it is not that the US fundamentalists changed, it is that Zionism itself, in its hatred of Jews who do not fully identify with the politics of the State of Israel, paradoxically became anti-Semitic. In other words, it constructed the figure of the Jew who doubts the Zionist project along anti-Semitic lines.

Trump did exactly the same when he used anti-Semitic stereotypes to characterize Jews as driven by money and insufficiently loyal to Israel. Israel is playing a dangerous game here: some time ago, Fox News, the main US voice of the radical Right and a staunch supporter of Israeli expansionism, had to demote Glen Beck, its most popular host, whose comments were becoming openly anti-Semitic.

False allies

When, at this year’s Hanukkah party, Trump signed his controversial executive order on anti-Semitism, John Hagee was there, the founder and chairman of the Christians United for Israel. On top of the standard Christian-conservative agenda (Hagee sees the Kyoto Protocol as a conspiracy aimed at manipulating the US economy; in his bestselling novel ‘Jerusalem Countdown,’ the antichrist is the head of the European Union), Hagee has made statements that definitely sound anti-Semitic.

He has blamed the Holocaust on Jews themselves; he has stated that Hitler’s persecution was a “divine plan” to lead Jews to form the modern state of Israel; he calls liberal Jews “poisoned” and “spiritually blind”; he admits that the preemptive nuclear attack on Iran that he favors will lead to the deaths of most Jews in Israel. (As a curiosity, he claims in ‘Jerusalem Countdown’ that Hitler was born from a lineage of “accursed, genocidally murderous half-breed Jews.”) With friends like these, Israel really doesn’t need enemies.

Money talks

Last but not least, the third reason is what I call the Piketty trap. In his Capital and Ideology, Thomas Piketty proposes to radicalize the welfare state – not to nationalize all wealth like in Soviet-style Communism but to maintain capitalism and redistribute assets by giving every adult a lump sum at the age of 25. The progressive income taxes he proposes would allow governments to give everyone a basic income equivalent to 60% of the average wage in wealthy nations and cover the costs of decarbonizing the economy.

Furthermore, employees should have 50% of the seats on company boards; the voting power of even the largest shareholders should be capped at 10%, with an individualized carbon tax calculated by a personalized card that would track each person’s contribution to climate change.

Piketty is thus fully aware that the model he proposes would only work if enforced globally, beyond the confines of nation-states; such a global measure presupposes an already existing global power with the strength and authority to enforce it. However, such a global power is unimaginable within the confines of today’s global capitalism and the political mechanisms it implies – in short, if such a power were to exist, the basic problem would already have been resolved. Piketty’s proposal is utopian, although he presents it as pragmatic, looking for a solution within the frame of capitalism and democratic procedures.

Safe game?

Imagine that Corbyn had won (or, for that matter, Bernie Sanders becomes US president) – and just try to fathom the shattering counter-attack of Big Capital with all its dirty tricks. Maybe the voters were aware of these potential dangers inherent in a Labour victory and preferred the safe game.

The challenges that we face, from global warming to refugees, from digital control to biogenetic manipulations, require nothing less than a global reorganization of our societies. Whichever way this will happen, two things are sure: it will not be enacted by some new version of a Leninist Communist party, but it will also not happen as part of our parliamentary democracy. It will not be just a political party winning more votes and enacting Social Democratic measures.

This brings us to the fatal limitation of Democratic Socialists. Back in 1985, Felix Guattari and Toni Negri published a short book in French ‘Les nouveaux espaces de liberté’ whose title was changed for the English translation into ‘Communists Like Us’ – the implicit message of this change was the same as that of Democratic Socialists: “Don’t be afraid, we are ordinary guys like you, we don’t pose any threat, life will just go on when we will win...” This, unfortunately, is not the option. Radical changes are needed for our survival, and life will NOT go on, as usual; we will have to change even in our innermost feelings and stances.

So we should of course fully support Labour in the UK, Democratic Socialists in the US, and their peers in other states. But if we just wait for the right moment to enact radical change, this moment will never arrive. So, we have to begin with where we are. But we should do this without illusions, fully aware that our future will demand much more than electoral games and Social Democratic measures. We are at the beginning of a dangerous voyage on which our survival depends.

Farooque Chowdhury, "Slavoj Zizek's Misunderstanding

Mr. Slavoj Zizek has tried to interpret recent development of the UK Labour Party – its election debacle – but has only exhibited his misunderstanding of the entire capitalist scenario.

The heading, if the heading is by Mr. Zizek and not by the editor, of his article in RT on December 17, 2019 – “Big Capital will use every tool at its disposal to crush socialists like Corbyn” (https://www.rt.com/op-ed/476079-corbyn-socialists-labour-capital-zizek/) – is the first show of his misunderstanding. Whoever formulates the heading, Mr. Zizek writes: “The second reason for Labour’s failure was the well-orchestrated campaign of character assassination against Corbyn […]”.

Not only big capital, all capitals irrespective of size, origin and character, irrespective of the circuits these pass through, and in whatever way it metamorphoses use every tool at its disposal to crush socialists. And, it’s not only capital, but all economic and political forces use all tools at its disposal to crush opponents, not only socialists, if not compelled to make compromise. Slave owners and feudal lords followed the formula. Capitalists of all sizes always try it. Any rich landowner in any backward economy uses all the tools he can master to crush his opponents. It’s an old fact in economy, society and politics. In any socioeconomic reality, this is the formula the antagonistic class forces follow while the forces deal with each other. However, a section claiming to be “lefties” forgets this fact as they expect their political opponent would not behave hard, brutal or barbaric. They expect their political opponent would act like a lover. It’s a childish expectation. This expectation is based not on lower- or upper-middle class, but on middle-middle class idea about class-based politics, which is actually no-idea. They understand neither class nor class struggle. They expect that they will organize protest marches and their political opponent will shower them with rose water. It’s failure to understand politics and political struggle. They even deny looking at recent street protests in Sudan and Iraq – the number of people the state machines killed.

Crushing Corbyn is not a new development. It was tried in case of Lenin, Mao and Fidel. Lenin was depicted as a German agent; Mao as a red dacoit, Fidel the same. Long articles have been composed and “serious” analyses” have been made showing Lenin was “financed” by bankers to secure bankers’ interest. There were assassination attempts on Lenin and Fidel. Even, Arafat had the same experience. There are hundreds of similar instances in countries. Therefore, Mr. Zizek’s statement is nothing new.

The point Mr. Zizek misses is: Capital’s no attempt against Lenin, Mao and Fidel succeeded. Socialists’ one of the tasks is to foil capital’s all these attempts. It depends on socialists’ capacity, capability, efficiency and power. The incapable and inefficient is busted. The rest learn from the failure.

Mr. Zizek writes in the opinion piece: “The Labour Party’s election failure in the UK proves that, for the progressive left to succeed, it will have to become considerably more revolutionary. The ‘softly, softly’ approach isn’t working.”

“More revolutionary” means the party is already “revolutionary”. In no sense, the LabParty is revolutionary. The LabParty’s program is not also revolutionary. Illusions and unreal expectations should be thrown away if someone likes to survive in the turmoil of class struggle.

In a time of rightist onslaught, in a time of the rise of the rightist and ultra-rightist forces of different colors, in absence of forceful presence of revolutionary politics, the LabParty seems better, seems better than ultra-rightist. That’s the consolation. But, basic character of the LabParty’s politics shouldn’t be forgotten. Aspiration of supporters of a political party and character of politics of the party are not always the same. The two – aspiration and character – may be the same, and the two may be different, even completely opposite. A party leadership can play – exploit – with the aspiration of its supporters to advance the interest it’s tied to. This has been/is found in all sorts of countries – advanced bourgeois democracies, colonies/neo colonies, in the metropolis of the capitalist world system and in the periphery, in the case of aged political parties and in the case of political parties new in terms of age but old in terms of politics and ideology.

Mr. Zizek refers to “[t]he challenges that we face”, and writes about the requirement of “a global reorganization of our societies.”

Other than the forces of status quo, none will disagree with this claim – “a global reorganization of our societies.” Mr. Zizek deserves thanks for this reiteration of position.

But misunderstanding begins in the next sentence: “Whichever way this will happen, two things are sure: it will not be enacted by some new version of a Leninist Communist party, but it will also not happen as part of our parliamentary democracy. It will not be just a political party winning more votes and enacting Social Democratic measures.”

If the requirement is, as Mr. Zizek writes, not a Leninist Communist party or its “some new version”, then what type of political party should it be if it goes for a global reorganization of societies? Let’s assume “some other party” or “some other parties”. But which class interest shall/should it uphold? No political party is simply a gathering or an amalgamation of huge or small number of persons with humbug or sweet pronouncements. All political parties uphold or aspire to uphold interest of any of the classes or any faction of a class in the society the organization operates in or makes loud proclamations about its politics.

A global reorganization of societies requires radical change of the world capitalist order – the old order; and that requires snapping of ties with the order; and that requires a political force that finds no interest in the old order; and that requires a class force having no interest in the order. It’s a complete antagonistic relation between the world capitalist order and the class force aspiring for a radical change of the order. The political party Lenin proposes is nothing other than of a class that have no interest in the world capitalist order, which is based on private property; and the political party doesn’t aspire transfer of ownership of private property from one class to another, but complete abolition of private property. It was not Lenin, who told these for the first time. Marx and Engels told this long ago. Lenin reiterated their position. In any class-based society, can anyone show any political party that doesn’t go for any of the class interests prevailing in the society? Is it possible to escape class question other than in some sort of middle class dream devoid of any idea of reality?

Mr. Zizek writes, “it will also not happen as part of our parliamentary democracy. It will not be just a political party winning more votes and enacting Social Democratic measures.”

Most probably with the word “our”, he means the bourgeois democracy. It’s not known whether he considers the system as his. And, if it’s not limiting with “enacting Social Democratic measures”, he has to go either to bourgeois democracy with no compromise with labor, if situation permits, or take measures fully opposed to bourgeois democracy – people’s democracy, which is opposed to class exploitation. The task needs leadership of a class, a class capable of carrying out the task. No political move in any society in any phase of the society was/is possible without leadership of any of the capable classes in the society. Contemplating anything else is a reflection of a brain having no idea of political move and maneuver in class-based society.

Mr. Zizek claims: “Radical changes are needed for our survival”. Then, it seems that Mr. Zizek is for radical change. What does it mean by radical change? Isn’t it a change in property relations? Isn’t it a change in political power? Are these possible without a political party having no class-mooring, program for change of property relations and political power? Lenin’s claim is this: A political party of the class, which is capable of radically changing these relations. Activities of a certain political party at a certain stage of the party in a certain society are not the sole concept of Leninist party. Mistakes and errors are not the entire concept. The mistakes and errors are not the sole output of the party. And, mistakes and errors are not always the output of the party. Objective conditions, the concerned party’s capability and experience also play a role. A clean, clear claim: “Blame the party” or “the party is the problem” is not a scientific approach. Mistakes and errors don’t wipe out the question of political party’s class basis. The bourgeois or even the backward classes don’t even dream of, plan, or organize their political party not running along the path of their class interest, not carrying out tasks the class interest deserves. Is it possible to cite a single example from any of the class-based societies other than the claim made in the preceding sentence?

Therefore, where does Mr. Zizek lands? It’s nowhere, but a misunderstanding.

Mr. Zizek has another misunderstanding as he writes: “So we should of course fully support Labour in the UK”. Is it possible to support the LabParty fully if it goes to imperialist war in some other country? Has not this – joining imperialist war – happened? Then, how can the working people support the LabParty fully? Should support be extended in absolute term – fully – when the LabParty has a history of joining imperialist war even if aspects of its policies in the domestic issues are ignored? Should objective lessons of politics remain unlearned?

These issues should be discussed as there are efforts, since the debacle of the post-revolutionary states in the eastern and central Europe and in the USSR, to misinterpret questions of politics, political party, dictatorship of class in class-based society, errors in those societies, etc. The basic concepts of class-based politics are thrown away in the name of weeding out mistakes and errors although it has not been possible to throw away issues of politics in class-based societies.

Mr. Zizek is right as he writes: “[O]ur future will demand much more than electoral games and Social Democratic measures.”

Therefore, there comes the question of class-based politics, political party, making support conditional to political forces trying to stand apart from the existing political matrix of right and far-right.

Farooque Chowdhury writes from Dhaka.

On Byung-Chul Han's "Psychopolitics"

Anton Cebalo, "Living in a Time of Psychopolitics: How an idea by philosopher Byung-Chul Han helps us reframe our world"

In the early 1970s, psychologist Herbert Freudenberger wrote of a condition he was seeing more and more among his patients: emotional exhaustion coupled with a loss of motivation and commitment. He called it “burnout” — borrowing a term initially used in the underground by those suffering severe withdrawal from drug abuse.1

It quickly caught on both clinically and among everyday people, helped by Freudenberger’s autobiographical style in describing it. He had experienced the condition himself in bouts. But more importantly, the diagnosis came at a critical time in American society as it was transitioning to a more “post-industrial” way of life, yet another term coined around the same time.2 Americans were graduating in greater numbers and increasingly pursuing knowledge-based work in offices, which was especially susceptible to stress and psychological ailments.3

The “burnout” of professionals in a “post-industrial” society: the two ideas were clearly linked. They also provided a window into the new era, one that was loosely being called the “Information Age.” The immediate relevance of Freudenberger’s ideas was obvious, and would soon be made into wellness questionnaires by psychologist Christina Maslach and others. By the 1980s, corporate management realized this malady was here to stay and began to craft methods specifically for dealing with demotivated labor.

These developments have since had time to deepen and mature, and today are more relevant than ever. In the last two years, many workers have resigned, often suddenly, due to a lack of fulfillment and burnout in what’s been called the “Great Resignation.” These familiar sentiments are the starting point for philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s writings which have grown popular as of late.

In his 2017 work Psychopolitics, Han writes of how power today has grown reliant on manipulating psychological states, uniquely made possible by technologies of control. Its symptoms are of the mind, like burnout and diseases of despair, coupled with addiction and compulsion. Understanding psychopolitics helps us to reframe the time in which we live, where one’s mental state has become a leading place of conflict.

Life Under Psychopolitics

Psychopolitics opens with an ominous statement: “freedom will prove to have been merely an interlude," something that's most felt when "passing from one way of living to another."4 Byung-Chul Han views the current situation as the turning of a new page, whose psychological ailments constitute a “profound crisis of freedom." The forces responsible operate on a level which he calls “psychopolitics.”

While Byung-Chul Han writes clearly, he also has a tendency to write aphoristically, very much in the style of a pamphlet. He is best known for his social diagnoses, writing often on themes like alienation, burnout, and how market demands have broken up the social fabric. Psychopolitics itself is a collection of short essays and a distillation of his worldview.

The book, however, is not historical by any means which may confuse the reader over how any of this is unique to our time. After all, psychological techniques on the unconscious, either in the realm of politics or markets, have been used to great effect since the early 20th century. For example, can fascism be called a form of psychopolitics? It certainly relied on mass psychology.

Psychopolitics is not "psychology applied to politics," though. Han describes psychopolitics as a new stage in how we relate to power, made possible by online life. Long ago, in agrarian societies of the past, power was exercised by the sword and threat of death.5 In succeeding industrial societies, power was exercised not by the threat of death, but by discipline and regulation over life. It needed to efficiently manage the physical bodies needed for production.6 Now in post-industrial societies, power is exercised by allowing individuals to exploit themselves in an open, transparent, and increasingly zero-sum environment. Rather than controlling bodies, Han argues psychopolitics is mainly about souls and minds.7

Because sentiment travels fastest in the digital realm, Han likens psychopolitics to a "dictatorship of emotion" in its ability to manipulate desire and opinion.8 In such an environment, "freedom switches over to compulsion" and addiction is rampant.9 Participation is easily reduced to grievance and complaint.10 Grand narratives of the future that used to motivate the past break down.11 This is because there is no longer a "political we" like before nor are there clear classes of mutual antagonism, Han argues.12 Instead, a world dominated by psychopolitics produces a constant "inner struggle against oneself."13 The boundaries between work and leisure weaken as well.14 And trust altogether declines because “the more we are confronted with information, the more our suspicion grows.”15

The ideal subject for psychopolitics according to Han is the always-optimizing "self-entrepreneur" who is unable to form relationships "free of purpose."16 Such social relationships, he argues, would ideally be the basis for healthy, non-coercive freedom. Psychopolitics tends to instead produce generalized anti-sociality.

Han’s writing tends to cut through the noise with concise insight, and I don’t want to quote the entire book here. But what is most convincing about his view is how abundantly clear its symptoms are.

In a previous post, I have already covered the ongoing “social recession” and community decline. Still, there are other signs we live in psychopolitical times: random acts of anti-social violence; deep democratic discontentment17; historical amnesia and memory loss18; and an unprecedented rise in mental illnesses like depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, insomnia, and attention-deficit disorders.19

In many ways, it is evident we are living in a psychopolitical time, one especially susceptible to maladies of the mind and soul. A quote for today ought to be “protect me from what I want,” a phrase Han borrows from artist Jenny Holzer.

Byung-Chul Han’s Dystopia

While these are all pressing problems in their own right, what really strikes the reader when reading Han’s work is the alarming tone. Really, what he is intent on illustrating are the dire stakes if we do not undo “that which is changing freedom into coercion.”20

On this question, he unabashedly sets his target on “Big Data,” the platforms and market forces exploiting psychopolitics. The tech monopolies operate on a vast scale, transforming people into raw data and “quantifiable selves” amenable to surveillance, manipulation, and directed consumption. These entities allied with the state could leverage psychopolitics and its proclivity for emotion to simulate desired outcomes. It is creating a situation where, Han believes, “free will itself is at stake."21

He writes:

In the age of digital psychopolitics… influence takes place at the pre-reflexive level.

For human beings to be able to act freely, the future must be open. However, Big Data is making it possible to predict human behavior. This means that the future is becoming calculable and controllable. Digital psychopolitics transforms the negativity of freely made decisions into the positivity of factual states.

Persons are being positivized into things which can be quantified, measured and steered. Needless to say, no thing can be free. But at the same thing, things are more transparent than persons.22

The disciplinary power [of industrial society] discovered “population” as a productive and reproductive mass to be administered carefully. Reproductive cycles, birth and death rates, levels of general health, and life expectancy provided the objects for regulation.

However, this approach is unsuited to the neoliberal regime, which exploits the psyche above all. Big Data provides the means for establishing not just an individual but a collective psychogram, perhaps even the psychogram of the unconscious itself.23

[Digital psychopolitics] manages to intervene in psychic processes in a prospective fashion. Quite possibly, it is even faster than free will. As such, it could overtake it. If so, this would herald the end of freedom.

It is possible that Big Data can even read desires we do not know we habor… [thus] rendering the collective unconscious accessible... in the position to take control of mass behavior on a level that escapes detection.24

The invisible technological forces that Han describes are already in play, molding culture and politics. The thought of a society managed through algorithmic prediction and suggestion is a disturbing prospect. Yet, I am also encouraged by the fact that these systems have so far failed miserably in predicting the future. Human spontaneity is still clearly present nowadays, often expressing itself in spite of any attempt at control, albeit very chaotically. Society has not yet been reduced to just inputs and outputs.

Living in Spite of Psychopolitics

Byung-Chul Han illustrates a grim picture of technological control and emotional manipulation, whose complexity is hard to fathom. Still, we interact with it every day, and part of its appeal is it is mostly curated for us. A psychopolitical breakthrough was the popularization of the “infinite scroll” in the early 2010s, as timelines moved away from being strictly chronological, with Facebook leading the way.25 This also coincided with social media being less about connecting with real-life friends.

A while back, I stumbled upon an essay written in 2017 on a website called Graphite Journal. In it, an anonymous user writes, “the internet is larger than any one metropolis, but browsing it today feels like walking down a narrow circular hallway.”

They go on to recount a story of how in 1956, philosopher Guy Debord looked over some sociological studies on Parisian city-dwellers and noticed something similar. He was surprised to find their movements across the city quite limited, “forming a triangle with little deviation.” From such a realization, Debord proposed the idea of the dérive: the conscious decision to pass through areas and moods previously untraveled, drawn by whatever attraction one finds. The goal of dérive was to reject the narrow hallways one is forced into, and instead, turn them into bigger worlds. “It is high time that we develop a dérive for the internet,” the user writes.

When I read Han’s work, I’m reminded of the need to cultivate thoughts and worlds beyond what’s curated for us. And perhaps that also starts with cultivating our physical public spaces and third places as well, so that we have an actual home and community outside of psychopolitical dynamics. Oddly enough, I think the solution, in this case, seems fairly straightforward although admittedly difficult to carry out in practice.

1 Wilmar B. Schaufeli, “Burnout: A Short Socio-Cultural History.” Pg. 105, 107.

2 American sociologist Daniel Bell published The Coming of Post-Industrial Society in 1974.

3 What makes post-industrial society possible is the growth of knowledge-based work led by educated workers. In 1960, only 41% of Americans finished high school and just 7.7% graduated college. See below.

 

4 Byung-Chul Han. Psychopolitics (2017), pg. 1.

5 Psychopolitics, pg. 19.

6 Industrial society concerned itself with administering bodies. One of its breakthroughs was Taylorism, a form of scientific management that became popular at the turn of the 20th century named after Frederick Winslow Taylor. It was a new way of organizing labor and capital in production. This would be applied to state planning, and later utilized by both fascist and communist-aligned governments to transform their public.

Some other focuses of modern industrial society were eugenics and demographic questions.

7 Han borrows this “body and soul” language from philosopher Gilles Deleuze who he quotes. Disciplinary society was about the body and psychopolitics is about the soul.

8 Psychopolitics, pg. 46.

9 Psychopolitics, pg. 2.

10 Psychopolitics, pg. 3.

11 In Revolt of the Public (2013), Martin Gurri writes that the new digital public is largely a negating force that tends to break down all authority and norms. This is because it struggles to form a positive vision of society. This fact is a core feature of psychopolitics as well according to Han.

12 Psychopolitics, pg. 6.

13 Psychopolitics, pg. 5.

14 Many can vouch for feeling like work and leisure bleed into each other. In some cases, online life can completely distort one’s internal rhythm and sense of time which is why sleep disorders are more common nowadays.

15 There’s a widely-shared quote by Harvard Biologist E.O. Wilson who said that “we are drowning in information while starving for wisdom.” It should be said that more and more information does not necessarily confer more meaning. In fact, it’s the opposite. Han talks about this in a recent interview with Noema Magazine.

16 Psychopolitics, pg. 2.

17 In 2019, Cambridge University’s Centre for the Future of Democracy recorded the highest level of discontentment across all democracies since it began conducting survey research in 1995. There’s been no follow-up since the pandemic.

18 L. M. Sacasas on his substack blog The Convivial Society has written some excellent essays on how the internet distorts our sense of time and memory.

He writes:

On the internet, there is no present, only variously organized fragments of the past.

We no longer encounter the past principally as a coherent narrative informing our present and future action into the world. The past, is now encoded in ponderous databases, and it can be readily and endlessly re-interpreted, reshuffled, recombined, and rearranged. This activity is what now consumes our time and energy.

On the internet, fighting about what has happened is far easier than imagining what could happen.

Because we live in the past when we are online, we will find ourselves fighting over the past. Because our fighting is itself inscribed and inscriptions cannot be defeated only overwhelmed, it very quickly becomes part of what is fought over. The casus belli recedes inexorably from view as it is layered over by the cascading inscriptions, which themselves become things to be fought over. Soon, it becomes impossible to map the course of the conflict or even make sense of it. And nothing changes.

19 The alarming rise of mental disorders is well-documented, largely affecting those who grew up digitally. A turning point seems to be around 2012. But there has been a steady increase in prescriptions for anti-depressants, SSRIs, and ADHD medication since the 1990s as well.

20 Psychopolitics, pg. 2.

21 Psychopolitics, pg. 60-61.

22 Psychopolitics, pg. 12.

23 Psychopolitics, pg. 21.

24 Psychopolitics, pg. 63-65.

25 https://www.theverge.com/2014/3/6/5469952/facebook-goes-back-to-basics-with-latest-news-feed-redesign

Antifa and Antifascism

 

Squirrel Nihilism w/ Nietzsche Girl

‘Militanz’ as moralised political violence has been applied by the radical Left since the 1960s, but has scarcely been defined in academic literature. In the particular West German context, ‘Militanz’ has been restricted to attacks against objects rather than persons, in contradistinction to the terrorist attacks of the 1970s. The Autonomist movement has further theorised this concept through the caveat of the ‘three Antis’ (racism, sexism, capitalism), against which they consider their violence to be morally justified. This article offers a genealogy and definition of this 1990s Autonomist ‘Militanz’ by relying on extensive archival research and oral histories collected within the Hamburg Rote Flora Autonomist milieu. It then interrogates both this concept and the group's claims to moral authority by working within the Autonomists’ own conceptual definition to apply ‘Militanz’ categorically to a riot during the 2017 G20 summit. The article disentangles the various ideological factions who took part in this riot, and challenges media discourses that the Rote Flora Autonomists were responsible. However, it also concludes that ‘Militanz’ as a purely ‘Anti’ stance cannot legitimate moralised violence without offering any affirmative definition of appropriate political action, lest all violence become acceptable ‘Militanz’.

- Ali Jones 

---

 

So, where does morality and the "right" to become morally righteous lie? Does it lie with the individual and his self-chosen and self-imposed and often inconstant Ethics? Does morality and right to moral righteousness lie within the State imposed/ policed/ enforced causal "frame" in which the individual functions (Nation//Laws)? Or perhaps it lies with second order observers who find themselves between the frames of their own Ethics and that of the Nation State and therefore add and apply post-hoc extra-judicial curatives such as those of the radical Left or Right (Militanz - against those deviant morals go unpunished by the "system" established under the Nation State in the name of prosecutorial discretion)? Or does morality and the right to act with moral righteousness lie with the United Nations, Security Council, and/or its' NGOs or Nations who pretend to preside and judge over "International Interests" in the name and service of humanity and sacred Human/Humanist Values? All of the above? None of the above? A United Federation of Planets?

MeThinkes  that too many second-order observational cooks spoil the stew. And justice dealing Militanz sanctioned SJW Superheroes need to remain in the comic books.

---

Susie Linfield, "The Return of the Progressive Atrocity"

It is the responsibility of Western activists to know who and what they support, and to separate themselves—openly and decisively—from programs and regimes that are predicated on violence and repression.

All lies and jest,
Still a man hears what he wants to hear,
And disregards the rest…

~Paul Simon, “The Boxer”


In 1957, Albert Memmi addressed the question of the Left’s relationship with terrorism in his book, The Colonizer and Colonized. Memmi was a Tunisian Jew, equally committed to socialist Zionism and anticolonialism. The Left tradition, he observed, “condemns terrorism” as “incomprehensible, shocking and politically absurd. For example, the deaths of children and persons outside the struggle.”

But Memmi’s suppositions were outdated even as he wrote. The history of the modern Left’s romance with terrorism—not the “old-fashioned” version aimed at czars or imperial officials, but the kind directed against unarmed civilians—had already begun. It started with the Algerian War and gained momentum throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and beyond with the emergence of the Red Brigades, the Baader Meinhof Gang, the Irish Republican Army, the Japanese Red Army, the Weathermen, and the panoply of organizations included in the Palestine Liberation Organization and, especially, its Rejectionist Front. The latter held pride of place: “For the Sixth International, the Palestinian resistance is a banner ... an inspiration for the revolt of the dispossessed, both in its ends and in its means,” proclaimed Mohamed Sid-Ahmed, a prominent Egyptian leftwing intellectual and activist.

It was at this time that the oxymoronic and ethically repellent concept of what the late Middle East scholar, anti-colonialist, and socialist Fred Halliday criticized as “progressive atrocities” gained credence on the Left, particularly within the Palestinian movement and among the groups supporting it. Of course, the Palestinian national project—like Zionism—has always contained a variety of ideologies ranging from peaceful coexistence to the elimination of the other. (The latter tendency is appallingly prevalent among many members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s current government.) But it is no exaggeration to say that the Palestinian movement, even before the founding of Israel in 1948, has been defined by terror more than any other, and that terrorist groups have always been prominent within the movement.

In the age of the “progressive atrocity,” PLO terrorist attacks on Israelis, Jews, and civilians throughout the world were hailed as instruments of liberation. A very partial list of such incidents would include the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics (the games continued, nonetheless) and the Lod Airport massacre the same year (death toll: 26, along with at least 80 injured); the Ma’alot massacre of 1974, in which 115 Israelis, mainly schoolchildren, were taken hostage (resulting deaths: 31); the Entebbe hijacking of 1976, in which Israeli and other Jewish passengers were separated from others and threatened with death (most were rescued by Israeli commandos); the 1978 Coastal Road massacre, in which a civilian bus was highjacked (death toll: 38, including 13 children; 71 wounded); the 1982 attack on the Chez Jo Goldenberg kosher restaurant in Paris, considered at the time to be the worst incidence of antisemitism in France since the Holocaust (death toll: six, with 22 injured); and numerous other instances of air piracy. Various international groups, especially Baader Meinhof of Germany and the Japanese Red Army, sometimes assisted their Palestinian brothers “in solidarity.” Not all leftists or leftwing organizations supported these actions, but to criticize them was a sign of “bourgeois moralism” as Ghassan Kanafani, a leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, put it. (Kanafani, who was also a gifted writer, was assassinated after the Lod attack by the Mossad.)

Curiously, none of the groups that employed terrorism, other than the Algerian National Liberation Front, achieved its aims—well, sort of. The Algerians gained their independence, but the regime established by the NLF remains one of the most repressive on Earth—the NGO Freedom House ranks Algeria as “not free,” its worst category. The revolutions that did succeed—the Chinese, Vietnamese, Cuban, Nicaraguan, and South African revolts—weren’t nonviolent, but they largely refrained from attacks on unarmed civilians. Indeed, Marxist movements had traditionally shunned terror against civilians on both moral and political grounds. Terror against civilians demoralizes ordinary people and almost always pushes them to the Right, often into the arms of authoritarian leaders; terrorism exalts the singular act at the expense of building a mass movement. André Malraux’s 1928 novel The Conquerors, set during the failed Chinese Communist uprising of 1925, opens with a dramatic act of terror; it is Garine, the book’s hero and a Marxist, who opposes this. The dire state of the Palestinian movement today suggests that there is an inverse relationship between the use of terror and the achievement of freedom.

In recent years, the Left’s embrace of terror seemed to have ebbed; you won’t find many defenders of al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban, or Boko Haram. The notable exception has been groups devoted to the destruction of Israel: Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah, all of which still garner enthusiasm and deluded admiration. One might have thought that an orgy of sadistic murder, of the kind that Hamas committed on October 7th, would have inspired serious moral and political self-interrogation. As the past four weeks have illustrated, however, the exact opposite is the case.

The extraordinary nature of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations that have swept through the capitals of the West—demonstrations that began before Israel dropped a single bomb on Gaza—has, perhaps, not been fully appreciated. Horrific massacres of unarmed civilians are, unfortunately, taking place right now in South Sudan, Congo, Ethiopia, Syria, and Darfur. Unforgivably, the so-called international community usually ignores them. But none inspires cries of esteem for the perpetrators and acclaim for their crimes. And nowhere are the victims—defenseless civilians, including children and their mothers—blamed for being murdered. That is what is happening now. The deadliest single day in the post-Holocaust history of the Jewish people has been greeted in some quarters with joy and—to be blunt—an entirely undisguised hatred of Jews.

Many of the sentiments that have been expressed—on social media, during street marches, and in the pages of various publications—reveal an astonishing distance from anything that might be considered rational political judgment and ordinary humanity. At the “All Out for Palestine” rally in Times Square, held just one day after the massacre, elated chants of “700!”—the number of estimated Israeli deaths at the time—rang out, and demonstrators made throat-slitting gestures. A speaker at a Palestine Solidarity Campaign rally in Brighton, England, also held on October 8th, described the attacks as “beautiful and inspiring.” The image of a hang-glider—just like the ones Hamas used!—with a Palestinian flag has gone viral on the web, posted by everyone from Black Lives Matter/Chicago to neo-Nazi groups, which gives intersectionality a whole new meaning.

On the streets of Brighton today this woman said that the murderous mayhem of Hamas terrorists in Israel was “beautiful” and a “success”.

They killed 600 Israelis in one day which she said “we need to celebrate”.

In Britain. In 2023. Absolutely despicable. pic.twitter.com/DaRYspP7Ru

— Heidi Bachram 🎗️ (@HeidiBachram) October 8, 2023

It is likely that many of these groups—especially those composed of privileged students who promiscuously toss about words like “genocide,” “settler-colonialism,” and “fascism”—have scant (if any) knowledge of Middle East politics or history, and couldn’t tell you the difference between the river and the sea. Many are simply advertising their “anticolonial” credentials, though I imagine that the usually stern Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran must be smiling in amazement as he sees just how many protestors in the West echo his thoughts and subscribe to his plans—openly articulated—to destroy the “Zionist entity,” even if they don’t quite know that they’re doing so.

But (presumably) knowledgeable intellectuals were also quick to jump into the fray. In the New Left Review, Britain’s leading Marxist journal, Tariq Ali praised the terrorists for “rising up against the colonizers” and implied, bizarrely, that the murders resulted from Palestinian frustration with Israel’s recent enormous pro-democracy demonstrations. In the London Review of Books, Amjad Iraqi noted the horrifying nature of the attacks but praised them for “shatter[ing] a psychological barrier,” though it might be argued that civilization depends on the maintenance of such barriers.

In Dissent, a journal with which I have long been associated and that was formerly the home of Michael Walzer’s liberal-left Zionism, history professor Gabriel Winant described Israel as a “genocide machine” and argued that Israeli victims should not be grieved. Joseph Massad, a tenured professor at Columbia who teaches Middle Eastern studies and intellectual history, was unable to contain his enthusiasm: the attacks were “innovative,” “astonishing,” a “major achievement,” “awesome,” “incredible,” and “a stunning victory”; he wondered with excitement “if this is the start of the Palestinian War of Liberation.” (Thousands have signed a petition demanding that Massad be fired; tempting though this is, I maintain that these are the times to defend free-speech principles.) Some student organizations do have ties to the region and, presumably, know what’s going on there. The inaptly named Students for Justice in Palestine, the most bloodthirsty of student groups, declared “Glory to Our Martyrs”; described the massacre as “a historic win”; and demanded, “Do not let Western media call this terrorism. This is DECOLONIZATION.”

To equate such pro-Hamas groups and activists with being “pro-Palestinian” should be a misnomer, just as it would be to call violent settlers in the West Bank “pro-Israel.” Yet the clear and often overtly expressed implication—of the demonstrators, the articles, the cascade of statements and open letters—is that the October 7th attacks and the Palestinian national project are synonymous. If not, why do so many demonstrators lustily echo the Hamas program? (At my own university, much to my shame: “We don’t want no two states, we want all of it.”) Even among those who would never actually align themselves with a terror group, there is cursory—and sometimes zero—condemnation of the killers, which is replaced by censure of Zionism as a presumptively racist-imperialist project and by hasty pivots to the so-called “root cause” of Hamas’s violence.

Why the euphemistic language, as if the Left is too delicate to look atrocity in the face? At Columbia University, 130 professors, prominent scholars among them, characterized the massacres as a “military operation,” which unfortunately echoes Vladimir Putin’s description of his invasion of Ukraine as a “special military operation.” (October 7th was also quite special.) In the New York Review of Books, some of our country’s most esteemed writers, including Ta-Nehisi Coates and Richard Ford—who surely know the difference between language that clarifies and language that occludes—described the murderous rampage in an odd way: “On Saturday, after sixteen years of siege, Hamas militants broke out of Gaza.”

Why the cowardly inability to face the cruelty: the infants murdered with sharp objects, the heads without bodies and vice versa, the terrorizing of children, the women stripped naked and shot point-blank, the burning of entire families, the mutilations, the torture, and perhaps most of all, the jubilant laughter of the killers as they accomplished their tasks? Letters (here, here, and here) signed by thousands of artists, writers, academics, philosophers, and journalists in the United States and United Kingdom—Tilda Swinton! Jonathan Lethem! Nan Goldin!—have castigated Israel without ever mentioning the Hamas attacks. Why this desperate attempt to “disappear” October 7th, as if it is already ancient—or irrelevant—history? The mealy-mouthed evasions and pretzel-like contortions of the cultural elite are an ignoble thing to behold. Jewish Lives Matter is, clearly, not a rallying cry for many on today’s Left.

In 1979, leftists who supported the Iranian Revolution had a rude awakening when the mullahs came to power and promptly executed them, along with secularists, union organizers, intellectuals, feminists, and everyone else who fit into the enormously capacious category of a counterrevolutionary. There was a lesson here: Activists have the responsibility to know who and what they support, and to separate themselves—openly and decisively—from programs and regimes that are predicated on violence and repression. Similarly, those who imagine that Hamas’s slaughters may have promoted “liberation,” “justice,” and “freedom” for Palestinians, as the banners demand, have a big surprise in store.

Unlike Iran in 1979, though, there’s no mystery as to what kind of state Hamas (an acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement) aims to create; we need only look at what it already has created. This time, no one can plead ignorance. There’s little liberation, justice, or freedom to be found in Gaza, where there are no opposition political parties, no elections, and no freedom of religion, the press, or protest. Opponents are arrested, tortured, and sometimes executed. (Yahya Sinwar, a head of Hamas’s armed wing, was known as “the butcher of Khan Younis” for his brutality toward other Palestinians.) Abortion and homosexuality are outlawed (what are those protestors with “Queers for Palestine” signs thinking?); mentioning trans rights would be unwise. It is legal for husbands to beat their wives, and so-called honor killings go unpunished. The ruling clique is notoriously corrupt, and though Gazans are very poor, Hamas is a very rich organization. “I Stand with Palestine!” demonstrators and writers proudly proclaim while lauding Hamas for having “rejuvenated a sense of political possibility” and hastening “the hour of liberation.” But what, exactly, are they standing for? And what kind of liberation will this be? Aside from the Taliban, Hamas has established the least progressive pseudo-state on Earth. The lesson of Iran has apparently not been learned; history is repeating itself not as farce but as tragedy.

Much has been written about the occupation; much more needs to be. In no way do I minimize the increasingly brazen, homicidal violence of some settlers, or the conduct of the crazy messianic zealots in the current Israeli government. An absolute precondition for any political settlement between Israel and the Palestinians will be the end of the Netanyahu coalition and its ideology, as well as the defeat of Hamas. But Hamas isn’t opposed to the occupation, and it has made this position abundantly clear. It has responded to every move toward Palestinian sovereignty, including Israel’s unconditional withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 and the signing of the Oslo Accords, with deepening violence, including rocket attacks and suicide bombings. (David Grossman recently told the New Yorker that had Hamas turned Gaza into a peaceful and prosperous enclave, as many Palestinians and Israelis had hoped, subsequent withdrawals from West Bank settlements would have proceeded.) What Hamas calls “usurpation” means Israel itself, regardless of borders. Any political agreement, including two states or even a binational one, is blasphemy: “So-called peaceful solutions and international conferences” stand “in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement,” its founding document and subsequent actions make clear.

The events of October 7th have clarified to Israelis from across the political spectrum—and should to everyone else—just what it means to make Palestine judenrein, as Hamas’s founding document and its current leaders promise. Indeed, the only way to “free Palestine from the river to sea,” as thousands of demonstrators worldwide are chanting, is to kill (or at best expel) all the Jews who live there, which is precisely what Hamas openly states is its primary goal. (Rep. Rashida Tlaib recently released a video in which she endorsed this demand, which she then ludicrously tried to spin as “an aspirational call for ... peaceful coexistence.” Perhaps she imagines that the millions of Israelis expelled from Yemen, Morocco, Iraq, Syria, and a host of other Arab countries will be offered the “right of return.”) Hamas specifies that every Muslim, including women and “the slave,” is duty-bound to join in the eschatological struggle to cleanse Palestine of “the Jews,” whom it identifies as the world’s most powerful force and mankind’s greatest enemy. October 7th was the practice of that principle.

.@POTUS, the majority of the American people are not with you on this one. #CeasefireNow pic.twitter.com/rV97zrMkad

— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) November 3, 2023

The determination of many on the Western Left to either ignore this program or refuse to believe it—despite Hamas’s consistent candor about its aims and means—is a sign of intellectual Orientalism: Palestinians are viewed only as helpless, reactive victims rather than people who generate ideas and actions for which they can be held accountable. But of course they do create political worldviews and programs, and Hamas has been especially voluble of late in explaining its future plans. Just last week, Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad affirmed that his organization planned many more October 7th-type attacks until it “annihilates” Israel; a week later, Hamas spokesman Taher El-Nounou told the New York Times, “I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders.” This makes calls for a “mutual ceasefire,” in Tlaib’s words, nonsensical.

Hamas Official Ghazi Hamad: We Will Repeat the October 7 Attack Time and Again Until Israel Is Annihilated; We Are Victims - Everything We Do Is Justified #Hamas #Gaza #Palestinians pic.twitter.com/kXu3U0BtAP

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) November 1, 2023

In fact, a ceasefire (as opposed to a humanitarian pause) would be entirely unilateral on Israel’s part, which raises the question of why Israel would lay down its arms against a forthrightly eliminationist enemy that holds more than 220 hostages. What would happen the day after that one-sided cessation? (Hamas has shot almost 10,000 rockets into Israel, including Tel Aviv, since October 7th; in the north, Hezbollah launches attacks.) Apparently, Hamas should be allowed to keep its bombs and bomb factories, assault rifles, drones, grenades, missiles, rockets, and tens of thousands of fighters as it plans future mass slaughters. How this will lead to anything approaching peace, as its advocates insist, rather than to war ad infinitum, as Hamas promises, is bewildering. The other option, of course, is that many believe that unending death and destruction are precisely the conditions that Israelis deserve.

Hamas does not recognize the category of “civilian” when it comes to Israelis, which is why a straight-faced, high-level Hamas spokesman could tell Britain’s Sky News: “We didn’t kill any civilians.” He wasn’t exactly lying; that’s just how he sees it. What is less well known—but is key to understanding the humanitarian calamity in Gaza right now—is that the group does not recognize the category of civilian when it comes to Palestinians. Nathan Thrall, formerly head of the International Crisis Group’s Arab-Israeli project and a frequent critic of Israel, has pointed out that Hamas undoubtedly knew that the extraordinary cruelty of these attacks would be met with an extraordinarily deadly Israeli response. “Clearly, this act by Hamas is suicidal,” Thrall said the day after the massacre. “I think that the attacks are virtually guaranteed to bring civilian deaths [in Palestine] on a greater scale than we have seen.”

Amir Tibon, a leftwing journalist who lived in Kibbutz Nahal Oz (where 14 were killed and five kidnapped), observed that on October 7th, Hamas “knew they had signed the death certificate of thousands of Gazans. For them it was a price worth paying for the joy of murdering my teenage neighbor and kidnapping children. They knew Gaza would suffer terrible, shocking destruction. They did it anyway.” Hamas has since affirmed what Thrall and Tibon knew: “Without a doubt, it was known that the reaction to this great act would be big,” Khalil al-Hayya, a top official, told the Times. In fact, Hamas has always found that carnage in Gaza—and the hatred for Israel that it engenders—is among its very best tools. Dead Palestinian babies and dead Israeli babies both serve its purposes, albeit for different reasons. The fact that this is incomprehensibly perverse doesn’t make it less true.

Israel is, of course, accountable for the decisions it takes, including the siege of Gaza, which I believe is morally wrong, and the ground invasion, which isn’t. Though it did not seek this war, it is fully responsible for its actions and their consequences, including unintended ones. The civilian toll in Gaza is appalling. But the enormous numbers of unarmed Palestinians who have been, in Hamas’s parlance, “martyred” are no problem for the leadership: as the group’s founding document explains, “Death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of ... wishes.” That is not mere rhetoric; as the massacres unfolded, senior political leader Ismail Haniyeh insisted that “victory or martyrdom” are the only choices. Ordinary Palestinians, who had no say in the attacks, may see things differently. They are stunned by and terrified of the fury of the Israeli response.

IN HIS OWN WORDS: Hamas Leader Ismail Haniyeh, from the comfort of his home in Qatar: "We need the blood of women, children, and the elderly of #Gaza... so as to awaken our revolutionary spirit."

Listen to this vile terrorist scum sacrifice his own people, while living in the… pic.twitter.com/GL7ZTfa5Dw

— Embassy of Israel to the USA | #IsraelUSA75 (@IsraelinUSA) October 27, 2023

Even as the corpses pile up, Hamas remains unconcerned; just last week, Hamad brushed off civilian casualties by explaining, “We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.” Moussa Abu Marzouk, another spokesman, has insisted that the group bears no responsibility for the fate or well-being of Gazan civilians and has acknowledged that its extensive network of underground tunnels is meant to protect Hamas fighters, not civilians. (Unlike the “martyrs,” including children, whom Hamas is proud to sacrifice, its fighters are safe underground where they hoard stocks of food, fuel, medicine and, of course, weapons. Much of the senior leadership, however, lives in luxury in Doha, Tehran, and other cities.) Hamas’s desire for dead Gazans has never been more evident than in this war. It has not joined the international calls for a humanitarian corridor, and it refuses to release the kidnapped hostages, which is the precondition for ending the siege.

There is, and always has been, another tradition, another sense, of what it means to be “progressive” and to stand with the oppressed. In 2011, Fred Halliday wrote an essay titled “Terrorism in Historical Perspective.” It is the most intellectually and morally lucid work on the subject that I know. Halliday addressed himself to his comrades on the Left and made a crucial argument: Any movement that claims to represent an oppressed people must act in an ethical way even if it is not in power and perceives itself as weak.

Oppression is not a carte blanche for severing heads from bodies, shooting hundreds of young festival-goers, bludgeoning people to death, murdering children in front of parents and vice versa, killing naked women point-blank, and kidnapping babies and the elderly; there is no universe in which these are revolutionary, emancipatory, or anticolonialist acts, much less “beautiful” ones. Sadism and violence are not synonyms. Sexual torture cannot be anti-imperialist—nor is it an understandable, much less inevitable, response to oppression. An eliminationist program is not a freedom charter. History has proved, again and again, that terrorists and freedom fighters aren’t the same, which is why the former never achieve anything approaching either liberation or justice. There is no room for “yes, but.” Why, when it comes to the deaths of Israelis, is this so hard to understand?

The Western Left’s response to October 7th will, I believe, be viewed as a moment of moral corruption on a par with the defense of Stalin’s purges, Czechoslovakia’s antisemitic show trials of 1952, the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and Poland’s antisemitic expulsions of 1968, along with the denial of the Khmer Rouge genocide (see under: Chomsky, Noam) and the adulation of China’s vicious Cultural Revolution. Since October 7th, there have been a handful of liberal and Left writers who have written bravely and honestly: Jonathan Freedland and Howard Jacobson in the Guardian, Michael Walzer in the Atlantic; Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times, Alan Johnson and Cary Nelson in Fathom, Seyla Benhabib on Medium. They are, alas, exceptions. Halliday’s leftism—the leftism of humane universalism rather than anti-imperialism—is in eclipse, as was Memmi’s.

Except in Israel. Somehow, that nation of genocidal-white supremacist-fascist-settler-colonials has produced a Left that still adheres to the traditional principles of universalist dignity and equality, and that isn’t too squeamish to recognize terrorism for what it is. It rejects Manichean reductionism—something it can ill afford—and can therefore hold more than one thought at a time. It understands that Israel is a powerful country and that it is existentially threatened by its enemies. It understands that it is a perpetrator of the occupation and a victim of terrorism. It knows that one can oppose the way in which Netanyahu’s government is conducting the war while also avowing that a war must be fought. It understands that vanquishing Hamas and defeating the fanatical ultra-nationalists in its midst—and in its government—are not only related but utterly interdependent. It rejects the concept of collective guilt, whether of Israelis or Palestinians. It has a pretty good understanding of what antisemitism is. Of necessity, it comprehends tragedy. Its tone is sober rather than histrionic. These are the people who have done more to defend Palestinian rights and promote Palestinian sovereignty than all the West’s self-aggrandizing decolonialists, boycotters, and anti-imperialists combined.

Michael Sfard is one of Israel’s most important human-rights lawyers; he has spent his life defending Palestinian rights inside and outside of courtrooms. He recently condemned, in the harshest terms, Israel’s political response to October 7th:

Israel today is a country and society where ... lawmakers from the ruling party are openly and unashamedly calling for a “second Nakba,” where the defense minister orders a denial of water, food and fuel to millions of civilians, a country whose president, Isaac Herzog, Israel's moderate face, says that all Gazans are responsible for Hamas’ crimes.

When the political and military leadership loses all restraint and approves ideas about a massive blow to civilians, we’re creating a society where the process of stripping away the humanity of the people on the other side of the border has been completed. And when that happens, the inferno is near.

But he also addressed his (putative) allies:

Not far from us, on their own way to the black hole, hover those who call themselves members of the “progressive left.” They’re finding it hard to unhesitatingly condemn—and without fleeing to the “context”—a satanic orgy of destroying civilian Israeli communities near Gaza, along with their residents. Some are even blabbering something about decolonization being an ugly process; that’s what happened in Algeria and Kenya, for example.

I read that and die of shame. Maybe you didn’t understand, but the struggle to end the occupation and achieve independence for the Palestinian people is part of the universal struggle to defend everyone’s human rights, not vice versa. The idea of the sanctity of human life, the noble idea that every person has basic rights that shouldn’t be undermined, isn’t a tool for implementing Palestinian independence but the other way around.

The Western Left, basking in the safe, prosperous cities of the liberal democracies, lives in a very different world from the one Michael Sfard inhabits. Its moral rot may have suddenly become clear, but an ethical collapse takes time to develop. October 7th reveals the long-simmering theoretical confusions, and the moral void, that dominates many of today’s “progressive” movements. A Left that is fixated on “decolonization” mistakes a death cult for a liberation movement and is unable to recognize a bloodbath, even one that was filmed, and publicized worldwide, by the killers themselves. A Left that, rightly, demands absolute condemnation of white-nationalist supremacy refuses to disassociate itself from Islamist supremacy. A Left that divides the world between racists and antiracists and is obsessed with “people who look like me” can’t understand that the clash of two national movements has nothing to do with color or race.

A Left that celebrates diversity vilifies one of the most culturally and ethnically diverse countries in the world. A Left that prizes itself on defending refugees castigates a nation founded almost entirely by refugees—among the most immiserated and persecuted in history—as “settler-colonial.” A Left that divides the world between noble “native” peoples and the aliens who pollute them reproduces the neo-fascist worldview of the far-Right, from Donald Trump to Marine Le Pen. A Left that lauds intersectionality hasn’t noticed that Hamas’s axis of support consists of Iran, famous most recently for killing hundreds of protestors demanding women’s freedom; the homicidal dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad; and Hezbollah, another fundamentalist Islamic group that is dedicated to Israel’s destruction and that terrorizes, and sometimes assassinates, fellow Lebanese who oppose it. What kind of Left gets into bed with such forces? Nor has it noticed that, since October 7th, ISIS and al-Qaeda have urged Muslims to step up worldwide “operations against the Jews” in solidarity with Hamas.

And so, as always, the eternally vexing Jewish Question emerges, though many on the Left seem to think it’s been answered. A Left that has spent years, and spilled mountains of ink, tediously insisting that anti-Zionism cannot morph into antisemitism is unable to discern, much less clearly denounce, a militia of avowed Jew-killers. A Left that sees systemic racism in every nook and cranny—and in every (white) heart—can’t recognize the systemic antisemitism that results in mass murder. “I killed 10 Jews with my own hands!” a Hamas terrorist exulted as he called his parents, in the midst of the October attacks, to tell them the good news and send photos to prove it. That cry—both modern and ancient—must also be seen as a root cause of October 7th; that, too, is a key part of its “context.”

Individually and collectively, Israeli leftists have expressed their sorrow, their shock, and their anger at the Western Left’s betrayal. Crucially, they have tried to educate their supposed comrades about what a true Left response—to both the occupation and October 7th—must be. A group statement signed by some of Israel’s most prominent intellectuals read in part:

Many of our peers worldwide have expressed strong opposition to Hamas’s attack and have offered unambiguous support for its victims. Prominent voices in the Arab world, too, have made it clear that there is no justification for sadistic murder of innocent people. However, to our dismay, some elements within the global left, individuals who were, until now, our political partners, have reacted with indifference to these horrific events and sometimes even justified Hamas’s actions. ... And there are even those—no small number—for whom the darkest day in our society’s history was a cause for celebration.

This array of responses surprised us. We never imagined that individuals on the left, advocates of equality, freedom, justice, and welfare, would reveal such extreme moral insensitivity and political recklessness. ... We emphasize: there is no contradiction between staunchly opposing the Israeli subjugation and occupation of Palestinians and unequivocally condemning brutal acts of violence against innocent civilians. In fact, every consistent leftist must hold both positions simultaneously.

Sociologist Eva Illouz was even more blunt. She closed a recent article in Haaretz with this farewell note:

Many Arabs, within Israel and without, have shown the compassion the doctrinal left has so shockingly lacked. They have stood by our side. It is them with whom we must build a party of humanity determined to bring justice and peace. The global left has made itself irrelevant from now on. 

The Left in Israel, unlike the global Left, recognizes that Hamas must be eliminated, not appeased. “A country that doesn’t kill the people who tried to murder my daughters, and those who sent them, has lost its right to exist,” Tibon wrote. Civilians in Gaza must be protected whenever possible, but Hamas’s concealment of fighters and weapons within the civilian population and civilian sites guarantees that the war will be extremely ugly. Postwar, new political landscapes will emerge, though only a fool would predict what they’ll be. (One thing is clear: the political leaderships of both peoples have led them, and each other, to ruin.) October 7th, Tibon wrote, “hasn’t changed my belief, based on a cold, calculated reading of reality, that in the long run we must find ways to share this land. ... But first we must survive.” It has become obvious that there are many on the Left who dispute that last sentence.