In the current waking nightmare and trauma mill into which Mesopotamian geopolitics has degenerated, one question stands out above all others: how do ethno-fascist imperialists not perceive the historical continuity between their own genocidal mentality and their own historical experience? Jews, after all, have been persecuted for millennia, surviving attempted genocide after 20 centuries, so much so that we might consider Jew-hatred a historical archetype of human cruelty and insanity. Should Zionism not know as well as anyone the need to rise above the absurdist binaries between Self and Other that precede atrocity?
Opponents of genocidal imperialism tend not to explore this question in more detail, beyond lamenting the obvious. This begs the question as to our own complicity with the Zionist failure to rise above their own persecutors in other contexts. We might decry Zionist ethno-fascism, but we do not decry the logic of scapegoating that conflates the need for a Jewish homeland with the need for systematic extermination of Palestinians per se. We might decry the vile, despicable cowadice and hatred that drives that systemic extermination, but not that of empire-builders per se.
We remain loyal, in other words, to the mentality that the interplay between absurdity and atrocity, per Voltaire, is a feature of discrete power structures, of discrete historical circumstances, of particular conditions in unique times and places. We remain loyal to the mentality that the ends justify the means. Hannah Arendt, for example, has claimed notably that the Jewish experience during WWII was historically unique, taking umbrage with the understanding of atrocity amongst historians of the calibre of Val Plumwood and Norman Cohn as the result of a much deeper, binary-driven rift in the collective historical unconscious.
Arendt’s exceptionalist mentality renders invisible the experience of 60 million indigenous Americans after 1492, if not the aforementioned long history of Jewish persecution, if not parallel atrocities currently playing out in places like Darfur and the Congo. None who retains their humanity can deny that the Nazi Holocaust was a major crime against humanity, and one that innovated in notable respects in the industrial production of extermination. From a historical perspective, however, the Final Solution was hardly unique.
As a historical crime against humanity that dwarfs the Nazi Holocaust by an estimated factor of 5:1 (arguably more), we can arguably learn much from the example of the American Holocaust, as well as from our attitude to it. If Jewish persecution was driven not least by their demonisation in the New Testament as a fifth column of subversives devoted to the destruction of Roman civilisation, and the archaic conspiracism of the blood libel, so too did the the apostles of the European Civilising Mission demonise indigenous Americans as savages and barbarians as a prelude to their destruction.
In both cases, demonisation preceded dehumanisation; dehumanisation laid the basis for what Bandura calls ‘moral disengagement’—in layman’s terms, self-talk to explain to ourselves the necessity of self-serving double standards. As Bandura has demonstrated, mechanisms of blame-shifting like blaming the victim, playing the victim, conflating criticism and attack, sanitising language, and misrepresenting harmful consequences as beneficial to the victim are vital for abusers in avoiding responsibility for those consequences. In abusive interpersonal relationships, these mechanisms manifest as DARVO behaviours, or ‘deny-avoid-reverse-victim-and-offender.’ We conflate being criticised and being attacked, invent reasons why critics would want to attack us, use these to rationalise ‘end justifies means’ logic, and then continue with the same abuses and harms as before.
On a social and historical level, raised to the level of ideology, these same subjective mechanisms have laid the foundation for empires, attempting to account for why peoples need grand protection rackets to save them from an endless procession of what H.L. Menken called ‘imaginary hobgoblins.’ While the values allegedly being defending might change, the state of emergency allegedly accounting for why ends justify means has remained the same. If we question the judgement of empire-builders, the terrorists win. Or the devil-worshippers. Or the communists. Or the enemies of communism.
In the case of the Palestinian genocide, there is not even the need to juxtapose different forms of window-dressing, as Benjamin Netanyahu revives European Civilising Mission narratives of ‘taming the barbarians’ to defend allegations of Zionist indigeneity to Mesopotamia. This reappearance of Civilising Mission narratives in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict is as symptomatic arguably of the failure to learn from past atrocities, from the failure to draw general lessons about the operations of power, from the failure to see through pretences that atrocities are the product of discrete times and places, and not from the self-rationalisations of hierarchies as such.
Their atrocities, then, are the result of vicious cycles of violence and retribution; our atrocities are necessary to defend civilisation from the brutes who invite their own extermination. They are childlike primitives who shift blame and are not responsible for themselves, we are the adults in the room who serve the greater good by saving our inferiors from themselves. They are cruel, brutal, heartless, atavistic, mercenary terrorists, we are servants of necessity.
Interestingly enough where the newly-resurgent narratives of the Civilising Mission are concerned, the need historically of European colonists to distinguish themselves from the atrocities of the conquistadors was such that they gave birth to the conspiracism of the Spanish Black Legend. Hardly necessary from the perspective of making genocide look worse than it already was, the lurid demonisation of the Spanish was perfectly necessary for feeding the pretence that the Portuguese, French and Dutch Empires were in any way morally superior.
As Stelder has demonstrated, 16th century jurist and paid propagandist for the Dutch East India Company Hugo Grotius relied on this pretence of discreteness in atrocity in constructing the ideological pendulum of Utopia and Apology so necessary apparently to the European Universalist foundations of international law. This pretence fed Grotius’ construction of the propertied European male as universal subject under hegemonic colonial and imperial hierarchies, based not on free consent but violent fait complies of conquest, the Otherness of colonial subjects, and so their demonisation and dehumanisation as savages, barbarians and unpeople.
These facts notwithstanding, the Eurocentric world order constructed on the back of European Universalism and the Civilising Mission is understood to be a liberal one; European Colonists allegedly sought the improvement of colonial subjects inspired by historical developments internal to Europe like the Enlightenment and the French Revolution (‘mise en valeur’ in the French sphere of domination)—their middle-class character notwithstanding. Needless to say, such values were embraced in the abstract but trampled in lived practice in the colonies, just as they were and are trampled when it comes to the individual rights and responsibilities of the working class under conditions of social and class hierarchy.
In light of these considerations, the failure of ethno-fascist imperialists in the present moment to perceive the cognitive dissonance between their own historical persecution, and that they perpetrate themselves, is far less of a surprise. No one can reasonably dispute the necessity of combatting antisemitism; what takes more work for ethno-fascist imperialists is explaining why the fight against antisemitism is not also a fight against imperialism, against genocide, or against fascism in general. Exceptionalist mental gymnastics are necessary to conflate opposition to crimes against humanity with anti-Semitism—to account, in other words, for why critics of genocide would want to attack Israel.
Indeed, such is the degree to which antisemitism used for ‘alarmist’ purposes, and to weaponise antisemitism to try to account for why critics and opponents of crimes against humanity would want to attack Israel, that it creates open splits amongst the Zionist elite:
Rivlin took issue with his idol Menachem Begin’s justification for the 1982 war in Lebanon, which was to “prevent another Treblinka.” He said that such an approach consigns the justification for Israel’s very existence to preventing another Holocaust. He described the approach as “dangerous,” one in which “every threat is existential and every enemy is Hitler.” He decried the division of the world to either “righteous gentiles or anti-Semitic Nazis,” a separation that transforms any criticism against Israel to an expression of anti-Semitism. Instead, Rivlin offered what he described as “a third way’ that combines the Israeli vow of never again, accentuates Jewish solidarity throughout the world and adopts the Jewish value of respecting all men and women, regardless of their religion or race.
To the extent that opponents of imperial crimes against humanity fail to acknowledge the exceptionalist logic of European Universalism, manifest in the workings of imperial hierarchies operating within an international system built on fait accomplis of colonial conquest, it is also far easier to make sense of our own incapacity to transcend, rather than reproduce, what we claim to oppose. The ends-justifies-the-means, exceptional logic of empires is evident in the liberal tendency to conflate conflict and abuse, just as it is evident in the technocratic vanguardism of Marxist empires historically. On this count, nominal champions of the oppressed working class are as loyal to the legacy of our own persecution as any Zionist, our reproduction of all we claim to oppose tending only to enable the prodigious festering of absurdity and atrocity.
Ben Debney
