Crisis has always been a moment for elites to reconstruct the basis of their own power. History tells us from innumerable instances that they have long understood crisis to also be a moment of opportunity, and that they can turn nominal threats to their power and control to their advantage if they can successfully fashion themselves solutions to problems of their own making. The War on Terror was a reaction to an atrocity perpetrated by religious fundamentalists sponsored by one of the parties to the crusade. Cold War anticommunism built an empire in the name of defending the world from predatory expansionism. In the American Holocaust, European colonialists genocided godless heathens in the name of ‘love thy enemy’ and the Civilising Mission, a project that continues via European ethnofascists in Occupied Palestine.
On this count, Zionist Caesarism is a nod to Jefferson, who noted the ‘standing maxim’ of the Romans to ‘excite a war whenever a revolt was apprehended.’ In the case of the war criminal Netanyahu, his warmongering expedited this process as surely as it did for Bush two decades ago in shutting down anti-corporate activism exemplified by the ‘Battle for Seattle.’ Now, as then, scare-mongering and association of criticism and opposition with disloyalty remained useful for counterterrorist conspiracists like Netanyahu in shutting down domestic opposition within Israel to his fascist incursions into bourgeois democracy in the first place, while also problematising opposition from Palestinians to the cruelty and soullessness of Zionist oppression in the second.
From a historical perspective, this is all straightforward power politics—history being the principal means of comparing what its genocidal thugs have claimed, as distict from what they have done. It exposes the lived values of power behind the endless pious grandstanding and conspiracist moral panicking of its addicts. Historian Charles Tilly argues imperial power structures operate on the model of a protection racket, making sure that future clients come to harm under their watch, and then selling themselves as a solution to problems of their own making—in return for the vassals becoming permanent sources of tribute. Crisis to such structures means a crisis in elite power and rule, not crisis for the societies they enslave. Apparently, crisis for genocidal ethnofascists means not dominating USD$400billion+ in natural gas resources in the Gaza sea, control over which has heretofore been contested with peoples now subject to crimes against humanity. In no sense does it mean the ecological consquences of extacting and burning that gas.
In these facts, Gaza embodies as well as any previous historical example Gramsci’s most recognisable quote: ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’ Within the present interregnum, a paradox is unmistakable insofar as the absurdities belong to a global imperial order that is dying literally as well as metaphorically; the percieved advantage to perpetrators of crimes against humanity of successfully defending civilisation from the brutes is belied by the fact that short-term victory can only feed the fire of globally-encircling ecocide.
The up-to-the-minute relevance of Gramscian praxis stems from the fulfilment, within the interregnum of ongoing crimes against against humanity in Palestine, of Voltaire’s equally notable observation that those who can make us believe absurdities can make us commit atrocities. The absurdity-atrocity nexus arguably swings on twin axes of essentialism and opportunism—absurdity by way of taking a part and calling it the whole, and opportunism by way of exploiting the make-believe that results to one’s own advantage. The value of the natural gas deposits in the Gaza Sea is a measure of the willingness of zionist ethnofascism to engage in wanton atrocity.
The new world of baseline sanity and justice, unknown to moderns, struggles for birth against the sheer weight of the waking nightmare the traditions of the dead generations construct to fulfil their imperial legacy, per Marx. It constitutes their parting gift as they abandon any pretence to respect for international law or human rights, and put all their bets on successfully rebottling the same kind of counterterrorist conspiracism that left the Taliban in control of Afghanistan.
Besides the overt and ongoing perpetration of crimes against humanity, two facets of the traditions of the dead generations, critical to the maintenance of the interregnum, are apparent. The first is the conspiracist logic of, ‘if you say bad things about crimes against humanity, you hate Jews.’ The second is the bystander culture of influentual Arabs like the Saudi Royal Family, primary perpetrators in this instance. In both case, absurdities reach such crowning heights as the fact that the kind of non-state terrorism the Zionist Civilising Mission essentialises as its only form, as did the Bush neoconservatives, is sponsored by its Saudi allies.
This again was also a conspicuous paradox of the First Terror Scare; the 9/11 hijackers were predominantly Saudis, brainwashed into Wahabbist fundmamentalism in an entire network of ‘schools’ sponsored by an autocratic monarchy. The ultimate sponsors of the indoctrination that fuelled the hijackers who perpetrated the atrocity were also nominally geopolitical agents of the open society during the orchestrated global moral panic over terrorism that didn’t benefit Western elites, and opening of multiple theatres of warfare that followed.
Back then, mind-bending absurdity preceded the moral atrocity into which mainstream Western intellectual culture degnerated, once more trying to alchemy altruistic outcomes from selfish means. Imperial overreach would of course have been nipped in the bud had Project for the New American Century neocons not been looking for reasons to take advantage of provocation for myopic purposes. Their steadfast refusal to negotiate with terrorists was always belied by the fact that their first act, nominally in opposing their evil designs, was to give the suicide bombers exactly the overreach they needed to give meaning to their own sacrifice. It was they who benefitted more than anyone else from the passive bystanding of the Western political, media and academic establishment in the face of the military adventurism and sustained conspiracist moral panicking and coercive control propaganda that came next.
The attempt to alchemy altruistic outcomes from selfish means is likewise apparent in the rebottling of counterterrorist conspiracist logic from the First Terror Scare to the current Second: ‘if you think for yourself or oppose our international aggression, the terrorists win.’ Two decades ago, the same logic associated doubting the designs of the powerful with disloyalty to the cause of the individual against coercive control and autocratic despotism. Little has changed, save the rebranding of the vintage as shiny, magical and All! New! to excite the alienated and repressed consumer within. As in the mind of every domestic abuser, the target of violence has to be devalued and dehumanised. That which is to be conquered and controlled must not know its own value, lest it resist and survive.
The construction of the terrorist stereotype at the outset of the First Terror Scare was readily apparent in everything from ratation stock historical footage of Bin Laden as a HR specialist serving the West to ubiqitous Islamic terrorist bobbleheads made in his likeness. The process of constructing the folk demon de jour necessitated essentialising the target of imperialist, extractivist predation as the Disloyal Other—taking the phenomenon of terrorist violence, limiting the definiton to instances that didn’t serve extractivist imperial power structures, dehumanising targets of brute conquest, such that normative moral constraints against coercive violence to individual boundaries were felt not to apply.
As Stanley Cohen pointed out, deviance is a matter of who has the power to control the meaning of the word and impose its interpretation on global public discourse. In 2001, as in 2024, deviance has been defined by the structural violence of corporate media monopoly and corporate capture of national governments, not least though prodigious use of dark money. National parliaments, thus reduced to wholly-owned corporate subsidiaries, reproduce their own power and legitimacy in the manner of the standover racket, dragging what H.L. Menken once called ‘an endless procession of imaginary hobgoblins’ in front of the public to drum up business for itself, and to invite the public to jump on a moralistic bandwagon where everyone can belong and have value as long as we accept that the only values that matter are the ones leaders articulate. We should also have the basic decency and sense of decorum to not notice when they embrace markedly the opposite in the values they live—almost as though they’re using national emergencies as an excuse to project inadmissable shame onto scapegoats and carry on with with the wanton aggression they had been planning all along. We can never forget that Hitler described his desire for lebensraum in the 1920s, long before he began inventing atrocity tales of persecutions of ethinic Germans in Poland to justify launching World War II.
In a similar manner did neoconservative perpetrators of imperialist aggression in 2003 suffer the obvious paradox of embodying the threat to democracy they alleged to oppose; once again, exceptionalism and a state of emergency historically familiar enough to be far closer to the normal state of affairs explained the contradiction as a temporary expendiency to ‘meet the evildoers in the only language they understand.’ Then, as now, counterterrorist conspiracism was critical as a cover story instofar as essentialising the Other for demonisation purposes enabled them to reverse victim-and-offender roles, adopting the pretence that a provocation was not a desperate act and a calculated one, but a barbaric lashing out that justified the same in response.
The dehistoricised spectre of the terrorist not serving Western interests enabled the panic mode necessary to excuse the patent absurdity of democracy enhancement from international aggression, and, underlying that, the patent absurdity of altruistic outcomes from selfish means. Western enablers amongst the Respectable Classes™ kept shtul for a decade, with the inevitable long-term consequences, so long as their own opportunities for personal advancement remained intact. Then as now, mainstream intellectual culture was comatose and sterile in its bystanding and enabling.
While nominally an expediency to meet the barbarism of the Other in the only language it understood, from the much-vaunted state of exception came the even greater absurdity of the pre-emptive strike, the literal embodiment of the causal atrocity of altruistic outcomes from selfish means. To this logic, the emergency neoconservatives were praying for was why the world needed to suffer a decade more of the same, and Bush neoconservatives ignominious defeat on two fronts. Before the resoundingly destructive and harmful consquences of fossil fuel grabs caught up to the perpetrators, they could be recast as beneficial to the victim.
From this legacy, 7 October replaces 9-11 as the mantra of identitarian perpetual victimhood, old wine rebottled with an updated label as the old world shifting the goalposts to prolong subjecting the entire planet to a systemic grift in the name of hoarding dividends and moral virtue. In the new bottle, the age-old altruism-from-selfishness alchemy. The age-old pseudoscience of opportunism enabled by essentialism, scapegoating and coercive-control narrative rewriting enabled by xenophobia and Islamophobia. Now, as 20 years ago, any new world that might emerge, inclusive of human rights and a survivable future, is sacrificed to the special interests of key players, who sacrifice their own power to influence events, and the lives of those who suffer and die so long as they waver, to their skin in the game, to the opportunities complicity affords them.
This is a major stumbling block in the West, where the identitarian norms of neoliberal capitalism reflect an antidemocratic hollowing out of liberal democracy by a colonising corporate aristocracy. Essentialism and opportunism are both overt in neoliberal economic fundamentalisms, reflecting a predatory, instrumentalist mentality of Platonic vintage prone to reducing every living thing on the planet into objects, and measuring worth in terms of our exploitability for dividends. Within its mercenary and sterile social culture, egalitarianism presents an immediate and direct ideological threat to its purposes and goals; neoliberalism must co-opt and strip egalitarianism of its intersectional and class-aware substance, reducing any movement towards institutioanl change to a shopping list of sexy progressive causes, bereft of any underlying connection of a systemic or historical nature. Thus does it essentialise symptoms into social and historical root causes in much the same fashion as neoconservative and ethnofascist conspiracism essentialises the phenomenon of terrorism. Both essentialise authoritarian social relations into individual attitudes, while conflating criticism of authoritarianism with attacks on egalitarianis—reversing victim and offender in the time-honoured tradition of coercive control.
At this late stage of our collective downward spiral, the neoliberal Professional Managerial Class already enjoys an increasing notoriety for its opportunistic, careerist essentialising and bystanding in the face of the kind of absurdities that precede atrocity. In a vernacular sense, the co-opting and colonising imperative of the imperial class manifests as the ongoing attempt to roll a corporate turd in egalitarianism glitter. The patent absurdity here of course is the introduction of coercive control via the mythology of altrustic outcomes from selfish means. As articles of coercive control imperialism, the reconstruction of harms as beneficial to the victim and perpetrator-as-true-victim whatabotism as evident everywhere within the imperial domain from the ‘we had to destroy Ben Tre in order to save it’ narrative of the Vietnam War, to the supply-side fundamentalisms of the Chicago School, to the newer mythology of Net Zero.
In each instance, the logic remains faithful to the codependent toxicity of the domestic abuser, increasingly a problem for Western establishment liberals and the Professional Managerial Class insofar as this is also the logic of Zionist ethnofascism. The commonalities (or intersections even) in this regard raises a nasty conflict between A. nominal liberal values and B. ongoing opportunities for personal advancement within establishment stuctures, where markedly different values are lived in practise. The imperative on the part of the neoliberal Professional Managerial Class to roll corporate empire turds in egalitarianism glitter becomes acute; caught in terminal contradiction, they can either concede colonisation and defeat, or reproduce their own class power as colonised, neoliberal technocrats by opportunistically reverting to the essentialism and structural violence that wrought it during the era of European Colonialism.
As one of the principal architects of counterterrorist conspiracism via his pioneering labours as czar of the Jonathan Institute, so named after his brother, Benjamin Netanyahu knows how to plug into the essentialist and opportunistic culture of neoliberal identitarianism. Postively ghoulish extremes of craven opportunism scream like their victims in the essentialising of anti-Semitism as the only form of discrimination worth combating. In deeming anti-Semitism the essential issue for defenders of egalitarianism, Zionist ethnofascists construct the absurdity they need to reconstruct atrocity as beneficial to the victims, to reconstruct crimes against humanity as a service to it.
As in the case of a class so blind to its own essentialist bystanding that it fails to notice it geopolitically, so too are Professional Managerial Class green technocrats flanked by opportunistic Zionism exploiting their own strategy of essentialising, enclosing and co-opting threatening value systems. The source of their class power become as blinders and chains, creating a feedback loop of myopic hubrus and overreach, and hastening their own demise, and of everyone they take down with them. In the interregnum, the final morbid symptom of the old world is its downfall and collapse. The new world made by those of us who survive to repair both it and ourselves starts when we recognise and rise above the opportunism and essentialism that killed the old one, taking so many innocents down with it as it went.
