Ben Debney || So said Voltaire. Like many truisms that stand the test of time, this one often fades into the fog of war and is lost to the blinders of moral panic and high drama, but resurfaces again and again. Masked by the fog of war, the historical truth that becomes its first casualty remains as immanent as causality is the paranoid conspiracism of the predatory imperialist.
Nevertheless, history remains as inalienable from reality as innate rights and responsibilities, innate worth and innate value remain inalienable from each of us as individuals. Ozymandias is defiant of the inalienable and blows away with the shifting sands, an Overlord of Archetypes.
Intellectual history, the history of belief systems, tells of practically endless absurdities preceding atrocity. Hage talks of stereotyping and Othering as a targeting mechanism, as an effective process for cliques to define themselves negatively against folk demons of their own making though moralising, grandstanding and virtue-hoarding.
Reflexive conflating of criticism and attack to recast doubt, nonconformity, opposition or refusal to worship the ground autocrats walk on with the requisite level of awe as themselves abuses seems a popular strategy for recasting abuse as beneficial to its victims.
Such is the legacy of the European Civilising Mission. It sought to recast colonial predation and extractivist conquest as a gift of consent-based law—presumably, to the 10% of heathen savages who survived a century-and-a-half of American Holocaust after 1492.
This point bears repeating: while the American Holocaust accounted for what historians generally agree was about 90% of the population of both continents, anywhere between 60-80 million people because no one knows for sure. This Great Dying was such nevertheless that it produced a climate event, cooling Northern Europe into a miniature Ice-Age that guaranteed atmosphere for every 18th century English novelist.
If the American Holocaust is any measure, this targeting mechanism of stereotyping and Othering—the construction and destruction of a scapegoat, enabling predators to recast themselves as solutions to problems of their own making—becomes more and more absurd the more violent it becomes.
For their part, European colonialists regressed into the racism they invented at a historically discrete moment to explain the incapacity of their prey for sound adult judgement, as though they have any concept of themselves. Racism regresses into the pack violence its cult slaves confuse with strength. Blood flows, trauma guarantees more.
In the United States, haunted by the ghosts of its own Holocaust, colonists fought a revolutionary war against the motherland 1) to retain slavery, which London wanted to abolish due to the cost of policing them and putting down rebellions, and 2) to be able to continue Westward expansion, which was against costly in demanding financing of Indian Wars (Horne). ‘Taxation without representation’ meant not being allowed to own slaves and steal other people’s land.
When the land and the blood ran out at the end of the 19th century, nativism replaced westward expansion as the ‘great national safety valve’ for class conflict (Van Nuys). Eventually it joined with the Nazism inspired in part by US indigenous reservations; these of course became the model for the concentration camp system scattered throughout Eastern Europe. Atrocity was just around the corner.
Absurdity feeds on aggression. The more absurd does absurd become as its cult slaves fetishise violence as an outlet for the frustrations of codependent enslavement under an authoritarian oligarchy. In time-honoured fashion, opportunists and grifters boost conspiracist moral panic, fueling hatred of the barbarian menace.
In time-honoured fashion do aggressive opportunists quietly dodge domestic discontent and enforce the conformity allegedly demanded by emergency conditions created by the positively diabolical threat. In time honoured fashion do they excite a war against the satanic barbarians who are jealous of antidemocratic kleptocracies and therefore coming to get us.
In time-honoured fashion do conspiracist demagogues essentialise on the basis of some arbitrary, surface-level feature that makes them easy to categorise visually, or a hidden disability easy to invisibilise and attribute to some subjective malfunction on the part of the doubter, critic or nonconformist. In such ways of targeting does history tell of the endless rebottling of old paranoia vinegar with new labels and adaptable propaganda strategic communication, absurdities preceding atrocity.
The ongoing atrocities in Gaza honour the absurdities of history in all the wrong ways. This appears true not least of all in the Zionist co-option of Civilising Mission narratives associated with defending some mythical ‘rule-based world order’ from equally mythical terrorist savages, while claiming indigenity as a coloniser with improvements from back home. Protecting international law from heathen barbarians requires crimes against humanity. The predator recasts the abuse as the solution to itself, people starve en masse.
‘The spice must flow.’ The big knobs running the make-believe pantomime throw fuel on the fire of counterterrorist conspiracism as often as they can and hope no one remembers the outcomes from the unintended consequences that arose the last time the world caved to moral panic over international terrorism.
Whether it was Iraqi oil, tightening their grip over the petrodollar recycling system and the ability to maintain the stability of the dollar artificially, as long as the oil flows, or the natural resources of Afghanistan, the drive for plunder was the ulterior motive behind moral panic over the barbarians. It has long been and remains the pretext for pre-emptive violence to speak to the heinous savages in the only language they understand, to save them from themselves and help them become one of us.
Netanyahu is after Gaza’s natural gas; they have hundreds of billions of dollars worth of it in the sea just off the coast. You don’t have to share dividends with a population you’ve ethnically cleansed in the name of fighting antisemitism, no more so than anyone has to notice that one of your partners in your reheated War on Terrorism also supplied the Islamic fundamentalists to partake of the first nominal incident that became a notorious pretext for purges, emergency laws or war. Like the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, or the Mukden Incident, or the Reichstag Fire, or the assassination of Sergei Kirov.
In its craven hypocrisy-on-a-mission, and facile, infantile idiocy, the weaponisation of antisemitism alone is testament to the power of absurdity in enabling groupthink. Credo quod absurdam is the logic of the Inquisition and the goosestep. It is the logic of toxic workplaces where organisational enabling is valued ahead of competency, especially where this might lead one to doubt the judgement of organisational thugs, if not fail to adequately conform to a dysfunctional equilibrium. I believe social and class hierarchies are positively sacred but personal boundaries not so much if they get in the way of mad power and dividends because continued employment demands it.
Credo quod absurdam is also the logic of rolling imperialist, ethnofascist, resource extractivist, psychotic and genocidal turds in anti-discrimination glitter. It is the logic of acting out on history, rather than reflecting on and rising above it. It is the logic of identity in speech rather than acts, of saying one thing and doing the complete opposite, of doublethink.
The mentality that saying bad things about crimes against humanity means you hate Jews is the coercive control logic of the imperial protection racket, offering national security blanket carrots to the stick of state terrorism (Tilly). As in the last War on Terror, the predator produces the problem. The US invasion of Iraq produced Islamic State and Al-Qaeda offshoots—one of which it just removed from international terrorist designation now that it runs Syria as a tribute-paying vassal within a military alliance staffed by former Nazis who fought in the war.
Who is the terrorist? Who is the fascist? Does it matter half as much as the plunder and mad accompanying atrocity accompanying absurdity? Hardly. Does the rebottling of a vintage that was already on the nose now that the Taliban run Afghanistan again matter where perpetrators need to recast their own hard as beneficial to their victims? Hardly. It is almost as though conspiracist make-believe per the credo quod absurdam of “might makes right” is just the sales pitch for the thugs and frustrated domestic abusers who will smash your windows if you don’t cough up tribute like Al-Qaeda.
Perfectly cool and normal.
Ben Debney. Originally published on Znetwork.
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