One of the more conspicuous paradoxes of the Gazan genocide is the weaponization of nominally progressive values to rationalise it ideologically. The weaponization of anti-semitism as redundant and vacant as it is surely vain—not least in also being perpetrated by the same demographic who consider anti-fascism, ever nothing more than spontaneous opposition to totalitarianism, terrorism.
How can we be against the fascist demonising and persecuting of jews on the one hand, and against those who oppose fascist persecution on the other? Are we only against fascist persecution when we’re not the fascists who benefit? It seems almost as though we should consider ourselves fortunate to be witnessing the world’s first progressive genocide—the people who know better than the rest of us finally figured out how to make ghoulish bloodlust work for history. That should be obvious to anyone who doesn’t just hate on others out of stupid cruelty (do you hate fun and cats too, commies).
In any event, answering such questions without leaving the normative assumptions of the liberal capitalist world order that emerged in the aftermath of WWII is, well, not very easy. Postwar liberalism did rest, after all, on an Enlightenment foundation freely conflating a nominal rationalism with property rights, and associating opposition to colonial predation, land theft and enclosure with the primitivism of unenlightened savages and brutes.
If far from the first example a conspiracist mindset that traces back to the Ancient Greeks who coined the term ‘barbarian,’ the paranoid projection of the inadmissible self onto a natural world associated with unruliness, disorder and permissiveness towards sin, and requiring conquering, enclosing, taming and domesticating, rebottled the ancient vintage nevertheless.
This rebottling of conspiracist wine has, for millennia now, protected elites from opposition, not by pretending their rule isn’t causing harm, but by concocting grandiose theories to explain why they’re not responsible. They also need to explain why opponents and critics would want to attack their rights and wellbeing in the same way as tends to underwrite the power of elites to begin with—in the same way they do, in other words.
Elites and their courtiers can avoid addressing historical root causes of the popular misery, hardship and alienation, and therefore also their own ultimate culpability, by blaming the historical consequences of social and class hierarchies on forces disloyal to the great virtues for which elites allegedly stand—civilization, progress, enlightenment, the rule of reason, peace, all of the cultishly tribal ingroup united as one (to all outward appearances) happy family.
In the postwar global push for resource control, opposition to major acts of US imperial aggression in Korea and South Vietnam was couched in such terms. Extractivist American imperialism was defending the open society from communist aggression at the same time as it was helping to overthrow democratic governments in the Middle East and install autocrats serviceable to US oil conglomerates. None of this was inconsistent with the postwar liberal capitalism normatively associated with the European Enlightenment, not least of which apparently being the Enlightenment critique of aristocratic autocracy in defense of the rights of the individual.
Nor was associating anyone prone to attaching social responsibilities to aforesaid rights, or extending the critique of political autocracy as intolerable to the innate rights and responsibilities of the individual to the economic variety, with disloyalty to values of peace and progress—while, of course, bombing Cambodia, demonising Mossadegh, and assassinating Allende. As long as we hold social and class hierarchies more sacred than personal boundaries, we will need the habit of conflating criticism with an attack, or opposition with abuse and denial of rights. We will need the habit of projecting, in other words, the habit of naming inadmissible features of the self, knowing that they have harmful consequences for others, but attributing them to some other cause. Usually this is the victim: the critic or opponent.
This fact points to an elephant in the room: the commonalities between Zionist weaponization of anti-semitism as a broad brush to tar opponents and criticism, and the weaponization of Enlightenment liberalism as an ideological weapon of U.S. imperialism, externally and domestically. The exceptionalism of the Monroe Doctrine was premised on the assumption that the colonialism that had been the basis for the United States itself, as a settler colonial enterprise built on great crimes against humanity like the American Holocaust and the Atlantic Slave Trade, was now a menace to peaceful prosperity. It was now the mission of the United States to police the hemisphere, if not ensure domestic pacification and tranquility to minimize disruption to this most solemn duty.
In practical terms, of course, policing the hemisphere in the name of Enlightenment liberalism meant making sure everyone else followed the rules. If US imperialism was exposed, it was a horrible mistake. If anyone resisted, they were useful idiots of the Evil Empire. Forgiveness for me, punishment for thee, was the tacit assumption agreed on by all within the great conspiracist rebottling plant of incipient extractivist aggression and expansionism. It also reflected the deep abiding cruelty and sadism of national ingroups, whose exceptionalist, collective narcissism provided temporary refuge from consequences. Even if it required constant rebottling to meet new opposition to imperialist aggression which, in its cruelty and sadism, was a devil’s bargain insofar as also a self-fulfilling prophecy for future conflict anyway.
Exactly the same kind of dynamics are at play amidst the Gazan Genocide. A great false equivalency hangs like a shroud over ongoing crimes against humanity conflating the heroic resistance of a truly desperate people with genocidal impulses. It is no coincidence that this is the same great false equivalency conflating heroic resistance to US imperialism with the dark designs of a menacing empire, much less that conflating existence as an indigenous American with wanting to divest Europeans of alleged Enlightenment respect for the individual or their spiritual selves. In all cases, projection enables naming of true conditions while misrepresenting causes, as well as a particularly zealous drive to avoid addressing historical root causes.
These typically point to hubris and overreach on the part of aggressively violent, expansionist empire-builders. If hubris and overreach can be defined as taking the devil’s bargain of short-term advantage vs. long-term consequences, muddied with the help of false equivalencies and prophecies of doom guaranteeing conflict with the people we victimise, it also a consistent root cause in the decay and downward spiral into decline and eventual collapse of empires. In the current iteration of history’s broken record, the long-term consequences have barely been felt surely, but unless the current perpetrators of crimes against humanity have the power to reverse causality, they can no more yield victory from raging, wanton, summary bloodlust than they can altruistic outcomes from selfish means.
On this latter count in particular, as things now stand, it seems a bit like Zionism and liberalism are getting on famously. What remains of civil society in the West exists under what remains of liberalism; one is reminded of Edgar the Bug in the original Men in Black movie, except it is imperialism and insurgent corporatism wearing the skin of the European Enlightenment (as opposed to a bug-like extraterrestrial trying to disguise himself as an honest farmer). The Enlightenment liberalism that has made its peace with social and class hierarchies, imperialism and now apparently genocide is also the one to name the inadmissible features of the self, projecting them onto anyone who idk takes the Enlightenment critique of autocratic political hierarchies and extends it to society and the economy.
This certainly creates an awkward historical moment for Enlightenment liberalism. It wasn’t enough apparently that Europeans had long used the alleged higher purpose of serving some higher purpose, be it God or a Civilising Mission, to rationalize self-serving double standards in deciding to move in on other people’s land and resources. It wasn’t even enough that these Utopian pretexts had evolved from religious to secular in the same way they evolved from communist to terrorist as the Soviet Union broke up and there was no more great bugbear and folk demon to construct Apology for hands-are-tied imperialist aggression with (Koskenniemi).
The new round of extractivist conquest and enclosure of sources of primitive accumulation had to be couched in the conspiracist narratives of defending civilization from the heathens, the barbarians and the brutes—Zionism thereby reportedly demonstrating its indigeneity to the Middle East. As back in Ancient Greece, the reconstruction of a violent attitude and proclivity and its harms as beneficial to the victims, assuming they lived, was as necessary to controlling society ideologically as coercive control is to dominating victims within abusive relationships.
As in the case of domestic abusers, it was the conspicuously violent who, it was claimed, were ahead of the curve in being able to rise above the stupidity and vacancy of brute violence as the preferred means of solving itself. It was only the utter depravity of the victim that forced their hand, absolutely rock-sold, cast-iron legit against their better judgement. If the consequences of self-fulfilling prophecies can’t be avoided, turds can always be rolled in their opposite, and anyone who opposes the turd can be said to hate themselves.
Ironically maybe this seems the basic mentality of our veritable Edgar the Bug amongst western liberal intelligentsia, who, if judged by their actions, believe respect for individual rights and responsibilities means dodging historical root causes of disorder in the violence used to construct the imperial hierarchies of modernity, and in the name of policing an Enlightenment rationality conflated, as ever, with property rights for apparent good measure. Under these conditions it becomes possible to conflate individual, structural and collective violence, reify social relations with subjective attitudes, and otherwise ensure an ongoing stream of subject matter for anyone wiling to represent the consequences of social and class hierarchies as those of individuals if it aids their own upward mobility.
At this point, the Western conspiracist legacy inherited from the Greeks provides ample opportunity performative games of ‘purge the weakest link’; permissiveness towards the false equivalency conflating addressing root causes of conflict with the prophecized doom that will befall us if we don’t always identify conflict with abuse ensures the production of a demon and a witchhunt to purge the Elect ingroup of impurity.
The False-Dilemma logic of the War on Terror was not hard to miss in the operating mentality that, ‘if you think for yourself or question the war, the terrorists win.’ From the perspective of the intellectual history of conspiracism and subjective colonization through coercive control raised to the level of ideology and empire-building realpolitik, the counterterrorist False Dilemma was no different in principle or harm than its anti-communist antecedent—‘if you think for yourself, the communists win.’ The religious content of anticommunist conspiracism invoked earlier precents from the European Witchhunts and other persecutions in the mentality that, ‘if you think for yourself, the Deceiver wins.’ In trying to co-opt an inherent capitalist institution (the Golden Rule of politics is that those with the gold make the rules), Leninism demonstrated its true loyalties in adopting the credo that, ‘if you think for yourself, the enemies of communism win.’
The witch-hunting of resisters of genocide, the denial of their humanity and of the harm done in the process of perpetrating crimes against humanity is no newer than the counterterrorist conspiracism of the War on Terror; such is the flagrant rebottling of the nominal vintage that we find ourselves compelled to ask if Osama bin Laden was Hamas too. From the perspective of intellectual history, the counterterrorist conspiracism of the Second War on Terror is no more than an iteration in a subcategory—a deep tragedy for humanity in not having been historically and collectively responsible enough to stop this from happening in the first place. Indeed, and in the final analysis, this tragedy is only compounded by the ideological routing of liberals who paved the way for unintended consequences and their own defeat by making the devil’s bargain with the conspiracist rebottling factory.
In other words, if Gaza is nominally a progressive genocide insofar as opposing it is the same as denying Jews their rights, and subjecting them to another holocaust, and discrimination is bad, Western liberals are encumbered in mounting an effective opposition to genocidal subjectivity in being so deeply faithful and loyal to it. It’s almost as though Edgar the Bug western liberalism has been routed by the current perpetrators of crimes against humanity by means of the same simple process of co-option that conflated Enlightenment rationality with property rights—the same process that looks to roll positively sacred social and class hierarchy turds (personal boundaries not so much) in egalitarianism and inclusion glitter, and ethno-fascist genocide in the antifascist.
At the end of the day it’s all still just turds, and rebottled conspiracism to explain why it’s not all just more of the same ideological gaslighting and structural violence (you never had it so good, peasants, someone here doesn’t have a conscience or any capacity for empathy or compassion but it’s not us. What’s wrong with you? Etc). The pathogen of blood-thirst survives equally well whether we think in carrying and acting out on it, we’re bearing the torch for the divine or the rational; we suppress inadmissible features of the violent self and the unintended consequences of self-fulfilling prophecies equally well on individualist or collectivist pretexts, authoritarian or libertarian (per Political Compass).
Amongst Western intellectuals, permissive attitudes towards performative harm (‘teach them a lesson’) and games of revitalizing ‘purge the weakest link’ enables flight from personal responsibility. It enables hiding behind the values of Enlightenment liberalism instead of standing in front of them and defending them for all. It enables the conflation of rationality and property rights, resistance and persecution, criticism and attack, opposition and abuse. It also leaves us wide open to the same co-option Europeans used to rationalize our own violence and predation after 1492; civilization means Europeans control the world. Enlightenment means claiming one set of values as a Utopia, and applying another as Apologia in the face of the certain doom of completely predictable violence from anyone who resists. If you think for yourself, you give power to the terrorists, or the communists, or the enemies of communism, or the Deceiver.
On exactly the same logic, on exactly the same vintage inherited from the Greeks and their prophecies of violence from outsiders they labeled, we say bad things about extractivist imperialism over hundreds of billions of dollars of gas, we’re no better than genocidal fascist empire-builders. Voltaire’s observation about those having the power to make us believe absurdities also having the power to make us commit atrocities could equally be the epitaph for European Universalism, the European Civilising Mission, Zionism, American Exceptionalism and Enlightenment liberalism.
Maybe for good measure we should improve wasteland all the way back to wasteland by pulling billions of dollars of natural gas out of the Mediterranean, the dividends from which Gazans can’t share in if they’ve been exterminated, and get the next set of counterterrorist conspiracism bottles ready to break out against Earth Defenders.
They will probably want to commit heinous crimes against humanity you know.
