View from above of the judges’ bench at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.

In opening the Nuremberg Criminal Trial on 21^st November 1945, US Prosecutor, Justice Robert Jackson, emphasised the responsibility of the victors in bringing proceedings against Nazi Germany. And the lofty reason he gave was because the wrongs which the court sought to condemn and punish were deemed “so calculated, malignant and devastating” that civilisation couldn’t tolerate their being ignored,” and the reason for that, Jackson suggested, was because “civilisation could not survive their being repeated.” The first part of that statement is clearly untrue: The West has happily tolerated the genocide being perpetrated in Gaza and has even offered Israel military support and diplomatic cover for its crimes. As for the second part, it is too soon to tell.

Following the precedent set by Nuremberg, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant for crimes against humanity, provoking outrage in the US, and thereby affirming Churchill’s interpretation of Nuremberg as ‘Victor’s Justice’. President Biden ‘fundamentally rejected’ the ICC’s decision and described the warrants as ‘outrageous’.  Senators, from both parties have called for the prosecutors of the ‘Kangaroo Court’ to be punished and sanctioned. Senator Lindsey Graham has reminded us in the UK of our ‘special relationship’ with the hegemon: warning that the British economy will be ‘crushed’ if such arrests are carried out or even enabled.  Other, more gung ho political representatives have cited the ‘Hague Invasion Act’ and called on the administration to promise to break Bibi out of prison should any one dare to arrest him. Such an escapade – which has precedent: the SS broke Mussolini out of a mountain stronghold when his fascist government collapsed in 1943 – would presumably be called something naff, like ‘Operation Free Our Boy’ given the American love of handles and the fact that this war criminal received endless standing ovations in congress.

Justice Jackson described Nuremburg, which was very much an American initiative, as “the most significant tribute power has ever paid to reason.” It’s unlikely that American foreign policy could be couched in such august terms today, but it wasn’t true even then. Allen Dulles, head of the soon to be formed CIA, had already communicated to the Nazi government that a strong Germany was what the allies were seeking in a post-war Europe which needed to be kept safe for capitalism. The real enemy was perceived to be the USSR, notwithstanding the fact that they had just lost 27 million of their number in the fight against fascism. And to counter that imagined Soviet threat, the US was busy recruiting hundreds of Nazi scientists – many straight out of concentration camp research facilities – to work on various weapon programs.  ‘Operation Paper-Clip’ was the name given to the plan – whereby Nazis with useful backgrounds were identified by attaching a paper clip to their file so that they could be surreptitiously funnelled over to the US and given new lives.

Whilst an ambitious scheme, Paper-clip was fairly sedate in its operation. Having taken off their Nazi uniforms these scientists settled into American suburbia, drawing salaries and pensions, getting promotions and even winning awards for their work. Meanwhile in Europe, a more dynamic fascist-affiliated project was under way. ‘Operation Gladio’ – another Dulles initiative – involving former Nazis and local collaborators, so called ‘stay-behind’ units, who had assisted in the genocide of East European Jewry, were being recruited and trained to quell the imagined Soviet menace. Over the next few decades these NATO-aligned military units deployed terror tactics in false-flag operations all over Europe with the aim of ensuring there was no swing to the political left.

Interviewed in 1992, Vincenzo Vinciguerra – a former member of the neo-fascist organisation ‘Ordine Nuovo’ or ‘New Order’, now serving a life-sentence for murder, whose occupation is described by Wikipedia as ‘Terrorist. Writer’- explained the Gladio operation as follows, “You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security. This is the political logic that lies behind all the massacres and the bombings which remain unpunished, because the state can’t convict itself or declare itself responsible for what happened.”[1]

It wasn’t just in Italy that these CIA operatives worked with far-right militants – just about every single West European country appears to have had its cell. But it was in Italy, probably because of the extraordinary level of violence there: the so-called ‘Years of Lead’ that forced an investigation into what had become almost a shadow government with parallel power structures. Accordingly, in August 1990 Italian Prime Minister, Giulio Andreotti revealed to the press that a secret NATO-linked stay-behind army had been working covertly in Western Europe for decades[2]. Such a revelation might be thought to have been a bombshell, a scandal or at least news, but that wasn’t the case. Notwithstanding the fact that a number of European leaders then followed Andreotti, publicly acknowledging the existence of similar covert operations in their own countries –  Greece, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxemburg, France, Portugal and Turkey – unsurprisingly, the UK kept shtum -there was little journalistic interest. Later that year the UK Observer newspaper ran an article calling Gladio, “the best kept and most damaging political-military secret since WWII.” But damaging to whom? The notion of European political independence had already passed into fiction and the ‘exposé’ barely raised an eyebrow. For the wily Dulles, foreseeing the potential problems of an independent press, had in 1953 initiated yet another operation: ‘Operation Mocking Bird’, to forestall them. According to author, Paul L. Williams, “This operation involved recruiting leading journalists and editors to fabricate stories and create smoke screens in order to cast the Agency’s agenda in a positive light.”[3]And here we are. And so when Declassified UK journalist, Mark Curtis, describes the US as a rogue state, who could argue, particularly given Nord Stream; but we all know that it doesn’t really matter. Because going rogue is of no consequence when you are the biggest rogue of them all and have adjusted the world to echo your narrative.

Justice Jackson was wrong: Western power wasn’t stooping to reason, rather the victors were co-opting it to serve the new imperialist agenda. Because a different kind of empire was coming into being. One that worked through the colonisation of minds rather than territory. America had realised that global dominance could be attained through the infiltration and corruption of national civic structures. It didn’t need to go to war, though a coup here and there would send the right signal. Rather the US Empire would control the globe through an endless process of self-propagation: ousting uncooperative leaders, collapsing economies, and destroying all contrary forms of communal existence. Under cover of ‘promoting democracy’ it would implant its own oligarchic model of governance into every other nation state. And in the process undermine and subvert aspects of that society’s intellectual and cultural life not conducive to its goals. Thus, all foreign institutions would be remade in America’s image: subservient to corporate power and culturally inert. And what those newly formed bastions of corporate America would then help shape in their own domains would be a new form of pliant citizenry commensurate with America’s demands of production and consumption.

In ‘The Closing of The American Mind’, cultural critic, Alan Bloom described America as a ‘land of souls without longing’, of beings comfortable with a sort of ‘soft nihilism,’ and it is this exemplar of citizenship that the US has energetically exported. And it is thanks to the corrosive power of such easily placated nihilism which appears to have seeped out just about everywhere in The West that European culture has dissolved into a form of ubiquitous ‘lifestyle’ focused on the heavy promotional demands of a shallow individualism. But worse than the dissolution of social life and the ugly McDonaldization of much of Europe is the perversion of reason and the corruption of the human soul that such engulfing emptiness has brought. I doubt many of us could have imagined how smoothly the world would continue to tick along against the backdrop of an ongoing live-steamed genocide: that a life/genocide balance would be so easily struck. But, of course, creating a cultural milieu in which genocide is socially acceptable has precedent.

If you thought that Nazi Germany was a land of rabid racism in which the populace was constantly ranting anti-Semitic tropes, you’d be wrong. In reality it was just the opposite. Having been persuaded of the historical necessity of Jewish extermination – primarily through it being sanctioned by the country’s intellectual class – the populace sought distraction. And that is precisely what the Third Reich provided. The German people readily accepted Nazi jurist, Carl Schmitt’s slogan that ‘Not every being with a human face is human.” but they did not want to be reminded of it.[4] Accordingly, Goebbels’ genius was not so much in selling genocide, but a way of life that made it normal. As Claudia Koonz points out in ‘The Nazi Conscience’, it was this ‘deceptively mild and objective form of racism that ultimately proved to be the most lethal’. The German people were not brainwashed into hating Jews, rather all feelings of empathy for outcasts were simply disabled within popular culture. And what was presented in its stead was the ‘historical truth’ of German supremacy. How could the populace resist their destiny?

And that remains the task of geo-political propaganda today: turning some mythical destiny into objective reality, securing the endorsement of the intellectual class and providing the populace with diversion. The myth America’s power-hungry oligarchy needed to sell, in order to pillage the earth and monetise just about every aspect of human life on it, is that of American Exceptionalism. That America, being the ‘Exceptional nation’ is special and not bound by the same constraints as lesser nations.  First female secretary of state Madeleine Albright updated the myth to ‘Indispensable Nation’ when serving in the Clinton administration. America was ‘Indispensable’ to the world according to war-monger Albright, because it ‘Stood taller’ and ‘Saw further’. And this is the self-serving mantra that has for decades been used to justify a plethora of coups, assassinations, economic sanctions, terrorist attacks, wars and colour revolutions. All with the intention of extending the reach of the American Empire around the globe. Maybe some incurious Americans still buy it, but nobody else does. And, given America’s complicity in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, any vestige of soft power the Empire might have retained has now evaporated.

The foundation of the American Empire was laid by President Truman in The National Security Act of 1947 which founded the CIA and installed the military industrial complex at the heart of American society. With its emphasis on expanding weapons programmes, raising taxes, and funding covert operations – largely through crime, this initiative enabled the US to become the global hegemon it is today. And whilst the economic costs of that expansionist enterprise are evident in the suffering of a massively neglected US populace, the moral toll American Imperialism has taken on humanity runs far deeper and has longer-lasting significance.

It was Dean Acheson, Truman’s secretary of state and advisor on foreign policy, who observed that the average American spends less than 10 minutes a day thinking about foreign policy.[5] This was important because in order to be able to sell the destruction ‘over there’ what was required was a quiescent population at home. And, as Acheson noted, as did De Tocqueville before him, the US property-owning class had been gifted with precisely that. To Acheson, the ideal American citizen presented with three main attributes – they were docile workers, enthusiastic consumers and obedient soldiers. What more could a power-hungry elite intent on global domination wish for? Although, as observed by Gore Vidal, who has written extensively on the American Empire, an extra boon was provided in the shape of America’s unique art form – the TV commercial. Through its mastery of propaganda, the US Empire could easily maintain a sufficiency of ignorance and political support back home however violent, destructive and immoral its practices abroad. Filling the puny ten minute observation window was no problem, particularly after Iraq got flattened and ‘Militainment’, another American art form, came into being.

The significance of the ‘at home’ aspect of Imperialism should not be underrated. Nor should the fact that the relationship between the perpetrators of violence and the community that condones those crimes is a dialectical one. Meaning that the more egregious the horrors the community allows, the more fractured its own moral foundation ultimately becomes. Initially, partisanship in the form nationalism or ethnic loyalty may be used to mask moral double-standards – like the dubious notion of ‘protecting western values’ – i.e., ‘whiteness’ currently being pushed by the European right-wing intent on absolving Israel of war crimes.  Such ethno-supremacist views are commonly expressed in brief throwaway comments, casually dropped into the everyday – often with a conspiratorial nod towards immigrant communities. As Koonz writes, it was precisely such ‘small doses of poisonous racism’ that were the most powerful in Nazi society because they were the most insidious and could subtly garner support. But eventually in any form of totalitarianism – and here it is not difficult to see Liberalism fitting the mould previously filled by Fascism and Communism,  which at least did not pretend to be democracies – the moral collapse turns inwards and dissent is outlawed. Dissent has to be driven out because of its challenge to the immoral status quo: “The everyday decency of a few magnifies the complicity of the many,” as Koonz puts it. Which is why the Zionist lobby in the West has so strenuously fought to silence protests and arrest journalists. And it is why Tik Tok is likely to be banned in the US and why students there may face criminal charges, or even deportation for criticising Israel. But in this massive crack-down on freedom of speech what has been exposed is the true nature of an ailing, morally bankrupt, and violent Civilisation. So when Justice Jackson suggests that Civilisation – by which he means Western Civilisation – may not survive another genocide, one is tempted to ask, “Should it?

In his address to Harvard in the 1970s, Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn laid out a few home truths. Having been exiled from the USSR and given sanctuary in the US, many expected to hear Solzhenitsyn sing the West’s praises. But he did not.  Unsurprisingly, he heavily criticised the Communist regime under which he had suffered so much, but he did not see life in the West as a model to emulate. He framed his views as those of a respectful outsider, but opined to being shocked at the shallow materialism and moral degeneracy of western life. He found the notion of conquering people and imposing a western lifestyle on them not only immoral but borne out of a blind superiority and a foundational ignorance that rendered the West incapable of recognising the essence of other cultures and civilisations. And, in its inability to adapt to a changing, post-colonial world, he saw a sign that the West had come to the end of its development. A declining Empire is, of course, a dangerous thing, as it crashes and burns and destroys as much as it can in the process. But the fading of The Imperial West is not the end of western values but an opportunity to rediscover them.

Notes.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUvrPvV-KQo&t=29s Operation Gladio – State-sponsored Terrorism

[2] Nato’s Secret Armies – Daniele Ganser, 2005

[3] Paul L. Williams – Operation Gladio, 2015

[4] Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, 2003

[5] Gore Vidal, The History of the National Security State. 2014

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

At the last London protest – the 18^th National march against the Genocide in Gaza – a solitary protester held up a home-made sign which read, ‘Imagine Being Stupid Enough to Actually believe A Genocide Doesn’t Affect You’, which I took not only as an exhortation to remember our common humanity, but also as a warning to us all if we don’t.

The next day an ad for Jordan Peterson’s latest podcast: ‘Foundations of the West’ popped up on my screen. The image, which wouldn’t shame a 90s boy-band – seemed to be presenting something of historic importance: Peterson and four of his chums, sitting on ancient steps, hands clasped in thoughtful repose. The accompanying caption described their worthy mission as ‘focusing on the necessity of a unifying vision for the future.’ And the trailer, which opens with a whirling Gladiator-style vista, shows the lads chatting whilst walking around old monuments. The only other member I recognised was Ben Shapiro. But it seems safe to assume, having heard the pro-Zionist views of both Peterson and Shapiro that my protester’s exhortation will not be working on them. And that when these self-appointed cultural representatives get down to the earnest task of sorting out the ‘vision that unites us’, the fact that we are watching an ongoing Genocide won’t be included.  Which should give us all pause for thought, because if normal life is now a spectacle of undiluted horror, openly aided and abetted by our entire political class then the vision that is ‘uniting’ society is something humanity needs to slough off.

The late Edward Said was the acknowledged master commentator on issues pertaining to the relationship between cultural representation and politics. In works such as ‘Orientalism’ and ‘Culture and Imperialism’, Said exposed the links between different aspect of colonial power, the soft-cultural and the hard-military, and showed how the former so often enable and support the latter. Said showed that it is how we talk about ‘the other’, what images we create of them and how we represent them to ourselves in the novels, plays and films that fill our cultural repartee that determines how we see them, or don’t see them. Those shared cultural images also provide us with the necessary moral justification for utilising ‘the other’ to fulfil what we regard as our historic destiny.

According to Said, it is the underlying belief system, the idealistic architecture of values and purpose that an Imperial power relies on that is used to legitimise its exploitative practices, however cruel or inhumane. Whether expressed as ‘the White Man’s Burden’ for the British, ‘Mission Civilisatrice’ for the French, or America’s notion of ‘Manifest Destiny’ and ‘Exceptionalism’, all settler/colonial projects cloak themselves in some idealistic justificatory garb and Israel is no exception.

In ‘The Origins of Modern Zionism’, Shlomo Avineri, Professor of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, lays out ‘the intellectual origins of the Jewish State’. According to Avineri, “Zionism was a post-emancipation phenomenon.” Meaning that it came into being not when antisemitism was rife, but when it ended. And the reason Zionism emerged later is because with liberalism came assimilation and inter-marriage which threatened the collective identity Jewish communities had built up over centuries. According to Zionist journalist, Ahad Ha’am, [Asher Ginzberg] the problem was modern culture itself, “[it] overturns the defences of Judaism from within so that Judaism can no longer remain isolated and live a life apart.” Obviously, for an individual, liberalism and assimilation were a good thing – between 1882 to 1914 over 3 million Jews emigrated from Eastern Europe to the USA and Canada, with less than 1% going to Palestine. But assimilation was not good for the collective Jewish community which became hollowed out as a result. As Leon Simon, a leading British Zionist who helped draft the Balfour Declaration confirms, “Even in England, where antisemitism is practically unknown, there is none the less a Jewish problem, because the synagogues are empty…..and there is a great deal of drift into assimilation and intermarriage.” Orthodox Jews would continue to live in their collective religious communities with a self-imposed separation from the rest of liberal society, as they still do today. But for the non-orthodox community, liberalism presented a novel challenge and Zionism was the novel solution.

With all the competing nationalisms emerging in Europe, together with the challenges of secular life, it is hardly surprising that some Jews looked to Zionism’s promise of a Jewish homeland as an answer.          Nevertheless, there was a lot of Jewish opposition to Zionism and not just from the Orthodox community. Many Jewish intellectuals regarded any notion of Jewish nationalism as a betrayal of Judaic principles and voiced their opposition through books, pamphlets and lobbying.  Lord Edwin Montagu – the only Jewish member of Lloyd George’s cabinet in 1917 was a particularly vociferous opponent not just of the Balfour Declaration, but of the Zionist movement more generally.

However, there was not just one form of Zionism. In the early days many Zionists who went to Palestine were not in search of an exclusively Jewish homeland and wanted to achieve a cooperative relationship with the native Palestinians. The best known ‘Bi-National’ Zionist is probably Martin Buber, author of ‘Land of Two Peoples’, who insisted that as ‘interlopers’ the obligation was on them to win the trust of the indigenous Palestinians and to help them to realise their aspiration for a nation state.

Buber was not alone in his belief that politics was the test of the spirit of Judaism. But some, like his friend Hans Kohn, author of ‘The Idea of Nationalism’, who would later become an academic in the US, were horrified by the violence and left. In 1929 Kohn wrote to Buber, who was then still living in Germany, “You are fortunate not to witness the details of the Palestinian and Zionist reality, for with Zionism as it is today, the objectives of Zionism cannot be affirmed. I fear we support something we are unable to comprehend. That something drives us from misconceived solidarity, ever deeper into the morass. Zionism will either be peaceful or it will be without me. Zionism is not Judaism.”

With hindsight, Buber’s early optimism looks naïve. But maybe he had not recognized what a strategic prize Palestine represented for the West as Balfour’s 1919 declaration of support for Zionism makes clear. “The Four great powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes of a far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.” In any event, by 1961 Buber’s mood had become more sombre, “Only an internal revolution can have the power to heal our people of their murderous sickness of causeless hatred (for the Arabs). It is bound to bring complete ruin upon us.”

Zionism appears to have been an idea with more than one facet, in the early days at least.  Perhaps it could have gone in a different direction, as Buber had hoped. But it didn’t and instead an exclusively Jewish state was established and most of the indigenous population were ethnically cleansed. The essential point though is that there never was anything inherently righteous about Zionism. It was a practical solution to a practical problem worked out by secular European intellectuals with the funding of Western capitalism. It was and still is simply a novel exclusionary form of nationalism. Only later did the idea became weaponised – by attempting to make the terms ‘Zionism’ and ‘Judaism’ coterminous – in order to block legitimate political critique. And, as with any idea, it is how it is represented that counts.

+++

When Said wrote about Zionism, he obviously did so from the point of view of its victims, his people, who had been made to pay a concrete price for the abstract European idea that had been brought to their land. (It goes without saying that nothing like Zionism existed amongst Arab Jews; as Iraqi-born, Avi Shlaim recounts in his memoir – it was impossible for Arab Jews to feel at home in such a Eurocentric state where they tended to live on the margins of society).  Said recognised the importance of understanding the intellectual ferment that gave birth to Zionism, but it was the way it was represented that gave it life. According to Said the reason Zionism succeeded as a military operation was because the political battle for Palestine had already been won “in the international world in which ideas, representations, rhetoric and images were at issue.” Two literary works singled out in this regard, by Said and also by Ghassan Kanafani – a Palestinian novelist assassinated by Mossad in 1972,  are George Eliot’s ‘Daniel Deronda’ written in 1876 which could be considered a hi-brow, proto-Zionist, Victorian wanderlust affair. And Leon Uris’s ‘Exodus’, a colourful, Arab-bashing, pro-Israel page-turner, written in 1955, and which was shortly thereafter turned into a Hollywood blockbuster. Both representations were massively influential in promoting Zionism although, obviously, in very different ways.

Daniel Deronda is a rootless, spiritually homeless young man living in Liberal Victorian England with other bored and rootless individuals who are all united by the fact that they are in search of meaning. Unlike the other characters, Deronda later discovers that he is Jewish and decides to escape the barrenness of his life in England by going to Palestine. As Said writes, “Eliot uses the plight of Jews to make a universal statement about the 19^th century need for a home, given the spiritual and psychological rootlessness reflected in her characters almost ontological physical restlessness.” Another character, Gwendolyn, a young spirited woman who has been dragged around Europe by her mother and is tired of her cosmopolitan existence, envies Deronda his chance of escape, whilst all she can look forward to is a loveless marriage.

Essentially, it’s a book about the importance of belonging somewhere.  As Eliot writes, “A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth.” What Eliot does not mention is the fact that whilst her characters have a desire for adventure and meaning,  and are, indeed, seeking to forge a connection with a piece of land just as she prescribes,  there are already people living on the very ‘spot of native land’ they covet who are not suffering from the same liberal malaise. And it is their actual homes that are going to have to be demolished to make way for ‘the spiritually homeless’. (In 1948 Israel destroyed 400 of the 508 extant Palestinian villages – taken apart stone by stone so that not even the cemeteries remained.) As Moshe Dayan affirmed in 1969 “There is not one place built in this country that did not have a former Arab Population.” Of course, Eliot can’t be blamed for not mentioning the native inhabitants, she is writing at a time when indigenous people didn’t count. Even if they were acknowledged to exist, they were not deemed worthy of discussion because they were not considered historically relevant:  not being ‘doers’ or producers of anything– just part of the fauna. They were ‘objects’ of history, as Samuel P. Huntington would say, not its subjects. Not yet. For anyone reading the novel today it is impossible not to recognise that what Eliot concretised in the fortunes of Deronda is the coming wanderlust and search for meaning of generations of bored western liberals.

If Deronda was written at a time when ‘the other’ was invisible to western culture, and so didn’t warrant a mention, by the time Uris penned Exodus that was no longer the case. In the Middle East all the other category ‘A’ mandated countries: Syria, Iraq and Lebanon had attained their independence, as promised in the mandate. Palestine alone had been denied. It was inevitable that the presence of Palestinians would become problematic for the Western-backed Zionist project: the only people in the world who have been denied and are still being denied their entry into history, still seen as objects rather than subjects: uniquely burdened with “negative rights”, as Chomsky would later observe. In years to come, Palestinians would be represented as terrorists in an attempt to de-legitimise them – as indeed is the case in Gaza today. But Uris chose to implicate them in the holocaust which was a more obvious ploy just after the Second World War.  As Ghassan Kanafani notes in his review of Zionist literature, published in 1967, “It is nearly impossible for one to find Palestine treated in a Zionist novel without a reference to Hitler’s massacres.” Here is Uris’s less than subtle segue, “Ours not to reason why…. I can’t seem to forget the Arab slave markets in Saudi Arabia and the first time I was invited to watch a man have his hands amputated as punishment for stealing, and somehow I can’t forget those Jews at Bergen-Belsen.”

Uris ploughs on with another popular trope – Arab backwardness and the superiority of Western civilisation, “Israel today stands as the greatest single instrument for bringing the Arab people out of the Dark Ages.” As I am sure Peterson has discovered in his momentous search for the West’s foundations, the Dark Ages, marks a period of history experienced exclusively by Christian Europe. The light was turned off when the Christian church closed Plato’s Academy and forced the philosophers eastwards to Arab lands. The contrast could not be sharper, because whilst the West was milling around in the darkness, the Golden Age of learning in Andalusia was in full swing. Indeed, there would not have been a Renaissance without the later infusion of Arab knowledge. But it seems as though the West is ontologically incapable of recognising the outstanding achievements of other civilisations and cultures.

Yet, for many Americans, and Europeans too no doubt – I remember watching the film as a kid and thinking it was brilliant – Uris’s representation of the Middle East is to be preferred. It is shorter, punchier, Paul Newman is in it, and you end up on the winning side, which for believers in ‘Exceptionalism’ is probably quite important. Thus, it is hardly surprising that for an older generation, the continuing conflicts in the Middle East are viewed predominantly as footnotes to the novel.

And it remains the case still today that it is in the world of representations that the real contestation between the Israeli occupation and Palestinian rights is taking place.  It seems obvious, because whilst the reality of the genocide is being live-streamed 24/7 on social media, none of the deaths or destruction make any difference to government policy or mainstream opinion. Even in the face of blatant legal culpability, Israel faces no consequences. Every now and then the UN passes ‘a resolution’, but the next day Israel drops yet more American bombs on people sleeping in tents. At which point we should probably ask ourselves whether the murder of every single Palestinian would have any effect on the West’s foreign policy. My guess is that it wouldn’t. Because what matters are the essential myths that comprise our history, identity and values, and the Palestinians don’t feature in any of that. And even though those myths may appear fragile, irrational and even contradictory that is irrelevant when it comes to matters as foundational as collective identity and historical purpose. So when Netanyahu blathers on that He is one of us and that over there is like the West, just a tougher neighbourhood, he is tapping into our familiar representational world and people nod their head.

Said recognised that Israel held a certain value in the Western mind – not just in terms of being an economic place holder but also as part of its cultural identity as a superior ethos with higher values and knowledge. And that to question the violence of Israel’s founding or its oppression of the Palestinian people was to affront Western sensibilities. He considered the shameless contortions of the Liberal class to be ‘grotesque’ as they struggled to conform their progressive worldviews to Israel’s ongoing atrocities decade after decade. And he called out the spurious scholarship and rewritten histories which attempted to efface the Palestinians and to justify the violence meted out to them. “A threadbare hoax”, like Joan Peters ‘From Time Immemorial’ which was lauded and awarded prizes by an obeisant American literati before being demolished by Finkelstein’s forensic critique, (only begrudgingly published in the US after the book was excoriated in the UK.) But surely even Said would have been shocked at the depths our cultural aparatchiks plumb today as they attempt to normalise the ongoing genocide.

And yet, although Said was right that “Zionism and its partisans command the resources of diffusion and representation in the West”, there has been a historical shift. The lies and misinformation may continue, but the representations have changed and today Israel looks fake. It’s ironic that a nation that has done so much to eviscerate the presence of the indigenous people in an attempt to establish its own faux historical legitimacy, ends up being upbraided in the authenticity stakes by people living in rubble. The hospital hasbara that was so outlandish it came across as parody didn’t help and nor did the brattish behaviour of Israel Junior at the UN, but it is the resilience of the Palestinian people that has shown Israel up as counterfeit. In the battle of representations, it is the Palestinian people who have won.

Which is why Western bombast – following Netanyahu’s lead – now extends to the whole Islamic civilisation and its imagined threat to Western Values; whatever they are. Although it is 30 years since Huntington’s article on ‘The Clash of Civilisations’, Western panic over Palestinian resilience has brought it to the fore. Said described the article as bellicose and war-mongering. He also thought it culturally illiterate, since Huntington evinced no knowledge about how cultures and civilisations actually grow, evolve and interact. But that’s irrelevant in the world of representations, where all that matters is what people can be persuaded to believe. And to that end, a whole army of ‘Western Values’ pundits have, on cue, mustered to the ‘Civilisational’ cause. Whether it be populists in Europe tapping into anti-immigrant sentiment or pseudo public intellectuals, taking to their armchairs to warn the public of the existential danger they face from people who are against genocide. But, of course, it is just a hoax, another crude representation put out to persuade people to forget their common humanity and align with the Western hegemon in its last throes of historical dominance.

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Hastings Peace Camp – Outside General Dynamics Arms Factory

As prospective candidates for the next UK parliament enter their final week of electioneering, it is hard to believe that Israel’s relentless slaughter of the Palestinian people has got barely a mention. With the singular exception of the Workers Party, headed by George Galloway, and a number of Independents, the political parties fielding candidates in this election appear united in their insistence that the only issues worth discussing are domestic. According to these wannabe MPs, the ongoing Genocide in Gaza is simply not sufficiently ‘local’ to interest the electorate. Not only is this a grotesque insult to the British people, it is also manifestly untrue as evidenced by the millions of protesters turning out, week after week, to demand a ceasefire. Whilst material issues have their place, to suggest that the most horrific political event of our lifetime is electorally irrelevant is not just untrue, it is deceitful. And it is a deceit intended to spread the complicity of the government and the opposition parties throughout society – with each person’s silence being taken as an alibi for somebody else. And the fact that the mainstream parties are shamelessly attempting to distract the electorate from talking about the Genocide tells us much about the intended direction of travel for the next government – towards more violence, brutalisation and war.

Because, of course, this silence is intentional. It is a political tactic aimed at effecting a normalisation of genocidal violence, by rendering what is morally repugnant socially acceptable through its elision from public discourse. Since the genocide can’t be justified, morally or legally, the only way to normalise it is to erase it. The idea being that by ignoring what the Israeli government is doing and never mentioning International law, those genocidal  actions – simply by virtue of not being condemned – achieve de facto acceptance. Given that over a quarter of British MPs are funded by the Israel lobby, the lack of political discussion is hardly surprising. As with AIPAC in the US, both of the main political parties in the UK contain members who identify as ‘Friends of Israel’, making it impossible for either the government or the opposition to pursue a policy critical of the Israeli regime, notwithstanding its numerous and egregious breaches of International Law. And, it is not just the political class, the media too, which is now little more than an adjunct of that class, servilely falls in line, silently watching as massacre follows massacre.

However, it has been the response of the Chattering classes: the political pundits not normally slow in coming forward on current events that has been most disappointing. Many of these self-promoting ‘freedom-lovers’ who earned their stripes during the covid lockdown: justifiably criticising the government’s assault on education and health-care, are now strangely silent when every university, school and hospital in Gaza has been bombed and medical staff and academics singled out for assassination. And as for the legitimate outrage they led concerning the way children were treated during the pandemic, the unquestioning acceptance of the slaughter and maiming of so many Palestinian children has provided a chilling contrast. And what of their attacks on ‘cancel-culture’ and vehement insistence on the right to freedom of speech? Apparently that freedom does not extend to speech concerning Palestine. But what is most ironic in all of this is that those same ‘civil-liberties’ champions who loudly slated the government’s infamous ‘nudge unit’- imploring people not to be swayed by propaganda but to do their own thinking, have themselves been so easily ‘nudged’: unreservedly swallowing the ‘beheaded baby/mass rape’ hoax propagated by the Israeli government. This outrageous piece of propaganda was swiftly debunked by journalists at the Grayzone and the Electronic Intifada, doing the research journalists used to do. Even the New York Times later admitted that its own story on the matter had been inaccurate. Not that any of that matters to Israeli government propagandists here or elsewhere, or indeed to the wider political climate more generally. Because if truth had not already lost its purchase on events, Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land could not have endured for so long and October 7^th would never have happened.

In Hannah Arendt’s last interview she talked about the ‘Gleichschaltung’ – the social ‘Coordination’ she’d witnessed in Germany in the 1930s. This process, which did not take long, involved a ‘widespread giving in to the changed political climate in order to secure one’s position or get employment.’ It was a ‘fitting in’, an ‘accommodation’, a ‘knowing what is good for you.’ And, as Arendt reports, ‘amongst intellectuals, Gleichschaltung was the rule.’ A moral flexibility Arendt put down to the fact that intellectuals found it easy to make up justifications for themselves. She readily admits that in what finally resulted there was an abyss to which one could never be reconciled, but the getting there was not as difficult as people like to imagine.

This was the realisation which informed her infamous phrase ‘the banality of evil’ attributed to Eichmann – the Nazi functionary whose trial she attended in Jerusalem in 1963. Arendt used the word ‘banal’ in order to convey the idea that evil was something a person could casually adapt themselves to. Persisting in the notion that evil was something deep and demonic and wholly ‘other’ Arendt regarded as a comforting illusion which people utilised in order to erect a barrier between themselves and those they imagined to be the real perpetrators. Because, so far as Arendt observed, it was circumstantial differences that played a large part in determining how readily people allowed themselves to be coordinated.  And the primary circumstance she identified in the lives of those ready and willing to be accommodated to the new political reality was a desire to be identified with the ‘We’. For these functionaries, and they are functionaries from whichever rank in the social hierarchy they serve the political class, it is essential to always be aligned with the dominant social power. It being a simple fact, then as now: if you want to climb the ladder, you have to be compliant. But ‘Going along with the rest’ is also pleasurable, Arendt insisted. People simply enjoy the feeling of being close to power. It also saves them from the responsibility of doing their own reasoning which can be burdensome and isolating. The pseudo-religious nature of such fealty to the state seems obvious. And it was through trying to understand how social conformity had achieved such gravitational force over people’s lives that Arendt developed many of her ideas about totalitarianism. Seeing former friends and neighbours turn against her was a transformative experience for Arendt. It is what turned her into a political animal and convinced her that she needed to leave Germany.

What Arendt articulates in one work after another is a form of social existence that is malleable, apolitical and in thrall to the dominant social narrative. And whilst the Gleicshaltung she experienced in Germany led to extreme violence and finally a genocide, she recognised that it was not an isolated phenomenon, insisting that “Jews and German Jewish intellectuals would not have acted any differently had their own circumstances been different.” This newly emergent, easily co-opted being wasn’t specifically German, but was the product of modernity and it came into being because politics had been dethroned. And she concluded that politics had been dethroned because the public space where people used to meet to discuss matters other than themselves no longer existed and as a result “nobody cared any longer what the world looked like.”

Obviously the space Arendt is talking about is a not a physical place but a mentality that people used to share. Yet at the same time, in sharing that public-facing perception of the world, what was created was a far more spacious, less confrontational society than we enjoy today. One in which people could converse with each other in a way that was not seen to be personal or conflictual, because a person’s political views, however passionately held, were not their identity. This meant that those views could always be changed by reasoned argument to which everyone was susceptible. This was the basic political milieu in Britain in the 1970s. Where along with a noisy public culture for politics people still had private worlds to withdraw to and find intimate expression in. Those two separate worlds – the public and the private – had not yet collided and destroyed each other.

The neo-liberal reforms of the Thatcher years demolished the power of the unions and the community associations that had underpinned so much political action and education in the decades before. But the major achievement of depoliticising society and effecting a massive pacification of the electorate was accomplished through the socially engineered Hyper- Individualism that followed. At the same time as the work place became transformed into a faux democratic space, with workers finding themselves on first name terms with the boss just as CEO salaries skyrocketed – many aspects of what was formerly known as private life began to be extruded into what was once the public sphere. As a result, the space which formerly held shared political values became filled with individualised expressions from newly minted ‘selves’ all vying for attention. The political energy of the younger members of society was sublimated into something more manageable whilst that of the older members was cut off and largely withered away, as the division between the two worlds – the public and the private – was collapsed. And what was put in to fill the space has come to resemble a sort of stage, or perhaps series of stages, on which people perform the social identities they have cultivated. To ensure there could be no backwards slippage towards re-politicisation, this theatrical set-up was safeguarded by a regulatory framework of strict social control, particularly regarding speech. Whilst the concept of freedom of speech has been retained in law, it has become culturally difficult to express views which are at odds with the dominant social narrative, particularly because the very idea of contestation or disagreement which is the essence of the political, has come to be regarded as antisocial. And as we have seen in recent months, people now daring to challenge the dominant narrative are being labelled ‘terrorists’, anti-Semites, and even arrested.

It is against this back drop of almost total social control that the challenge of the student protest camps needs to be viewed. The mere presence of these peaceful enclaves has so enraged the establishment that it has reacted with massively disproportionate force. And in so doing, has revealed the violence at the heart of the military-industrial state which is the source of funding for so much of Ivy-league America and beyond. On campuses in the U.S. and the U.K. and many other countries students have bravely risked their education, future jobs, their freedom and even their physical wellbeing in order to take a stand against the genocide. And in so doing, they have inspired others to do likewise. Here in Hastings, on the south coast of the U.K. we have had our own pre-election weekend peace camp, set up, where else than outside our own local arms factory, General Dynamics. According to American Friends Service Committee, “The world’s sixth largest weapons manufacturer, General Dynamics, supplies Israel with artillery ammunition and bombs for attack jets used in Israel’s assault on Gaza.” Which suggests to me that this genocide is very local indeed.

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“Justice is destroyed by the violent man who possesses power.”

– Aquinas

When Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin described Liberalism as a racist ideology, his Liberal interlocutors looked shocked. One of them, American Journalist and critic, Leon Wieseltier responded by describing Liberalism as the “Supreme achievement of the human spirit.” That comes with “a portrait of the human being in terms of dignity, nobility and rights.” But what has become increasingly obvious, watching Liberal democracies cheer on the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, is that the much-vaunted ‘Liberal portrait’ is not of them.

How can these contradictory aspects of Western society be reconciled? Elevated words about human potential on the one hand and on the other, the most devastating assault on humanity the world has ever seen? Of course it is hypocrisy and a shameless demonstration of a colonial mind set. But more than that, it reveals a fundamental flaw in Western society that may not be amenable to repair. And that is because the supremacist mentality Dugin identified is a constitutive, though usually hidden, aspect of the Western Liberal project. And it remains hidden because the public intellectuals, academics and journalists whose role it is to challenge their society’s failure to uphold the moral standards it proclaims, have themselves been co-opted by the very ideology they are supposed to hold to account.

Despite the flowery ‘human rights’ rhetoric, Liberalism does view the world in hierarchical terms. And sees itself as having a messianic mission to transform all other cultures and civilisations to its likeness. By convincing people that its principles are universal, and consequently morally binding on everyone, Liberalism has succeeded in presenting itself as the final ideology for the entire globe. And, as a corollary to that, the West has set itself up as sole judge of the new world order: authorised not only to write the rules, but to change them or break them at will. Because, by assuming the position of supreme moral arbiter, the West has effectively secured itself against moral censure.

However, Liberalism has only been able to achieve cultural dominance by maintaining a perceptual divide between its imaginary humanist principles and the bloody reality of its imperial exploits, which have been considerable. Historically, public opinion didn’t need to be managed because all the atrocities, massacres, ethnic cleansings, genocides and other destructive practices carried out by European settlers took place in hidden places and were inflicted on people who didn’t count. After all, this was a time when the extermination of ‘lesser’ races was openly discussed; Charles Darwin thought it a ‘not very distant certainty’.

That is no longer the case; now opinion has to be controlled in every single aspect of public, and increasingly private, life. It is easy to think of media censorship, tighter laws controlling what people can say and see and belong to, and the threats of arrest, expulsion, being sacked, deported or imprisoned, not to mention the colossal financial costs that can go with ‘speaking out of line’ all of which have now been normalised. The mistake would be to see such measures as arbitrary add-ons and not recognise them as the very fabric of Western society itself. From the first gateways that deliver us over to public life, we are cajoled and entreated to become a certain sort of citizen. Whether consciously or not, it is easy to see where the rewards are, and the direction we need to go in if we want to get ahead or even just enjoy a carefree life. But this massive collusion has had a deleterious effect on every aspect of Liberal society: hollowing out the social sector, destroying the purpose of education, corrupting human relationships, and desensitising people to the suffering of others, particularly if they are not white. As it should, because it is not possible to corral people, infantilise them and attempt to divert them from realising and expressing their moral nature without suffering serious cultural consequences.

The primary way the West maintains control of the dominant Imperialist narrative is by keeping those who would challenge it locked out. This is easily achieved by the use of terms of erasure like terrorist, rebel, insurgent or criminal. Though ‘terrorist’ is the label most often used, ‘Islamist’ has become popular as a handy counter to criticism coming from the Muslim world; the obvious implication being that such critics are religious extremists and dangerous. And of course, ‘Hamas’ is now the link word for erasing anything Palestinian.

All of these terms are supremely useful because, having primed the masses to draw undesirable associations from them, a single utterance usually suffices to nullify any information mainstream doesn’t want acknowledged. Keeping the populace permanently primed against certain groups is also useful to deflect criticism from Western governments should they find a country they want to invade or bomb.

Presently, the term ‘antisemitism’ which is the name appropriately given to the odious, racist ideology deployed against the Jewish people by Christian Europe, is being misappropriated as a term of erasure against any criticism of Israel or Zionism. In this latter inappropriate context it is now being widely deployed against Palestinians or, indeed Muslims more widely. This is particularly insidious given the close relations enjoyed between Islam and Judaism during the many centuries of Christian persecution. As renowned scholar of Judaism, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, points out, rejecting Judaism was the very essence of Christianity and was unique to that successor religion; it is not something capable of being grafted on historically. And that is because unlike other faiths, e.g., Islam or Paganism, Christianity regards Judaism as an ontological anomaly: as something that should no longer exist now that Christianity has arrived. Which is why it is historically illiterate to describe Hamas’ attack on Israeli citizens as a pogrom, which is an attack on Jews qua Jews, or to suggest that Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation is somehow antisemitic, as Wieseltier, and numerous other doyens of the Liberal establishment recently have. That would seem to suggest that the Palestinians have the choice of one of two labels: subjugant or racist, which doesn’t sound very Liberal. But, of course, the purpose of such language is not to further political analysis but to block it and thereby effect erasure of the Palestinian cause.

In many ways the permanently-postponed righteousness of Liberal ideology resembles religion more than politics. Its believers preferring an imaginary distant utopia which can be pontificated on at length to political action demanding justice now. It is therefore not surprising that just as Christian missionaries were once deployed to assist the colonial project, (King Leopold II reminded his that whilst evangelising was fine, their priority was Belgian interests) Liberal pundits provide the same white-washing service today. It seems extraordinary, but practically all the intellectual resources of the West are now deployed in maintaining this illusion, with academics, think-tanks, and all manner of spokespeople congratulating and rewarding each other in a never-ending and entirely circular performance that is supposed to inspire and reassure the wider populace that they are part of the utopian vanguard.  The most troubling aspect of that delusion, however, is the toll it has taken on society’s moral conscience. As a heavily propagandised populace is constantly being reminded that Liberalism, in all its aspects, is the salvation of the planet and all they have to do is recycle and keep shopping. Anyone who rejects that propaganda and insists there are imperatives demanding truth and justice that need to be followed is lampooned as an obstacle to progress. Since, according to Liberalism, all moral rules have been subsumed into the Liberal promise. That means that Liberalism now actually serves as a bulwark against justice which is the greatest tragedy and the most serious sickness a society can suffer.

In essence Justice is about getting what one is due – simply that. It is about an entitlement that is owed and must be recognised. That is the obligatory nature of justice. And the key thing about the virtue of Justice [apart from it being about the only thing Derrida could not deconstruct] is that it is the only virtue that is not about us as separate individuals; it is relational. In philosopher, Josef Pieper’s work on Justice, in the second chapter, entitled, “Duty in Relation to The Other”, he quotes Aquinas as saying, “It is proper to justice, as compared with the other virtues, to direct man in his relations with others….”, ‘direct’ being the operative word here. “The other virtues,” he continues, “perfect man only in those matters which befit him in relation to himself.”

Already we can see a gaping lacuna at the heart of the Liberal project, focused as it is on hyper-individualism. Unlike Liberalism, Justice actually is a universal: we all know it. Even animals recognise injustice.  And as the ancients were aware, ignoring justice has ontological consequences: you cannot be unjust without destroying yourself as a human being. As Plato explained in the first treatise written on statecraft, a society cannot act unjustly without destroying its humanity, and individuals cannot ignore justice without losing their soul.

In the world of justice, it is the deed that speaks. As Aquinas makes clear in the Summa Theologica, “the point is not how the deed accords with the doer, but rather, how it affects ‘the other person.’” Justice directs us to act for them, for the other, not for ourselves. And every single solitary act, or failure to act by every single person counts, because as Pieper explains, “every external act belongs to the field of justice. Whatever external act a person performs, it is either just or unjust.” There is no sitting on the fence where justice is concerned. Self-justifying procrastination may be fine for Liberalism – par for the course in fact – but it is a dismal failure when seen through the eyes of justice.

The fate of the European soul was the focus of Conrad’s famous novella, ‘Heart of Darkness’, published in 1899 – four years after the Berlin Conference at which the European powers divvied up the continent of Africa. Conrad’s ‘inspiration’, if that is the right word, came from his time working for Belgian colonial interests in what was then known as the Belgian Congo, (It was King Leopold II’s own private fiefdom until the Belgian government took it over). Conrad went to the Congo a sailor but came back a writer, so horrified was he by the atrocities he had witnessed there. But the work is not simply a polemic against Western colonialism, Conrad looks deeper than that. His account is of the change that violent venture effected on the European mind.

And it is through the fate of Kurtz – the transplanted European: cultured, liberal-minded and gifted, who is transformed by the Imperial power he wields into a monstrous, soulless creature – that Conrad shows us the degeneration and deformation of the liberal world order. In Kurtz there is no duplicity, no pretence. He has not kept himself divided between the pretentions back home and the violent reality of his colonial quest; he has ‘stepped over the edge’. What is most remarkable about Kurtz, whom the sea-faring character Marlow (a stand in for Conrad) goes to find, and is of continuing significance today, is his eloquence. “The man presented himself as a voice,” is how Marlow describes him. Notwithstanding Kurtz’s hideous physical malformation, the atrocities he openly committed, and the obvious hollowness of his being, it is the man’s eloquence that Marlow notes and treasures. And for one troubling moment, when Marlow is overwhelmed by the magnificence of Kurtz’s words, we wonder, as does Marlow, which one is the real Kurtz? Will the luminous, utopian treatise he has produced be sufficient to wipe away the horror? The report Kurtz has written is for ‘The International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs’ and as he reads it, Marlow is transported by its ‘august benevolence’ and its ‘burning noble words’. But what brings Marlow back to earth is Kurtz’s postscript, written in a different hand after his confrontation with the real world. Penned in the margin next to the final paragraph’s ‘moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment,” Kurtz had written, ‘Exterminate all the brutes.”

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