Matt Haig’s The Humans (2013) uses sci fi, ‘speculative fiction’, for what it does best: reveal to us how lethal human beings are and how we need to control technology before it turns us into monsters and reduces planet Earth to … Gaza. This time it’s a simple tale of the seductiveness of ‘going native’ faced with totalitarian alienation, and genocide by the latter against those oh-so seductive natives.
‘Going native’ was a big problem for settler-colonial imperialism over the past 4 centuries. Too many settlers, especially in New England, refused the near-starvation conditions they faced as indentured labour or even as so-called landowners, and joined their local native tribe. Or women and child were captured and, voluntarily or grudgingly, joined the captors, and were happy to live the less stressful life of hunting and gathering. They were hunted down and forcibly returned to ‘civilization’, as this was really the worst crime – rejecting the settler-colonial enterprise.
The natives’ lives were indeed better, but they didn’t believe in money or private property, which were essential to the slave society the Americans were introducing, so they had to be eliminated. Imagine if ‘settlers’ had defected en masse and managed to maintain the real paradise of the time (or any time): the free indigenous life, proven for more than 10,000 years, without oppressive laws (natives: I won’t obey any law that I can’t disobey), private property, slavery …
The most famous case of abduction is Olive Oatman and her sister Mary Anne who were captured in a raid in 1851, and ended up with a sympathetic Mohave chief Espaniol, who adopted them into the tribe. They lived happily, had Mohave names and even facial tattoos. Mary Anne died but Olive went on to marry a native and have children. When whites interacted with the Mohave, she did not make any effort to be repatriated, figuring her white family was dead, considering hersellf a Mohave. When the authorities in Fort Yuma heard of her existence, they demanded her return, threatening to wipe out the Mohave if they didn’t hand her over.
She always spoke highly of her Mohave family, though she was pressured into falsely saying she was a slave and denying her native family. There are many more cases of white men who defected to live with natives. They too were hunted down by settlers and either forced to reject native life or killed as enemies. Those days are gone, but in Palestine-Israel, it is still illegal for a Palestinian to marry an Israeli Jew, Jews are raised on racism and hatred against Palestinians, and the ongoing genocide is accepted, even celebrated.
Dickinson would have loved Oatman
Aussies, Emily Dickinson, nutty profs
In The Humans, Haig uses his plot as a platform to make a devastating critique of our techno-dystopia, and the general goofiness if not perverstity of the human race. Materializing on Earth, Mr Alien (a clone of nutty prof Andrew) is baffled by the earthlings’ manners and social customs (they very rarely discuss the things they really want to be talking about), their neurotic body shame and clothing etiquette. Oh, and let’s not forget The Things They Do To Make Themselves Happy That Actually Make Them Miserable. This is an infinite list. It includes – shopping, watching TV, taking the better job, getting the bigger house, writing a semi-ahtobiographical novel, educating their young, making their skin look mildly less old, and harbouring a vague desire to believe there might be a meaning to it all.
He pities them, being not only mortal but have to take precious and limited time and read. No wonder they were a species of primitives. By the time they had read enough books to reach a state of knowledge where they can do anything with it, they are dead. He wonders if their purpose was simply to pursue the enlightenment of orgasm. A few seconds of relief from the surrounding dark.
Haig and his alterego Andrew take refuge in Emily Dickinson – I dwell in possibility – whose pearls are dropped throughout The Humans, poetry being one of the few unadulterated good things about humans.
Vonnadorian Andrew was sent on a nasty mission to assassinate some nasty earthlings. Much like Australia was populated by British dregs, criminals, so rebellious Andrew was sent to far-flung Earth, as punishment for his blasphemous talk at the museum of Quadratic Equations. To the colonies, though with a different mission – not to colonize but to stop the horrible humans from achieving a singularity in their technology, allowing them to move around the universe and bring their violent, racist ways with them. They have developed technology at a rate too fast for human psychology too keep up with, and yet they still pursue advancement for advancement’s sake, and for the pursuit of the money and fame they all crave so much.
Haig has his finger on humanity’s pulse in his string of sci fi adventures. How to stop time (2017) and The Midnight Library (2020) are intriguing takes on time travel, whereas The Humans brings past and future into a troubled present. The Vs are an advanced race who have perfected their ‘civilization’, having long ago solved the (very real) Riemann hypothesis, unsolved since proposed in 1859.
Alien Andrew is a clone of the eponymous mad maths prof who managed to prove the infamous Riemann hypothesis, supposedly the scientific link which would catapult Homo sapiens into the techno-future. His mission is to kill the real Andrew, impersonate him long enough to remove all traces of the Riemann solution, the key to earthlings’ singularity. Of course, alien Andrew starts to appreciate the messy, smelly, disgusting ways of the earthlings, their anger, hate, fighting, murdering fellow earthlings. Vs never kill each other, but have no remorse about killing earthlings, whom they despise as primitives.
Fast forward to the genocide of Palestinians by settler-colonial Israel today, and the AI nightmare technology that is abetting it. Even the best-case utopian endgame is erasure of all ethnicity in a sterile eternal life of no pain, but no humanity. Sterile reason (destroy Untermenschen) governs without any messy emotions.
Basically, the Vs are Nietzsche’s superman who is ‘beyond good and evil’, or Israelis, soulless in their cold-blooded genocide, or today’s AI, mistaking computer-think for what’s innately human – love and emotions, our baked-in altruism.
A delightful thread weaving through the novel is Haig’s love of Emily Dickenson, who for some reason the real Andrew discovers and which is the anti-Riemann solution, i.e., ‘all you need is love.’ Alien Andrew discovers classic rock music, especially the Beatles and Beach Boys. The Vs don’t need love anymore. ‘All you need is maths’ is their credo. Along with ‘don’t kill any Vs, but sub-Vs, humans, are fair game.’
Israel as counterfactual mistake
Which brings us back to Israel. Israel is chock-full of Nobel maths and physics nerds, ‘all you need is maths’. It should be a paradise, up there with Vonnadoria. The sacred law of both is don’t kill your own people. Oops, forgot the IDF’s nifty Hannibal hypothesis. So already something is seriously amiss.
What the Vs – and Israelis – did was to take the totalitarian utopias of the 20th c, fascism and communism to their ‘logical’ conclusion. They were in many ways similar – a social project with universal aspirations, though with the huge difference that fascism was based on war and race and Űber/Untermenschen, and communism was against war and racism. The Vs clearly see humans as disposable, subhuman, Untermenschen, but to be killed only if they become a threat to other planets, so ‘nice’ fascists. And if humans miraculously stop slaughtering each other and destroying their planet, then they would be invited to join the Vs and other mature races. Ditto Israel, which promises benign totalitarianism for Palestinians too, if they renounce any aspirations for their own state and submit as Untermenschen to the Jewish master race.
Much as I loved the ideas of the Soviet Union, with its benign aspirations as a model for post-capitalism, it always struck me as, well, a bit boring. No real suffering for the vast majority, no unemployment, no war, but no soul and a techno-laggard; i.e., it seemed unable to catapult itself into a singularity, a real jump forward. I never had any truck with Nazism, no lust for inflicting pain, for mass murder, but I think it’s a shame our earthly communist ‘paradise’ ended so badly.
Enter Israel. It started as a sort-of ally of the Soviet Union, glad to accept Soviet recognition, collective agriculture, arms. Stalin supported it, thinking it would be a willing socialist ally, along with Mao’s China. For a few years (months?), the world looked to be communism’s oyster. Lol.
Israel’s founders were not the rational communists of Stalin’s imagination, but the irrational Zionist racists of Hitler’s imagination. Hitler flipped the Zionist project of Jewish supremacism on its head for his own racist Aryan project: to kill and ethnically cleanse Germany, the world, of all Untermenschen nonGermans (Jews, Slavs, blacks …). We now know that from the 1920s, Zionists were courting Nazis such as Eichmann, working in league with them to push Germany’s Jews to emigrate to Palestine. Yes, the Balfour letter set the stage, but Israel was originally a fascist project in league with Hitler, as much as British one.
Fascism was attractive to Jewish Utopians, bent on creating a Jewish state, as a pragmatic, militaristic, racial theory. All the Zionists did was carry on with their fascist project under the guise of democracy, abandoning collective agriculture and embracing US anti-communism. Their secret love of Hitler’s fascism was swept under the carpet, a blip on the road to Greater Israel. Hitler’s own fascism and gas chambers proved very useful in retrospect, giving the Jews a get-out-of-jail-free card forever. Until 10/7/23.
10/7: Beyond the Pale
Since October 7, 2023, the world has been force fed genocide on flat-screen TVs. Too much Semitism! And the wrong kind, favouring Jewish Semites over Muslim and Christian Semites. And most of the ‘Jews’ aren’t Semites at all. They are Europeans, Americans, French, etc. Very few actual Jewish Semites — the Arab Haredi — and they are despised almost as much as the Palestinians are. You want to puke from the lies spewing from the Israeli maw.
Finally their sins are catching up with them. IOF occupation soldiers, honouring a fallen comrade in Gaza, had to discretely turn their backs to the camera, as they now fear arrest under the ICJ and ICC for their crimes if they travel abroad. No more selfies by these cowardly soldiers parading in bras and undies of Palestinians they’ve raped and murdered.
What can we call these ‘new Israelis’? The idea in 1948 was to create a Homo israeli, a new macho, militant Jewish identity, not the Untermenschen of Nazism. But this new Israeli is immoral, happily violating accepted Old Testament morality (thou shalt not kill/ steal/ rape); in fact, abandoning all morality, making them amoral. What is the meaning of Untermenschen but ‘beneath humanity’, Hitler’s description of Jews? Israel has completed Hitler’s project, making Jews ‘outside the Pale’, today’s Untermenschen, beneath human, inhuman.
Unfortunately, these days, these Untermenschen are for all intents and purposes, controlling the world. Proof positive is the fact that they can boldly carry out their genocidal deeds in full view of all earthlings, who cower in fear of them. Unless US Jews and goys wake up very soon and put a stop to this, we can only pray that some Vonnadorians somewhere out there come and save us from our evil Other. Hitler #2? No. Enough violence. BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) will do the trick, i.e., grassroots mobilization of our altruism instinct.
How tragic. With the Jewish renaissance of the 19th century bringing Jews into the western mainstream, they quickly became central to Europe’s great cultural flowering, with Marx and Freud at the heart, and dozens of Jewish Nobel Prize winners in all fields, from literature to physics. But even as this was happening, Zionism was percolating, festering, erupting in 1948, its apotheosis in 2023, Nazism (now embedded in US/NATO) passing the torch to the once-persecuted Jews, who didn’t skip a beat, immediately killing and dispossessing 100,000s of Palestinians, much like the Nazis dealt with the Jews of Germany and the shtelts of Poland just a few years before. The West accepted this state of affairs for 78 years out of guilt or ignorance, but finally is waking up to the reality.
But this is exactly what you did to your natives right up to today, the Israelis retort. You have your Untermenschen, and we have ours.
Not so simple, we reply. We realize now this was a great crime. Hitler tried to do it to you and we helped liberate you. What you are doing now is no longer acceptable. We don’t believe in Untermenschen anymore, and neither should you. And if you insist, then we are obliged to stop you and protect your so-called Untermenschen, the Palestinians from extermination.
What is troublesome, and which undermines the ‘going-native’ Andrew’s epiphany (and heppi end), is that Israelis almost fully approve of the genocide, have no remorse, no conscience. They are following Hitler’s losing strategy of violence, not Stalin’s crude, but benign communist strategy, which, as it turned out, was also losing, though because it was too ‘nice’, not too inhuman, like Hitler’s.
We managed to get mixed up in the 20th century, calling communism evil and fascism good. We pretend we don’t like fascism but we accept Israel’s (and Ukraine’s) and are now adapting it under Trump. Now we are painted into a corner, and it will take getting our feet stained and rejecting Israel’s version of the shiny Vonnadorian fascist utopia is soulless and sterile.
Any alien arriving on Earth couldn’t help but be appalled at our inhumanity, the bacchanalia of Evil we celebrate every day. The US has been at war 235 years out of 250. Israel has been at war since before it was ‘created’, and currently is fighting on (last count) 7 fronts (get ready, Egypt!), with US and NATO funnelling arms into the conflagration.
Alien Andrew rejects his self-satisfied, boring eternity in utopia for the dystopian world of feelings. He went native, as Israeli Jews are going to have to do if they plan to stay in the Holy Land. Aliens can assimilate. Zionism has turned Israelis into bona fide Untermenschen, the lowest of the low, unashamed, inhuman genociders.
Indigenous peoples around the world have survived their holocausts, their genocides, and we humbly turn to them for advice about the meaning of it all, about how we should live, though as humans, we will always fall short. I suspect Haig doesn’t really believe in an atheistic techno-eternity. That the real meaning of life (thank you Woody Allen) is … love and death.
ENDNOTES:
The post
From Nazi Germany to US-Israel – Who Are the Real Untermenschen? first appeared on
Dissident Voice.
1 The Riemann hypothesis explains why there are 25 primes below 100, only 21 between 1– and 200, 16 between 10000 and 1100 and then few higher, but still an infinite ‘few’. There has been a $1m Millennium Prize for proving this equation in reality, still unclaimed.
2 Introduced in 1986, the Hannibal Protocol states ‘kidnapping must be stopped by all means, even at the price of striking and harming our own forces’, i.e., it’s okay to murder Israeli soldiers to make their release from captivity unnecessary.
3 In 1933, even
Freud, though no Zionist, and not without some subtle irony, sent his admirer Mussolini a volume of his public exchange of letters with Albert Einstein titled
Why War? with the inscription: “Benito Mussolini with the respectful greetings of an old man who recognizes in the ruler the cultural hero.”
4 The Pale of Settlement was a western region of the Russian Empire with varying borders that existed from 1791 to 1917 (de facto until 1915) in which permanent residency by Jews was allowed and beyond which Jewish residency was forbidden.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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