October 30, 2023

Abasement and self-respect in the liberal worldview

Posted by faustusnotes under off-topic ranting | Tags: , |
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An interesting thing is happening this week as Israel enacts its Hannibal Directive on the hostages taken by Hamas, and behaves against all understanding of common decency or the basic principles of international law. Representatives of powerful nations, in some cases the most powerful nation on earth, have been lining up to very loudly declare that there is nothing they can do, and to reaffirm in the blandest possible terms their complete inability to do anything to stop Israel. The most striking example of this is Joe Biden himself, who came away from a meeting with Netanyahu and, with a shrug, said that there was nothing he could do to stop Israel from killing the 10 Americans taken hostage, and it’s all very sad but there’s nothing else he can do.

In 2011 Joe Biden was Vice President when Barack Obama started a three month bombing campaign of Libya, estimated to have killed about 10,000 people, which fragmented the country and reduced it from one of the richest nations in Africa to a bombed out shell with an ongoing civil war where open-air slave markets are held in once-proud cities. This was done simply to support Libyan rebels against Gaddafi. But somehow there is nothing Obama can do to rein in his client state, whose prime minister is a US citizen and which receives about 15% of its annual defense funding from the USA.

It’s not credible, is it? It’s not that he can’t rein in Israel – he doesn’t want to. But he can’t say that, since the last 20 years of liberal interventionism have been built on a dishonest foundation of protecting human rights, and human rights concerns are now fundamental to how many Americans – especially young Biden voters – see America and its role abroad.

This puts states and significant public figures in a bind. Israel plays an essential role in the criminal extractive world order that maintains US dollar hegemony and the stolen wealth of the western European states, but in a modern liberal electorate they can’t admit that, so they need some other way to appease the very real – and good! – conscience of their electorate, while maintaining Israel’s freedom to brutally destroy the lives of its poorest residents. So they fall back on a public spectacle in which they replace their very real power with a performative self-abasement.

I mean, what country with self-respect allows a nation 3% its size, heavily dependent on foreign aid, surrounded by enemies, indebted to a colonial nation’s gift for its very existence, to tell it no, you have no say in the fate of 10 of your citizens who were abducted by criminals within our borders? No self-respecting leader would allow that to happen. The same is true of the shameful death of Rachel Corrie, an American citizen who was killed by an Israeli army bulldozer when she was trying to protect a Palestinian home, whose death is occasionally celebrated by Israeli soldiers who make pancakes with her face on them. If anything like this happened in one of the “shithole countries” that the US likes to “throw against the wall” every decade or so, there would be an immediate violent response. But when Israel does it suddenly there’s nothing that can be done! Suddenly America’s leaders, politicians, journalists and public figures hang their heads in shame and admit that they’re just weak little nobodies who have to let the Israeli Chads kick sand in their face.

Of course it is not only Israel and not only in times of crisis that this strange ritual abasement has to take place, and it isn’t just politicians who have to sometimes display a complete lack of self-respect. The most classic case is the decision by the British media to turn the UK’s most principled anti-racist politician, Jeremy Corbyn, into a nasty anti-semite who was going to cause Jews to “flee the country” if elected. Journalists across the country, political leaders, community figures, all spent a year penning columns and making speeches about this ridiculous idea, all in lock step with the idea that he was an anti-semite, without ever producing any evidence or addressing any of the many very clearly anti-semitic views of his opposite number in the Tory party. Isn’t it the job of journalists to report facts, or truth? Suddenly they lost this ability, and all of them together had to give up their professional self-respect and report complete drivel for a year. So too with the Uyghur genocide nonsense, which was made up out of whole cloth by a born-again christian who fantasizes about New York being destroyed in the rapture because it’s full of “bankers” (nudge-nudge wink-wink) and gays. Anyone who knows anything about China and has even a fragment of self-respect, integrity or honour knows this is a completely made-up lie, but for years now it has been repeated in every major media outlet without ever a single shred of evidence. The same thing happened with the Iraq war, compounded by the god-awful scenes of journalists and “pundits” and “public intellectuals” recanting and apologizing for their misleading coverage after the fact and giving us ridiculous “how was I supposed to know?” sob stories about Colin Powell’s transparently dishonest presentation at the UN (but he had powerpoint!) or the dumb 45 minutes story. These people didn’t even have the minimum level of self-respect to acknowledge their role as proxies for empire, and stand up for themselves as honest hacks. No, they abased themselves after the WMDs disappeared (remember “Friedman units”? But that loser is still out there peddling his poison!) and through this “difficult self-reflection” managed to keep their jobs and pretend they’d learnt lessons, just to repeat the same lies from the same liars about Chinese spy balloons or Uyghur genocide or how no, Nazis aren’t really Nazis if they’re Ukrainian.

This guy is the author of a book called “Jewish pride”?

Can you imagine having to degrade yourself like this every day? What a strange fetish to have. It could be described as a kind of Orwellian doublespeak I suppose, but doublespeak is primarily an intellectual dissonance, while this is also emotional. Consider the chorus of people reacting in horror and fear to protests in support of Palestine, or people chanting “from the river to the sea!” These people aren’t just abasing themselves in the world of ideas, such as when they repeat unquestioningly the claim that 40 babies were beheaded; they’re also abasing themselves emotionally, suggesting to the world that they are terrified of peaceful protesters, wetting their pants at the thought of ordinary people in the nations that brought us the Iraq war and the Libya shambles maybe not wanting this stuff done in their name anymore. Everyone who has been on an anti-war march knows exactly how peaceful they are; in fact there were large contingents of Jewish peace activists marching as Jews at these demonstrations, and nothing happened. Yet these smol beans have to pretend that they’re so terrified. Imagine being an adult man in the UK in 2023, scared of a peace march? Either you’re a brazen liar, or you have the self-respect of a particularly coddled house cat. This is doublefeel as well as doublespeak, the same abasement that has “gender critical” “feminists” (i.e. women who hate transgender women) being terrified of public bathrooms, and rushing to get men to protect them from anything that might look faintly like a man in a dress – probably leading to the harassment of other women. Somewhere in their dark hearts they know it’s not true, that men don’t need to pretend to be women to harass women, that the greatest danger to women is men they know, etc, but this honest assessment of the world isn’t going to help them destroy a hated minority, so they have to market it with fear instead, a fear so pathetic and unbelievable that the only way to sell it is to publicly abase yourself, to admit to a complete absence of self-respect.

This was a big thing in the aftermath of 9/11 as well, of course, with crazy reports of non-white people getting kicked off planes because their mathematics looked terroristy, or being racially profiled in their own neighbourhoods because of scared neighbours. This has, of course, always been the go-to US strategy for dealing with black people, but since the turn of the century this doublefeel has become a common part of public discourse. I’m scared; I’m feeling threatened; there are (to use the favourite phrase of “gender critical” “feminists”) “safeguarding issues”. Yes we really do think that homeless people need somewhere to shelter, but the children here will be scared – they should be put somewhere else (where? are you really scared of the poor, hungry and desperate?) Watch as journalists and politicians fall over themselves to criminalize and dehumanize asylum seekers, who could be “terrorists” or “Chinese spies” and who “just don’t fit in.” Remember when France had to ban 14 year old girls at school from wearing Hijab, because the revolutionary state that had survived 200 years and 2000 guillotines could be brought tumbling down by a teenage girl with covered hair?

This performative abasement is necessary because of the increasingly obvious contradictions in the structure of the liberal worldview. The fundamentals of what the liberal order demands of us – submission to the market, constant social competitiveness, social mobility instead of genuine equality, and the existence of winners and losers in every aspect of our social life – isn’t wanted by anyone except the people already at the top and benefiting from it. So the liberal democracies have attached genuine, important principles – like but not limited to sexual and gender equality, freedom of movement, an end to racial discrimination, freedom of association and expression – to their ideology as if these principles did not exist in any other worldview, and then beaten us relentlessly over the head with these principles at every turn, to distract us from the fundamentals, or – in their more honest moments – to try and convince us we can only have these valued social ideals as part of a package that includes exploitation and greed. But as the exploitation and greed becomes clearer, and the crises that our liberal order cannot fix become ever deeper and more obvious, and as concepts from outside the liberal viewpoint begin to be heard more clearly in our increasingly diverse media landscape, it becomes harder for liberal spokespeople to hide these contradictions. This is why congress people attacked Facebook after the 2016 election, and even more so have tried to ban Tiktok – Tiktok enables western young people to see life in countries outside the imperial core, which means they might see alternatives to the way their own social systems are structured and (worse still!) might begin to see those people as fully human, which would be a disaster for the exploitative international system that holds up the western countries and the in particular the wealth of their elites. These new forms of interaction and exchange of knowledge have enabled concepts like decolonization to enter mainstream social discussion – where in the 1990s you would see Che Guevara’s face on a t-shirt, now you can see his face in a Tiktok video with a quote, or some young woman doing her make-up while she explains why he was right. Words, ideas, alternative principles, information from outside the bubble, unfiltered by the guardians of the liberal order, being viewed by ordinary people at the same time as the climate crisis, the housing crisis, the banking crisis, the automation crisis and the covid crisis constantly show up how badly our masters are handling everything.

The answer then is denial, and as the contradictions grow the denial becomes more difficult, more pathetic and more transparently self-serving. The only solution, then, is this performative abasement. And on a deeper level, how can you have self-respect if you defend these things? When you go onto the media and have to repeat your condemnation of Hamas for something they did three weeks ago before you hem and haw about how stopping the things Israel is doing right now is complicated, you know deep in your dark heart that you’re doing dark deeds. Why aren’t you speaking up? People lose their jobs for that! Why is it left to people like Lowkey to speak the truth that we all know, and how embarassing is it for a journalist to be schooled publicly on these things by a rapper? What kind of man must Piers Morgan be, that he was willing to lose his job on morning tv rather than stop condemning Megan Markle for imagined crimes, but he can’t bring himself to condemn Israeli slaughter? Someone like that doesn’t have any self-respect, does he? If he did, he’d get a real job.

It’s sad of course when you see people you had hopes for, like Australia’s new PM Anthony Albanese or reasonably direct and honest journalists like Owen Jones have to humiliate themselves once they get within a sniff of any influence because the gatekeepers of power demand it. It’s depressing when the people we are depending on to actually fix things – people like Biden or Schultz, who we knew were never going to amount to much but who are the only people in place now to fix things now – fail to do anything, and fall back onto the same mantras of both-sides and it’s-complicated and but-the-economy. But it’s inevitable, because there is no reconciling the crises liberalism has to face with the fact that so many of them are a direct and immediate consequence of its underlying mechanics. In the face of that, you either tear the whole thing down – or the weight of the whole edifice will force you to your knees, begging and pleading and desperately trying to get people to understand these pathetic feelings that everyone knows aren’t real.

Liberalism is incompatible with self-respect and dignity, neither individually nor collectively. Its final vision is a sniveling journalist abasing themselves before the public over and over as they tell you that nothing can ever get better, and you’re just gonna have to stand there and bear witness to horror as the people they installed and they supported and they propagandized for destroy everything that is good and right in the world – and bursting into tears at how mean you are when you tell them it’s their fault.

 

October 18, 2023

Liberal Democracies Finally Let the Mask Slip

Posted by faustusnotes under Meat Life, off-topic ranting | Tags: , |
[3] Comments 

Have you noticed things seem to be getting a little worse in the developed world? Australia voting a resounding No on the weakest, most milquetoast concession to acknowledging and amending its colonial crimes, the Middle East’s Only Democracy(TM) going on a wild killing spree, unprecedented global heat at the same time as governments of the world’s richest nations are canceling basic infrastructure plans, reneging on carbon reduction commitments, and getting into weird culture war battles about how to define a woman? Things seeming a little desperate? It appears we have reached the stage just after the “and” in the famous phrase “scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds”.

Canada’s Liberals Applaud a Nazi

The mask really slipped a few weeks ago when Ukraine’s president Zelensky visited Canada to beg for weapons. The war in Ukraine isn’t going well, and the much-vaunted wunderwaffen donated by the west – German tanks rolling into Eastern Europe for the first time in 80 years – have failed to advance the promised counter-offensive, though Ukraine’s leadership has made sure that the offensive achieves the US’s goal of fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian. With video of NATO’s supposedly superior “kit” (ugh) getting wasted on the battlefield proliferating, no progress in the war, and the US house getting skittish about signing more blank checks, Zelensky needed to shore up his support among his allies. After Zelensky’s speech to the Canadian parliament, an apparently well-meaning Canadian speaker introduced a 98 year old man who he told everyone “had fought for Ukrainian independence against the Soviet Union in world war 2”, with Liberal PM Trudeau leading Zelensky and the parliament in two rounds of standing ovations for this stalwart of freedom.

Apparently nobody bothered to think what kind of man might have “fought against the Soviet Union” for Ukraine in world war 2, and of course it turned out very quickly that the man in question was a member of the Waffen SS. Canada’s parliament somehow tricked a Jewish head of state (Zelensky is Jewish) into giving a standing ovation for an Actual Nazi, just because he fought the Soviet Union.

This is a kind of treason, of course: the Soviet Union were Canada’s allies in world war 2, fighting the Nazis, and suffered horrifying losses during their retreat from and recapture of Ukraine. Applauding someone who fought them makes a mockery of their sacrifice, shows the ignorance of all assembled towards their own history, conflates modern Russia with the Soviet Union (a common mistake among liberal apologists for our ridiculous support of Ukraine), and – most importantly – means applauding a nazi.

The 14th Waffen SS division of which Hunka was a member wasn’t an innocent bystander in the war either. They did partisan suppression duties in Poland and Ukraine, freeing up regular SS and Wehrmacht units to kill Soviet soldiers, and in some instances destroyed whole villages. They probably helped with round-ups of Jews, and of course by providing support services they freed up regular units of the SS in Ukraine to speed up their activities in the Holocaust. Himmler himself visited the unit, and said some pretty horrifying things indicating he knew full well where their racial solidarity lay. The knowledge of this unit’s activities isn’t dead in Ukraine, either, far from it – you might recognize their symbol on the Wikipedia page as a common symbol on Ukrainian soldiers uniforms, and in the year before the war started the unit was celebrated in Kyiv. It’s likely that in that horrific display of Nazi solidarity in the Canadian parliament Zelensky, at least, knew about the unit’s history, since it’s a matter of public celebration in certain sectors of Ukraine’s political class, including the people who surround Zelensky.

When Nazis aren’t Nazis

There’s a joke going around the internet that since the Ukraine war began western media have slid through stages of Nazi-denialism, from “there are no Nazis in Ukraine” to “Oh, there’s just a few” to “they aren’t so bad” to, finally “Being a Nazi isn’t always wrong anyway”. It appears we’ve reached stage 4, because within a few days Politico EU published an article arguing that being in the SS didn’t make you a Nazi. Now there’s a reversal on the Nuremberg Trials, eh! Then there was a lot of talk about well how could they have known that these guys fighting in Ukraine against the Soviet Union were Nazis, and he probably wasn’t a volunteer anyway (he was). Then it began to become clear that the Canadian government had courted these Nazis after the war, and a whole bunch of horror stories began to emerge about monuments to the Nazis in Edmonton, an endowment in this Nazi’s name to a Canadian university, and, well, a generally sordid past of encouraging these treacherous villains to contribute to culture and history in Ukraine.

It should be noted that Canadian scholarship on Ukraine was an important contributor to the development of the contested theory of the Holodomor, the idea that Stalin deliberately starved Ukraine. This idea was not new in Ukraine, but the word itself appears to date from the 1980s or 1990s, and it’s likely a fabrication of these Canadian Ukrainian scholars, many of whom were former Nazis. One person who has contributed to the popularization of this claim is Anne Applebaum, who is a regular contributor to liberal publications like the Atlantic and has been a vociferous proponent of the idea that Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine. Her book Red Famine, which contributed to the popularization of this genocide myth, is no doubt heavily influenced by these Canadian-Ukrainian scholars, but she has been perfectly silent about the revelation that they were all Nazis. This body of recent work on the Holodomor feeds into a wider anti-semitic current, known as “double-genocide theory“, which holds that Stalin was as bad as Hitler and is often implicitly or explicitly cited as a justification for Ukrainian (and other countries’) support for the Nazis. This dangerous elevation of a high-school debate bro fetish to the level of serious legal and scholarly work is dangerous, particularly for anti-fascists in Eastern Europe, but it’s a surprise to see it bubbling to the surface in such a grotesque way in Canada.

Russians, of course, have no illusions about this double-genocide nonsense, the evils of Nazis or the nature and persistence of Ukrainian Nazism. Here is what Vassily Grossman had to say about the looming threat of Nazi collaboration in Ukraine in his famous book Stalingrad:

This is the background to the growth of Red Sector, the Azov battalion and the neo-Nazis who humiliated Zelensky in 2019 and forced Ukraine down the road to the war. This is the reason that to get to Baby Yar – the site of the infamous 1941 massacre – and the memorial erected there by the Soviet government, traveling from the Eastern side of Kyiv your quickest route will be along Stepan Bandera avenue. But all this history has been wiped from liberal memory in the west, in the post-war scramble to redefine the Soviet Union as the Enemy, and to rewrite the history of the war so that the allies’ relatively small contribution – and much smaller sacrifice – could be raised above the great and catastrophic suffering of the Soviet Union, obscure the allies’ failure to rescue the Jews, and airbrush the Soviet Union’s central role in saving Jews from the Holocaust out of our history. And how is that working out, now?

The West’s guilty conscience lashes out

Some simple facts about the West’s culpability for the Holocaust should be well known but are relatively underplayed in Western history lessons. From 1939 when the Nazis started the war to the middle of 1944 there is almost no evidence of significant resistance against the Nazis west of the Danube. In Poland and Ukraine yes, there is a well-known history of both collaboration and resistance, but go west and you see a bunch of complacent nations that were largely happy to be pinned under the Nazi boot, with the sacrifice of their Jewish populations considered a small price to pay for their relative peace after they were conquered. The Western nations also resisted refugees, taking only a small number of rich Jewish emigrees and even, famously, turning away shiploads of children. In contrast Jews fleeing east were welcomed into the Soviet Union, and it was the Red Army that liberated Auschwitz, discovered Treblinka, and rescued the Jews of Poland from Nazi violence. The West stood by and waited, taking far more interest in the recovery of their colonial possessions in Africa than in helping the desperate Jews of western Europe, and it was only when the Soviet Union began to roll over Europe itself that they suddenly conceived an urgent need to fight back against the Nazis. If Hitler had cut a deal with Poland to march his armies through for a direct attack on the Soviet Union in 1939, would the west even have bothered going to war with him? I suspect that they would not, and would have stood by while the fate of the Soviet Union’s Jewish population was determined.

This is a stain on Europe’s post-war liberal conscience, so how did they endeavour to wash out this stain? They handed one of their stolen colonial lands to the Zionist project, which immediately unleashed the Nakba on the people of Palestine and established an apartheid state on the shores of the mediterranean. Every time the people of Palestine attempted to peacefully resolve this conflict the Israeli state responded with violence and destruction, and so we find ourselves at the present state, where 2 million Palestinians languish in an open-air prison camp constructed with western money. When Hamas finally respond with a successful attack on Israel’s military, that blood-drenched state unleashes a wave of violence – first indiscriminately killing their own hostages, making up a 21st century blood-libel about beheaded babies, and then attempting to starve and bomb the population of Gaza into oblivion.

In response to this savagery the same liberal democracies and media outlets that were just two weeks ago giving a standing ovation to a confirmed Nazi, or defending that same action, or steadfastly looking away, suddenly rushed to condemn every unsubstantiated lie put out by the Israeli Defence Forces, and publicly announced their unconditional support for “the World’s Most Moral Army” as it enacts the first mass murder of the 21st century. They have nothing to say except “more!” as the IDF slaughters thousands of children, cuts off electricity from hospitals, and forces civilians to drinking from puddles. None of this is kept secret either – in contrast to the “genocide” of Uyghurs that the western media and intelligence agencies invented from whole cloth, and have presented to us constantly over the last 3 years without a shred of evidence, within minutes of the unfolding bombardment of Gaza our social media feeds are flooded with videos of dying children, bombed ambulances, buildings collapsed on civilians, reports of entire families wiped out. The Palestinian ambassador to the UK reports 6 of his own family killed; the Scottish first minister’s own mother-in-law is trapped in Gaza and he cannot even get a response to inquiries from the foreign office, while the media drill him on whether he has sufficiently condemned Hamas. Meanwhile France bans rallies in support of the Palestinian people, MSNBC bars its muslim anchors from reporting, a Muslim child is stabbed to death in the USA, and Germany stops a protest by Jewish opponents of the slaughter on the grounds it might be anti-Semitic.

This is the “liberal” response to the mass murder by starvation and bombing of 2 million muslims. Meanwhile liberal blogs – those bastions of interventionism back in the Iraq war days – remain stunningly silent. Balloon Juice, which has run a daily post on the invasion of Ukraine, headed with a graphic accusing “Ruzzians” of genocide, declared “there’s no there there” about the shameful Canadian ovation of a Nazi, and is in full support of the Israeli military. Lawyers, Guns and Money have barely mentioned it, and Crooked Timber have put up a single, weak post about how they don’t know what to say, which has degenerated into a condemnathon and some complaints about Jeremy Corbyn – the only politician of any note in the UK who was willing to publicly support the Palestinian people.

It’s often said that the single defining feature of liberalism is that liberals never, ever learn. They constantly watch the same things happening, hear the same lies from the same criminal gang, absorb the same excuses from the same people, and respond in the same way without any adaptation to the circumstances. We know that the Israeli Defence Forces lie – they lied about Shireen Abu Akleh, they lied about the Gaza Flotilla Raid, they lied about Rachel Corrie – but of course every person in the western media, political and public elite accepts everything they say without question, knowing it’s all a lie and knowing their history of killing children. Journalists, of course, don’t even have object permanence, but this singular property of liberal politicians and political commentators generally is that they cannot, under any circumstances, learn from what constantly surprises them, because if they developed any theory of the structural underpinnings of the social forces at work it would become simply impossible to remain a part of the liberal establishment.

Our failing economy

The last part of this collapse in the coherence of the western social order is our failing economy. We are constantly told – by political leadership, by economists, by journalists and by pundits and “think” tankers – that capitalism is the best system available to us, that capitalism has made us the richest people in the history of the world, that any other system would leave us impoverished and embittered. Yet at the same time they tell us that they have to cancel even the shortest high speed rail line because they can’t afford it; that university fees must remain too expensive for most people to attend without going into a lifetime of debt; that it is simply impossible for people to have affordable housing; and that paying you more than $7.25 an hour is beyond their power. You must remain poor, squatting in sub-standard housing surrounded by decaying infrastructure and scrabbling to get together enough money just to stay housed and pay off the exorbitant price of your university loans – all in the richest countries in the history of the world. Whose wealth? Whose benefit? They couldn’t even control a simple respiratory disease, you had to go back to work as soon as possible or the best, most efficient system of allocation of resources in the history of the universe would collapse around you; and they absolutely cannot afford to pay for you to get a booster vaccine if you’re under 50, because … well, because how could the 6th richest country in the world afford it?

And where did this money go? The USA spends a huge percentage of its income on weapons, is a thoroughly militarized society; the UK and France are nuclear powers. But together the entire economy of the NATO countries – some 500 million people, including most of the top 10 richest countries in the world – ran out of ammunition and weapons to give to Ukraine after just 600 days of war with a country having not even a third of their population. Where did all that money they took from you go? What were they spending it on, while they were telling you they can’t afford high speed rail, schools that don’t collapse, COVID protections, universal health coverage, gun control or a raise in the minimum wage? After 600 days they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel, right down to munitions they promised they wouldn’t use because they’re borderline illegal (and won’t work in Ukraine anyway). And worse still the wonder-weapons they sent have all failed, proven to be worse than the cheapest material the Russians can throw at them. All the Leopard tanks are burnt out husks, the Challengers – “never defeated in battle” – abandoned on the side of the road next to ditches filled with the corpses of Ukrainian men, the Bradleys and Bushmasters and Marders all toast and the troops they were slated to carry forced to slog through the long grass where mines and drones are slaughtering them. That’s what your money was spent on, while you were being told 10% annual inflation was inevitable and no you can’t have a pay rise, and if you try striking we’ll make it illegal because the best system of allocating resources ever invented – the only one that works – can’t make food affordable and can’t produce enough ammunition to fight a small war in a distant country.

So, this is the promise of liberalism as we enter the third decade of the 21st century. No freedom of speech, no money for you and no investment in public services, and if you dare to speak up while we throw money into the mass murder of civilians living in the poorest place on earth we will throw you in jail. In America we’ll throw you in jail anyway, but not until we’ve stripped you of your assets without trial and only if you’re lucky enough not to get shot on arrest. In defense of this you need to stand by and watch – you must not speak, or you’ll lose your job! – as we commit warcrimes and cheer the bombing of hospitals and the starving of citizens and throw all our resources into defending a criminal, corrupt gang of Nazis as they grind an entire generation of men into meat, only to find those resources aren’t enough because our economies are running on empty.

But if you talk about any of this you’re a wild-eyed idealist, a “tankie” (who paradoxically doesn’t want to send German tanks into Eastern Europe!), an anti-semite, and – worst of all – naive, unable to understand that this is the only way things can be. Nothing can ever ever be better, and anyone who tries to make it better is a fool and a trouble-maker.

This is liberalism in the 21st century.

 

October 18, 2023

Comments Censored at Crooked Timber: Gaza Edition

Posted by faustusnotes under Horror | Tags: , |
[5] Comments 

Crooked Timber has a typically weak post up about the new horrors in Gaza, which has descended into a debate about whether (I kid you not) Corbyn has condemned Hamas enough, the DSA (some tiny fringe group in the USA) has condemned Hamas enough, and how hard it is to have an opinion about a war where everyone is a barbarian. I posted the following comment, because I think the minimum standard for an academic, liberal blog should be that they care about facts. The comment did not pass moderation, of course:

Perhaps before rushing to condemn fringe left groups for failing to condemn what Hamas did to civilians some of you should have waited to see what Hamas actually did. It turns out the babies weren’t beheaded (did you guys believe a community of 700 had 40 babies?), that Hamas militants called the police to negotiate with them, the IDF came in firing indiscriminately and killed all the hostages, fired mortars and tanks at the kibbutz buildings, and fired tanks into the buildings after the fighters were dead (did you think the damage in the pictures was done by Molotovs?) The idf announced it was doing air strikes in the area, info available on the cnn website but strangely not mentioned, most of the dead publicly announced are soldiers, and Hamas’s account of the events says that the IDF panicked, retreated and fought in urban areas. The IDF are the most dishonest organization in the world, who killed 500 children in the 2014 war, deliberately shot demonstrators in the 2018 match of return, and have been confirmed over and over again to lie, murder civilians, and commit horrible war crimes. You all know this but you just immediately rushed to believe everything they told you. What does it say about you that, for example, Chris Bertram immediately assumed they were capable of “breivik-like” attitudes? It’s racism, plain and simple. Try and engage just once with the reality fo the forces at play here, and stop treating the IDF as any th Inc. except a dishonest gang of mass murderers and criminals!

[I wrote that on my phone on the train, so apologies for typos or small errors]

We really are reaching the bitter end of things in western society, aren’t we? In light of this I’m planning an occasional series of posts on the collapse of the liberal order and the intellectual underpinnings of our present system of capitalist liberal democracies. As part of this I’ll be grappling with the failure of the 2000s-era liberal bloggers – CT, LGM, and spin-offs from the usenet era like Yglesias and others – to deal with the failure of their world view. This is necessarily going to involve some snark about the kind of things that go on their blogs, substacks and media appearances.

I hope amongst it there will be some more serious material assessing where the liberal academic worldview went so wrong, but don’t hold out too much hope – I’m angry about the horrors being done by our governments, and if you’re not angry too (or if you’re angry at the wrong targets) you need to be reassessing your humanity.